PoliScope

Tom Tomorrow here

2011-11-01T16:54:00.002-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Crazy cell phone girls

2011-10-28T16:28:00.005-04:00

Here they come, one-by-one, out of Ward 204, then Ward 203 . . . and Ward 202 . . . and the women's restroom right across from Ward 204 . . . flipping their cell phones open, firing up their iPhones, scrolling through all those missed calls that went directly to voice mail because their professors -- Luddite jerks like me -- had the nerve . . . the NERVE, to tell them they could not answer or talk on their phones during class. They put their phones up to their ear, place a folded arm across their chest and begin pacing eagerly for someone . . . . ANYONE . . . to pick up the phone so they can talk.

And talk. And talk. And talk.

To whom or about what, I don't know. But they just need to talk.

Because they are Crazy Cell Phone Girls.

"Like, you have so got to be kidding me, that's is, like, so insane for you to have to do that . . . like, so what are going to do . . . are you going to, like, tell your professor that you, like, have done no work or are you going to make something up . . . that's what I would do because there is, like, no way I could write a 25 page paper in, like, one night," begins the machine-gun banter by Crazy Cell Phone Girl #1. A slight pause, perhaps for oxygen, and then more . . .

"Oh, God, like, no way . . . you have got to come up with something to tell him," CCPG1 continues. "Like, here's an idea: how many fake funerals have you been to this semester because I have been to, like, three . . . but I keep track so I won't use the same people over and over because, like, in high school, I, like, forgot that I told my school that I had, like, all these funerals to attend and, like, my advisor said to me once, 'How many grandparents do you have?" and I was, like, 'Like my parents' parents remarried so these were, like, step-grandparents,' and my advisor was, like, 'We called your mom to ask her how many mothers and fathers she had,' and my mom was, like, 'What ARE you talking about, you know,' so I was, like, so busted. But the cool thing about college is that you can start over. I am like the master of the fake funeral."

Wow! "Fake funerals." I'd never heard that term before. See you can learn something from your students. That's what makes this such a rewarding profession, other than the money, of course.

Wait . . . wait . . . wait . . . the women's restroom door opens and CCPG2 bursts out in full-volume, everyone-needs-to-hear-my-conversation mode: "FUCK THAT SHIT!" is the well-thought out piece of advice on this end. Left arm flailing about as she barks into her phone, "You should just tell him, fuck you, asshole, and let him go fucking crawl back in his fucking hole, fucking asshole that he is, fucking jerk, GOD, he is such a fucking asshole that I can't wait to see him get, like, smacked down. Full bitch armor . . . that's what you need to do!"

Well, that was easy, wasn't it?

And Justice Kennedy had the nerve to write that women aren't decisive enough to know if having a late-term abortion is really the right thing for them? CCPG2 had it going on that morning. So imperative was the need to straighten out her unseen friend's relationship crisis that the call couldn't wait until was out of the restroom. I almost felt sorry for this poor "asshole" who, unknown to him, was going to feel the wrath of his girlfriend wearing her "full bitch armor." I mean, CCPG2 was kicking ass and taking names at 10.10 a.m. on a Monday, and coming out of the restroom, yet. For an undergraduate at my university, that is the equivalent of 4.30 a.m. grown-up time. In less than 30 seconds, seven uses of the word "fuck" -- as a verb, an adverb, an adjective . . . smack-down threats . . . full-bitch armor. Gotta admit . . . I hope this showdown ends up You Tube.

"Hey, do you think I should buy this guy's refrigerator?" asks CCPG3 into her phone, needing guidance on this important potential purchase. What better time to get appliance advice than while waiting for the previous students to leave the classroom on a Monday morning? "I think it's one of those dinky ones, but we could put, you know, some stuff in there, don't you think?"

Yes, you probably could put "some stuff" in an empty refrigerator. Not a lot. But some? Easily.

"Look at all these jobs," she continues. "Do you think I should get one? . . . I don't want to but my mom is, like, all over me to get a paying job this summer and I'm, like, I thought you wanted me to get an internship and I'm, like, telling her that they don't pay and she's, like, 'Then find one that does," and I'm, like, where? Oh, my God, did you know that, like, classes are over in, like, a week or something, and I'm like, so not ready to get a job. What should I tell my mother, because my dad is, like, whatever?"

"You should so NOT get a stupid job like waitressing or hosting because that is, like, so stupid," comes a voice from just down the hall. This is weird . . . it's almost as if CCPG4 is talking on the phone to CCPG3, who is standing just 10 feet away from her.

"That's, like, what I'm trying to tell them but, like, my mom is so, whatever. She really pisses me off with all her, 'You need to find a paying job' shit. Like I'm not trying, sort of. Let her come try to get a job in D.C. . . . she'd be, like, saying the same thing."

CCPG3 has a point. The stress of finding a summer job in college cannot possibly compare to the cushy life of this young woman's mother. She should pick up the phone and tell her mother, "Do you really expect me to sell my Vuitton purse and fake-Nicole Richie sunglasses to pay my rent? No way." That would show her. I know I would back down if this were my son or daughter.

"Totally," comes CCPG4's response. If I had my phone, I would have taken a picture of this scene. CCPG3 and CCPG4 were talking to each other, in the hallway of their classroom building, with their backs turned to each other, and, for about a minute, had no idea. Until CCPG4 turned around and said . . .

"Oh, my God, you are standing right here! This is so crazy. So what are you doing here?"

CCPG3: "I decided I should go to my 8.55 since the semester's almost halfway over. And, like, my professor is all, like, where have you been and I'm, like, thinking, 'You're lucky I'm here,' but I just told her that, like, 'I have been here but she hasn't noticed.' Why are you here?"

"I have a 10.20," says CCPG4. "But do you think I should go? I've been to, like, three classes in a row?"

"Hell, no. Let's, like, blow it off."

Off they go, CCPGs 3 and 4, not talking to each other, of course. Phones back open, they're scrolling and dialing, hoping that someone, ANYONE, will pick up the other end, giving them some company other than each other as they skip off to their newly appointed date with nothing.

Go ahead and pass me, or why 50 is not the new 30

2011-10-26T21:58:00.006-04:00

Last week, as I was bicycling home from work, about six or seven real cyclists blew by me with the speed and precision of a small squadron of fighter-bomber planes zeroing in on some clueless bastard worshipping his Condi Rice shrine in a cave or a group of sailors, unaware of that they’re about to be blown to bits, playing poker on a battleship in the middle of the Pacific. At least that’s what happens in the movies. WOOSH . . . WOOSH . . . WOOSH . . . they went, pedaling with power and grace, perfectly synchronized, as only athletes fully devoted to their training regimen could be. Once upon a time, say twenty or thirty years ago, I would have taken being overtaken personally, and started out after them. Pass me? Fuck you. Faster than me? Really? Fuck you again. “Passing on your left . . .” Passing? Fuck you a third time.

But now, twenty or thirty years later, two things are very different than they were back then. First, I just turned 50. Second, because I just turned 50, I just don’t care. There is, come to think of it, a third thing as well. I was never a serious cyclist and I’m not now. I was once, though, a pretty serious runner, particularly between the ages of 20 and 35. Back then, if I’d been out for just a routine training run, I would have said something like, “How far you going?” toyed with him for a while, and then said, “Gotta get going. Thanks for the run,” and left him in the dust. Then I’d find someone a few phone poles up ahead, draft him and then cruise right on by, refusing to return his “Hey, how’s it going?” courtesy greeting because I was a SERIOUS runner, and serious runners didn’t acknowledge “joggers.” Or run with portable music players – remember, there were no iPods until 10 years ago. No chance, no way. Not when you are monitoring your mile splits or calculating whether you are a few seconds ahead or behind your time from the previous day or week.

Yes, yes indeed. Twenty or thirty years ago I cared whether I could hit golf ball straight, or draw or fade it to suit my shot. I cared about finding the time to even play the damn sport. I cared about whether my records were arranged in the correct order, spending more time than any normal person should debating whether my Weather Report albums, or, later, CDs, should go in the Jazz or Rock section of my shelf. I cared a lot more about who came and went in the latest incarnation of the Allman Brothers, whether Branford and Wynton Marsalis were on speaking terms, or whether anyone found out that Paul McCartney, not John Lennon, was always and still is my favorite Beatle. I cared a great deal if the fast pitch softball team I played on while I was in graduate school was going to make the City of Atlanta playoffs, and I cared even more about where my team’s manager put me in the batting order. I cared about qualifying for the Boston Marathon while I was at my running peak during my early 30s, something I did, although I was unable to compete in the race because of an injury. I cared what people thought who might come to my apartment or house or wherever I was living at the time thought about my books or the posters I had decided to frame that I had interpreted as art. I remember caring about turning 40, and thinking that my friends all cared about that, too, so much so that I threw myself a birthday party. I cared about all these things and many more lesser things as well.

Then, as if on cue, I stopped caring so much about whether Braves choked again in the playoffs and whether the world would continue to turn after Bobby Cox retired. I stopped getting into arguments with opposing fans at baseball and hockey games because I realized we were arguing about someone or something that had nothing to do with my own welfare. Really, is it worth getting ejected from a game you paid to watch because the guy next to you thinks that Alex Ovechkin sucks, or that the Washington Nationals are just one quality starter and an everyday center-fielder away from going to the World Series or whether Jayson Werth is worth $126 million when it's not my money? Politics? Fortunately, I stopped caring about politics a long time ago, shortly after I moved to Washington. Actually, that's not quite true. I never really cared about the game of politics . . . who's up, who's down, who is working for whom or what the polls allegedly tell us 18 months before a mid-term congressional election, who got elected or why, or what an unseasonable winter in D.C. might mean for the 1988, 1992 presidential election, or the antics of former D.C. Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry. Ideas, yes. Politics, posing and the self-importance that goes with it? No. I once believed that Washington was a place where "serious" people thought about "serious" ideas and had "serious" conversations about them, sometimes even on television. Then, one Sunday morning, about twenty years ago, as I was watching some television political impresario scream at some reporter about why he was wrong about something that didn't matter, an anonymous voice grabbed my ear and asked, "Why the hell are you watching this shit?" I didn't have an answer. It didn't matter that the voice was lodged somewhere inside my head. All that mattered is that I heard it. I had no answer. And that was the end of that. Then, the following Friday night, I had the same revelation while I was watching "Washington Week in Review," the straight-laced PBS show where "serious" reporters sit around a table pretending to be interested in each others' opinions. The difference between this show and the others was that they were intent on being civilized, or "agreeing to disagree" about the big issues of the day. Peel back the veneer just a bit, and you realize that the Washington establishment doesn't really disagree on much of anything. Its members are all in on the joke, collecting ridiculous speaking or appearance fees to give their eager admirers desperately wanting to connect to this selective fraternity the impression that their "insider" status somehow translates into some very important information that they really, really need to know. Bulletin: what these "insiders" know isn't very important, unless you consider an advance warning that a deputy press secretary for some second term congressman is about to get fired something essential to your daily existence. Coming into possession of this important knowledge will not affect my life or yours, unless you're the person about to get fired. But it will give you something to talk about with your friends, and that little, bitty piece of information, for a sadly significant number people in Washington, is worth caring about.

A friend of mine who turned 50 about six months before I did told me that, when it comes to your work and career, once you hit this magic number you become part of the furniture. Smart man, my friend. Since the beginning of this year, I have indeed become the invisible man in my office corridor. I was once under the impression that the doors to our offices had hinges and the extra chair or two that we all have were for our guests to sit down. If you felt the necessity to talk to your colleague about the colleague across the hall or next door, your new dependent variable, or the exciting new conclusions you have "found" in your research ("In conclusion, we find that politicians are likely to talk when they campaign, but it's unclear that what they talk about matters to voters or to the media who cover them. We believe that further research, preferably funded by a grant that gives me a course reduction, is needed"), you could invite that person in your office, close the door and have a conversation. But no more. Now, my younger colleagues, brimming with all the excitement of college freshman living away from home for the first time, think nothing of holding court on the status of their path-breaking research with their doors wide open, lest any of us miss out on their glorious new findings. Better yet, I'm often treated to doorway discussions of the latest rumblings of the barflies at the most recent academic conference about what department is falling apart or which young star professor will soon be leaving for even less teaching, more money and less accountability to the taxpayers or the undergraduates that pay the tuition that supports their all-important research on some arcane topic that matters not at all to anyone who lives in current political world . . . or whoever lived at all. Once I realized that there was no point to getting frustrated or upset with my colleagues' behavior, which would not change even after a polite request or two or six, I asked for and received permission to move out of my building. I seriously doubt if my colleagues will even know I'm gone, transfixed as they are with their model-building, hetereoscadasiticty and the occasional bout of kurtosis.

Understanding that 50 is not the new 30 means much more than waking up even sorer than you were ten years ago after playing ice hockey the night before, or giving up even the occasional glass of wine or bottle of beer because it makes you sick, passing on the hot sauce, turning down gigs that require you to begin playing at 10 p.m. and end at 1.30 or 2 a.m., squinting so that you can see better the potential side effects of the vast assortment of purple pills that drug companies are marketing to guys my age or . . . and I take no pride or pleasure in saying this . . . when you don't laugh when you see the trailers for the new Farrelly Brothers or Will Farrell feature when you're at the movies because you don't find their movies funny anymore. No, it's about letting things go, learning not to care about things, people and events that don't really matter and embracing the reality that the cycle of life applies to everyone.

Even me.

On the other hand, I have noticed that I've knocked 1.15 seconds off my 5K times since July. Hmmm . . . maybe I should think about entering a race, perhaps in the Masters' category.

Or then again, maybe not.

Tom Tomorrow here

2011-10-24T15:06:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Jethro Tull

2011-10-20T20:03:00.003-04:00

Do you, or does anyone, have any idea what these lyrics mean?

"Happy and I'm smiling, walk a mile to drink your water/
You know I'd love to love you, and above you there's no other/
We'll go walking out while others shout of war's disaster/
Oh, we won't give in, let's go living in the past."

"Once I used to join in every boy and girl was my friend/
Now there's revolution, but they don't know what they're fighting/
Let us close out eyes, outside their lives go on much faster/
Oh, we won't give in, we'll keep living in the past."

To this day, I'm not sure what this song, "Living in the Past," by Jethro Tull means. A quick guess would have me say that it's a nostalgic look at a relationship challenged by modernity and complex times, or the need of a couple to hang on to their innocence in the wake of war and revolution. Or maybe it doesn't mean anything at all. Maybe the lyrics just sounded good and they were written for their sonic value. Whatever the case . . .

Thirty-seven years after I first heard this song drift out of the speakers of my transistor radio in the late (or early) hours of some Saturday night (or Sunday morning) in 1972, "Living in the Past" remains one of the Big Three songs I heard right in a row that forever changed the way I listened to rock music. At 10 or 11 years old, I was still finding my own music. I had, of course, been listening to the Beatles since I had come out of the womb thanks (naturally) to my mother and my ultra-cool teenage neighbor, Marcy Pitt. Motown records also provided an almost constant background, depending on which AM radio station our car could pick up and what the teenage and college black guys who worked in the neighborhood where my dad had his store were listening to on their portable radios. My friends with older brothers and sisters occasionally put on a Hendrix or Steppenwolf album, and that was certainly a jarring alternative to "Sgt. Peppers" and "Abbey Road." At that age, though, I could not claim that I had "discovered" a band yet.

