The Dangers of Windmill Thinking

The crazy keeps piling up. This week it was windmills. Our Dear MisLeader is convinced they cause cancer, although as Colbert points out, the real danger is that listening to Trump trumpeting his nonsense causes brain damage:



And part of the problem here is that wind energy is not all sweetness and light—it does have problems, and noise and bird deaths are issues. Still, the death, environmental damage and pollution caused by fossil fuels seems to make wind a pretty good deal, in comparison—and all those windmills rich jerks like Trump like to hate are being put up by pretty hard-headed utility companies.



But I worry that Don Trump Quixote may again be distracting us. While the media are tilting at his ridiculous farcical notions--meanwhile, horrible other policies are taking shape. Take this excellent column by Lynda Waddington from this morning’s Gazette.

I have no words, no wind, no ability to summon anything but anger. In the Civil War, the question was whether freed slaves would become citizens of the United States. A wise man of the time said some wise words about African-American soldiers:

"Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."

Frederick Douglass

Frederick had it right. Deport U.S. veterans because of misdemeanors or old paperwork errors? The sound you hear is not wind, it's my blood boiling at the very thought. I'm not a veteran, and you don't have to be one to love America, but if anything clarifies your loyalty to the U.S., wearing our uniform ought to, and citizenship for those whose breasts bore, in a symbolic sense, the brass letters "U.S." isn't even open to question, to my mind.

I hear a wind coming, and I hope it is a political storm that sweeps the Trumpers out in 2020.

Never forget—this is what this awful, evil administration has brought us to. While we are distracted by the idiocy of the war on windmills, our government is doing dark deeds that should bring us all shame.

Which means that it doesn’t really matter who is nominated to oppose Donald Trump in 2020. No, I know it matters in many ways--but it does not matter for whom a rational person a will vote that fall. As long as they aren’t Donald Trump, chances are they will at least have enough of a grasp of reality to know that the noise of wind can sway hearts and minds, but it cannot cause cancer.

As for the orange one, he is a cancer on our body politic. Let us remove him and his minions ASAP.

The Immigration Series Takes Shape

Leslie, an MMU student, designed this logo--and I think she did a great job.

There is a lot of organizing left to do on the Fall Faculty Series at Mount Mercy University this year, but I’m pretty excited to see our third such series coming together.

The university communication and marketing office just finished the logo for the series. I hope it, and the PR push the university will do, will draw a lot of media attention to what I think is an important topic and conversation.

The logo is pretty cool. It was designed an art student named Leslie, and she did a fantastic job.

Black and white version of series logo.

The series is on a pretty hot topic, in this volatile election year. We’re going to step back from the current controversy and take a deeper look at what immigration has meant to the United States, and why.

What will the series be about?

Well, here are tittles of some of the individual presentations in the series, which begins early in September and runs through mid November:

• The Immigration Nation Story: An Overview of our Journey History
• The First Americans: U.S. Policy in “Indian Country”
• Fear of an Immigrant Nation: Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination Against Immigrants in the U.S.
• The Wall: Research and Being Detained Along the U.S.-Mexico Border.
• When Deportation Means Death: The Church and Sanctuary
• Our Immigration Stories: Coming to Cedar Rapids and Mount Mercy
• The Immigration Election: How Has Immigration Become a Hot Topic and How Has it Been Discussed?
• We are your Neighbors: The Rhetoric of the Mother Mosque
• The Catholic Church and the Ethics of Immigration
• The Dollars and Sense of it: What Immigration Does to our Economy

Besides faculty members speaking about these events, the series also includes author Cristina Henríquez  discussing her novel "The Book of Unknown Americans;" and a performance of "VANG," a drama about recent Hmong immigrants who are farmers. In addition, a staff and faculty group will read and discuss the book  “Empires and Walls: Globalization, Migration and Colonial Domination,” written by Dr. Mohammad Chaichian, who is also doing "The Wall" presentation during the series.

