Michael Jackson, still dead.

I have avoided watching the news as often as possible because politics depresses me.  For the first time in my life, I am actually worried about my future. I always believed that if I worked hard, saved some money, etc, it would all be groovy.  It doesn’t seem like that’s going to be the case, anymore.  And while Congress is passing cap & trade legislation that is going to jack up the price on everything you buy and double your electric bill, what are my friends gabbling about? Michael Jackson.

Bread and circuses.

He’s getting buried today, like you didn’t already know that, right?  The bankrupt state of California somehow has the funds to pay overtime to at least 1000 (my mom heard 2500) police for this kerfluffle.  The Jackson family is trying to turn a profit on his death–originally, they were charging admission to the memorial service. Joe Jackson has already set up a website to sell Michael’s memorabilia.  And I went into the city the other day, and in every shop and newsstand and street vendor you could buy MJ pictures and postcards and the like. Seems like everyone’s turning a profit on Michael’s death. 

There’s a reason Michael wanted to leave his kids to Diana Ross–his family is a bunch of mercenaries.  Honestly, I feel sadder for him now that I see his family in action than I did when I’d heard he died.  The poor kid (he was, mentally, a child, and I’m not sure how much formal education he ever got) honestly never had a chance, and the best thing he could think to do was to make sure the parents who screwed him up for profit couldn’t do the same to his kids.  That means more to me in how I view him than any number of ’80s hits.  There, in that one gesture, we see a human soul.

I’m perplexed at how the black community has rushed out to claim him because it seems to me that Michael spent most of his life fleeing from his blackness–from his skin bleaching, hair straightening, plastic surgery, white mothers for his children, etc, this was clearly a guy who was conflicted about his race.  Yet I heard a comedian the other day say, adamantly, “Michael Jackson was a black man! He was ours!”

That really bothered me. First, because I don’t know how Michael Jackson would feel about, after all this, being labelled a black man.  But second, and more importantly, the whole notion that someone is ‘ours’ or ‘yours’ or ‘theirs’–that’s an ownership mentality.  That’s a SLAVE mentality. No one owns anyone else.  To speak like that is exclusionary–he is ‘ours’ means he isn’t ‘yours’.  That’s divisive.  That’s recidivist.  That’s not how we should still think, *how many* years after the civil rights movement?

Sometimes I wish a *real* civil rights leader like Dr King were still alive–a man who had a vision, and not profit, as is primum mobile.  I wonder what Dr. King would say about this continuing clinging to racial categories.  More, I wonder what Michael’s own children would say.

 

Integrity? What’s that?

This, I hate.

I gave a take-home exam in one of my classes this year.  NEVER AGAIN. It’s a shame, because I really believe in the idea of a take home as ‘consolidating’ information.  But the cheating has gotten way out of control.

On this exam, I told the students they could use their textbooks and their notes from class. NO OTHER SOURCES. Just to be safe, I even said ‘you cannot use the internet.’ Seems pretty straightforward to me.  Now I’m aware that for the more uninspired, I’m basically asking for them to blindly copy the textbook, but for some of them, even just reading the textbook and finding the right parts to copy would be useful. 

So this one guy, of course, goes online.  Copies a chart.  Cut and paste job.  Well, that’s it, I say. Fail. 

He emails me when he sees his grade. I explain why he failed–he did something that was explicitly outside the parameters of the exam. If I hadn’t caught it, he would have profited by cheating, and he fully intended to have profited by cheating.  No honor, no integrity = no pass.

He replies, saying “I know I copied that chart from that Chaucer website and I’m really sorry.” He goes on to ask me to grade the exam but somehow just not count that question–as if he hadn’t just thrown the credibility of every other answer on that test into question (Oh, and he actually copied from two sources but only copped to the one).  Okay, notice how HE ADMITS TO CHEATING.

That was like 2 weeks ago.  Today I get an email from my department chair.  This is the story he tells the chair: He copied a chart, yeah, but it was from an older edition of the same textbook so it wasn’t ‘wrong’.  And so he had no idea why he failed.

Now, I HAVE the older edition of the textbook. The chart is NOT in it. I’ve looked.  Even so, I have an email *from him* *ADMITTING* he copied the chart from online.

My chair wants me to meet with this guy.  I don’t see why I should. He knows why he failed. He’s admitted that he cheated to me. Now, he has every right to go to my department chair if he wants to, but he’s supposed to tell the truth! In my mind, this little creative exercise BS story he told my chair really further compounds that this guy has no integrity whatsoever.  He’ll make up whatever story gets him what he wants.

