I am such a sap.
Part of my prep work for getting hired as a teacher involves watching videos of highly skilled teachers in classroom settings and listening to interviews with their students both at the beginning and the middle of the school year. All the students start off saying that they don't really care much about school, but by the middle of the year, they're all talking about how they can do well in school, and they even think they might be able to succeed after school in their lives.
I keep getting choked up.
I fear I am an irremediable goon.
Now among the ranks of the "at liberty" brigade
Well, I am officially unemployed now. At least until the schoolyear starts.
It's an exciting time, and I'm looking forward to having more time to read and write and do a lot of the other fun things that I've sort of had to neglect for the last decade or so.
Like - here's something I've wanted to write for a while...
Dear
Jeff Gannon:
I don't know if you have noticed this or not, but you are
gay.
Gay,
gay,
gay,
gay.
In fact, you're so gay, they publish your articles next to leads for columns about
men who are tired of the bathhouse scene. I don't know if I can find a more emphatic term to explain to you just how gay you are than that.
Please don't think I mean this as a criticism. Gay men are awesome. Gay people in general are awesome. I'm not criticizing you for being gay. I'm just pointing out that you seem to have forgotten that you yourself are gay.
It's hard to know what other conclusion to draw when you write things like
this:
The first "couple" to be "wed" in a civil union ceremony in Vermont five years ago is now splitsville. This might be an object lesson of "be careful what you wish for" because if you want gay marriage, you have to take gay divorce, gay alimony...
Someone said of gay marriage: "Why shouldn't they be as miserable as the rest of us?"
First of all, Jeff..."they"? "us"? No, sweetie...it's "we" and "them". You see, you're gay.
They can get married.
You can't.
Secondly, why are you using "couple" and "wed" in "scare quotes"? Gay couples aren't couples? Haven't you ever been in love before? Weren't you part of a real couple then? I'm sorry if no one has ever really loved you before...although if this is the case, you might want to think about what impact, if any, your impulse to call gay marriages "couples" might have had on that. Just a thought.
This brings up my main point....I'm a bit concerned about your friends. I don't think they really like you. I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but they're
talking about you behind your back.
I know that
you were never really in the military, even though you said you were, but I'm sure you would have been a fine soldier, had you chosen to pursue a military career. Doesn't it bother you that your so-called friends don't seem to agree?
And I know you've
said that "there are things more important to you than sexual issues". Well, there are things more important to all of us than sexual issues. But marriage isn't a sexual issue, Jeff - it's a human rights issue. You may not ever want to get married; I can respect that. I'm 33 myself and never been married, and probably never will be. But that doesn't mean that I ignore the rights of other people, simply because an issue in question isn't one that affects me personally. Some people might say that a willingness to do that is a sign of moral cowardice, you know. All I can say is that if I were going to say that about you, I'd have the decency to say it to your face, instead of slurring you behind your back like so many of your so-called "friends" have done to you.
Look, I know you claim to have conservative values that you want to stand up for. I can respect that as well...even though I do feel compelled to point out how odd that sounds coming from a $1200-a-weekend rentboy. You know what makes it really odd? I've never once claimed to have conservative values, and I've never taken money for sex. And I've even had the offer, more than once, back when I was younger and broker than I am now. So it's not that I don't know what I'm talking about when I say how easy it is to avoid having sex for money.
It's a hard time to be a gay conservative. I can sympathize. If, however, you truly want to stand for traditional conservative values like smaller government and fiscal discipline, might I suggest to you
the Libertarian Party? And considering exactly how
insane I think these guys are (get rid of the FDA? Are you out of your cotton picking minds?!?), you should see that as a reflection of exactly how much
more insane I think the Republican party has become. At least the Libertarians don't want to
put you in jail for making love to someone.
Thanks, Jeff. I hope you feel better about yourself for being gay sometime soon. It's not a bad thing to be, you know.
