Partial Truths

Reflections on gardening from a consummate black thumb

2006-07-02T08:35:00.000-04:00

One. Real estate managed to hold my attention for one year.
Two. In that year, I have killed two batches of landscaping.
Three. I have applied for three new jobs in the last week.
Four weeks notice I gave to my current employer.
Five friends that I have lost.
Six million dollars in sales.

I think it is time to find some more fertile soil to till.

Rather prophetically, the instructor of my real estate class said. "Some will, some won't, so what? Next!"

Next!

And sometimes it pours...

2005-05-05T10:28:00.000-04:00

Last week, one of my very dearest friends had a massive stroke. He is young, seemingly fit, and in the process of starting a family. His illness was so sudden and so devastating, that it has left me reeling.

The good news is that his beautiful mind is fully intact and he is on his way home from the hospital and on the path to recovery.

It is stunning how much certain friends come to mean to you, and how quickly, and how magnificently fragile those relationships can be. Unlike with family, where you have expectations and privileges that allow you to intervene, assist, and love freely in times of crisis, friend relationships create a network of ambiguity where the boundaries are frustratingly unclear. Over the last week, I repeatedly found myself bumping up against a wall of questions. What can I do? What can I ask? How can I help? How can I be supportive, but unobtrusive? How can I be present but not a burden?

What can I do?

Because I cope with stress and grief by doing, helping, and fixing, when I find myself in the midst of a situation where there is nothing to do, nothing that can be done, I am lost. And for this person, this friend, who reached out to me when I was ill, notices things when no one else does, and whose friendship means more to me than I can put into words, the inability to make things right is particularly devastating.

It makes me understand why people pray.

It makes me pray.

Perhaps the worst compliment ever...

2005-05-02T21:08:00.000-04:00

L, a good friend of mine and I were having coffee earlier today. She is a fellow writing instructor, and she shared with me what had to be the worst compliment ever.

One of her students IMed her:

"Your the best writing instructor ever!"

Indeed.

Miss Me?

2005-04-27T18:16:00.000-04:00

I'll be back very soon I promise, but until then, here's a little snippet of my life right now.

(From my current IM conversation.)

Fem: so you turned in your paper yesterday?
Amy: yes
Amy: camber finished it for me because he is the best husband ever
Fem: cool. is it still the worst thing you ever wrote?
Amy: (he wrote the last 3 pages monday night)
Fem: that is a good husband
Amy: it's got to be the worst thing I wrote since the 4th grade.
Amy: I think I can remember a story I wrote in kindergarden where every sentence (and therefore every page) began with the word "but".
Amy: It might have been worse, but barely.

Gardening, Amy style.

2005-04-10T07:36:00.000-04:00

Spring is my very favorite season. I love watching the gradual process of renewal, the greening of the grass, the sprouting of the leaves, the outrageous color erupting from early blooming trees and flowers. There is something that is both hopeful and already triumphant about it all.

Spring has also burst forth in my own life. This month marks my transition from the hallowed, quiet, stately halls of the academic world to the wonderfully chaotic, vaguely predatory, and frenetic world of real estate.

That means this month I have two professional roles. On the note of out with the old-- I am still teaching my freshman composition class, with many students who I have been working with for an entire year, who I first met as fresh-faced freshman on their first day of classes. They are now on the verge of successfully completing their first year of college. I will miss them. I also have a twenty-five page paper to write in the next two weeks for my 18th C. moral and economic thought class. This role of academic student/teacher is harder and harder to slip into with each passing day. Like an ill-fitting suit, it seems to bag at the knees and scratch around the neck.

And, in with the new-- I am taking an accelerated class that will allow me to secure my real estate sales license at the end of April. This adds 24 hours of class time to my schedule every week and at least another ten hours of homework. For the last two weeks I have been interviewing for and interviewing potential employers for my job. Since hiring practices in real estate are vaguely predatory, this has been a mental-energy intensive project.

In the midst of all of this, I have re-landscaped the front of my house. I told my ex- boyfriend/best friend from high school about this plan over IM, and he laughed, and called it, “Gardening, Amy style.” Naturally, the thing to do when you already have two full-time jobs is to put 40+ hours into an entirely unnecessary project. So, my style, as can be derived from this project is either: a) totally insane, b) overly ambitious with a healthy disregard for sleep OR c)just my style.

I think it’s d) all of the above.

I promise to return to blogging the many entertaining and hilarious stories of my life as soon as I get two or more consecutive nights of adequate sleep. (That should be sometime in June for those of you who keeping track.)

Adult Life.

2005-04-01T06:42:00.000-05:00

I wanted to write something silly and flippant this morning, but I find that I just don't have it in me. Three of my close friends and family members are dealing with really horrible situations right now, and I am not able to do anything to make any of their problems any better. It's funny that I welcome adversity in my own life, but when troubled times come for someone I care about, I just want to be able to make it go away. And, I can't.

Ever since I was a little girl I have had this rule of three. One major setback, no problem. Two major setbacks, bring it on. The third problem, I fall apart. This third thing could be as simple as stubbing my toe, but it would make me fall apart.

Two days ago, I was driving home from school when I called a friend and was told some really bad news, and I cried.

Then, I prayed.

Then I felt silly, unsure whether I believed in the prayers or not.

But it was the only thing I could do to help.

My Hobby Horse.

2005-03-31T14:29:00.000-05:00

So, I just finished all of the revisions on my M.A. thesis, and it's begining to appear that this chapter of my life will conclude with a degree. I had to laugh however, when I reached the conclusion of my paper and, there it was, the same old obsession trotted out again. It seems, that I really only ever make one argument, and my thesis is no exception. Here's the conclusion:

In a political world where women possess only very limited means of representation, the question of who is entitled to construct narratives becomes crucial. Earla Wilputte writes: "For Haywood, “to control modes of narration…is to control the world” (Doody xxvvii), and women, readers, and citizens must carefully and responsibly interpret the representations offered by men, authors, and politicians. Neither a woman’s nor a nation’s history can be neatly allegorized, romanticized, or narrated without bearing the impression of its storyteller. Haywood’s hybrid novel suggests that one closely examine the politics of representation and decipher the voices and the meanings behind artistically constructed texts"(Wilputte, Textual 42).
Narrative constructions are implicated by power differentials, as are politics. To gain understanding, the individual, in life and in reading a text, must assess sometimes contradictory and always biased pieces of information in order to form his or her own understandings about events and ideologies.

Viewed through this lens, The Adventures of Eovaai is not about the advancement of a specific political system as much as it is about becoming a critical political subject. In order for women to gain any access to political agency, they must, like Eovaai, come to interpret society for themselves and make their own decisions about politics. Rather than acting as receptacles of received knowledge, which set women up to be the manipulated pawns of “great” men, they must begin to make their own evaluations of the information that they receive. This prevents women from becoming, like Atamadoul, the amorous political subject who remains faithful in the face of gross mistreatment.

The process of reading that Eliza Haywood engenders in the The Adventures of Eovaai is one of attunement. This attunement is forced upon the reader through the sheer complexity of the text. By defying the reader the possibility of a singular, unified reading, the text demands the creation of multiple contingent readings. In that way, Haywood’s mélange is a reveling in partiality, a refusal of completeness, of completion. Instead, the text produces a new vision of political subjectivity for all readers; a vision that urges the reader to become her own arbiter of meaning rather accepting the interpretations created by others. This vision advances the radical notion that the act of constructing a reading functions fundamentally as a mode of empowerment. It thus implies that by becoming an independent reader that is attuned to the modalities of interest within received information, a person can create her own space of understanding. It is within this space that independent political subjectivity begins.

Blots and Blurs

2005-03-24T08:06:00.000-05:00

I have a big day ahead of me today. I am meeting with my advisor to tell him that I am leaving the program, and I have a job interview. Today is a radically accelerated version of out with the old and in with the new. The first meeting is at noon, and the second meeting is at two.

I am uncharacteristically both excited and nervous. Apparently, this is as it was meant to me. (She says a bit facetiously.) It was not without amusement that I read my horoscope this week:

The transition you'll soon be going through should be exceptionally dramatic and fun, if a bit abrupt. You'll be evolving from a slow, sleepy meander to a savvy, scintillating bolt. As you finish getting your psychic batteries recharged, you'll accelerate quickly and be in sleek, fast motion before you know what's happening. Bid goodbye to your sabbatical, Sagittarius; say "yow" to the brilliant, bracing adventure.

A note about horoscopes. I read them because I am fascinated by the fact that people who write them always manage to paint in such broad strokes that everyone can take aspects of the statement and apply them to their life. It is a literary Rorschach test.

And, mine says that everything will be wonderful.

Yow?

Monday Evening Poetry Corner.

2005-03-21T20:09:00.000-05:00

Feeling raw and a little overwhelmed, I am beating a hasty retreat into the words of others.

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, whis is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

~Margaret Atwood

This is my hand.

Shaken, and Stirred.

2005-03-21T11:32:00.000-05:00

Last night, I made dinner for the other two members of the Unholy Triumvirate. In preparation for their Ph.D. comps, I fed them brain food. Spinach salad with blood oranges, goat cheese, and almonds, grilled wild salmon with brown rice and curry sauce, and several glasses of wine to help them sleep. I sent them off well fed and hopefully a little less stressed about their written exams, which are today and tomorrow.

So, slightly tipsy I sat down at my computer, where I came across something that left me rattled and sad. In one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have read in a long time, my friend said goodbye to graduate school. He entered the program at the same time I did, in the same area— one of only a handful of eighteenth century graduate students. Despite the fact that we entered at the same time, he was two years ahead of me in the program, having already received his M.A. elsewhere. We have read together, taken classes together, and gossiped together. He is a true intellectual, who came to graduate school later in life with a real passion for his work and ideas. He is intimidatingly well read. He is, in my mind, what a graduate student should be.

And now, he too is leaving. And I shouldn't care. After all, I am leaving.

But I do.

Get to Know Me.

2005-03-19T07:24:00.000-05:00

1. IF YOU COULD BUILD A SECOND HOUSE ANYWHERE, WHERE WOULD IT BE? In the mountains, near skiing and a lake.

2. WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE ARTICLES OF CLOTHING? My pink button-down. A black and teal v-necked argyle sweater. Do shoes count? My light pink sling-backs with the 3" spike heel.

3. THE LAST CDs YOU BOUGHT? Harry Manx.

4. WHAT TIME DO YOU WAKE UP IN THE MORNING? 5:00am M, W, F. 7ish every other day.

5. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE KITCHEN APPLIANCE? My knives (which were seriously the most exciting wedding gift I got.) Although technically they are not an appliance, so I'd have to say my Kitchen Aid (which was our second most exciting wedding gift).

6. IF YOU COULD PLAY AN INSTRUMENT, WHAT WOULD IT BE? Guitar. I already play saxophone but it's not a very social instrument. I would love to play something that could reasonably make an appearance at parties.

7. FAVORITE COLOR? To wear? Pink or burgundy. To decorate with? Sage green and any shade of blue.

8. WHICH VEHICLE DO YOU PREFER, SPORTS CAR, MOTORCYCLE, OR SUV? Sports car. When I was 19 I flipped a Chevy suburban three times and landed it upside down on a concrete guardrail. Which was quite a feat considering that I wasn't speeding, and I did it by swerving to avoid an accident and slamming on the breaks. The plus side was that we all walked away from the accident, but I've never felt comfortable driving anything that far off the ground since.

9. DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE AFTERLIFE? Eh, probably not.

10. FAVORITE CHILDREN'S BOOK? A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L'Engle)

11. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SEASON? Spring. I love it when the days get longer and things start turning green again.

12. IF YOU HAVE A TATTOO, WHAT IS IT? Nope, none.

13. IF YOU COULD HAVE ONE SUPERPOWER, WHAT WOULD IT BE? I'd be able to fix everything. And I don't just mean stuff, I mean people too.

14. CAN YOU JUGGLE? Like a circus performer? Absolutely not. Life events? Superbly.

15. ONE PERSON/PEOPLE FROM YOUR PAST YOU WISH YOU COULD GO BACK AND TALK TO? This question was by far the hardest for me. There are a lot of old friends that I've lost touch with because I moved every few years when I was growing up and was bad at keeping in touch with people. Sometimes I wonder what has become of them. I would like to talk to my Nana, my dad's mother, who I always had an ambivalent relationship with, only that conversation wouldn't be any fun.

16. WHAT IS UNDER YOUR BED? Nothing. My box-spring is currently on the floor. We call this decorating look "grad student chic". Maybe, once I get a real job we can get a real bed.

17. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DAY? Right now? Thursdays. I don't have to go into campus, I usually don't have much work to do. The weekend is on the way, and I usually make time to spend some time with a friend or two.

18. WHICH DO YOU PREFER, SUSHI OR HAMBURGER? Sushi.

19. FROM THE PEOPLE WHO NORMALLY READ YOUR BLOG, WHO IS THE MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND FIRST? Do people normally read my blog? Just kidding. I know you are out there, and I know who you are.

20. ON WHICH BLOG DID YOU FIND THIS MEME? Geeky Mom and Bill's Stuff.

21. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE FLOWER? Gerbera Daisies.

23. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MEAL? Ah, food is a serious subject with this girl, and I couldn't possibly pick just one, but at this moment I would say Thai: Tom Yum Soup, Green Curry Chicken, Drunken Noodles, and Thai Iced Tea.

24. DESCRIBE YOUR PJS. I don't really wear PJs for sleeping, but I have some that I lounge around in. My winter ones are pink pants and a long-sleeved shirt with cartoon flowers on them. In summer, boxer shorts and a tank top.

25. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE BREAKFAST? Frittata (Grilled veggies, aged gouda), Fruit salad, tea, and sourdough toast.

26. DO YOU LIKE YOUR JOB? What's my job? I have a job? Probably not. I like teaching but hate grad school. That's why I'm leaving.

27. WHAT IS YOUR DREAM JOB? I'm not quite sure, but I'm going to keep looking until I find it. I would love have my own residential real-estate investment company. I would love to open a restaurant. I would love to be a novelist.

28. WHAT AGE DO YOU PLAN TO RETIRE? I don't have any plans to retire.

29. WHERE DID YOU MEET YOUR SPOUSE OR SIGNIFICANT OTHER? In college. On the debate team. We went to a debate institute in Vermont together, became close friends, then debate partners, then started dating. We actually knew each other for a few months before we ended up in Vermont together, but had never spoken because Camber thought that I was an airhead (because I smiled a lot). This impression quickly evaporated once we actually spoke to each other, but in order for him to talk to me I had to be literally the only person around.

30. SOMETHING YOU WOULD LIKE TO DO THAT YOU HAVE NEVER DONE BEFORE. Travel in Africa or Save the world.

Reclamation

2005-03-14T10:38:00.000-05:00

"I think it's hilarious that you've taken to calling yourself a dillitant." My husband said to me as we were walking out the door.

"Ah, but I am a dillitante."

"Who is completely aware that that word carries negative connotations."

In response, I just laughed.

"I mean, I think it's great that you've decided to reclaim that word..."

"Mmmhmm- I'm a dilletant bitch." He elected to silence the grin on my face with a kiss.

No Oceans.

2005-03-13T07:54:00.000-05:00

Seven Months Ago

A few of us, who read together, were looking over M's exam reading list for her impending Ph.D. exams.

R: "This is awesome. Your reading list is amazing. I can't believe you have read all of this."
M: "It's not really great, it reflects a lack of focus. It took me too long to narrow down the focus of my dissertation. My reading list reflects that lack of focus."
Me: "But don't you think that the scope of your list makes your work better informed?"
M: (making an ambivalent noise) "Not really, I mean, it pretty much reflects a lack of focus. I can swim in no oceans, but can splash in many puddles."

