perennial topic

Yesterday Stanley Fish blogged about that perennial favorite, political indoctrination on campus, weighing in somewhat belatedly on the University of Illinois policy barring professors from wearing candidate buttons in the workplace, putting candidate bumper stickers on their cars, and attending partisan rallies on campus.

The place of partisan politics on college campuses. One point often lost in the debate is how the arguments, on both sides really, tend to infantilize college students and puff up professor influence. We have to mold these young minds and show them how to be civically active adults. Really? Aside from the troubling and monolithic way such an argument invokes student need, much research about civic engagement on campus suggests students engage differently (through places of worship, for instance) from professors but at no lower a rate. Others , like Fish, argue: We abuse our position of influence and neglect "real" teaching when we "bring" politics into class. I have been interested in the rhetoric of this debate for a decade and I have yet to see solid evidence establishing the influence we allegedly have over students.

College students are adults. They can make up their own minds. They do make up their own minds. They bring experiences, habits, literacies, and ideas with them. Hopefully they continue to gain new experiences, habits, literacies, and ideas. Hopefully we are effective enough to expand their repertoire as thinkers and doers. Are we talking about partisan politics this semester in my rhetoric classes? You bet. Do I have partisan bumper stickers on my car and a button on my backpack? You bet. Do I take "public" stands on issues and candidates, both on and off camps? You bet. Do I wear a button to class? No. Exercising both my first amendment rights and my academic freedom as well, I choose not to. Given my teaching style (discussion-oriented, informal, open) , I think such a symbol might distract. For some teaching styles, such a symbol might help.

The policy is bogus because it removes those aforementioned liberties and because it suggests that college students are something other than adults with prerogatives who have chosen to enter into an arena of competing and new prerogatives.

Experience-as-proof has its limits and I don't mean to generalize here, but let me invoke my own story. As an undergraduate, I knew a great deal about the politics of many of my professors. Some, not so much. But a lot of my professors displayed symbols, on their office doors for instance. And a lot of them brought not only the issues but also their perspectives into the classroom. Certainly in courses like ethics and women's studies, but also in courses like postmodern fiction and philosophies of God. I studied with a lot of outspoken public intellectuals. Many were far to the left, but not all of them. I took several philosophy classes with an extremely conservative Catholic, a member of the religious right who incorporated his views on abortion to illustrate various lessons: a priori argumentation, for instance.

Now, granted, I was at a private University. Also, it was the early 90s, the height of the campus multi-culturalism movement. But the point is: I never felt coerced, never felt victimized by indoctrination, never felt like a child incapable of making up my mind. I felt challenged to consider new things. It's called adulthood.

via Metro Times part two

This news/rumor couldn't be cooler. A Gories reunion may be happening next summer. And any Gories reunion is going to include a Detroit show, right?

insert here a pun based on sex pistols lyrics

via Metro Times

Jay-Z

Haven't yet had the chance to say a few words about Saturday's Jay-Z concert. The Obama campaign, with which Nicole and I have been volunteering, billed the show as a voter registration party. You had to register (or be registered) to get your free ticket. What a deal, right?

After Chinese take-out from a Michigan Ave. dive, we headed to Cobo, saw a long line on the sidewalk between Cobo and Joe Louis Arena, and so parked on the Cobo roof thinking we could avoid the long line. Down in the lobby, security shuffled us outside to the end of the line. Outrage! We immediately worried we were experiencing an "oversell" situation. Kind of like when radio stations have free movie tickets (what can I say? Nicole and I love cheap dates) but give away three tickets for each seat and you have to get there like an hour early but it's totally worth it because the people watching is so awesome and the price is so free.

Anyhow, we were on the verge of outrage because it was cold and we had now spent ten bucks to park on the roof. Plus, we hosted a debate-watching party for the campaign and canvassed Berkley. Getting shut out would seem completely...Keep cool--plenty of seats available, assured the young Obama campaigners with their clipboards and their Barack The Vote t-shirts.

Finally, the doors opened. Concert-goers shuffled past about two dozen of Detroit's finest wearing...wait for it...shirts that said "Detroit Police Department Gang Unit." I'm all for safety, but did they have to wear the gang unit gear? Wouldn't regular uniforms have been just as effective? We grabbed a couple good seats in the lower balcony and enjoyed the stylings of a DJ whose name they never gave, who spun some Detroit house music while the Obama logo flashed on a screen behind him.

After a quickie campaign film (good but generic, probably recycled from the national convention--would it have killed them to put together a motor city version?), two local radio personalities from two competing hip hop stations MC'd a series of very brief speakers including Diane Hathaway who is running for Supreme Court and a trio of young field organizers from the campaign. I had expected a little bit higher wattage (maybe our governor who played the role of Palin during Biden debate prep? maybe the new mayor? maybe Beyonce?), but the line-up revved up a crowd that didn't need much revving.

Jay-Z hit the stage like an explosion. Clad in dark shades and his trademark NYC cap, he didn't let a raspy voice weaken his swagger-y delivery of one-two openers "Say Hello" and "U Don't Know." Inexplicably, the screen behind the stage showed the opening credits of "Reservoir Dogs." The crowd went wild. Much dancing. Much singing along.

The cool thing about a Jay-Z show (at least this one) is that the audience is a LOT less self-aware than at most shows I attend. Go see, say, Yo La Tengo and audience members have two priorities: 1) enjoy the show and 2) look like you're not enjoying the show. Not necessary in that order. I love Yo La Tengo live, where the music is unpredictable and intense and the set-list is always full of surprises, but, man, loosen up, audience. I know you're pissed off that the My Bloody Valentine re-issues didn't include the b-sides to the import-only, Japanese versions of the singles, but smileforgoodnesssake.

Anyway, Jay-Z doesn't waste a lot of time. Speeding through over twenty songs, he played a lot of hits: "Izzo," of course, and "99 Problems" and "Big Pimpin'" and highlights from the Black Album. Cool to hear something closer to the original versions (albeit sped up versions) of those Black Album tracks, since Nicole and I always listen to the gray album mash-ups. By far, the highlight of the night was "Roc Boys," where Jay-Z's live band--especially the horns--finally had a chance to shine.

Early on, Jay-Z told the crowd of 12,000 not to hold anything he says against Barack Obama. "I'm just a free citizen exercising free speech." Amen. Great show.

good cop bad cop

If Obama wins, what happens to Palin? Does she have regrets about being a 'Hail Mary' pass? Sure, now she commands a high six-figure honorarium for speakin' engagements in the lower 48. Does she have a political future? Given the desperation and cynicism behind her nomination, does she feel used?

What I wonder most of all is how she might feel on November 5 and beyond about the good-cop bad-cop game John McCain is playing with her. McCain says Obama's ex-pastor is off limits. Palin, who is on video with her own minister exercising witches, questions McCain's hands-off attitude and goes after Rev. Wright. (I have no beef with Palin's beliefs--as long as she doesn't impose them on public schoolkids--but the irony deserves mention.) For the next four weeks, Palin's job is to call Obama unpatriotic and traitorous and untruthful.

Make no mistake, her dissent from McCain is orchestrated. She captures headlines every time she "questions" the top of the ticket. Political theater. She is Dennis Franz to John McCain's Jimmy Smits. We're perps in the interrogation room, noses bloodied, and she just pushed a steno pad at us and barked, "write down what happened!" Maureen Dowd is the FCC cracking down on too many bare asses and uses of the S word during the show...What? Enough with the NYPD Blue metaphor? Okay, fine.

flashback: 92

After a day of church, emails, laundry, and cooking, I turn on the television. Spike TV is showing Boyz N The Hood, that great time capsule of the early 90s, John Singleton's story of African-American teenagers in south-central L.A.

I saw the film in Spring 92, a few weeks before graduation. I went to Seminary in rural Wisconsin, an all-boys boarding school that had made a post-Second Vatican Council broadening of its mission from training future priests to training future "active Catholics," ordained or otherwise. The school attracted an odd mix. White, black, lots of Hispanics and Vietnamese, a good number of kids from thankful, devout immigrant families who felt they had to "give back" to God (maybe by sending a son to the priesthood). The common bond was a reason and/or a willingness to leave home at fourteen. One of the populations: kids from pretty rough areas of Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans who wanted to avoid poor schools, troubled neighborhoods.

Senior Trip meant spending a week in Chicago, mostly hanging out with Franciscans who did gang ministry and ran soup kitchens and community literacy centers. The week was kind of a cross between a sociology class and an intensive lesson in Catholic social teaching. The priests and brothers knew a lot about gentrification, violence, racism, drugs, police brutality, and such, and they all thought Boyz 'N The Hood was something we had to see, something we had to see in the hood. I was used to spending a lot of time with priests, so I probably didn't think twice about the odd site of us walking into that theater: Franciscans in their long brown robes, alongside a group of seventeen-year-olds, some of whom got their knowledge of gangsta life from NWA (on cassette!) and some of whom grew up pretty close to scenes like those on the screen in front of us.