One night changed that. Right in a row, I heard "Do It Again," by Steely Dan, "Long Distance Runaround," by Yes, and "Living in the Past," by Jethro Tull. The next day, I went to the Woolworth's dime store and bought all three singles, a terribly uncool thing to do, since "real" music geeks only bought albums. Not that I cared, at that age, although I did, whether I had been accepted into the neighborhood club of music geekdom -- that would come soon enough, when the Gregg Ivers seal-of-approval was required to buy any new Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and, yes, Jethro Tull album. The song's melody, led by Ian Anderson's flute playing, was hypnotic. Underpinning the entire tune was an incredible bouncing bass line supported by a rhythmically supple drum pattern. Anderson's vocals were hardly in the tradition of any other singer. He sounded like he was snarling at you while he was singing and, at the same time, fighting off a bad head cold. Only Donald Fagen of Steely Dan had a voice that came close to Anderson's in its nasal distinctiveness (both voices stood could not have been more different than Jon Anderson's of Yes, whose contra-tenor choirboy vocals soared above that band's majestic, orchestral music). Yet, in this song, the notes he is singing follow the bass line, not the chord progression of the guitar, a very unusual choice in rock music (and something more or less invented by Paul McCartney. Just listen to "All My Loving" and you'll hear what I mean).

After "Living in the Past" came "Aqualung," the first album in what would become Tull's classic period. Anderson's lyrics -- he was not, as many people commonly believed, actually named Jethro Tull, who was a famous 17th and 18th century English agriculturalist -- were strange and often off-color. How many bands have as the opening verse in their most famous song lyrics like these:

"Sitting on a park bench, eyeing little girls with bad intent . . ."

or

"Snot is running down his nose, greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes . . ."

But that was Ian Anderson, never on the inside of much of anything! In the true tradition of the 70s British progressive bands, Tull produced an album, "Thick as a Brick," that was a two-sided opus of one song! Long before Spinal Tap produced "Smell the Glove," Jethro Tull gave us "Thick as a Brick," and "A Passion Play," another one-song "concept" album over two sides. Yes, it was pretentious as hell. But compared to so much other of the three-chord crotch rock of the day, it was a marvelously creative and very welcome alternative. And just as fans and critics felt that Tull had disappeared down a drain of ponderousness too incomprehensible for music nerds like me, the band produced the folk-driven, almost pastoral, "Songs From the Wood," the last, in my opinion, great Tull album.

Over the years, too many great musicians to name here have wandered in and out of Jethro Tull, which is still alive and, from what I understand, well enough to tour. The only other musician to remain with Anderson over the years has been Martin Barre, the brilliant guitarist whose guitar break at the end of "Aqualung," is one of the most frequently committed-to-memory air guitar solos of the last 40 years.

I don't listen to Tull that much anymore. When I do, though, the clever lyrics and completely original instrumentation remains without imitation. C'mon . . . when you can make a flute, a lute and an accordion a staple of rock music, sing songs about Mother Goose, jock straps, hurricanes, stupid English school boys, shire horses and, well before Sting, untrustworthy school teachers, you've earned your place in popular music history.

Like, am I so molding minds or what?

2011-10-19T10:59:00.003-04:00

"Like, are you in your office," asked the high-pitched, squeally voice on the other side of my slightly ajar office door.

I was -- and, thanks to this nail-gun of a voice, even awake. But should I tell her? After all, I wasn't holding my official "office hours," so technically I wasn't "in" my office even though I was, in fact, there. Somehow, though, I had a feeling that French existentialism was too much for my visitor.

Hmmmmmmmmm . . . sit there quietly, or get up?; sit there quietly, or get up?; sit there quietly, or . . .

Before I could continue to volley this moral conundrum in my head, the door slowly opened at a pace consistent with a horror movie scene, you know, when the door opens to reveal a foot gingerly walking on a squeaky floor, while the potential victim hides under the bed, meat ax in hand, hoping to avoid a confrontation with her stalker, yet ready if it happens. Standing in front of me was a young woman, hair pulled up into a scrunched knot, with a pony tail shooting straight up into the air, dangling about. Red sweats tucked into brown suede boots with enough exterior fur to stir the consciousness of even the most devoted hunter and trapper. She twisted the top of a Diet Coke bottle and began to look around my office. Then she looked at me.

"Like, oh my God, you are so here! Would you like a lollipop?"

"I am here," I acknowledged, smiling on the outside, crying on the inside, for this was a sure sign that I was now holding office hours, even if I wasn't. I was now talking to someone I did not know and had never seen. "And no thank you."

"Oh, my God, you totally don't know me, but I so know who you are, because, like, my friends have all had your class and they were like, you so have to take this class and because, like, you know, like, they were so all about you that I'm like, definitely!"

Dear God, Perry Mason, Tony Soprano, Sandra Bullock . . . someone, anyone, please help me.

"So, are you selling Tupperware, or is this just a courtesy call," I volunteered.

"Selling Tupperware, oh my God, that is so funny! No, but can I come see you when we have my sorority fundraiser? . . . I think we're selling something for cancer or the homeless shelter, I'm not sure. My friend, do you remember her (she offered no name) said you were like, so funny, and I'm like, really, and she's like, oh my God, and then my other friend, who you may not remember because he's not very smart said like, yeah, but like you really have to work in your class and that you call on people, so, like, whatever, I'm ready."

"And what class are you taking?"

"See, here's the thing: like, I'm not signed up yet."

"So . . . which one do you want to take?"

"How many are there?"

This stranger who, by now, had morphed into a novelty act, was now going to pay for her untimely interruption of the nap I felt coming on before SHE ENTERED MY LIFE, UNINVITED.

"I thought you said your friends took my class that you had to take. I assume you know which one that was?"

"Oh, my God, like, you are so right! Okay, it's the one about the Constitution, definitely!"

"In one way or another, they're all about the Constitution."

"Really?"

"Really."

"All right, oh my God, you must think I am so, like, whatever, for coming here and being, like so clueless. All I know is that it's the class I have to take before I graduate."

My visitor had just uttered a sentence without using the word "like." Progress. Or was it?

"What class did your advisor say you needed to graduate," I asked.

"My advisor? Like, I not sure which one it is, but I so haven't gone to see her yet."

"So how do you know which class you need to graduate?"

"It's the one my friends took."

Through the looking glass; in the twilight zone; caught in the funhouse -- pick any literary metaphor you like -- we were deep inside of nowhere-land now.

"So when you say you need this class, which you can't identify, to graduate, do you mean something like I won't have lived a full life until I climb Mt. Everest? It's not something I need to do; it's something I want to do so bad that it is, in a way, a life necessity."

Her mouth came open, and she gave me a very serious look. For the first time since coming into my office, she stopped twisting the bottle top to her Diet Coke. "Oh, my God, you climbed Mt. Everest?!? When? That is sooooo amazing."

"No, I haven't climbed Mt. Everest nor do I plan to. What I'm trying to say is, that for you, your college experience won't be complete until you've taken this class that you can't identify?"

Blink-blink. Blink-blink. Blink-blink.

"Try this: you don't need to go to Paris or Venice or Rome or London to live your life. You won't die or go to jail if you don't go. But your life will be much better for it, and you'll come home and say, "You just have to go to Paris or your life isn't complete."

"OH, MY GOD, THAT IS SO TRUE. I WAS ON STUDY ABROAD LAST SPRING IN MADRID AND IT WAS SO, LIKE, AWESOME, THAT, LIKE, I TOLD ALL MY FRIENDS THEY SO HAVE TO GO OR THEY WILL DIE!"

"Right," I said, "but you didn't mean that literally they would die if they didn't go."

"NO! Not, like, they would "die" (the hands went up for mock quotation marks) die. They would just like, you know, die."

"Well, you still haven't said which one you want to take. And are you aware that class registration hasn't started yet?"

"Oh, my God, really, not even for me?"

"Not even for you, whose name I don't know, and who I have never seen until now."

"Really, you don't remember me?"

"Have we met?"

"You know, like, I'm not sure. I think my other friend introduced us when we saw you one day in, like, Mary Graydon. Right on. Look, I have to go because I have a class. But I will so see you in January, so be ready for me!"

"The only way I'll see you is if I see you around campus. Registration hasn't started yet."

"Okay, you'll see. I'll be an awesome student and so read everything you assign, I swear . . . I don't want to be one of those people you make fun of."

"You, make fun of you," I answered. "How could I possibly make fun of you?"

"See, told ya!"

And with that coda, she turned around and left, fully convinced that she was signed up for a class that wasn't open for registration and, better yet, one that she couldn't name.

Stay tuned.

Tom Tomorrow here

2011-10-17T22:01:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

The "student-athlete" delusion

2011-10-14T14:39:00.006-04:00

Death, taxes, chaos in the Whole Foods parking lot and some daily delusional, idiotic statement by a Republican presidential contender are not, despite what you hear or may have been told, the only certainties in life. Autumnal change brings with it two sure-bets: the days do get shorter, and a legion of sports screamers and elite Op-Ed commentators masquerading as voices of populism and reason begin their annual drive on behalf of "student-athletes" in Big-Time, Division I programs to stop their "exploitation" by having the universities that already fund their education pay them for the work on the football field.

(Note to self -- before I continue, remember that the days do not get shorter or longer as the seasons change. They remain at 24 hours. Sunrise and sunset simply come at different times).

The argument to pay athletes who are already being paid to attend college to play, primarily football or basketball, the largest producer of revenue for college athletic programs, is that the universities that employ them -- and I choose the word "employ" deliberately -- make astronomical amounts of money off television contracts and, in recent years, an array of secondary sources, from equipment and apparel companies who pay universities a fee to become their official supplier to the licensing agreements that allow them, but not the players, to collect royalties from the sale of personalized jerseys, golf club covers, shot glasses and all the other sorts of oddities that the lunatics who never moved on from their undergraduate years buy to support "the program." Here is Michael Wilbon of ESPN:

I used to argue vehemently against paying college athletes. Tuition, room, board and books were compensation enough. And even if, increasingly, it wasn't enough and virtually every kid who accepted a scholarship was in the red before Christmas of his freshman year, the notion of pay-for-play was at best a logistical nightmare. Where exactly would the money come from? How could you pay college football players but not baseball players or members of the women's field hockey team? And how in the world would you pay men in a way that wouldn't violate Title IX?

So you know what caused me to do a 180 on the issue? That $11 billion deal -- OK, it's $10.8 billion to be exact -- between the NCAA and CBS/Turner Sports for March Madness between 2011 and 2024. We're talking $11 billion for three weekends of television per year. On top of that, there's a new four-year deal with ESPN that pays the BCS $500 million. So, if those two deals were worth, say, a combined $10 billion instead of $11.3 billion, would the games not be televised? Would the quality of the broadcasts or the coverage or the staging of the events be somehow diminished? What if people in the business of money took $1.3 billion off the top, invested it, sheltered it and made it available to provide a stipend to college athletes, how could anybody stand on principal and argue against paying the people who make the events possible in the first place?

But not to everyone.

Let me declare up front I wouldn't be the slightest bit interested in distributing the funds equitably or even paying every college athlete. I'm interested in seeing the people who produce the revenue share a teeny, tiny slice of it. That's right, football and men's basketball players get paid; lacrosse, field hockey, softball, baseball, soccer players get nothing. You know what that's called? Capitalism. Not everything is equal, not everything is fair. The most distinguished professor at the University of Alabama won't make $5.9 million in his entire tenure in Tuscaloosa; Nick Saban will make that this year. So I don't want to hear that it's "unfair" to pay the quarterback of Alabama more than all the sociology students in the undergraduate college.

No, Wilbon, that's not called capitalism. That's called corporatism, or facism -- take your pick. There is no "invisible hand" allocating income here. Rather, you have an organization acting as a titular government head, the NCAA, that is distributing the income based on the power that particular organized interest has to alter a "natural" outcome. The model Wilbon suggests is actually based on the American political system, which allocates goods and services based on the ability of a particular interest -- farmers, big banks, insurance companies and labor unions -- to influence the outcome of decision-making through money and power. Congress neglects to address important public interests all the time for no other reason than too many people have too much to lose by altering the status quo. No serious person can possibly argue that the reason that the United States is the only developed country in the world without a public health care system because we're on to something no else has quite figured out. Insurance companies, drug companies, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals and the lawyers who represent them all make too much money under the current system to even think about starting over from the ground up. That's what the United States needs to do; but the current arrangement, as amoral and corrupt as it is, benefits the people in power, and they are not about to give it up. Perhaps Wilbon can explain why we continue to legalize tobacco, a carcinogen that has more adverse consequences on public health (and health care costs) than any other substance on the market, but not asbestos.

College football and basketball players do not deserve to be paid any more than they already are. A scholarship player at Duke University is getting a $225,000 education for free. More than that, he is being admitted under a completely different set of standards than any other non-legacy, non-affirmative action applicant. A smart guy like Michael Wilbon cannot possibly believe that Alan Iverson got admitted to Georgetown after barely graduating high school and serving four months in jail because he was an academically promising student. Nor can he believe that most "student-athletes" in Big-Time Division 1 programs are academically qualified to attend the colleges they do. In my view, these athletes are taking resources from other students who have the ability but not the money to attend good schools. Really, what's a bigger rap on American society -- a college athlete at the University of Maryland already receiving a free education not getting paid an stipend of some sort or a kid admitted into Maryland who will have to attend community college because she can't afford the tuition, room and board? To me, it's not even close.

The problem with college athletics is not the exploitation of the athletes recruited to play the sports that produce all this money. The problem is a warped, immature American public that values competitive sports over the need to fund a college education at the appropriate level for anyone who wants one, a problem that begins when adults begin valuing their kids "careers" on the field, the court or the ice more than their intellectual development. I know plenty of parents who are not hesitant to drop whatever takes to get their little star athlete the individualized coaching they think he or she deserves and put them in grueling travel sports programs who are quite comfortable having their kids get their schoolwork done in the back of a car or bus on the way to some practice or game. Get a tutor for the kid struggling in Spanish or math? Not at the expense of some extra time in the batting cage or on the ice with a "certified" coach.

I stopped watching college sports around the time I graduated from college almost thirty years ago. There were many reasons, but chief among them was what I learned from my two weeks in a Division 1 college baseball program and my subsequent, misguided yet quite profitable time during my junior and senior years as a tutor for a Division 1 (different school) athletic program. In the early 1980s, I made $15 an hour to tutor football and basketball players, almost all of whom, including two who went on to play in the NFL and NBA, either wanted me to take the tests or get them, or write their papers for them. I was no stranger to the occasional dishonest dollar by that point in my life, but fraud was something I just wasn't willing to commit. I got caught cheating on my 10th grade math test, and that was enough to scare me straight. But I knew many other "tutors" who were all to happy to make even more money under the table, money that came from "boosters" and other "friends" of the athletic program. As I told a friend after my experience, an athletic tutor was the academic equivalent of a paid escort -- it sounds a lot more legitimate than it is.

Hell, yes, I love watching the sports I love, baseball and hockey, on television. I love going to as many games as I can. As I get older, I find myself screaming at my television or vacuuming my carpets even more than I did when I was younger. I spend more time calling pitches during games than I did 20 years ago and trying to out guess managers and coaches. But I only watch and keep up with pro sports. I do have many friends who continue to root for the colleges they attended and occasionally make a weekend out of going to a football or basketball game. I have friends who cannot understand why I don't go see Tennessee and Missouri football or basketball games, especially if they're playing nearby me. My answer, then and now, is pretty simple. I prefer to watch games played, managed and coached by people who I know are doing it for money rather than by people who keep pretending that they're not.

Should drunk white girls dance in public?

2011-10-12T15:21:00.002-04:00

Now that Sarah Palin has left the 2012 presidential campaign, hopefully for good, and Michaele Salahi has settled down, at least for the next few hours . . . or days, maybe, with Journey singer Neal Schon, I can now turn to other matters that have simmered in the back of my mind for quite some time.

Like whether drunk white girls should dance in public.

I know I should be embarrassed to admit this, but, for some strange reason, I'm not. This question has gnawed at me for years and years, and I am embarrassed to admit I was never able to resolve it until now. I think it started in college, when I noticed that white people only danced when they had crossed that invisible tipping point from a warm, social beer-powered buzz to that condition when the outward facade of seriousness or nerdiness gives way to giggliness and a near-complete loss of social inhibition. Not the squinty-eyed, hiccupy, close-range, "Who are you?" or "Like, you're cute, did you know that?" or "YOU'RE THE ONE WHO NEEDS TO LOOSEN UP!!!" or "Who did you come here with?" or "What the fuck did you say?" or "You know, just fuck you if that's how you're gonna be. . ." phase or when the intoxicant starts endlessly repeating phrases like, "Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!" over and over again. There's that fairly harmless middle-ground that's kinda-funny-as-long-as-you're-not-around-it-too-long. And when you can't escape there's often nothing more annoying.