I have to admit that at the time, I didn't really understand the source of my frustration, or why M's self effacement got under my skin. I just knew that the phrase "I can swim in no oceans" floated in the back of my brain, bobbing along on my growing sense of unease.

Six Months Ago

Mr Eminent Chair of Important English Department came to Carolina for a two-day workshop. He gave a keynote address that made me want to gouge my eyeballs out with my pen. I sat, listening to his perspective on the "future of graduate study in English literature" and my notes quickly devolved into doodles. The doodles were disturbingly violent, with the "literary cannon" turning into a literal cannon that was slaughtering a tribe of graduate students in a volley of flaming cannonballs. His vision for the field was one of increasing specialization, and he described with pompous pride the projects of individual genius of his students. His vision was one of increasing atomization, and for him that was a vision of hope.

Five Months Ago

I started this blog, out of frustration over the fact that my life felt wrong. It felt unsatisfying. It felt fake. Despite the approbation I was getting from my fellow grad students and faculty I felt intellectually listless. I missed the world, I missed research for the sake of interest, I missed the joy and exhilaration I used to get from ideas. Again and again I searched for the right answer, and I realized that just the process of looking was slowly making me feel better.

Four Months Ago

My need to rage against the world-gone-mad turned me into a grassroots activist, and, well, we lost anyway. My work in the world pushed my academic work to the back burner, and I found myself much happier. Since then, I have come to realize that my happiness is almost directly correlated with eschewing academic work to pursue other interests.

One Week Ago
The problem finally crystallized for me. I have no desire to spend the rest of my life swimming in one ocean. (I’ve never really liked saltwater all that much, not to mention dead floating things and sand.) Don't get me wrong, I love learning. I love to write. I love to read. I love the spark of curiosity that initiates a new research project. I love to talk, to argue, to reason, and to advocate. I love that never, in my whole life, will I run out of things that I do not yet know-- that I have yet to learn. I love the endless horizon of possibility that the world provides. I love to splash in puddles.

I am a dilettante.

The More Loving One

2005-03-11T20:28:00.000-05:00

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

~W. H. Auden

Funny...on relief and release.

2005-03-11T18:43:00.000-05:00

I am leaving graduate school. At the end of this semester. I am done with the hedging, hemming, hawing, and compliaing.

I will take my master's degree and just leave. I will not be found in another classroom for at least two years. I will continue to read and think. I will not feel guilty when I read the newspaper, or a non-literary novel, or a political science journal, or a piece of philosophy. I will keep the wonderful friends I've made along the way. I will not miss the pompous, the petty, and the pedagogically impared professors that populate my department. I will continue to admire the people who have the fortitude and focus to make the academy their home. I will not think of it as a character failing that I am not one of those people. I will view this departure as an act of courage. I will be happy.

I am happy.

Good-bye, good-bye.

2005-03-03T09:32:00.000-05:00

We sold the car. In three days. Amazing.

Posted: two free ads. Received: two inquiries in two days.

In the subsequent week...nothing.

But, one of the first two bought the car! Poor poor Chinese physics grad student fell in love with the shiny paint, leather interior, and engine that went vroom vroom.

I do not miss it. Not even a little.

Joking about the car with L last night over a bottle of wine, we talked about my current good Car-ma.

L: "That car was just so not you."
Me: "No kidding. Never liked it, really."
L: "I mean, it was sooo grandma."
Me: "Or, poor-dude-who-can't-afford-a-real-sportscar."
L: "At any rate, definitely not you."
Me: "Yeah, I am soo used-Camry."
Hubby (laughing): "We are definitely used-Camry."

That's hot.

Bad Karma.

2005-03-01T10:02:00.000-05:00

Ah, the trials and tribulations of car ownership.

It all began last week… I was driving back from Home Depot with the other two part of the Unholy Triumvirate, when I made a bold driving maneuver. I stepped on the accelerator and checked the rearview mirror. And saw—white smoke billowing out from the rear of my car.

C: “Maybe it’s just cold out.”
Me: “Let’s hope.”
L: “At least it’s not black smoke.”

We stop at the stoplight, and smoke begins billowing out of the front of the car.

Me: “Fuck.”
L: “Fuck.”
C: “Fuck.”

We pull into the nearest gas station. I lift the front hood to see white smoke rising in massive clouds from massive amounts of radiator fluid that is now coating the engine.

L: “It smells sweet. It’s white. It’s radiator fluid.”
C: “Yeah.”
Me: “Definitely radiator fluid. Fuck.”

I call AAA, and knight in shining armor of the day, E, who will be there immediately with his ever so reliable steed, a Camry. So now, the Triumvirate is standing by a car that is still releasing clouds of sweet smelling white smoke and is now also hemorrhaging green radiator fluid that is flowing like a river across the pavement.

Southern gentleman number one enters, stage left, wearing an orange reflective vest, signaling that he is either: a) a convict who is part of a roadside cleanup gang b) One of the homeless people who begs at the nearest intersections or c) a highway construction worker.

SG: “Need any help ma’m.”
Me: “No thanks, I’m just waiting for a tow-truck.”
SG: (leans over engine) “Thatthere’s oil.”
Me: “No, it’s radiator fluid.”
SG: (swiping his finger across the fluid on the no-longer-smoking engine while standing in a puddle of radiator fluid.) “No, thatthere’s oil.”
Me: “Really, it’s radiator fluid, but we’re waiting for a tow truck. Thanks.” (Cue entrance of southern gentleman #2. SG1 and SG2 lean over engine, murmuring. “oil” “oil” “oil”)
SG2: (runs finger over engine and holds it up to me) “See, oil.”
Me: (inspecting dirty green fluid) “No, dirty radiator fluid, but I’m waiting for a tow truck. Thanks.” Cue the remainder of the U.T. who snicker.

Deciding that I am beyond help, the two men wander away, tracking neon green radiator fluid footprints across the pavement.

Enter Southern Boy, stage right, from the passenger door of his mom’s minivan. I say boy, because this kid could not have been more than fourteen years old.

SB: “Need any help ma’m?”
Me: “No thanks, I am just waiting for a tow-truck.” (The U.T. snicker)
SB: (leans over engine) “Aw, ma’m, you don’t need a tow-truck, y’er car’s just overheat’n, you just need to put a gallon of water in it.”
Me: “No, the car is not just over heating. (point to river of radiator fluid all over pavement) There is some problem with the cooling system that is a lot more serious. The engine isn’t even hot.”
SB: “Ya just need to put a gallon of water in’t.”
Me: “Thanks, but I’ll just wait for the tow truck.”

AAA Plus Membership: $69. New intake manifold: $820.

Being "rescued" by Southern Gentlemen: Priceless.

Can't sleep. Reflections of a disordered mind.

2005-02-25T02:22:00.000-05:00

So my body seems to have decided that I have had enough sleep for the night. Or, enough sleep for the time being. Chalk it up to going to bed with too many projects unfinished. A logical thing to do when one is still slightly fuzzy from sleep seems to be to make grand mission statements about one's life and the world. In fact, I think there was a movie premised on some man destroying his entire career that way. Good thing I don't have a career or I might be on dangerous ground.

This week I have decided to quit graduate school. Well, take a leave of absence while I try on another career- what with risk aversion and all. In some ways, this feels like ending a not quite healthy, but intensely drama filled chapter of a relationship, complete with all of the self doubt that such a transition demands. Of course, only without the perks of break-up sex, make-up sex, and good bye forever sex. Maybe that's the problem with graduate school, or at least the problem with the graduate school as lover metaphor (not enough sex)...

But to get back on track... or at least a little less derailed (deranged)… Have you ever reached the end of a relationship where you are afraid or reluctant to break up with the person, so you try to make them break up with you? Your behavior becomes increasingly neglectful, you lose patience, you say terrible things, you don’t call when you say you will. You expect the outcome of such egregious neglect to be that the other party to do your dirty work for you, but instead you just end up dating someone who hates you. I’m beginning to think that graduate school hates me.

Juggling Perfection, Judging Perfection.

2005-02-04T15:08:00.000-05:00

Over a sublime cup of coffee yesterday afternoon, a good friend and I held court on life, the universe, and everything. I told him that I was beginning to think that I would never fit these pieces of my life together, and that perhaps my quest for a perfect arrangement of work, life, family was an impossible journey.

He, seemingly distressed by this, insisted that life was like the art of juggling, an art that I of all people, could surely master. This was really a pretty analogy that involved complete focus on the ball in the hand, and a reliance that if you tossed them with just the right force and consistency, that they would land where you want them every time. You see, in this world you really only have to worry about the ball in your hand.

But last time I tossed a baby in the air, I discovered it to be remarkably un-aerodynamic...

All joking aside, I'm not sure that this lovely testament to my ability gets quite to the heart of my concern. I think that for most women, and particularly for this woman, narratives of perfection more subtly erode even the best thought-out arrangements. When I speak to working women life seems like a constant series of compromises, where time at work is riddled by guilt over not being home, and time at home plagued by concerns over work. Clearly, although we have a social vision of what a perfect worker is, and an idea about what a perfect mother is, the working mother is simply taking our vision of a perfect worker and our vision of a perfect mother and adding them together. Unfortunately, the hours do not add up nearly as well.

It seems to me that the only adequate solution is one of compromise. If I am going to become a working mother, I will no longer be either the perfect mother or the perfect worker. This leads me to think more broadly about what I am coming to think of as the ugly lie of perfection. The Ideal is an amazing agent of social discipline. Like all good disciplinary systems, it is one that works through internalization. No one needs to criticize a mother for the job that she is doing raising her kids because she will judge herself (not that that will stop them). Although, it could be that women judge themselves preemptively in an effort to reduce the sting of social stigma. I wonder if we cannot come to think of the statement “she is doing the best that she can” as a statement of praise rather than as pity. What makes it so hard to accept that life may be a series of compromises?

Obsession. For Geeks.

2005-02-03T16:37:00.000-05:00

On the subject of obsessions, I am re-reading my favorite novel: Foe, by J.M. Coetzee. The reason it's my favorite novel is that is is all about narrative authority and articulation.

And here's the line that's been speaking to me lately:

If I were like a bottle bobbing on the waves with a scrap of writing inside, that could as well be a message from an idle child fishing in the canal as from a mariner adrift on the high seas—if I were a mere receptacle ready to accommodate whatever story is stuffed in me, surely you would dismiss me, surely you would say to yourself, "This is no woman but a house of words, hollow, without substance"?

Enjoy!

Side Notes and End Notes from a Reporter Embedded in Academic Life

2005-02-03T07:51:00.000-05:00

This morning, I took a break about reading reports on the State of the Union to check my usual roll of bloggity goodness. My dear friend, the Driv'ler gets the award for writing my favorite sentence of the day:

Conan holds a fantasy particular to my role as an aspiring scholar of literature. The world of Conan is the premanufactured shed I sometimes dream of inhabiting. The film speaks to the underlife of the academic project, against the compulsion of literary and theoretical academics to endlessly ponder the elusive allusions and submerged meanings of texts that become such a part of our thought processes that we void their recurrent questions at the expense of all thought: the anxieties of literature have become ingrained in our own anxious thought processes. With too much knowledge for the skeptic side, with too much weakness for the stoic's pride, we assemble out of the rag-tag and bon-ends of old tales and talking of people who perhaps had never existed anywhere at all the dead-serious comedies of a stage where people play at being serious, and, collecting their sentences and discourses as if they had been Oracles, life itself becomes a quotation. For example, this last sentence alludes to no less than five literary works.

Fabulous!

I believe that this guy is on a roll. He was positively oozing academic goodness at our reading group meeting yesterday too.

Don't bother insisting that the fact that such a sentence makes me giddy is proof that I am suited for life nowhere except in the hallowed bog of the academy. I'm in the process of constructing an elaborate fantasy that includes a society populated by sentient beings.

More on the “State of the Union” later.

The more things change...

2005-02-01T11:18:00.000-05:00

I was having drinks last night with my girlfriends (also known as "The Triumvirate of Unholy Feminine Power" or "the women's council" for short, because the first title is a bit of a mouthful.) and it seems that lately we've all been looking through our old journals. (If you don't journal, I highly recommend starting, because it is a fascinating way to uncover thought patterns, obsessions, and recapture particularly salient emotional moments.) The interesting thing that we all found was that we are continually working though the same themes over and over again no matter what else is going on in our lives.

For me, these issues are directly related to issues of voice and silencing, articulations of subjectivity, the ways in which identity is constrained by social limitation, and the problems of different minds.

In non academese: How we talk, what is communicated by that, how do social factors limit what we are allowed to say and how we are allowed to say it, and why it is that two people can watch the exact same event and completely disagree about what happened. For me, these issues have always been inextricably intertwined with gender and feminist thought.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...

The first time I became aware of these issues in an academic sense was through my experience with policy debate. Academic policy debate is a male dominated activity, and I frequently found myself to be the only female participant in debate rounds. Very early in my debate career, after I aggressively cross examined a male debater from the U.S. Navel Academy, causing him to become flustered and make major concessions, I was told by my panel of three judges that I came across as a bitch, and really needed to "take it down a notch".

Feeling chagrined and embarrassed, I became more careful about what I said, how I said it, and continued to win debates. In the finals, my female partner and I were debating an all male team, who were so aggressive in cross examination that it was basically impossible to get a word in edgewise. They were posturing, obnoxious, loud, and badgering. They made my "bitchy" cross examination from earlier in the tournament look like a lesson on manners. The same three judges sat in the back of the room, and I eagerly awaited the scolding these men would receive upon completion of the round, but none came. In fact, there hyper aggressive style was rewarded with First and Second speaker awards at the tournament (I came in third).

As I became a better and better debater, I became more and more matter-of-fact and less aggressive. Consistently, if I would get aggressive in the round, I would be reprimanded in writing or verbally by the judge at the end of the debate. My male partner could be twice as mean, twice as aggressive, and he was considered "confident" and "witty". I was rewarded for developing a bland cordial style, but it was a style that felt unnatural to me—one that I self-consciously adopted in order to succeed. And succeed I did. After I was named the Eastern United States Debater of the year, a coach from a rival school came up to me and told me that he always told his young female debaters to come watch me and emulate my style. My eyes grew damp, but not with tears of happiness. I was so frustrated that my consciously curtailed, unnatural speaking style was being held out as a model to other female debaters. No! I wanted to scream. Let them have their own voice. Let them speak in ways that are natural to them. I was, at some level, frustrated that I had not fought the good fight, but rather constrained my voice so that it met with the accepted norms of the activity. I felt as though, by becoming the model for other female debaters, I had somehow betrayed them.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...

This semester, I find myself in classrooms with more men than women for the first time in five years. In fact, in one of my seminars, I am the only female participant. During the first discussion of the semester I was reminded of what I perceive to be the differences between male and female patterns of communication. In discussions, women tend to phrase their arguments in ways that open discussion. They frequently qualify their statements with phrases like "I believe" "It seems to me" and end them with "What do you think?". Men make definitive statements in a tone of voice that dares you to challenge them. I call it "playing my balls are bigger than your balls." And in these seminars, I alter my language choices, body posture, and tone of voice to play along. But then I wonder, is this also a betrayal?

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...