What continues to make the film great is its ability to speak to both of those audiences and exist somewhere betwee those two modes of understanding. Watching Ice Cube on the screen wasn't all that different from listening to Ice Cube. Hell, his character in the film mirrors his persona from "Straight Outta Compton." But the film's tragic climax (Ice Cube's little brother gunned down and bleeding to death while his mom and his boys look on), even with its sentiment and heavy-handed irony (he's about to escape the hood on a football scholarship), transcends the narrative of gangsta rap, the camera lingering on the blood and the dead kid's baby boy screaming in the middle of the chaos, in a way that song lyrics (even brilliant ones written by Eazy E) can't. No gangsta rap song I know has a moment like the coda of the Boyz film. The 'Cube character, who just got revenge on the gangbangers who killed his brother and already "haunted" by his own ruthlessness, tells Tre he made the right choice not riding along during the shooting.

post-debate

The best thing I've read today: Salon's report on the v.p. debate. The report lists Palin's non sequiturs. Q: When should we use nuclear weapons? A: Dangerous regimes shouldn't have nuclear weapons. Well worth reading. Palin evaded questions and recited memorized lines. Week two of tremendously effective GOP management of viewer/voter expectations.

One thing Salon neglects is Biden's specificity. I'm not a big fan but I admired the moments where he cited extremely specific legislation and demonstrated ease articulating details of the voting records of Obama, McCain, and himself. His responses were remarkably logocentric and, aside from when he referenced the death of his first wife, flat in terms of affect. Facts.

Sharp contrast to Palin who is all about affective connection: winks, raising a hand everytime she says "middle class" or "American people," the accent. Her definitive moment: she's called out for not answering the questions and says she doesn't plan to answer the questions the way the moderator wants her to and will instead speak to the American people. Brilliant move. A license to evade. Everything is a "gotcha" question, even if posed by an "American person" (like the voter who asked her about Pakistan) as opposed to reporter. "American people" does not include reporters, professors, actors, scientists, and people who live in California or NYC. Out of fairness, it's a continuum. Socially conservative, working-class, Christian, undecided voters in swing states are definitely "American people."

In happier election news, Nicole and I scored tickets to see Jay-Z tomorrow night at Cobo Hall, a free show that's doubling as a pro-Obama voter-registration event. I.E., only registered voters could score tickets. H to the Izzo.

pre-debate

Jagger/Richards once penned the lines: "Take me to the station/Put me on a train/I've got no expectations/to pass through here again." They wrote those lyrics before Sarah Palin started elementary school, so they probably didn't have the Palin-Biden debate in mind. But it seems like sentiment straight from the republican playbook: forget about decreasing expectations, we've got no expectations.

Last week McCain performed ingeniously. Leading up to his first debate, he crafts an erratic persona. Call off the debates... suspend the campaign (insert outraged voice of Bonasera the undertaker: "suspenda da campaign?!"). Talk of McCain as unprepared and overwhelmed ensues. Expectations lowered.

Now Sarah Palin hits the big media outlets. It appears she can't name a single newspaper. She can't think of any Supreme Court cases except Roe v Wade. She proudly refuses to answer many of the questions Katie Couric (!) asks. Katie Couric...she's more softball than Jennie Finch.

People...she's playing the expectations game. Hello! At this point, folks have NO EXPECTATIONS for her performance this evening. At this point if she can enunciate the words "New York Times" or "Dred Scott" we're going to be impressed.

sometimes they still got it

I know the official party line on The Onion is that it was funny seven years ago but has run its course. Their headlines still make me laugh though: "Members of Twisted Sister Now Willing To Take It." Here's a taste of the story:

In a stunning reversal of their long-stated reluctance to take it, members of heavy-metal band Twisted Sister announced Monday that, after 24 years of fervent refusal, they are now willing to take it. "I acknowledge that we promised not to take it anymore, but things change. The world is a different place today, and with that in mind, we would like to go on record as saying that, starting right now, we are going to take it," read a statement released by the band's lead singer, Dee Snider. "To clarify, we would still prefer not to take it, but as of now, taking it is an option that we would be open to. That is all." Bassist Mark "the Animal" Mendoza also stated that, in regards to what he wants to do with his life, he no longer solely wants to rock, but would instead prefer doing other things, such as raising a family and working as a claims adjuster in Rye, NY.

job market

Clancy says she's glad not to be looking for a job this year. I second that. I have no desire to hit the market anytime soon. But hey, I'm 34 so I certainly won't say "never again." I will say "not now" as geography, good rhet/comp colleagues, interesting and varied teaching responsibilities, and an environment where I do a good amount of research and writing (moreso than at my first job) all keep me happy.

I had mostly good experiences on the job hunt both times; both experiences, in 2002 and 2005, resulted in jobs. But interviewing and campus visiting often presented reminders that academic communities can be closed and homogenous. This reality always seemed in sharper relief during the interviews than during the actual employment, in large part because I generally didn't mesh well with places that were especially closed and homogenous and thus didn't end up there.

Sometimes it was big and noticable things, such as everybody being white. More often, though, it was little things. The chair driving me back to the hotel and talking to me for like twenty minutes about how great their public radio station's jazz show was. Nothing against this person--she was just being friendly and chatty. But the implication was: "you're an English professor, you must love NPR and jazz." I listen to NPR, but I dislike jazz. And my sense of things was that if I said "Do you know if there's a good old-school punk rock station?" I'd come off sounding like a rube.

Another thing, the ubiquitous, almost mythic question that always comes up about the proximity of a Whole Foods Store. Like the jazz thing, I've got nothing against Whole Foods or people who shop there. I don't mean to imply that shopping there makes a person "closed" or anything like that. It's just that, speaking for myself, there was often this assumption when I was looking for an academic job that I fit this certain image. And I didn't. I love to cook. Cooking is probably my favorite of my hobbies. I can make some mean Indian food and Italian food. I can cook a meal for twenty people, even in the little tiny kitchen at my house. I like to shop at places off the beaten path (love farmer's markets that have reasonable prices, love some of the Arab specialty stores in Dearborn). I just don't like the prices at Whole Foods, that's all.

I'd like to be on the market and ask that question about the local punk rock scene. Or in response to an interviewer touting their town's Whole Foods, say "Where's the closest Aldi's or Sav-A-Lot?" Maybe drop a question like "Is there a Chuck-E-Cheese up in here?"

Probably the closest I came to saying something like that happened at a campus visit to a fairly prestigious Catholic university in a major city. At the time, I was a huge fan of the Arizona Wildcats and the subject of college basketball came up. The faculty members who had taken me out to dinner were talking sports in that very reserved, distant, and dignified way, not so much as fans as much as spectators of a mass cultural phenom. They were discussing Big 10 teams and I was interjecting some comments about the Wilcats here and there. One of them commented that he had not even seen any west coast teams get any national tv coverage. Caught up in the moment, I loudly stated, "Yeah, Dick Vitale gives NO kind of love to the PAC-10." We were at some kind of Asian fusion restaurant and it was like one of those scenes in a sitcom where they play the sound effect of a needle being pulled from a record. Silence. "Err, I mean, the late start times of games converge with the admitted prominence of programs like Duke to preclude the likelihood of national broadcasts of competitions between squads from the Pacific Ten Conference." There, better.

Anyhow, happy to not have to hit the market this year. Good luck to everybody looking for a new gig.

an open letter

President Bush,

I'm trying to understand what you meant when you repeated the mantra "the fundamentals of our economy are sound" and then, last night, said that the entire economy is in "danger." Also, why did you tell Americans that spending more money was their patriotic duty even as many were going deeper into debt?

Now that you have proposed spending $700 billion of taxpayers' money to bail out the financial sector, do you still claim to oppose burdening American people with taxes? Do you still claim to be a proponent of "small government"? Isn't this $700 billion plan a case of government intervention in the marketplace?

Related to those matters, do you still support deregulation of the financial sector? Do you think your party's nominee should continue to express his support for deregulation? Or do you reckon he should suspend his campaign and thereby avoid questions about his leadership in the deregulation movement?

Mr. President, I agree with you that those who took on huge mortgage debts made foolish choices. This morning during my commute to work, callers to a local radio show here in Detroit talked about earning annual salaries of $35,000 and buying houses that cost two and three times more than my home. The other callers mostly complained about how unfair it was that they had to bail out those indviduals. Clearly, everyday people made bad decisions.

But I don't want them to live on the streets as a result of their bad choices. I don't want them (and me!) to lose our retirement accounts. I adhere to an ideology that you frequently say is outdated, outmoded, and failed--an ideology rooted in the belief that "Great Society" initiatives can lift up members of the culture. Am I resentful that I pay my mortgage and don't need bailing out? No way. The two people in my household who pay that mortgage both collected lots of federal financial aid when we were in college. So resentfulness would be hypocritical on our parts. Plus, while I acknowledge that foolish or greedy decisions on the part of everyday people contributed to this problem, I also acknowledge that banks and mortgage companies became predators, making a buck off foolish choices, preying on the vulnerable.

Based on your $700 billion proposal, it sounds like perhaps you also believe the government has a (sometimes expensive) role to play in people's lives. I'm glad that finally perhaps the two of us share some common ground. But I'm thinking maybe you should say that you now believe the government sometimes must be "big" and acknowledge that giving corporate America a blank check was a mistake. Maybe you should admit that you were wrong when you advocated for a "pure," unregulated, "free" market. You know how you used to always say "freedom isn't free"? Maybe your new mantra should be "free markets aren't free."

Just saying.

to debate or not to debate

Okay, McCain wants to call off the debate because he needs to go back to the senate to govern us through the financial crisis. Is the senate going to be in session Friday night at 9:00 and the subsequent ninety minutes?

What a lose-lose situation our country is in. Bail out the financial institutions and the CEOs who perpetrated predatory lending practices and reveled in the profits that deregulation allowed walk away with their golden parachutes--parachutes subsidized by tax dollars. Don't bail out and people lose their retirement accounts and God knows what else.

