their homes to labor and factories in offices. serious complications arose over matters such as sex or gender roles and the care of children. however, in most of europe and north america, families recovered a significant agree of autonomy over so-called family waged regimes. constructed by religious leaders, social reformers and morally grounded labor unions, there used to be some, family waged systems limited the intrusion of the industrial principle into the family circle. . .

interpretation is that the disappearance of these regimes has been a major cost of the deterioration of marriage and family life since 1965. while such systems have falls, nothing compensated for loss of their strength. moreover, rather than being an aspect of social evolution, the

transformation of private life was the direct result of the ideological project designed to create a post family order. this unique ideological political project had both socialist and feminist groups. its clearest expression came in sweden, the ancestral home. the project began in the early 1930's when a declining marriage rate and sharply falling fertility rate lead to calls for radical changes in the swedish home. in 1932, a young socialist intellectual named alva myrdal generated a fear by advocating collectivized homes for swedish families. young mothers would join the men in the full-time labor force with infants and toddlers cared

for in, and nurseries and with meals prepared and collect feist kitchens. together with husband gunar shackelford the best 1934 book prices and the population question. they argued raising of the low swedish birth rate required other changes in the family. fathers should be freed from their distinctive breadwinner role. mothers should be freed from homemaking. all adults must work outside of the home while welfare benefits including state clothing allowances, day care subsidies, universal health care, meals at schools, state summer camps, low-interest marriage loans, these should pay for the costs of km. on the surface, the myrdals

garrard, with largely ceased to be an economic unit. as the contemporary feminist historian hirdman explains the myrdals adopted a, quote, successful trojan horse tactics. they would smuggle socialist forms into the capitalist society at its most vulnerable spot, the home. family and population policies would set the stage for the politicization of private life by radically altering everyday life. how successful were the myrdals and pressing the scheme on the swedish society? some policy successes during the late 1930's they actually went into retreat during the 1940's and the 1950's. remarkably, the mothers and homemakers of sweden both from the middle class and among the

remarkable group that could be fairly labeled the desperate swedish socialist housewife would be a great television show, wouldn't it? [laughter] the mounted a political successful counter terror attack. the defendant family wages for their husbands and in short of the welfare state of that era reinforced the mother at home. during the late 1960's, however, alva tecum alva myrdal push for change. the victory came in 1970 when they successfully replaced the taxation of married couples as a unit which used the technique of income splitting on the joint return with mandatory individual taxation. given sweden's's highly progressive tax system, the symbol change had the immediate effect of sharply raising the tax paid by one income father headed households. the homemaker became an

expensive lunch. meanwhile the government for an adult day care subsidies. in 1965, only 3% of all swedish preschool children had been in some form of parental -- rental day care. the early 1980's virtually all 1-4-year-olds were in state day care. yet perhaps this was good for young women allowing them to move in the challenging position of power and authority where they could display their talents. in fact, something much more peculiar had occurred. to this day for example, female corporate ceos in sweden are almost unknown. the number of women working in the fields of the forestry agriculture and industry has changed little. there was actually decline. however female employment rose by over 300% in the government-run field of social service, day care and education

and health. [laughter] in the words of to is really sociologists who study the change the swedish welfare state actually channels women in disproportionate numbers into the feminine occupational images, which is child care, elderly care, nursing and elementary education. swedish women still do so-called women's work. but they now do so for the government rather than for their own families. put another way sweden successfully socialized women's work in the labor of women themselves. the goal of socialism had always been to eliminate the family as a meaningful economic and social unit where a husband would no longer be dependent in any way on his life, nor a wife and her husband were young children on a parent's or elderly parents on grown children.

all would be equally dependent on the comprehensive welfare state. ivan hirdman, leading historian, describes this post family culture as the triumph of led sweden and adds new ideas of gender replace old-fashioned ideas about the couple. we witnessed the birth of the androgynous, the sexless individual, and i speak of the explicitly deal and the death of the provider and his housewife. we thus witness old ideas popping up, ideas which had been buried for decades but ideas that quickly found their advocates and became developed. people, men and women, eager to speak the tongue of gender. has the same post family culture

built on socialist and feminist assumptions made any progress in america? have we americans also learned how to speak the new tongue of gender and accommodate ourselves to the expansion of government which it seems to require? we have also in more convoluted and less obvious ways. the swedes at least be dated these issues more or less in the open. our debates have rarely been as clear and focused. all the same there have been key changes. in july, 1964 the u.s. house of representatives voted to add the word sex to the title seven of the proposed civil rights act be read the section prohibiting discrimination in employment. the amendment was actually offered by a curious coalition

of dixiecrat segregationists and republican feminists. the former coach to use the amendment to kill the measure. the latter group saw an opportunity to tear down the american family wage system. a few places warned of dire consequences of this curious coalition carried the day. starting in 1969 some years later the equal employment opportunity commission moved aggressively and successfully to eliminate the american family wage and indeed predictably between 1970 and 1990 the real wages of men fell by over 20%. which pushed more women into the labour market simply to make ends meet. also in 1969 the u.s. congress approved a major tax reform house ways and means chairman wilbur mills responding to criticism from single persons that the tax vote favored marriage successfully ended the

practice of income splitting in america. the tax burden carried by married couples rose and the marriage tax penalty which still haunts us today emerged. in 1973 the u.s. actually came within a hairsbreadth of creating a massive federal child development entitlement. fortunately president richard nixon vetoed the measure. in a statement reportedly drafted by his aide, patrick jay buchanan, nixon said the bill would have committed the vast moral authority of the federal government to decide of the communal approach is to the child bearing is against the child centered approach, and of quote. alas, worse turndown and quickly approved several other measures providing day care grants to the poor and a child-care tax credit to the middle and upper class is.

the broader results of america have also been in the same direction as in sweden. it is true the welfare state still remains somewhat limited also president obama is trying to change that. our volunteer of religious and charitable sector still remained relatively vital and the accelerated flow of american women to the labour force has been more complex or pluralistic than in sweden. all the same, government transfer payments to individuals in measure of welfare state activities of these have grown from 263 billion in 1980 to 1.55 trillion in 2006. even after taking inflation into account the number has nearly tripled. also much like in sweden the great influx of women particularly we delete, married women have been channeled

heavily into the government sector. and today, three out of every four american preschool children are in non-parental day care call all federally subsidized. in short tasks that have been performed by families in their own homes primary health care, infant toddler and after-school care, turtle nursing and so on, these have been substantially turned over to the state or state funded entities. public patriarchy some feminist theorists call that. higher taxes which of fallen with particular force on the remaining one income homes with three or more children helped pay the cost. achieved incrementally with few open ideological classis, clashes it might be called the swedish post family model via the american plan.

all the same there are important pockets of resistance and all of them are growing. most dramatically home-schooled families have mobilized the integrity of their home economies by focusing on the most important family responsibilities, education. emerging into the face of the state custody they have legal recognition across the country and are producing a disproportionate number of the nation's moral ground creative young adults. they are a special embarrassment to public schools which have long operated on a socialist industrial model with ever more discouraging results. some american religious groups have done a solid job in building new affirmations of the national family. under the leadership of figures such as paige patterson and albert mueller the southern baptist convention is developing

a powerful new profamily apologetic. another group, the latter-day saints or the mormons provide an important and timber great example how in the face of cultural turmoil and nomination can foster and maintain its own culture of marriage with measurable positive results. i also find a reason for optimism in the growing number of home businesses in america taking advantage of new technologies such as the home computer and economic democracy of the internet they are powering a new age of family entrepreneurship more importantly from the world historic perspective they are also beginning to heal the breach between work and home to decide exploited by the advocates of the post family order. ronald reagan understood what was at stake and a speech given

in chicago in 1988 he said the family is the bedrock of our nation but it is also the engine that gives our country life. it is for our families we work and labour so that we can join around the dinner table and bring our shoulder not the right way, care for our parents and reach out to those less fortunate. it is the power of the family that holds the nation together that gives america her conscience and serves as the cradle of the nation's soul. so true. and in their bitter moments even ole and lena would agree. [applause]