Visibility

2005-01-31T19:15:00.000-05:00

After several concerned phone calls, I feel the need to reassure everyone that I am not in some pit of deep despair. I am actually in a wonderful, powerful and empowering life moment that is accompanied by a healthy rage over issues of gender and labor. I am achieving a wonderful clarity of vision over issues that have been on the periphery of my life for some time. Never fear- I still love my husband and my marriage more than anything, I still hate grad school, and I will continue producing kick-ass baked goods.

Invisible

2005-01-31T19:12:00.000-05:00

I met the wind yesterday
invisible
master discourse—
fifty miles of brute force
backing me into some
other age
stripped to my skin
so I could slip
through the wind wall
no longer pinned but
naked—
my body blush
chilled from rose
to dusk
the wind rushed
down my open throat
swelled in my bloated belly
cold
unlike the rage I should
be feeling—
reeling—
and striped of my voice
the dead leaves jeered me
in concert with the
white wind
danced in my wake
their voice so much surer
than mine
and it—
the opening
the abandoning
the vulnerability
was all voluntary
and invisible.

The invisible woman speaks.

2005-01-27T13:03:00.000-05:00

I sat down to write a post about gender politics and, well, didn't. This is totally self-indulgent, but hell, this is my blog, so I hope you enjoy.

Maybe my problem with my husband is that he is not more than me, he is me. We fell in love with all the unrepentant passion of teenagers and vibrated so harmonically that our lives fused effortlessly. My soul and heart and most importantly mind transferred to him in this seamless fusing that left me with no need of a separate self. Now so many years later, standing at a crossroad of confusion I begin to look to my internal compass to guide me, but am blinded by the reflected perfection of our union. It’s blinding and comforting and obliterating to all else.

What does it mean that our friends, some of them, the male ones, seem to think that I would be satisfied to play second fiddle to my husband? Am I satisfied to play second fiddle to my husband? What does it mean that I am willing to not set certain goals for myself, that I am willing not to push for that career in DC, that tenure track for me, that real estate career that would require that I become geographically rooted before my husband has found his ideal life? What does it mean that I call the shots, but somehow end up endlessly rooted to one place, the place of putting him first, to making sure that our joint agenda caters to his own need before all else, and that I feel guilty when I somehow fail to do that? Is this love or is this bondage? And all of this I do to myself.

Am I just feeling the need for space because those around me seem to be setting out fresh? That’s not it, or rather that’s not it alone because I am also setting out fresh, envisioning my path my past my person. It’s just that this love, this wonderful perfect love with my wonderful perfect husband seems to cloud my vision. It’s so hard to plan for two, it’s so hard to figure out how to balance two needs two agendas especially when I am too good at putting his needs first. In fact, in some ways I feel like I’m incapable of imagining what my needs are separate from his. Perhaps that’s marriage, but perhaps that’s why marriage sucks.

To what extent do you need to maintain your separate identity in marriage? Is there a need for a separate identity, or is this perfect fusion a harmonic occurrence that leaves us both richer? What sort of stories do I have to tell to the world? What will my voice add to the seething mass of humanity in the streets? I don’t know that I have anything to give and everyone around me says I am capable of giving everything and I sort of resent that. Anything you want to do they say you only need to apply yourself they say. Never a failure of aptitude, always a failure of effort- don’t they realize that that reflects poorly on my character? You have the opportunity to be the perfect person if only you would try and instead you squander yourself and squander your talent until instead of the paragon you are the epitome of failure because you could have been could have been anything you wanted to anything you were willing to try to be or do.

I hold close the possibility of perfection. I hold close the possibility of failure. I hold an awareness that honesty might not be enough and that if there is no truth there is no such thing as honesty-- so I have committed to myself to some whippoorwill that leads me farther and farther into the bog of my own soul.

Invisible Woman

2005-01-24T14:24:00.000-05:00

I am the invisible woman.

My husband has spent the last month studying for his Ph.D. exams, and through his stress-filled haze, has ceased to notice me at all, except for the brief moments when he emerges hungry, and I feed him. Really, a vending machine would make a slightly less cuddly, less nutritious, but easily as convenient substitute...

I am the invisible woman.

Since the semester started, I am avoiding my department, professors, and colleagues as much as possible. I consider this the first step of my twelve step program to situate myself in a more suitable career. Baby steps to the elevator. Baby steps to fulfillment...

I am the invisible woman.

I was having drinks with a friend of my husband. (To alleviate the boredom of aforementioned husband's withdrawal into International Relations theory.) I suppose he is also my friend, in as much as men can ever be friends with the wife of a man that they like, respect, and were friends with first. (Which is not very good friends, good friendship is reserved for women they might get to sleep with.)

At any rate, I was having drinks with this man, and I brought up my desire to leave my current program with my Master's.

Him: "So, what will you do instead?" (Why does everyone ask me this? Oh, wait, it's a completely reasonable question. It just happens to be one that I don't have an answer to.)

Me: "Well, probably either policy work or for a different Ph.D. program. That's why I'm taking several Political Theory classes this semester. I think that I'd find work that is more grounded in reality more satisfying."

Him: "It would be so great if you got your Ph.D. in political science, then you could be Camber (my husband)'s full time research assistant!"

I graciously restrained myself from kicking him under the table. For those of you not in the academy, research assistant is not a noble or respectable role. It's the bitch work that young graduate students do to get paid enough to eat.

I am the invisible woman.

I came home from this meeting incredibly pissed off. Fuming, really. I suppose my anger lit me up enough to temporarily erase my invisibility, because my husband asked me what was wrong. I told him about my conversation with M, peppered with profanity, and my husband insisted that I was blowing things out of proportion. I pointed out to him that I had had a similar conversation with his friend D, who said to me, "I'm not sure what the big deal is, it's not like you need to have a career or anything." So...

I am the invisible woman.

I'm uncertain whether this is endemic to married women in general, or just me, a married woman whose sugary domestic sweetness oozes out of every pore, but I seem to have become invisible to most men the day I got married. My identity became somehow subsumed by my married state, and I no longer required an identity of my own. I am no longer Amy, woman of ambition, intelligence, and kick-ass baked goods, but rather I am Camber's wife, what's her name again?

I am the invisible woman. Stripped of my sexual power, relegated to the subordinate role, invisible.

It's so big!

2005-01-20T10:50:00.000-05:00

Last night, I had my first class with the originator of the infamous beard growing contest.

And, from text to subtext, he really seems to think that his beard is an extension of his phallus.

Fascinating.

Speaking Truth to Power.

2005-01-20T09:34:00.000-05:00

Funny, at the same moment I sat here contemplating my purpose, one of my favorite people wrote something that cuts to me to the quick.

To abandon hope is not to give up. It is, in fact, a place of freedom. We can no longer take refuge in futile dreams of a just America, outraged, rising against these totalitarians, these fascists, these men whose dreams are dark and full of power, these men who welcome--nay, seek to hasten--the end of the world. For what it is worth, I will not be silent. I will not be a bystander. I will not pretend to objectivity in my classroom. I just saw a picture of one of the torture techniques the Nazis used against Polish Jews and dissidents, and we are using the same techniques today, right now, in Guantanamo, in Abu Gharib. To remain silent in the face of evil is unconscionable. It is a betrayal of those who have come before us, upon whose graves we walk and whose memory we dishonor with our complacency. Let us acknowledge what actually is, not what we hope will be; what the American people have actually done, not what we hope they will do. We must have, as Gramsci said, pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. It will not be different. It will not be better. That is where we begin.

I highly recommend reading the rest, it is powerful stuff.

Comfortably Numb.

2005-01-20T09:20:00.000-05:00

So, many people have asked lately why I have stopped blogging. It's not that I've stopped blogging as much as I've stopped blogging. I read the paper in the morning, save a few links, open up my blog, and stop.

I've reached a point of political exhaustion. Perhaps the world has become too absurd. Perhaps the spectacle had overwhelmed me. Perhaps I'm just lazy.

Ok, lets face it. I am lazy.

I also question whether there is an appetite for the casual political blogging that has occupied me during the fall. There are many die-hard political bloggers out there that have the scoop, the analysis, and the energy to deliver top-quality content all the time. Me, I'm a dabbler, a dilettante.

So, perhaps it is time for a new vision, a return to the cultural commentary of sorts that sparked this blog in its inception. Or, perhaps it is time for this blog to become something else entirely.

What do you want to talk about? I'm open to suggestion.

Wow. Speechless.

2005-01-12T19:44:00.000-05:00

Iraq rebels in video taunt
Wed Jan 12, 2005 03:05 PM GMT

By Michael Georgy
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Departing from fiery Islamic slogans, Iraqi guerrillas have launched a propaganda campaign with an English-language video urging U.S. troops to lay down their weapons and seek refuge in mosques and homes.

The video, narrated in fluent English by what sounded like an Iraqi educated in the United States or Britain, also mocked the U.S. president's challenge to rebels in the early days of the insurgency to 'bring it on'.

"George W. Bush; you have asked us to 'bring it on'. And so help me, (we will) like you never expected. Do you have another challenge?," asked the narrator before the video showed explosions around a U.S. military Humvee vehicle.

Threats intended to demoralise and frighten in the tense build up to elections at the end of the month were tempered with invitations to desert and escape retribution.

A masked guerrilla from an unknown group called the Islamic Jihad Army, eschewing past impassioned Arabic-language threats of holy war, told U.S. soldiers: "This is not your war, nor are you fighting for a true cause in Iraq."

"To the American soldiers we say you can also choose to fight tyranny with us. Lay down your weapons and seek refuge in our mosques, churches and homes. We will protect you," he said.

There was no way of verifying the authenticity of the video obtained by Reuters.

Previous insurgent videos have been dominated by grisly beheadings of foreign hostages who kneel beside radical Islamic banners before their deaths.

The Islamic Jihad Army video featured familiar scenes of guerrillas blowing up U.S. convoys but also highlighted some of the key issues of the Iraq war, from weapons of mass destruction to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

"We have not crossed the oceans and seas to occupy Britain or the U.S. nor are we responsible for 9/11. These are only a few of these lies that these criminals present to cover their true plans," said the narrator, apparently referring to the Bush administration's assertion of a link between Saddam Hussein and those attacks.

A masked speaker with a machine gun beside him delivered his message to triumphant music with the ring of U.S. military propaganda films during World War Two.

He said the enemy was on the run as the video showed guerrillas firing on U.S. convoys, standing beside the corpse of an American soldier, or loading a large shell for an attack.

The U.S. military has said it would stay in Iraq until the country is by its definition secure.

The rebels focused on political issues that divided the United States and its European allies over the war in Iraq while reminding troops of casualties with images of burning trucks.

"We also thank France, Germany and other states for their positions, which we need to say are considered wise and valid until now," said the narrator, who also urged economic warfare against Washington.

"Stop using the U.S. dollar. Use the Euro or a basket of currencies," he said on the video dated December 10, 2004.

At least 1,067 U.S. troops have died in combat since the start of the war that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

From a younger self...

2005-01-05T19:16:00.000-05:00

Sifting through some files I ran across this bit that I wrote some years ago:

Reportage is violence. Violence to the spirit. Violence to the emotional sympathy that should quicken in you and me when face to face we meet with pain. How many defeated among our own do we step over and push aside on our way home to watch the evening news? 'Terrible' you said at Somolia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Russia, China, the Indian Earthquake, the American floods, and then you watched a quiz show or a film because there's nothing you can do, nothing you can do, and the fear and unease that such powerlessness brings trails in its wash a dead arrogance for the beggar on the bridge that you pass every day. Hasn't he got legs and a cardboard box to sleep in?

And still we long to feel.

The Cost of War.

2005-01-05T13:06:00.000-05:00

Rob Schumacher, a fellow blogger, brought this story to my attention, and I felt as though it was important to share.

Apparently, our soldiers, who are being sent into Iraq inadequately equipped to complete their missions, are now being punished for scavenging the equipment they need to stay alive and stay effective. This is disgraceful on so many levels.

Birt was called to war in January 2003, when he and the 656th were ordered to prepare to deploy to Iraq. Just two months later, the unit was at Camp New York, in Kuwait, awaiting the go-ahead to haul its initial load of 300,000 gallons of fuel to Tikrit, Iraq.

The 656th was eager to proceed, Birt said, but supply problems were immediately evident: For starters, he said, the unit was missing eight ring mounts needed to attach machine guns and grenade launchers to 10 of its 70 vehicles.

Then, just days before they were to make the "jump" into Iraq, higher-ups told the soldiers they would have to go without most of their tools, spare parts, machine guns, chemical protective gear, night-vision goggles, tents, computers and personal belongings.

The reason: None of the vehicles belonging to the unit were capable of towing shipping containers that held their gear.

"So you have a dilemma," Birt said, during a recent visit with his parents and in-laws in Hempfield Township.

"You have to make a choice," he said. "You either go forward without your stuff and not be able to support yourself, or you refuse to go until you get support. The third is to find something to move your stuff."

Birt said equipment the reservists needed was readily available at the camp. Trucks belonging to active duty units that had already pushed into Iraq sat idle, but the 656th lacked authorization to use them.

With the unit poised to move into Iraq, Birt said, he and the others took possession of four unclaimed vehicles and loaded them with their gear.

Birt said he wasn't entirely comfortable with his actions, but with orders in hand to enter the fight, he felt he had no other choice.

Birt plead guilty to the thefts, has served five months time, and is now awaiting clemency. If clemency is not granted, then he will be permanently stripped of his retirement benefits, his military burial, and will carry a felony conviction with him for the rest of his life.

This is a truly inexcusable way to treat a person who has risked his life in service to our country.

There is more good information on this topic, at one of Rob's blogs.
http://fairtreatmentforoursoldiers.blogspot.com/

Also, please take a moment to check out these petitions.

http://www.petitiononline.com/656th/petition.html

http://www.petitiononline.com/su5nshin/petition.html

Back to work, back to blogging.

2005-01-04T18:04:00.000-05:00

Well, as I sit down to work on a draft of my M.A. thesis, the inevitable tug of the blog world calls to me. I hope you haven't missed me too much during my prolonged absence, but I've been traveling, visiting family, and decompressing after what proved to be a marathon semester. During that time, I felt very little desire to blog, and since this is my space to decorate, abuse, or ignore at my leisure I stopped writing.

Never fear, the engine of work avoidence has driven me once again to write, and my sparkling wit and stinging political commentaries will resume tomorrow.

I wanted to take a moment, in the spirit of the New Year to thank all of you out there that have made my life brighter and more interesting in this last year. As I have struggled with health problems, life changes, and general growing pains I have come to realize how important friends are and just what a wonderful collection of friends I have. Thank you.

The Ghost of the Tin Foil Hat

2004-12-15T07:41:00.000-05:00

This morning I am under a tight deadline for a paper, so you will not be graced with my literary stylings...

But I will leave you with some reading:

Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio

P.S. Don't ask why it is that I have time to read the paper when under a tight deadline and not time to blog...

Supreme Escalation

2004-12-13T08:32:00.000-05:00

I've continued to keep an eye on the buzz surrounding Supreme Court appointments as Reinquist's health has continued to decline. The first nomination battle will most likely to take place over his seat early in Bush's second term. I actually think that it would be great for Reinquist's seat to go up first, because it won't swing the balance of power on the court, but will serve as a proving ground for Bush's nomination plans. Most likely, Bush will appoint an ultra-conservative nominee, who will become a lightening rod for the debate over potential replacements for Stevens and O'Connor.