Back to the debate. If McCain doesn't want to show up, fine. I think Obama should still show up and use the time to explain to the American people how he's going to keep us out of Great Depression Part Deux. Hopefully he'll say more than that "let's help Wall Street and Main Street" line.

student work

Not much time to blog, as I'm in the midst of reading loads of student work. Two sections of first-year comp-ers are analyzing one of the presidential candidate's positions on one particular issue. For two weeks we've been distinguishing between idea vs. opinion, arguments/position papers vs. analyses, and also talking about the overlap between those categories and genres. Their objective in this first assignment involves picking a candidate and an issue (McCain on gay marriage, for instance) and looking at the candidate's official platform, his history with that issue, and the ins and outs of his rhetoric when it comes to campaigning on that issue.

In my upper-level exposition course (a class geared toward education majors who have additional writing and linguistics requirements on our campus), meanwhile, students have been studying the concept of "voice," reading short pieces like Sarah Vowell's essay on the Godfather and Chuck Klosterman's piece on the Pirate movies, and writing their own narratives about their relationships with popular culture.

weekend roundup

Friday proved a good day. A lunch meeting and the desire to work out at the rec center took me to campus where, unbeknownst to me, the department's promotion and tenure committee was meeting. In what seemed like a "go see the principal" moment, the chair summoned me to her office and informed me that my tenure case handily made it through the department. Outside review letters arrived, the committee read and discussed them, and now the case goes to the college level in November. Then the faculty senate, then the provost, then the board of regents. If I keep making it past each committee, I'll get final notification from the regents in May. Postscript to outside reviewers: Due to weird, vaguely medieval practices, I'm not permitted to know who you are. Apparently you said nice things. Thanks.

Friday night, a family birthday party that involved playing cards and watching a particularly nasty Tigers fiasco where, speaking of medieval, Gary Sheffield tried to get all medieval on the ass of Fausto Carmona but ended up bruised. Nice metaphor for the whole Tigers season. Saturday morning, door-to-door canvassing with the Berkley Obama team. Noteworthy memory from this week's canvassing: Two separate older men commented that since Obama reminded them of JFK, they planned to tune in to the debate and see if he can perform as well as JFK did vs. Nixon. The Berkley team also talked me into hosting a debate party this Friday. Saturday night, a big Ramadan (month of fasting) banquet at school hosted by the Muslim Student Association, one of the biggest and most active student groups on my campus. Delicious food, good company, and entertainment by Baba Ali, "first Muslim youtube celebrity." My sister and her family joined us and I think everybody had a good time.

Sunday morning, Nicole and I visited the new Crossroads Soup Kitchen, now located a couple blocks from the old Motown studio. We're organizing our church's "Crossroads day" next month. They serve 700 people every Sunday, one of the few places in Detroit that has such a service on Sunday, when most soup kitchens shut down. After Mass, I worked in the yard all day, cleaning gutters and getting the garden ready for the winter. Made pasta and meatballs and had Nicole's family over for dinner, after which we played cards and watched another Lions fiasco (gee, is there a trend here?).

Aside from reading some rough drafts from students and doing a couple short writing sessions, I did very little work over the weekend, which means today I should not be taking a break to blog. On Friday, I'm leading a "Civic Literacies in First-Year Comp" workshop with our writing program faculty, so prepping for that is a big chunk of this week's work. Plus, Lew and I have swapped drafts of our collaborative empathy article, so reading and synthesizing and even revising is also on the to-do list.

dowd's homage to the west wing and obama

Anybody interested in this has probably already seen it, but I'll post anyway. On Saturday, NYT's Maureen Dowd conjured Aaron Sorkin's voice and wrote an imaginary dialogue between Barack Obama and Sorkin's fictional Prez Bartlet from 'The West Wing', aka, greatest television series ever next to 'Freaks and Geeks' and possibly 'Big Love'.

Santogold

Anybody else digging Santogold? Best new record I've bought in a long time. As an artist, she's hard to classify. New wave? Soul? Dance-pop? Her voice is beautiful and the genre crossing is very cool. Check her out: http://www.myspace.com/santogold

community standards

The WPA listerv (for anybody out there who doesn't know--an email discussion list for people who direct college writing programs and, more broadly, for anybody who teaches writing at the college level) is busy with messages in which people share their "Palin" names. Apparently, there's a website where you type in your name and the site spits a "Palin" name at you. "Boulder Hockeypuck." "Igloo Moosehunt." And so on. Wacky web fun, I guess. So far only one person has complained that the political discussion veers too far from the focus of the list; I suspect more complaints will follow.

I don't find the "Palin Name Generator" offensive per se. Sure, the site jabs at the names of the candidate's children. And yes, it's another example of the non-sequitor, cultural dismissal of Palin's leisure/lifestyle/personal affinities/geographical affiliation. But offensive? Probably not. Off topic? Who cares?

Still, the whole discussion seems like an interesting articulation of community standards. The "Palin Name Generator" strikes me as a safe, middle-of-the-road kind of humor. Not too edgy. Not too biting. And if there's an implicit politics behind the site and the listserv discussion, it's a moderate-to-liberal politics. Safe.

But for the sake of argument, here's a hypothetical. What if the site poked fun at the Afrocentric names of the children of an African-American public figure? Would the site still be funny? Would the sharing of those "funny" names still meet the community standards of a moderate-to-liberal discussion site?

on my reading list...

--Cathy Chaput, Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University
--Nancy Welch, Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World
--Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie
--Anne Colby et al, Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement

who is running again?

Is it starting to seem like this presidential race is between Obama and Palin? I feel as if Biden has disappeared and he's been in my own metro area at least three times since his convention. Unless something drastic happens in terms of Biden's media presence, then I don't see him having much of an impact at all in this election.

I could say the same thing about McCain. More and more stories about McCain contain the phrase "actuary tables," which may go a long way in explaining why Palin keeps on dominating the headlines.

Beyond that, Palin continues to capture the national imagination. She polarizes. She puts the so-called culture wars right back into the collective ethos. She attracts huge ratings (mazel tov, Charlie Gibson!). She fires up the far right. She fires up both the far and moderate left even more. Despite ubiquitous predictions that the Palin bump, or fad, or fascination, or whatever you want to call it, will disappear...well, she's still all over the place.

She makes an affective connection with the far right. It's about identification. It's about demagogue appeal. It's about anti-intellectualism. It's about making the case that being an every-person is more important than good judgment and intelligence.

Even more interesting, though, the left's affective response. Over and over again, I hear "she scares me." Many seem to fear not only her platform but, more broadly, who she is. In terms of religion and ideology and leisure-time pursuits and lifestyle. She put a tanning bed in the governor's mansion. She eloped. She went to community college before university. She only traveled abroad once in her whole life. Everything about her becomes a signifier. I'm not faulting anyone for following these signifiers (full disclosure: she scares me too.), as they are endlessly fascinating. For instance, her response to Charlie Gibson's questions about gender: in my family, it's a non issue, you do what you want to do. Brilliant and, yes, scary. A subtle jab at affirmative action, at the notion of feminism, a jab at Obama and H-Clinton too.

I wonder, though, if the left's (including the moderate left's) affective disdain for Sarah Palin will become the Obama campaign's fatal flaw. Too much about the hunting and the praying and the shotgun weddings (her own and her kid's) and the rest. Not enough about her disengagement...she didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was. Not enough about her record on civil liberties...umm, an advocate of small government asking a librarian "hypothetical questions" about banning books?

A friend emailed me last night and fearfully called Obama our generation's Adelai Stevenson. too thoughtful, too engaged, too intellectual for the era. Here we are. Obama vs. Palin. Two weeks ago, I'm saying I like Obama's chances. Now, I'm kinda scared.

scenery

Two weeks into the term and so far I've made good on my plan to spend part of Mondays and Wednesdays writing at the coffeeshop. Plugging away at the empathy project--trying to theorize empathy at once as a material rhetoric and a pedagogy--and making a firm commitment to (stop staring at interview data and) start writing up the service learning data from last year.

I read the Detroit Free Press, skim the Times, maybe do the crossword, drink coffee, and the start writing. Distractions are anything but. I like the noise, the coffee smell that gets into the fabric of my backpack, most of all the mix of old and young faces. Always law and medical students lost in expensive books. The elderly guy with the accent (Eastern European?) who just asked me for my copy of the NYTimes. Sometimes he uses coffee stirrers to eat little packs of jelly from the condiment cart. Usually at least one person reading a Bible and taking notes. Dude who has loudly used the word "asshole" a half dozen times: "you can't find a parking space at the market because of cell phone assholes." Elderly guy has given him a section of my Times, I think to shut him up, but he's on a first-name basis with the subjects of each item he reads: Tiny Fey is "Tina," Alan Greenspan is "Alan."

Why write here? Because I constantly take breaks (sometimes a break is just a moment to look around) and the faces, the sounds, the smells, fill those breaks and become the next sentence on the page.

multi-tasking vs focusing

Sometimes too much discretionary time paralyzes me. Case in point: I did more writing in the last week--the first week of my fall semester--than I did during any single week during the summer. I sat my ass down at Caribou on the better part of three of my non-teaching days and worked on the empathy paper that I'm hoping is going to become my 4Cs presentation as well as a co-written article with my good pal Lew. Having done some planning, Lew and I are each composing separately right now.

Okay, there's a context for the alleged increase in productivity. I spent much of the summer *reading* for this article and for several other projects. I spent part of the summer coding some of last year's service learning data. I prepped for and went to several conferences, including a long visit to The American Democracy Project's meeting in Utah.