Well, I don’t want to meet with him. At best, he’ll cry or try to bully me.  At worst, well, see at best. There is no way I’m going to change his grade, especially since he compounded his initial lack of integrity with a further lack of integrity.  I almost had respect for him when he admitted in the email to cheating–no more!

My real question is what has become of our culture when people will just up and lie like this?  I suspect that the reason it took him two weeks to decide to move up to the chair with this is he’s looked on the Fall schedule and seen that I’m the one teaching the same class in the Fall.  Now this class is a weed-out course. It’s really hard, no joke.  It’s a requirement for our Sign Langugage program. I try to make it as reasonable for the students (hence, me trying to be nice by giving them a take-home exam in the first place) because I want to give them every chance to do well.  My standards are always explicit and clear (I stated in the first sentence on the exam they couldn’t use the internet, for example), so there should be no surprises. 

This guy doesn’t deserve a passing grade in my mind simply for his dishonorable behavior.  He’s ruined take home exams for every succeeding section of the course. I could take this to the Dean and get an Academic Dishonesty marker put on his transcript (which would follow him *forever*) but I’m still, STILL, trying to be nice.

 

My mouth gets me in soooo much trouble!

So, y’all will recall that I gave that speech about torture the other week, right? Actually, for being on ‘torture awareness day’. i really didn’t feel like I hit the main theme, since my thesis basically was that there’s no ‘humane’ way to interrogate: all these morons acting like the Army Field Manual is some magical truth fairy wand  of goodness and if we all just said nice things the baddies would spill the beans, renounce their people-explody-ways and all would be well clearly don’t know a thing about interrogations.  Even the nicey nice Pride and Ego Up isn’t humane, if you’re concerned about the long term psychological consequences of the technique–they blab because they’re bragging, and then realize that their big fat mouth just cost their friends their lives.  That’s gotta suck, right?

And along the way I called interrogators sociopaths. Which if you look at the Field Manual, is what you’re training them to be.  So people sacrifice their humanity to become sociopaths for Uncle Sugar all so Squidvester and Sugarina can sleep well in their Ikea beds.  Well, what’s the ultimate cost of that to, say, *civilization*? Whose peaceful sleep gets to ‘count’? Is a civilization really ‘civilized’ if it requires certain segments of itself to regularly violate the rules, even the rules of ‘polite conversation?’  I mean, check this.  Even the most ‘torture is wrong’ type, the kind who thinks the ‘attention grab’ is torture, really couldn’t find much ‘torture’iffic in, say, backing a guy across a room simply by violating his personal space bubble.  But what kind of person does it take to deliberately decide to do that?  Not a very nice one, I’d argue.

So, presentation went…okay.  Lots of good questions, but they kept expecting me to speak as a Bush Doctrine apologist, which, just by nature of my lowly position, I am not qualified to do.  Then a student emailed wanting all sorts of gory details of my life so she could write it in an article. No way, I said.  That stuff’s really a bit too personal. Yeah, she’s right, I shouldn’t have necessarily alluded to it in the presentation, but then I had my audience directly in front of me and could do any necessary repair.  For example, my joke about being waterboarded and being divorced and which one is actually worse probably doesn’t play well even here, but the audience found it hilarious. Say she writes this article and gives it the great headline like “Torturer on staff at local college’?!  Now my job is possibly in jeopardy, and my school’s rep is in serious trouble.  Yikes!  (Yes, I should have thought of this beforehand. I suck. It’s a theme in my life lately). So, ensuing argument with Journalism professor about whether or not I had any rights to my own life story.  I admire her tenacity–this program is her baby and I do respect the way she fights for it.  But respecting someone doesn’t mean  you cave in and agree to them.  So, big snafu.  End result: I win, the story’s killed and I’ve learned a valuable lesson about EVER opening my mouth in front of anyone about the Army again.

Next one, not so easy to distill the essence thereof.  About a month ago, I was cranky and posted something here that was…cranky.  Plumb forgot about it, really, as I frequently do things I write on this blog (I suck, see above).  Well, even though I kept it anonymous, someone found it and has punished me severely.  I suck. I’m sure I deserve it. 

But one thing bothers me: I wasn’t doing *libel*. I mentioned no one’s name.  Didn’t mention the site by name.  And I kept my petty little venting to such an obscure internet location that, having checked the stats, only 4 people have read in the last month.  Not exactly putting that on page one of the NY Times, am I? 