>> from a modest origins in colorado population 185 where she began a community paper at the age of ten machine has written to prominence writing and editing over 20 books and 500 scholarly essays presenting several hundred lectures are around the world earning nine on larry degrees, holding positions of princeton, harvard vanderbilt, georgetown and chicago receiving awards from the guggenheim and rockefeller foundations. serving on the boards of the institute for advanced study of princeton and national humanities center and delivering the electors of the university of edinburgh which william james

and need worked once delivered. today she simultaneously holds the rockefeller professorship at the university of chicago and the chair in the foundations of american freedom at georgetown university. but she is all of that and much more. as a wife and mother of four children and grandmother of three, she is a woman for all seasons. let's welcome to the regent university platform jean. [applause] >> good morning. i'm delighted to be here. i'm afraid that unlike the first to splendid speakers i am going to be jokeless this morning.

i'm sorry. laughter koza you have to bear with me. everybody's a critic. it seems to be a natural right among americans to gripe about pretty much everything but politics above all how many times have you heard they are all a bunch of crooks? trust in politicians and political process appears to be among us. it has plummeted. now for many decades, cultural elites anointed themselves as the designated critics of the culture. in today's elite criticism finds in the outpouring of ordinary citizens about the state of the union, a little bit ignorant fanaticism. in turn some of those attacked said just criticizing the

country in severe terms is tantamount to lack of patriotism and return others reply shout that the only were the patriot is the harsh critic because america is guilty of so many terrible things. it is not my intent to make my way through all of this malaise. instead i want to start on another place as we say. when we think about the hebrew profits of old we are reminded they were part of and loved the people they were criticizing. they did not see themselves as above all or somehow on the outside man launching thunderbolts from on high. reminding myself of this, i recalled a wise comment made several years ago by cardinal francis george of the great city

of chicago who stated that you cannot criticize effectively what you do not love. now he had in mind criticism of his church that frequently enough comes from a stand of bitter and ennis similarly one can see anamosa at work and too many criticisms of contemporary america. it is a few will the for the side of the old notion of american exceptional some. you have some idea what that entailed, american eckert sectionalism. the claim that america was an exceptional nation that was ordained, anointed and historic sense to carry on a particular mission in the world at left it up tall times and carried forward the method of freedom. this position of american

exceptional the some is a very bad presinal of days. but there were and are several versions of its. one of linscott cells to aggressive nationalism. the other to robust patriotism and there's a difference between the two. for the patriot, america is indeed exceptional in a number of ways that is simply a fact but that does not tall demand we treat the loved others have for their particular countries lightly. instead we recognize this and work work with it so to speak. surely iran lincoln's idea put forth in the agony of the country at the time that america is the last best hope on earth is an expression of the gentle form of american exceptional some. still there are critics who make

no distinction whatsoever between the belligerent and the more lane one than versions of american exceptional was and can condemn it outright. but they do so in a manner that is itself a species of a particularly noxious form of american exceptional some, mainly america as the leading exemplar of injustice, racism, imperialism, classicism, brummer, capitalism, globalism, you name it. if it is bad america somehow in bodies it. now put forward as criticism it is in fact a type of conspiracy theory if anything bad is happening anywhere america's bloody hands are bound to be involved. now, in response to this

duralast outburst some defenders of america we need to acknowledge go overboard in another direction and exonerate us all together. as the primes and misdemeanors they offered a rosy view and everything we have done as a nation. thus we find a great deal of back-and-forth labeled criticism but it takes us know where. it is by now so much background static it does not assist the ordinary citizen in thinking about how we might go about losing our country and criticizing her at the same time. those who do not love their country as american citizens will be entirely not moved by the argument i will set forth but you can't win them all as they say. so let me step back and think about a framework set forth many years ago now by reinhold

niebuhr's less famous brother h. richard niebuhr himself a distinguished theologian. he was the great public theologian in america in the 20th century. in an old but a good one called christ and culture richard neighbor identified five different possible positions taken by christians historic plea and their relationship to the wide cultural surround in which they found themselves and these were christ against culture, the christ of culture, priced above culture, christ and culture in paradox and christ as the transformer of culture. can we take our bearings as we think about criticism more generally whether it comes from the stance of christian belief or not from the neighbors categories? i think we can.

is the critic against or above his own society, as the critics seek to transform the society from within? is there a paradoxical relationship between critic and culture, how do we sort this out? why is it important. meter was insistent the possibilities he proffered were not airtight categories they blend into one another at many points thus christ against culture and christ against transformer of culture might not be seen as opposites but as part and parcel of an overall stance but the against part cannot be one that is standalone involving condemnation from a hot presumed moral superiority when i hear some of the contemporary radical critics to appear to load the america they criticized i am reminded of the antiin nazi

theologian's assessment of the radical and his ethics he argues the radical begrudges god, his creation for the radical sikhs a self sovereignty of incompatible with recognition of our indebtedness to others in the past as well as in the present and of course our indebtedness in the first instance to our creator. the radical tells us is all ultimate, that is every goal is an ultimate goal, everything has to do with sacrificing the sheer and now for some of scatological goal in history. that is to say all of the good is located as some future point so we have contempt for the present but if we just destroyed

this in the future will get to that which we can call good we must rid ourselves of this present through any and all possible means. that means trampling on people's lives, controlling them from above, ignoring their cries for understanding would also be it. the radical knows better somehow now he continues that this is not a stance the christian can embrace for we are taught that creationists could that doesn't mean everything that is happening at the present is good but it does mean that there must be some good to embrace in the present the they're all after all blessings all around us even the most dire circumstances and they were donner beyond anything we can imagine also if you believe some of the most

belligerent critics, they are in danger of some gestapo like entity bursting through the door and hauling them all for their political efficacy at any moment. and i am not exaggerating here. a few years ago i attended a conference in europe and berlin and there were prominent intellectuals both american and german who claimed guantanamo bay was really set up to become a prison camp where american citizens critical of the bush ad and attrition would be sent. [laughter] now this was so preposterous. one didn't know what to say other than that is preposterous. now this engendered knowing looks all around you that you were either a suspicious sympathizer of that administration work you had your

head in the sand and did not want to phase what was coming down the pike. now of course there is an exact mirror image of this recommendation stands to be found and what might be called equally radical affirmation. niebuhr's we would face the distance. i refer to those who equate all that is good with american culture who grow heated and defensive if you know our historic shortcomings and progress on display from time to time. as the negative radical side leave you with the enemy if you do not agree with them 100%, so that it was defender of all things america who eletes america with a religious project sees you as dangerous and

perhaps unpatriotic if you criticize your country you get all lumped in with a radical. neither of these and bodies authentic cultural critique. one over does it to the point of losing her own country and finding nothing good in it. the other rejects and abandons her birthright as a thinking being and a citizen by endorsing as good all that is going on. now surely this cannot be either certainly if you are a christian and hold that human beings are fallen creatures. christians are enjoined both to love the world and to be against the world. similarly, citizens should both love their country if that country is at least a minimally decent place in america meets that standard and goes much

beyond its and understand when and where she must be held to account and even chastised. they do this because they love the country and want her to rise closer to the blessed community of which martin luther king on of our civic profits spoke. let me offer an example what political theorists michael walter calls the connected critic the person who speaks from the stance of deep immersion and that which he and she criticizes who does not exist in a lofty world apart who does not send down those lightning bolts of condemnation on any and all who disagree with him. there are many examples in history to choose from. mine will be from frederick douglass, the great abolitionist a speech he delivered in rochester new york july 4th,

