In re: The Efficient Operation of Schools

I am an educator, exasperated already with the system of education. This means less than nothing in some ways; I’m one of thousands – probably millions – of the 8.3 million teachers in America who finds himself insulted and angered by an institution which systematically rewards the tame and marginally effective while weeding out the challenging, the extraordinary, the new, the bold, and the good.

There is an article by Walter Karp titled “Why Johnny Can’t Think” which makes the claim that the real problem with schools is not that students don’t take enough math or science, or that we need a new literacy program, or that we need to be more reform-minded, but rather that schools are constructed to actively tear down children’s will and capacity to think for themselves. For all of the high talk of critical thinking and out-of-the-box ideas, the system itself grinds them underfoot with twelve years of witheringly dispassionate opposition. With trained, military-style response to bells, intercom announcements, and sharp commands from teachers and administration, students stumble through their school days in a sort of mindless haze. Their interest only seems active as they wander the halls between classes, in the ten minutes they have before they need to be in their seat, facing forward. And now, some twenty-five years after Karp’s article was published, even the halls have been cracked down – more schools every year require ID badges, metal detectors, and armed guards.

Safety and order, safety and order. The efficient operation of the system. These are the tried-and-true excuses for everything from random locker checks to school uniforms. But there can be no legitimacy to protecting the order and efficiency of a system that doesn’t work. We aren’t producing students capable of well-reasoned critical thought – we’re producing students who know that the surest way to succeed is to keep your head down, keep your thoughts to yourself, and do exactly what you’re told. It requires an almost Nietzschean will-to-power for a student to express him/herself in this atmosphere, and if the form of expression is deemed at all inappropriate for any reason, the student will likely find him/herself suspended – removed for the efficient operation of the system. The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.

But I don’t intend to focus on the students’ plight here – Walter Karp did a fine job of that. What is on my mind is one level up – the teachers. How can we expect critical thought from the students if we stamp it out of their educators?

Little more than a week ago, I was told that one of the finest teachers I have ever had was being removed from the school in which he has taught for more than ten years. There were no complaints, his personnel file was clean, and he had even won the Educator of the Year award from the county. All it took was a request from the new principal to the director of schools, and he was “transferred” to the other side of the county. Why go through the hassle of finding a legitimate reason to fire somebody when you can simply break their will?

This man – a teacher of government and economics classes – was legendary for his ability to engage a class. Students began hearing about him years before they would have his class, even before they were in high school, through older siblings and friends. Parents finagled their children into his class just so they could know that they would actually be challenged to exercise reason and debate to express their beliefs – not just cough up a name and a date on a scan-tron test. Classroom discussions were famously spirited – students discovered passions they had never known before as they were finally allowed and encouraged to treat their own ideas with respect.

In other words, it was a class begging to come under “administrative review.” When students actually begin to question the object of their education and the effectiveness of their school, when they actually begin to look at their government and wonder if it is disingenuous, when students are actually able to take a hard look at the system and realize things could be better, it throws a kink in the conveyor-belt assembly line of public education. The instigator must be removed like a cancer.

God help me, I just can't figure out why. I do not understand why all subjects of any life and vitality and passion are removed from the classroom. It’s not just Government teachers – it’s any teacher that opens a portal to ideas that matter, whether in English, Art, Science, Theatre, or even Math. Sooner or later, their number comes up, and it’s their time to go. The efficient operation of the system requires they be “relocated.”

So who is left behind? All of the other teachers. All of the teachers you don’t remember when you’re 40 – or even 25 – because you didn’t pay ten minutes of attention in their entire class. They didn’t ask you to, and there was even a vague impression that if you paid too much attention – if you actually looked into the subject yourself and understood just how shortchanged you were by this teacher – you would get in trouble. You sat – or slept – in the room, you didn’t speak up, you didn’t answer the teacher’s rhetorical questions aimed at a fifth grade intelligence level.

These were the classes in which you got an easy A, in which you watched movies like “Gladiator” because they had a tenuous connection to historicity, in which you were given maps to color. These were the classrooms in which the teacher read an entire book aloud over the course of two weeks while the entire class daydreamed or fiddled around with their personal electronic devices. These were the classrooms where the only learning that happened was taking place in the back corner, where a bored student thumbed through a textbook or a library book on his own, and the student next to him scrawled a poem onto her desk.