Of course, even though I regret my moment of stupidity, part of me is saying “dude, that was like a MONTH ago” and surely someone’s allowed one peevish day–a peevish day no one ever actually bothers to read?! 

Am I not allowed to have an opinion? Seriously?  It seems really wrong to me that I can’t disagree with someone’s policies and not be punished for it.  It’s not like I was on that particular board being all vicious. In fact, I like just about everyone on there. Even the mod who apparently has banned me for life. This worries me, because, frankly, this is NOT how adults solve problems.  You don’t like something I post on a totally obscure blog? Guess what you do?  Confront ME about it.  Call me out on it. I’ll either apologize or I’ll defend my position.  Or more likely a bit of both–I’m sorry I said that in such a stupid way–here’s what I really meant.  But not to even mention it to me until I just *blam* am banned?  That seems a little scary to me.  I don’t mean ‘immature’, because that’s a stupid way of saying things. I mean that that’s the way I see people resolving conflicts all over the place these days, and I will be blunt on this: it sucks. If your idea of conflict resolution is to ban anyone who ever dares express an opinion different from what you think, and you don’t even bother to educate them about their transgression NOR give them a chance to explain and/or make amends–what the hell is going to happen to our society? 

Now, look, obviously, my big fat mouth has gotten me in trouble before.  But I’ve always, before, had a chance to explain myself and to say, wow, I am really sorry: tell me what I can do to make this better.  Four years ago a student misread a jokey email I sent her (I’d cancelled class because I was on jury duty and she’d written a very hostile response about how I didn’t personally call her and tell her class was cancelled and yeah it skirted parlously close to sarcasm) and I had to sit in front of the Dean of Faculty and hear exactly how not-funny that funny email could sound.  He was appalled. I was mortified.  We worked on a solution together.  He recently *referred* another professor to me for the solutions he and I had worked out together–ways to sound polite and friendly in emails, but not misinterpretable.  So I guess I counted on having a little shred of sympathy.  Seriously, board mods? You’ve never ever said anything (which no one really reads or hears) that you said totally in the heat of the moment that sounds really stupid now?  Y’all are always masters of your temper?  You’ve never regretted ANYthing you’ve said?

Well, then, you’re right. I don’t belong on your site. I’m a lowly human, fraught with error. I can’t stand with moral giants like you.

 

Torture? I’ll show you *torture*.

So, our local peacenik is organizing a Week of Awareness in a few weeks.  Thankfully, this being a community college, we ONLY have to be aware for a week. And here, a ‘week’ translates to three days.  This woman hates me because I made some rather uncharitable comment (me and my mouth again!) about her dressing up last year in March in an orange jumpsuit ‘in solidarity with those victims at Gitmo’.  I think the word ‘treasonous’ came up. Maybe ‘sedition’ as well.

Anyway, she didn’t dare contact me herself, so she went via proxy, because getting a third-party dragged in is the way of all cowards.  I was asked if I’d be willing to present at the Torture Day, because they needed another event to fill out the schedule. 

I laughed for about 10 minutes.  Seriously–the room started spinning from apoxia when I got the invite.  Because apparently I’m Torquemada, and am supposed to represent the ‘pro-torture’ side. I probably shouldn’t find this as unbelievably funny as I do–in reality it’s kind of tragic: I’m a die-hard supporter of US soldiers and somehow that means I’m pro-torture? 

So of course I said yes.  Because what would be more delicious than being able to put something on my next promotion packet sponsored by this yellow-bellied sucker? Am I going to be ‘pro-torture’ is the question. 

Not really, no.  But I guess the full answer depends on what we agree torture is.  According to some of my friends, and other ivory-tower isolees, those pictures from Abu Ghraib were torture. What? Women’s panties on their heads? That was Friday night in Frat Row when I was in college.  Being posed naked in humiliating positions? Have these ivory tower types never pledged Greek?  Humiliation is not, in my mind, torture.  Sure, it’s not very nice.  But torture? I think torture is the stuff that involves car batteries and permanent physical damage.  Rape is torture. Fingernails ripped out, torture.  I’d even go so far as to say just a generalized beatdown as torture.

But all stress is not torture. Reading some definitions of torture I can find here on the hinternetz, it seems that both my sister and I have been extensively tortured, which may be why I’m so hardened and callous about it.  Because, let’s see: sleep deprivation? Bad or inadequate food? High levels of performance stress? Threat of huge punishments for minor infractions? Needlessly rule-changing overseers?  That’s my sister’s residency and my PhD in a nutshell.