1862, independence day. much of the speeches pointed even better. douglas crisis you cannot drag a man in offenders and change before the altar of liberty and expect him to celebrate on a day that mocks his condition. douglas offers a blistering comparison of the condition of the slave when measured against the declaration of independence and preamble to the constitution but then he goes on to say i am not condemning these principles. i do not think that they are false and the founders were nothing but hypocrites, no, these are great principles, great documents. i share those principles, this leaves aspires to them we want to be part of the country, too, not part from that. we, too, one to be free citizens.

so you see the dynamic here and in niebuhr's scheme of things it would be again stand with the position so here we see the would-be citizen with and against culture. one of both criticizes and extols so i submit thus the critical patriot whether he or she is a believer or not. the aim of criticism this transformation. the critic in america is so fortunate because our civic and can always be measured against our great founding documents. we do not have to invent a new every day principles to guide us, something it is impossible in any case. so the basic questions for the critics would be measured against our ideals of ordered liberty to read freedom

consistent with the common good, human dignity, and america as the last best hope that alerts us to work responsibilities in the world at large. if the credit function is entirely outside of this framework, her criticism will at best be entirely irrelevant. we do not need to import full-blown ideologies from marxism or hard-core libertarianism or other stance to serve as a basis for criticism not if we are deeply connected to the american polity, acknowledge our loved for her and our indebtedness to her. now why have thought about that indebtedness a lot recently. perhaps because as one grows older one reflects in greater detail on one's past. my immigrant grandparents of a beloved memory on my mother's side of the family came here as

children, impoverished germans from russia so called volga germans to be debated is to plead for in the sugar beet fields of northern colorado, living at first in household huts finding themselves covered with layers of dirt as they awakened every morning. they were not there every day with the hot noontime sun beating down and that can get brittle in colorado as i can testify. they worked until dusk and then they started again at dawn. eventually once my grandparents had married they acquired slowly a bit of land that expanded to a bit more, but the dawn to dusk work didn't light and very much. that indeed is the image with which i associate them always working hard, loving their families, insisting that their grandchildren game and on

interrupted education for some of their own children including my mother after the eighth grade to work on a farm. how quickly -- this is america, after all -- how quickly things went from that economic hardship and the daily relentless toil to grandchildren and great-grandchildren now being doctors, lawyers, teachers, savitt because of the benefactors of all kind most importantly mothers and fathers as were their grandparents and great grandparents before them beating a legacy of decency, hard work, love of family, love of country. now how could i possibly condom a country that made all of this possible for me and so many authors. the element of loafing and resentment in so much contemporary criticism coming from people living who lives

america made possible i am thinking here of the professoriate especially as simply beyond me. so i will remain a connected critic, critical patriot, one who understands what an astonishing proposition america is and how she must never be an object of idolatry but neither should she be an object of scorn. thank you very much. [applause] >> i feel the need for authority second stand-up. let's stretch for just a bit. 30 seconds. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] amol conversations [inaudible conversations]

all right, you may be seated now. the house will be in order. thank you. good to see such a large crowd on a day that promises ill whether. and good to see so many young people in the audience [applause]

our age range is i would say from mid teens -- [laughter] my age. [laughter] it is alone fact paul cantor the clifton wall where professor of english at the university of the virginia was a varsity athlete at harvard college. yes our renowned shakespearean scholar was on the financing team. in the two years of the varsity competition, she had a perfect record, eight ballots, eight losses, no rim's. [laughter] now, paul may not have been a

sterling athlete but who among us has ever had moses come to our defense. when poehl wrote a book review in the weekly standard attacking one of those books that claimed shakespeare didn't write his plays, the antishakspere crowd and viciously attacked him in the next issue. but who should come to paul's defense with a brilliant scholar early revival none other than charlton heston. [laughter] paul said that was like having moses himself, to his defense. [laughter] his books include shakespeare roma rebel gindin tire, "creature and creator: myth-making and english romanticism", "shakespeare," "gilligan unbound," "pop culture

in the age of globalization," and "literature in spontaneous culture." he writes in the clermont review of books to read paul received a ludwig von mises scholarship in the austrian school of economics and served on the national council of the humanities from 1992 to 1999. let's welcome paul cantor to address the unpredictability of culture. [applause] according to the clock i have five minutes by the schedule but i am told i can speak for my full 20 minutes. thank you a very much for the introduction. as you have gathered, dr. dunn asked for simulating facts about our past. i should have told him we'd for my lecture. that will be humiliating enough.

[laughter] i've taken seriously the topic and i'm going to speak about the future of american culture. as an english professor i think of culture as being primarily the arts and i've recently become especially interested in popular culture and can say in all modesty i am regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on the simpsons so i'm going to talk about television and the movies today. i feel like the odd man out in the presence of ronald reagan and groucho marx negative like and talk about the movie with some respectability here even though i guess i am lowering the tone of everything here. so focusing on a popular culture i will need the following predictions about the future of america. american cultural production the next decade will increase in an average rate of 3.7% per year topping a 7.6% never failing

below 2.2% on an annualized basis to read this overall growth rate will mask a decline in the percentage of motion pictures relative to that television and video games. motion picture production will peak in 2014 and thereafter suffer precipitous decline largely as a result of the simultaneous retirement of stevens bill spurred, james cameron and jerry brookhiser. by 2020, the few game production will have outdistanced the total of both motion picture and television production by a factor of two, meeting of the release of grand theft although 27, which will be purchased by every single person on the planet. [laughter] meanwhile, during the same purpose america's share of the world cultural production would decline by 12 to 15.5% depending upon how quickly the chinese are able to develop video games compatible with chinese characters. on a more optimistic note in 2020 the simpsons will still be

airing sundays at 8 p.m.. [laughter] also the fox network will have long since been taken over by the federal government for the reasons of national security. [laughter] so there you have a defiance of american productions complete with percentage figures, accurate i assure you to one decimal point. americans like to believe the future is predictable and in precise mathematical terms because we desperately want a future to be predictable we assume somehow it must be and listened eagerly to anyone who claims to be able to tell us what will happen tomorrow or the next day or one year from now or ten. since the world is simply awash with predictions at any given moment one out of 1,000 will turn out to have been correct and we think we've discovered the new no strongest. the test of the power is a track record. if we look at history we see an unending succession of predictions that turned out to

have been wrong and that should teach a healthy skepticism about the above the of the human race to for toilets future. this is especially true in the realm of popular culture even in the short run. big budget movies supposed to be sure fired gets routinely tank at box office while every year produces sleepers, movies that can barely get financing that belong to garner huge audiences and academy awards. the record of long-term cultural production is even more. think of the hollywood careers that work will and in the case of people who dismissed the talking picture as a passing fad. let's face it, culture is the realm of the unpredictable. studying the history of the cultural prophecy this appalls anyone trying to predict the future of american culture in the try first century. did anyone in 1900 have the faintest idea what the cultural world would look like in the year 2000? in the literary world for a

sample did anyone foresee by the middle of the 20th century some of the best literature would be coming out of latin america, africa and asia? in the musical world did anyone in 1900 with a possible exception of arnold see that the composers would dispense with melody and harmony? more importantly did anyone in the cultural world in 1900 to notice of something called moving pictures and predict this form of amusement would go on to become the greatest art form of 20th century. i hate to play the part of the typical english professor, i am one but i hesitate to turn this talking to a commentary on the possibility of cultural prophecy. but perhaps now we can learn something about the cultural future paradoxically by examining why it is impossible to predict it and i want to insist on a point that the cultural future is unpredictable not merely in practice the principle.