With that in mind, I read this article about filibustering nominees from today's WaPo with great interest:

At issue is a seldom-used, complicated and highly controversial parliamentary maneuver in which Republicans could seek a ruling from the chamber's presiding officer, presumably Vice President Cheney, that filibusters against judicial nominees are unconstitutional. Under this procedure, it would take only a simple majority or 51 votes to uphold the ruling -- far easier for the 55-member GOP majority to get than the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster or the 67 votes needed to change the rules under normal procedures.

It would then take only 51 votes to confirm a nominee, ensuring approval of most if not all of Bush's choices.

Senate GOP leaders say no final decision has been reached on whether to use this maneuver (which they prefer to call the "constitutional option") and, if so, when. But they have signaled they may do so next year, either shortly after the new Congress convenes in early January or -- more likely, some Republicans say -- after Democrats mount a filibuster against another judicial nominee.

The interesting thing is that being able to tear down the practice of filibustering nominees, with Reinquist's replacement as a test case, is ideal for the Republican leadership. They can self-righteously hide behind the contention that they are effectively maintaining the current balance of power on the court by replacing a staunch conservative with another staunch conservative, while at the same time greasing the wheels to make it easy to shift the balance of power if and when Stevens or O'Connor retire.

This is all pretty grim, but there may be an unexpected silver lining. The article continues:

Use of the nuclear option "would make the Senate look like a banana republic . . . and cause us to try to shut it down in every way," Schumer said. "Social Security and tax reform need Democratic support. If they use the nuclear option, in all likelihood they would not get Democratic support" for those and other initiatives, he added.

Republicans considered the nuclear option last year but backed off because they lacked the votes to prevail. Emboldened by a gain of four seats from the Nov. 2 elections, many of its most ardent supporters believe they now have the votes to win.

This may be a road to the legislative gridlock that I've been hoping for. I know that the logic is totally perverse, but here it goes. Replacing Reinquist with another staunch conservative does not shift the balance of power on the court. If either O'Connor or Stevens retire, we were in a world of hurt, filibuster or no filibuster. However, if the Senate Dems get angry enough, they might find a way to block further tax cuts and social security deform...I mean reform.

News in Brief.

2004-12-13T07:27:00.000-05:00

From Today's NYT's online frontpage:

Pentagon Weighs Use of Deception in a Broad Arena
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
The Pentagon is engaged in bitter debate over how far it should go in managing information to influence opinion abroad.

All I could think was:

It seems like they are perfectly comfortable with the use of deception to influence opinions here at home...

Now I am going to get back to work on my paper (that's due today) I swear...

Slip slip sliding down...

2004-12-11T11:47:00.000-05:00

CNN's latest catch-phrase is "Culture in Decline." I believe Lou Dobbs (who I loathe) started it, but I've now seen it featured in other times and places.

I think the phrase has its own elegance, really. There is also the added benefit that you can follow every negative headline with it, and lets face it, most news headlines are negative.

Rising divorce rates? Culture in Decline! Gay marriage legalized? Culture in decline! Your twelve year old (son) is dressing like Brittany Spears? Culture in decline! Pantyhose are out of fashion? Culture in decline!

It's great.

More broadly, I think this new catch-phrase is an interesting indicator of a rise in societal pessimism. Really, since the Enlightenment the dominant cultural narrative has been one of rise rise rise. This means that since the moment of its inception, America has been riding the modernization rocket up and up and up. Have we perhaps reached our cultural climax?

If four more years of Bush won't turn you into a pessimist, I'm not sure what will...

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go...

2004-12-09T10:55:00.000-05:00

So, today is my birthday:

Happy Birthday to Me,
Happy Birthday to Me!

I just had a very nice birthday lunch with my sister, where we discussed my current career malaise. It seemed to fit nicely with a song I heard at the Ani DiFranco concert the other night...

and this vague little smile
is my all-purpose expression
the meaning of which
i will leave to your discretion

my distraction's my defense
against a lack of inspiration
against a slow leak deflation
the further the horizon
the more it holds my gaze
and the foreground's out of focus
but you know i kinda hope it's
just a phase

Test-es Woes.

2004-12-08T15:11:00.000-05:00

I spent most of the day grading with a friend, who is a T.A. for an Introduction to International Relations Course.

Apparently, something went terribly wrong in the professor's explanation of several key concepts in the class, because the consensus interpretation of radical feminism is rather comic.

From the blue-books:

"The idea of radical feminism, which states that societies with a surplus of men are more susceptible to physical violence because of testosterone are more prone to engage in violent war, is the case with China where there is indeed a surplus of men."

"Level one image of human nature emphasizes that even one of the most basic of Chinese values—the premium placed on males—can result in a startling surplus of testosterone possibly fueling aggression."

Wow.

Ever been stuck in traffic?

2004-12-04T08:21:00.000-05:00

I mean really bad traffic, the kind where you are not going anywhere?

It's maddening, and as a person who spent a number of years outside of D.C., I can tell you that beltway traffic is uniquely horrific.

Why am I talking about traffic? Well, because I've been thinking about what a fabulous phenomenon legislative gridlock is. The most common source of such gridlock is between a president of one party, and a congress of a different party, or when the two bodies of congress are of different parties. So, since the evil empire had been voted into office, and GW claimed his new "mandate" I thought that those traffic filled blissful days of legislative immobility had passed.

Imagine my delight when I read this analysis from David Brooks:

Over the past few years, attention has focused on things, like tax cuts, that can be pushed through with partisan majorities. But in the second term, Bush's top initiatives will require bipartisan compromises while making divisions within the parties more apparent.

Whether they like it or not, Republicans and Democrats are going to have to meet privately in rooms and negotiate with one another. They're going to have to develop some level of trust so they can make unpopular suggestions and know they won't read about it in the next day's papers. They are going to have to compromise, reach a deal and then stick together in the face of the special-interest onslaught.

The Social Security issue changes the incentives. The rule is compromise or fail. If the president is to avoid a debilitating defeat, the atmosphere has to change.

In the past when it came time to build these sorts of grand coalitions, we would have seen centrist deal makers in the Howard Baker mold rise to take the lead. But those centrist types are gone, and now it will be up to realistic partisans like Graham, who, it should be recalled, was one of the aggressive House managers during the Clinton impeachment.

Of course, this is just one man's opinion and he is actually lamenting the fact that the great deal-makers of our legislative pasts are gone. Oh, yeah, and he doesn't give much real support for his argument that bipartisanship is required to pass important legislation these days except through some vague mention of the fact that some republicans would rather not take on even more crippling government debt in order to reform social security. That implies that some stupid democrats will have to chain themselves to the bloated corpse of our rapidly expanding national debt...

As for me, all I want for Christmas is some good old-fashioned gridlock.

Right, yet so wrong...

2004-12-02T16:43:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling silly and a little inarticulate today, so I've decided to make a visual commentary:

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

Did you guess which thing was not like the others?
Did you guess which thing just doesn't belong?

Nine of these kids belong together
Nine of these kids are kind of the same
But one of these kids is doing his own thing
Now it's time to play our game

It's time to play our game.

Living well, cheaply.

2004-12-01T08:22:00.000-05:00

A recent critic informed me that I never talk about anything other than politics on my blog.

This post is offered as proof that I can talk about something other than politics.

Just don't ask me to talk about something other than politics or food.

As the holiday season approaches, the endless round of holiday parties begins. I am a notorious wine snob, and have on more than one occasion embarrassed myself by mocking wines to friends who had brought similar wine as gifts. Of course, having had a few glasses of wine didn't increase my tact or discretion. On one particularly awkward occasion I was having a dinner party, and I went on at some length about how much I hate merlot. Noticing that certain friends had grown really quiet, I paused, at which time they informed me that they always brought a bottle of Merlot when they came to visit.

Yeah, I didn't manage to remove my foot from my mouth for weeks after that, it was so firmly lodged down my throat...

In honor of the season, I have a few bottles of cheap wine to recommend to the world:

Smoking Loon Viogner (2003)- California. Ok, I hate most Chardonnays. Really Really hate them. Especially California Chardonnays. Especially cheap chardonnays. They are aged in oak for too long and remind me of knawing on a stick. In contrast, check out this wine, that you can get for $8-$10 dollars a bottle. It's crisp, with a nice green apple and slightly floral nose. It has that nice sweet/ crisp balance that it so pleasant. It would be great for a party because it is good with food or by itself.

Kanu Sauvignon Blanc (2003)- South Africa- This is a good wine, with an assertive fruit start and a slightly grassy finish. The Chenin Blanc (2002 or 2003) is even better, but harder to find.

Norton Malbec- Argentina (2002 best or 2003 good)- This is my favorite cheap red, it sells for $9-10 dollars a bottle. It has a full plummy nose and some spice to the finish, a little earthiness to keep it interesting. It is a lot like a good California Pinot only cheaper and no ones ever heard of it, so you can impress your friends.

Marques de Caceres Rioja- Spain- (The older the better, 2000 is the youngest I've drank and is good) This is a really big red with a lot of pepper. It is good with stews, roast meats, pizza.

Hogue Late Harvest Riesling- (2002 best or 2003 good) Washington State- This has to be the dessert wine buy of the century. $8 for a 750ml bottle of some really high-quality dessert wine.

Life's too short to drink bad wine...So, drink some good wine.

Now, if only I could give away all these bottles of Merlot and Chardonnay that I've been stockpiling...

Identity Politics:Signs, signs, everywhere are signs...

2004-11-29T18:06:00.000-05:00

My husband just sent out an article on communications networks and ethnic conflict to a prominent international relations journal. Me, being the fabulous wife I am, helped edit it before he sent it out. (All 50 pages of it.) I bring this up not to demonstrate how wonderfully helpful I am, but because it has me thinking about identity formation and group politics.

Part of what is discussed in his paper is that in Rwanda and Serbia a necessary precursor to ethnic conflict was the move to get the people of those countries to view ethnicity as a primary and salient identity category. Although some people have claimed that the conflicts in those countries were the result of "ancient hatreds" the reality on the ground was one of peaceful coexistence and intermarriage. In both of these countries, elites who had control over media outlets began transmitting messages of ethnic hatreds that pushed the people towards war.

In Rwanda, the Hutu government gave out radios and started a state-sponsored radio network that transmitted messages of ethnic hatred. Part of the reason they did this was to keep the poor of the country (which was most of the country) from uniting and rising up against oppressive elite rule.

So, I can hear you thinking, why in the world are you thinking about this now?

Well, it all began with my Kerry-Edwards yard sign. The one that made my mother so angry. I was musing about why I couldn't bear to take it down, even weeks after the election. I had also noticed that I was not the only one who hadn't taken my sign down. My neighborhood is still full of Kerry-Edwards signs. My friends are actually still asking me for Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers now that the election is over.

Something strange is gong on here. Democrats are trying to make themselves seen as democrats. They are trying to make this identity readily apparent to everyone who looks at them. Democrat and Republican have become salient identity categories in this country. Less than 5 % of Americans changed who they were going to vote for during the election cycle. This means that there are almost no "swing" voters left.

Why is this important? Well, the rural poor and the urban poor fall on opposite sides of this identity fault line. Instead of forming a coalition that allows them to rise up against exploitative elite and corporate interests, they become the foot soldiers in a ground war that has been created for the sole purpose of keeping them distracted. While the people are busy hating the other party, enacting petty acts of revenge (like tearing down my lawn sign this morning), the powers-that-be are left free to pillage, murder, and clear-cut at their leisure.

Monday Morning Poetry Corner

2004-11-29T11:04:00.000-05:00

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and every motion and joint of your body.

~Walt Whitman 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

See, I'm working on my paper. I swear.

Belated Turkey Day.

2004-11-28T10:47:00.000-05:00

There are too many Turkeys on Meet the Press right now.

Here's the panel that has gotten over half the airtime on the show:

Jerry Falwell, founder, Faith and Values Coalition
Richard Land, president of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission
Al Sharpton, founder, National Action Network
Jim Wallis, convener, Call to Renewal.

Who booked this show?

Did they set up this slate of guests to help everyone with their post-holiday purging? I know they are making me feel like puking.

The most interesting thing about the panel dynamics is that they all seem to love god but hate each other. I mean really really hate each other. And they're all Christians. Same God, different ideologies. Is this a vision of religious unity?

Of course, they spent a significant amount of time talking about abortion. Which is great, because I was not really awake yet this morning and the surge of anger that Falwell brought down from the heavens was really quite refreshing. God.

The only highlight of the panel, besides watching grown men squabble like children was Al Sharpton’s defense of the pro-choice stance. He pointed out that Jesus stopped the crowd from stoning the prostitute, and that it is not our personal or the state's right to judge the choices that women make with their bodies. It's not the strongest argument that I've ever heard, but it has the judo touch that I so admire. Rather than re-fight the same-old right/wrong, life/not-life battle it refocuses the questions elsewhere. Nicely done.

These were some pasty turkeys…

Squabble Squabble

Gobble Gobble

Squabble

Gobble

Tasting Notes.

2004-11-26T11:18:00.000-05:00

And now for something completely different...

I've decided to take a few days off of my political ranting, in honor of the approaching holiday season. This is partially due to sheer exhaustion. It's labor intensive to be depressed and angry about the world all the time. Plus, with my family in town and my massive school/work load I need to preserve my energy.

There are definite pluses and minuses to having your whole family in town.

The minuses:

Sibling squabbling. I have three sisters and a brother, and two of my sisters and my brother are in town this weekend. Now, my siblings are some of the coolest people in the world. Bright, talented, and with very diverse interests. However, sometimes we can't help occasionally reverting to our adolescent selves when we all come together. For example, last time we were all home, my twenty-two-year-old sister and my fourteen year-old brother had a fight that involved a magnetic pointer and a pair of shoes.

"Mo-om, Liam took my shoes."

"That's because Melanie took my pointer."

"God, Liam you are so immature."

The Political Divide. My parents are conservative. My siblings are liberal. Enough said. Almost, but I can't help relaying a few choice tidbits from the holiday weekend thus far.

As I was driving my mom up to my house for the first time, she noticed my Kerry-Edwards sign. (Yes, it's still up in my yard.)

"Oh, you still have your sign up I see." (I know the comment sounds innocuous enough, but the tense, angry tone of voice alerted me to its loaded comment.)

"Yes, I consider it a don't-blame me when the world goes to hell sign."

"hmmm."

As we sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, my mom said pointedly. "I would like to say a prayer unless anyone has political objections." Glaring at all the rest of us.

The Pluses:

Good food and even better wine. I am a total foodie. When we all get together, we drink much much better wine than I usually do. Being a poor graduate student, my usual wine price range is in the $10 and under range. When my step-father is buying the wine is much, much better. This year, he brought down the wines I had given him for Christmas last year, all of which I had picked out when I went tasting in Sonoma.

What we've been drinking:

Wellington's 2002 Viogner. This wine is a knock-out (although I love all this vineyard’s wines). It is lush, with a great apple/grapefruit nose and just enough of an herbal boquet to keep it from being cloying. It's slightly sweet but the acidity level gives it a crisp finish. This wine is a real winner with spicy or robust foods. Unfortunately, 2002 is the last Viogner vintage coming out of Wellington, so if you find any, buy it up (and send me some).

Wellington's 2000 Noir de Noirs. Yummy, yummy. This is an inky black wine with a plumy start and just enough tobacco and pepper to keep it interesting. It's made from a bunch of old-vine varietals that you've probably never heard of- primarily Alicante Bouchet (79%).

Alterra Sangiovese (I don't remember the year). Despite my stepfather's intense and vaguely insulting commentary on this wine. (He insisted on calling it a Chianti, and told me that Chianti's were "boring") This wine won him over when we actually opened the bottle. It had a nice round flavor profile with a light berry start and a spicy finish. Not bad at all considering that I never actually meant to purchase this wine, but got it as a mistake when I was purchasing two bottles of Alterra's Grand Melange (which is a fantastic blend btw).