So, the other night at the Washington Capitals home opener, the music starts to pump during a television time-out, since the idea of more than 3 seconds of idle time at any contemporary professional sporting event is simply out of the question. And the public address announcer bellows, "ALL RIGHT CAPS FANS! LET'S SEE YOU DANCE FOR THE CAMERAS!" Normally, I take those few moments to browse through the stat sheets or read a snippet of a game program I always bum from the people who sit next to me. This time I watched because I hoped the Jumbotron would show my son and three of his hockey teammates on the ice, since they were getting to serve as part of the crew that cleans the ice during breaks in play.

No luck. All I saw was one beer-buzzed white person after another attempting to dance. They all begin at with a certain set of base moves. And before I go on, let me dispel any accusation that this column is sexist. Notice that I don't even bother to suggest that drunk white boys should attempt to dance in public. They just shouldn't and if you have to ask then you should never ever dance anywhere within a 50 mile radius of one in any public space. Of course, no one other than a drunk white boy would even ask that question, so that this means they have a better chance of getting arrested for dancing in public than urinating in public on the side of a building because -- you guessed it -- they're really drunk and had to pee. Perish the thought.

First, white persons who dance in public only do so if they are holding a beer in one hand. Come to think of it, I don't recall ever seeing a single white person in college dance without holding a beer or drink in one hand. I think it must be in the Unofficial White Person's Manual that any public dancing must take place while drinking an alcoholic beverage. Perhaps this is a concession by white people that dancing is just not their thing, and they are, in a way, apologizing in advance for dancing so badly by admitting they are partially, if not entirely, drunk.

Second, white persons who dance in public know they must either hold their beer over their head, preferably to one side, so they can better rotate their arms. Or, if the beer isn't over their heads, it must be held up against your chest, so you can gesture with the other arm while talking to the person you are pretending to dance with.

Third, white persons cannot dance in public unless they have perfected off-beat snapping. Translated, white persons know they must snap the fingers on their one free hand slightly ahead or behind the beat, simply to confirm that they are, in fact, rhythmically-challenged and to confirm further that are making no serious effort to really dance, but merely shuffle along while attempting to pick-up or make conversation with their dance partner, or communicate their indifference to the art of dancing more generally. This is a valuable technique, one that says, "I don't dance, as you can tell, so I want you to know I'm doing this because I like you." On the other hand, holding a beer bottle while you dance, especially if you start to peel the label with the other hand, can also communicate the following: "I don't want to do this, and the full attention I am giving my beer bottle should tell you that I can't wait for this song to be over." Or it could be a sign of sexual frustration. That's a plausible theory, and might explain why I don't remember what kind of beer I drank in college -- the labels were never on them by the end of the night.

Fourth, white persons carry a beer bottle to the dance floor as protection during those songs that start "fast" and end "slow," thus saving the aggrieved party who didn't really want to dance in the first place from actually having to touch their dance partner. Bad drunk white dancers still retain enough of their faculties to know, as they were taught by the Bush administration, that touching during dancing can lead to sexual arousal and thus unwanted pregnancies.

Back to the Jumbotron . . .

The first drunk white girl on the Jumbotron hoisted her beer over the head as soon as she realized the cameras had captured her. She sort of grooved from side to side, while pointing at her beer with her free hand, which she also appeared to snap. Nothing special -- routine drunk college girl dancing. This one needs to work on her game, and she can start by NOT pointing at her beer bottle. Rookie mistake, since it says to everyone assembled, "Hi! Like, I'm either totally underage or just, like, totally turned 21 or whatever and I am, like, so psyched to be here, wherever here, like, totally is or whatever!!! Woo-hoo!!! OMG, I'm taking a picture of myself with my cell phone!!!!!!!"

The second drunk white girl had stripped down to a sports bra and had painted her body in a way that would have landed her in jail in certain parts of South Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. Nonetheless, there she was, hands above her head, beer bottles in both hands, swaying to the computerized beat blasting throughout the arena.

The third drunk white girl was actually two drunk girls dancing without the benefit of proper choreographic training. Not only did each one have a beer hoisted above her head, they started to grind, much to the pleasure of extraordinarily large number of fat, bearded and drunk white men who make up about 97% of hockey crowds. The cameraman, or maybe camerawoman, or even the person of camera or who or whatever, must have gotten lost in the moment, since it took about 5 seconds longer than normal to pull away from this brazen display of drunk white girl-girl sexuality unseen since Madonna kissed Britney Spears on television.

But the final contestant ruined everything. He was a drunk white boy, not a drunk white girl, so that made a mess of everything right off the bat. He was sitting in a seat that looked very far away, somewhere literally near the rafters and not quite too far from the emergency exit. And when he saw his big ole' face on the Jumbotron . . . well, did he put on some kind of show! . . . a real step forward in performance art. First, he clucked like a chicken while holding his beer bottle. Then he started pretending to bicycle, exaggerating each revolution to make it appear that this wasn't really straining the hell out of him. His crescendo? All of a sudden, he just stopped, like a child playing freeze tag, turned to the side and chugged the rest of his beer, just like John Belushi did in "Animal House," or, more recently, Will Farrell in "Old School."

Standing-O from the crowd, which made him the winner, and, in turn, rewarded him with a free pizza from Papa John's, something that this guy definitely didn't need.

This chance to reflect on a matter that has simply not gotten the attention it deserves confirms the hunch that I suspect I had long harbored but never wanted to admit: that drunk white girls, when they sober up, should be able to do anything and everything a drunk white man should do.

Never, ever . . . though, should they dance in public.

Steve Hackett

2011-10-12T11:11:00.004-04:00

Blues-drenched rock guitarists who dominate the rock music pantheon have never done it for me. Strangely enough, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, around the time that guitarists like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page emerged -- justifiably -- as the Guitar Gods of rock, I found myself drawn to players that could not have been more different. Until I was about 11 years old, I never listened to music "seriously." I listened to music all the time, but I didn't think much about what it was I was listening to. Either I liked the song on the radio or I didn't. And after the Beatles, I didn't really think much about what other bands had to offer musically. For me, the turning point came when I heard three songs in succession on the radio one night that changed how I listened to rock music: "Living in the Past," by Jethro Tull; "Do It Again," by Steely Dan; and "Long Distance Runaround," by Yes. The unusual melodies and rhythmic feel of the first two songs grabbed my ears, and the vocals of Ian Anderson and Donald Fagen were far different than the conventional rock singers of the era. Their voices weren't great, by a singer's standards. But they were perfect for the music, and added a voice that complimented the instruments perfectly. Jon Anderson of Yes was entirely different. His angelic, contra-tenor voice was unlike anything in rock music, and perfectly suited the jazzy, sophisticated feel of the song. Everything about that song registered with me -- the vocal harmonies, the melodic bass playing of Chris Squire, the jazz-influenced drums and precise cymbal playing of Bill Bruford and the clean, scale-based guitar runs of Steve Howe. That "clean" guitar sound appealed to me much more than Hendrix, Clapton, et. al. (Duane Allman is only one of that bunch that still resonates with me, simply because you can really hear and feel the blues in his playing). I read an article about Steve Howe in a music magazine soon after I heard the tune, and discovered that his influences were not the blues-based guitarists, but jazz guitarists like Joe Pass, Jim Hall, Tal Farlow and, of course, the incomparable Wes Montgomery. To this day, Steve Howe is one of two rock guitarists I'd pay top dollar to watch from a living room distance.

The other guitarist is much less well known, yet arguably one of the most original and creative guitarists of the post-Hendrix era in rock music. I had never heard of Steve Hackett until a the stoner-guy who owned the used record shop around the corner from my house played "Genesis Live" for me and some friends one afternoon while we were hanging out in his store. The first song I heard was, "Watcher of the Skies," which remains one of my all-time favorite Genesis pieces of music. The dramatic mellotron opening by Tony Banks, the "tap-tap-tap" in what sounded like Morse Code on the hi-hat by Phil Collins, the counterpoint bass of Mike Rutherford and the altered-state vocals of Peter Gabriel were quite an introduction to this band. But what really shook me -- literally -- was the first searing guitar line by Hackett that ended the first chorus. I'd never heard a guitarist play like that in any genre. Whoops, swoops, near-orchestral approaches to structuring a guitar line . . . rock guitarists didn't play like this. And while I had decided after hearing that entire record that I wanted to learn to play like Phil Collins (don't laugh -- between 1972 and 1982 he may well have been the best drummer on the planet. Plus, he's left-handed), I also concluded that Steve Hackett was about the coolest guitar player around, save only for Steve Howe.

From 1971 to 1977, Steve Hackett was the lead guitarist for Genesis, leaving after the "Seconds Out" live album to begin what has been a very interesting and musically diverse solo career. A couple of weeks ago, one of my still-best friends from my teen years and I traded our "Top 10" Genesis songs. Not a single song after "Duke" made the list for me. Only one song from 1982 forward made my friend's list. We distributed fairly evenly between the "Gabriel" and "Collins" eras (a false distinction, but it serves a purpose here). Only three tunes, though, did not have Steve Hackett playing on them. My friend and I agreed that Hackett's departure was much more musically significant for the band than Gabriel's. Peter Gabriel is a great, great talent, and was a great vocalist and interpreter of Genesis's early music. But he was fortunate to have Tony Banks, the most underrated great keyboard player in popular music, as the compositional backbone of the band. Rutherford and Collins were completely original players, especially the latter. And Hackett's completely unorthodox approach to the guitar was the perfect foil to Banks's cinematic approach to composition and keyboard playing. At one moment, Hackett could play perfectly formed classically-based pieces as part of a song, then in a later section introduce a guitar part that bore through like a laser. Listen to his guitar solos on, "Supper's Ready," "The Knife," "Watcher of the Skies," "Firth of Fifth" (his most famous), "One for the Vine," and "Los Endos," for starters. Then listen to the gorgeous composition, "Blood on the Rooftops," "Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers," and "Entangled." Save the best for last, "In That Quiet Earth." Some of the most beautiful moments in modern rock music come from Hackett and Mike Rutherford's 12 string duets in such songs as "The Cinema Show" and "Ripples."

Steve Hackett is a musician who traded fame for artistic integrity. He left Genesis just as the band had made a major breakthrough to the American market because he wanted to play his own compositions and believed the Banks/Rutherford axis in Genesis allowed him no room for his own material. The move benefited Hackett much more than Genesis, which went on to staggering commercial success by departing from the aural seascapes upon which it based its early identity. I've seen Steve Hackett play live twice, once on the "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" tour (when he sat crouched over in a chair) and the "Wind and Wuthering" tour (when, in a complete makeover, he stood tall in knee high boots, black scarf and all-white shirt and pants, looking too cool to be real) and listened to his recordings over the years. Yes, he can summon up the flurry of notes that possess erotic-qualities for many guitar enthusiasts. What still impresses more than anything else about his playing, though, is his use of the guitar as an expressive voice in ways that defy rock convention. Listen to Steve Hackett and you'll get a clinic on the admonition that less is often much, much more.

Tom Tomorrow here

2011-10-10T20:45:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

The Ugg point

2011-10-06T21:59:00.005-04:00

In case you didn't know, barometric pressure, or the pressure at which air density changes with altitude, can be determined either of two ways.

Equation 1

Equation 2

Simple enough, right? Good.

The dew point, or the temperature at which a parcel of air must reach before vapor turns into water, is calculated like this . . .

A well-known approximation used to calculate the dew point T_d given the relative humidity RH and the actual temperature T of air is:

where

Knowing how we derive both barometric pressure and the dew point is essential to calculate accurately the "Ugg point," or the point at which the occasionally worn and seen Ugg boot suddenly becomes the essential footwear statement for the female fashionista between the ages of 13 and 34 and, sadly, the teen-wannabe Cougar Moms between the ages of 37 and 53. You know how in mid-March, at least in the Washington, D.C.-area, those few days in the middle of the month when, after two or three consecutive days in the high 60s, you notice a couple of crocuses here and there, and the bulbs you forgot you planted in the fall yield a couple of tulips? And then just as quickly as temperatures rose and the ground teased us with glorious color, winter comes back, and we have to endure two or three more weeks of dark and gray before the pastels of spring emerge again? So it is with the Ugg boot, perhaps the shoe industry's most unsightly contribution to popular culture since whatever those strange objects are called that resemble a hybrid of a ballet flat and a child's corrective shoe. Once the temperature drops below 60 degrees in Washington, sending the nation's elite scrambling for their L.L. Bean catalogues so they can begin layering themselves to death in enough clothing to guarantee population management for at least the next seven months, you're likely to see a few Uggs here and there. But the real onslaught comes once the average temperature drops to:

UP = U(x) - % [NFF + BSL]
_______________
[L,W + OMG!! (xx)]

whereas

UP= Ugg Point
NFF = North Face Fleece
BSL = Black Stretch Leggings
LW = Like, Whatever
OMG = Oh, My God!!

so

AVGT = B(1) RHy + HUH? (x) FIH

______________________________

SHOEUNCOOLNESS

whereas

AVGT = Average Temperature
B = Barometric Pressure
RH = Relative Humidity
HUH= Clueless
FIH = Four Inch Heels

then

The Ugg point, or that point at which this inexplicable cultural phenomenon, moves from occasional nuisance to c

So long, Washington Post

2011-10-04T22:39:00.004-04:00

If, somehow, the Washington Post defies the odds of the economics of newspaper publishing and manages to survive another five, ten or even a hundred years, it won't be because of me. After twenty years of reading the Post on a fairly regular basis, and waiting about the same amount of time for some . . . any . . . just a wee-wee bit . . . a tiny inkling of evidence that it is, in fact, the "great" newspaper that it proclaims itself to be, I have finally come to the decision that it's time to cancel my subscription.

Not that I haven't had a zillion reasons before my latest one (I'll get to it) to give the Post the heave-ho. Where even to start? The pathetic editorial page, which, to demonstrate its "seriousness," generally accepts at face value any statement issued by the congressional majority and presidential administration in power at face value on virtually every issue, and feigns shock that politicians act like politicians by lying, withholding evidence or just plain avoiding any accountability? Of course, the Post does insist that . . . wait for it . . . it is necessary to form the all-knowing, deadly serious and "bi-partisan"Blue Ribbon Commissions on occasion, usually headed by Bob Dole, Donna Shalala, Madeline Albright, Sandra Day O'Connor or some nominally partisan Washington establishment lawyer (Bob Strauss, C. Boyden Gray, Vernon Jordan) or former governor (Thomas Kean, Lamar Alexander) who meets the all-important test of "seriousness" and "bi-partisanship" by not taking a position or stand on any issue that might sacrifice their social, economic or political status in the all-important Washington hierarchy of fame and power.

And how about the stable of thoughtful, erudite and original columnists that grace the Op-Ed page . . . such as Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Richard Cohen, Jim Hoagland, Jackson Diehl, Sebastian Mallaby, Fred Hiatt, David Ignatius and Robert Samuelson? Add to that the Post's new trioka of "women's voices" on "serious" matters . . . Anne Applebaum, Ruth Marcus and Kathleen Parker, and what do you have? Other than concrete proof that the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has allowed women to rise to a level of incompetence to match their male colleagues. Taken together, these purveyors of conventional wisdom constitute perhaps the most incompetent, uninteresting and utterly unimaginative collection of Washingtonians in any one place save City Hall. Imagine the Pundit Class taking the field against the Vincent Gray administration at the next company picnic. Now that would be a corporate softball game to remember.