And we did it to ourselves. Now, maybe that’s the difference, that torture involves a lack of will or volition.  But then again let’s go back to humiliation–how could you be compelled to humiliate yourself? What would it take to get you to pose naked and suggestively with a member of the same sex?  That answer varies. Looking at Myspace, apparently all the coercion needed is a few beers and a goading friend with a camera.  Or an ideology that doing such a thing makes you ‘cool’ and ‘edgy’ (which is how, I suspect, Joe Francis made his disgusting millions).  Or maybe I could beat you into it.  Maybe not.  Threat of physical force only works up to that point when physical force is used. Once I hit you and you realize it wasn’t so bad, that threat of “I’ll hit you” really doesn’t cut it anymore.

My point being this: if we can’t set one standard of removal of volition, I don’t feel comfortable calling it torture.  If a few girls on Saturday night would do it after a brewski or two and surrounded by a crowd of lusty guys, I’m not really sure I’m comfortable calling it torture in any other context.

Especially since, well,  just look at TV’s lineup: humiliation and pain galore.  Those first few unwatchable weeks of American Idol? ANY episode of any MTV reality show? They are built around humiliation and pain.  So how does anyone draw the line and say, this is torture, this is not? This is torture because only a few people, in uniform, do it, but this is not because they’re on TV or they’re going to be doctors or professors after it?  I think torture should be recognizable above any context.

In the end, all I’m really hoping to say is that we need to be careful when we sling words like ‘atrocity’ or ‘torture’ around.  I think they are real, and they are bad, but that using them to describe every act of coercion diminishes the power of the words and the revulsion of the concept.

 

Venting

So I have this student. He disappeared about a month ago. Yesterday was the midterm. He shows up. He wants to ‘work something out’. Meaning even though he’s missed TWICE the number of allowed classes, not only does he not want me to fail him, he does not want a withdraw. He wants some guarantee of some passing letter grade.

Because I have standards, I say no.

Out comes the sob story: uncle (though I could swear once he said father) dying of cancer, he has to take care of this sick said uncle…. Wow, I say, that’s rough. That sounds like right now you’ve got way bigger concerns than any silly old class. College will always be here: go take care of your family.

Nope. If he doesn’t get a passing grade in my class he’ll lose his health insurance, he’ll be homeless and he’ll lose custody of his son. I’m not sure how, exactly, my measly Intro to Lit class now has powers to determine child custody, but, let’s let that rest for the moment. The issue here is this: HE is an adult. HE made a decision to prioritize his family over his schoolwork. I have no right to judge that decision (good or bad). I think that in the same situation I’d probably have made the exact same decision to take care of my family, to be honest. But I wouldn’t expect that there wouldn’t be consequences to the thing I did not prioritize–my grades.

So, student’s pissed off. Goes away. Comes back a few minutes later, because, as he says, I’ve already ruined his life so he’s got nothing to lose so why not tell me exactly what he thinks of me? Whoa. Let’s just say that the event finally stopped when he began hyperventilating.  Needless to say, just about everyone in my department, and no small number of other students, got to hear this little ‘expressive art’ piece. 

I was upset, obviously. I think any human being would be a little upset if someone said something like “I wonder how you can sleep at night after ruining my life.” And not being allowed to say anything back. 

I do feel bad for this kid.  And I don’t mind being used as the ‘bad guy’ a little bit, but personal attacks like that, or his other one, about ‘I can see why no one wants to marry you’ are just a bit more than I think anyone should take. I made my decisions about the course because when I’m in that classroom, my concern is education.  Being a good or ethical or moral person, alas, is not part of the course objectives.  Based on the course objectives, he fails.  Based on the policies, he has to fail.  It does not mean I have no sympathy. It does not mean that he made the wrong decision.

Still, I keep replaying in my head what I could have done. I tried to apologize at first, because, obviously, the student was upset–he’d just lost a family member and no one’s really at their best in that situation, and what’s it cost me to apologize, right, if it would make him feel better.  But when he refused to even hear my apology and began an ever increasing litany of my failures as a human being (NOT as a professor–I would have accepted those as valid!)  well, I couldn’t think what to do. Hearing him out seemed to have no effect.  Not arguing with him seemed to rile him up even more, like he’d seen that his target was down and he was going in for the kill.