Excuses, excuses. The fact is, I do a better job divvying up time among teaching and writing than I do taking full advantage of long stretches of no teaching. Weird. My colleague Liz (go Liz!) just got tenure and is collecting on the post-tenure sabbatical in 2009. If the tenure gods smile on me next year and I get that sabbatical the following year, I'm wondering about the best ways to get myself ready to use that time for all it's worth.

"you're hurting America...stop"

Jon Stewart got much-deserved attention during the last presidential campaign when he spoke those words to Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. Stewart summarized what's wrong with the cable news model of political discourse: take two partisan hacks and let them shout talking points at each other.

I thought of Stewart's famous appearance on Hardball as I read about MSNBC firing Keith Olbermann from his anchor job. I haven't watched Olbermann much, so I'm not going to say he's a hack, but certainly I've seen enough to recognize his comfortable place within that cable news paradigm. He yells. He goes for the easy laugh. He rehearses soundbites. He doesn't do much to acnowledge the spaces between (or, for that matter, farther to the right and the left of) the positions of the two parties. Democrats, good. Republicans, bad. Me, Tarzan. You, Jane.

That's not political discourse. A wide spectrum of ideas exists. That means, there are more than just two positions on issues. There are more than just "I like Obama" and "I don't like Obama." Pointing that out is not a call for whitebread, moderate politics, or for the removal of antagonism and dissent and argument from the public sphere. We need MORE of those things. But the arguing and antagonizing needs to come from a spectrum of voices. Not just two.

Even the reaction to Olbermann's demotion fits into the too-neat, black-and-white, pro-con trap. Democrats see it as an attack on their guy and bemoan that they don't have their answer to FoxNews. Republicans see the story (or rather FRAME the story) as comeuppance to the liberal, out-of-touch media.

Part of the problem is that the left wants to innovate by imitation. They reason: conservatives have right-wing talk radio so we'll start AirAmerica and conservatives have FoxNews so we'll have our Olbermann. The brilliant, hysterical comedian Patton Oswalt--who leans far to the left--has a great bit about how right-wing media knows how to rock ("we'll be right back with more FoxNews, but now, taking us to the break, The White Stripes") but "our side," a phrase he uses with a wink, does not ("coming up on NPR, the fifth installment of our interview with Joyce Carol Oates, but in the meantime here's a string quartet from Bolivia"). I'm paraphrasing his bit big time, but you get the point...

Partisan media is fun. Partisan media is theatre. Tucker Carlson saying he'll eat a shoe. Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly showing clips of a fired-up preacher (In a scene during the final season of The West wing, the Kristen Chenoweth character is telling the candidate she handles about his upcoming media appearances and says something like "you'll be talking to mean Irish men"). AirAmerica hosts using the phrase "baby mama" in reference to a seventeen-year-old girl. It's entertaining. A lot more exciting than reading a ten-page article. But, as Jon Stewart pointed out so memorably, it hurts.

netflix, as time allows

Netflix, the coolest thing about the internet. Ease, low cost, great selection. Love it. My friend Willy--a great guy who runs our campus rec center, remembers your name for life the first time he scans your i.d. card, and always has interesting things to say about movies--has convinced me to start watching 'The Wire' asap. I've never seen an episode. He offers familiar raves about the show: stark representation of drugs and politics, consistently high quality of the writing. But, as Detroit's real-life mayor finally steps down in disgrace, Willy also says it's a great time to dig into The Wire's plots about urban corruption. You talked me into it, Willy, in a week or two I'm going to start Season 1. I'll probably become obsessed and watch all the seasons in quick succession. (I did this with the Harry Potter books, reading all seven back-to-back immediately after the finale's release...I've got some kind of mild OCD thing when it comes to pop culture.)

Speaking of obsessions and netflix, I've been working my way through the giallos, an Italian, grindhouse-ish fusing of the "low" genres of horror and murder-mystery. Named for the cheap paperbacks that the films adapt ("giallo" = Italian for "yellow"), the giallos couldn't be wierder. At first glance, the giallo looks like a so-called police-procedural: a violent crime, a good deal of gore, a detailed investigation. But they tend toward the surreal: close-ups of a drop of blood, extended musical interludes where perspective shifts to the killer as s/he skulks through a cityscape. The best of the bunch: Dario Argento's Deep Red, about a musician investigating the murder of a psychic who foretold her own killing. The film disturbs and the music (Argento collaborated with the Italian rock band Goblin, aka The Goblins) is as memorable as the killings that serve as Deep Red's centerpieces. Check it.

joe klein

Joe Klein, writing for Time Magazine:

The story of the day out here in Minneapolis is the McCain campaign's war against the press. This has been building for some time. Those of us who have criticized the candidate--and especially those of us who enjoyed good relations with McCain in the past--have been subject to off-the-record browbeating and attempted bullying all year. But things have gotten much worse in recent days: there was McCain's rude, bizarre interview with Time Magazine last week. Yesterday, McCain refused to an interview with Larry King, for God's sake, because Campbell Brown had been caught in the commission of journalism on CNN the night before, asking McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds what decisions Sarah Palin had made as commander-in-chief of the Alaska national guard. (There was an answer that the unprepared Bounds didn't have: she had deployed them to fight fires.)

So what's going on here? Two things. McCain is just plain angry at us. By the evidence presented in the utterly revealing Time interview, he's ballistic. This is a politician who needs to see himself as the man on the white horse, boldly traversing a muddy field...any intimations that he's gotten muddied in the process, or has decided to throw mud, are intolerable.

The second thing is more insidious: Steve Schmidt has decided, for tactical reasons, to slime the press. He wants the public to believe that there is an unfair--sexist (you gotta love it)--personal assault going on against Palin and her family. This is a smokescreen, intended to divert attention from the very real and responsible vetting that is taking place in the media--about the substance of Palin's record as mayor and governor. Sure, there are a few outliers--and the tabloid press--who have fixed on baby stories. That was inevitable....the flip side of the personal stories that the McCain team thought would work to their advantage--Palin's moose-hunting and wolf-shooting, and her admirable decision to have a Down Syndrome baby. And yes, when we all fix on the same story, whether it's a hurricane or a little-known politician, a zoo ensues. But the media coverage of the Palin story has been well within the bounds of responsibility. Schmidt is trying to make it seem otherwise, a desperate tactic.

There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is "a task from God." The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.

hurricane relief

Here's a link to follow if you are in a position to give to the Southeast Louisiana Red Cross.

from DEEP in the archives

The zucchini plants continue to produce lots and lots of zucchini. I even dusted the cobwebs from this old classic: zucchini squares. Couldn't be easier. Combine 3 cups sliced zucchini, 1 cup bisquick, 1/2 cup parmesan cheese, 1/2 cup diced onion, 1/4 cup olive oil, 4 eggs, 2T dried parsley, pinch of oregano, pinch of pepper, couple pinches of salt. Bake in a cakepan for 35 minutes, 350 degrees. Cool and then cut into squares. This was standard at picnics when I was a kid, but I hadn't made any for years.

yes we can

Barack Obama's great rhetorical talent seems to be giving his audience permission to feel optimism. Cynicism, apathy, and doubt are easy defaults, especially, perhaps, for those of us who came of age in the 80s and early 90s. Reagonomics. Ironic popular culture. David Letterman. Social movements of the previous generation providing not inspiration but rather punchlines on sitcoms like Family Ties. Julianna Hatfield singing "I Got No Idols."

We watched Obama's acceptance speech at a party attended mostly by members of our church. Left-leaning Catholics, some who live in the city and some in the suburbs, some black and some white. A group as partisan as the crowd gathered in that huge football stadium, to be sure, who clapped at Obama's punchy quips ("eight is enough") and promises (tax cuts for 95% of Americans, health care for all). A crowd mindful of yesterday's Free Press story about new census data that designates Detroit as the most impoverished large city in the country. A crowd that appreciated Obama's call for optimism.

In addition to optimism, the other feeling in the room was history. The making of history. Not just because Obama is the first black American to accept a major party's domination for president of the U.S. History because we've lived through too many years of an illegal, immoral, pre-emptive war. History because deficits are so high and so many people don't have health care. History. Where were you when people felt like they could be a little bit optimistic?

kucinich today

Today's electric speech in Denver came from Ohio's own Dennis Kucinich. Here's the full text of his speech:

It's Election Day 2008. We Democrats are giving America a wake-up call. Wake up, America. In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the neo-con artists seized the economy and have added 4 trillion dollars of unproductive spending to the national debt. We now pay four times more for defense, three times more for gasoline and home heating oil and twice what we paid for health care.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their health care, their pensions. Trillions of dollars for an unnecessary war paid with borrowed money. Tens of billions of dollars in cash and weapons disappeared into thin air, at the cost of the lives of our troops and innocent Iraqis, while all the president's oilmen are maneuvering to grab Iraq's oil.

Borrowed money to bomb bridges in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. No money to rebuild bridges in America. Money to start a hot war with Iran. Now we have another cold war with Russia, while the American economy has become a game of Russian roulette.

If there was an Olympics for misleading, mismanaging and misappropriating, this administration would take the gold. World records for violations of national and international laws. They want another four-year term to continue to alienate our allies, spend our children's inheritance and hollow out our economy.

We can't afford another Republican administration. Wake up, America. The insurance companies took over health care. Wake up, America. The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing.

