Paging Spiderman

Prohibiting teachers (kindergarten through college) from displaying bumper stickers on their car is going overboard. And certainly the First Amendment isn't terribly specific about whether teachers wearing campaign buttons or other campaign swag falls within its penumbra (much less umbra).

But the one thing that's missing from the whole debate is the concept of responsibility. I could rail for reams against the all-noblesse-and-no-obilige (h/t Gary Trudeau) pack of boorish louts this nation has become. But that's somewhat orthogonal to the point. And the point is that teachers instill either strong emotions or none. You're rarely ambivalent about a teacher, whatever your grade. Heck, I had teachers--even student teachers--I all-but-worshiped. Some teachers--thankfully few--I despise to the marrow of my being. But everyone else, I do well enough to remember their names.

So. You have the polarizing influence of politics and the polarized attitude students have toward their instructors. Combining them can't be a good thing. I don't care how you slice it--there's just no good outcome. You might as well just start playing favorites at that point and have done with it. No teacher worth her/his dry-erase vapor should be doing that.

Moreover, it's flouting the responsibility that goes with the job. This isn't like teaching sex education or evolution where you actually have data and facts with which to brow-beat hysteria and superstition. Politics, like religion, is All About opinion. Adding to the herd mentality already stampeding rampant through society does no good whatsoever.

More to the point, teaching--like it or not--requires a certain amount of gravitas. On any given day, teaching more about mob control than it will ever, EVER be about the proverbial Three Rs. Introducing politics--particularly when it's not even age-appropriate--is counter-productive. And that only when it's not just flat-out stupid. Stupid to the point where I'm have to admit that I'm gob-smacked that morons--educated and non---are actually arguing over this.

Look: I don't have any sort of leadership position. If I had a real business card for work, I'd list my title as "Alpha-Peon." But for all that, I certainly wouldn't presume to politically proselytize on the job. It's just tacky. We already have one person on staff to cover tacky. Sadly, we haven't figured out how to outsource tacky. And it's merely one of the reasons that this person is the office pariah. Bottom line: Don't be that person.

Giving honor its due

I would disappoint my inner Hufflepuff if I neglected to give John McCain credit for trying to stuff the proverbial genie back into the bottle. Being booed by the people who came to cheer you has to be d--ned unnerving, even with a Secret Service posse at your back. I heartily commend the courage that it takes to incur that--make no mistake. There's a reason I slipped out of pep rallies and into the library, trust me.

Unfortunately, the sorcery that turns mobs 180 degrees from their initial course is all too rare. Worse, Miss Wingnut USA is just too goshdarned white trash dingdangitalready for any prayer of gravitas.

But I digress.

Again, my sincere kudos to the senior Senator from Arizona. Sadly, though, with such discombobulated campaign machinery running beneath him, I'd put McCain's chances of holding back the dark side of conservativism at slim to none. I just hope to Hades that the hatefulness is confined to the rallies.

Conservative party-crasher

On the surface, David Brooks' "The Class War Before Palin" op-ed makes me want to cheer. But barely scratch the highlighting powder of Mr. Brooks' self-conscious makeover--one eye to the mirror and the other to a photo of George F. Will--and he bleeds nervousness. Someone's little bubble has been burst, methinks, and mewonders also how long it will be before that someone presumes to outrage on the same grounds.

Tell me, Mr. Brooks: How does it feel to sit in the decidedly un-Enlightened salon of Madame Guillotine? Did you perchance think that the lady in the front was knitting you a sweater? You and your ilk for too long provided the pseudo-intellectual rationalizations for the political mob-mentality of the last decade and more. How can you claim surprise when the self-same mob howls for the missing "one" promised to them when the Red Team proclaimed that two plus two equals five (and FSM help anyone who insisted that the answer was actually four--why do they hate numbers?)? When housing prices climb as all other indicators plunge, it's not the American Dream--it's a real estate bubble. The Iraq War is not paying for itself in oil revenue. National Security measures at airports are pure voodoo--you can board a plane packing (inert) grenades, but not nipple jewlery. The NSA doesn't have time to eavesdrop on Osama's pizza-delivery calls because they're too busy jacking off to other peoples' phone sex.

In short, the Emperor is butt-naked, somebody's got some 'splainin' to do, and you're one of those somebodies, jack.