It was a humiliating experience for me.  Even though I know that I was standing by my principles and that everything he was saying was outrageous and wrong and motivated out of his hurt and not his reason, it still hurts to be verbally savaged like that in public.  I’m sure everyone in my department who overheard this exchange , while they may feel sympathy for me, and feel that I did nothing ‘wrong’, doubtless feel that they could have handled it ‘better’. 

I really wish I knew how.  I know students don’t like hearing that they are actually responsible for their actions, and that ‘fairness’ does NOT mean being unfair in their favor only.  I wish they understood that these decisions aren’t easy for me either. But that’s what principles do: they give you guidance in those hard times, a place to stand where you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, wow, that was ugly, but I can still look at myself without feeling like I’ve betrayed the values that have meaning to me. 

I value my job, and I value education. And I value  and think that one of the VITAL lessons learned in college is precisely this sort of responsibility/consequences chain. I just hate having to teach that lesson.  Especially because I don’t think I’m an A student in that subject myself.

 

What can Brown do for me?

Apparently, not much. They certainly can’t manage to deliver a package, which seems to me to be their, umm, *job*. They have come close to inducing apoplexy, though–does that count?

See, Amazon sent me a Kindle. I won it, in a manner of speaking.  It’s my prize for having been an Amazon Best Novel Award reviewer.    They sent it via UPS, requiring a signature.

UPS doesn’t seem to recognize that people have jobs.  Yesterday I got a notice saying that they’d tried to deliver and I wasn’t home (imagine that) and they’d try the next day (today)  between 2 and five.  So I RUSH home today: got here at 2:01.  No notice on my door. I presumed I was groovy.  Well, at 5 pm I still hadn’t got my visit from Mr UPS, so I called. WEEEELLL, he had tried to redeliver at 1:04.  And I wasn’t home.

But wait! I said.  He told me yesterday ‘between 2 and 5′–you can’t go around telling someone to be there and then come an hour early and blame them for it! That’s insanity.  It’s bad business. I mean, I can’t tell my students the exam is next Wednesday, walk into class tomorrow and say, ha! It’s today!

But that’s exactly what UPS did to me. 

Now, he didn’t leave a sticky this time saying he’d tried. Which was why I waited.  So I called and they said, well we’ll redeliver tomorrow.  Ummm, not going to be home tomorrow either. In fact, I have a 12 hour day tomorrow. 

Loooooong story short, I have to find some time in the next 5 days to drive a half-hour each way to pick up my package.  Someone paid for UPS to deliver my package.  They didn’t pay for UPS to screw up my schedule.  They didn’t pay ME to pick up my own package.  They paid UPS to do a job, and UPS did not do that job.

Now, if I can’t find an hour or so in my life in the next 5 days (and it’s midterm week so I can barely find time to pee, much less time to pee during the inane hours their ‘pickup window’ is open) it gets sent back to Amazon.

I’m old. I remember when customer service did something. I even remember when UPS re-delivered when they said they would. 

Not this time. Last month, they left my $1000 computer on a neighbor’s porch, and a note on my door saying ‘left with neighbor’–not telling me WHICH bloody neighbor. Picture, if you will, me wandering around at 9 at night knocking on neighbors’ doors like a crazy woman. 

I used to LOVE the UPS guy.  I mean, he’s way better than the mailman–the mailman brings my (hateful) mortgage statement.  UPS only brings me presents.

Until now.  They bring me betrayal along with their incompetence.

 

How often are you wrong?

I run my life along a very simple principle, which I like to call the Any Idiot Principle.  It goes like this: if *I* can do something, well, jeez, ANY IDIOT can do it–it’s obviously not that hard! So, for example, I drive a stick shift car.  I can’t understand it when people insist that they tried but simply cannot drive a stick.  Why? Because if I can do it, and I’m not that coordinated or skilled, and I’m an idiot (as is well documented) well, then any other idiot should be able to as well. 

That means that NOTHING I’ve accomplished in life is really impossible for me to imagine anyone else achieving, should they want it? PhD? Sure. If you want it bad enough, and work hard enough, anyone can do it.  Learn to knit socks?  Sure, any idiot can figure that one out too.  Read or speak a foreign language? Whyever not?  Analyze a poem, especially after we’ve been doing it for two weeks? Absolutely.