Wake up, America. The speculators took over Wall Street. Wake up, America. They want to take your Social Security. Wake up, America. Multinational corporations took over our trade policies, factories are closing, good paying jobs lost.

Wake up, America. We went into Iraq for oil. The oil companies want more. War against Iran will mean $10-a-gallon gasoline. The oil administration wants to drill more, into your wallet. Wake up, America. Weapons contractors want more. An Iran war will cost 5 to 10 trillion dollars.

This administration can tap our phones. They can't tap our creative spirit. They can open our mail. They can't open economic opportunities. They can track our every move. They lost track of the economy while the cost of food, gasoline and electricity skyrockets. They skillfully played our post-9/11 fears and allowed the few to profit at the expense of the many. Every day we get the color orange, while the oil companies, the insurance companies, the speculators, the war contractors get the color green.

Wake up, America. This is not a call for you to take a new direction from right to left. This is call for you to go from down to up. Up with the rights of workers. Up with wages. Up with fair trade. Up with creating millions of good paying jobs, rebuilding our bridges, ports and water systems. Up with creating millions of sustainable energy jobs to lower the cost of energy, lower carbon emissions and protect the environment.

Up with health care for all. Up with education for all. Up with home ownership. Up with guaranteed retirement benefits. Up with peace. Up with prosperity. Up with the Democratic Party. Up with Obama-Biden.

Wake up, America. Wake up, America. Wake up, America.

a cooking frenzy

Mindful that this is the last week of summer vacation, I performed two of my favorite everyday summer rituals today. Biked to Caribou and spent much of the morning and afternoon reading for a 4Cs paper and article in progress.

Back home, I cooked up a storm, using mostly stuff right from the garden. A big pan of zucchini parmesan is in the oven. As is an equally large pan of tepsi, a dish my sister taught me to make. Basically, you sautee slices of eggplant, onions, tomatos, and potatoes and layer the various slices in a pan with tomato paste, freshly squeezed lemon, and salt. Easiest thing in the world to make, and very delicious.

sunday

Back from church, which was nice, and a "quick" stop at Costco, which was not so nice. Costco has a reputation for treating its workers fairly well and gets bonus points for not being Sam's Evil Empire. I like buying cheese--especially the yummy fresh mozzarella--at Costco, but that's about it. How do I let Nicole talk me into going there on a weekend? Wall. To. Wall. People. People in a hurry to get to the expensive produce, that is. Or maybe the gross frozen tacquito samples. At least three of those oversized carts rammed the backs of my ankles. Ouch.

Garden's going nuts, especially the zucchini. Better late than never. I made a big pan of zucchini parmesan yesterday. The day before that, a pizza, with sauce, cheese, and thin slices of zucchini that I sauteed with lots of garlic. About four or five eggplants are just about ready to be picked too.

Got an acceptance e-mail for CCCC in San Francisco. I hope that many, many fellow bloggers will be there too.

Our pub crawl on Friday night was fun. Pretty much the entire Berkley Dem. club showed up and we all enjoyed a little bowling, a little beer, a little v.p. speculation. Last night our friends J and J picked us up and took us to the comedy club in Royal Oak. Today, after a little reading, my brother-in-law's birthday party. I'll probably whip up a couple quick pizzas (been on a bigtime pizza kick) to take since I got my Costco cheese on. Speaking of v.p. selection...Biden seems like kind of a ho-hum pick, but I think his Catholicism and working-class background are probably good for some electoral votes in Michigan and Ohio. Hoping for someone NOT supportive of the Iraq invasion was probably a pipe dream on my part.

Lastly, currently reading: The Gargoyle, which is a pulpy, fun read. My brother really liked the book and let me borrow his copy. Also, Other People's Stories and Notes on the Heart: Affective Issues in the Writing Classroom, both for the research that my friend L and I are doing on empathy. Finally, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I never read in its entirety before, and am doing so now for our church's book club meeting this week.

geeking it up

Wow, what a sucked-in-by-the-hype nerd I am. By all accounts, Obama's going to name his VP in the next few hours, and I. Can't. Wait. I should be working on the empathy research, and I'm glued to news websites monitoring the speculation. Hillary Clinton was never vetted. Chet Edwards from Texas has a double-secret spot on the shortlist. Evan Bayh is out running errands and looking coy. The coverage is straight up TMZ. The press is absolutely stalking Joe Biden.

Bayh and Biden seem like boring choices to me. Isn't Obama opening himself up to further charges if he chooses an "establishment" (long-time, visible, moderate) democrat like one of these guys? Just saying. Now the reports about the Obama camp never getting all of H-Clinton's financials and doing other things common to the vetting process. Haven't the financials already been released? Hasn't she already been vetted? I'm no fan of H-Clinton, what with her support for the Patriot Act and the Iraq invasion, but at least she brings a little pizazz. I'm rooting for Sebelius of Kansas or Napolitano of Arizona.

Tonight my town's democrat club has its annual pub crawl, so I'm looking forward to lots of VP talk this evening. And friends from the Peace and Justice group at my church are having an Obama party next Thursday and a house party for House candidate Gary Peters the following week. Plus, my lovely wife is our precinct delegate, which means lots of get-out-the-vote stuff in our neighborhood. I'm baffled, given the crappy state of the economy, that Michigan's in play, but again I'm a sucker for the hype so I'm kinda sorta happy to be in a swing state. Stay tuned...

rediscovered

While working out yesterday, I punched up Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" on the i-pod and the noisy melodies and the tight thematic focus of the lyrics (anxiety, the thin line between loneliness and human connectedness) reminded me why the album is one of my favorites.

I bought YHF in Tucson the day after I defended my dissertation. NPR and just about every website I read had run stories about the band's label dumping Wilco because of YHF's alleged lack of commercial viability. The band streamed the record online, got a boatload of hits, and an indie label released the record in Spring 02. I had listened to bits of the YHF stream, and I liked the band's "Mermaid Avenue" on which they wrote music to accompany heretofore unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics. Plus, buying the record felt like a nice thumb of the nose at the evil empire, i.e. the corporat label that couldn't recognize greatness.

Listening yesterday, I remembered how the lyrics--written *before* the terrorist attacks--create a kind of 9/11 narrative. Early songs, slow and melodic, seem to capture, eerily, the horror of the morning. In "Kamera," the surreal line "phone my family/tell them I'm lost on the sidewalk." In "Jesus, Etc.," the melancholy "tall buildings shake/voices escape/singing sad sad songs." In the middle of the record, a song like "Ashes of American Flags" is full of ambivalence--patriotism and dissent jumbled together. The pace picks up on the second half of the record. The Beatlesque "I'm the Man Who Loves You." The single "Heavy Metal Drummer." Snappier, upbeat tunes, with lots of nostalgia ("I sincerely miss those heavy metal bands"). And the record ends with what can be read as poignant resistance to continued flexing of western might; I always saw the self-explanatory "Pot Kettle Black" as a response to the hypocrisy coming out of the mouths of U.S. leaders (not unlike "War on War," from the first half of the record).

Before the band's label dumbed Wilco, know what the record's original release date was? (Cue creepy orchestral music worthy of a Nostradamus documentary...) Yep, September 11.

YHF gets a bad rap. Dad rock. NPR rock. Suburb rock. You know, the branch of indie that's yuppie friendly. (Favorite moment in the new movie "Pineapple Express"...the insecure , slacker, Seth Rogen character tells his girlfriend who's going to be going to college soon "You're going to start listening to Godspeed You Black Emperor and The Shins" [and dump me is the implicit rest of the sentence]) But forget that noise. This is a record that weaves together old-fashioned radio rock, artsy German noiserock, and hints of the alt-country genre that Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy practically invented. Brilliant stuff.

nine years and counting

Nicole and I married on August 21, 1999, nine years ago today. What a curvy road we've driven through three states, three bar exams, three universities, indian restaurants and estate sales, dollar movies and card games, democrat meetings and door-to-door canvassing, a casino Christmas, a crappy two-term presidency, the acquisition of two most excellent dogs, a claypit, the front row of the B-52s and Tom Tom Club on the reservation, and lots of pumpkin pasta. I'm way luckier than I deserve to be.

top ten pop culture artifacts or events that don't appeal to me whatsoever

10. The Olympics. The events strike me as boring. Guys swimming laps? Teen-agers doing gymnastic routines? Really? I'm a big fan of both The Human Spirit and Wheaties, but I can't get into "the games."

9. Pink Floyd. I've never owned a Pink Floyd record. Even their fast songs seem too slow. I can't explain why I like The Who's Tommy but have no interest in this band's output.

8. TV shows about judges. Judge Judy. Judge Wopner. Judget Mathis. Yawn. It's hard to make small-claims cases matter to anybody other than 1) the person who's out the hundred bucks, and 2) my dad.

7. The Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise. This is a local pick. The annual weekend when baby boomers drive gas guzzling cars up and down the Detroit area's main north-south artery and fans set up lawn chairs on sidewalks and parking lots so their kids can breathe the fumes from as close to the road as possible. The "Cruise" is a great weekend for anybody who appreciates classic cars, littering, port-o-potties, oil company profits, and gridlocked traffic.

6. Nick Cave. This guy's critical acclaim makes The Sopranos look like a Pauly Shore vehicle and he's down right iconic among indie rock fans. He played at one of the Lollapalloozas I attended during college and, I swear, he sounded like a frog. A very sad frog. I don't have anything against melancholy in music per se, but, for me, Cave saps rock and roll of its adventure and sense of play.

