Good piece about liberal professors and conservative students. It took me back to my college days, a scant two years ago. “John” of Bérubé’s class could have any number of standard-issue white blowhards in a few of my own classes. Luckily there weren’t many. I almost wish I had encountered more of them. I was an obnoxious hand-raiser in my own right. “John” would not have lasted long had I been in class with him.

But back to the Bérubé piece.

“John’s” problem isn’t so much that he’s a conservative surrounded by liberals than it is that he is a jerk surrounded by people too polite to call him a jerk to his face.

Actually, some students agreed with John about one thing or another but were simply annoyed that he was taking up so much class time. They began sending me e-mail messages and speaking to me privately about how they did not want John's remarks to set the parameters for class discussion. One student complained that she was wasting time trying to think of things that John wouldn't reply to; another said that he found anti-porn feminism obnoxious, just as John did, but couldn't stand it when people dismissed feminism so sweepingly as to render suspect other people's more careful critiques (his own, for example). If I asked John to cool it, then, he would undoubtedly feel silenced, and I would be in the position of validating what was perhaps, for him, a stifling liberal hegemony over classroom speech; if I failed to restrain him, I would in effect be allowing him to dominate the class, thereby silencing the other students who'd taken the time to speak to me about the problem.

It reads like a technique straight from the Bill O’Reilly Guide to debate. “John” wasn’t unpopular because he was conservative, he was unpopular because he was an ass. Moreover, being conservative didn’t make him an ass (huh? you say). Sounds to me like the students resented the fact that “John” not Bérubé was dictating how they were learning.

Learning seems to have a ratings system much like movies. In elementary school you get the G-rated version of things. Columbus actually did discover America and was good and kind to the savage Indians. In High School things get a little racier. Well actually Columbus only discovered the West Indies and the Vikings may have gotten here first. By college you should be ready for the ugly truths of colonialism, imperialism, genocide. Triple X stuff. “John” clearly has issues with this and compounds his immature approach to higher learning by throwing a tantrum when the story doesn’t go his way.

…by the time we got in December to Colson Whitehead's 1999 The Intuitionist, a whimsical allegory about racial uplift and the history of elevator inspection, John was complaining that there were no good white characters in the novel. By that point, even I had had enough, and I told him, via e-mail, that his complaint was not only unwarranted on its face but thoroughly beside the point: In this class, I said, we are not in the business of pursuing reductive identity-politics enterprises like looking for "positive images" in literature, regardless of what group images we might be talking about.

Sho ‘nuff. Seriously though. I didn’t have a problem with College Conservatives going after more liberal student groups. That’s part of campus culture, the protests, the counter protests and the rest of us worming through the crowd because we don’t want to be late for class. But trying to dictate department curriculum… ick. I wonder what “John’s” syllabus would look like. Any takers?

Time Wasters



You know you want to.

Lovely

A 7-year-old boy was scolded and forced to write ``I will never use the word `gay' in school again'' after he told a classmate about his lesbian mother, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged Monday.

Second-grader Marcus McLaurin was waiting for recess Nov. 11 at Ernest Gaullet Elementary School when a classmate asked about Marcus' mother and father, the ACLU said in a complaint.

Marcus responded he had two mothers because his mother is gay. When the other child asked for explanation, Marcus told him: ``Gay is when a girl likes another girl,'' according to the complaint.

A teacher who heard the remark scolded Marcus, telling him ``gay'' was a ``bad word'' and sending him to the principal's office. The following week, Marcus had to come to school early and repeatedly write: ``I will never use the word `gay' in school again.''

This kind of homophobia is bad enough in fellow students, but teachers? Can you spell homeschooling? Poor kid.

Then and Now

I’ve only known one person who died of AIDS. He was my sister’s 6th Grade teacher, a rare mixture of good disciplinarian, good educator, and likable person. One day he was out sick, and then another, and another. The students were told he was in the hospital but we weren’t told why until it was clear that he would not be able to return to teaching. When they told us they also told us that his insurance wouldn’t cover the cost of his medication. We were about to go into production for the Spring Musical, the musical he would have directed. The school wanted the permission of the students to donate the proceeds to our teacher for his treatment.