Don't forget the A section either. Headline: "Nuclear Weapons Explode in Four Different Locations Around the Capital" Sub-Head: "Unclear How Radioactivity Will Shape 2012 Elections." Sub-Sub-Head: "Gingrich, Cheney Tie Attack to Obama's Muslim Background; Pelosi, Reid Struggle to Defend President." Sub-Sub-Sub-Head: "Palin to Switch Countries, Citing Lack of Constituents to Vote for Her." Sidebar: "A Nation Looks to Joseph Lieberman to Find Centrist Path."

And then there is the Style section. Naturally, how much "style" can there be in a city where men wear Timex Ironman watches with their suits and women still wear neon-red suits with big gold buttons as a serious fashion statement? Leaving that aside, there are still, sadly enough, plenty of people in Washington who really do care where Newt Gingrich had lunch last Thursday, or that some ex-Deputy Press Secretary to the Interior Secretary sold her house in McLean to an assistant producer for some blab-fest on Fox or how a couple of congressmen got into the bi-partisan spirit by hosting a fundraiser for the Left-Handed Shortstops Awareness Fund -- and just how much fun it was to "agree to disagree" to raise $15,000 for such an important cause!

Count me out.

* * * * * * * * * *

Sometime around the 10th or 11th grade, I began to think about what I might want "to do" if and when I ever graduated from college, assuming, of course, I would be eligible to attend one. I use the phrase "think about" in the most generous, abstract fashion possible, since pretty much all I thought about at that point in my life was about the next 3 to 24 hours, if even that far in advance. But, growing up in a house of proud, unabashed, anger-on-their-sleeve Nixon-haters -- my father hung a portrait of Nixon over his bathroom toilet so that he could pretend to pee on him every morning and evening. My mother was always pissed at the government about something -- the Vietnam War, foot-dragging on civil rights, the space program, which, she was absolutely convinced, was taking resources away from badly needed investments in education and health care -- so I was acculturated, socialized . . . okay, maybe even brain-washed not to accept authority, especially elected authority, at face value. In 1974, when I was in the 7th grade, the Watergate scandal had become almost as much of a national obsession as it was in our house. My 7th grade teacher, Miss Lynn Powell, had us do a "simulation" of the Watergate hearings being held in Congress. Knowing my mother as she did, Miss Powell chose me to serve as the Special Prosecutor, which meant I got to decide who would be prosecuted and hopefully go to jail. So, while the other kids went home to report their progress in math, spelling and reading comprehension, I was permitted to eat dinner at my family's expense depending on how many people I had successfully sent packing. Really, I'm not making this up. That, and my second place finish in the county-wide social science fair the year before for my "re-enactment" of the JFK assassination, complete with a second shooter behind the grassy knoll, were my two greatest academic accomplishments prior to receiving my Ph.D twenty years ago.

At first I thought being a sportswriter would be a great job, since I could attend games for free, travel to stadiums and arenas I otherwise probably would never see -- at someone else's expense, meet famous people ("Dr. J! How've you been? "Pete Rose? Sure, I saw him last week when the Reds were in town . . .") and get paid to write about sports. And this was long before a job in print journalism was just a segue way into a television gig on ESPN as a screaming head ("GODDAMN RIGHT THEY SHOULD ADOPT NO-TOUCH ICEING! WHAT ARE YOU, SOME KIND OF MORON?"). Then, during a field trip to the Atlanta Constitution at the beginning of my senior year in high school I met a couple of the writers who covered college and professional sports in and around Atlanta.

"Who here wants to be a sportswriter?" one asked our class. I raised my hand. "Do you like the idea of covering high school sports in a town of 10,000 year 'round for about five years after you finish college?"

"No, no I don't," I remember saying. "I don't even care about high school sports now and I'm in high school and play on the baseball team and run cross country."

"You'd better learn," he replied. "Because that's where you're going to start out."

Pass.

So, having ruled out a career as a sportswriter, I then decided that I would aim my sights for the big time and become a Washington-based political correspondent and opinion-writer. I thought back to my moment of glory in Miss Powell's 7th grade social studies class, when I brought down the Nixon administration. Although my mother was sure this marked me for a career as a lawyer, I was actually more inspired by the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I became intrigued by the idea of combining two of my favorite activities, writing and spying on people, into a singular profession. Political journalism seemed like the perfect choice. After all, Woodward and Bernstein were channeling their inner-James Bond as much as they were the muckrakers of the Progressive era. I imagined myself walking softly around parking garages, carefully eavesdropping on conversations by famous people I recognized but who wouldn't recognize me, chiefly because I wasn't famous. I thought about who might play me in the movie version of whatever book I wrote that chronicled my crack reporting . . . Robert Redford? Too handsome. Robert DeNiro? Bad fit. Sean Connery? Wrong accent. I made the mistake of thinking out loud about this one afternoon at a pool party, inspired by perhaps one beer too many.

"Oh, my God," screamed a girl sitting at my table. "You know who should play you?" And then she began reeling off one impossibly dorky, bad-looking actor after another who not only never ended up with the cool girl, but usually found his way to prison or, worse, living in Detroit or Birmingham.

"You know, that will never happen, so it's really not worth getting into," I said.

"No, no, this is really fun," another girl called out. "Hey, who do y'all think should play Ivers if he's ever famous?"

"Ron Howard!!!" shouted one. Oh, boy. Opie from Mayberry RFD

"I got it, that guy from "Leave It To Beaver," Eddie Haskell!!

"Wrong," said a guy I thought was my friend. "It's whoever doesn't get the girl."

And on it went.

That was not the kind of question you asked a bunch of semi-inebriated 20 year-olds on a hot, humid summer afternoon in Atlanta. At that point, I decided that whatever I did in life, being famous was not on my list. Sitting through a casting session would be a precursor to suicide, getting a tatoo or some other form of self-mutilation.

My infatuation with a career as a Washington journalist lasted until about my junior year in college, when I gave the wrong answer to my journalism professor when he asked my Reporting 301 class how many us relished the idea of being rousted out of bed by an editor's phone call at 3 a.m to go cover a fire or mob hit -- and what is it, by the way, about "3 a.m." that screams fire or mob hit or terrorist attack or some other tragedy? Why never 1.30 a.m or 4.45 p.m. or some other time? Everyone raised their hand but me.

"Mr. Ivers, why the objection?"

"I don't really like reporting all that much," I responded. "I'd rather write a column offering my opinion about the fire or mob hit."

Silence. Dead silence. Mass murder silence in the room.

That's when I knew that a career in journalism was not for me.

* * * * * * * * * *

Despite opting for a career in the big time as a political science professor, I remain somewhat interested in journalism, but from the perspective of a jilted lover who simply doesn't understand my ex- sees in the loser she's now dating. The kind of journalism in which I'm interested is not the "journalism" practiced by the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, the major commercial and cable networks and smaller opinion magazines I read (and admired) in college, like the New Republic (now better known as the New Republican). The people who work for these organizations understand how to produce a paper, magazine or broadcast that looks authentic. For substance, though, you're not going to get anything from reading or watching any of them. Establishment journalists in Washington are celebrities, and celebrities are only interested in doing what they need to do to remain celebrities. In Hollywood, actors and actresses get breast implants, face lifts and other cosmetic restoration to maintain their "appearances" or remake them. In Washington, journalists trade whatever interest they might have had when they were younger for a Volvo, a house that gets featured in the Washingtonian, their children's acceptance into the elite network of private schools that effectively serve to condition them to other worthy of their company and all the other accouterments that go with what passes for high society here. How else could someone like David Gregory, a man who has never had or uttered a serious thought in his life, become the host of "Meet the Press" and one of Washington's most sought-after dinner guests and interviewees? In what serious democracy does someone so vacant achieve such "status" as a "serious person?"

For the twenty years I read the Post, it never really offended me or impressed me. It never reminded me as much of any other great media institution of days gone by, for the primary reason that the truly great reporting in American history has never been done by large corporate entities as much as it has by individuals with no ties to the government, membership in the Washington social elite or, something that most journalism "companies" will never admit, to advertisers to temper down their work. The Post reminds me more of Sugarloaf, a rock band from the early 1970s that had one really great song, "Green Eyed Lady," and then disappeared until iTunes put them in the "one-hit wonder" section and made this song available again. Watergate was the Post's "Green Eyed Lady" moment. Since Watergate, the Post has lived off a reputation it never really deserved and hasn't subsequently earned. Pop songs, though, don't really shock the conscience or call into question the moral underpinning of democratic institutions. A newspaper that refuses to call torture "torture," knowing full well that it would not have ever referred to the tactics used by the strongmen of Saddam's regime as "enhanced interrogation techniques," doesn't deserve to survive into the digital age.

Besides, you can get your sports from ESPN.

Tom Tomorrow here

2011-10-04T10:22:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Jazz for the beginner

2011-09-30T12:28:00.003-04:00

I came across one of those articles recently by a jazz writer recommending recordings for the jazz novice . . . as in someone who might have heard something he or she might have liked and decided it was "time to get into jazz." Not surprisingly, I found the critic's suggestions pretty strange. I have no idea why anyone would recommend Eric Dolphy's "Out to Lunch" as one of the first ten recordings to own. Don't get me wrong: I love Eric Dolphy and I love "Out to Lunch." I have several recordings on which Dolphy plays (mostly with John Coltrane) and as a leader. But to start? No. Dolphy, Andrew Hill and Tony Williams were pushing bop into a freer place, although still a good standard deviation or two inside Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, both of whom I love. A novice does not need Miles Davis's early '70s recording, "On a Corner," a period in which Miles was at his lowest creative ebb, having followed the "fusion" movement launched by Weather Report and Gary Burton. As much as I love Miles Davis and deserves every great thing that can be said about him, I never liked his electric period (post-1968). I love music that fuses genres -- Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Joe Zawinul's world music, for starters; I just don't think Miles did this very well because it wasn't him. His heart, which he fought against in the latter part of his career, was always in the beautiful melodies of the great jazz standards and the freedom and beauty of modal jazz.

Anyway . . .

Here are my ten starter jazz recordings in alphabetical order. I begin with Ellington, the great American composer and bandleader, who bridged the gap between old swing era and the bebop revolution. I end with Wayne Shorter in 1966, a time when jazz had reached sort a peak in terms of boundary-pushing. Ornette, Cecil and Andrew Hill were moving jazz into a place so free that few could even understand where the pulse was. Miles was about to disband his second great quintet; the fusion movement was building but had not yet rocked, literally, the jazz world; the Beatles were at their peak, and African-American recording artists like Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Temptations and James Brown were drawing black listeners, and the young white music fans, who would have grown up on Bill Haley and Elvis Presley a decade before they were about to turn to Jimi Hendrix and the Who to stake out their claim in the late 60s cultural rebellion. On these ten recordings you'll hear most of the major instrumentalists and composers of the early modern era, which is one of the main reasons I chose them. Remember, this is for the beginner! And in alphabetical order.

Enjoy!

Dave Brubeck, "Time Out"
Miles Davis, "The Complete Birth of the Cool"
Miles Davis, "Kind of Blue"
John Coltrane, "Blue Train"
Duke Ellington, "Live at Newport 1958"
Bill Evans, "The Complete 1961 Recordings at the Village Vanguard"
Thelonious Monk, "Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington"
Wes Montgomery, "The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery"
Charlie Parker, "The Complete Savoy Recordings, 1947-48."
Wayne Shorter, "Adam's Apple"

Moneyball meets academia

2011-09-28T22:32:00.012-04:00

Of course I saw "Moneyball" the first day it came out.

Everything is great about the movie adaptation of Michael Lewis's terrific book on how Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, managed to field a competitive team with scarce resources by junking the conventional model of team-building in major league baseball and emphasizing instead the "hidden" statistical performance of players who had either been written off or, as was more often the case, never had their worth properly assessed. Prodded by a 29 year-old Harvard-educated economics major named Paul DePodesta,who had developed, while working for the Cleveland Indians, a complex model of player performance, Beane retooled his management style that put him at odds with the way professional "baseball men" had assessed the talent and, in the post-reserve clause era, the monetary worth of free agents. He didn't have a choice. As a small market team with a payroll that was roughly a little more than one-third of the New York Yankees team that defeated the A's in the 2001 American League Divisional Series -- indeed, the typed graphic across the screen as the highlights of that series are replayed at the beginning of the movie emphasizes the David and Goliath context of Beane's challenge (the A's payroll is around $39 million per year; the Yankees, about $114 million) -- Beane was operated at a distinct disadvantage. After the 2001 season, the A's lost their three highest paid players to free-agency.

If you read the book or saw the movie, you know what happens next (there are a number of liberties taken with the book for dramatic effect; nothing fatal to the basic story, though). Billy Beane or Brad Pitt or whomever is sitting around a table somewhere in the dank bowels of the Oakland Coliseum with a group of scouts, most of whom look like they were extras on "The Sopranos." The old guys rattle on about the "five tools," "athleticism," and discuss gaudy stats like RBI and HRs, determined to find the right players to replace the ones they lost. One guy even says he doesn't trust a player because he has an "ugly girlfriend," which suggests that he lacks confidence. Others see his point. Beane stops them in their tracks and tells them they simply can't afford to replace all three, so they're going to have to find players that, in the aggregate, can replace first baseman Jason Giambi, center fielder Johnny Damon and relief pitcher/closer Jason Isringhausen, who, together, comprise about one-third of the team's already small payroll. And that's where the search for hidden talent comes, through a process that Bill James, who made his living as a security guard for a company called Stokley Van Camp, which made and canned baked beans, in a small Kansas town, introduced in the late 1970s caled "sabermetrics." James explicitly rejected the star system, and instead argued, through hard numbers and empirical evidence, that many players who nobody ever heard of were, in fact, quite valuable, and that many star players were not, in fact, nearly as important to a team's ability to win as the conventional wisdom seemed to believe. Compounding the problem was the enormous amount of money that owners were lavishing on position players and pitchers that had put up one or two decent seasons, only to watch their "investments" tank after a decent year or two or never put up a good season again. Something wasn't quite right, and James knew it before almost anyone else.

Naturally, when I watched the movie, I wasn't thinking too much about the novelty of the Beane approach, which was, in reality, was something that Sandy Alderson, who preceded Beane as A's general manager, had begun tinkering with in the mid-1990s. I've never believed in the star system in much of anything, mostly for the simple reason that it doesn't work. And it's not just because of the big busts this year in major league baseball, such as Jason Werth and Carl Crawford and John Lackey. That happens every year, and it will happen again next year. Owners will pay absurd amounts of money for reasons that have nothing to do with winning baseball games. They want to "prove" to the fans they're committed to winning (the Nationals and Werth); or they just can't help themselves (the Red Sox and Crawford/Lackey); or they're sentimental (the Braves and Chipper Jones, who I love, but is barely a WAR player at this point in his career). Some teams even believe it because sometimes -- sometimes -- it works, like when the Phillies bought the best starting rotation in baseball for one complete season, and they won the most games in they're history and are easily the odds-on favorites to win the World Series this year.

No, I thought instead about the mentality of my employer, and the belief, almost universally shared among my colleagues, that our department will get "better" if we hire the "best" political scientists entering academia from graduate school or hire a senior professor away from another university. Think of the former as first-round draft picks and the latter as free agents. Naturally, all employers, regardless of profession, want to hire the best people they can. But in a world where buyers and sellers are not equal, who you want to hire is largely based on the resources you have. Those resources are not equal. Understanding that, you hire the person that best fits the what the firm, institution, organization, baseball team or political science department is really there to do -- represent clients, advocate for the homeless, win baseball games or teach students. The problem with much of academia is that hiring professors often has nothing to do with the people who will pay our salaries and sit in our classrooms. In my department, the problem, in my view, is even more acute: we are a university that is approximately 95% dependent on tuition to operate. Nonetheless, our hiring decisions for about the last ten years or so have not been based on our undergraduate curriculum needs or by the need or desire to engage our undergraduates. Not at all. Instead, we hold meeting after meeting to discuss how we can address a "hole" in our graduate program, and that usually means finding a someone who can teach a course in advanced research design and/or statistics. These are important needs IF you are a major research institution -- Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Chicago, etc. -- that attracts the very best students and educates them specifically to land in other elite academic departments, where they will teach very little and instead bury their heads in their computers and hope that make a "significant contribution to the discipline." Undergraduates will never discover what those "significant contributions" are for two reasons: (1) they are not, in any real world sense, "significant contributions" and; (2) on the odd chance their contributions are significant, these professors will not teach them to undergraduates; rather they will teach them to the graduate students who sit in their seminars, all the better to perpetuate the illusion that they are all doing something very, very important.