So I’m constantly floored by how easily, in our culture, we ‘give up.’ I made my IntroLit students do a group activity yesterday: I gave them a poem and they had twenty minutes before which they had to tell me SOMETHING about it. (I like to set the bar pretty low).  One group, four students, got “Dover Beach”, one of the easier poems (compared to “To His Coy Mistress” with all of those hidden sex references?)  They could say nothing about this poem. I literally could not pull one complete word out of the four of them.  Oh, wait.  They did keep saying “I dunno.” (Which I spell that way to differentiate between it and “I do not know”–’I dunno’ means not only do you not know, you do not care to know.)

Now, I’d be pissed if I stared at something for twenty minutes and could not wrap my mind around it. I’d at least have some questions. But when I asked, okay, where did you get lost? Tell me something you really struggled to understand, I couldn’t even get eye contact.

Part of this has to do with our culture of specialness.  Surely you’ve seen it, right? Everyone is intelligent.  No one’s ever wrong. And the worst thing you can do is to make a student feel ‘singled out’.  Oh, horrors.  So they act like ostriches, presuming that sooner or later I’ll give up because to persist too long in insisting they answer the question (that is, take some active step in their own education) will feel really humiliating to them (and it’ll waste too much class time). 

So apparently someone needs to say this: It’s okay not to be right all the time.  It’s okay to say something and have someone else say, well, not exactly.  Maybe this.  The point is the THINKING, especially in college; more than having the ‘right’ answer. Especially in class! But no, rather than ‘look stupid’ for having tried and gotten it wrong, they decide to look like stupid and sullen, and not even try. 

Being wrong is not a crime; it’s not a sin. It doesn’t make you look stupid. It makes you look like you *tried* and maybe failed, but at least that’s better than just failing.  And there’s that old salt about Edison trying to invent the lightbulb, who, after a thousand or so failures, said, well, I know a thousand ways NOT to do it! Where did that attitude go? 

I fear for the future of our country.

 

Thus begins…The Whining….

Okay, sorry to steal the title of M. Night Shyamalan’s next movie from him, but this is too, too much. 

After Virginia Tech’s horrible shooting incident, the college I work at, which is an open enrollment place (meaning you can enroll your favorite pair of shoes as long as you can provide a signed FAFSA form), shook its collective head and said, whoa. That kind of thing could *totally* happen here.  Hence, Measures Were Put Into Place.

We now have a manual that covers every emergency one can think of, and even a few one normally doesn’t like to think of, like ‘poisonous chemical cloud’ and ‘anthrax hate mail’.  And the latest is a Secure In Place drill, to happen tomorrow. Basically, imagine if (or when) we have a crazed gunman on campus. Having people run around like decapitated chickens is a bad idea.  First responders won’t be able to get onto campus, nor will they be able to pursue the bad guy. SO, plan is to hunker down in classrooms with doors locked. This is directly based off of the lessons of Virginia Tech.

Okay, I can dig.  I’m honestly not very comfortable with anything that says in a time of danger I need to sit on my ass and wait for someone to rescue said ass, but I understand that that’s what needs to be done to end this thing quickly. My coworkers however are protesting. Whining.  If you listen right now and you hear a ‘waaaaaaaaaah’ sound faintly in the air, that’s them.

It’s hilarious, in a way. They insist that this drill is some sort of infernal Bush doctrine, of course; some sort of Homeland Security idiot drill designed to instill fear and thus state compliance into the poor proletariat. Fear is the ideological tool of evil, and by extension of President Bush, and thus must be resisted.  One professor claimed this exercise would make her a hypocrite if she kowtowed to this fear-mongering ideology and would undermine her teaching that a college campus is a perfectly safe place.

This professor is, with all due respect, living in some fantasy land. College as a safe place?  Since when? What is it? One in five female college students will be raped or sexually assaulted?  Alcohol related deaths, anyone? I’m not saying college is a scary scary dangerous hellhole, and in fact our college is safer than my old school, partly because it’s a commuter school. No one’s staggering around here drunk at 2 am waiting to be victimized as they were at UNC. But that doesn’t mean it’s absolutely safe. It’s an unfortunate truth (but that doesn’t prevent it from being a true truth) that no one is ever absolutely safe from assault.  Even in their own homes, alas. We recognize this latter one with all those burglar alarm systems.

One thing college students could learn, and should learn, is that life, alas, is not safe.  You’re guaranteed NOTHING in this world except the proverbial death and taxes.  The Constitution provides for the right to *pursue* happiness, but doesn’t offer any guarantee about actually catching it.