What are your favorite wines?

Smoke Signals.

2004-11-24T23:31:00.000-05:00

With all the elegant irony of a message never heard, Sherman Alexie's essay from 2003 is resonating with me tonight.

Maybe it's because he's a master of words.

Maybe it's because I haven't gotten enough sleep lately.

Maybe I should let him speak for himself...

While fundamentalist Christians crusade against fundamentalist Muslims in a postmodern holy war, a few liberals weep for the oppressed cows and lab mice of the world. During a recent San Francisco antiwar protest, a young woman carried a sign that read "Vegetarians for Peace."

When are we left-wingers going to learn that we are losing the cultural and political battle with conservatives because we are fractured into narcissistic special-interest groups? Why should an antiwar protestor be so concerned about her dietary identity? The political opinions of vegetarians and meat-eaters are, after all, equally important. And what does it tell us about vegetarians that it would never occur to meat-eaters to carry a sign that reads "Pacifist Pork Chop Lover for Peace" or "Backyard Rib Barbecuer for International Nuclear Disarmament"?

But maybe we should start carrying those signs. In fact, if we meat-eating pinkos ate medium-rare hamburgers while we marched against war, I think the conservative politicians and pundits would find it difficult to completely demonize us.

"Well, Rush, most of those antiwar commies are treasonous bastards, but the ones eating 100 percent All American beef can't be all bad."

We liberals have become elitist bastards out of touch with the white working class, but conservatives have been smooching the WWC for years. So, in order to defeat the conservatives, we liberals have to enter into the Great American Love Triangle and somehow win the hearts, minds, and votes of the WWC. But how do we do that?

And, in closing...

Maybe we still need an answer to that question.

The Month.

2004-11-23T08:07:00.000-05:00

Academic life is an interesting study in rushes and lulls. Most of the year, I get to meander at my own pace, spending a week grading papers here, writing nothing there. The flow of reading is a tame three to five books a week. (I know that to those of you who are not graduate students, that sounds like a lot of books, but realize that besides the fifteen hours a week I am involved in classes that I am teaching or taking, consuming vast amounts of information is my other job.)

The cost of this relative bliss is The Month. This is the month where you write three 25 page papers in three weeks, read stacks of books and articles every day, and grade twenty final projects in one day. Sounds like hell, huh?

And it is.

And it straddles Thanksgiving and my birthday.

And it means that my usual outpouring of flotsam and jetsam about the world will slow to a trickle as I write and write and write things that no one particularly wants to read. So here's what I'll be doing for the next several weeks.

Project 1
tenative completion date: yesterday
due date: tomorrow
argument: That in The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empyre of Guiana Walter Ralegh posits a vision of colonization that is fundamentally opposed to the Spanish vision of domination and rule. Instead, he urges a relationship of benevolant trade. This relationship is mirrored in the micro-level structure of the text, where failed narrative of Spanish colonization interweave Ralegh's own explorations.
title: tba.

Project 2
tenative completion date: December 3rd
due date: December 7th
argument: Recent critical work on Walt Whitman has focused on two elements of his poetry: the homoerotic elements and his democratic vision. The seemingly inclusive vision of Whitman’s democracy has made his work a popular platform for literary critics and political theorists alike. However, within all of this theorizing about Whitman’s democratic vision, very little work has been done that considers the ways in which Whitman’s vision is complicated by market forces and the complex identities which are formed and excluded by Whitman’s democratic body. I hope to read the first edition of Leaves of Grass in a way that reconciles these two extremes of reading Whitman’s democratic imagination. By careful consideration of the languages of production and reproduction, I plan to show the limits and possibilities envisioned within Whitman’s democratic body. It is particularly important that attention be paid to the exclusion of colored and female bodies from Whitman’s vision of democratic labor.
title: The Laboring Democratic Body: Production and Reproduction in Whitman's Leaves of Grass

Project 3
tenative completion date: December 8
due date: December 10
I'm nowhere on this. Don't ask.

In addition to all of this, I have two exams on December 10th. One at 4pm that ends at 7pm and one that starts at 6:30pm. Oh, yeah, and I get my final projects from my class on the 6th and their grades are due on the 8th.

But it's all a small price to pay for 10 months a year of relative freedom...

At least I try to tell myself it is.

Run. Run!

2004-11-22T08:02:00.000-05:00

Watching the tide turn...

John McCain was asked about Iran on Meet the Press yesterday. He said that the next step is to try to get the Security Council to take meaningful action, but at the end of the day it may be up to the United States.

Here's the transcript:

MR. RUSSERT: Iran--the president said they are developing components which could be used for nuclear bombs. Secretary of State Powell said they are designing the missiles that could deliver those bombs. Are we close to potential military action against Iran?

SEN. McCAIN: I'm not--I don't believe we're "close," but we certainly should be very concerned, disturbed and even alarmed, but there's been information about this for a long period of time. The IAEA had given us a lot of that information. The next step obviously is to try to get the Security Council to act in some meaningful fashion. But, you know, Tim, this is a harsh comment, but at the end of the day, it's the United States of America that may have to act if we act, but I hope that we can dissuade them through other means. Well, of course, the first attempt would be to get the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions. So we'll see, but it's a very great challenge.

MR. RUSSERT: Would you be disappointed if the Israelis did to Iran what they did to Iraq in 1981 and have a pre-emptive strike on the nuclear reactor?

SEN. McCAIN: Well, first of all, it isn't so easy because the Iranians have these facilities spread all over Tehran. You couldn't do it in one strike. So from a practical standpoint, it would be difficult. Second of all, I don't see how it would do anything but provoke probably a conflict between Israel and Iran, and we want to avoid that at all costs. And I think the Israelis recognize that. I don't think the Israelis are at a point where they would feel that they have to do that. It's one thing to attack a reactor in Iraq 20-some years ago. It's something entirely different to take on that challenge now.

MR. RUSSERT: What's our timetable? How much time do we have for Iran to stand down?

SEN. McCAIN: I don't know. I would think we're talking about a matter of months rather than years.

So what does this mean? John McCain has his ear a lot closer to the ground than the rest of us, so what he says carries an extra weight with me. These are the implications as I see them:

-My earlier scenario about Israel and the bunker-busters may be incorrect, since the bunker busters would be both inflammatory and ineffective. Unless of course, we have already decided that we want to launch an all-out military offensive, in which case we would want to inflame Iran into aggressive action in order to build the will for war here at home.

-We are calling for Iran to "stand down" even though they have already agreed to a suspension of their nuclear development program. This looks a lot like an unreasonable standard, which sounds a lot like deja vu all over again from the lead-up to the Iraq war. What exactly do we mean? How could they further stand down?

-My gut instinct is that this call for the Security Council to impose sanctions is another non-starter. Sanctions have not been particularly effective at halting proliferation in the past, so its unclear how they would be effective in this instance. Additionally, the U.S. has had unilateral sanctions on Iran, which means that while trade with Iran is not important to us, it is important to countries like France and Russia. This means that they will be highly unlikely to impose sanctions. Furthermore, sanctions would, if anything, slow the liberalization of Iran. Economic interaction leads to social liberalization and its clear that forces of global economy have already begun to work on young people in Iran. If anything, sanctions will slow or halt this movement. Look at Cuba. Many people agree that were it not for the U.S. sanctions, Cuba could not have maintained its political system.

-The timeframe is short.

Funny, when I sat down to write this analysis I was going to argue that perhaps we weren't moving towards conflict with Iran, but now...I think we are laying the groundwork for conflict. It is too early to say that we are committed, but we are definitely courting.

Speaking to me...

2004-11-21T13:16:00.000-05:00

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

~W.H. Auden

Paying the piper.

2004-11-21T09:48:00.000-05:00

Consolidating the rich poor gap one step at a time:

Bill Clears Way for Government to Cut Back College Loans

"The federal government will be able to require millions of college students to shoulder more of the cost of their education under the new spending bill approved yesterday by the House and Senate. The government moved to change its formula for college aid last year, but was blocked by Congress. Now, however, no such language appears in the appropriations bill lawmakers are considering, clearing the way for the government to scale back college grants for hundreds of thousands of low-income students. Nearly 100,000 more students may lose their federal grants entirely, as Congress considers legislation that could place more of the financial burden for college on students and their families.

The cutback stems from a revision to the formula governing virtually all of the nation's financial aid. Last year, the Department of Education changed the formula on its own, angering members of Congress who contended that it was a backdoor way of cutting education spending without facing the public. The department retorted that it was merely following the law. In response, Congress passed legislation in the fall of 2003 to suspend the new formula for at least a year. The Senate put forward the same measure this year, and many members of the House said they also expected the new formula would wait at least until Congress updates the Higher Education Act, which will probably take the better part of the coming year.

But keeping the old formula in place for another year would add an extra $300 million in grants for college students to a program that is already running at a shortfall, the Office of Management and Budget said. So, the bill approved yesterday, brokered by Congressional leaders in a conference committee, eliminates a provision that would have barred the Education Department from changing the eligibility formula. A Senate staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the White House insisted the provision be dropped, citing the shortfall, and House Republicans were adamant in their agreement to do so."

$300 million dollars a year is a drop in the bucket compared to what we doll out daily to fight the war in Iraq. According to some estimates, it is what we pay every day or two. And yet, the government cannot find the money to support the Pell Grant program in its current configuration. This formula change will impact low-income students and Universities alike as it begins to erode one very important source of college funding. Although, forcing these students to try to acquire private loans will provide a nice bene to the private-sector collegiate funding services, and allow students to better "own" their educations. So everyone wins-- right? Well, except for the students.

This is just a small change in government spending, a mere crumb. But I suspect this is just the first piece of the cookie to crumble in the plan to transform our government's debt into private debt.

Haunting Specter.

2004-11-18T19:01:00.000-05:00

The price of power just got higher.

I just read that Arlen Spector had received the unanimous support of his Republican colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

How interesting, I thought. What sort of signal does it send for senate republicans to back Specter in the face of intense protest by some conservative groups? This seemed to be an example of senators acting independent of a seemingly powerful constituency. It made my heart go a little warm and fuzzy inside.

Then I did some further reading and the chill set in. Specter's is engaged in a stunning act of self-immolation. Looking at all of the things that he is giving up in order to re-earn his rightful position as chair of the judiciary committee made me realize that this is not petty game that the conservatives are playing here.

Scary stuff, let me tell you.

Specter released a statement that lays out his capitulations.

“In it, he reiterated his pledge not to use a "litmus test" to block antiabortion nominees, and said he had "assured the president that I would give his nominees quick committee hearings and early committee votes." He vowed to consult his colleagues on legislation, including tort reform, an issue he has not championed in the past, and promised not to use the committee to bottle up legislation or proposed constitutional amendments that he personally opposed.”

So, he has agreed to deal on tort reform and to lay down on a gay marriage amendment. Scary Stuff, but still not the worst of it.

"It is my hope and expectation that we can avoid future filibusters and judicial gridlock with a 55-45 Republican majority and election results demonstrating voter dissatisfaction with Democratic filibusters," Mr. Specter wrote. "If a rule change is necessary to avoid filibusters, there are relevant recent precedents to secure rule changes with 51 votes."

Wow. The dreaded rule change. I’m doing research on whether or not there are really precedents for changing procedural rule changes with 51 votes (all my previous research indicated that they would need 67). So stay tuned for more on that. The possibility of changing the procedural rules is terrifying.

In parting, you may be asking yourself, why in the world did Specter lay out all these terms in writing? Well, because they demanded it, of course.

Of course.

From Purging to Projectile Vomiting

2004-11-17T07:47:00.000-05:00

Holy F#(%!^& S$!*

My plan for this morning was to finish reading Man of Feeling for my reading group meeting this afternoon, but on my way I decided to complete my morning ritual by swinging by the NYTs headlines. Where I read:

New C.I.A. Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration Policies

Suddenly I felt as though someone had dumped a gallon of icy water on my head.

"WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - Porter J. Goss, the new intelligence chief, has told Central Intelligence Agency employees that their job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work,'' a copy of an internal memorandum shows. "As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in the memorandum, which was circulated late on Monday. He said in the document that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road." "

Ok, so earlier this week I speculated about a possible purge going on at the CIA. But I have to admit that I had some skepticism about it. Newsday.com is not the best source, and I had yet to see anything about it in a mainstream news source. I just couldn't believe that something so cold-war era was actually occurring in 2004.

So, this is how one goes about achieving a consensus. Silence the opposition and raise the stakes for objecting.

Remember when Bush claimed, "I'm a uniter, not a divider." I suppose this could be considered an extremely warped vision of unification. After all dissenting voices are purged from the CIA, they will undoubtedly speak with a unified voice... All the while, a little voice in the back of my head is screaming: "They are supposed to analyze intelligence data! This should not be a partisan activity! It should certainly not be done in accordance with the president's (very warped) foreign policy agenda!!"

When even Colin Powell, who destroyed his integrity and international credibility in support of this administration's war is judged insufficiently loyal, the rest of us are in a world of hurt. Let this administrations message be clear, Mr. Powell, Mr. Spector, it is not enough to act in support of this administration. You must whole-heartedly agree. If your heart and mind are not with them, you are against them. No matter what. And you are out.

Confessions of an Ideologue.

2004-11-16T14:20:00.000-05:00

Words Hurt.

I will begin this post by making a confession that I am deeply disturbed and searching for the source of my disturbance. It all begins with a friend of mine. A person whose mind I deeply respect and whose approach to the world I also admire. He is a vocal liberal and, like all of us who worked for change this election, was dealt a harsh blow on Election Day. He stopped blogging for a time, and last time I saw him I urged him to take it up again. Since then he has, but everything he writes upsets me.

Ah, Amy, therein lies the source of your disturbance!!

The problem is that it does not upset me for clear reasons. I agree with much of what he says. I enjoy disagreement and generally find it productive— but not this time. I read his words and vacillate between anger, shame, and despair. There are discrete elements of his recent writing that irk me, but even added all together they do not amount to enough disagreement to constitute my current level of psychic distress. I think that the root of it all is a problem with some of the rhetorical choices that he is making.

Which got me to thinking a whole mess of things:

Words matter.

What does it mean to urge one towards openness when at the same time making rhetorical choices that close off avenues of conversation?

How is it that one is persuasive? Is it through the force of argument, of language, or of both?

When is it time to put persuasion aside and voice one's opinions openly?

And, finally, turning this in on myself:

Am I deluded to believe that words are invested with such power? Foolishly naive?

Damn Yankees.

2004-11-15T18:41:00.000-05:00

Ah the joys of teaching.

The scene:
After class today, I had a student approach me because he has missed six classes. My course policy clearly states that after three absences, your grade will drop one-half a letter grade for each class you miss, which means that his maximum grade for the class was now sitting somewhere in the low-B range. He had made a fairly lame plea for mitigation on Friday, and I told him I would think about it.

The conversation:
"So, have you thought about what you are going to do about my grade yet?"

"I'm sorry, but I haven't yet decided. I hope this isn't causing you undue anxiety. "

Him, sort of chuckling: "What, are you waiting for God to speak to you in a dream or something?"

Me, also chucking: "Well, not really. God doesn't speak to me." (I know, you are groaning, that was something I should not have said, even jokingly. It was a bad moment— I was tired.)

Him, sneering: "Yankee."

Me, somewhat shocked: "Yes, and a secularist." (Let's play opposites. The opposite of Christian is not Northern— it is Secular.)