this is not just a matter of my individual incompetence. to hope for the sake of argument i'm glad to concede that point. more is a matter of our meeting better data or sharper analytical instruments or larger samples of further experiments. as was a scientific matter. we fundamentally go wrong when we invoke scientific methods and criteria production trying to understand cultural phenomenon. indeed we need to trawl fundamental distinctions between the world of the physical nature studied by science and the world of human culture studied by people like me. the planet whose orbits are chartered are not themselves astronomers. jupiter and neptune are blind and deaf to any claims we make about where they will be in tennis our earth years. but not some human beings will have their own ideas about their future. in the cultural realm, human beings are making predictions about other human beings and the

predictees wonder what predictors say to prove them wrong. in short the culture is a will where they may change their mind at any moment and often act on a whim. i've been studying the history of cultural production carefully and i've come to the one conclusion, cultural profits will usually be wrong because the people actually creating the cultural future of our more creative than the people predicting it. [laughter] the people i asked to make cultural prophecies by virtue of being in the position of authority to do so may well be the least likely to predict accurately. precisely because they are authorities they tend to be invested in the past and hence established the patterns of culture. indeed intended to weed the cultural future on the model of the cultural past. this is just another way of

saying these authorities are usually academics, and here we are. academics have perfect 2020 vision in hindsight. they are however profits. they can be very good at analyzing artistic quality but they are not as good at discovering it or recognizing it when it comes along especially in unexpected places. they are in fact often among the last of development in the culture precisely because of their role as custodian and conservatives of the culture of the past. this is particularly true when it comes to the development of cultural media. academics tend to understand the new medium by the rules of the established media and the judge the new medium deficient by the standards of the old. to the many academics, the motion pictures for a long time look like bad stage plays. bye contrast ordinary people began to realize the motion picture was the great art form

of the 20th century as early as its second decade. thus the record of academics with regard to the emergence of the cinema as an art form does not aspire faith in them as cultural profits. like generals, academics often seem to be a fighting the last cultural war. they expect films to be like novels or pleas and complain when they did not develop the characters or did not obey the dramatic unity. when the television came along many academics traded tv shows as the substandard movies. the history of culture since the 19th century has become increasingly bound up with history of new media, academics have had a really hard time keeping up with new cultural developments, loan getting out in front of them. it may be painful to give up our feet in the predictability of culture, but at the price of uncertainty we should in fact welcome the unpredictability of culture because it means the culture remains a realm of human

freedom. now, having totally undermined any credibility i might have as a cultural profit, i want nevertheless to pursue my assigned task by means of a single case study of predicting the cultural future of america. i will deal with the remarkable example of the cultural prophecy a book published in 1915 called the art of the moving picture. by vachel lindsay. he was a poet and his book on the moving picture is virtually unknown to the moving public. film historians acknowledge it to be among the first books in america to deal with the cinema is not the very first. this book offers a good lesson in the cultural prophecy in times it can restore one's faith in the possibility of forcing the future but other times it can serve as a warning against the pitfalls of trying to outguess the creative forces in the new media. in assessing lindsey as a profit we can begin with a simple fact

that he was writing a book on of the heart of the moving picture at all in 1915 that is a time virtually all cultural authorities dismiss movies as a low form of popular entertainment. this was arguably the earliest possible moment when such a book could have been written with any degree of plausibility. in 1915 the evidence was at hand for the first time the motion picture could be a genuine art form. giovanni's movie about the rahman cartilage had come out in italy in 1914 and had just been released in the united states, and course d.w. griffith's "birth of a nation" just created perhaps the greatest sensation any film ever has. even bigger than avatar. [laughter] many critics today would say that these are the first truly to great films in movie history and are both epic in subject matter and length and both push existing limits of the cinematic

art introducing for example new camera techniques and lindsay managed to proclaim them as masterpieces at just the moment they came out. this kind of immediate recognition of a turning point of culture is terri rare in the history of criticism. to draw an analogy is as if someone in 1588 viewed the first great play christopher's tabler land and on the spot frequented the great of the new era in the popular theater of england. lindsay calls this parable. faced with the towering achievement in the movie intolerance, lindsay pulls out all stops that d.w. griffith is the byron of the films, but certainly as magnificent and since he is the first of its kind, all i am willing to name him. just as marlo did in the theater, d.w. griffith and the motion picture industry was the first to reveal the artistic medium while at the same time

scoring an unprecedented commercial success. what i find so extraordinary is the we've lindsay, writing when the films were being released singles out as masterpiece is precisely the works that film critics to this day hold up as the triumph of the early cinema, birth of a nation in tolerance. to be sure, lindsay praised his many works that do not appear today on anybody's list of the 100 greatest movies of all time. sometimes the movies he talks about simply no longer exist. reading the book is like a foliage to the island of lost the reels as the credits will buy such a little treat, neptune's daughter, a wheel in water, the mine owners daughter and two of the most provocative titles the wild girl of the sierra and my personal favorite, the land of the headhunters. [laughter] it is a sobering experience to release the films of lindsay

values and holds up as the arts have disappeared entirely. lindsay is eloquent about another film that is evidently lost called the battle hymn of the republic. he calls it one of the two most significant foe plays with me earmarks the motion pictures were often called photograph please. an interesting sign how things have changed the most significant photograph please, the other is the reasonably well-known 1914 judith of petroleum. lindsay insists every student of american art should see this film were already in 1915 lindsay is involved in what we now call the tannin formation. he says of bedle him it should be studied in the canons of art for which it stands are established in america. we must remember lindsay was riding at a time most people full of the films as something to get audience a moment of pleasure and then be seen no more. bye contrast, lindsay accurately

predicts films would eventually be archived and he writes there would be available at certain centers, collections of films equivalent to the standard dictionary and encyclopedia britannica. without exactly for seeing the video cassette or the dvd he did look forward to the availability of movies and people's homes he writes pogo plea libraries as active not as multitudinous as the books circulating the libraries. admittedly, lindsay failed to receive blockbuster or netflix but for someone writing in 1915 deserves a lot of credit for realizing films are not throwaway items but have lasting value and would be recycled endlessly in various forms of reproduction. at least that is true of the birth of a nation though evidently not of the land of the headhunters. and here we come to the pit bull of instantaneous can information. we are impressed by lindsay's ability to identify fisa maddock classics of the moment the

appear but we must also be troubled by the tendency to get carried away by what looked to us in retrospect like moment of the enthusiasm. he links the never to be forgotten what the nation blow in quality the loan since forgotten battle hymn of the republic. this is a reminder of the fact contemporary criticism is likely to be inconsistent even a sharp critic may mistake what was turned out as passing fads for contributions. that is why the test time is crucial to the process of the canon formation. it may take years to sort out the week from the chaff. that is also one reason why the criticism works better as a retrospective science than predictive science. if we try to infer the future from the president we are likely to go wrong precisely because we need the future to find out what really is important and long lasting significance in our own day. still lindsay is impressive, generally has a grasp of the big picture and explicitly states

he's writing about one of the epochal shift in history. at times even sounds like the great media profit marshall, lindsay writes edison is the new guttenberg. 1915 he's saying he's invented the new printing, the state that realizes this may lead to america the day after tomorrow. here lindsay issues and shows understanding of the larger context of cultural developments. the art of the moving picture has an entire chapter called california and america. lindsay was quick to grasp that by 1915 the american movie industry had largely migrated from the new york new jersey area where it originated to los angeles. lindsay understood this was made shortly chile because the requirements of obra filmmaker for the of reliable good weather. but lindsay sensed something deeper was happening. a shift in american culture geography at a time the dodgers were still in brooklyn and the giants of new york he correctly

intuited the balance of power between the east coast and the west was finally tilting towards the pacific he writes california indeed stands a chance to achieve through the films and utterance of our own will this land furthest west be the first to capture the spirit of this newest most curious of the arts. lindsay realizes how much is at stake when the question of whether one of locale will dominate the movie business. he talks about the standing dominance of boston and american culture. patriotic arts students he writes discuss with mingled irony and admiration the boston domination of the only american culture of the 19th century namely literature, boston still controls the text book in english and dominates our high school. ..