We plan to end the series with a forum that reflects back on of what we learned along the way. I hope you can join us for many of these events. They will be announced soon and listed on the MMU web site.

Struggling to Name That Series

Images on this post from National Park Service.

At Mount Mercy University, we’re getting a minor lesson in the importance of names. In an earlier post, I wrote of my disdain for the president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland—and recently, a fellow faculty member at my university posted a link to a news story reporting that the embattled president of Mount St. Mary’s has been drowned and shot with a Glock. Or something like that.

Right away, one of his Facebook friends posted: “Oh No! I had no idea this was going on at your university.” (That’s a paraphrase, by the way, despite the punctuation for effect.)

Well, it was neither my friend’s university nor mine. Although both the Maryland university where the controversy rages and the Iowa university where I teach are Catholic and use the word “Mount” in their name, they are totally different schools—different places, different cultures, different presidents and differing in attitude, apparently, about the appropriateness of drowning or shooting freshman bunnies.

It was ironic to me that, when looking up news stories about the Maryland University while I was working on the earlier post, the ads that Google placed on my page were for Mount Mercy University, my school. Maybe name confusion isn’t that surprising.

Anyway, the school that I do teach at, MMU, has an annual Fall Faculty Series that I volunteered to coordinate. This is our third series: The first in 2014 was about the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I; the second in 2015 was about the 50th and 40th anniversaries of the first big U.S. troop surge in Vietnam, and the end of that war.

You can partly thank Donald Trump, or Drumpf as I prefer to think of him (thank you, John Oliver): In this current election year, immigration is a hot topic. We are planning a series of panels and presentations on the cultural meaning of immigration—how people of the U.S. have responded to the reality that most of us are descendants of immigrations, and yet as a culture we often don’t welcome new outsiders.

“Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses … as long as they aren’t Muslim and we know exactly what’s going on,” or something like that.

Anyway, the Sisters of Mercy, who founded MMU and have nothing to do with that other Mount on the East Coast, identify “immigration” as one of their critical social concerns.

Although I’m sure our series will reference the current heated political debate, that’s not really the point. We want to think a bit more about what immigration has meant and does mean in American culture.

And to do that, we need to name this thing.

At the first planning meeting, those who attended wanted to talk first about the vision of the series, which is, I think, a good discussion to have.

Here is my stab at a vision statement for the series: “The United States has always been a land that drew people from many cultures and countries. During waves of immigration in the 19th Century the idea of America as the ‘melting pot’ formed, but this metaphor implies giving up a cultural heritage for a new identity. For some groups and people, it’s not that easy to assimilate, and some suggest a mosaic or a salad—many distinct parts making a whole—as more inclusive symbols of the U.S.A. And there are those who lived here before the settlers, pioneers and slaves flooded onto these shores—Native Americans didn’t have to go anywhere for an immigrant nation to overtake their lands. What does immigration mean? What is the journey narrative of the peoples of the U.S.A., and how do we respond to and understand immigration? The 2016 Mount Mercy University Fall Faculty Series will examine these questions about the American experience.”

There is nothing official about that vision statement—it’s just my current thinking, my personal draft. I post it here mostly so you, dear blog reader, can understand when I ask you to “name that series” just what the series is.

Anyway, faculty, students and staff at the first meeting did have some ideas for names. What do you think? What should we call this series? Some of our initial ideas:

• “Who are the Americans? The U.S. Immigration Experience.”
• “Immigration America: Shunning or Embracing the Huddled Masses.”
• “I am America: U.S. Immigration Experience.”
• “U.S.A.: Immigrant Melting Pot or Mosaic?”
• “Strangers to our Shores: The U.S. Immigration Story.”
• “Building Walls And Building Bridges: The U.S. Immigration Experience.”

I’m not sure that’s an all-inclusive list, and at this point I welcome new ideas. But, I would like to get a name for this series soon.

Please chime in, as long as your ideas have neither bunnies nor Glocks in them.