But as someone -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, I believe it was -- once said, "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different than you and me." Just like the New York Yankees were and remain different than the Oakland A's, Harvard is a very different place than American University. Harvard's operating expenses are nowhere closely related to the tuition they charge their students to come to Cambridge. My university's expenses, on the other hand, are almost entirely dependent on the tuition we charge our undergraduate students. For me, the analogy moves to another dimension of baseball: the fantasy leagues in which people with no real stake in a team and no real money to spend play a season by "drafting" players and "competing" against their friends for bragging rights, a small pool of money that the members of a "league" cobble together, beer, or, for the very rich, significantly higher stakes. In the end, though, it's just a fantasy, sort of like pornography, romantic comedies and professional wrestling. Cold, hard facts aside, we continue to hire (and fire) professors who do not meet our definition of a "productive scholar," which is the kind of person I described above and in more recent post on the diminishing role for professors in the classroom.

For example, we don't hire a professor with a particular research or teaching interest based on our curriculum needs. We hire someone because we think it will impress professors in other departments and prospective graduate students, who we think will come here to study with a new or established "star" professor. In all likelihood, we will adjunct-out our new hire's teaching responsibilities so that s/he may concentrate on publishing and teaching graduate students. Forget that we don't attract very many graduate students, and the ones that we do attract don't get good academic jobs. All that matters is that we think we are making an impression on the cocktail circuit at academic conferences held periodically around the country, where political scientists gather not to share any genuinely interesting work, but to gossip about what's happening in the "profession" and to hustle for book contracts and publishing opportunities. If the talk is that AU is hiring some "really good people" who will have an "impact" on the profession, that's considered a successful recruiting year. And that, in turn, makes us a department that is "on the way up."

But are we on the way up, and, if so, where are we going? Since 2000, we have hired 14 new professors. Of the professors we hired between 2000 and 2005, only one is still with us. Three were denied tenure, one left after a year to attend law school, and two more moved on to large universities that historically have not emphasized teaching in their hiring and promotion decisions. They were free agents who were never a really good fit for what we do. Only one who was tenured has remained with us. Since 2009, we have hired two established professors and five untenured assistant professors, so it's too early to tell how these hires will work out. But when you are unable to retain almost half the people you've hired over an 11 year period, and the two most "productive" professors leave for institutions with greater prestige in the field, it's not a bad idea to ask if we are hiring the right people for the kind of school we are. We are not asking that question. Instead, we hire professors who don't teach undergraduates very much, and, in some cases, not at all. But that's by design. Among my newer colleagues, this means that we are getting better as a department because we are becoming more "visible" in the profession. Are we really getting better? And visible, though, to whom?

We are the academic equivalent of a small-market team in baseball. Our hope for growth and prestige lies not with the star system and the misguided notion that we can compete with the richest and most powerful universities in the country by hiring people who don't really fit with the kind of institution that we are and think we should be. With an undergraduate population of roughly 6,000, a good number of whom did not consider AU their first choice when applying to college, our focus should be on delivering the best undergraduate experience we can in the classroom and developing an environment where professors and students can form a community. For the most part, professors who do the most teaching are the closest to their students and the most engaged in student life. At AU, those professors consist of adjunct, temporary and other non-tenured faculty, not the stars making the most amount of money and eligible for the longest-term contract available in all the professional world -- tenure.

So, for most of the baseball-heads who rushed out to see "Moneyball" last week, the movie was about baseball, and how a small band of unconventional thinkers challenged themselves and the sport they had grown up with to think beyond the star system. For me, the movie was about much more than that. Others in the theater saw the Oakland A's payroll of $39,722,689 vs. the New York Yankees payroll of $114,347,764. I saw $52,236, the cost of attending one year of college at my university, and wondered why continue to adhere to a business model that does little more than give those in power the feeling that they, and not someone else, are really in charge.

Tom Tomorrow

2011-09-26T16:38:00.002-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Farewell to record stores

2011-09-25T22:02:00.002-04:00

From the first time I ever touched one, I loved holding a vinyl records in my hands. Loved 'em, loved 'em . . . absolutely loved 'em. I am not a good record-keeper, so I have no way of knowing whether my own unofficial estimate that I spent roughly 95% of what little disposable income I had as a kid on records is accurate. I still remember the first time I held a record in my hand. I was two or three months past my eighth birthday, hanging out at my neighbor Marcy Pitt's house on a rainy day. I saw a copy of "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club" band leaning against the record player in her room. My father had just put a copy of "Sgt. Peppers" on his reel-to-reel tape deck and, like most kids in 1969, I was utterly transfixed by the Beatles. I asked Marcy if she could put it on. Because she had polio and often got tired from walking around in her braces and crutches, Marcy told me I could put it on myself. This was a privilege I did not yet have in my own house, where records were the equivalent of the nuclear codes and were guarded from my sister and I as if a child's hand touching one would set off a mushroom cloud over our house.

So I slid the record out of the sleeve and, just like I had watched my father handle his records, let the vinyl touch my thumb, careful to balance the middle on my other four fingers, my palm concave to ensure that my skin would not come into contact with the grooves. Balancing the record like a seasoned waiter balances multiple plates on his palm and forehand, I lifted the dust cover and, placing both palms on the outside of the record, placed the greatest record ever made on the turntable. Marcy had a Dual 1237 turntable, a model slightly below our own, so I knew how to work it from watching my parents play their records. I knelt down on one knee, careful to line up the tone arm so that the stylus would hit the outer groove at just the right point and begin its concentric journey to the opening song, "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band." This was really my favorite part of playing records -- lining up the tone arm with the record with the precision of an Army ground-spotter calling in a precision air-strike to an F-15 fighter plane. Even into my twenties, the period when CDs started to replace records, I still went through the same ritual every time I put on a record.

* * * * * * * * * *

My mother played records constantly. Her concession to popular music was the Beatles, more the early "moptop" Beatles than the later "Revolver/Sgt. Peppers" Beatles. She was convinced that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was a drug song and had serious reservations about whether I, much less my younger sister, should listen to it. Her own tastes ran to Broadway show tunes, album versions of such popular musicals as "Oklahoma," "The Sound of Music," and "Stop the World: I Want to Get Off," the dramatic, over-the-top renditions of popular songs by Judy Garland and occasional singles by such noted female vocalists as Nancy Sinatra, Bobby Gentry and Ella Fitzgerald, who, in my mother's terminology, could "really belt out a tune!" My mother frequently attempted to "belt out" these same tunes, usually in public places and without the slightest concern that anyone would turn around and stare at us. Of course, she was the same person who would STAND UP in the movie theater and yell "Bravo!" when especially moved by an actor's performance. My mother's strategy of avoiding embarrassment to herself and reserving it for my sister and I was to take us to movies in African-American neighborhoods, where the call and response culture of the black church suited her own preferences just fine. Rather than a "sit down and be quiet response" that she would have surely received in a theater closer to our house, my mother's antics were greeted with a "That's right!" or "Mm-hmm!" or "Tell that woman she can sing!"

Having no particular enthusiasm for my mother's record collection, I contemplated sabotaging her albums, particularly anything on which Judy Garland appeared -- through a subtle, gradual campaign of scratching them, infecting her vinyl with the dreaded "skip" that made records unlistenable. An occasional bump against the turntable, down with a brief but effective hip check against the base on which it sat, would do it. I also thought about jumping up and down to shake the stylus off the record, forcing it to "jump" across the vinyl, setting it on its path to destruction. But I never followed through on my well thought-out plans to get Judy Garland out of my house. After a day of my sister and I driving her crazy, those records were my mother's sole reminder that she had a life outside of her children. She could keep her records and play them as much as she wanted. Besides, I would have gotten caught and had to endure my mother's tears as she looked at me and asked, "Why did you do this to me?" Not worth it.

* * * * * * * * * *

My dad treated his records very differently. He held them, examined them, checked them for dust, fingerprints and other foreign substances before he put them on his Dual 1245 turntable. He owned a Discwasher record-cleaning system, a Sound Guard "miracle" spray concoction that claimed to provide a "protective coat" of some chemical on the record to preserve the vinyl's integrity. To the best of my memory, record-cleaning fluids and audio equipment were my father's only concession to "brand name" products, convinced then, as now, that all cars, cookware, plates, lawn fertilizer, bottled spaghetti sauce, canned vegetables -- really, everything -- were all "made by the same people." Later, in my teen years, when I suggested to him that just because General Motors made the Cadillac and the Nova didn't mean they were really the same car, my father looked at me incredulously, unsure whether to clock me (which he didn't do and never did) or feel sorry for me ("boy, I don't know how you're going to survive when you start paying your own bills!").

For every one record my mother owned, my father owned twenty. He had hundreds and hundreds of albums, his record collection spanning the history of American jazz music. The emphasis was on Louis Armstrong, 20s swing, New Orleans music, big band leaders like Benny Goodman, who my dad revered as a band leader more than a horn player ("never hired a bad musician -- ever."), Billie Holliday and, of course, Duke Ellington, whose music he collected and studied like a Biblical anthropologist alone with the tablets that Moses received on Mount Sinai. Entire weekends were devoted to making documentaries about an Ellington performance featuring a particular horn player or unusual arrangement of one his standards. He took great care of his records, always careful to return them to their paper sleeves after he finished playing them and insert them back into the cardboard cover, with the sleeve facing up so the record could never accidentally slip out and make contact with the ground.

My dad's record collection ended when the be-bop revolution started. He acknowledged that Monk, Dizzy, Miles, Lester Young, Max Roach and Bud Powell were "talented" musicians but he didn't find the break from swing the eye-opener that I later did. Popular music had little room in his collection. Aside from the occasional Tony Bennett record, my father's scholarly interest in male vocalists was limited to early Frank Sinatra. He loved female jazz singers much more, and used to lament how unfortunate it was that I never got to hear Billie Holliday sing on record the way she sang live. "The saddest life in the history of music, maybe ever," he would say about Billie, with whom he was on a first-name basis.

* * * * * * * * * *

The first two records I ever bought with my own money were "Let It Be," by the Beatles, and "American Woman," by the Guess Who. This was shortly after I touched Marcy Pitt's copy of "Sgt. Pepper." My parents understood that if my cool 17 year-old neighbor would let me touch her favorite album, I was ready to buy and take care of albums on my own. I did not buy them at a "real" record store. I bought them at a discount department store called Zayre's. My mother had taken my sister to another part of the store to buy pajamas, underwear, slippers or whatever essential items a 5 year-old girl needed. I announced I was going to "look at records." I picked up those two albums, contemplated whether I could afford both with the ten dollars I had in my pocket. At $3.99 a piece, with tax on $7.98 coming to 32 cents, I realized I could pull it off. Better yet, the albums folded out, and included pictures inside. This meant the spine of the records was a little bigger, and made it easier to see the album artist when you stored them sideways. So thrilled was I with my first albums that I peeled the plastic wrap off on the way home just so I could the inside of the cover and peer into the record sleeve itself. The first song I ever played from the first record album I ever owned was "I Got a Feeling" by the Beatles. Not a bad start.

* * * * * * * * * *

By the way, the first record label to introduce album covers that opened up was Impulse!, a jazz label begun in the early 1960s as a somewhat arty alternative to the jazz being issued by CBS and Atlantic Records. Impulse! wanted to compete with Blue Note and Riverside, the premier labels for jazz purists. Impulse! put a great deal of time and expense into designing album covers that would be distinctive, as much as Blue Note had developed a "look" through four-color covers that included the musicians names, usually in white block letters, on the front, and a "sound," courtesy of the legendary recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Impulse! records features orange and black colors, changed up on the front but consistent on the spine. It also signed John Coltrane, who put Impulse! on the map by releasing a record, at his insistence, with Duke Ellington. Serious record collectors always placed their albums in alphabetical order by the year they were released, separated by genre. The two exceptions were records on Blue Note and Impulse!, which received their own special section.

The folded record cover would, of course, serve a far more useful purpose later in the 1960s (and beyond) -- to sift the seeds out of marijuana and serve as a platter to roll joints. For music collectors who have grown up with CDs and never had to make the conversion from vinyl, they missed out on one of the great rituals of listening to records.

* * * * * * * * * *

The arrival of CDs in the mid-80s was initially touted as a storage medium that would augment vinyl records and cassette tapes, not replace them. I held on to all my records even while I started to replace them, more for romantic reasons than any useful purpose. How could you argue with a system that allowed you to hear 45 or 60 minutes of music without having to turn the record over? That permitted a listener to skip over bad songs like "Mother" on "Synchronicity" by the Police? That you could play over and over with no risk to the recording's fidelity -- no pops, clicks and scratches? At the beginning, I bought into vinyl snob's insistence that vinyl recordings were superior to the new digital storage medium and that imperfections in the playback process made the music "real." By the mid-1990s, I used my turntable maybe once or twice a year, having converted fully to CDs. I stopped buying records five years or so before, even giving up the time-honored practice of all record collectors of rummaging through used record stores for the occasional $3 gem.

For Father's Day this past June, my family gave me a new turntable and, separately, a turntable that transfers vinyl records into digital files. I hadn't played a record in my house in years, since my Dual 522 turntable stopped working and I didn't feel the need to repair it. But I also didn't feel the need to get rid of it, as it sits inside of a closet nestled between boxes of crayons we bought our children anywhere from 10 to 15 years ago and a desk lamp whose bulb I haven't gotten around to replacing. The first record I put on my new turntable was Bill Evans, "Live From Shelley Manne's Hole," because it contains my favorite version ever of "Isn't It Romantic?" the great Rodgers and Hart standard. I was nervous putting the album on, unsure of what it would sound like after years of sitting dormant inside the record sleeve, full of the sorts of jitters I remember getting when waiting for the door to open on a first date way back when. But as soon as the stylus hit the turntable and those first few seconds of static came through the speakers, I remembered immediately why I loved records so much in the first place: the care and selection of the album, of searching through your records to find the one you felt like playing and re-reading the liner notes to make sure that you hadn't missed anything the first 40 or 50 times you read them. Best of all, the album sounded great -- full, warm and completely absent of the harshness that sometimes accompanies digital production and recording.

I still have probably two or three hundred records in the built-in bookshelves in my home office, which are there simply to remind me of how much I loved buying and listening to records growing up (and now, record by record, are being moved to digital files so I can put these records on my iPod). Close to my house growing up was a small record store called Cheap Thrills, which was run by a guy whose main income, I later determined, came from dealing pot out of the back of his store. But he always had the best records, the "cool" ones that Zayre's, K-Mart and Woolworth's didn't carry. Coolest of all were the "bootlegs" of concerts he kept in the back. You had to ask for them, and once he decided that you weren't an undercover cop, or a kid recruited by an undercover cop to set him up, he would sell them to you. I still have three bootlegs he sold me -- a Pink Floyd concert recording from 1973, a Genesis show from 1976 and a 1977 Yes concert. One afternoon, when I was about 14, I remember sifting through album after album in Cheap Thrills, looking for something I didn't have or, as was more likely, records I did have that were cool enough to be sold in this coolest of all stores, and thinking to myself, "This is what I want to do when I grow up. Own a record store so I sit around all day listening to music, keep the bootlegs in the back, develop a reputation as the "go-to guy" when you needed a hard-to-find album or just wanted somewhere to hang out." For a kid like me, there was no better feeling than, upon being told by the Cheap Thrills guy that an album I was holding was one I "should buy," to say, "I've already got it." All kids, whatever their pretense to rebellion and independence, want approval. And approval from the Cheap Thrills guy was as good as it got.