5. Bright Eyes. A couple of years ago, my students couldn't stop talking about Bright Eyes. How does a teen-aged boy decide to perform rock music under the name "Bright Eyes"? I'd love to know the backstory. I appreciate his politics (he toured with the anti-Bush Vote for Change tour in 2004, which is how I came to see a Bright Eyes live performance) but, like Mr. Cave, Mr. Eyes takes himself way too seriously.

4. Hockey. This is *almost* a local pick. In Detroit, hockey's as popular as any of pro sports' big three. My five-paragraph essay about why hockey doesn't appeal to me would contain body paragraphs that address the following three ideas. First, I don't understand a lot of the rules (What beef, for instance, do the officials have with players who commit "icing"--which I think means hitting the puck too far down the ice--especially given that it's okay to hit players from the other team?). Which brings me to my second hypothetical body paragraph, I don't like to watch people fight. Third, those Red Wings flags that Detroiters fly from their car windows...way tacky. Postscript number one: my first two reasons could also fit in a five-paragraph essay about why rugby doesn't appeal to me. Postscript number two: from a Freudian point-of-view, my lack of affinity for fighting (and much of my political ideology) might originate in my grandma's insistence, circa 1978, that we call the card game "war" by the more benign name "steal-a-pile." Postscript number three: if you're going to doctor up the name of the game to exclude things that are bad, why condone stealing?! Postscript number four: I think car dealerships in Detroit affixed those Red Wings flags to all SUVs in the 1990s.

3. The Big Lebowski. --Insert sound effect of needle being abruptly pulled off a record-- What? How can you not love this movie? Dude, give it another shot. I love most Coen Brothers films (especially Blood Simple and Fargo), but the Lebowski movie totally and utterly eludes me. Including this choice feels risky. I mean, this is like a pop culture litmus test. Sorry, just being honest.

2. The 'His Dark Materials' trilogy. I know people who absolutely rave about these books and respond to my dislike of it with shock and awe. I couldn't get through the first installment. I love the Harry Potter books. I love most things that piss off conservative Catholics. But I don't dig on Golden Compass.

1. Divas who hit high notes simply because they can. I'm talking to you, Mariah Carey. I'm talking to you, every female singer who ever appeared on American Idol. Not every song needs to explore a half a dozen octaves. Aretha Franklin, Beyonce, Big Mama Thorton all have/had tremendous range and one of the reasons why all three equal awesome is that none feel/felt obligated to show that range constantly.

...so how about you? what would your top ten look like?

let us now praise famous men, part 2

Mercy, mercy me. Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is in jail. How bad-ass is Detroit? Our mayor is behind bars.

More remarkable than the arrest itself? The speed of the media response. The arrest was a few hours ago, and the Free Press website boasts the story itself, video of the arrest, six op-ed pieces by big name columnists calling for him to step down and/or calling on the governor to remove him from office, person-on-the-street reactions and numerous other side-bar pieces, Barack Obama's statement about the arrest (!), the obligatory "here's what the national media's saying" synthesis, a photo montage of past Kilpatrick scandals, full text of Kilpatrick's words in the courtroom, and various PDFs of official documents like the memo appointing a Kilpatrick staffer the acting mayor.

let us now praise famous men

Will any of my students--past, present, or future--every write anything as widely read as Gilbert Arenas' blog? For that matter, will I ever write anything that has half the circulation of said blog? Before he became "Agent Zero," Arenas was "Robin" to Jason Gardner's "Batman" at the University of Arizona. Fall, 1999. Freshmen guards. Proverbial big men on campus. And enrolled in a first-year composition course taught by yours truely.

Tucson media followed Arenas and Gardner closely because they made for great stories. Flashy California kid with a penchant for pissing off Lute Olson (Arenas) and quiet, tireless Indiana kid who averaged something like thirty-nine minutes of playing time per game (Gardner) who became inseperable on campus, young starters on a team full of stars-to-be. Loren Woods. Richard Jefferson. Luke Walton, who had to put up with "who's your daddy?" chants from opposing teams' student sections and "is your dad disappointed you aren't at UCLA?" questions from every journalist in pac-10 land. Future Globetrotter (and fan of old school Nikes and striped socks) Gene Edgerson, who got negative press (how could he not put the Wildcats first?!) for red-shirting so he could finish his education degree student-teaching at a local kindergarden. Extremely tall basketball player teaching five-year-olds. What a photo op. Guys destined for the NBA sat the bench on this team.

Arenas' popularity definitely trickled into the classroom. On the first day of school, I had to ask one of the young women in the class to wait until after classtime to get his autograph. And that was two months before the season even started. Sometimes I wonder if any of my former students will ever write a New York Times bestseller, or a manifesto that will change the course of human history, or a series of lucrative greeting cards. Maybe. In the meantime, one of those former students, Agent Zero, is last year's Weblog Awards winner for Best Celebrity Blog. Yep, he beat Rosie O'Donnell and that kid from Stand By Me and Star Trek. Congrats, Gilbert, on the b-ball prowess as well as the blogging prowess. But would a shout-out to the U of A composition program kill you?

blur

As always, summer is the blurriest season, the season with less routine and more aspirations. I'll write for how many hours per week? I'll read how many books and articles? My dad, an elementary school teacher, used to start bemoaning summer's quickness earlier and earlier each year. It's the middle of June, summer's almost over. I inherited some of those clockwatching tendencies. Not that the prospect of a new academic year doesn't excite me, it's just that I know I'll miss the bike riding, the digging in the garden, the chance to spend entire days working on research and writing at Caribou Coffee.

The inevitable "so you're off work until September?" conversations irritate me and I've got my answer ("well, teaching's only forty percent of my job...") all queued up. And I've done pretty well in the productivity department: wrote a book review for the WPA journal, finished work and sent off an article based on a 'revise and resubmit', organized last year's service learning data for coding, gave a paper at RSA, attended American Democracy Project seminar in Utah, put together a PowerPoint on service learning for fall writing program meeting, and started reading for a new project on empathy and teaching. BUT...truth be told, I do feel as if I become a part-time worker bee in the summer. I've volunteered with two different political campaigns. I've twice gone down to my folks' house for long weekends. I've played with the dogs and gardened and watched a bunch of netflix movies. Off work until September? To an extent, yes. Blurry summer, another reason to be thankful for a sweet job and a sweet life.

so far

The garden so far has yielded:

--Kohlrabi. One of my favorite veggies. Sliced and eaten raw, you can't beat it.
--Grape tomatoes. The full-sized are still green, but these tasty treats are turning red. So far we've eaten them in salad with...
--Cucumbers. I was starting to worry that the SPRAWLING vines were just going to sprawl. But today I picked four nice-sized 'cukes. Each time I eat a home-grown cucumber I swear I'll never buy one at the grocery store again.
--Berries. Thank you, former home-owner, for the awesome currants and rasberry bushes. Rasberries rarely even make it into the house, so I haven't cooked with them at all. Currants have made a nice mix-in for rice prepared with almonds and various herbs. I've also sauteed them with onions and greens. There are still loads of them out there too!
--Fresh Herbs. They've been good this year: cilantro, parsley, marjoram, mint, tarragon, thyme. Forgot to plant basil. Didya know that one cup of parsley has 100% of the daily recommended vitamins A and C? I had a bunch of barley in the cupboard and made a barley version of tabouli, using equal parts mint and parsley. Really good.

Favorite time of the year? Yes.

sublime jams

Ever experience a cultural event--a 'happening,' to borrow 60s lingo for a moment--so special that you know history is all around you? For those who believe that Detroit's musical heritage is something special, history happened last night.

At the annual Concert of Colors festival, storied record producer, performer, and multi-instrumentalist Don Was assembled what he called a Detroit Super Session, part old-time musical review (house band hosting a series of performers), part multi-act gig (think early 70s Detroit shows where some combination of Alice Cooper, the Stooges, MC5, Mitch Ryder, and Ted Nugent would share a bill), and part celebration of sonic and ethnic multiculturalism in Detroit.

I got to the Opera House early, brought some reading, and staked out a front-and-center seat. And the show didn't fail to bring together some of my favorite artists from the last forty years. Was played bass with the family punk band The Muldoons (hands down the best live act in Detroit right now), as the Muldoon brothers (9 and 14 years old) wailed through a version of "Chubby Bunny." The Was-led houseband hosted Mick Collins of the Dirtbombs, who sang a slow and soulful version of "Stop," during which I missed D'bombs bassist Ko's backing vocals and the loud and agressive stylings of the rest of the D'bombs but really appreciated Collins' voice (the guy's got some serious vocal chops). The houseband also backed The Sisters Lucas, Lola Morales, Mitch Ryder, and the poet John Sinclair of MC5 fame, feeding the excited audience some excellent Americana, soul, salsa, spoken word, and rock to chew on. One song per performer, no matter how legendary.

The houseband surrendered its spot for several performances. The reunited Black Merda--my favorite performance of the night--did a funky version of "Cynthy Ruth" and proved they're not just a great '60s band, not just "the first black rock band," not just a great psychedelic act, and not just a great Detroit act. They rock. Period. Was played bass with the Detrot Cobras on "As Long as I Have You," after which DC's guitarist took disposable-camera pictures of Was, John Sinclair, and herself posing with various musicians. Emblematic of the whole night's fun atmosphere. Black Bottom Collective brought its eight-piece fusion of hip hop, soul, and hard rock and clearly impressed the rock-and-roll-leaning crowd. And members of 70s punk outfit The Ramrods--another of the reunions--showed no "when in Rome..." decorum, Iggy-ing around the Opera House stage as if playing a cheap Cass Corridor pub.