The reaction:

That was a strange teaching moment. I'm not sure how to interpret being called a "Yankee." It was very much said in the tone that you used to use when you were twelve and you would say something really terrible to someone, and then say "just kidding." But you weren't kidding. Not really.

And then there is the additional complication that where I come from, Yankee is not a slur. It's a baseball team. I know that it is a slur here, but I'm not sure exactly what it means. I'm not all that concerned about the exchange, just baffled. This student is difficult to understand. I sort of like him, prickliness and all. He is bright; he is an independant thinker. And, he just called me a "Yankee."

sigh

Binging and Purging: Digesting Reality.

2004-11-15T08:13:00.000-05:00

It appears that the CIA may be in the midst of purging intelligence agents who are not loyal to GW:

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

So, the Central Intelligence Agency has been obstructing the president's agenda, huh? I thought that they were analyzing intelligence. How can an information agency obstruct the president's agenda? They don't have legislative abilities; they don't set policy; they don't even control any money except that granted to them by the government. The only thing that they have is information...

(Well, and maybe, if the movies are to be believed secret operatives with ass-kicking martial arts skills, but I doubt that they are physically obstructing the president's agenda.)

I think we can safely assume that the CIA is obstructing the president's agenda with information. The CIA has been credited with leaking information to the press about Iraq and Afghanistan that was inconvenient for the administration. And then there are also those pesky pre-war briefs that indicated things like Saddam does not have WMD...

Now I am not so naive as to assume that there is only one true interpretation, especially in complex foreign policy matters. However, it is hard for me to believe that any truth-lets can constitute "obstruction." Don't they in some ways constitute "reality?" What does it mean for facts to be obstructionist? Doesn't that essentially mean that some interpretations of reality are inconvenient for this president's administration?

Shouldn't there be a bare minimum requirement that our administration officials consider all possible interpretations of intelligence data before proceeding with an action that puts the lives of our troops and our citizens at risk? If they are allowed to purge dissenting voices, that hurts not only us leftist who will inevitably make the black list, but everyone. In a democracy, there should be accountability to all citizens. The decisions that impact the entire world should be able to stand up to the scrutiny of competing viewpoints. Our government’s decisions should not be reliant on a monolithic and partial interpretation of the truth.

Roe Roe Roe your boat.

2004-11-14T18:38:00.000-05:00

A is for abortion, the topic of the day...

A small scene from this morning:

A conversation one should never have before a four hour drive by oneself starts something like this: "Mom, I don't really want to talk about politics, but I have to know this one thing and then we won't talk about it any more."

"What?"

"Do you think that Roe V. Wade will be overturned, and is that something you want to see happen?"

I know, you are thinking: Jesus Amy! You never talk about politics with your mom for a reason!!!

My mom warily replied: "No, Amy, I don't want to see women having unsafe abortions in alleys with coat-hangers. But that's not going to happen. The majority of Americans do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned. They just want the country to move toward the center. They won't allow gay marriage, but people will get civil unions, and they won't ban all abortions, just things like partial birth abortions where the woman basically gives birth to a live baby and then they kill it."

I tried to keep to my word and avoid arguing with her, but we all know that I am terrible at keeping my mouth shut. "Mom, they won't put banning abortion up for a popular vote. If Stevens or O'Connor retires, Bush will nominate a super conservative Supreme Court justice and that person will essentially decide whether Roe stays or goes."

"Well, most Americans are very moderate. They just want to see everyone move to the middle. That was the problem with John Kerry. He was too leftist. GW is a moderate candidate. Not everyone intellectualizes their politics the way that you do."

At that point I began shrieking something about how GW is so far right that he can't even identify the center anymore...

So there are really two lessons I hope to take from this conversation:

1) Damnit already, Amy, you know better than to talk about politics with your mother ever. You cannot talk about politics with your mother. It is not because she is conservative. It is because she is your mother.

2) We need not assume that all conservatives are extremists. "They" are not all our enemies. They are not all coming for our wombs, just as we are not all coming for their guns. Oh, yeah, and we need to learn how to speak to them (most of them anyway— just not my mom— she’s impossible— trust me), because these moderate conservatives are not hearing us now.

Tin Foil Hat Redux.

2004-11-11T18:45:00.000-05:00

This just came across my inbox, and I thought it was worth sharing. It's from MoveOn.org PAC.

"We're all hearing the stories and wondering what's true and what isn't. But at least two cases of serious problems are accepted beyond doubt:

In Broward County, Florida, electronic voting machines counted backwards: as more people voted, the official vote count went down. [1]

In one Columbus, Ohio suburb, election officials have acknowledged that electronic voting machines credited Bush with winning 4,258 votes, even though only 638 people voted there. [2]

These are just cases where we know something went wrong. There were also lots of reports of people being denied ballots on Election Day. So far, these reports remain anecdotal, but they must be compiled and examined. And the Internet is abuzz with theories about why the official counts were so different from the exit polls.Do you have a story? Were you prevented from voting?

Tell us, at:http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

Six prominent members of Congress have called for an investigation. Representatives Conyers (D-MI), Holt (D-NJ), Nadler (D-NY), Scott (D-VA), Watt (D-NC) and Wexler (D-FL), have demanded that the U.S. General Accounting Office:

immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered, and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration. [3]

We've got to support their call by asking our own Representatives and Senators to join them.If you have a personal story of disenfranchisement, tell us. These members of Congress have agreed to include our stories and comments in their call for an investigation. Please sign now -- we'll deliver our compiled statements to them on Friday."

Supreme Semantics

2004-11-10T07:12:00.000-05:00

I find it fascinating that the democrats are losing the war of words. Being an obsessive wordsmith myself, there are two aspects of this that I find particularly interesting.

The first is that the Republican message machine is both impressive and terrifying. Every Republican pundit will say the same three things on any given day. They will say it using the same language. They will say it again and again with unwavering intensity. This is how one group manages to create reality. The democrats need to take a play out of this playbook and learn how to play the talking head game. (Although before democrats can be 'on message' they should probably get a message...)

The other important thing to consider is that the Republicans are clearly winning the battle over terminology. Sometimes I think that this is because they are the only ones who are fighting it. I watched Karl Rove this weekend on Meet the Press repeatedly refer to the "Democrat" Party. This seems like a small detail, but Rove has decided that "Democrat" sounds meaner than "Democratic". This change had begun to reflect itself in Bush's stump speeches during the election. Look for it to spread in the days and months ahead.

Specifically, I have been thinking about how we see this debate reflected in the Supreme Court debate. First we have "activist justices"(liberal) and "constructionist justices" (conservative), except that it is unclear how accurate these labels are. Bush v. Gore is a recent example of "strict constructionists" clearly dabbling where they have no place, and dabbling in extremely partisan ways. Another interconnected example of loaded terminology surrounds the "pro-life, anti-abortion" vs. "pro-choice." Being anti-choice is a whole lot better than being anti-life or pro-abortion. Lately I've even heard the term "Abortionist" thrown around.

There is no reason we should be losing the word war. Don't we dominate the academy? My conservative students certainly seem to think so. Clearly, as part of developing a new message, democrats also need to develop a linguistic framework to surround their message. Words matter more than they think.

Run. Run! I ran. Iran!

2004-11-09T06:55:00.000-05:00

When we started the war in Iraq, in the Spring of 2003, I was living in Paris and serving as a house-mother for 7 undergraduate women. Most of them were from Texas. Two of their daddies were oil executives. One was the vice-president of one of the larges banks in the United States. We argued a great deal about politics. I told them then that we were in for a long period of unpleasantness in Iraq. They didn't believe me. They laughed and pointed when Bush declared "Mission Accomplished." I told them it wasn't over, that fighting would stretch on for at least one year to eighteen months. They told me that I was making up crazy stories...

In the wake of the election, everyone I know has been busy cooking up doomsday scenarios. I have to admit that although many of them don't quite have the ring of truth, this administration has made a believer out of me. I find that in the last four years things are frequently far worse than my worst-case scenario.

With that in mind, I turn my attention to Iran.

"What, Amy, don't you mean Iraq?"

Ah, what a difference a single letter can make. I mean Iran. When my husband came home from school last Wednesday (he is a political science Ph.D. student) and informed me that two of his IR professors (one conservative and one liberal) predicted that we will be at war with Iran in the next 18 months, it sounded a lot to me like crazy talk. We flat out don't have the troops, the money, or the political will. European leaders are currently negotiating with Iran.

Then I began to think: Wait, we were in negotiations with Iraq too. Of course, we were asking Saddam to prove that he didn't have weapons that he didn't have and to give us the weapons that he didn't have so we could destroy them (sometimes I wonder what he was thinking when we were making those demands with a cruise missile pointed at his head). This administration managed to manufacture political will last time by systematically misinforming the American people. They are unconcerned with astronomical budget deficits. And, well, for troops we can always either just move them across the border or re-call some more reservists.

So, as it becomes more and more clear that Iraq will never become a stable pro-U.S. democracy in the Middle East, look for us to try again right across the border. The real shame in all this will be the fact that market forces were slowly and peacefully liberalizing Iran and there was a horizon of peaceful democratic transition...

In case you were wondering, the scenario goes like this:

We give/sell Israel 5,000 pound bunker-busters for Israel to use against Iran's subterranean nuclear program—Israel attacks, Iran retaliates at least against Israel and maybe against U.S. forces in Iraq. They are now officially the aggressor, and we have a means to foster the political will for war.

Let's just hope I'm wrong on this one.

Supreme Intolerance

2004-11-08T11:12:00.001-05:00

Today's CNN question of the day was: How will Bush thank his conservative base?

Well, it's becoming increasingly clear that appointing strong anti-choice justices will be the first chunk of flesh thrown to the sharks. Considering the political firestorm that has flared up in the wake of Arlen Spector's merest suggestion that appointing conservative anti-choice justices would be a difficult and possibly impossible process, it is becoming very clear which part of the Bush constituency if in the driver's seat. And, we all know what they are praying for...

Now Spector is on the brink of losing the prized position of head of the senate judiciary committee, and it is looking more and more like his groveling will not be enough. Spector is claiming that he was only highlighting the pragmatic difficulties of appointing a staunch pro-life justice if overturning Roe v. Wade was on the horizon, but no one buys that, especially since Spector is pro-choice himself. My only question in all of this is, why could this man have not kept his mouth shut until after he was selected as chair?

The frightening thing about all of this is just how clear the conservative social agenda has become at this moment. There is now a powerful conservative movement afoot to prevent Spector from gaining power in the Judiciary committee. The uproar over the mere suggestion of a moderate appointment to the Supreme Court highlights just how powerful the evangelical constituency has become. Rove has activated them, but can he control them? The cost of appeasing them could be much much higher than anticipated. Bush could burn a whole lot of his newly claimed political capital trying to advance a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage or trying to change the procedural rules in the senate...

Post- Post- Post-

2004-11-07T09:05:00.000-05:00

Coming up for air from my recent political ruminations...

I realized that I owe Monstro several responses. For those of you who have not been following along at home, Monstro and I have been having a discussion about my argument that postmodern thought is complicit in totalitarianism. He has written several thoughtful responses in defense of postmodern literature.

Dear Monstro,

I think at the heart of this dispute lies two central issues, that are really only one, that is really not a dispute at all, but rather a question of scope. I believe that we should constantly struggle within and without to find an ethical stance in the world. My scholarship, reading, thinking, and living are all tied together by my attempt to try to live well and better towards others. Although our projects differ in scope, we are not very far apart in intention. When you write, "For my own part, I believe that literature tells us what it is to be human, to experience the lives of human beings. We can only live through our own skins, but in literature, we are asked to try on the skins of others for awhile and to walk around in them. This isn't escapism, except from the limitation of the form of having only one life time, and that life time rarely escaping certain parameters of experience. That's what I believe literature to be.” you highlight the aspect of literature that initially led me to study it.

Interestingly, that articulation seems deeply informed by psychological realism and free indirect discourse. I point this out not to raise your postmodern hackles, but rather to highlight how all of the articulations we form in the academy are underwritten by ideologies. Yes, ideologies plural. I believe that it is a rare scholar who uses only a single lens through which to view the world. I also believe, that the more perspectives we can bring to bear on a situation the better off we are. But most importantly, I believe that any frame we use is partial and that it is a fundamental duty to try to examine our assumptions as closely and as thoroughly as we can. What I was doing, when I crafted my initial argument, was not to try to call someone else out for being a postmodern thinker, but rather to examine how my own patterns of thought are limited.

I think our primary disagreement lies in the question of what texts "do." You write: "We simply say that certain texts are good for what we hope that texts will do." I don't believe that texts "do" anything. I believe that we do things with texts. This is why I have a difficult time understanding what you mean when you say you are postmodern because you read postmodern literature. I also read postmodern literature, but it does different things for me than it does for you. I do not think that DeLillo + Pynchon = systematic structure of beliefs. This is not just because they are writers of postmodern fiction. James + Austen does not equal a system either.

The problem with postmodernism is that it is fundamentally nihilistic. Deconstruction has been valuable because it has taught us to pick things apart to reveal underlying hegemonic assumptions. However, it does nothing to teach us how to put things back to together. It is a negative system. The core of my argument is just this—We have a responsibility to put things back together.

Amy

P.S. A little birdie told me that Monstro thinks that I am trying to start a fight. I am not. However, I do like to argue, so it's possible I am trying to start an argument.

P.P.S For those of you in our television audience, you should check out "Shock Tea" when you are over at Monstro's site. It is the first chapter of his own literary stylings. It is good. You should read it.

Supreme Concern

2004-11-06T09:08:00.000-05:00

Let's face it, we are headed for some rough times ahead. This will be the first in a long series that works through the policy shifts that are on the horizon. Of course, you know by now that there is a chance that Bush will have the opportunity to appoint up to three Supreme Court justices in the next four years. The most likely candidates for retirement are Stevens, who is currently 83, O'Connor, who has been making noises about her desire to retire for some time yet who held on for the last 4 years, and Reinquist, who has thyroid cancer.

In case you haven't geeked yourself out on the voting tendencies of Supreme Court justice, here's how they sit:

Reinquist- It would functionally be impossible for Bush to appoint a justice who is more conservative (in supreme court speak "less activist") than Reinquist. Replacing him even with the most supremely conservative justice will not swing the voting behaviors of the court.

O'Connor- Is a critical swing vote, which in my mind maker her a great judge. She tends to vote to protect the environment and privacy rights. She is a critical part of the 5 in the 5-4 that upholds Roe v. Wade. She is currently 76, and has openly talked about retirement but did not retire in the last four years. She clearly didn't for a reason. Let's hope she holds out and stays healthy for another 4.

Stevens- Is a great liberal justice. And is very very old. Pray for his health and his energy levels because to lose Stevens would lead to scary impacts on our privacy rights. Some critical privacy-based rights include a woman's right to choose and sodomy laws.

What we haven't heard about lately is the fact that Bush has been successful at stacking lower courts with rampantly conservative ("strict constructionist") justices. This has huge impacts on law in this country because much legal precedent is set by appellate courts and never make it to the supreme court for review. I bring this up both because it is something to be aware of and because it indicates that Bush has a long track record of making ultra-conservative court appointments.

So who Bush will get to replace and who he would nominate are only the first steps in the process of appointing a supreme court justice. After Bush selects them they must be confirmed. And that is good news for us, because we still have the ability to filibuster nominees in the senate. It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster in the senate and last I checked the republicans don't have it.