And these are the classes that will remain forever. Since they raise no red flags, they will never, ever catch the eye of anyone higher up. All the administration knows is that the students go into the room, they are reasonably quiet for an hour, and then they exit the room. 90% of them pass, and the ones who don’t – well, no one is all that surprised they didn’t. On the occasions that such a class is observed by the administration, the teacher is duly warned ahead of time, and actually plans something of a lesson for his class after asking them to be good for the principal. Next week, they’ll get a free day as a reward.

And we still wonder what’s missing in our schools? For God’s sake, we’re missing teachers – they’ve all been replaced by warm, gelatinous babysitters. The real educators stirred up too much trouble to be bothered with – they assigned a book that had a sex scene, they discussed the inherent hazards of capitalism, they challenged a student to defend his or her political beliefs, they questioned the unilateral country-first approach to history, they actually got a reaction out of some of the twenty-seven bodies sitting in their desks – and with a few complaints from a handful of students or parents (or even other teachers, shamefully), the principal threw his hands in the air and cried uncle. Take this teacher somewhere else – we don’t want to deal with him anymore.

Does the whole system need to be scrapped? I hope not. There are some damn fine teachers out there, and they are still making a difference. And they’ve usually got a solid principal behind them – one who has enough backbone to fight for the positions of teachers who take risks, one who has enough personal character to understand that even if he or she has a personal disagreement with a teacher, the students’ educational experience trumps all other concerns. We’ve got a structure in place that could theoretically allow students to be challenged in more directions and exposed to more points of view than in any other time of their life – what we need are the teachers, the principals, the directors and superintendents and school boards with the guts to do it.

Gut-pour

For years – probably since high school – I have categorized the worthwhile paths a person might take in one of two ways: either they would strive to change the world in a grand and impersonal fashion, by, say, curing a common affliction, or they would make it their goal to change lives personally, one at a time, face to face – like a teacher might.  It was a handy distinction.  People who weren’t all that keen on the luvy-duvy side of things could spend their whole lives in a lab if they wanted to, and I didn’t have to discount that, because their efforts change lives by the millions.  People who didn’t really have much to offer science or literature but found themselves gifted with an overabundance of heart could do any kind of work they enjoyed, and could pour their hearts into meeting the less easily defined needs of those around them.  Everybody fits; everybody’s got something they can do. 

I gave up most of my big ideas when I learned to make this distinction.  I figured I was the guy with the heart, so why should I waste time chasing after ridiculous ideas when I could be focusing on the people around me?  We all know how people become the top actor, or the top writer, or the top photographer – they cut off every extraneous thing in their worlds in order to focus on their art.  And for many of them, that means cutting off extraneous human relationships, extraneous hobbies, extraneous…hell, everything.

Well here I am.  I teach now.  Could I put more into my lessons, into my planning time, into researched teaching strategies?  Absolutely.  But could I invest more of myself into these kids?  I’d be surprised if I could.  If it weren’t stalkerish and weird, I’d show up at their sporting events and their birthday parties.  I’d join their families.  I’d wave goodbye to them at the airport.  Just because I love all of these kids.

So why does this not feel even remotely like “enough”?  Why do I still want to be the guy who does all of this, and creates a generation-defining work of art (or saves a few busloads of children, or revolutionizes international diplomacy, or…)?  How is it that after spending so much of my life talking up the value of the everyman, I won’t let myself be happy as one?

I am as convinced that I have more to give as I am convinced that I have no idea what direction to take it.  I’ve got a good mind and a few worthy talents and I’m standing around like an idiot, wasting the only time I’ve got.  You want to know my deepest fear?  What poetic lines will plague me till I die?  I’ve got a few (they’re all worth asking about), but here’s the appropriate one for now.  By Edgar Lee Masters, written from the perspective of a dead man:

“And toward the last, when I thought it over,
There by my window, growing clearer
About myself, as my pulse slowed down,
And looked at one of the mills I bought--
Which I didn't have the slightest need of,
As things turned out, and I never ran--
A fine machine, once brightly varnished,
And eager to do its work,
Now with its paint washed off--
I saw myself as a good machine
That Life had never used.”
 

I’m 23.  I’m a damn kid, barely older than the high-schoolers I was teaching the other year.  So why in God’s name am I so convinced that I have already irrevocably ruined my life, and fallen pitifully short of my own potential?

I never believed God would open up a whole life-plan before my eyes, but I always thought He’d lead me to what’s next.  Honestly, the sense of aimlessness and meaninglessness, and my perception that I’ll never be able to change or develop into anything more than I am now, do more to dig at my faith than any tight philosophical argument.

