I've Become My Parents...My Crazy, Crazy Parents

Reusing tin foil is thrifty.

Reusing Post-It notes is crazy.

How come I never realized this before? I just had an epiphany, looking at the used Post-Its lining the edge of my desk, sticky side up, carefully arranged so that they won't adhere to one another, waiting to be resued. This is crazy.

Armchair Activism!!

Now it's not like me to preach or to harangue about politics....

Oh, ha ha ha! I crack myself up.

But, really, here is a nifty and convenient way to make your voice heard about this new "anti-terror" legislation. Politicians are quite susceptible to pressure from their constituents, and all you have to do is fill in a few fields, and they will send the letter for you. It's a lazy dissident's best friend!

Now, if I could just figure out how to do it with a remote control, I'd be all set.

The Depublicans Strike Again

12 Democrats voted for to suspend the rights of habeas corpus. The rationale is that enemy combatants aren't covered by Constitutional protections.

What about the citizens and legal residents who are being detained? The problem with the justification of denying habeas corpus to enemy combatants is that it's left to the executive branch to decide just who these "enemy combatants" are. The bill is clear that these "enemy combatants" need not be engaged in any, you know, actual combat in order to be classified thus.

Even the good bits of this bill are an obscurantist fiction. The bill outlaws torture, while letting the President determine how suspects will be interrogated. Huh?

This bill continues the program of denying us the means of making our government accountable. Elaine Scarry's essay on The Patriot Act says it better than I can:

The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people's lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque. Either one of these outcomes would imperil democracy; together they not only injure the country but also cut off the avenues of repair.

This new bill also cuts off the avenues of repair. Without any adversarial process or any means of appeal, there's no way to rectify wrongs or even to see if wrongs have been committed. There are people who have been detained for five years with any judicial review.

Remember judicial review? That thing that keeps us from absolutism, martial law, etc? Remember that? Me neither.

If the terrorists really hate us for our freedoms, I guess they'll hate us a little less now.

Is that a victory?

Addendum: Perhaps my favorite part of the bill is the bit that gives retroactive immunity to the torturers. So the logic of the bill goes like this, I guess: We know you don't like it when we torture people, so we are going to make sure that we do it in private from now on. BUT we really need all those torturers to do the job, so let's just wink at the law so that we can set up our secret government in peace. M'kay?

And the Democrats say "yea."

I Couldn't Make This Shit Up

People don't believe me when I tell them about what bottomless pits of entitlement my students can be. This should help my case:

Earlier in the week, I asked the class for a volunteer to share their notes with a student in the class who is disabled and whose crippled hands prevent notetaking. I mentioned that an ideal volunteer would be someone who takes notes on a laptop, so that the notes could simply be emailed.

This afternoon I got an email from a student asking if he could "be on the list of people who get typed lecture notes sent to them."

Insensitive much?? Where do you even begin to say what's wrong with that?

Spend 20 years in that kid's wheelchair, and then maybe you can get on the list.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This is what I get for devoting my life to working with overprivileged children, I guess.

Pedants Suck

On the bus today, I heard someone going off on grammar and how "they" as a singular pronoun marks the decline of western civilization (and poor old Penelope Spheeris blamed the Circle Jerks).

Now, I'll admit, I'm biased: I like "they" as the neuter pronoun. I think it's more elegant than "he or she" and can be read aloud unlike s/he. And it's a far sight better than the Spivak solution. Which, just...ugh.

But I find that it's always the people who don't know diddly about grammar who get so worked up about it. They know a few rules and then they smugly crusade against all deviations. I bet half these busride grammarians couldn't tell their participle from their gerund and couldn't tell you what part of speech the infinitive is to save their lives. But by God, they think the world is going to fucking end if someone accidentally uses an apostrophe to make a plural.

I'd be remiss in my duties as a leftist crackpot not to note that there is a strong class inflection to this matter. And let it never be said that Feemus is derelict in his duty (for those of you at home, now would be the time to say: "Ha ha, you said 'duty'"), so here is my statement about class: This is just a way for people who grew up speaking standard/prestige English to congratulate themselves on what amounts to nothing more than using their own dialect.

But at the heart of the matter, it's people substituting martinet rigidity for real gentility, which entails actually trying to understand someone even if it means putting aside initial judgments; it entails courtesy over dismissive prescriptiveness; it entails not subjecting Feemus to 23 minutes of kvetching while he tries to read on the bus.

Sometimes, I really think I should drive to work.