But before you breathe a sigh of relief, there are some things to worry about. As Nicholas Kristoff pointed out in a NYT's editorial yesterday, perceptually we can't afford to filibuster every conservative court appointment. He writes: "Hold your nose and work with President Bush as much as you can because it's lethal to be portrayed as obstructionists. Sure, block another Clarence Thomas, but here's a rule of thumb: if an otherwise qualified Supreme Court nominee would turn the clock back 10 years, approve; back 25 years, vote no; back a half-century, filibuster. "

Also, the Senate sets their own procedural rules, and some noises are being made about changing the rules so as to make filibustering judicial appointments impossible. I think that sort of regulatory change will be met with widespread outrage, but keep your ears open and get ready to hit the streets if that happens. I think that having bipartisan approval should be a minimum criteria for a judicial appointment because we should try to avoid politicizing our courts to every extent possible.

Here's me in my tin foil hat.

2004-11-05T13:40:00.000-05:00

I'm not one for conspiracy theories. (Ok, maybe in my deep dark secret soul I love them.) But I'm certainly not one to advance them publicly. However, if you are interested in the possibilities of voter fraud in this election, here is a really interesting discussion of possible discrepancies in Ohio.

While I believe in letting all of this sort itself out without doing our best impressions of chicken little. I do think that we need to demand reforms in our electoral process. I think I may have just found my first cause... Who is with me?

Apocalypse Now.

2004-11-05T13:35:00.000-05:00

As I slowly move from mourning to resignation I am beginning to reflect on the broad spectrum of reactions to this election. We won't yet talk about the smug self-satisfieds, because I don't yet have the reserves to speak about them in productive ways. However, I find that my friends on the left are experiencing a broad spectrum of reactions that range from mild disappointment to severe depression and from slight concern to extreme panic.

To my friends who do not believe that this matters much:
I hope you're right, and I'm sure this all depends on how you define “much.” I am pretty sure that it will matter more than you think and less than I do. I hope that you will not be too cynical to feel outrage when things begin to go worse than you think. At least you are conserving your emotional energy for the coming revolution…

To my friends that are packing up their belongings and heading for the border:
Please stay. You can't leave this country without giving up all the guns and nukes. Do you really want to do that? There needs to be internal dissention that attempts to slow the damage. There needs to be internal dissention to activate for change in the future. If we leave or allow ourselves to feel defeated it means that we erase ourselves from the political process. I know that you have the energy, the drive, and the analytic skills to help turn the left around. Mobilize, mobilize, mobilize.

To my friends who sit somewhere in between:
Don't let the man get you down. Don't let your friends get you down. The current realization that our country is not what we thought it was is enough to get anyone down all by itself. Speak as the voice of moderation because you can. You can urge the apathetic towards action and the pessimistic towards productivity.

To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, we have already lost all we can lose.

spINSANITY

2004-11-04T18:33:00.000-05:00

If I hear one more thing about Bush's mandate I will scream.

Overheard: This was an "extraordinary" victory for George Bush.

We have never in the history of the country voted out an incumbent president while we were at war.

Overheard: More people voted for Bush than have ever voted for a president ever.

Well, more people voted against him than have ever voted against a president too.

Overheard: Bush is the first president since god knows when to win a plurality of the popular vote.

Clinton would have won more than 50% of the popular vote in '96 were it not for the fact that Perot was a viable third-party candidate. Despite the fact that Perot got 8 million votes, Clinton still received 49.9 percent of the popular vote. He also beat Dole by over 8 million votes. (Bush only beat Kerry by 3.5 million votes.)

Stand up and say it with me. Bush does not have a mandate. He has the unfortunate task of presiding over a divided electorate. If we do not contest this ridiculous spin, then it will become true. Claiming the mandate is a strategic maneuver on Bush's part and the democrats have been too shell-shocked to point out just how unremarkable this victory is.

For more excellent analysis, hop over to my favorite site.

New Visions.

2004-11-03T19:36:00.000-05:00

So, yesterday was a very long very sad day. I must admit that I have not yet watched the concession speech or the acceptance speech. I tried, but there was something too painful about them. Instead, I watched this great speech by Barak Obama. Now, here is the new vision the left needs to embrace. Here is a beautiful piece of rhetorical work. Here is the person that I would bet on to become our first black president.

What do you think? Is Barak Obama is the new voice of the left?

Here are some exerpts from his speech:

"I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents’ dreams live on in my precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible. Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody’s son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted—or at least, most of the time.

This year, in this election, we are called to reaffirm our values and commitments, to hold them against a hard reality and see how we are measuring up, to the legacy of our forbearers, and the promise of future generations. And fellow Americans—Democrats, Republicans, Independents—I say to you tonight: we have more work to do. More to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that’s moving to Mexico, and now are having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour. More to do for the father I met who was losing his job and choking back tears, wondering how he would pay $4,500 a month for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits he counted on. More to do for the young woman in East St. Louis, and thousands more like her, who has the grades, has the drive, has the will, but doesn’t have the money to go to college.

Don’t get me wrong. The people I meet in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks, they don’t expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead and they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don’t want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or the Pentagon. Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. No, people don’t expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.

...

For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga.
A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper—that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism here—the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!

In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!"

Now that is a fantastic speech. Just a really really great speech.

America the beautiful.

2004-11-03T08:16:00.000-05:00

So I suppose I have nothing witty to say this morning. All I can say is-

I honestly thought we would win.

And (yes, folks, you heard it hear first, I'm calling Ohio) we lost.

I'm not sure what shocked me most. Well, I am sure, it's that we lost. We just re-elected, by a significant margin of the popular vote, the worst president in history. Our credibility with the world- gone. Our environment-gone. Our government safety net- gone. A woman's right to choose- under assault in a way that I never thought was possible. I honestly think that I'm on the verge of throwing up.

Actually, I have two things to say to the world.

To all of you fantastic democrats who have been activated by this process,

I know you are out there, I've met many of you while I worked towards John Kerry's election. Don't lie down. Don't stop your momentum. The world needs you more now than ever. We need vocal resistance in this country. We need it now more than ever. We need to stand up: for the environment, for our troops, for a woman's right to choose, for the least among us, for the world.

The other thing I have to say is that we need to reach out. When I worked to help get Kerry elected, I believed that it was not worth my time to change anyone's mind. Over 113 million people turned out this election and 3.5 million more of them voted for Bush than for Kerry. That means we have some convincing to do. Turning out our base will not win us an election. Our party has lost touch with the values voters in this country. We need to find a way to talk to them. To do that, we have to talk to them. We need some of them on our side, because, let's face it, it will take a lot more than four or eight years to clean up the mess produced by this administration, and we need all the help we can get.

So, take today, and even tomorrow to mourn. Then, start working. Our country needs us. Let's not give up on her.

Misinformation and stuff.

2004-10-31T07:49:00.000-05:00

My mother once made the statement, "Bill Clinton is solely responsible for the moral decline of this country." That statement now seems fabulously ironic to me. She continued, "The fact that he would stand up in front of the country and lie..." If you can't guess, my mother and I do not agree on political matters. And, yes, according to the screaming fight we had yesterday morning, she is still voting for Bush. I suppose, once the country has morally declined there is no longer any reason to stand up for truth. Oh, excuse me, misinformation. Perhaps it would have been o.k. if Clinton had said, "according to British intelligence sources I did not have sex with that woman." Because, it is apparently acceptable to my mom, and not a sign of moral failing, that Bush stood up in the STATE OF THE UNION address and claimed that British intelligence sources had revealed that Iraq was attempting to purchase yellow-cake uranium. A claim he and his administration knew to be false. But, since British intelligence sources had in fact made that claim, Bush did not lie, per se, he merely misinformed.

Misinformation will be the subject of today's meditation. This is spurred by my current experience as a writing instructor. I am currently teaching a public- speaking unit, where I asked my students to give a five-minute persuasive speech on any political issue of their choosing. One student (conservative, ROTC) gave a speech advocating a multi-lateral approach in our negotiations with North Korea. In his speech, while he was demonizing North Korea, he characterized our foreign policy history with them as follows: "They have consistently failed to live up to their end of agreements (which is true). For example, they were building a nuclear-power plant that would produce weapons-grade nuclear materials as a byproduct. To get them to stop this project, we built them a different power plant and gave them heavy-oil shipments. They resumed construction on the power plant anyway."

After class, I asked this student if he was aware that North Korea only resumed construction on the plant because we never built the power plant that we had promised and discontinued heavy oil shipments. He chuckled and said, "yeah, I know, but it was more persuasive this way. You know, misinformation and stuff."

Needless to day, I was very very angry. He lied during his speech, LIED! Then I realized that I never explicitly forbade my students to lie during their speeches, and, as my husband pointed out, it was more persuasive the way he framed it. Furthermore, misinformation is indeed the mode of the day. I find myself torn between expecting more from people and recognizing that in some fundamental way, the value of truth is slipping away in our society.

God, I'm beginning to sound like a broken record. Perhaps, after the election there will be a new disastrous cultural thread that I can pluck at until it thoroughly unravels. If I had to take bets on what it would be it would have a lot to do with social justice, disenfranchisement, and class warfare. My evidence comes from statements like this, from a lawyer working for the Republicans, "We don't need to bus," he said. "Most of our people have cars."

I apologize for the relative scarcity of my posts this week. I am in the midst of serving as a precinct leader for Move-on, which means that I am responsible for coordinating canvassing efforts. It takes a lot of time. I am not getting much sleep.

Nothing personal.

2004-10-27T18:05:00.000-04:00

A few years ago I found a fascinating artifact from my childhood. Sifting through a large box of photographs and report cards, I came across a construction-paper book titled “About Me by Amy.” The handwriting was not mine, but the drawings indicated that although someone else had penned the text, the illustrations were all mine. Flipping though the now brittle brightly colored pages that said things like “I have two sisters, a dog, and three cats.” I happened on a page that said, “My dad has his own business and my mom does nothing.” Nothing. NOTHING.

With a mixture of shock and embarrassment, I trotted down the stairs to show my mother this horrific evidence of my youthful disloyalty. She chuckled and said, “Oh yeah, I remember that your teacher was really embarrassed about that. She said that she tried and tried to get you to say something else, but you were quite insistent that I did nothing.” I just grimaced and hugged her. Somehow, she had managed to forgive me many years ago.

Clearly, my young literal mind had interpreted the question “What does your mother do?” as “What job does your mother have?” And, she, at the time did not have a “job” although she had many. She had a demanding husband, three daughters, three cats, and a dog. She had the PTA, coaching soccer, running a charity organization, feeding, clothing, cleaning, and cleaning up after our hefty brood. She did not, however, get paid for any of those things, so in my mind she did nothing.

As I have recently devoted a significant portion of my mental energy to trying to figure out how to fit the pieces of my own life together, this unfortunate episode of “out of the mouths of babes” has come to form the center of my own internal struggle. Could I be a stay at home mother? Am I willing to take on the endless and thankless role of “working mother”? Will I always have lingering guilt that I should be doing the other job in some sick inversion of “the grass is always greener”? And, most recently: can I formulate a stable self-identity that is not in some central way informed by “what I do”?

Because, lets face it, as a society, we construct our identities based on what we do. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is one of the first questions asked of children as though it is some sort of divining rod that will reveal a child’s true character. And, not only is it critical to identity formation, it also forms a cornerstone of the adult economy of conversation. “What do you do?” is one of the first questions you are asked at a cocktail party. In fact, at a recent Move-on meeting, when people were asked to introduce themselves, without fail people would say, “Hi, I’m Mary and I’m a teacher.” So, what do you think? Is it possible to form a (stable, happy) self-identity that does not somehow encompass what we do? Because, some day, I fear that I might end up choosing to do “nothing.”

The revolution will not be televised.

2004-10-25T21:15:00.000-04:00

Subtitled: The theory wars taken to a whole new level.

Sub-subtitiled: Does post-modern and post-structuralist thought serve the ends of totalitarianism?

Super-subtitled: Because we know the U.S. media does, and now we are afraid the academy does too.

Last week, I stumbled across an essay by George Orwell, called "Revising History". This essay was written in 1944, and yet carries an eerie resonance in our current world. Orwell writes:

"History is written by the winners. In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell fewer lies about it than our adversaries. The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits "atrocities" but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future."

I think we are in a political moment when the idea of objective truth is undeniably under assault. Consider this chilling example from Ron Suskind's article "Without a Doubt" from the New York Times Magazine:

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure,and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

The evidence that the current presidential administration creates their "own reality" is everywhere. Beginning with the "Clean Air Act" and the "Healthy Forest Initiative" and ending with the massive deceptions to the congress, the U.N. and the American people about the threat posed by Iraq, this administrations total disregard for truth is astonishing. The real problem is not only that they are out their creating their frightening "own realities" but also that there seems to be no attempts to actually hold them to truth standards of any kind. ("When Clinton lied, nobody died", oh, yeah, and he got impeached...)

The media has clearly failed us here. Current television news has decided that "Fair and Balanced" means that we put on a talking head from the left and a talking head from the right and allow them both to scream at each other with no regard to actual facts. For example, take the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" controversy. In a full week of center stage news coverage, the fact that the claims made in the ads were lies was never mentioned. Of course, Jon Stewart has become my hero on this issue.

My real concern here is, though, is once again with the academy. Orwell continues in his essay:

"There is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive. "

The problem these days is that empiricism and enlightenment thinking has become pleasantly outmoded in the academy. As academics we no longer think of truth as something external to ourselves that needs to be discovered and upheld. Rather, we think of truth as partial and contingent. We think of reality as a simulacrum. We think that there are a multiplicity of valid readings. But I think what we really need to ask ourselves is:

In what ways do these habits of mind pave the way for totalitarianism?

After all, social truth is in some ways about transmission value and those in power will always have a greater ability to disseminate their version of truth. As long as there can be "versions" of truth the marginal are well and truly fucked.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

Now tell me the world is safer.

2004-10-25T09:21:00.000-04:00

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq

By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 25, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

I am spending every night between now and Nov. 2 working with Durham for Kerry and MoveOn in an attempt to help increase democratic voter turn out for the election. Can one person's actions really make a difference? I'm not sure I need an affirmative answer to that in order to do everything I can. For, if, come November 3rd, or 10th, or whenever the circus leaves town and our next president is named, Bush wins the election, I don't want to think that I didn't do EVERY THING that I could have to prevent it.

"Sod's Law," Bush, and the "Haunted Tree"

2004-10-23T22:04:00.000-04:00

Are you intrigued? Here is a delightfully written article about the presidential debates and the American news media from The Guardian. And you know you have to look, because it manages to integrate three, yes three, separate nature metaphors! Oh, yeah, and it also criticizes the U.S. news media. Three cheers for criticizing the U.S. news media.

"Who best can send on high/ The salient spout, fairstreaming to the sky"

2004-10-23T09:05:00.000-04:00

All names, places, and other identifying details have been removed to protect the guilty, the innocent, and the absurdly emblematic.

I recently stumbled across this email. It was addressed to a significant number of male graduate students of a single department.