And on top of all this, I get to hate myself for being a drama queen.

Ariadne Thread

Beautiful nomad, beautiful child,
you cannot cut the train you drag.
Cross as many miles as you like, my love,
wend through desert bones and dying forests –
there are always threads from you to me.

And I am tangled up, all arms and legs, and pasted
to a wall in a cold city, near an open window
where a breeze will always blow across our naked bodies,
will curl sometimes into ears wet with crying.

But if one day you turned, and traced
your Ariadne thread, it would not end with me,
or your cousin,
or your father –

it would wind all the way to God.
You would find him bound in it as I am,
silent, loving, melancholy.  And at his bleeding feet
you’d see two frayed ends –

One, the beginning of the labyrinth,
one, the end.

Mixing Myself Up with the Characters - Am I Alone in This?

The first book about which I specifically remember crying was Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows. Gosh darn those stories about faithful dogs – they’ll get you every time. More recently, I had quite a good cry over Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and its protagonist’s beautiful recollection of a life that has passed him by. Who hasn’t lain awake thinking these thoughts? I might also mention Hardy’s excruciating Jude the Obscure, which hurts even more when you believe yourself to be living an unnaturally parallel life to that of the title character.

My first train of thought was that fiction teaches us proper social behavior by modeling it for us: this here is an appropriate time for sorrow, while in this situation we celebrate. We should respect loyalty; we should mourn loss; we should hope to achieve great things. I don’t mean that fiction does this in a vaguely threatening nefarious way – it simply does it. We pick these images up and store them unconsciously (one of literature’s few lessons that actually can be learned virtually by osmosis), and we recollect them or reenact them (again, often unconsciously) when analogous situations arise in our own lives. When we read about them again, we read into them our own actual experiences with the topic, and in doing so we tie in the loop of catharsis, along with reinforcement of social behavior. We learn to live by way of example, and whatever examples we lack in the direct contact of our lives, media is happy to supplement. We often live, then, by the example of the media we intake, and at the end of the day, we seek solace in this same media. I do not make the claim that we are slaves to the general media, as we have an unfathomable degree of choice in what we partake of, and whatever we do choose to read/watch/listen to, we can feel strongly for or against. What I do claim is that we form a bizarre relationship with the stories we choose to listen to, and that far from being simple, useless tales orbiting the periphery of our lives, they become a deep part of our personal identity.

We do this all the time – we pick up a character in a book or film and string along with them for awhile, identify with them, think of ourselves (flatteringly or not) as their avatar on this earth. And when we can convince ourselves thoroughly of our likeness to the characters, things get weird. As I read, I might perhaps notice that Jude the Obscure makes a decision very similar to one I just made, and I might note the next day that I have made a decision very similar to that which I just read about Jude making night before. And then – wait, did I make the next decision, or did Jude? Did I make the same choice that I would have made had I not read the book, or did my self-identification with the character of Jude cause me, even slightly, to choose a behavior more like his, or what I would imagine his to be? After all, I like Jude. But then, I don’t want my life to turn out like his, and so maybe I contradict him after all.

Fiction, or even gripping non-fiction, pulls us along its intricate canals. I wonder whether it would be misleading to say, in this case, that fiction teaches us. Perhaps it is more to my point that fiction lays before us different possible paths – there is nothing that says I ought to act in the manner of such-and-such a character, but there is a book that tells me what might happen if I did. Not “what might happen” in the way that a fable tells us “what might happen” if we are greedy, or kind to strangers, or foolish with our money, but who we might become. In this life, rain falls equally on the land of the just and the unjust. Given this – that things might go well for us whether we act for good or ill – our query tends away from “What is the good?” and toward “Who do I wish to be like?” And in response to this query, each of our stories has its own suggestion.

My best guess is that I’m wading around the territory of psychology when I say that after we choose a character with whom we self-identify, we begin to model behavior on said character. This is one reason we all love great hero stories – Braveheart and the like – and find ourselves deeply disturbed by the probing of our own darknesses in films like, oh, say, The Dark Knight. In the first case, we get to make the satisfying claim that we are acting courageously, like Braveheart, every time we make a somewhat bold decision, while in the second, we find ourselves looking into the consequences of our actions, at our own duality, at the vile closeness between us and the evil around us.