And frankly, even though I’m not crazy about this plan, or this drill (it’s still better than the ‘evacuation’ drill upcoming) I plan to play along. Because at least it shows that we’ve thought seriously and honestly about the possibilities and have A Plan.

It’s not that much different, in my mind, from a fire drill. When the fire alarm goes off, we all obediently troop our students outside fifty feet away from the building and wait. No resistance there among the Whiners. But isn’t that also fear-mongering? Isn’t that also forcing rather Pavlovian compliance to an arbitrary order?

This whole thing, The Whining, and the recent election have really made me rethink about what I do. I teach all this stuff–patriarchy, marxist class-studies, gender studies, post-colonialism, etc–and now I wonder if I am just brainwashing students. I always tell my resistant students to just play along as a mental exercise, because that’s mostly how I do it: oh, look at what this text says about femininity and masculinity. Neato. I don’t allow it to fuel any sort of ire or animus against the ‘real world’. I don’t foam at the mouth at real men because someone wrote a poem that was sexist five hundred years ago. Please.

 And one of the Whiners, referred to above, seems to have blurred that line to the point where, in my mind, lives might be at risk. If we (god forbid) ever do have an active shooter on campus, her refusal to comply with the drill and lock her doors could get people killed.

She says that if it ever happened, she’s smart enough to know what to do. WRONG! In a moment of fear, people don’t think straight. I think back to that professor Librescu at Virginia Tech. He survived the Holocaust, and when he heard the shooter approaching, he barricaded the door with his own body.  Surely he too would have snooted in his office a few days prior that if it ever happened *of course* he’d have the presence of mind to lock the door or to push a table up against the door.  But when it happened, he acted on instinct. And the way I see it, it’s truly disrespectful of someone (especially someone at a lowly comm coll like mine) to think that they’re somehow smarter or more mentally together in a crisis than Professor Librescu. Frankly, I don’t think I have the same moral fiber and love of my students to offer up my life for theirs, but I surely can practice shoving a desk against the door and turning off the lights.

 

But, nah, it’s not about race….

So I’m watching my local news and they’re asking people in polling places who they voted for and why.

Now, me? I’m Old School. I believe in private ballots. That’s why I’m against card check, honestly.  It’s nobody’s bidness who I vote for. I think even my Mom can’t say for sure on some elections.

But this, this gets me.

This black woman said, proudly, that she voted for Obama. Yay! Democracy in action.  The reporter asked her, “Was race a factor in your decision?” She answered in a very excited affirmative. She backed off to say it wasn’t her *first* issue, but it was definitely an issue. 

Okay. Let’s turn it around, and pretend it was a white woman, or a white man who had said that: Yes, I voted, and yes, race was an issue.  Whoa. They’d have to be those redneck racists that Murtha claims live in Pennsylvania to say anything that horrible (Murtha, meanwhile, who threw fellow Marines under the proverbial bus about the non-existent ‘Haditha Massacre’). Whites recognizing race as a deciding factor are BAD. Racists.  Proof positive of Jeremiah Wright’s AmeriKKKa.  But a black woman saying race was a factor, well, that’s just swell.

Flipped on the TV where I heard Don Imus (pause to vomit) smarm up something about how nice it would be for little black children to have actual proof that they, too, could grow up to be President if Obama gets elected. Hey, ya think that ‘nappy-headed hos’ comment is still haunting him?  Well, Mr. I, wouldn’t it be even NICER if little girls could have that same proof?  Wouldn’t it be nice to extend the ‘realizable dream’ of becoming president to, oh, like 51% of the American population? 

This election has taught me one thing: in this country, sexism is tolerated. In fact, I learned watching all the Palin-bashing, that sexism is a sport. I’ve seen logos of fists smashing into cartoon Palin’s face.  (Because battery of a woman is hi-frickin’-larious). I’ve seen people criticize her clothes (but they somehow missed that canteloupe colored pantsuit of Hillary’s?), her family, her intelligence, and the fact that she plays an instrument.  I have heard unspeakably noxious sexual jokes that her musical instrument is the flute. If she’d ever been embroiled in a sex scandal, I’d say go to it: I likes me some Larry Craig mens room jokes, and former governor Spitzer has become almost passe for yuks.  They brought it on themselves.  Prurient sexists have done this to Palin.

Every criticism of Obama has been linked to racism. Every single one.  Socialism, apparently code word for black.  Really? I thought socialism was a code word for…ummm, socialism.  If you want to get offended by the term, consider this: the Nazis were *socialists*.  You want a nasty association with the term, it’s right there in your kid’s history book. You don’t have to make up racist nonsense.