which is at times a shallow in as thought as the shadow that grows upon the screen. this new california has in common with all photoplays'. it is possible for the state and the art to acquire spiritual tradition and that together. today we might make the point

this way. hollywood has about as much depth as a flat screen tv. [laughter] lindsey's that's about california have been shared by culture critics ever since. lindsey hope sharing a fresh start the state in the movie industry might together. and to something richard culturally. by standing for freedom and openness california epitomizes much of what is best in america and it was a fitting setting for a dynamic movie industry but lindsey recognizes california stands for something else in america, the threat of lawlessness and the lack of cultural traditions. after all california is the last outpost of the wild west and lindsay rights, the moving picture captains of industry like the california gold finders of 1849 making glossal fortunes in two or three years have the same glorious responsibility and occasional nita of the sheriff.

blasco amazing in 1915. weekend not folk lindsey for leaving unresolved the question of the culture leadership is bad for america. we are still struggling with this issue nearly a century later. this is exactly the sort of development that usually flies right under the radar of most cultural critics. lindsey was an astute enough to spot a cultural tsunami were other people saw a ripple on the waters. lindsey teaches an important lesson come up be on the lookout for seemingly insignificant developments that may have widespread consequences. so on the basis of what we have learned from studying clancy i will now fenster is a few modest predictions of my own. the future of american culture will be very different from what we expect today or what kind they predict. some of the things we value and our culture today will survive into the future and by the same

token many things we value in our culture will be forgotten and suffer the fate of the vast majority of culture productions in the history oblivion. trends that we'd barely notice at the moment will turn out to have had all sorts of unintended consequences and to have transformed american culture in ways we cannot imagine. i would love to be able to tell you we are a great substantive jill shift but unfortunately i am not up to the test. i will say this much. it is likely happening in the last place most of us expected. that generally means it is not happening in the media brown and which we therefore think are all important namely motion pictures and television. with the history of media teaches us is new media have a way of sneaking up on us in ambushing us culturally. now all this may sound ominous for me to say the future is

unpredictable is probably making people nervous, thinking only bad things will happen so let me end on a somewhat optimistic note. indeed let me take that much of what i have been saying and question whether cultural is transformed between 1900 and 2000. if we look at the development of the media we cannot help being struck by the discontinuities. a lake victoria would be amazed by television and probably appalled by it. confronted by a pena medium we are struck precisely by its novelty and usually feel unearth pyett. but what the media portrays may not be all that different. my very late victorian survivals of the 1990's with the first shocked. but if he could settle down with a show he might overcome his initial dismay and began to see something familiar in it. the fact that it comes in weekly installments, the way it

combines humor and sentimentality, the huge cast of quirky and lovable characters, the creation of an entire imaginary community, the topical references and political satire. i hope you can hear my victorian saying i have seen all this before. it is just like charles dickens. we could get so wrapped up in distinctions among the media that we forget by and large they are only used to do the same thing, to tell stories and often while the media change the stories remained the same. look at the way dickens story set kept circulating in movies and television. i think that is a cause for hope. i will end with a quotation from a to a classic of pop culture the movie in which our hero ronald reagan did not get the girl. in fact famously he did not even get the part. i am talking of course about casa blanca and i will quote some of its most memorable lines. it is still the same old story,

a fight for love and glory coming even as time goes by and that is the best prediction i can make. [applause] >> if you and i are alike, and i think we are, we need to catch our breath after these four outstanding lectures. is there a hope for america? i would say yes there is hope because the size of the audience here would come and studiously sit and listen to lectures and the quality of the lecture. there is hope in america. now, in the hebrew, the number ten is the devine number of for

completion, and we are scheduled to have a complete ten-minute break, but also in the hebrew, the number seven is the divine number for perfection. now-- [laughter] we need to perfect our break, reducing it from ten to seven, so that we can get into our question and answer session more quickly. so let's take a short break, return. please line up here at the head of either aisle to ask questions. thank you. ♪

>> we have quite a lineup on that i'll but we only have a couple on this isle. we need to get a few more folks down here. we have already had the folsom the and yet has only begun. now, this afternoon we have three other excellent speakers, so we have a lot to look forward to. and i want to thank you for coming and for your excellent attention. this is remarkable, are fit

symposium and they seem to get better every year. if that is indeed possible. so thank you all for making this such a productive event. alright, we will begin now with their questions and answers and because there are more of you then the view we are going to start on this side. >> hello, this is a question for mr. cantor. i wanted to know can culture profits redeem themselves to speak about american culture with prophetic accuracy in sites? >> i am not sure i understand the question. can you elaborate a bit on it? >> in your speech you were talking about culture profits and how that you believe that they cannot predict accurately but what i want to know is can they redeem themselves? >> i am not sure what you mean by redeem themselves. that is i guess my problem. i do not believe that the

cultural future is predictable. and, again, because i think that the people created are so much more imaginative than the people who try to predict it. i don't think it is an issue of redeeming in the sense that, i offer the example of lindsey. i think he does a good job. i tried to stress the auman riding in 1915 as much as he did about movies but i mean he made so many mistakes in the book. for example he predicted sound would never work in movies and if it did it would make movies worse. and that was so ridiculous to west now but he had all sorts of reasons for that. he was used to silent movies. the earliest attempts at sound movies where pretty bad technically. and that is the problem, but, i don't, i don't think there is anything cultural profits could do that is better unless they

would learn some humility based on studying the record failure of profits. that is why, actually when i set out with this task in mind i said maybe i should take a look at how people have done it in the past, predicting the future and it is a lesson in humility if you study, even someone as intelligent and successful less lindsay. there is so much he misses. the way i came to see it is what looks like a limitation to the cultural prophet turns out to be a challenge to the artists, so for example when you go back even to 1925, even to 1930 after sound movies had been introduced the vast majority of the critics are saying sound won't work in motion pictures are better if they are silent. meanwhile the actual people making motion pictures for facing up to the challenge how do we make sound work, how do we make good talking pictures?

they were creative, the prophets were actually looking to the past and not to the future, so the one lesson i have learned as i would be very cautious about making culture predictions in some sense leave it to the artist or the truly creative people. >> just very briefly i am glad you've touched on humility because it does seem to me your question suggested that and if i may i would like to extend that invitation to humility to people in political science and the social sciences. because-- [applause] because there too we have these confident models that are proffered with great certainty about the future of american politics and help things will all turn out and what is remarkable about them is that they are consistently wrong, so i think that humility is, it is

a lesson that needs to be learned more generally in the academy and not just by people in paul's field. >> professor arkes. >> in fact my model for the thinking is-- and the whole notion of spontaneous order and i am just trying to show that culture works the same way the economy does, and it is such a complex phenomenon that involves interaction in so many different factors that all the thames have failed. it is not a limit-- linear occulter. >> professor arkes has a comment. >> i have course but the accent on the permanent things. what about the moral components contained in culture, the framework for culture? could we not predict 100 years from now we'll still not be signing labor contracts of dogs and horses or seeking informed consent of our household pets before we authorize surgery on

them but we continue to think those who can understand reasons deserve to be ruled with a rendering of reasons in neighbors seem that unless there consent. there will always be an expect to things we find good will be praised and awarded them the things we find that will be repulsed and penalized. but there will always be a moral framework in culture and i was just thinking of this new thing by madonna. a recorded voice comes and where a youngster is trying to download dingus from the net he should not be downloading and madonna comes out to say what the f are you doing? as much as she is in the vanguard of the culture she still wants royalties and property rights. those things that property rights will lindora i think we will find many other things in the arts enduring the long-haul. >> as we turn to the next question here, our afternoon speakers we welcome you to participate here in this

discussion. go ahead. >> this question is for dr. carlson. my home state of oklahoma has the dubious distinction of leading the nation in the percentage of four-year-olds in the government's preschool program and some even want to expand that to three-year-olds inth settings. there are however these encouraging pockets of resistance you mentioned. we have a thriving homeschool sector and we have i think the only state are certainly one of the first-aid that has a child tax credit on the state tax return. it is tiny but it is something that stay-at-home moms can get as well as the daycare moms can get so that is something. my question is what from a public policy standpoint of the state level can be done to encourage and in bold in these pockets of resistance and to promote the natural family in this way?