That’s an overly simple statement, and when I look at it again, I would add that it is overly Freudian, with all of its claims of identification and all that rot. Also, if I say that we model our behaviors after characters, it implies a specific intent to do so, when what I mean to say is that once we have identified with a character, the character itself shapes our behavior to a degree, because we have added this character into our definition of who we are and how we behave.

Does anyone else ever feel this way? I think of a few specific cases in my own experience. I’ve already alluded to the example of Jude the Obscure. I found myself, years after having read the book, still making decisions and thinking to myself, “Wait, am I doing this because I honestly think it’s the right choice given my own experience, or because I think this is what Jude should have done in his similar situation?” I still have only partial answers to that. Another text that haunted me for years was the poem “Wild Oats,” by Philip Larkin. Again, the question: “Am I the kind and tender person that my mind probably wants me to think I am, or am I more simply the speaker of this poem, too selfish, withdrawn, and easily bored to love?” In both cases, for the record, believing my supposed identity with the character/speaker threw me into stubborn depressions. In these depressions, I may have acted even more like the characters, though I was at the same time even more conscious of how little I wanted to be like them.

I don’t know where to take this meandering thought-trail. It has very specific feelings attached to it for me, but I seem to be having an unusual difficulty expressing them. I will try one last time to say this simple thing: sometimes I read or hear something that, for whatever reason, seems to announce itself to me like a curse. And like any good curse, it doesn’t matter whether I fight it or embrace it: it all plays out just as the oracle predicted, as tightly wound as Oedipus, Laius, and Jocasta.

I would love to hear any thoughts and impressions from anybody, or questions, or greetings from the black, churning void of the internet.

Does no one at all ever feel this way in the least?

Why Obama, Part 2: A Brief-as-Possible Look at Taxes

I thought about heading into the territory of “change,” since both candidates have decided to make the word their mantra this election, but since everybody always talks about Obama and change, I think I’ll talk about taxes and fiscal responsibility instead.

[EDIT: If you want an even clearer comparison of McCain’s and Obama’s claims to fiscal responsibility, read this article: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/09/04/2008-09-04_forget_the_pork_wheres_the_beef.html .  Frankly, this article says it better than I ever could, and I think you should read it.]

            It is the view of the Republican Party that the government should let more people keep more of their own money, should spend less money itself, and should keep a tightly balanced federal budget.  It seems to be a tightly guarded secret that, for the most part, Democrats actually agree with all of these tenets.  Yes, Democrats tend to support new social programs that do cost money, and are less averse to raising taxes than Republicans, but Democrats aren’t here to steal away your hard-earned house to turn it into a bathhouse for the homeless.  And while Democrats tend to spend more on things at home, they tend to spend considerably less on things like the military.  And, you know, wars against nations that weren’t threatening us.

            Listen to a few facts, take a look at a few numbers, and re-assess what you think.  Neither Obama nor McCain plans to raise taxes for the middle class – anybody below the $250,000/year mark.  In fact, both McCain and Obama plan to cut taxes for people up to that mark.  After that, their plans diverge: McCain’s tax cuts extend all the way to the top, while Obama plans to simply return the tax levels of the top 10% to just below where they were during the Clinton years.  McCain’s tax plan results in a very clear and very direct loss of income for the government – that is, less money to fund the government’s most necessary functions.  (Actually, of course, all of this money is hypothetical – we won’t actually run out of it, we’ll simply run ourselves further in debt to countries like China, whose ties to us are purely opportunistic.)

The theory is that the low taxes will encourage so much growth and trade and revenue that they will pay for themselves.  While I admit that this is quite reasonable, I am forced to say that I am unconvinced by its results in the past twenty years.  Our Federal Budget deficit ballooned during the 80s as our economy grew and stabilized with low taxes, and in the 90s, under higher tax rates, our economy grew by leaps and bounds.  In fact, those higher taxes left us with a budget surplus, long since evaporated after falling into the hands of a president whom no one, Democrat or Republican, calls a fiscal steward.

A philosophical disagreement with taxes is something worth talking about another time, but let’s stop to look at what we’ve got here: moderate increases in taxes don’t destroy the economy, and they can provide our country with a balanced budget and economic freedom.