* * * * * * * * * *

The first mega-record store to come to Atlanta was called Peaches. It was the size of a large supermarket, the kind now that would qualify as a "Gourmet Giant" or "Super Safeway." Peaches featured the hand prints of musicians and bands that had come to town on the sidewalk in front of the store, and stocked, so it seemed, every record ever made. You could also by "Peach Crates" to store your records, and naturally I owned many a "Peach Crate" over the years, not getting rid of my final one until I moved from Atlanta to Washington in 1989. As a "serious" teen-age record buyer I faced a serious dilemma once Peaches, and then later, a store called Turtles opened much closer to my house: do I save a dollar or so on records by buying them at the big stores or continue to buy records from the cool guy at Cheap Thrills?

I did the only logical thing I could do: I started buying them at all three stores. Anything else would have been unfair.

* * * * * * * * * *

Tower Records closed its doors three years ago, a victim of the Internet and a bad business model. The company's demise marked the end of records stores as I once knew them. Once Wal-Mart becomes the nation's leading music retailer it's time to throw in the towel. People like myself who once spent hours in record stores reading liner notes and looking for the occasional "lost" album that showed up in the Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull or Pink Floyd bins do not constitute the majority of recorded music buyers. CDs meant the end of vinyl records, and iTunes and the mp3 revolution are slowly bringing to an end the CD. Music buyers want the music they want, and care little about liner notes, album covers or displaying their music collection for their friends and guests to see when coming over. To this day, the first thing I do when I walk in someone's house I've never visited is to look for and then assess their music collection. I think this is a distinctly male trait, much like my wife will ask me if I think she -- I mean, we -- should redesign the kitchen in which I prepare her and my children's meals after seeing someone else's vastly superior layout, state-of-the-art appliances or genuine marble counter tops.

Me? I now hold on to my CDs the way I still cling to my vinyl records. In an effort to adapt to the on-line revolution, I bought a few "albums" through iTunes a few years ago, but felt empty that I didn't have a booklet to flip through or a plastic case to hold in my hand. So I now buy CDs, transfer them to my iPod the moment they arrive (I buy all my music on-line), and then put them in their appropriate alphabetical, chronological place -- by genre, of course -- in my CD cabinet.

No different than 20, 25 or 30 years ago, I do this because I labor under the illusion that someone will care about, much less be impressed by, my CD collection, which I am no longer permitted to keep upstairs in full public view, but rather downstairs in an obscure corner where we keep discarded sports equipment. Yes, I still hold onto that "reverse snobbery" prevalent among record people that says, "Okay, so you've got your BMW 535i, but do you have the Complete Village Vanguard Recordings of Bill Evans or the Complete Classic Quartet Recordings of John Coltrane on Impulse! Do you know who Rudy Van Gelder is? Do you have the 'lost' version of the Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East album?"

Perhaps that is not the most mature way to weigh your station in life as I approach the half-century mark. But when you're sliding down the wrong side of the parabolic curve of middle age, it sure feels normal to me.

Thelonious Monk

2011-09-22T22:00:00.003-04:00

Going through some CDs the other day I came across a Thelonious Monk recording from 1965 called, "Monk in Paris: Live at the Olympia." The performance, as always, is something to behold. Monk's group from the 1960s doesn't always get the acclaim it deserves, since there has been a tendency among jazz critics to measure everything he did against his work from the late 1940s to late 1950s, Monk's most prolific compositional period and when his bands featured musicians like Art Blakey and John Coltrane. But I know many Monk-o-philes who are quite content to listen to his CBS recordings featuring Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone and Ben Riley on drums. Rouse, in particular, was a great interpreter of Monk's music and he shines on this recording.

I had forgotten, however, that the CD included a DVD featuring Monk performing three tunes from a separate concert in Oslo, Norway. And as the liner notes to the disc point out, you had to SEE Monk to really appreciate what he was doing, and just how incredible his compositions were. The band plays "Lulu's Back," "Blue Monk," and "Round Midnight," and all the musicians swing their asses off. Just watching Ben Riley is a humbling experience -- his kit consists of a kick drum, snare, hi-hat and a crash/ride, and he makes more music from these four instruments than most modern drummers make with an arsenal of toms, electronic enhancements, nine or ten cymbals, a double-bass drum, remote hi-hat and so on. And Monk, of course, is a trip: watching him play you get the impression that there is so much he could be doing but would rather toy with his listeners by leaving us to wonder what is going to happen next. His percussive, angular piano style always met with a mixed reception by critics who loved his compositions and his bands. Monk's piano playing has gotten a better reception over the years; I, for one, have always loved him. No pianist, not even Bill Evans, could infuse his playing with the wit and humor that Monk did; and no one has since.

For the Monk neophyte, this recording is a good place to start because you get the DVD along with a superb recorded live concert. But be careful. You'll get hooked, and before you know it you'll be spending a lot more time (and money) trying to figure out what this seminal American musician was all about.

Professor TBA

2011-09-21T14:41:00.002-04:00

If you've ever wondered who Professor TBA is in your course catalog, now you know.

Professing nothing

2011-09-20T12:06:00.014-04:00

Last spring, I paid about $150 for two tickets to sit about four rows from the field to watch the Atlanta Braves open their baseball season against the Washington Nationals. Normally, I pay $32 for two tickets in the upper-deck to sit near the air traffic controllers tower at National Airport, get to the park early to watch batting practice and never make it up to my seat. Since the Nationals are grateful for anyone to attend their games, the ushers never ask you for your ticket. On that day, I decided to play it straight, go against my family's roots in Jewish retail and pay full price. Worth every penny. But I'll tell you this: I would have been pissed if the University of Virginia or a local high school team had showed up instead.

Towards the beginning of summer, I paid some serious cash, about $100 a ticket, to see my favorite all-time rock band, Yes, for what was probably the 25th or 30th time. Of course, I knew Jon Anderson wasn't there, but I will pay whatever I can to sit as close as possible to Chris Squire, Steve Howe and Alan White. And these guys, creaking and, in Squire's case, staggering on stage, can still play rings around musicians a third of their age. Had some prog-head emerged from his basement to perform his F# minor scales for me instead, or some other wannabe air-guitar player even attempted even to simulate a Howe guitar solo I would have stormed the stage and, after my release from jail, demanded my money back.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see the movie, "The Help." She gets in for free because she's that hot, and I usually have to pay a little extra because I'm not. I have mixed feelings about the movie, since I grew up during that era in the South. But you can't argue with the performances, though. Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Alison Janney and Octavia Spencer are all remarkable. Had I paid to see this movie with this cast, and instead been treated to actors and actresses that were not billed in the advertisements, I would have been pissed. And I would have been doubly-pissed had this been ten years ago and I had a baby sitter on the clock.

*******************

$53,236.

That's the retail price for an undergraduate to attend one year of college at American University. That assumes you pay full tuition, live on campus and participate in the university's meal plan. It does not include travel, clothing (a big expense at AU), books, parking, getting around town, drugs, alcohol and so on. On our website, we tell our prospective students that are faculty-student ratio is less than 20:1, that our professors are "engaged" in the world and with their students, that we have a "world class" faculty that has done everything from building nations from scratch to saving the world from itself. And these are just the modest professors on campus. Many, many more are busy governing and instructing the country, when not busy advising presidents and various heads of states, or rescuing the economies of less-developed countries or countries that don't even exist quite yet, creating new languages or assessing non-verbal social interaction between gay insects in Madagascar. Some have even managed to find foundations and government agencies to fund their intellectual endeavors, allowing them to disappear for a semester, a year or sometimes even longer to collect their data, construct their hypotheses, put together panel discussions and write articles and books for the dozen or so people who share their interests, all of whom are scattered in universities around the country competing with their fellow scholars for the very same academic sugar-daddies (and, to be fair, sugar-mommies) and publishers.

What our world class faculty is not doing, at least in my department, is teaching. Think about this for just a minute: in what other business do customers pay for a product that they are not going to receive? Not only that, but in what other business to customers support a workforce whose status increases the less they do what advertise they are in business to do? Go back to the top and add this example: you decide to travel to New York to see a Broadway show because you saw an advertisement in the New York Times featuring a superlative cast. You travel to Manhattan, perhaps even fly or take the train, book a hotel for a couple of nights and set aside some time to take advantage of everything New York has to offer. You show up at the theater, only to discover that the billed cast isn't there. Rather, they're up the street, performing in a workshop for other top-billed actors and actresses, trading stories and perhaps even secrets of the trade. Meanwhile, you're watching their understudies while still paying top-tier prices. Granted, understudies on Broadway are very accomplished stage performers, and no doubt endured a brutal apprenticeship just to make it as far as they did. But that’s not what people are paying for when the lights die down on Broadway.

In my department, the professors who are not on tenure tracks, who are paid the least and have job (in)security to match do more than 60% of our undergraduate teaching. These professors are either (1) adjunct, which means they teach one or two courses a semester but no more than three in an academic year. They range from accomplished individuals like Julian Bond, the civil rights activist and living historical figure to some Washington “professional” yanked off the street a week or two -- or day or two -- before a semester begins to fill a class that some other adjunct bagged at the last minute. That person may or may not have the highest degree in his or her chosen field, and wants to teach because it is “fun,” or having made money in some "real" profession, decide they can now afford to teach, like it's a hobby of some sort; (2) one-semester or one-year temporary appointments who teach either three or four courses per semester or six or eight per year, depending on a department’s needs at any particular time; and (3) lucky enough to have received a multi-year contract of three to five years, renewable based on good performance and behavior, which gives them a reasonable degree of job security, if not in academia at least compared to the non-tenured world that exists beyond our walls. But not even these professors are equal people in academia, or at least in my department. They are generally not allowed to vote on departmental matters, even though they are sometimes asked and often do serve on university or departmental committees. Moreover, they are generally not eligible for a promotion in rank and, most of all, the possibility for tenure. They are considered “teachers” and not “scholars.” They can, of course, attempt to publish in professional journals and with academic presses. But that is just for a sense of accomplishment, sort of like setting a personal goal to run a marathon in a certain time at a certain age. Good for you; but no one’s watching.

Jobs that Professor Type 1 and 2 have are often called “replacement” positions for people like me, tenured professors who are on sabbatical, have received an external grant to work on some research project or have had their teaching load reduced because of their prolific scholarship. In the academic world, the more “productive” you are as a scholar, the less you generally have to teach. In contrast, no matter how well you teach, you will never receive an equivalent benefit. As with most things, the more time you put into your teaching the better you will generally be, assuming you begin with some degree of ability. The more time you spend on your teaching, the less time you have for your research. And that means you’ll never be as “productive” as a mediocre teacher who publishes lots and lots of work. That work or may not have any real significance or even qualify as real scholarship. No one but themselves and some colleagues will probably ever read it, save for the students they assign their work to read. But it allows departments to “count” it as a publication, and that is how most departments measure their status within their academic discipline. Look at it another way: a reduced teaching load is not a reward for productive scholarship; rather, a “normal” teaching load is a statement that you are an average scholar. Getting an extra course tacked onto that is punishment for not engaging in or generating any scholarship at all. Think about that a minute: colleges are sending the people they claim are the least productive, the least “on top” of their fields, the least imaginative and capable of anything creative into their undergraduate classrooms. How do some of my colleagues view people like me, tenured full professors who, at this stage of their professional life – and honestly, at the beginning and middle – believe that college teaching is a luxury and a privilege and that trying to teach their undergraduates about they know -- and sometimes what they don't know -- and how to make their way in the world is the most important thing they do? I got this question, although not from someone in my department, late last spring from a young professor: “Do you still consider yourself a scholar, or do you consider yourself mostly a teacher now?”

About three or four years ago, my university made an explicit and conscious decision to become a “research institution.” This, after making a decision about a dozen years before to become a liberal arts, teaching-oriented university. Translated, this means as long as you are relatively competent in the classroom – not necessarily good or even better – you will not diminish your chances for tenure provided that you have an outstanding research record. In my department, the teaching load for a new tenure-track assistant professor is 1 / 2 for the first year. That means they teach one course during their first semester and two in their second. We hired two new assistant professors to join our department this year who are teaching around or below 35 undergraduates, as one is teaching a graduate course in research methods and, as such, no undergraduates at all. Last year, we hired two new assistant professors who taught a total of 25 students in their first semester. Like this year, one taught a small class of graduate students and the other taught a small undergraduate class of around or below 35 students. Sure, they’ll teach more next semester; but they probably won’t teach more than 40 students. In contrast, the non-tenure track professors I described above are teaching anywhere, assuming they have three courses per semester, anywhere from 90-140 students, depending on the sections and enrollments. And because they’re good teachers – remember, that’s why they were hired, it’s a good bet they are at the higher number rather than the lower one. They also make a lot less money.

What’s the incentive for us to offer such a minimal teaching commitment to our new faculty? Competition, from what I understand. We can’t compete with the “best” institutions in our disciplines if we don’t offer “competitive” teaching loads, which means that we have to entice our new hires by minimizing the time they “have” to spend teaching undergraduates. This doesn't speak well of political science as a discipline, as we receive around a hundred and usually more applications for our entry-level tenure-track positions. From there, we whittle the pool down to three or four. And generally our department is only happy with one. Sometimes we put searches over for another year because we're not happy with what's out there. And these candidates come from the "best" graduate departments in the country. Can you imagine if medical and law schools trained their students to enter their profession and no one would hire them, not for reasons of supply and demand, but because they weren't very promising? We have far too many students in graduate programs around the country "training" for jobs they will never get. Part of the reason is that there are so few tenure-track jobs out there. But another reason, and one more substantial than many will admit, is that the Ph.D students we're training don't have very much to say. What they do have to say they really aren't very good at saying. And very few view the opportunity to teach as something they really want to do. In most elite Ph.D. departments, any student who openly says that he or she wants to teach at a small, liberal arts college will not get the attention and support as students who spend the better part of their waking hours fretting over their dependent variables.

Many of our young professors, but not all, would prefer to teach graduate students, the better to impart the mysteries of political science to our own graduate students, almost none of whom will ever get a tenure-track job in higher education. Since 2002, we have placed exactly one student from our department in a tenure-track position. Last time I checked, our department ranked 89th out of 125th of Ph.D. granting departments nationwide. Nonetheless, we are putting more and more resources into our graduate programs, as that somehow provides incentive for the best graduate students at other universities to come to ours. Personally, I think this propagates the illusion that we are doing something really important in our professional journals and similar outlets, and that political science is real profession. Not college teaching, mind you. Not being a college professor. Being a political scientist – that’s a real profession. Then again, so is event planning. Really. It is. Look it up.

None of this matters to the decision-makers and committees involved in our hiring process. Last year, our committee consisted of three professors who did not teach a single undergraduate during the fall semester. One taught four graduate students, another 16 graduate students; and one didn’t teach at all. You need not graduate from the Paul Drake Detective Agency to conclude that a committee like that isn’t too concerned about getting a committed, energetic undergraduate classroom teacher.

Potential professors we bring to campus are not required to teach a class during their day and a half of interviewing. Instead, they meet with various professors to discuss their “research agenda,” and we give them a chance to ask us questions about who we are and what we do. Interviews culminate with a research presentation, which is generally a summation of the article, dissertation or book that attracted our hiring committee to them in the first place. So we spend the most time on what we know most about our applicants, and the least time on what we know the least about our applicants – what they’re like in front a group of undergraduates. A few years ago, I suggested that we build in time for our applicants to teach a class. Eyes rolled. Too disruptive to the interview process . . . will interfere with my course syllabus . . . students might not like the applicant (well, good then) and, best of all, it would require the applicant to prepare more and put more pressure on him or her. Good. If someone is about to offer you a job for what might be the rest of your professional life, having to put a few more hours to prepare for it isn’t such an unreasonable demand. Suffice it to say my suggestion never went anywhere.

