(dave e)

victory

"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."

ugh.

go deep

ha. he's like a quarterback, but with a bomb. and his helmet is all 1940s.

africa hot

you know how i said "code red"? nope. nossir. what we got here is a code purple. and, let's face it, a code purple is no monkeyshines. you need to git home, git some sweetenedicetea, turn on that fan, and sweat. turn that damn s.u.v. off.

the wheels go round and round

back on el autobus today.

as it happens, david lynch wrote and directed today's public transporation experience.

this morning, our bus kind of went out of commission a few blocks from home when what felt like a crash took place. that familiar crunchy-pop sound, the driver looks out her sideview mirror, picks up the phone (seriously, rideon buses have an old-fashioned telephone handset for communication... i imagine ralph cramden would rather talk on the phone than be all CHiPs with a c.b.), and everyone de-buses. i saw no car crumpled into the back of our gillig phantom, so maybe the engine just blew up.

my afternoon metro train (i'm giving you these links, dawgs, so you get out of your cars and on the bus... we got this here code red on) crawled its last 1/4 mile to the station at roughly 2 miles an hour. when we lurched in, the driver incoherently mumbled what i can only guess was "red line service" and waited a good minute before he opened the door. i bolted.

at the bus stop, a man was shouting at these two girls that they were going to "stop laughing when they got BURNED LIKE BACON GODDAMIT." the man kept trying to tell others the same thing. the bus driver was, simply put, nonplussed. as soon as bacon man started walking in circles around the bus stop bench, another man, middle-aged, approached the same (by now, not very happy) girls, who i'd guess were probably, like, middle schoolers. "hey y'all go to the same school y'all in school y'all takin' summer school what y'all doin on the bus where's your school?" i haven't been that creeped out in a while. on the bus, bacon man told everyone it was hot outside and that "whew, i'm going to call it a day."

i guess it's the heat. but, then again, just another day on Our Nation's Capital's trains and Our Nation's Capital's Adjoining Counties' buses.

[edit: well, at least i got off before this happened.]

i give up

from ha'aretz, by way of salon tabletalk:

According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

let me see if i understand.

a little less than two years ago, the scariest day in america. no need to go on about it, you and i were terrified, right? i still look up when i see low planes. with tremendous and immediate national and international support, the u.s. military overwhelmed a despotic, misogynist theocracy in afghanistan. the postprimitive collection of fiercely independent tribes that make up that country got a new president, hamid karzai. he has survived an assasination attempt, and his authority extends little beyond the city limits of kabul. after months of seeing osama bin laden's face at least once per newscast, the u.s. search for him and for the religious leader of the taliban, mullah omar, kind of faded away from american discourse. oh, sure, they're still there, we're told, out in the "wilderness boundary area between afghanistan and pakistan." today, the second day of the summer of 2003, i see that bin laden is nowhere to be found, that omar is busy again, and that americans are still kept nervous about the terrace. you know, the war on terrism. that terrace might get you.

in the meantime, americans believe that it was wise to start another war (ok, defend itself... if you insist, we can call it that). remember, the war against the terrace in afghanistan, though absent from your nightly news, can't possibly have been won. if the point was to "smoke 'em out of their caves," or somesuch strategy, so they no longer had a place in southern asia, the job hardly seems done. the thing is, the reason i'm ranting about this, is the fact that so many 'mericans actually believe that saddam hussein played a substantial role in the september 11th disaster. um. if i remember correctly, the alleged meeting-in-prague was disavowed by the u.s. administration. it's also my understanding that bin laden issued a prominent fatwa for the head of hussein, a despotic (but, not good for appeasing fundamentalist warmongers) secular leader of a persian "nation." country singers like toby keith and darryl worley sing songs about kickin' hussein's ass 'cause we need to remember what "they" did to us. have you forgotten? (by the way, does anyone else remember the "gaddafi duck" song from the 80s?) people go, "oh, yeah! god bless america. united we stand. power of pride. 9/11 was the worst day ever. let's go git saddam." [EDIT: did some more looking. found this. perhaps the point isn't that a majority of americans believe that saddam hussein was responsible for the september 11th horror, but that, without much reason, so many are willing to ignore distinctions and convert justifiable anger at september 11th into an incomplete logic for going into another war. foxnews, for the record, still introduces stories about iraq with their gyroscopic "war on terror" graphic].