Looking back it seems kind of amazing that it wasn’t more complicated. It can be a risky thing to appeal to better angels of twelve and thirteen year olds. But it worked. This was 1991 when there weren’t as many medical options and we pretty much believed that if we didn’t help he would die right then and there. So we did it. We raised over $3,000 dollars through our production of the The Wiz. Opening night he was there. He’d lost his hair to chemotherapy by this time but he was up and around. We asked him to stand up at the very end and there were tears running down his cheeks.

He died in the fall of 1992

I habitually don't watch the news on Thanksgiving. It's more of a parade-football- The Two Towers, Special Edition kind of day. I did however catch the surprise visit to Baghdad.

This is all I have to say about it. It was--literallly--the least he could do.

Guns don't kill people. Stupid redneck racists with guns kill people.

A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said.

(snip)

About 10 people, including two children, had gathered for the ceremony. The man who was being initiated was blindfolded, tied with a noose to a tree and shot with paintball guns as Freeman fired a pistol in the air to provide the sound of real gunfire, Sheriff Fred Phillips said.

November 23, 1963

Growing up Catholic in a large family in New Mexico, death was reenacted on a daily basis in the image of the crucified Christ at morning Mass and ever present in the crucifixes on our walls and our rosaries. We mourned every Lenten season, covering the saints and holy statues with purple cloth, and with every Station of the Cross we relived the torture and murder of Jesus Christ. The Brothers Grimm stories were fairy tales in comparison.

Saturday marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was five years old, watching Pete and Gladys, and alternately running screaming and laughing around the room with my brothers and sisters, when the bulletin appeared on TV. All our noisy horseplay disappeared in an instant. The light and air seemed to drain from the room. My mom, who’d been downtown paying taxes on our house walked in, pale and silent. I strained my neck to look into her face towering so far above me. Someone at the bus stop told her that President Kennedy had been shot. So it was true. We were stunned. The rest of that day and the days following we watched the television images of the assassination replayed over and over. We watched Lyndon Johnson take the oath of office with Jackie Kennedy looking on, bloodstained jacket and skirt; her stricken face spoke for all of us, in mourning and now betrayed. We watched Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald. We bundled hundreds of newspapers for my brother’s paper route every afternoon. KENNEDY SLAIN. I learned to recognize that name on the printed page before I recognized my own.

John F. Kennedy was our president. The same age as my mother. He was intelligent and kind and every time he gave a speech or addressed the nation in a televised broadcast my mother would call us all in-- be quiet and listen. He was the perfect representative of our country to the rest of the world, dynamic, brilliant, handsome, and funny. He had a beautiful, smiling wife and happy children. He was taking us to the moon.

Forty years later, it still breaks my heart to see that face--those faces, and remember.

If you missed yesterday's David Brooks column, it's worth a look-see. Not because he's right
but because one must marvel at his ability to come out almost on the right side of the argument and
still manage to be completely wrong.

Shorter David Brooks: "Marriage is so sacred that we must force gays and lesbians to do it."

UPDATE: See this is the problem with being a so-called "moderate conservative." If your opinion on an issue falls left of of Jerry Falwell, you end up having to justify yourself by wrapping it up in all this moral bullshit.

Wow.

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.

One would hope that this might make things uncomfortably sticky for Bush especially since he and Perle are both in London, but these days it's hard to say. Just look at how Perle followed up.

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

This is the problem with Perle and people like him. They wrap themselves up in moral certitude to a point where they poo poo at the rule of law. And that is dangerous. Going against the rule of law for a so-called greater good only works if the results are positive. And if you are going to make that stand and take risk, then you had better be ready to take the consequences when things go horribly wrong.

Protecting the sanctity of marriage Bush Style. (via World O'Crap)

Oh fer the love of Gawd!