>> actually i'm a great believer in tax policy as a way to shift the incentives and you mentioned an oklahoma you have a little tax break that helps. illinois it by the end of has a very nice tax credit against a fairly small flat tax 3% in illinois but there is a nice fat tax credit for all kinds of educational expenses. and, actually it has been a real help to the homeschool families and it passed constitutional muster in the illinois state courts and it has been a way to but it also helps people in christian schools, parochial and private academies. so, i would find whatever possible, wherever you can find a tax for you can fill the credit and for families. really it is a family in particular. that is a great benefit and a great help. i have even pondered ways to do it were elected to sales taxes are relative to even the property taxes.

look for tax breaks, and it is a nonintrusive way of expanding the zones of liberty for families to function. >> other comments on the platform? next question. >> good morning. this question is to the entire panel. how much influence if any did the reagan doctrine have on the fall of the soviet union? >> have on the fall of the soviet union? the reagan doctrine. >> if you look at the fall of the soviet union i think you will find is we have already insisted up here a complex pattern where as not just one factor but certainly if you put together the policies of the reagan administration, he put together the economic troubles of the soviet economy, and then i think one has to add the

powerful witness of pope john paul ii. you simply cannot leave that out in so many of the analyses of the fall of the soviet union, that the role of john paul ii. and the fact that when he made his first pilgrimage to his homeland after being ascending to the papacy in 1978 the first pilgrimmage was 1979 again spontaneous. millions of people turned out, the millions, peaceful gatherings of these enormous crowds, and the regime at that point realized it had lost control. because once people are brave enough and hopeful enough, to take certain risks, then these authoritarian apparatuses are in real trouble. let me very briefly because i want to get all the questions in but i was in poland in 1983 on

the john paul ii pilgrimmage. i figured that would be something not to be missed and there was a moment when we were and warsaw, sort of heading across the bridge to where they have put the pope. they ripped up the central square in warsaw so it could not be held there. and, the crowds paused before the singing crowd and there were flowers and people that had hampered signs. before they had orders of the communist party which were completely shuttered, just shut down. and, the crowd started shouting the solidarity slogan, singing hymns and so forth and it was such a powerful moment. we showed you the moral voice collectively speaking, and what that could do to help bring down an empire that i was taught when i was an undergraduate would

last as far is that i could see. we would have this bipolar world, the two empires that you will, the united states versus the soviet union and that was it. and, here we go. something quite extraordinary happens so you can't leave out the moral witness of people. the experts again had it all wrong. the sammy at colleges were absolutely stunned, absolutely stunned. >> professor kessler. >> there is credit to go-round of course, margaret thatcher, helmut kohl was important to the installation of the pershing missiles in germany and the united front against the soviets. but also i think reagan said early on that his view of the cold war was that they would lose and we would win. and the denial of the assumption of the inevitability to

communism and to the left in general was one of great breakthroughs of reagan, thatcher and others that because part of the mystique of the left and particularly of communism was that history was on their side and i think reagan at home and abroad showed that was simply not the case, that history is up for grabs as it were. >> next question here. >> this question is for dr. arkes. as law appears to be intertwined in the copresident should president ever be part of the conservatives jurisprudence? >> i did not catch that. >> as positive law appears to be intertwined in legal president, should precedent ever be part of the conservatives jurisprudence? >> even in the tradition of natural law, a place had to be made the positive law. you may see a sign on the road saying 55 miles per hour, 45.

but, that's fine, there is nothing of principles significance between 45 and 55 but the positive law is underlying by a natural law. there is a principle that tells us why we would be justified in restraining the liberty of people to drive at speeds hazardous for the innocent lives including their own but we need some kind of a regulation to convert that principle into a measure that applies the principle to the circumstances and the terrain before us. so we have always had a place for positive law and at times of course positive law reflects the mood of statesmanship, people who recognize with aquinas that they don't impose under the bulk of imperfect burdens those who are already virtuous. we may not apply a principle in its fullest sweep.

and i don't doubt the principle that borrows racial discrimination, that bars as from joining nascent race would apply to the choice of a spouse, but our legislators have not-- drone it that far into positive law. they have held back, so there is always the main vice comes when people say that they take their measure of right and wrong simply from what the positive law says-- sets forth. we have all been tutored by harry jaffa and stephen douglas and in the debate with lincoln. there are no natural rights. all men are created equal simply meant the rights of white men. whether slavery was right or wrong we will leave to people to vote it up. we don't care what they say as long as they do it in a democratic way. what is right or wrong is that that has the support of the majority and as lincoln quickly

pointed out if that is the measure of right and wrong then we cut the ground out from under constitutional rights and the rights of the minority because sisson is the majority has spoken it has given us the exhaustive definition of what is right or wrong. we have no other source to which to appeal. james wilson said, one last thing, james wulsin said that america does begin with the revolution principle contained in its laws because america begins with the possibility that you can have an unjust law, that there things that are passed with all the trappings of legality but lack the substance of justice and that is possible only because agents the positive law we can appeal to another body of principles to measure the justice of what the law has done. [applause] >> next question.

>> hello mr. arkes. this question is for you. >> i just came into read the meter and they asked me-- [laughter] stayed behind and offer a few words. >> my question is directed towards what you said about ronald reagan in stating that he was able to take philosophical principles and make them understandable to a majority of people and my question to you is what is the secret behind taking judeo-christian principles, the philosophical abstract thoughts and helping the modern average individual help understand that? >> i don't know anyone i have seen at any age who, when hearing lincoln's line, the fragment he wrote imagining a conversation, doesn't get it. it is accessible. they get this. this is what apolitical person should be able to do. scott brown cut some of this

when he said we shouldn't be taxing, we should be taxing the american taxpayers to buy guns, to fight enemies, not to by lawyers for our enemies. [laughter] he caught something. [applause] how did he do it? it is a question of how does a teacher do it? reagan said, that line i quoted, he did it so often you know. the line about, we are subsidizing people for losing their jobs as a result of-- he just pointed this out and as soon as he pointed out it is as though we have already understood that so i don't think there's any way we can train people unless we just give them examples of the way it was done. the best things done in the past by the people who wrote those

federalist papers and argued them this way. that is the best way we can teach them now. >> i regret that i am under command of the person who controls my life at work, my assistant, that we have to take a recess now for lunch and that leaves two of you wanting to ask questions. the guarantee is this afternoon you will get to ask questions first, okay? >> we will be back. >> that is right. we will be back. [laughter] i have carefully prepared introductions of our three guests this afternoon. to point out certain things about their checkered past. [laughter] they don't know what it is i am going to say but anyway let's

all come back this afternoon after lunch, and please enjoyed a good lunch. thank you. ♪ >> well embedded with the u.s. air force in southern afghanistan freelance video journalist david axe observed of the u.s. uses the unmanned aerial vehicles for drones. >> there are two drone units to

american john units in afghanistan. basically one handles the north and one handles the south. this out this the busier of catoosa you have the exact numbers classified but i would guess 100 predator reaper drones. the predators look like giant model airplanes. about the size of a small compact car. the reapers look about the same but they are twice as big. and look more like honest to god fighter jets then they do model airplanes, and you can hang the sultan bombs on these things. their noses carry a bunch of different sensors, cameras, radar and things like that. these things can stay in the air a long time. the exact number depends on what you are carrying and where you are flying but it is not impossible for one of these to orbit for a whole day, just soaking up vast amounts of the maggi and theta peering down and looking at, taking radar snapshots of terrain.