Now, back to some numbers: the way McCain’s plan is structured heavily favors the wealthy.  That’s not an accusation, it’s number sense (click this link to see just how much: http://nearing.newsvine.com/_news/2008/08/28/1797267-mccains-tax-cuts-are-aimed-at-the-rich-even-more-so-than-bushs-were ).  The average middle-class family, under McCain’s tax cuts, can hope to save some $325 a year, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (a non-partisan group).  If you’re voting to put more cash in your wallet, take a look at this: the same family, under Obama’s plan, can hope to save about $1,120 a year - $795 more than with McCain. [http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/a_new_stitch_in_a_bad_pattern.html ] With Obama, 85-90% of the public is getting a tax cut.  Are the wealthy stuck with the tab?  Well, somewhat – as mentioned before, their taxes go back to just below the Clinton tax levels.  But while their tax levels return to 90s levels, their actual income levels have multiplied since that time by at least five-fold.  They won’t be forced to shut down their factories just yet.

But how does it pan out on a national level?  Where do these cuts and raises leave our national budget?  McCain’s cuts are expected to increase our debt by as much as 4.5 trillion dollars, while Obama’s are expected to increase it by 3.3 trillion dollars.  Those numbers look pretty similar in type, but think about the actual difference between 4,500,000,000,000 and 3,300,000,000,000.  It’s staggering. [http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates_taxproposals_tpc/index.htm?cnn=yes]

Here are some other things to chew on: McCain and Palin are running on a platform to cut pork-barrel projects and dastardly earmarks.  More power to them – if the projects are worth spending money on, they should go through the whole process that everything else does.  But cutting pork-barrels and earmarks does not add up to a plan to balance the budget.  Do you know how much money is spent on pork-barrel projects?  In 2004, it was less than 53 billion dollars.  Even if you could eliminate all of that – which, of course, you couldn’t – it would barely put a dent in government spending (we were just looking at numbers in the trillions!).  By comparison, our government now spends more than $700 billion a year on military expenses alone.  Even as recently as 2002 that number was just about $350 billion dollars. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/01/27/GR2006012700168.html

(If you want to see some really interesting – and scary – charts about military spending, click here: http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending)

Just so you know I haven’t left reality behind me, I’m going to admit that neither candidate is going to balance the budget.  It’s not gonna happen.  But it is valid to ask which of the two will leave us in a better position at the end of his term, especially when one of them wants to focus so much on the government’s budget habits.

McCain knew that the Bush tax plans were bogus back when they were first being pushed through.  He voted against them, and he was vocal about it.  Whether Adam Smith has chosen to haunt McCain’s dreams ever since, or whether McCain has chosen to make another considerable concession to his conservative base (as he did with Palin…more on her some other time…when I’ve got a lot more time on my hands…), I cannot say.  But the fact that he now not only supports them, but wants to extend them further, confuses me.  And it saddens me.  Because he’s never given a good explanation for why he switched on this issue, and I’m not sure that he can. (See also: environment, global warming, off-shore drilling, straight talk).

Why Obama, Pt. 1: The Beginning of Something Long

I've been thinking through some of these things for months, and I wanted to voice them. If they spin out unheard into the void, I don't mind - some of this is just a chance for me to organize my thoughts. They need organizing, because I'm quite given to incoherent babbling when it comes to politics, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm going to try to avoid willfully subjecting my friends to this.

Essentially, my thought is this: whether you are a Republican, Democrat, liberal, centrist, or moderate conservative, I think the case for Obama can be made very compellingly. I'm going to take a crack at it. I don't think any solid conservatives will go for it, but I'd still like them to listen in anyway. While I don't plan to hide my views, I hope to state them in a way that avoids the simple habit of bashing the other party for kicks, slandering people, making unfair accusations, or making straw-men arguments from the opposing view. I respect the conservative Republican approach to things, and I respect people who maintain that approach. But let me tell you why I shifted away from it.