Very few, if any, applicants ask us, or me, anyway, about our class sizes, what are students are like and the kinds of courses they will be able to teach. Their questions are geared towards resources available for research and how little time they’ll need to spend in the classroom. Practically, I don’t blame them. This is the system. Jobs like mine are rare, and you do what you need to do to get the part. I’m sure there are plenty of talented actresses who would rather not to slum on Cinemax after dark; but they need to work and need to eat. So they do what they have to do.

Perhaps I’m too old and cynical. After all, I’ve been doing this 23 years now. Sadly, I enjoy it more than I ever have. I look forward to the first day of the semester. I love engaging those students who come into class determined to “get me” or prove their mettle. I don't care who I teach and when, as long as it's after 10 a.m. I love meeting new kids whose intellectual curiosity and creativity makes me wish I had it together at their age. I love hearing from people I taught 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago whose email begins, "Hey, professor, I just want you know that I'm not that skinny, obnoxious jerk I was back then. Now, I'm fat, rich and obnoxious. Just kidding. Just fat and rich. Thanks for setting me straight back then." Those 75 minutes I spend in each of my classes twice a day on Mondays and Thursdays – yes, feel sorry for me – are reasons 1 through 75 I continue to do what I do. But what I do know? I’m just a teacher.

Tom Tomorrow

2011-09-19T22:43:00.002-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Yes, students are biased. So what?

2011-09-17T18:08:00.005-04:00

So I confessed a couple of days ago the shocking news that professors have points of view, sometimes feel strongly about their own research and scholarship and like to share, in different ways, those opinions with their students. To distill, in uncharacteristically precise fashion, the point of that piece to its essence, I suggested that, in the end, it doesn't matter what professors think or what their opinions are. What matters is how well the student challenges his or herself and how honest a student is willing to be about s/he does or doesn't know. What I believe or how I vote -- or even if I vote -- is no more relevant to a student's education than a student's decisions are to my own life.

I have colleagues who make no bones about where they stand on almost anything, and others who make a special effort to "hide" their opinions for fear of "prejudicing" their students' perceptions of them. After more than twenty years of teaching at the college level, I don't think it really matters how professors handle their "opinions" as long as they create space for a student to introduce and defend their own ideas.

Here's the real question for students who wonder how their professor's "biases" affect their in-class experience: Do students ever think for a moment about their own biases, and how those biases affect their perceptions of their professors?

When I was an undergraduate, I didn't spend a lot of time guessing or even thinking about what my professors' politics were. I spent most of my time thinking about:

1. Whether the girl that I thought was cute would go out with me. (Answer: No. But would she confess three weeks later in a bar that she would have if I had only asked her out 33 more times? Yes!)

2. Whether I had enough money to go out Friday and Saturday night, or whether I would be stuck home pretending to study one of those nights because I was broke. (Answer: No; yes.)

3. If I made a A in this class, would that move my GPA up enough to get into the "reach" graduate school to which I applied? Or what if I made a B? Or C? (Answer: I don't know. I got in where I wanted to and hoped like hell I didn't get a call saying there had been a bureaucratic snafu and I was back on the street.)

4. Whether the other girl I thought was cute would go out with me. (Answer: No. But would she confess after graduation that she always liked me, and was afraid of liking me "too much?" Yes!)

5. Whether the other girl I thought was cute would go out with me. (Answer: No, without a caveat.)

So, no, I didn't wonder very much if my professor in whatever class I was taking in college was a Communist, a socialist, an atheist, a Republican, gay, lived with his mother, killed small animals as a child just for fun, smoked dope, was a reformed arsonist, a secret cross-dresser and so on. I spent much more time, when I wasn't thinking about which cute girl was going to turn me down for a date, about the opinions of my classmates, and what could have possibly happened to them that caused them to say some of things that they did. Dropped on their head? Locked in a shed? Brainwashed by foreign, no, extraterrestrial agents? Denied food and water for extensive periods of time? Suffering from an untreated concussion? The list was endless . . .

But that was really one of the funnest parts of college -- getting a chance to hear views, opinions, accents and beliefs that you had never heard before (and, depending where you moved after college was over, you might never hear again). That wouldn't happen to me again until I started playing ice hockey ten years ago, when I was fortunate to meet men and women younger and older than me who didn't do what I did for a living and lived in other parts of town. Now, colleges emphasize intellectual diversity in their admissions decisions (sometimes linking them to race and ethnicity, but that is a whole different subject) because they want the undergraduate experience to be one that exposes students to different points of view.

Great. All for it.

But that means students will come into the classroom with biases of their own. And just as professors must evaluate students as fairly as they can on graded assignments, students must learn to evaluate professors as fairly as they can without regard to their own opinions. I'd much rather have a student just come right out and say, "You know, that guy is an asshole!" rather than feel that s/he couldn't get a fair shake on the basis of their opinion. Teach long enough and enough students will conclude that you are an asshole (or a fuckhead, shitbrain, prick, whatever) regardless of their self-styled political philosophies, but very few believe that my opinions, whatever they may, got in the way of a fair evaluation). For me, as for any serious and ethical college teacher, students need to understand that they are going to get a high, hard one right down the middle regardless of whether they think they agree with me or not. Or make it move around a bit, change speeds and, when necessary, throw at their heads. A student needs to develop the self-awareness and the maturity to realize that they should not always blame me if they ground out or whiff. My only obligation is to put the ball over the plate. The rest is up to you.

Bill Evans

2011-09-15T19:11:00.002-04:00

Thirty-one years ago today, Bill Evans died at the age of 51. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t discover his music until a few years later. I was listening to an early 1960s Herbie Hancock album, Maiden Voyage, with a friend and was just completed entranced by it, especially the title tune and "Dolphin Dance," which closed side 2. My friend, a talented pianist, told me that I needed to listen to Bill to understand Herbie’s playing. He lent me a copy of the seminal Miles Davis-led recording, Kind of Blue, and told me to listen to the tracks that Bill played on, and then compare it with "Freddie Freeloader," the sole cut on which Wynton Kelly (another great pianist) appears. My friend was one of those jazz guys who took a knowing drag on his cigarette, squinted his eyes, cocked his head just a little to the side and leaned into you just a little bit, but never too far, to make it clear l that what he was telling you was really important.

"I want you to listen to me," he said. "Really, really listen. And let go . . . I mean, just let go of everything inside you and let him come into your world. Listening to Bill Evans is going to change everything about how you hear music and experience life."

Okay, I thought to myself. This marked approximately the 3,285th time a semi-stoned musician had told me that a particular musician or recording was going to change my life. I was a bit skeptical.

But there something about the way my friend looked right in my eyes to make sure I "really, really" was prepared to hold on for a life-altering experience.

So listen I did, the stakes seemingly higher than any other musical challenge I had confronted since I listened to Side 2 of Dark Side of the Moon. I nervously took Kind of Blue home with me. And several hours later, and after playing "Flamenco Sketches" over and over and over until I began to see the white under the black vinyl, I emerged from my bedroom, fully converted to the cult of Bill Evans. To this day, I remain firmly convinced that Kind of Bluebelongs to Bill as much as it does Miles.

The jazz journalist Gene Lees has written that he has never known fans as possessive of their favorite musicians as Bill's fans were (and remain) of him. The first time I heard the Beatles on my own, my ears perked up as if some mysterious life force had just opened up a new world to me. I remember, in 1972, hearing, right in a row, "Long Distance Runaround" by Yes, "Living in the Past" by Jethro Tull, and "Do It Again" by Steely Dan late at night on the radio, and thinking, “Wow . . . what is that all about?” My first experience with John Coltrane I remember all too well: I sat in my crappy graduate student apartment on the cheap-shit couch I bought at a moving sale for $50 the previous spring. Feeling pretty good after a long, hot run, a refreshing shower and, after a half-gallon of water, a perfectly chilled Heineken waiting for me on the coffee table, which now that I think about it, wasn't so much a coffee table as it was a pile of phone books my roommate and I stolen from the other buildings on our apartment complex, I put on Coltrane, his eponymously titled Impulse! recording from the early 1960s, and didn't get up for the next hour, long after Side 1, which ran less than 19 minutes, had stopped playing.

Literally.

I couldn't move. Even to this day I can't quite describe what hit me and what it felt like. Was this how it felt to get shot at close range by hunting rifle? Eeeek! Those poor fat guys from the circus who had cannonballs shot into them. How horrible! Didn't anyone try to stop it? You can be damn sure that if some carnie was shooting cannonballs into a horse or cat or tiger, the outcry from animals rights groups -- hell, perhaps even the Vatican or the Orthodox Rabbinate -- would have demanded an end to that fiasco. No, not a cannonball, but like slamming into brick wall going 30 miles an hour. I don't mean in a car, either. I mean suppose you were skating really fast or werejust whipped by some air blower or gargantuan slingshot. I can only imagine that would offer a memorable entrance into a world of pain.

Bill was different. After my Kind of Blue experience, I went to a second-hand record store to buy all the Bill Evans albums I could afford. For $3 a piece, I bought Waltz for Debby, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Live at Shelley Manne’s Hole. I spent an entire afternoon listening to the Vanguard recordings, and then all of a sudden it hit me. I welled up in tears and just put my head in my hands. I had never heard music so beautiful, so meaningful, so heartbreaking, so genuine, so bare, so sympathetic, so loving . . . so, so, so . . . anything ever before. And once I learned about the difficulties he experienced in his life, with drug addiction and depression at the top of the list, his music radiated even more powerfully with me. I reported to my friend the jazz guy that I had begun the Bill Evans journey, and that I just wanted to reach into the speakers and tell him, “It’s okay, I know, I’ve been there, too.” Maybe not drugs and depression, but certainly my share fair of tough encounters with life. My friend went through his whole routine with his cigarette, and said, “You feel like he’s talking to you, don’t you, in a way that nobody else ever has, right?” Bill devotees think they have a straight line to his heart, and his to theirs, that only they understand. This was Gene Lees' point, and I certainly feel no embarrassment or shame in admitting to feeling that way.

Miles Davis once wrote that Bill Evans didn't play chords; he played sounds. Miles was right.
The place to start, of course, is the Complete Live at the Village Vanguard box set, which offers the legendary June 25, 1961 sessions from start to finish, including a new version of "Gloria’s Step," complete with a missing few bars due to a recording malfunction. You can also see Bill play thanks to the wonderful people behind the "Jazz Icons" series. Another great DVD featuring Bill's later 60s and early 70s work is called "The Oslo Concerts."

If you want to know where Bill was going at the end of his life, listen to the final Village Vanguard sessions from June 1980. The beauty, grace and otherworldly harmonic voicings are all there, but you will also hear a power and urgency that had reinvigorated his final years. It’s almost as if Bill knew that his time was almost up, and the moment had arrived to open his heart once last time to tell us everything he had ever seen, heard, touched and, most importantly, felt.

Yes, professors are biased. So what?

2011-09-14T17:13:00.004-04:00

"Like, I know you're not going to agree with me on this, but . . . "

If I had a dollar or some other equally worthless form of currency for every time a student said that to me in or out of class in twenty-two years of college teaching, I could retire and live off the interest for the rest of my natural life. And yes, that takes into account the very real possibility that the life expectancy of relatively fit, non-smoking white men in non-physically demanding jobs will increase by three to four year years by the time I teach my late 70s. That, according to the people who keep statistics on such things, is when I'm supposed to die. But they could be wrong. According to the Weather Channel, I should have died approximately 16 days ago when Terrorist Hurricane al-Irene huffed and puffed through Washington, D.C. I don't know if the Weather Channel thought I was going to die because the Hurricane was just that bad, or because it knew that PEPCO is my power company.

Regardless.

Of all the things that seem to preoccupy so many students about their professors -- whether our socks match, how often we wear a particular tie, sweater or an old sweatshirt that says "McGovern/Shriver," what kind of car we own (at American University, usually one less expensive than our students), what our husbands or wives look like, our lack of attention to ill-sprouting hair in our noses and ears -- our "bias" heads the list for the more politically minded undergraduate. Conservative students, in particular, are the most attuned, or so they believe, to our "liberal" views and spend a good deal of their time attempting to sniff out radicals in their midst.

An example: "My professor said that President Bush's decision to invade Iraq was the worst foreign policy mistake of the post-World War II era. He is so biased and unfair to those of us in the class who think it was the right thing to do!" a young conservative might fulminate.

Another: "I saw my professor getting into her Honda Civic and she had an "Obama/Biden" sticker. She also had a sticker that said, "Arms Are For Hugging." So how I can say that I support Mitt Romney in class or suggest that my Second Amendment rights include the right to own a flame-thrower?"

So what? What if the professor took the opposite position? Would if a professor said in class that President Obama was simply the latest in a long line of Democratic presidents that punish the successful to support an inefficient and morally problematic welfare state? What if a professor said in class that the modern feminist movement is at odds with the biologically determined path of men and women? Would that mean that s/he was being unfair to liberal proponents of the socially and economically active welfare state? Unfair to students who support gun control or, at minimum, don't believe that American citizens have a "right" to own flame throwers, handguns or automatic weapons of any kind? That student would probably not even think the professor was biased. Rather, this professor was telling the "truth."

It works both ways: "Like, I said in class this morning that I so totally supported abortion rights, and then my professor jumped all over my ass and told me that my position was an opinion, not an argument. I thought he was liberal. Or I really think he just doesn't like me because I don't agree with him . . . " is an often ever-so-insightful comment from a student holding a more conventional liberal belief.

Here's a secret of the professorial trade: most professors aren't altogether that concerned with a student's politics. I don't care at all about the opinions of any of my students -- save for those that might think the "Unabomber had a point." They can vote for whomever they want as often as they can and take whatever positions they want. They are free to insist to think that whatever they believe is true. I do care quite a bit, though, whether a student can distinguish between an opinion and an argument. Support abortion rights? Fine. Support capital punishment? Great. That the United States has the greatest health care system in the world. Your choice.

But can that student tell me why? That's the key issue. For many students, falling back into "the professor is biased" defense as an excuse for their inability to form a cogent, well thought-out argument for an opinion they've asserted is quite convenient. It's also really lazy. College is supposed to teach young people that the world of ideas is a much more complicated place than they have been led to believe. Every time I hear a student asked me, "Is it okay if I take the other side of the issue as long as I back up my argument?" I'm not sure what to say. How does a student get to his or her first year of college intimidated or afraid to voice an opinion for fear of punishment? Just what the hell is going on in our secondary schools?

Of course, supporting a position that you believe in is a good thing. But assuming there are only two sides to any given problem is too simplistic a way to think about abstract issues. In some ways, this is the consequence of attending college in Washington, where students often enter the world of politics as part of their undergraduate experience, and get caught up in the "liberal/conservative" dichotomy that drives what passes for "debate" here. Players in the Washington culture are driven by the need to acquire power and keep it. If they can't acquire very much power or keep it, they want to pontificate on television just to let the world know what the rest of us should be thinking and why. Professors are not immune from the temptations of membership in the Washington political-media complex that operates as a sump pump against the seepage of any thoughtful commentary or discussion of contemporary issues facing the country. There is no shortage of professors on our campus who would rather talk to reporters and camera crews than students and believe their every thought is so important that it must be "tweeted" as often as possible.

In Washington, ideas are simply a means to an end, commodities to be cleaned and sanitized so that everyone stays "on message." Everyone -- politicians, lobbyists, think-tankers, reporters, professors, bureaucrats, for starters, -- is in on the game. A few months after I moved here, in 1989, a reporter from the Washington Post called to ask me a question about a Supreme Court decision. I don't remember all the details, but I remember the reporter's frustration with me after giving her a "it could mean this, or that, or this, or that, or maybe nothing at all"-type answer. Or perhaps that she realized I was 27 years-old and didn't know much about anything.

"Just give me a three-sentence summary!" she demanded.

"But I can't," I responded.

"Well, then I guess you won't make it into the Washington Post! Remember, this will help you," she sniffed.

I had to admit I was curious. "Help me how?" I asked.

"It will get your name out there, and you'll get more calls for quotes."

"Honestly, I don't really care about that."

"You have a lot to learn," she said. And then she hung up.