the drones, you can think of them as manned aircraft except the man in the aircraft is actually sitting on the ground. he is still talking to the ground troops, talking to the air comptrollers. they actually use a check program. it looks like instant messenger to do a lot of the communication with guys receiving the support from the drums, and the drones are fairly precise as far as these things go. they don't carry large weapons, they don't fire a lot of them so it is a far cry from a b-1 bomber dropping a 2,000-pound bomb on the suspected taliban position. >> this is an mq-1 predator, a quarter the size of the reaper. essentially it is a very efficient for what it does which is stay airborne for a long time. has a small engine in the back, a four cylinder turbocharged engine that runs on gas. the payload it can carry is much

smaller. instead of caring for missiles into bonds picking kerry to missiles. typically we don't fly with the missiles because weight is fuel and fuel is time so we would rather have the time in this guy being able to clear the rose, helped support the troops if they are on the convoy or perform some kind of strategic level mission looking for the big bad guys. the payload is a little smaller so the picture isn't as nice as their reapers but at the same time it does exactly the same mission. >> the drone units in afghanistan don't actually handled many attacks. reason being the drone missions are bifurcated. most of the drone operators guys to steer them sit in these trailers and steer the drones hency the drones seats.

most of those guys are in las vegas and work in air force bases in nevada. guys in afghanistan just launched and recovered the drones and they also are responsible for drone operations and certain small areas usually around the airbase, so what happens is it is like a 24-hour operation. these airforce guys and contractors who are constantly dragging drones to the airstrip launching them from their control trailers with their remote control and then they start passing them off to guys and las vegas. when the guys in las vegas flight around for a day or so and return the drone to the guys in return control to the guys in kandahar and those guys get to keep the drones for an hour so they will fly around kandahar and look for roadside bombs or rockets are enemy activity. >> they took a plane and they replaced, took the pilot out of the cockpit and put a satellite

in, but the pilot is always controlling the aircraft so just because there is nobody in the plane is looking for that human control saying what am i doing. we did that because missions can be so long, over a day sometimes that a regular person could just sit up there in a small cramped but two it allows us to do the majority of the work back in the u.s. so there's no need to employ it or have a big foot frontier and you can also shift out. sometimes i would work for four hours and maybe have a two-hour break and another four hours and then having that kind of flexibility allows you to do that. >> we have video cameras. it looks like a tv camera and they also have high fidelity radar the take snapshots, these impressive snapshots of terrain.

what you do is take in the morning take one snapshot. you come back in the evening and take another and you compare them and if you see differences, if you see that corner looks like it has been disturbed like somebody was chopping up the ground there and you might have spotted a roadside bomb so that taliban will come in and bury it when you are not looking but if you have the two snapshots, they call the change detection and you can spot where it has been buried so that is what they do. they revisit areas and take radar snapshots and extend-- send in the ground teams. >> this is a reaper. how was it different from the predators? >> they basically have the same design, bigger wing's, more powerful engine and that makes significant differences. we can carry more so instead of carrying two missiles we can carry for missiles and to bombs, to 500-pound bombs and then the payload is actually different.

hanging from the wing here. they were able to put a larger, basically a telescope to be able to put better optics because you can carry up more weight so it is a much better censor payload and because there's a bigger engine they can go higher and faster and it is tough to get the predator over 100 miles an hour. if you need to respond to troops in contact on the ground you push the meter of over 200 knots and get there faster. >> you are using the repurchase of roadside bombs, right? the correct. the reaper has radar up here under the nose. it is a sensor package that is under there and it basically uses radio waves just like regular radar would work but if we fly in the same path over and over we are certainly trying to help keep the roads clear in keep those ied's from essentially impacting.

>> david axe was embedded with the u.s. air force at kandahar air force base in southern afghanistan in october and november. to watch this program again or to find other programs produced with his material check out our web site at c-span.org. go to the search box in the upper right-hand corner and type axd. >> now tennessee governor phil bredesen delivers his state of the state address. hughes insuring is final year in office and focused his speech on education and his state's economy. from nashville, this is 35

minutes. >> thank you very much, and lieutenant governor ramsey in speaker williams, speaker pro tiem deberry, members of the general of the 106 general assembly justices and constitutional officers and friends and guests and my fellow tennesseans. once again, i stand before you tonight to report on the state of our state and to present and recommend a budget prepared in accordance with the requirements of our constitution. as we begin i want to once again recognize the men and women of our state who are serving our country abroad this evening. as we gather here about 1200 members of the tennessee national guard are deployed in iraq and afghanistan. this coming friday we will see off more than 3,000 members of the 278 armored cavalry regiment redeployed to iraq. most of these men and women

spent 2005 there and now five years later are returning again, and included among the soldiers returning to iraq is a member of this body, lieutenant colonel john mark windle. [applause] [applause] [applause] >> sense 9/11, nearly 20,000 tennessee national guard soldiers and airmen have deployed to iraq and afghanistan it in their response to our nation's war on terror, these

men and women have proved again tennessee's claim on the title, the volunteer state. i have invited some representatives of these men and women to join us here tonight and would ask each of you to stand as i introduce you and then we would all like to show our appreciation. master sergeant rosie biggs has been deployed with the 168 military police battalion out of dyersburg. this battalion conducted detainee operations in iraq and she returned last fall to tennessee. captain david roberts returned in december from his fourth deployment to afghanistan, his third as a member of the tennessee army national guard. he was a security force team leader and completed over 200 and 50 missions. senior airmen jessica webb is a member of the one 18th airlift wing and recently won the 2009 airmen of the year award for the

entire tennessee air national guard. when she is not serving as the command post comptrollers use one of tennessee's teachers working at luff chapel elementary and are one. finally i would like to ask general max taste into stand with these representatives. general hastiness tennessee's new adjutant general. [applause] [applause] general pace then, stay there. general pace ten took over -- comes from a family with a long

and distinguished history of service in our guard. let the change of command ceremony last month his father, jerry haston who is a master sergeant for 44 years in the tennessee guard, watch his son be promoted to major general and saw him some command of the tennessee national guard. i can tell you there was one proud master sergeant at that ceremony. please say your thanks to all of these men and women. [applause] [applause] >> these tennesseans are with us tonight to receive your thanks on behalf of their colleagues. once again there tennesseans for

missing. since i stood before you last year, another 11 tennesseans have lost their lives in the war on terror, for a total now since 2001 of 114 brace mendin women. as we have done in the past and as is proper tonight i ask you to join me in recognizing their sacrifice with the moment of silence. thank you very much. i want to begin this evening by thanking the members of the general assembly for the extraordinary job you have just done in our special session on education. i know the weeks worst dressel but the way you conducted your business is exactly the way it is supposed to work. there was nothing superficial about the results. the changes you made to the low

or real and they will change the way the buck k-12 and higher education work for the better in the years ahead. a lot had been worked out ahead of time by representatives from both parties in both chambers as well as the education community and the result was a genuine melding of ideas from different points of view. it was a better product for that. both individuals and organizations with specific interests found ways to keep those interests in check and come together for the common good. there was no splitting along partisan. the final vote was generally bipartisan. there is a governor's race going on in two of the candidates from different parties are major players in the legislative process. in a lot of places this would have been a prescription for trouble, but one of my favorite memories of a special session was saying jim kyl and ron ramsey sitting next to each other at the end of my table,