Bush = Hitler is soooo five minutes ago
Poor W.'s been taking a real beating of late. The Dubai ports deal seems to have lost him the support of huge chunks of his own party, and the immigration battle shaping up for this week in Congress looks to lose him even more. More and more, we keep hearing this cry of "I was a conservative before I was a Republican" from disillusioned Righties. Peggy Noonan's on that bandwagon, as is Andrew Sullivan, Kevin Phillips (who is an idiot to be acting shocked over the course of the current Republican party anyway, as he helped create it by engineering Nixon's Southern strategy years ago), even masters of
realpolitik (which is often just a fancy codeword for "right of center") like John Mearsheimer. (I should confess upfront that I will never again be able to take seriously anything that Herr Mearsheimer has to say after seeing him say that in his particular version of
realpolitik, "it does not matter...whether Germany in 1905 was led by Bismarck, Kaiser Willhelm, or Adolf Hitler, whether Germany was democratic or autocratic").
I know the comparisons of Bush and Hitler are old and tired at this point, and we've had a surfeit of high school economics teachers suspended for saying anything to the contrary. Honestly, I was never that impressed with that comparison anyway - there are some creepy comparisons between the neoconservative bid for power in America and the National Socialist party's bid for power in prewar Germany, but saying that makes Bush like Hitler is like saying that because the U.S. army used intense firepower to "shock and awe" Iraquis and the Imperial Army used intense firepower to "shock and awe" the Alderaanians, therefore Tommy Franks is like Grand Moff Tarkin. It's just silly.
But there is a more interesting comparison to be made. It's going to be hard to get people to think about it seriously, because - well, honestly, do I even need to answer that? People don't think seriously about
anything anymore. But this in particular is going to be hard to get past the white noise generators that twenty years of talk radio have embedded in almost every American brain. But I'm going to give it a shot.
At this point, Bush is like Stalin.
No, no no. Stop right there. Bush is not a nefarious evildoer who gets drunk in his dacha every night and makes all of his closest advisors get drunk and dance together for his amusement. After all, Bush doesn't have a dacha. (I kid.) This is not to say in any way that Stalin is not a Very Bad Man, or that we should all refrain from reflexively spitting and crossing ourselves every time his name is mentioned, or whatever it is you crazy anti-Commies do.
Think deeper for a minute.
Think about what happened to the American Left after Stalin came to power.
I'm only going to deal with the American Left here, because I really don't know enough about the prewar Left in other countries to feel comfortable commenting on it. But I know that when Stalin came to power, there was a lot of excitement among the American Left. Lenin was mourned, but Stalin, it was believed, would carry on his vision, and further the cause of creating the worker's paradise. Sure, was a lot of division among the American Left, and plenty who hated Stalin's guts from day one, but in the early days, there was a sense of hope and optimism for a lot of Lefties.
Then the showtrials began. It didn't take long.
Accusing two of the heroes of the Soviet Revolution, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, of being involved in a "counterrevolutionary plot" that resulted in the assassination of a government official, he had them put on trial. The trials were public, and although they were taken at face value by most people, the rumbles of concern began to emerge in the American Left.
Factions emerged. Some people thought it was important to support Stalin no matter what, because he was the best hope (or the only hope) for the Success of The Glorious Revolution (which must always be read in capital letters). Others began to wonder if the Success of the Glorious Revolution was worth a guy like Stalin, who began cutting deals with the fascists just a few years after the first of the showtrials.
This, it seems, is sort of the position the conservative camp is in of late. Is it worth it for a conservative government to control all three branches of government when that conservative is as enormous a doofus as our Feckless Child in Chief?
With any luck, this will end as well for modern American conservatism as Stalin's bloody record did for modern American leftism.
Incidentally, the quote from yesterday is from the illustrious Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, who is in many ways the father of modern day Iraq, much as
Faisl was its mother(I don't think he'd much appreciate that reference).
Lawrence was deeply opposed to British postwar colonial adventures in Iraq (which was called "Mesopotamia" at the time) and was convinced that any attempt to maintain a British military presence there would ulitmately backfire and lead to greater unreset in the region - which it arguably did. I've just recently acquired a very pretty edition of
Revolt in the Desert, and am desperately looking forward to reading it. The only way to make full sense out of the present right now, I think, is to spend time in the past - something that seems to be the case more and more frequently of late.