WHAT THE FUCK?

look, i'm not talking about weaponsofmassdestruction. i'm not even talking about whether or not the war was right, whether or not the u.s. is an "occupier" or "liberator," whether this will haunt us for decades, or whether our president rightly declared victory by landing a plane on a ship loaded with people who'd been on the longest deployment ever and probably wanted to see their families instead of waiting a couple of extra days for a photo op.

i'm talking about the fact that facts, reflection, and informed decision making have, apparently, little to do with the way people come to conclusions.

premise 1: according to the washington post, there are 11,500 american soldiers in afghanistan, looking for bin laden, omar, remnant taliban and al qaeda.

premise 2: afghanistan remains out of control, and the two faces we saw on the news every night are still out there.

premise 3: 'merica, following the intellectual lead of the messr's worley and keith, kicked butt in iraq.

premise 4: whether or not they existed, the weaponsofmassdestruction have not been satisfactorily accounted for.

premise 5: sucks to be an iraqi nowadays (if that last link doesn't work: an image of a teenager, hands apparently bound, being led by a u.s. soldier, captioned, "U.S. soldiers arrested 17-year-old Khaled Salim in the southern suburbs of Baghdad Tuesday. Salim, who insulted occupying troops on his way to school, was bound and taken away as a warning to others").

premise 6: turns out, 'merica is ready for iran, now.

premise 7: the president of the united states of america, my country, is telling men who are ostensibly world leaders that god is "telling" him what to do next.

premise 8: these are becoming more frightening than funny.

conclusion: i'm sort of at a loss.

apologies to the three people who read this. nothing new, here, for sure. just needed to do something besides banging my head against the table for a few minutes.

wishful thinking

so i'm all like tired of the way my, uh, blog looks and stuff. i'm going to change the way the letters look and the overabundance of white space between them and add a picture of some stuff and have better links and say brilliant things about the difference between some la-la web "surfer" and a hard-core web builder. and then i'm going to look into getting my dissertation written. but first, i need to make the world's most sublime sandwich. or at least to microwave one of those trader joe's sesame chicken with noodles deals. sure is pretty outside.

i drove to campus today. no good bus-people stories. but i am noticing that people are getting angrier and angrier at me for driving the speed limit. i say, i'm in the geriatric lane and you can go around, young missy. and a small kid, jaywalking like crazy across a busy four-lane road, shouted, "hurry up, slowpoke!" when i slowed down to avoid the whole vehicular homicide thing. what the hell? shouldn't he be in damn school or something? don't parents explain crosswalks to their kids? let 'em play killer video games. let 'em watch skinemax. let 'em drink too much sody-pop. let 'em listen to that rock and roll business. but please get 'em out of the middle of the damn street.

this entry should have been called "crotchety." i'm off to look for my pet worm, now.

will teach for food

this sort of piece gets me all happy about my career choices.

maybe if i had a better resume... (thanks, heck's kitchen, as always, for the link).

my country can (and just might) kick your country's butt

i suppose everyone has his or her take on the State of Things in The World, particularly the State of Things After 'mer'ca Has Liberated Those Iraqis From the Axis of Evilites (except for the ones who keep getting rounded up).

and i suppose polling is every bit as suspect as we're led to believe. national review's healthy stable of banner ads often rotates one for a book that'll "explain how liberal pollsters trick you." gotta watch out for them lib'rals, after all... it seems reasonable enough to assert that almost any poll can, in some way, be critiqued rigorously enough to make its findings suspect.

nevertheless, thanks, bbc, for your broad survey of "what the world thinks of america." that'll help quantify things a bit. their numbers and translations between "yes or no" responses and "favorable and unfavorable" are a bit difficult to negotiate, but it at least seems pretty clear that some people think the united states of le beeg mac totally sux.

my favorites: while 73% of respondents said "free" was a fair description of americans, 65% indicated that "arrogant" worked, too. in australia, 93% would rather stay put than move to the land of the free (not surprising, but that 1% who say they'd rather live in america looks pretty cast-out-to-survive-with-paul-hogan. g'day, indeed). koreans, asked which is more dangerous, north korea or the u.s., offered the following: neither: 8%, north korea: 39%, u.s.: 48% (whoo! sunshine policy!). on average, "the world" thinks the u.s. is as dangerous as north korea, and more dangerous than china, russia, france, iran, and syria. in case the reader's response is, "ah, the world just hates us because they think we're idiotic, immoral dolts," note that a slight majority believes that the people of iraq will be better off following the u.s. action than they were under saddam hussein.