projectively working together on moving these reforms forward and i thank each and every one of you. [applause] in the end not only was the vote bipartisan, it was also overwhelming and it made clear to everyone that these reforms are not a bread is in plan, they are not a democratic plan, they are not a republican plan. these reforms are a tennessee plant and that is going to make a lot of difference in the years ahead. i also want to say a special word of thanks to the tennessee education association, the teachers' union for good to earl wiman and al mance in my friend jerry winters and all the members you represent, thank you. i know you become a political whipping boy from time to time. i know you have a job to do for your teachers. your cousins in some other

states of not always been as concerned with putting students first as they might be but if anyone ever had any doubt about your dedication to the good of the children of this state first, the way in which you handled yourself in the special session of put them to rest. you are good to work with and you have taught me milot barcode you are a class act and i thank you very, very much. [applause] i want now to talk for a moment directly to the teachers and the teachers in our state. i to understand some of the changes we have made especially those regarding the use of student achievement data and teacher evaluation cause some of you concerned. i talked with that heard from a lot of teachers these past few weeks. some hate these changes, some love them. many are concerned but waiting

to see. i want you to know that i understand and respect your concerns. i understand that teaching is a profession that has many more dimensions than can be measured by a student's performance on the written test. and i also understand that there are many factors beyond your control. the influence of home, the influence of parents, the personalities of students themselves. let's work together and find an approach that is both fair to your teaching profession and also gives our citizens' confidence that the money they have invested in our schools is being used well. we can do this. the reforms to approve in our higher education system are far-reaching as well. there is now a lot of work to be done to flesh out those reforms and i plan to spend a good deal of my time during my final year as governor working to move this along. there has already been one very positive development.

dr. surely rains at the university of memphis who is with us here this evening has been working for some time to put together a coalition of life sciences organizations to work with the university to help grow its standing as a research institution. the general assembly's approval of the energy campus at oak ridge has brought her long simmering effort to a boil. in the past week this has enabled dr. raines to finalize the memorandum of understanding with nine of these organizations including st. jude billions research hospital and the university of tennessee health sciences center. this memphis research consortium holds great potential. it can help the university to grow its research mission and it can help lay the foundations for an even more robust biotech economy in memphis. almost three weeks ago, standing right here, i challenge the university of tennessee to

become one of the top 25 public research universities in the united states in the next decade. tonight, i challenge the university of memphis to do the same in its peer group. dr. raines, i challenge you to leave your universities to become one of the top 25 metropolitan research universities in the next decade. to both dr. shinn and dr. raines who are sitting here, you have a job to do. we consistently reach those upper levels and are sports programs and there is no reason we can't do the same with our academic achievements either in knoxville or in memphis. [applause] this is the age of the final time that i will report to you on the state of our state, the

eighth and final time i will present a budget to you. we have had a share of these years. we have had some tough years by any standard these past two years have been extraordinary. this coming one will be as well. the recession which has gripped the nation has been felt strongly here in tennessee. we have seen unemployment and housing issues affect far too many of our families. our state revenues have plummeted, creating tough challenges for us to maintain the services that our citizens want. there are many things about this recession that we can't effect here in tennessee. believe me, i am very aware of the pain and uncertainty that this recession is causing in homes all over our state and i am very gratified by the renewed focus in washington on our economy. iay wish that congress and the president well in their efforts to address these difficult issues.

there are many things we can't address from tennessee and what i have tried to do is concentrate on two things that we can. managing our own house, state government, to live within its means and continuing to look for ways to move forward on those things on which our future depends. every day, every week, every month every year is precious and the state of our economy should never be an excuse for failing to advance the things that our the most important to us. even as we have made some painful cuts, we have made amazing progress as well. special session just ended its reforms for k-12 and higher education is an example of that. the work we have done in setting higher standards in our k-12 system has gained us national recognition. we have attracted major private investments in the last 18 months that will benefit us for years to come. the volkswagon plant in east

tennessee, the nissan investment in electric vehicles in middle tennessee will help secure place and of the mother of manufacturing for gore concentration on green technologies that produce investments of more than a billion dollars by hemlock, the pew charitable trust named tennessee one of the top three states in the nation for green jobs. too his prentiss partner in this work, great job fellows. to jim nealy and all the members of the jot cav ned for all the work that he left done to advance this agenda, thank you as well. [applause] now we have talked about education and economic development many times before and i would like to take a moment this evening to celebrate in even more recent but quieter victory.

five miller has run our department of children services for the past six years and i know that all the people who work in her department privately take great pride in loving and helping the many unfortunate children that come into their world. i also know that there may not be a more thankless job in state government. their successes are quiet, the final adoption of a child to a loving home and family when things don't work out, they are front-page news in the subject of brutal monday morning quarterbacking. winds vi miller joined the she told me she wanted to try to achieve formal accreditation for the department. i encouraged her. my own background is in health care were as like children services, the outcomes are not always what you would want. in child welfare, just as in health care accreditation is how you wischer yourself in the outside world that even when the

results are imperfect, your approach is right in you were doing the best job anyone knows how to do. i have to admit i was skeptical. the department of children services had a host of internal tensions and philosophical differences. we didn't have nearly the budget the other states devoted to child welfare. the department was in, the subject of legal action and federal court brought by an outside of the goosey group operating under the terms of the consent decree, the so-called decree that the state entered into in 2001. may i say as an aside, the advocacy group in question, children's rights in new york city has educated me about the very constructive role that at the kids can play. they have been very tough and ms. lowrey has certainly made both the commissioner and me angry more than once. it is best when we worked things

out ourselves but it there has to be a forced marriage this particular one is the way it ought to be. despite the problems in time as givings commissioner miller persevered and started the accreditation process in may of 2005. they developed new policies. they improve recordkeeping. they train some people when they fired some. they fix environmental issues in their offices and redid the emergency prepared his plans. they and it went on-site reviews for almost a year. i am pleased to announce tonight that on january 27, tennessee became the seventh state of the union to operate a fully accredited child welfare system. vi-- [applause] [applause]

let's move on now to our state's financial situation and to the budget which is being presented to you tonight. my goal throughout this recession has been to remain true to the principle of the family budget that i talked about when i first became governor. it is nothing more than a common-sense idea that if we are going to adjust their expenses to match your income and be careful about using money from our savings account. otis the licensable families have to manage through these times and while the numbers for state government are much larger than for any family, the principle is the same. in addition, while there was no way to avoid some use of our rainy day fund says revenues continue to fall, it has been important to me to have our

finances stabilized so that i could pass on to the next gov a budget that match recurring revenues and expenses. i have spoken before about the value i place on good stewardship. i want to talk about our finances in three parts tonight. first to walk you through just where we are right now with regard to both expenses and our reserves. second i will describe to you the basic budgets that i am recommending and third, i believe we are in a strong enough position and it is raining hard it out that we can use some reserve to soften the worst of some of these cuts. just a day, our president announced that he was proposing to extend for an additional six months a portion of the financial help to the states in the recovery act. this would take the form of funding in the health and human services budget to continue to the first and second quarters of next year, of 2011, the higher

medicaid match that has been in effect since last year. this is this the so-called enhanced f. i very much appreciate the help to state finances in the recovery act. it enabled a much softer landing than would otherwise have been possible and allow this to preserve jobs and importantly to plan more carefully for the reductions we need to make. i thought it was a good move. we were all very aware that these funds would disappear at the end of december this year. pandith carefully planned how we transition from using those funds to once again standing on our own. that was the four year budget that i presented to you last year. we have a good plan and i think it is important that we stick with it and not get our heads turned by the possibility of more one time and money. ..