Guess who said it?
The people of [country name] have been led in [Iraq] into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They ahve been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information...Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our ...record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster....
We say we are in [Iraq] to develop it for the benefit of the world...how long will we permit millions of [dollars], thousands of...troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?Answer later.
Oh, so THAT'S what it is!
People seem to think that members of academia tend toward the left end of the political spectrum anymore, and speculate endlessly as to why that is.
I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that they don't want to be associated with people who write
entire books based on
logical fallacies.
Could be.
Sitting under a palm tree...
I actually do have a coconut palm on my front lawn. With coconuts on it and everything. I pity all you suckers in the snow and the cold!
Even so, moving still sucks. I am about ninety percent unpacked at this point, and slowly getting settled in. People in Miami cannot drive - and I'm not a cowardly driver. I've driven in downtown rush hour Chicago traffic before.
On the bright side, I've got about six weeks of work left before I resign, which is simply delicious. It's made even more wonderful by the fact that I've just received notice that the office I've just transferred to is due to be closed by August.
You see, I put in the request to transfer to the Miami region from where I was working before (the wilds of Noo Joisey) because my teaching position that starts this upcoming school year is here in Miami, and I wanted to make the move as soon as possible in order to economize. I suppose it's a bit dastardly to request a transfer at your job when you're planning on quitting in just a few weeks' time, but I figured that it was nothing my company wouldn't have done to me if it suited their purposes. The joy of that argument is that they actually
did do it to me - they offered me an opportunity to transfer down to a location that they knew darn well was only going to be there for a few more months. The company says that they'll offer all of us transfers to locations "as near as possible to your current work location", but given the Miami traffic, that could easily mean doubling one's commute, timewise. Oh - and they won't be offering severance. If you can't work at the spot they offer you, then you are choosing to resign. Tough luck. I am soooo glad I'll be gone before that becomes an issue.
I'll be adding something of actual substance in the next few days, with any luck - the crazy hours I've been working have made that sort of difficult, when piled on top of the post-move stuff I'm still doing. But I did have to sign on just to add this last bit, if nothing else:
It's finally dawned on me. Dick Cheney is obviously an
Alvian.
"'Vengeance is mine,'quoth Alvis. Then he shot that guy right in the freakin' face!"
If you aren't watching
Adult Swim, you're missing out.
More later.
And the torment continues
Still working on the move. I have never before in my life hated packing as much as I seem to this time - and I've done all my own packing since I was eight years old. And this will be move number fourteen (or is it fifteen?) since then.
How the hell did I get all this crap?
I have an R2-D2 phone I forgot I owned. It's two feet tall, and when it rings, it beeps and chirps just like R2-D2. Why did I get it, and what's more, why can't I bring myself to throw it away?
Do you know how long it takes to pack and move a fifteen hundred volume library? Do you know how much it weighs? I don't think I want to know.
Just a few random bits of errata to help preserve my sanity as I deal with this dreadful move...
From the ever wonderful
Brian Leiter comes the stunning news that America is an
empirical nation. This, I suppose, would explain why Lord Russell disliked us so much.
From a lovely British text on post-war world history I'm reading, on the Eisenhower administration: "Republican administrations had no enthusiasm for high levels of government expenditure and reduced the size of the armed forces." Sigh...anybody else remember the days when the Republican party was the party of small government? It's like reading something out of a counterfactual history book at this point.
Just caught a commercial on TV the other day for the "Kingdom Holding Company" which was touting its investments in various U.S. companies. One of them was FOX news. The "kingdom" in Kingdom Holding Company is, of course, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Made me laugh for a good couple of minutes to think of Sean Hannity getting his paycheck in petrodollars.
I really need to pick up the pace with this packing, as I'm supposed to be leaving sometime on Friday. I swear to God I'm never buying another book again.
Good thing I'm an atheist. ;-)