However, Joe Biden, whom I’m guessing has been gagged and tossed in a closet for the last week, and I can only pray he spends his time in the White House similarly, at a very early stage called Obama “clean” and “articulate.” Coming from the South, people, I can tell you: THOSE are racist codewords.  If Biden had said that he looked forward to sittin’ down to some co’nbread and wattamelon with Senator Obama he couldn’t have been more offensive. But Obama chooses him as his running mate? Is this like the pretty girl having the ugly best friend? 

Now, all Americans should choose based on the merits of the candidates’ visions of America.  Is America really to blame for all of its problems?  Has green ruined it?  Will the Protestant work ethic get us out of it or do we need something more drastic?  Are we the conscience of the world or not?  These are the important questions, but the media has consistently refused to engage them, instead keeping us to levels of unbelievable frivolity of race and gender. 

I don’t know who is going to be the winner tonight: Senator Obama or Senator McCain. Either one, I hope we can actually move beyond skin color and onto great ideas to fix OUR country.

I believe the quote by GB Shaw: Democracy is the system that ensures we are governed no better than we deserve.

 

No taxation without representation…not any more!

So, hey, guess what?  Your elected officials in DC don’t want to hear from you.  No, seriously. Not only are they giving themselves a f***ing HOLIDAY in the middle of what can *kindly* be called a financial MELTDOWN OF DEPRESSION ERA PROPORTIONS, but now they don’t even want to read their emails. 

It’s true.  Apparently in the last week they’ve been swamped with emails from you, me and that weird neighbor down the street with all the back hair.  Why?  Because you, me and even Sasquatch down the street there realize that this crisis, AND this bailout, affect us.  Who’s going to be paying that *trillion dollar tab*? Even if you think we won’t, and even if we don’t raise taxes, you and I will still be paying more.  Why? Because the government can just go print more money. Yay! Free money!!!!

Except it isn’t.  ‘Free money’ means that the dollar becomes further removed from any sort of standard, and closer and closer to ‘piece of paper with weird and not particularly attractive drawings on it’. The dollar will tank against currencies overseas, which means that anything that does not have a Made In USA tag on it will go up.  Your cheapo t-shirts: more expensive.  Your Chilean fruit: more expensive.  Your…gasoline, dare I say?

But I think most of us have pretty much realized and more or less (less in my case) accepted that we’re going to be screwed.  We’re just hoping for a little lubrication and maybe a ‘thank you’. 

However, here’s how I see it:  If these skankbags in DC are going to vote against *our* interests (the suckers who elected them) and for the interests of their corrupt buddies (like in Fannie and Freddie), the very least (seriously) that they could do is to listen to me bitch about it.  Hear me scream as they sodomize my American Dream.  (Honestly, you and I know they don’t even read their emails, it’s some poor schlub of an intern, but still).  To me, it’s the final serving of poop in my plate of governmental disgust. 

A few weeks ago, before all this nonsense began, I read a statistic I eagerly brought into my comp students to show them about statistics.  President Bush, the statistic said, has *three times* the approval rating of Congress.  THREE TIMES!! That makes him sound like Prom King, non?  We-eeelll, when you looked at it, Congress’s approval rating was 9% (yes, NINE percent), which would still make Bush, at 27%, I think historically unpopular). 

And now I suspect that ‘nine percent’ will soon be viewed with nostalgia. Oh, if only I could go back to the days when I only hated you bastards 91%, we’ll say.  Because not only are they, ummmm, not doing diddly squat, but they’re not even going to listen to us, their constituents!

Now, this is the government that brought us the infamous Bridge to Nowhere and a host of other pork barrel spending products.  Do they REALLY think we’re that dumb that we won’t rise up and say, ummm, hey, if you can afford these expensive earmarks, surely you can afford to install another bloody *blade server* so you can at least pretend that you care what I think?

Nope: pretense over.  They’ve stuck their fingers in their ears and are screaming ‘lalalalalallalala’ as loud as they can.  I wish ALL of them were up for reelection in November.  Vote with your ballots, people.  I’m not even talking about the Presidency (because, honestly, can you tell the difference between the two candidates on the economy issue?  One’s got a combover the other’s got weird grey lips, but that’s the only difference I see), I’m talking about these jackasses in the House and Senate, playing fast and loose with *our* money, *our* economy, and *our* futures. 

To quote Megadeth, “It’s still ‘we, the people,’ right?”