I am sure by now you all have seen the news.

Can I admit just a teensy-weensy bit of schadenfreude at the whole RS thing?  Can I admit an utter and complete lack of surprise that a fecking Baptist isn’t just a goddamn drunk; didn’t just lie, cheat, and steal his way to the top of an American Fortune-500 corporation; but in fact plain bald-face’d lied about possessing a fecking theology degree from a fecking Bible college (one that goes by the moniker “Heartland,” no less). 

No, I am not surprised.  But evidently a bunch of Christabigot bastards are.  So their solution?  Talk about how we need to instill character in our children to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.  Which is to say, don’t worry your pretty little heads about the lying Baptist bastards currently in charge of the Armed Forces, the state and Federal governments, and our nation’s assets.  No, don’t worry your pretty little heads about that, not for one second.

No, we need to make damn sure those pansy-assed faggots don’t adopt no pretty little white babies and turn them into, what, millionaire celeberity decorators?  Honest heads of Fortune-500 corporations?  Soldiers in the homosexual army? Pies?

Alright, I’m off to the Hub of the Universe for a couple of days.  A temporary sojourn in the intellectual rose, to taste the sweet nectar of liberalism and brace myself with the clarifying air of a real winter.  Ta ta for now.

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So in one of my courses I do “discussion questions” — i.e., I send out a list of half a dozen questions each week on the next week’s readings, the students pick one, and they write up a half-page or so to turn in on Friday.  Usually the questions are pretty straightforward (”summarize the basic point of so-and-so’s article), but I try to include one bullshit gimme (for the slackers) and one hard question (for those who actually want to try and think for once).

This past week we were finishing up our module on race and ethnicity.  The gimme question was basically “what’s your ethnicity?  What’s good about being that?  Are there any downsides?”

Most of the time I get standard answers like “I’m Italian and we have great food, but boy the temper!” or “I’m Irish and damn proud, but boy do we drink!” or “I’m Welch and I don’t know what that means!”

[leeks, dear.  It means you eat leeks.  Have you never seen Henry V?  Oh, and good singing.  But I digress.] 

This year, however, I got a doozie.  I won’t quote _precisely_, but the comments were on the following lines:

“I’m a middle-class white kid and I’m very proud of that.  The best part about being white is how ignorant and selfish we are.  I really do love seeing the ignorance that we middle-class white people exhibit all the time.  The worst part, though, is that whatever we do to other people, they call us racist.  And, sure, a small number of people are, but why is that if you don’t like Mexicans or blacks for whatever reason that makes you a racist?  That’s the only thing I don’t like about being white — that everybody is constantly calling us racist.”

Ummmm, yeah.

I can’t _wait_ to hear what this kid has to say about date rape.

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So apparently his Excellency Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of NH — yes, that bishop, the gay one — is a big alkie

I could scream I’m so pissed at the man.  This is all the christabigot right needs right now: “see, we told you so.  Sinners sin, and you just can’t appoint intrisically sinful people to positions of moral authority.”

If you cannot uphold the dignity of your people, for heavan’s sake don’t put yourself forward for this kind of position.  It’s not fair that people judge us by your bad behavior, but that’s beside the point.  People do judge us by your behavior, and you have let us down.  Even worse, if you now resign (which I’m of more than half a mind you should) everyone will know that it’s because of pressure from higher-ups over the gay thing, and not because of the alcoholism (after all, it’s not like the whiskeypalians don’t know how to take care of that kind of thing discreet-like).

Grrrrrr.

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So, the Commander and the lovely-and-talented Miss S. came to visit this weekend.  They were on their journey West, leaving New York while still in their early 30s, as Didion did oh so long ago (”Goodbye to All That”*).  I do hope they had a good time, as I knew D and I enjoyed very much hanging out with them.  For one thing, we were able to take them to the ONG, the best place for chicken-friend-chicken this side of paradise.  For another thing, we were able to take them over to a party with some colleagues.  And as the Commander pointed out, the people I know here are, well, just demn fine people, darnit, and there’s no way around it.