In the interest of full disclosure: I actually do blame the Circle Jerks for the decline of civilization. Sorry, guys.

Devilry

John McCain scares me more than Cheney does.

Cheney is what he is: a mean-spirited hatchet man. You know it. I know it. The American people know it.

But McCain scares the bejeezus out of me. Everyone I know seems to think he's a cuddly moderate. Compared to Karl Rove, maybe, but I'm not grading this on an a curve.

McCain is pretty damned far to the right. Ok, I give the guy props for the anti-torture thing. But these new "compromises" look suspiciously like ways to make the Geneva Conventions unenforceable.

Which is better than outright defying them. Um, how?

But McCain, like Giuliani, has turned into a Stepford Republican. Every time he's asked a question he parrots the party line and sucking up to Bush like Libretti to Malandrino. He loves the war. He hates the homos. He thinks that the Constitution needs to be amended to prevent flag burning.

But this latest "devil" controversy just puts it all into to stark - and pretty fucking hilarious - relief.

Hugo Chavez says that Bush is "the Devil." That's despicable, says McCain.

Jerry Falwell says that Clinton would rouse Christian voters more than Lucifer. That's funny, says McCain.

Okay, it is a little funny. But that's not the point. Not too long ago McCain called Falwell an "agent of intolerance," and now he's rushing to his defense.

This Stepford Republicanism is a big part of the right's strength. Rather than squabbling amonst themselves, they stay focused and stay on message. But this show of solidarity won't end after the election. Debts have to be paid.

Moderate or not, John McCain isn't acting like one. Beware.

ok--this is slightly off topic, but the flag burning shit that gets trotted out everytime an election looks like it might get close--what a crock of shit. Now, the civil liberties thing bugs me, of course, but what really bugs me is the scale: how do you compare, say, extending suffrage to blacks and women, or the right to free speech (oh, the ironicalness), with protecting some fabric from being used by some jackass to make a point. Sheesh. I'm gonna go burn one on principle.

A Lot of Nice Things Turn Bad Out There

My coffee pot broke last weekend, leading me to a serious contemplation of Islam.

So, I've been buying coffee in the shop by my office. The coffee's very good and the people who work there are very nice. I went in this morning (what else does one do on a Sunday but go to work?) and for the third - the third - time this week Cat Stevens was playing.

The kid working all three times looks sort of like a cross between John Doe and Dave Navarro. Doesn't exactly look like the typical Cat Stevens fan.

On a side note, women visibly swoon when they see this guy. Actually swoon. It's shameless and unseemly. Not to mention unfair to me, over whom women never swoon. This kid clearly gets more trim than Mr. Monk's banzai tree. Just by showing up.

But I've managed to put my resentment aside. He really is a nice kid, and it's not his fault that I'm old and starting to get a little paunchy and women wouldn't look at me if I was on fire.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Cat Stevens. So three times this week this pierced and inked and entirely too-cool person chose to put on a Cat Stevens album.

It got me wondering if this is some reaction to the US war on all things Islam. Is Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam cool now? Is listening to him an act of protest?

I mean, I understand the impulse. Every time I hear something about the "clash of civilzations" or "crusade" or "good versus evil" or "black and white" getting trotted out by the administration to legitimize their hazily understood war or their use of torture and illegal surveillance--every time I hear it, I feel kind of defensive about Islam.

I start thinking, "You know, the Taliban is just misunderstood. They just want to protect women."

Now, I don't know anything more about Islam than I did five years ago. But I am more than ever convinced that the terrorists are a fringe sect of a basically peaceful faith. I'm convinced of this out of sheer contrarianism, I admit, as a reaction to being preached to about "evil" by the White House. My own version of truthiness, I suppose.

But Cat Stevens? Really?

First of all, the whole fatwa thing. I would like to go on record to say that I think it is very wrong to try to kill Salman Rushdie. Although...maybe if someone could have just
disabled him somehow while he was writing Fury....no, no. Fatwas are wrong.

An even more powerful reason, though, to not let political dissent shape your musical choices is this rhyme from "Moonshadow":

If I should ever lose my mouth,
All my teeth North and South.

Worst. Rhyme. Ever.

Some things just can't be forgiven.

I realize that there is a non-ideological explanation for this ridiculously attractive coffee guy to be listening to Cat Stevens: he actually likes Cat Stevens. But this just seems too incredible.

Although in the interest of full disclosure, I was tortured in my formative years by my older sister's copy of Teaser and the Firecat, which she played endlessly. And sang along with. To this day she defends the "north and south" rhyme.