I'm probably overlooking some of the acts. Not a weak link in the whole show. A great, great night for the city.

your old road is rapidly agin'

Jim Holley's editorial in today's Detroit Free Press invokes Bob Dylan's words, implicitly at least. Rev. Holley, a long-time civil rights leader, responds to Jesse Jackson's critique of Barack Obama by urging Jackson to "step back and let the new guard take control." Holley establishes his own credibility by connecting himself generationally and ideologically to Jackson: I'm one of you and I'm saying from the inside that WE need to defer. By way of justifying the step aside argument, Holley doesn't hesitate to point out the shortcomings of his own generation of activists:

The simple truth is that our generation -- my generation -- has not only failed to fulfill the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, but we have also failed this younger generation. We gave them nothing, and yet it is a member of this generation that is coming closer to fulfilling King's dream than any one of us ever thought possible.

Holley cites current economic conditions as evidence of this failure and concludes that new tactics and a new message are necessary.

It's an interesting and compelling argument. The major weakness of the piece lies in the shaky, shifting nature of the "we" pronoun. Throughout the piece Holley vaguely invokes the first person plural. Sometimes "we" refers to black America. Elsewhere, "we" refers to a particular social movement--i.e., civil rights workers of the 60s. Sometimes "we" refers to activists in general.

The thing is, social movements work in concert with electoral politics. They represent two different realms of the democratic process as we know it, so the idea that a political candidate could somehow replace a social movement strikes me as odd. Obama has moved from one realm to the other, first working as a community organizer then as an elected official. Has he worked on similar issues in both realms? Absolutely. Lots of politicians have made seamless or nearly seamless transitions from non-profit sector or activist community to public sector or elected office.

But the fact remains, the worlds have different norms and different objectives, and present different rhetorical possibilities. I think some of Jackson's statements may not have been politically expedient or prudent. However, conceiving of Obama's candidacy as a replacement for activist work seems wrong-headed. In fact, given Obama's moderate platform, it seems potentially dangerous.

cooking continues

One of the great things about plentiful herbs: less reliance on salt. I made burgers out of ground lamb using just the meat, a huge handful of fresh marjoram, an egg, and fresh breadcrumbs. No salt. Good stuff. I topped the burgers with a pesto of sorts made from almonds, white vinegar, parsley, mint, and lemon balm. Once again, no salt needed.

On the recommendation of my dad, I sauteed some zucchini flowers. I dipped the beautiful orange and white petals in flour and then egg, and did them in a pan with a little olive oil. Subtle, fresh taste.

Detroit's been hot and humid this week. High 80s, mostly. Lots of working in the garden, bike riding (Nicole and I got new mountain bikes and we're having a ball), and reading out in the backyard. Oh, and at church I helped out in the "community garden" (an urban gardening site--completely organic) building a gazebo yesterday. Kind of like an Amish barnraising. I know when the schoolyear kicks in, virtually all my exercise comes in the rec center on campus, so I'm committed to taking advantage of the outdoors in the next two months.

follow-up

This is a kind of a Part II to yesterday's post about what's happening in the garden...or, rather, in the kitchen. I made tea with lemon balm leaves last night. Very relaxing. I boiled a little saucepan of water and dropped in about half a dozen leaves to steep for five minutes or so. I stirred in about a tablespoon of honey from my sister's hives and, voila, a nice evening beverage.

Today, I was hungry for a healthy late lunch. I had gotten up early, biked to Caribou (about a thirty minute trek), spent the morning and early afternoon writing at the coffee shop, and biked back home. Sweaty and tired. So inspired by that Mario Batali escarole recipe, I sauteed: a couple handfuls of romaine lettuce, half a diced onion, and a handful of currants in some olive oil. I sprinked some crushed red pepper and stirred in a tablespoon or so of Anna's honey. Most excellent.

If anyone has more suggestions for good things to do with currants or lemon balm, leave me a comment!

garden

The yard's starting to produce some tasty things. The eggplant and zucchini plants are getting big and my mouth's watering already, but in the meantime our rasberry bushes runneth over with berries. Excellent. In the herb department, both the mint and parsley seem to be in their prime, so the last few days have seen salads with equal parts lettuce, mint, and parsley.

The currant bushes also have loads of fruit right now and I'm wondering what to do. I'm not a big fan of jams and jellies. Any suggestions? This escarole with honey and currants sounds nice and, well, you can't go wrong with Mario Batali.

How about lemon balm? The previous owners of our house must have loved the stuff, because we've got beds full of it. Any suggestions re: cooking with lemon balm? Tonight I think I'm going to try to make some tea. And--once again, thanks Sgr. Batali--Mario suggests making a pesto with half lemon balm leaves and half mint (which we've got boatloads of).

on headwounds and pasta fasool

I capped off a travel-packed May and June with a trip to Cleveland's Little Italy. My parents, my sister and her kids, and I hit the road for the great Mama Santo's, one of the two or three coolest restaurants I've ever experienced. Pizza? It's great there. Pasta? Some of the best you'll eat. Atmosphere? Right on Mayfield Road, which is lined with bakeries, gelato bars, shops with balconied upstairs apartments where old Italian couples always seem to be sitting. I almost did my Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve just so I could live in one of those apartments and walk to school.

So on this recent trip we're cruising Mayfield's side streets looking for a place to park. Out of a little garage walks a little old man named Frank, wearing the requisite undershirt, looking disoriented, and covered with blood. I mean covered. My sister and I hopped out of the car. Anna got Frank to sit down on his stoop and I called 9-1-1. He had a massive headwound. I'm told headwounds sometimes look worse than they are due to the amount of blood that's usually involoved. I guess Frank was in that category. The white undershirt--saturated by this point--certainly contributed to this visual intensity of the whole scene.

Anna did a good job of keeping Frank still and calmly got some pertinent info. E.G., he had fallen and hit his head. Useful to know there's not an ax murderer hanging out in the nearby garage. I handled the ridiculous barrage of questions from the emergency operator. From what height did he fall? Are you kidding me? Do you have a different ambulance that you dispatch for people who fall from the third rung of a stepladder vs. the second rung? Just send the ambulance!

My dad, in what had to have been his most resourcesful moment EVER, suddenly walked up to Frank's stoop WITH A NURSE. Yeah, we were close to University Hospital, but, still, pretty miraculous that a nurse happened to be walking by and my dad happened to find her. She cleaned his wound with gauze packets that I unwrapped for her ("your hands are really shaking, honey," I remember her saying to me), which helped a lot, except for the fact that when she sopped up enough blood, you could see the guy's skull. No joke. Frank's elderly wife came outside and kind of freaked out. Anna chilled her out and got her to bring a clean shirt, which helped a lot and made the scene seem less grisly. The nurse assured us that Frank was fine. Sigh. Thank God.

The ambulance finally showed up and by then my mom had found a parking space so we walked to Mama Santo's. Hey, crisis situation or not, you gotta eat, right? Leave it to nieces and nephews to find the humor in moving from medical-emergency-involving-copious-amounts-of-blood to a lunch-involving-copious-amounts-of-red-sauce. What's the coolest thing about Mama's? The menu has a whole pasta fasool section. That's "pasta e fagioli" if you're fancy pants. My dialect-reared grandparents always called it "pasta fasool." You can get your pasta fasool with white beans, kidney beans, or a host of other legumes. I got mine with peas. Delicious, especially with lots of black pepper. They use a thin sauce for their pasta fasool so it's like a cross between a soup dish and a pasta dish. You can opt for ditalini, but the best pasta choice is the broken up spaghetti pieces. My dad says both his grandmas made it that way, with the spags broken into four or five small lengths.

is it happening for ya'll?

I loved the unabashedly zany THE HAPPENING. This is the kind of movie I would have dug on, hard, when I was twelve, and the type of movie for which I still have so much affection. Blood and gore ("M. Night Shyamalan's first R-rated feature," proclaim the commercials). Dread. Post-apocalyptic speculation. Heavy-handed themes, drawn from Major Issues of the Day. THE HAPPENING is as good and bad as The Blob or any movie whose title contains the words "I was a teenage..."

Where to begin? Definitely with the dialogue, which I'll try to re-create from memory. Female lead to mystery man with whom she may have had an affair: "Dude, get over it. It was just tiramisu. Stop acting crazy." Religious zealot: "You eyeing my lemon beverage?" Random survivor of apocalypse to other survivors: "You guys like hot dogs?" Marky Mark: "Why am I talking to a plastic plant?" Never has a b-movie offered so many delicious rhetorical questions.

One of the plot points that raises silliness to a state of zen is when the high school teachers react to the massive catastrophe using their discipline-specific worldviews. The math teacher calculates the probability of a second catastrophe. The science teacher (he of Funky Bunch fame) tries to make sense of the chaos by identifying variables. I was waiting for the language arts teacher to drop some allusions to dystopic fiction.

I also loved the quick and ill-fated devolution of the two middle-class adolescent boys into thuggish behavior. Spencer Breslin puffs out his little chest and says "We've got a hungry little girl out here, bitch!" (another stand-out piece of dialogue, by the way). Several survivors won't share their refuge and these two young suburbanites go all Tupac. And wind up dead. It's an instant, cheesy, allegorical moment: see how important it is to stay civilized. But also a moment where the perennially coveted demographic--teen boys--can sip their Dr. Peppers, grab a handful of buttery popcorn, and nod approvingly at the machismo.