*”The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired.  Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire.  We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York.  There were years when I called Los Angeles ‘the Coast,’ but they seem a long time ago.”

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What part of this story is not a transparent exercise in call-and-response election-year demagoguery?  As in, the President says “terrorists” and everybody autofuckingmatically punches their goddamned ballots “Republican?”

No, really.  I’m curious.  Apparently this was supposed to happen four years go and we’re only just now learning about it?  Excuse me? 

The part that’s really galling is that the NYT is falling for this trick again.  To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, when your john stiffs you for the fuck and punches you in the face to boot, it may be regarded as a misfortune.  When it happens twice, that starts to look like carelessness.

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So, here on my campus all the students are part of some web-based thing called Facebook. 

I gather it’s somebody’s bright idea about how to generate social capital among the yung’uns, who’ve never learned the fine art of staying up ’til 2 a.m. playing hearts in the dormitory lounge while sipping cheap red wine and procrastinating from writing an essay on, I don’t know, what Althusser would say about the War on Terror. As a way of generating social capital, the students can form affinity groups with others who log on to the program.

Anywho, one of my students, a rather fabulously articulate young man with a name even more unforgettable than mine told me of one of his affinity groups.  It’s called “Every time I see a Black Republican, a little piece of me dies.”  The electronic entryway to this group consists, it will not surprise you to learn, of a picture of our current Secretary of State.

This so cheered me up that I immeadiately started brainstorming ideas for new groups:

- Ken Mehlman is a screaming bottom

- Large numbers of white people scare me

- Democrats need to strap on a goddamned pair of ovaries already.

Etc.

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So I went to the dentist a couple of days ago (yeah, I know, always a winner of a way to introduce an anecdote).  I shall spare you the background of my utterly fruitless quest to find decent dental care in this town, which I think might stem from the fact that I was a dope and chose the low-premium, high-deductable plan (who says class doesn’t matter in America?  Remind me again of how health care is a matter of making “appropriate” choices based on “rational” cost-benefit analysis?). 

Anywho, so I go in for a first appointment with this new dentist.  I walk into the office, and bam, there’s a dramatic water accent in the lobby.  What is it with these Texans and their fountains?  Why in heavan’s name would a doctor put such a thing in their office?  All it produces is a vague sense that I need to go to the bathroom, along with a subtle and paranoid hunch that the thing is cleaned not-often-enough and that I’m running a non-trivial chance of picking up a case of Legionnaire’s while sitting here waiting to get my gums poked at with sharp metal objects by Liesl the sadistic hygienist. 

So I fill out my paperwork.  And read the latest issue of that craven tool of the establisment, Newsweek.  It’s such a confection of spun-sugary nonesense that I could not even tell you what was on the cover, other than that it made me vaguely nauseous.  Of course, I’m not ushered into the inner sanctum until like half an hour after my appointment time, but really, who’s keeping track? 

The hygienist (who is not, in fact, the German refugee of my fevered imaginings, poking at my expensive orthodonture and muttering darkly about “ah, die schone gelbe kroner”) is then very professional and runs me through the x-ray routine (right, because they have to run x-rays before doing anything else — gotta get that claim in to the insurance company, after all).  

She then sits me down in my chair, puts the laminated bib over my chest, looks me in the eye, and says:

“You seem like a nice guy, so I’m going to level with you.  You’re not getting a cleaning today.  The dentist refuses to pay his hygienists for cleanings performed after 11 a.m., so if I were to do so I’d be working for free.  I suggest that you make another appointment and then complain to your insurance company.”

Sigh.  Just when I think I’ve heard it all, these fecking Texans blindside me.  I guess I’ll be putting in a call to the Attorney General’s office for labor code enforcement (or perhaps their insurance fraud division?)

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