Introduction:
I’ve been vaguely interested in politics for much of my life. When I was younger, I believe my motivation was chiefly that the ability to talk politics seemed to make me sound smarter, more adult. I probably still hope it does these things, but this hope is entirely secondary to my growing fascination of the pure mechanics of it all. In the last two years, politics has become a hobby of mine that consumes a surprising amount of my time, as I spend hours combing through the New York Times, the BBC World News, and sites like www.politico.com.
I might as well tell you now that in 2004, I voted for Bush. I did not know Kerry very well, I didn’t like his voice, and he sounded very suspicious to me. I was not entirely sure that I liked Bush, but at the time I was more concerned that any Supreme Court openings be filled by more conservative judges. As it happened, two openings came up, and Bush appointed Roberts and Alito (aside from his rulings in favor of expanding executive powers, I think I like Roberts. I don’t really know about Alito yet.)
Around 2006, I began to grow very excited about the 2008 elections. Interesting things had been happening. John McCain had been finding his way into the press again, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else getting the Republican nomination in ’08 – which was great, because I loved McCain. I even got to see him speak in person, and he conveyed a message that deeply resonated with me: the needs of America ought to come above the petty squabbles between parties. This same year, Democrats had chased Sen. Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party because he wasn’t against the war – never mind the fact that he had always been a successful, popular, well-loved and well-respected senator. But he, too, rose above: he ran as an Independent, and won his seat back handily.
I began thinking that my dream ticket for 2008 would be McCain/Lieberman (when people actually began to consider this a possibility in recent weeks, nobody believed me when I tried to say I predicted it years ago. This may be why I’m writing my thoughts now, just in case I get the chance to say, years later, “I told you so.”) Both of these men were well-respected, ethically sound men who could – and frequently did – work together to get things done. McCain broke with his party to pursue responsible care for the environment, and Lieberman broke with his to support things like the troop surge in Iraq, among other things. These two men could change the world.
And then, early in 2007, I stopped to watch a little video online. A good-looking young black man with a name I wasn’t sure I could pronounce gave a forty-five minute speech in his church about how faith ought to interact with politics – providing a compelling contrast to our current president’s approach, which has deeply troubled me. I wasn’t ready to let go of McCain, but I had to hear more from this man. Just as I knew that McCain had to be the Republican nominee, I knew that this man had to be the Democratic.

First Things:
I hope there is nobody out there who still thinks Obama is a Muslim. He’s not. (Insert obligatory “Not that it would matter…” here). And I think most people have put the flag-pin incident behind them (although, in truth, he was making a very apropos comment on patriotism). His wife’s “finally proud of this country” statement was nothing more than a mis-phrased gaffe (if you want to hear a gaffe, you should hear some of the things McCain has called his wife in public), and I haven’t heard anybody say anything about Jeremiah Wright in a while. I find this comforting, but I also haven’t been hanging around the people who would say something about these things, and so I imagine these non-issues haven’t completely died for everybody. Particularly Wright. I considered writing full-fledged responses to these ridiculous items, but I find that I can’t bring myself to do so: these topics are just not worth it. None of the above-mentioned topics is in the least bit important. At all. Seriously. I’m open to discussing these if somebody else wants to get me worked up about them, but honestly, I’d rather discuss more interesting things, like tax policies and health care.

I was wandering around the DNC last week with my roommate, enjoying the festive air and the bounty of crazy people doing bizarre, attention-grabbing activities, when I made what I admit is something of a crass joke. "Hey," I said. "Wouldn't it be funny if, every time I passed anyone who looked remotely ethnic, I ran up to them and shouted, 'Yes we can!'?"

The joke, of course, is that it would not be funny at all. It would be really embarrassing and offensive to assume that anybody with slightly different pigmentation in their skin would vote for Obama simply because he's black, no questions asked (Does anybody remember Alan Keyes? There's a reason you have to wikipedia him. He didn't win anything.). So why is it that everybody thinks it's perfectly acceptable to assume that women are going to turn out in droves to vote for a woman, simply because she's a woman?

I grew up in good old conservative Tennessee, and I swear I didn't hear a kind word about Hillary Clinton the whole time I was there. Even from women. I didn't even know people liked her until last year, when I was able to warm up to her a bit myself. The news talked incessently about her picking up the female vote (as though she was born with that vote in the bag), but you know, it all panned out pretty evenly. If she had gotten "the female vote" (as though they vote in bloc!), she would have handily won the nomination.

And now you have McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP, which I think was an incredibly shrewd choice (I just hope it wasn't shrewd enough to tilt things in his favor). I think it was shrewd for a number of reasons, but none of these reasons have to do with Palin picking up the mythical "female vote." Palin will appeal to, oh, I imagine about half of American women. Roughly the same amount as sympathize with her [incredibly] conservative views. She's excited conservatives, she's gotten endless news coverage since the announcement, she's generating much needed attention for the Republicans, but she didn't just sew up the election by virtue of her reproductive organs. Ok?

Oy. So anyway, I've decided that, since I feel far too guilty to actually subject my friends to endless inane political talk, I'm going to broadcast it into the great void of the web, where it will bounce around harmlessly and bore only those who wish to read it. Say, have I told you about the series of articles I'm planning to write...