In terms of both plot and tone, the film reminded me of two of my favorite Stephen King novels. First, The Stand, that masterpiece of roundly drawn yet familiar archetypes reacting to the apocalypse. Second, the ultra-violent Cell, King's more recent look at disaster on a grand scale, this time brought on by signals from cell phone towers. Those are two books that revel in genre and seem to drip with affinity for their inspirations. Two books that I love.

Let me say a few things about THE HAPPENING as post 9/11 art. I'm not giving anything away by mentioning that early on the film shows a bunch of New Yorkers jumping from a building to their deaths. This is the scene featured most heavily in the film's trailers, and it's striking and memorable. We see the scene from the perspective of an earnest construction worker (a blue-collar hero) below. What follows is ninety minutes of dread. As I've emphasized, it's campy dread. But dread nonetheless. There's a kind of sadness that permeates THE HAPPENING, from the couple whose marriage is on the rocks, to the best friend character who goes off on a quest for his woman but deep-down knows she's probably dead, to that supporting character's little girl who realizes her parents have most certainly died horrific deaths. Just like the 50s b-movies whose paranoid stance refracted cold war mentalities, THE HAPPENING plods toward its eventuality.

Roger Ebert's somewhat over-the-top review says: "For some time the thought has been gathering at the back of my mind that we are in the final act [of Earth's existence]." Ebert's referring, of course, to the film's environmental themes, but I must admit having similar thoughts on the way home from the multiplex, not about the environment but about the more general pessimism of our own age. Our safety is threatened. We must band together against evil. The world has changed. Raising such concerns is one more example of how THE HAPPENING, in so many ways, is wonderfully and provocatively awful. So far, it's the best (worst) movie of the summer. Then again, I haven't seen THE STRANGERS yet.

seriously?

Distressing story in the New York Times. In "Beloved Characters as Reimagined for the 21st Century," the Times reports on toy companies making over '80s semi-icons like Strawberry Shortcake. Obviously, the companies wish to make some nostalgia dough from people my age who are having kids. Fine. Sure, characters evolve to fit the sensibilities of new decades. Warner Bros. famously began to de-emphasize the racist content of Bugs Bunny (disgusting stuff--check out the awesomely comprehensive DVDs) in favor of BB's sexually ambiguous trickster persona.

What's distressing about the new make-overs, though, is the way the companies are imagining/shaping the identities of milennial kids--girls in particular. Strawberry Shortcake is now very skinny and talks on a cellphone instead of playing with her cat. I guess animal shelters don't pay much for product placement. The company also is moving the Strawberry Shortcake gang away from their affinity for candy and toward a love of fresh fruit. Elsewhere, according to the story, the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have "less attitude." Huh? You don't want young boys growing up in wartime to have attitude, I suppose. My favorite, though, is the plan for the new Care Bears: "less belly fat, longer eyelashes." I'm not making this up. What kind of weird zoological rationale does the corporation have for this move? I doubt that bears today are skinnier. And I really, really doubt that they have longer eyelashes.

My objection is not that these characters are changing. And it's not personal, either. I was never into any of these cartoons. (Remember on "Family Ties" when baby Andrew arrives and Alex P. Keaton tells him "Enjoy your childhood; I know I did and it was the best two weeks of my life"? That's kind of like me as a kid, minus the conservatism of course.) My problem is the reprehensible contribution these companies are making to body normalization and consumerism. All for profit. Let's not kid ourselves...Strawberry Shortcake was always about selling dolls. Now she's about selling cell phones and negative body image too, both of which are even more lucrative than action figures.

just saying...

We in this generation must not only repent for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. -MLK Jr.

a definition

I've often returned home after conferences with ideas and energy. This weekend, spending time at the American Democracy Project meeting, I've found not only ideas and energy but also motivation to keep focusing on community service pedagogies at Dearborn. I actually came back to my room last night after the last session and did some brainstorming on directions I hope to take in the piece I'm writing based on last year's service learning dfata. I also spent several hours working on a presentation for our writing program faculty on civic literacy. Letting info from various sessions and various readings sink in, I came to a working definition of 'civic literacy' I'm kind of happy with. Here goes:

Civic Literacy: the skills, values, habits, and knowledge needed for full(er) citizenship. Skills include written and oral/interpersonal communication, collaboration and collective decision-making, critical-analytic thinking, organization, and persuasion. Values include responsibility for the common good, belief in deliberative rhetoric, and engagement with and across difference. Habits include participation in the public sphere, voting, critical consumption of media, and cultivation of the life of the mind. Knowledge includes--but isn't limited to--history, current events, and community issues.

on location

Writing from Snowbird, Utah. What can match swimming on the roof of the lodge, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and the cold, clean air of Utah? Sometimes opportunities for rejuvenation come at the most opportune times. Thanks, UMD, for sending me here. Props also go to the American Democracy Project for putting on an incredible program, complete with film screenings and challenging plenaries and talks that are rigorous and pragmatic all at once.

new endeavors

The summer months speed by...what else is new? Every teacher laments how quickly days turn into weeks during the summer season.

I'm thankful for the travel opportunities. Seattle. Tomorrow, a wedding in Illinois (two former students). Next week, off to Snowbird, Utah, for the American Democracy Project meeting, where I'll spend three days learning about service learning in first-year courses. Good timing, as our campus is launching community-based writing sections of first-year composition and I'm teaching two of them. The ADP meeting is held at a ski resort complete with spa facilities (pool and hot tub on the roof, with views of snow-capped mountains!), so, like with the RSA meeting in Seattle, I'm taking advantage of the geographic locales of professional gatherings. Did I mention that Snowbird has a few inches of the white stuff today?

I'm writing, but not forcing a quick pace. The big project is working through the data gathered during last academic year's service learning courses. That research looks to be evolving into two or three articles, but I'm going slow and steady. The small project is a book review for the WPA journal.

And my Peace&Justice group continues to be an enjoyable time commitment. Working on plans for our fall retreat already as well as our next book club gathering. Through P&J colleagues I got hooked up with July's Homeless Count in Detroit, a project I'm going to make a priority in the next month, and one which I hope will spill into one of our fall projects in the first-year courses.

Not just thankful for the travel opportunities, I'm thankful too for all that Detroit continues to offer, personally, professionally, and all points in between. Juggling endeavors that are rewarding is a reminder that moving was a very, very good decision.

wacky wednesday

Each Wednesday, the Arab-owned produce markets in Dearborn offer their cheapest prices. We're talking about really good sales: cucumbers for forty-nine cents/lb., three heads of romaine for a dollar, and so on. If big crowds and loud kids don't bother you, the experience can't be beat. Feels like being in another country, and not just because most people are speaking Arabic. From what I can tell, giving children food that hasn't been paid for is perfectly acceptable. I've seen kids in shopping carts eat bananas, grapes, bags of chips.

Yesterday the lines were especially long. I had almost gotten to the registers when a little old woman with a very large bag of rice approached me and spoke Arabic for perhaps two minutes. From gestures and my imagination I intuited that her point was something like 'I was at home cooking when I realized I needed rice. Can I jump in front of you, my good man, so I can purchase my rice and be on my way?' Flattered by her imagined use of the phrase "good man," I gestured for her to take a cut in line. Immediately I heard dramatic sighs from behind me and knew trouble was coming.

Another woman approached my rice-loving new friend and absolutely berated her (in English, which she clearly did not understand) for cutting: "you're getting in front of everybody, not just this guy." ('This guy'? I'd much rather be referred to as 'my good man'!). They went back and forth in two different languages. Finally the old woman got the message and began to mope toward the back of the line.

Now, the customer behind me in line was too busy feeding her toddler a meal's worth of unpaid merchandise to notice the argument. When she saw the old woman walking away from my cart, she offered the woman the place in front of her and then with a sneer looked me up and down as if to say 'what kind of a jerk won't give an old woman with one item a cut?' At this point, I had one customer mad at me for giving cuts, one mad at me for thinking I don't give cuts, and one under the impression that I speak Arabic. The anti-cutting advocate got in front of the woman with rice and said that if rice lady was going to get a cut then so was she. Nobody stopped her, so I guess in the end everybody was happy, including me with my cart full of good and cheap stuff.

it won't end

At this point, is there any doubt that Hillary Clinton is damaging the democratic party and weakening Obama's candidacy? How can a presidential candidate project the requisite image of power when his first act as nominee is negotiating and making concessions to Clinton and her "camp"? Clinton values her own ascendancy to executive power more than she values her party or any of the goals and principles on which she built her campaign.

At this point, how can she go back to the senate and work effectively with colleagues who can't believe her refusal to concede to Obama? I suppose all she can do is initiate/continue the behind-the-scenes negotiations with Obama's inner circle. A lot of buzz about the possibility of Obama promising Clinton a Supreme Court nomination. But a hypothetical Supreme Court seat for Hillary Clinton would fuel unprecedented GOP fundraising ("help us keep more Hillary Clintons off the bench") and generally fire up the religious right, thereby doing more harm than good.

Clinton as vice president? It's looking likely, isn't it? I would rather not vote for a ticket that includes someone who voted for the Patriot Act--and even voted to renew the Patriot Act once its popularity was already on the decline. I hope the Obama camp doesn't give in to Clinton's "demands" and opts for one of the better vp choices: Kathleen Sebelius, Ed Rendell, Bill Richardson, or my favorite of the alleged short-listers Janet Napolitano.