Why? Because we find ourselves three-quarters through 2008, beggared of several Constitutional birthrights, our children steadily dumbed down by NCLB and left to pipe-dreams of winning the lottery as rap artists or ball-players or supermodels rather than spending their adulthood usefully or meaningfully. It's lucky for you that math is so fatally uncool to U.S.-born students. Otherwise they might be able to count high enough to appreciate how bankrupted they've been made by your ideologies. For anyone who adds any value to the economy, however, two plus two does after all equal four.

But, ever so regretably, awakening to sober reality does not undo the damage of fantasy. When you disparage education and rational thinking, you damage far more than the educational system itself. You also undermine the social compact that we should be making with those who are raised in this country: Pay attention in class, work smart, live smart, and you won't have to sell your soul to be financially safe. Even if you don't want to work for The Man, you have to be well-rounded enough to be The Man.

The baiting of the educated "elite" didn't start in the past week, Mr. Brooks, and it is, at best, disingenuous to admit it on the cusp of a potential Palin Vice-Presidency. The time for that was 2000, if not before. Nor are the educated the sole targets of the GOP's putrid us-vs-them tactics. The definition of "them" (sometimes) excepted, the Republican brand of populism is indistinguishable from a Klan rally. The "them"s are the rainbow that intrudes on your tribe's black-and-white(-bread) weltanschauung: Gays. Liberals. Immigrants. Muslims. Atheists/Agnostics. Wiccans/Pagans. Judges whose rulings they dislike. People who tell them to stay the @#$% out of their reproductive choices. Wealthy, connected Jews (But in the latter case only sotto vocce, because they wouldn't want to sound, you know, racist.)

And, too, the "educated." For the statistics speak, and in full throated chorus: U.S. social mobility is ossifying into a caste system. Thus, a devil's-bargain (a.k.a. "debt for degree") must be made by middle- and lower-income undergraduates to an extent not seen during my undergraduate epoch a mere two decades ago. Then, after incurring thousands of dollars of debt and jumping through hoops for four more years--wondering all the while how offshore-proof their career will actually be--these folks step off the commencement stage to be vilified for their wager of effort and expense. That's just gotta make it all worthwhile, dunnit?

Feh. I'd say "Welcome to my world, Mr. Brooks," except you're emphatically not. Not without significantly more self-reflection and a penitent appreciation of your own complicity. You were in no way obliged to attach yourself to the preening cheerleaders and jocks to the exclusion of the dweebs who do their own homework. On test day, your team chose a Champagne Brigade flyboy over someone who was actually used for target practice by dudes in black 'jammies. And, in case it escaped your notice, your team is now backing the privileged son and grandson of Navy brass who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class. Against a guy who beat the odds of being dark-skinned and raised in a single-parent family to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard.

Is it any wonder that the GOP acts as high-handedly as it has these past several years? To them, getting ahead is couched in terms of playground pecking-order, and not in any way a meritocracy. The last eight years have been the political equivalent of "Lord of the Flies." And now the whole island is ablaze, thank you very little. Puppeteering and power-grabbing only carry so far, even in politics. Reality has a nasty way of defying dogma of any kind. The next few years will take political smarts, but more still of the academic kind, if there is any hope for pulling this country back from the banana republic brink.

While that's underway, I would appreciate it if you would do us a big favor, Mr. Brooks, and take your own words to heart. Pretty-please stay the hell out from underfoot while the "educated" folks try to put America back together. And I'd be doubly obliged if you would actually help the effort by nudging your party--and hopefully the nation at large--back to some sort of intellectual respectability.

Elayne Boosler nails it in one

Brought to you via The Huffington Post: Elayne Boosler hands Harry Reid his head. Alas, not in person. But it does prove, yet again, that you never, ever want to piss off anyone who's funnier than you.

The truth is rarely so delicious and bitter at the same time. Enjoy.

The twelve o'clock flashers strike again

Quelle surprise: The line between science and wishful thinking is crossed yet again. And I'm not even talking about creationism, global-warming denial or abstinence-only "education" this time: Scientists question terrorist-hunting techniques.

Y'know, I consider myself a professional dilettante--it comes with the territory of working with multiple languages and technologies for a living. But for love of the FSM, I at least have the humility and wit to flout the wisdom of my alpha geeks only after triple-checking my facts.