it's just telling that homer simpson, love him as we do, was chosen overwhelmingly as the greatest american ever. again, i understand, i rilly truly do, that this sort of information is hardly a transparent window through which we can view "the world's" view of us with precision. on the other hand, this stuff doesn't just materialize out of the ether.

as my man-on-the-bus might observe, sh*t! thass some sh*t!

faking it

wow. ...really wanted to say something about my day. you know, sort of force a record out there.

herewith, snippets:

freaked out students.

some sort of eighth-grader conference (i think i saw an id badge that said "history day"), so the whole campus -- but most notably, my bus -- swarmed with the giggling class and their protective chaperones.

a metro train in which a maintenance man was standing, no, straddling two cars, with the inter-car doors open and air rushing into the car. as soon as he closed the doors, the lights went out for at least a minute (in a tunnel). they do that in nyc, not in dc.

overheard conversation on a montgomery county rideon bus: "sh*t! motherf*cker can't be getting a job and sh*t if he be a convicted felon. he gots to go into bidness fo' himself and sh*t. that's what i did. f*ck working for no g*dam white man. what if you go to hell, and you been working for a white man? g*dam that's some sh*t."

and the neighbors are jackhammering their driveway.

that's some sh*t.

when i grow up...

i want to be this cool:

image courtesy of It's a sad and beautiful world.

on the far left, "godfather of grunge" neil young. next, my generation's version of dean, presley, and brando. if you haven't seen dead man, you should. depp isn't all benny and joon, you know. speaking of which, the shocks of white hair are director jim jarmusch's, and he's the reason i watch movies. on the right, robby muller, jarmusch's primary cinematographer, who also shot lars van trier's dancer in the dark, the saddest film ever.

i wonder what they're talking about.

and in short, i was afraid

today, when i returned graded papers, one student began shouting and throwing his folders around.

don't return grades on friday the 13th.

maycomb was a tired old town

"don't say 'nigger,' scout."

when i was a boy, and my family got our first vcr, to kill a mockingbird was one of the first movies we managed to tape. and we watched it often.

i haven't seen it in a while, but i'm pretty sure i'd still cry during the scene when, immediately after atticus finch has so desperately tried to save tom robinson's life, reverend sykes, standing at the front of the courtroom gallery's black population, tells scout, "stand up. your father's passing."

the subtle understatement of harper lee's atticus finch always seemed so profound, such a local and just response to what strangeness and unfamiliarity means in the south. mindful of the tricky distinction between eccentricity (dill's aunt stephanie) and cruel outsiderness (tragic boo radley), peck's atticus was one of my childhood's greatest educators.

that's the gregory peck i'll remember.

el profesor

for the first time in three years, i'm teaching a composition course this summer. in six weeks, i'm attempting to cover roughly the same curriculum under this course's regular semester-long plan, with minor exceptions. one week and two days into the session, things seem alright.

i've graded two papers just now. time to be all reflective and stuff. time to take a break and flip a different cerebral switch.

one direction this blog may take from time to time aims at --no, dave, no!-- politics. i feel like i should put a helmet on before i head this way...

as a teenager, i was first a dogmatic leftist. my skateboard in hand, i proudly stomped about in combat boots and an anarchy-sign adorned jean jacket...

black flag, the dead kennedys, and minor threat gave me my anthems, and authority was there to be ignored (skateboarding is not a crime). (look, honestly, i was also band president, so this was a pretty safe punk ethos, but, man, was i hardcore).

then, i found rush limbaugh. i listened, and i ditto'd. i even met pat buchanan during the primary season that preceded the 92 presidential election.

ok. as an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college i unlearned both of my political phases. i became, like everyone else, it seemed, a "moderate."

and then i stopped voting. adopted an aggressive indifference (a blog name!) about the american political scene and all its symptoms. proudly argued against the futility of "my one vote." dismissed the sincerity of my college democrat and college republican friends who actually believed in their respective allegiances.

fast forward (yes, let's) to last fall. now, i'm most certainly left-of-center (hard not to be, given where "center" seems to have found itself) (look, i know that all this "left," "center," "right" business is crazily reductive). i was still able to hang on to my no-vote stance, because the status quo in my state matched pretty well with my views. and then, it happened. maryland went and got itself a republican governor.