Yes I realize that there are more interesting stories out there, but can we please pause to roll our eyes at this ridiculousness?

Policy analysts across the political spectrum yesterday denounced the energy bill that Republicans in Congress hope to push to approval this week, saying it represented micromanagement of the economy and would open vast new opportunities for tax cheating.

Many experts said they were taken aback by the size of the proposed breaks, estimated by Capitol Hill staff members at $25.7 billion over 10 years. That is more than three times the $8 billion in tax incentives that the Bush administration said last year in a letter to Congress that it wanted for energy producers.

Can these people do anything without adding massive tax cuts?

I think I managed to remain awake for about 2 hours of the Senate complete-waste-of-time-athon. So I'm glad that someone braved the boredom to tell us exactly how big of a waste of time this was. (via Pandagon)

The Almighty Steps In

State Boards of Education have been under pressure to rewrite Biology textbooks to include material about Intelligent Design as an alternate explanation for evolution. In case that happens, I've been working on a rewrite of my own: "In the beginning, about 13 billion years ago, God created the quantum gravity barrier. And the weak nuclear force was upon the face of the deep. And God divided it into matter and antimatter, with a slight asymmetry in favor of matter. And God said, Let there be a Quark-hadron transition, and there was a Quark-hadron transition. And He called the particles baryons. And when the universe had cooled to 3,000 billion degrees Kelvin, God created hadrons and leptons and helium and hydrogen. And God saw that it was good." Of course it's still a work-in-progress, but kids have to learn about science somewhere!

The first Republican to fall asleep gets his hand stuck in a bowl of warm water.

C’mon Trent Lott.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

The most hated president in U.S. history is afraid of a little freedom of speech

The Stop The War Coalition said yesterday that it had been told by the police that it would not be allowed to demonstrate in Parliament Square and Whitehall next Thursday - a ban it said it was determined to resist. The coalition says that it has also been told by British officials that American officials want a distance kept between Mr Bush and protesters, for security reasons and to prevent their appearance in the same television shots.

Oh, and could you move them over to the left so they don't block the shot of the "Mission Impossible" banner? To prevent their appearance in the same TV shots??!! Jeez, was Nixon this paranoid and frightened of being unpopular? So much for democracy in Great Britain as their right to protest goes the way our right to protest has gone. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone seems to be the only Brit holding office willing to complain about the pressure Scotland Yard is under from, where else?--the Whitehouse.

"...I have to see demonstrators all the time. It is part of the great joy of politics. Those police were actually breaking the law as they took those banners away.[referring to a visit of President Jiang Zemin of China in 1999] We are not having any of that...

To create a situation in which perhaps 60,000 people remain unseen would require a shutdown of central London which is just not acceptable."

It's interesting how far this country has fallen in President Raised-by-Poodles quest for the perfect TV spot. We apparently will be forcing Great Britain to compromise their own laws and citizens freedom of speech to accomodate one man's inability to accept criticism.

John Kerry just rode on to the Tonight Show stage on a motorcycle.

Sigh.

Someone wake me up after the primary.

(In all fairness it wasn't that bad. I mean Bush fell off a Segway. Nevermind. I forgive you Kerry.)

Empty rhetoric thy name is McClellan. Ari would be proud.

Sarcasm aside, this is BULLSHIT. There is no Hell bad enough for these people.

Today, George W. Bush lay the traditional wreath at the Tomb Of the Unknowns because empty gestures are easy. Bush is about thirty-odd years too late in acknowledging the brutality of Vietnam and I can't help but wonder if it will take thirty more years for him to face up to the unamed--if not completely unknown-- dead of his own war.

Today the New York Times ran letters written by some of the fallen soldiers. I wonder if they made it past the White House "Bad News" filter. If he read them would he feel even the tiniest bit of remorse?

Somehow I doubt it.

I Want My Liberal Radio

Democracy Now on 88.3 FM here in Chicago.

How did I miss this?

Kos has baby pictures up of future Democrat and blogger Ari.