"Gentlemen, As you may have noticed, fall is in the air. The leaves are changing their colors; the breeze is a little colder; the days grow ever shorter. Soon there will be frost on our windows and ice on our streets. This can mean only one thing--we must enter into a beard-growing contest. Last year the first year men (at least the six hardiest of us) tossed away our razors and enjoyed the solidarity that comes from collective action. This year we're going to open it up to the entire cohort, so everyone can be part of the fun. I have visions of the collected lot of us sporting monstrous and mangled masses of facial follicles. Among the highlights of this month-long tour into hairiness:--secret beard-growers hand shake--bewildered looks of uninitiated colleagues--rowdy beard celebration at a time and place to be determined. Just like last year, those who sport the 'best' and 'worst' beards after a month will be treated to rounds of ale at a local pub of their choosing (that is where the 'contest' aspect shows up). Maybe we'll even get t-shirts. Who knows? So, if you share in my vision, let me know. We will set-up the specifics next week. "

After I finished laughing, I engaged in a brief rhetorical analysis. First, I admire the clear-cut imperative expressed in the "we must enter into a beard-growing contest." I also like the charmingly antiquated reference to "ale" rather than the more modern and pedestrian word "beer." I am impressed by the detailed plan of group-formation, which includes both physical and social markers. The secret code of dress, the obvious growth of facial hair, and the secret-society handshake all do a great deal to "sell" the idea of participating in such a patently bizarre masculinist ritual.

So all glib-glossing aside. This email did hit on some interesting thematics from earlier posts.

First, the drive for competition in the academy seems to have literally embodied itself in this instance. Although this doesn’t quite involve the direct comparison of genital endowments, the beard definitely forms convenient substitute. It becomes a socially appropriate external marker of virility.

Secondly, it forms a prime target for a feminist critique. To quote the artifact at hand:
"This year we're going to open it up to the entire cohort, so everyone can be part of the fun." I know for a fact that the “entire cohort” includes many women, who are, alas, automatically excluded from this competition. Due to unfortunate anatomical limitations, they will not be able to literally and figuratively “measure up” in this instance.

Unless of course, we speak of a beard of another sort, and this becomes a strange and discomforting example of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Mine's bigger.

2004-10-21T08:56:00.000-04:00

"Why Amy, Why so many posts this morning?"

Well, because I currently am suffering from a version of writer's block. Although I am currently trying to write a prospectus for a paper that should have been written yesterday, and it is due in a half an hour. When faced with such a situation, the only obvious thing to do is to write something else and pretend that the problem doesn't exist while the pressure builds and builds. Basically, my academic production is fueled by desperation. Like a steam engine, I only seem to get rolling once suitable amounts of pressure have built up.

This brings me to a rather ephemeral musing about academic life. We all want, and in some ways need, to be the smartest, best, brightest. Our academic careers and general sense of well-being hinge on our ability to produce insights and ideas that are better than those of others around us and others that have come before. In a very very fundamental way, our work is all about competition. Those who are "better:" who produce more insightful insights, more elegant sentences, more pages of text are met with an odd mix of fear, wonder, and hostility. We are constantly measuring ourselves against each other.

The problem is, that unlike in sales, or sports, the measuring stick is never clear. No one sells more homes, or runs a fast 40 yard dash. There is no easy way to answer: Am I doing well? Am I doing better than these other people in my program? These questions aren't merely those of ego, but those of professional necessity. With the bleak outlook of the academic job market, it is important that we be better and best. But how do we know? The truth is, we never do.

So, basically, it's like penis envy, except that we can never just whip them out an measure.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program...

2004-10-21T08:18:00.000-04:00

I just heard an commentator on Fox News characterize their viewership as "pretty evenly split ideolgically." Hahaha.

Hiding behind a Bush?

2004-10-19T17:48:00.000-04:00

Sinclair has apparently announced that it will not air the anti-Kerry "news" documentary in its entirety. They claim that they never intended to run "Stolen Honor" in its entirety (a claim I highly doubt). However, they will be running a show titled "A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media."

So I can't say for sure that this is a win for the liberals.

The good news: massive amounts of public pressure made Sinclair alter their plans to air a blatantly partisan documentary.

The bad news: massive amounts of public pressure have led Sinclair to craft an equally partisan broadcast under the guise of news. This means that the content will be less closely scrutinized and more likely to be believed. Welcome to the matrix.

I would like to leave this here for now, but can't resist adding:

I hate Laura Bush. I hate the fact that she seems to stand as a blatant counter point to the massively unpopular early days of Hillary Clinton. For those of you who don't remember, in the early years of the Clinton presidency Hillary easily distinguished herself for being an overtly political first lady. She attempted to advance the Clinton health care plan and failed fantastically, gaining many many enemies along the way. I thought she was fabulous. At the other end of the public/private divide is the divinely domestic Laura Bush. The "i love my man" Laura Bush. The thoroughly depoliticized Laura Bush. And I hate her. (You may file this rant under "F" for "Further evidence that I secretly devalue the domestic realm.")

F*$% Democracy, bring on the dirt!

2004-10-14T16:40:00.000-04:00

I'm writing this post as I'm watching Crossfire. They are discussing the fact that Kerry outed Dick Cheney's daughter during the presidential debate last night. I think that both Kerry and Edwards mentioned that fact that Cheney's daughter is gay in order to inflame/possibly flip anti-gay voters. When John Edwards did this last week, I cringed at what seemed to me an act of dirty politics masked as kindness. I feel the same way about John Kerry's statement last night.

I bring this up not because I want to wave the "shame on you" finger at Kerry/ Edwards, but rather to shed light on a far dirtier secret:

(I was secretly pleased at the dirty political maneuver. I hoped it would be effective.)

I (and many other liberals that I know) seem to have willingly and flagrantly jettisoned my ideals in my intense desire to show GW the door. So I proclaim, in a bizarrely self-conscious manner, "Keep Nader off those ballots!" and “Spin baby, spin!” On some level, I suppose I am far more pragmatic than principled.

Fluff 'n Stuff

2004-10-13T13:13:00.000-04:00

So today is the beginning of my fall break. For my vacation I will be touring the scenic insides of several university libraries while desperately trying to catch up on all the work I should have been doing...

(As an aside, I read that even chimpanzees procrastinate. They will put off mandatory tasks until the last possible moment. Researchers have been able to genetically modify some chimps so that they no longer procrastinate, but in the process of turning them into dutiful little productive machines they essentially make them pathologically obsessive compulsive. So I always try to remind myself that things could be worse.)

At any rate, I am in a rather irreverent mood, having blown off my last class before break to come home and make an apple pie. I am making the pie for a debate party tonight. But, as you can tell by the presence of this post, I haven't yet started the pie. (so typical)

I've decided to leave you today with a list of things I like today.

1) Titles. Not royal or business titles but rather titles to papers and books. I love titling things. I'm not sure if this is very revealing about my personality, but I will leave you with some of my favorite titles of papers that I've written: En/Gendering Education: Learning to Negotiate the Sexual and the Political in Eliza Haywood’s Eovaai, The Pastoral (Re)imagination of J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer: The South African Postcolonial Trauma of Cultivation, and Sympathy and The Sublime: The Need for Others in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

2) Seasonally appropriate food. Tonight's menu: Butternut squash soup garnished with cider sour cream, fresh cranberry relish, chicken pot pie with an herb crust, and the aforementioned apple pie.

3) Clever people. For example, I happened to stumble upon this blog, which is charmingly self-referential.

I'll let you know how the pie turns out.

This is a test of the emergency broadcast system...

2004-10-12T17:01:00.000-04:00

A little break from my typically self involved rants about gender...

(I fully believe the charge that it is only middle and upper-middle class white women who think that gender oppression is the worst most pressing form of social injustice. Not that I personally believe that it is, it’s just the one that is most evident in my life right now. Stay tuned for my top three list of the worst forms of social oppression.)

So, as you may know, Sinclair Broadcast Group plans to air a documentary called "Stolen Honor" on all 62 of the stations it owns 10 days before the election. This is an anti-Kerry documentary that will be run in prime-time, pre-empting regularly scheduled programming. They own stations in key states, and this is a blatantly partisan attempt to swing the election. "What's wrong with this?" You ask? Well, aside from the fact that we regulate advertisements, campaign contributions, and other broadcasts leading up to an election, there is the whole problem with the continued erosion of the supposedly impartiality of the news. You see, the only way that Sinclair can air the documentary is by labeling it "news content." Now, I'm too postmodern to fully believe in the idea of objective truth, but at the same time, blatant partisan rhetoric (any documentary for that matter) seems to lie clearly outside the scope of "news content." What does it mean when news organizations become mere panderers of political rhetoric? How is it possible to be an independant arbiter of information when it is no longer possible to access underlying information?

Currently, there are several fronts trying to prevent Sinclair from being able to air this documentary so close to the election. If you would like to take part, sign some petitions, or make some phone calls.

How feminism ruined my life.

2004-10-11T18:40:00.000-04:00

As I was having lunch today with a friend. The topic came around to gender issues. Actually, I brought it up, because, as you know, I have become totally obsessed with issues of gender, labor, and relationships.

(In order to be totally up front with you, I have to let you know that I have spent a lot of time lately trying to decide whether or not I will finish my Ph.D. or leave the academy for work that is either more lucrative, more fulfilling, or preferably both.)

And although the conversation eventually came around to how much it sucks to be a woman in the academy, it actually began with a fight that my husband and I had the other night. The fight began (as it usually does) with the fact that he hadn't done the dishes, hovered in the middle for a while about the fact he hasn't helped unpack (we recently moved), and ended with the accusation that he consistently devalues domestic work. His head was spinning a bit by the time we got to that last point. My head has been spinning ever since with the worry that it isn't only that he devalues domestic work but that I don't value it either.

So as I was describing all of this to my friend, she just smiled and said, "Yes, yes, that's why I'm going to write a book. I am going to call it "How feminism ruined my life"." "And," she added, "it's going to be funny."

On Production and Reproduction.

2004-10-07T16:37:00.000-04:00

I really enjoy telling people about my plans to have children. I especially enjoy mentioning this fact to other graduate students. Once I make it clear that I plan to have children before I get tenure, and believe that that means I will never get tenure, I am met with appalled skepticism.

"What do you mean women who have children don't get tenure?"

When I ask them to name a woman who has both babies and a full professorship, they pause. Inevitably, the names that pop up are the names of women who have waited until after they are tenured to begin having children (which means waiting until their late 30s if they are lucky). I actually don't know a woman who had children before she came up for tenure who actually got it. I know that my sample is slightly skewed because I have spent my career at research 1 universities, but still, the outlook is grim.

In all seriousness, I have had a very difficult time lately determining my work/life/relationship balance. I have been struggling with my place in the academy, whether I want an academic carreer, and what that would mean for me (as an intellectual, as a woman, as a wife, and as a mother). There are several aspects of my life and personality that form major stumbling blocks in my future-building. The first is the fact that in reality the academy seems hostile to family life. The other is the fact that my husband is also a graduate student, and academic-academic families make career negotiations difficult. He wants tenure at a research 1 school, a goal that I support for him. This means that my career goals (which include some combination of raising an family and having a career) become secondary to his. This seems to make profound sense to me on an emotional and intuitive level while at the same time appalling my fellow feminists.

Which leads me to the following question:

How can I be both a feminist and a mother?

there will be more on this later...

Through the Rabbit Hole

2004-10-05T08:02:00.000-04:00

Look at this NYT's headline for today:

"Bush Calls Kerry's Policies a Danger 'for World Peace'"

Wow.

The view from up here...

2004-10-04T09:08:00.000-04:00

in the ivory tower is looking pretty grim these days. I have to ask myself, what ever happened to the public intellectual? It seems that academic research is becoming increasingly atomized and detached. We spend endless amounts of time specializing ourselves into little cells. Rather than a life of engagement stretching before me, I see a life of monastic production of texts that reach smaller and smaller audiences. I know that there is a tacit outrage amongst my fellows in the academy about the direction of U.S. foreign and domestic policy and the philosophical tenets of the current Machiavellian neo-con agenda, yet we say nothing. For if we speak out, up, or divert our intellectual energies even for a moment, what would that do to our relentless pursuit of tenure? Isn’t it ironic that the institution designed to protect intellectual freedom has functionally silenced the academy as a social voice? When a comedy news show becomes the leading voice of the liberal agenda in this country we are in a sad, strange place.

Revisiting

2004-10-02T15:28:00.000-04:00

From a younger self:

I had been working all afternoon and the bottoms of my sneakers were slimy with grease. Rushing out into the rainy night, they could not grip the wet pavement. I half-walked half-slid through the puddles eating a creamsicle. The rain made it wash away rapidly and it hit the pavement in drops of bright orange like tears or blood.
The night air clung to me like damp cotton, melting like cotton candy melts on my tongue. It left my skin sticky. I turned my face to the sky to catch the drops of rain condensing out of the thick air. A drop struck my eye and my vision blurred. I blinked away the water and saw him waiting for me.
He stood, back lit by white lights that glowed like candles diffused by the water in the air. Standing beneath a columned walkway, he shunned the drizzle I so eagerly embraced. I was floating in the rain, the slight breeze bringing the earthy smell of fall.
It is easier to confess yourself in the cover of darkness. Everything you say at night could be happening in a dream. Distance from the shadowy secrets is easy. This boy, who was not my boyfriend and possibly not even a friend, was dangerous. I gave myself over to that knowledge just as I had given myself over to the rain.
Confession is as easy for me as breathing. I inhaled warm air that spoke of the growing season coming to an end and told him things safer left unsaid. After all, these things, this boy, could not touch me under the light of day; could not touch me in the safe golden halo of my boyfriend’s love. I bent over to break his gaze under the premise of taking off my shoes. He laughed as I splashed a puddle in my bare feet. This I did to put space between us.
The water lapped at my bare feet and helped keep me grounded. The pale glow of skin more soothing to my eyes than the harsh white of my sneakers. I looked up from the patterns my toes were drawing in the water and my eyes caught on a light. Warm and round it burned with the echoes of a dream. Years ago I dreamed of a glowing orange balloon, just me and the balloon at the end of the world on a clear day. The sun warmed my back, and the balloon and I talked. It promised to take me away if I would just surrender the safe ground and grab hold of its string. I was afraid. I was afraid of leaving the warmth of the sun and the steady ground. I feared the balloon was too hot and would scorch my hands. Most of all I feared the glowing orb was all an illusion and would not be able to hold me. I awoke from the dream as the balloon blew away and the ground crumbled beneath my feet.
This dream replays itself every time I meet someone new. Every time I am faced with the challenge of leaving the safe ground. It is never easy to trust they will be able to hold you, that the conversations you have on dark nights will mean anything in daylight. During the struggle I try to remember that even sunshine will burn if you get too much and the safest ground can be undermined by the smallest almost imperceptible cracks.
Knowing the present is no more certain than the future, I let him in to my world. I reach for the balloon knowing I will fall and I will land face first on the hard ground. A secret smile breaks across my face when I realize that even when you fall, it is never the end of the world. The chiming bells remind me how much of the night has passed out here in the rain. I make my excuses. Walking home the sky opens and the world disappears in sheets of water. I allow the cleansing rain to wrap around me like a blanket. Returning safe and alone to my bed, I wrap myself in dreams.

Sure, sure

2004-10-01T12:35:00.000-04:00

So as I was watching the presidential debate last night, I was struck by the fact that "unwavering resolve" is being heralded as an ideal. I wonder when changing one's mind became a bad thing, especially in arenas where the stakes are so high. At the same time, this absolute (blind) certainty clearly is appealing to many (the majority?) of Americans. "The horror, the horror." I suppost it's less than surprising that the idea of a complex foreign policy for a complex world fails to translate to most viewers. But at the same time, it's frightening that short-term future of this country will be determined based upon sound bites. The problem with democracy is that it is incredibly fragile and relies upon the civic impulse of its citizens. Great when its working but when apathy and ignorance rule...

In the beginning there was...

2004-09-23T20:17:00.000-04:00

nothing.