so i've started reading. i pay attention to the conservative argument again. often, the only real effect is an elevated blood pressure, particularly given the... well... screed to wade through in order to get to the point. i'm not really sure if i'm getting anything at all from being yelled at by hannity or o'reilly (obvious enough, i guess). and i DO NOT imagine that my reaction to that sort of vituperation means anything to anyone but me. but it strikes me as plain naive to pretend that the reasoning behind the right's rant is just stupid knuckle-dragging, antagonistic selfishness. the national review's staff may get my stomach all knotty, but i'd be a stupid knuckle-dragger to write their material off as stupid knuckle dragging (although buckley's "onward, christian soldiers: evangelism in iraq" evokes shades of ann coulter's compassionate christianity).

and yet, i think i may, from time to time, offer my own very quiet reaction to the assertive assertions that seem to be re-defining (oh, come on, dave, you're at least two years behind!) the grossly either-or state of american politics.

or i might go grade another paper...

home

go here. right now.

why?

where the hell else are you going to be able to find out where to eat, dance, and listen to some damn music when you find yourself in memphis? you want some bbq and beer? a good jukebox? the really-pretty-much-perfect-representation-of-memphis links section even has a link to memphisrap.com, where you can get the latest on three six mafia, the river city's finest tennessee representaz.

tell them elvis sent you.

overdose

several years ago, i was in a seminar on digital textuality and culture. one of the cornerstone requirements of the course was a personal homepage, a project in which i immersed myself for several weeks and then pretty much forgot. the major project was a longer study of some (we hoped) timely issue at play near the intersection of scholarship and the online world. i wrote a series of short-ish pieces on the ways homepages construct, reflect, convey, and perform the identity (and, i guess, subjectivity) of their creators.

like any good graduate student would, i left both projects to collect dust...

the homepage gets a half-hearted update from time to time, usually when i fill in the blanks for a new semester's syllabus. i do spend a good deal of time consuming the web's matter, and i'll hop on the new media booster train whenever it rolls past, but i think today's skulking has left me spinning.

the questions from the other side of the skulk, those i haven't thought of since i last tried to "make" something on el web del mundo, are fairly tired. probably too tired to enumerate. things to sleep on. maybe tomorrow i'll have a better sense of whether or not it's cool to edit already-posted prose for style, or of whether or not providing links to amazon for my "current" reading and listening tastes is helpful (or my complicity in a killer marketing plan).

sophomore slump

ok. beginning to figure things out, here. i think progress is being made, and i offer as evidence the world's most compelling list of links. i suspect that most folks haven't heard of these, so my catalogue is an effort to finally get the world familiarized with up-and-coming journalism.

failed names for this record of daily flotsam:

"subtle intensity" : natalie says it sounds like something the beatnik poet from Peggy Sue Got Married would say. everyone remember michael fitzsimmons' poem about razors and rats? good.
"aggressively indifferent" : while i love the implied message of a contradictory approach to things, it sounds to me more like a diagnosable condition than a personality.
"a complacent worry" : the indefinite article kind of arrests a general state of worriness, i think, but it reminds me too much of mcsweeney's descriptions: "quarterly concern" and "internet tendency."
"obsessively calm" : dang. this is really beginning to sound like an effort to name your next rock album. cover art in this case would definitely involve a calm ocean surface, building clouds in the distance, and a not-subtle reference to "red sky at morn..."

bloggers new to the medium will, at first, post compulsively, even several times per day. soon, the excitement fades, and the commentary diminishes.

back in a minute.

uncertain

well.

not sure what to call it. not sure what to say. i've read these things for a while, now, and, like you (wow. that's downright presumptuous!) [insert knowing discourse on the dynamic relationship between bloggist and anonymous, yet somehow tangible consumer], i have favorites. every bit as important to me as the washington post. this morning, on a radio network i listen to and cite, on average, 8.4 times per day, i heard a piece in which [media critic] boldly argued that blogs are at least partly responsible for the editorial sea change at the ny times.

pause was given.

i think what i'll do with this (already once renamed) weblog (i hear the kids are calling them blogs... that can be our secret) is to do my best to avoid experiment, to let theory fly, to resist worry, and to fiendishly ignore the preceding three rules. and probably to talk to myself often (because, let's face it, who doesn't love reading that?).