Sigh...if our so-called "leaders"--in the private as well as public sector--could grok that they've merely been promoted to the level of their incompetence and act with the appropriate friggin' humility, it would easily halve the world's problems.

What color is the sky in W's world?

Daaaang. I didn't think that hypocrisy could come in this density without imploding into a black hole. Cheeseburgers alone can't mess up your thinking this badly, can they? I gotta think that Dubya's been brain damaged by all the white-out he's used on hundreds of signing statements--not to mention the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention, Salt II, and reality in general. (Fortunately, it flakes off reality sooner or later. The others? Don't hold your breath...)

But the amount of hypocrisy and/or self-deception required for Dubya to pontificate about "apply[ing] the laws as written" just knocks the wind out of you. I don't think you realize this, Mr. President, but Keith Olberman was being polite when he told you to "shut the Hell up." That's certainly not the four-letter word I would have used.

Channelling Robinson Jeffers

Not surprisingly, I've become a poll-junkie lately. Between the passionate hope of seeing an end to the hemorrhaging of everything I was taught to respect about the U.S., and a scholarly interest in statistics--4 credits this semester--that's pretty much inevitable.

In the milieu of bailouts ("Would you like some pork fries to go with that pork-burger?" "Super-size it!") and ballyhoo on the political circuit, an echo calls from the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, to remind us that we have been this way before:

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to Empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and
sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother, and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You, making haste, haste on decay; not blameworthy; life
is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: Meteors are not needed less than
mountains: Shine, perishing Republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their
distance from the thickening center; corruption
Is never compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster's feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--
they say--God, when he walked on earth.

Corruption is never compulsory. But refusing to be corrupted--if only to a threshold percentage--carries a price tag. I'm not especially convinced that all recognize that. Maybe only the folks who have been corrupted, or those who spent childhood/adolescence on the proverbial outside looking in truly do. And that, ultimately, may be what's truly wrong with Joe and Jane Sixpack.

Again, the ghost speaks:

Ave Caesar

No bitterness; our ancestors did it,
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth, too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or, rather--for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists--
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who'll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive.
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.

The Danegeld that Washington just pledged to the Wall Street jarls is no different from shooting an adrenaline-morphine cocktail into the vein of a terminally ill person. Even without card-houses tumbling and the spike in unemployment, the fundamentals of our economy are most emphatically not strong. We're borrowing money to pay for the things we should be making ourselves. It's Company Store Capitalism--period, full stop. Anyone who claims that this is healthy has no business being President.

Maybe it's just my mood today, but Jeffers almost seems too optimistic. Are there actually mountain refuges in this day of illegal surveillance? And how can any tyrant--kindly or not--save us from our own excesses when they will not curb their own? FDR was considered a dictator by some, and there's no question that he crossed Constitutional boundaries by packing the Supreme Court. But he had brains and a sense of noblesse oblige and a tenacious, two-handed grip on capital-R reality. (And, of course, he had Eleanor to lean on.) Things that our latter-day Caesar lacks in superabundance. And, unlike the maverick-y reformer pretensions of a certain Republican candidate, FDR went toe-to-toe against Tammany Hall and won--Eleanor carrying the banner and helping to deliver the coup de grace a few decades later.

But such Caesars are far, far too rare to be relied upon. While the Boss Tweeds are not--and they are back in spades. (Funny how Karl Rove is fat, too.) Percentage-spreads and interactive maps on the internet are all well and good, but there are October Surprises and Diebold and good, old-fashioned voter suppression to reckon with. When the GOP's concern-trolling stoops to obsessing over tee-shirts and singing hats (I am NOT making this up), worry. Cornered people are dangerous. People at risk of facing their own guilt are far more so. Today' GOP is both.

Take a little time next week--over your lunch break or what-have-you--to call your registrar and make sure that you're on the rolls. If you're not, dot the 'i's and cross the 't's to get that way. This month. If possible, vote absentee (with your political tee-shirt on, just to stick it to the fascist fashionistas). Me, I'm packing my utility bill, my driver's license, and my friggin' passport for good measure on November 4th. The cheeseburger-poisoned b@@rds who run this show have already robbed you of your birthright of habeus corpus. Pilfering your vote is completely in character.

Update, 11:50 p.m.
By sheer coincidence, Dearest forwarded this Andrew Bacevich op-ed to me: He told us to go shopping. Now the bill is due.

Shine, perishing republic.