Oh, well. I didn't go to my high school prom, and I managed to survive that, too. I mean, it was tough, but . . . .

So here it is: a professional academic who has spent a decent amount of time thinking about and studying a particular subject is going to have opinions. And it is perfectly reasonable for that person to share those opinions with students or whomever. Dentists, internists, hardware specialists, baseball scouts and many other professionals have opinions on what they do, and that is perfectly fine. Imagine going to an orthopedist for an examination to find out why your knee or shoulder hurts so much, and the doctor responded by saying she didn't want to offer you her opinion because that might come across as biased.

A student's responsibility is to absorb as much information as s/he can before forming an opinion that s/he can defend. Are universities disproportionately occupied by liberals? Uh, yes, just as the banking, real estate and communications industries are disproportionately run by conservatives and the arms business is run by people who favor politicians who want to spend more on weapons systems, regardless of whether those systems have any real value. The difference is, and this is something that gets easily lost on students concerned about "professorial bias," that the English department of Duke or the sociology department at the University of Indiana have far less influence in the real-world of politics and power than the men and women who run the country's most powerful institutions. This might come as a shock to my colleagues at American University, but the people who run this country don't really care about what we think or what we're teaching our students in class.

So, my young friends, if you are reading this, worry less about me and more about yourself. What I believe or think doesn't really matter. It's getting you to grow up a little and take charge of your own mind that does.

Welcome to 13th grade

2011-09-13T11:06:00.005-04:00

So here they come, strolling through campus, barely looking old enough to cross the street without a white-gloved, yellow-vested guard holding up traffic so their parents can escort them to elementary school. Some look like they are on their way to a job interview, parole hearing or debutante party; others appear to have last bathed sometime during the previous month, and then only because they were caught in Hurricane Irene. Some are chatting away on their cell phones even as their undergraduate guide describes where they are walking and what goes on in the buildings they briefly enter, survey and leave; others are paying rapt attention, writing everything down, placing post-it notes in their "welcoming materials," as if there will be a quiz at the end of the tour that will count towards the final grade in a fall class for which they have not yet registered; still others are looking at their watches or at their feet, wondering when their tour will end so that they can go back to their rooms and do nothing, or convince their parents to buy them more "dorm room essentials," as Bed, Bath & Beyond calls the approximately 427 items that burst from their display racks in the weeks before school begins.

And they are all texting. Constantly. Sometimes I'll just stand in the middle of a sidewalk or hall way and wait for someone to run into me. Which they do, and then shake me off like Alex Ovechkin shakes off a check and just keeps going. And like Ovechkin, they don't say excuse me.

Welcome to American University, Class of 2015.

And welcome, too, the Parental Advisory Board Class to the American University Class of 2015. Not even summer orientation, which used to just be, at most, an arranged and carefully choreographed visit for incoming freshman, has escaped the sleek corporate setting of modern university life. Our program, which mirrors most orientation sessions staged by most colleges and universities, sets aside nearly as much time for parents as students to talk to their children's prospective professors, academic counselors, representatives from residence life, student organizations, career center specialists, fitness center staff and other university offices that would take up too many gigabytes to list here. College is no longer the good luck-and-see-ya-later ritual it was when I began my freshman year in 1979. Universities offer their students amenities that are more consistent with the pleasures one might expect from Club Med, Sandals or some other popular vacation resort that I have heard about but never seen for myself. For many, maybe even most, students, their parents will be very involved in mapping out their "formula" for college success, just like they hovered over every extra-curricular activity or every school-related issue that faced their kids from elementary school forward.

College is now the 13th grade.

* * * * * * * * * *

Summer orientation brings back great memories for me. I remember checking into my dorm room and finding out that my orientation roommate had already bailed. I saw the door to the adjoining suite open, and I walked through to say hello. Sitting on the bed, smoking a cigarette was another 17 year-old, one Joey Pierce of Memphis, Tennessee. Joey was reading a collection of Woody Allen short stories. He didn't get up -- Joey resembled a Buddha statute in those days -- but he put down his book and said hello. I noticed a "YES" belt buckle, an accessory that pretty much sealed our since life-long friendship. I was the only person in my high school that was really into Woody Allen, and Yes was my favorite band. We sat down and talked, left briefly to eat, sneaked some beer into the dorm, and talked into the early morning. I went to sleep thinking college would be the greatest, most life-changing experience of my life. And it was.

My Dad, of course, had driven me up to the University of Tennessee for orientation. Between the time I checked into my dorm until the moment we met back up at the appointed check-out time two days later, I didn't see my Dad for five minutes. Parents were housed somewhere else on campus. All I remember my Dad telling me when we met up again was that his roommate left in the middle of the night. Maybe he was my roommate's father . . . I don't know.

Parents did not accompany their children on the campus tour. UT had a big campus, about a dozen times the size of American, so we took the shuttles than ran through campus to a certain part of campus, and then got out and walked. During one round, I remember our student guide pointing to Hess Hall, the notorious freshman dorm that housed 1,100 students, and issued a warning to us. "That's the Zoo, the wildest place on campus," he said. "You don't want to get assigned there if you want to survive your first semester.

I lived in the Zoo my freshman year. It lived up to its summer billing and more. Joey lived in the Zoo, too; but thankfully on a different floor. Not only did I survive, I made the Dean's List, the first time since 6th grade, when my reenactment of the Kennedy assassination with a second shooter won second place in the county social science fair, I merited academic recognition of any kind.

I did not go home my first semester until Thanksgiving. I called my house once a week, always on Sunday night after dinner. I knew my family would be home, watching "60 Minutes." Our phone conversations never lasted more than 2 or 3 minutes because, living in a dorm with a shared phone, I had to call collect. I grew up in one of those families where a long-distance call was viewed as an extravagance. When my sister and I were forced to make a phone call to a relative thanking them for a gift or card, my Dad stood in the background, whirling his arms and hands in a cranking motion, the universal hand-signal for, "Hurry up and get the hell off the phone!" Since my sister and I didn't like any of our relatives, getting off the phone was never a problem.

I never called home to tell my family good news or bad. I never called my Dad to talk sports or politics or to get his advice on navigating the rocky terrain of college women ("Keep asking until one says yes!" was his perennial advice. "There's someone out there as hard up as you!"). I never called my Mom to ask for money or to get her advice on getting a date ("Remember, it's their loss," she'd always say. If that was the case, the women attending college at the same time as I did incurred more losses than the New York Stock Exchange did during the Great Depression or that wealthy bankers temporarily endured during the Great Recession of 2008). I missed my parents and my sister, who was three years younger than me and with whom I had finally stopped fighting. When my Dad took me to college that fall, he made it very clear that I was not to call home unless there was a "life-threatening" emergency. He helped me move into my dorm room, gave me a hug and a kiss good-bye, and, looking at my roommate's side of the room, which featured a Bible, a crucifix, a clock radio, a picture of his girlfriend and a bed made so tightly that you could bounce a quarter off it, wished me good luck.

* * * * * * * * * *

Had I ever called home to complain about a grade from a professor, or that my roommate was trying to convert me to Christianity (he didn't; he was a great guy and we remained friends for years after I graduated until life pulled us in separate directions) or that my R.A. was out to get me or the food wasn't meeting my expectations or that I didn't know what to do about this or that, my Dad would have hung up the phone. "Life-threatening emergency" meant someone had a gun to my head or that I had been taken hostage by a terrorist organization. During my sophomore year, I started receiving not-very-pleasant mail under my door from a self-styled "Christian" student organization, which was unhappy with me for some columns I had written in the student newspaper critical of the Moral Majority. I finally broke down and called my Dad, telling him I was worried that something was going to happen to me.

"What the hell are a bunch of yokels going to do to you?" as if I were some super-imposing javelin thrower and not a 145 lb. Jewish know-it-all who could barely lift a 16 ounce beer without getting sore . "Here's what you do: invite them to your room, offer them a glass of Dewar's, tell them you like your drink strong and your women stronger. Ask one of the girls to tie you up and flog you while reading the Bible. Call your friend, the one from Memphis who is always high . . . what's his name? . . . Joey! Give them a joint. You'll scare the shit out of them and you'll never hear from them again!"

So I followed his advice, for the most part. At the end of my pitch, they all got up and left, including, unfortunately, the one girl who, underneath her two heavily starched shirts, pink crew-necked cable sweater, green pants and add-a-bead necklace, was cute. I am pleased to report that I never heard from my "Christian" friends again.

* * * * * * * * * *

Dumbfounded over the constant cell phone conversations that take place in the halls of our academic buildings, in classrooms, the student center, the dining facilities, the gym . . . everywhere and anywhere open to students, I asked a student sometime ago who the hell all these kids were talking to. Didn't they see each other enough in class, walking around, in the dorms or at their apartments?

"They're talking to their parents," she told me. "That one (pointing to girl we dubbed "Phone Girl" because I never, ever saw her when she wasn't on the phone) talks to her mother five or six times a day." My student then told me that almost everyone she knew talked to their parents at least once a day. They talk to their parents about their grades, how unfair their professors are, how the university is screwing them over on this or that, that their roommates fart too much and don't apologize, or steal cheese sticks or won't pay them the $5 they owe them and a million and one other things that do not qualify as "life-threatening emergencies."

I am aware that students talk to their parents about their grades because I have had their parents call me to ask why I "failed" their son or daughter on an exam or assignment. I only had once such conversation with a parent over a grade before I decided never to make that mistake again. I had just returned midterms, and stayed about five minutes after class to schedule appointments with students who were convinced that their grade from me had ruined their life and diminished all hope of getting accepted to Stanford law school, their "safety." This despite a 2.9 GPA from a not terribly demanding university. A message awaited me on my phone from an irate parent when I returned to my office. This parent had worked as a legal secretary for 20 years and knew full well that her son had not written a F minus-quality midterm(Yes, I have given F minuses; just ask) . . . blah, blah, blah. I returned the call, more out of curiosity than anything else.

"I know my law, and I can tell you my son is not an F student," she insisted.

"He might not be an F student. But he wrote an F exam, I can assure you of that. Actually, an F minus."

"No, he didn't. He read his exam to me over the phone, and that was not an F exam!" she bellowed.

Far be it from me to argue with a legal secretary with 20 years experience.

"Do you know your son doesn't have the book? Do you know that your son just sits there with a blank piece of paper waiting for me to give him the answers? Do you know that the exam was open book, that students could refer back to cases when they wrote their opinions?"

I thought that might do the trick . . . but no.

"Judicial opinions are public record. How do you know he isn't reading the entire opinion from somewhere else?"

"Our conversation is over," I responded. "If your son has a complaint, he can take it through the appropriate channels."

I said that because I believed that no one would take this seriously. My department chair at the time didn't. She had an even less pleasant conversation with the mother. But I received a call about a week later from someone in the Dean's office asking me to allow the student to take the exam over. Perhaps there had been a misunderstanding about the class or exam requirements, I was told. No, I assured my superiors, there was no misunderstanding. This student simply had not done the work. Let's make this a "teachable moment," came the response, and give the student a "second chance."

The student ended up making a D on the re-take. He made a D in the class, only because I wanted to have leverage to say, should he complain about that, that I could have given him an F but decided against it. That turned out to be his best grade for the semester. He made F's in his others and did not return for the next semester.

Parents call academic counselors, department chairs, professors and even higher-ranking academic officers detailing the injustices to which their children have been subjected more often than you would think. For students having health or personal problems, families should work with universities to serve the best interests of the student. Universities are much better equipped today than when I was an undergraduate to deal with the genuine health-related problems of students, particularly students with physical and learning disabilities and other mental health issues. But in 99% of the cases, parents are calling their children's colleges for the same reason they leaned on the high school chemistry teacher, the lacrosse coach, the middle-school band teacher or the elementary school reading instructor: they have decided that their child deserves a permanent advocate. Their child, because he or she is their child, is entitled to whatever it is that the parent wants for them. Not in all cases do I blame the student for this unfortunate development. We do not get complaints from the parents of students who are the first in their family to attend college, who are from modest backgrounds, who are working their way through college or who do not have parents in "professional" fields. No surprise, but the biggest complainers are the affluent parents, who really, really believe that their social station and tax bracket entitle them to whatever it is they want for their children. I see this all the time where I live -- parents continually pushing teachers, coaches, tutors, camp counselors, bake sale coordinators, parent volunteers . . . whoever has responsibility for their children -- to give their children what they want even if they don't deserve it. And it now continues into college.

From there it continues into the workplace. Yes, these achievement-driven parents are now accompanying their children to campus job fairs and, in some cases, their job interviews. The sad part is that these parents have no idea what a tremendous disservice they are doing their children.

* * * * * * * * * *

I was taught that college was a "supply-centered" enterprise. That is, you went to college to get an education. Classes were supposed to be hard; professors were supposed to be feared then loved; you were supposed to experience the "hellish" professor who made the spring semester of your junior year a living hell, only to discover five years later that she was the best professor you ever had; you were supposed to figure out a way to live off of $5 for a week; you were supposed to take courses that sounded off-the-wall, since high school was (for me) an intellectual straight-jacket; you were supposed to stay up until 4 a.m. arguing about the "big" issues facing the world; you were supposed to fail an exam and then figure out how to climb your way out of a hole; if your roommate left his stuff on the floor or insisted on bringing strange people into room night after night, you were supposed to figure out how to resolve the problem without calling your parents or an attorney.

No more. Universities are now "demand-centered" endeavors. My university constantly surveys students and their parents for their opinions on everything from the food to parking to classes to professors to the appropriate number of Stairmasters in the fitness center. Every course taught at the university is available on-line so that students can decide if the professor meets their requirements. I include three pages worth of rules and notes for students so that when they complain that I don't let them sleep or have sex in class or call their broker on their cell phone that I made it clear on the syllabus that such behavior was prohibited. As an undergraduate, I viewed the course syllabus as a rough guide to the semester, not as formal contract. It never occurred to me that I could pee in my pants or light up a joint in class simply because the professor didn't have a "rule" against it on the syllabus.

For the most part, my university, like most universities now, will attempt to give the student and their parents what they want. We should draw a line that says, "No, sir. This is what we offer here. Take it or leave it." We don't. Universities now have "customer-initiative teams" that are trained to "improve the student experience." I am waiting for the day when we are told (not asked) that all professors will begin wearing red or blue polo-collared short-sleeve shirts with an American University logo on one side and a name tag with my name, rank and length of service on the other. For staff professionals, that day has already come. And they hate it. It makes them feel like they work at a car dealership.

When AU hosts programs for prospective or admitted students, it emphasizes three main reasons to make our university the student's choice:

1. We are in Washington, D.C., the most important and exciting city in the world.
2. We offer extensive internship-for-credit courses that will improve your position in the job market when you graduate.
3. We are Metro accessible with first-rate on-campus residence and dining facilities.

Nowhere do we emphasize the Great Books, the courses available for students that will expand their intellectual universe, student centers for intellectual exchange, the importance of music, the arts and philosophy or the other, more traditional reasons that people went to college. Universities are now trade schools that provide job training for private companies, government agencies, small businesses, public and private schools and so on. A college degree is a credential, not a certificate that tells the world you are an educated person. Getting a degree and getting an education are not the same thing. But we are responding to the marketplace. And this is what our customers want. In fact, our university now hands out awards to our advisers for "excellence in customer focus" or some other achievement in corporate double-speak.

Several years ago, I encouraged readers of this blog to read Rick Perlstein's essay in the New York Times Magazine, "What's the Matter With College?" This fall, I asked students in my freshman American government class to read Louis Menand's more recent New Yorker article on the point and purpose of going to college. This essay is not a response to either article. Rather, I wanted to offer my own take on the question. I will, though, attempt to answer Perlstein's question. I will comment on Menand's later this week . . . .

Two weeks ago, I stepped over several incoming freshman who were sitting on the floor in the lobby of our departmental office. They were waiting to see their academic advisers to plan and make adjustments to their fall schedules. I walked down the hall to the room where we keep our office supplies, and, on the way, peaked into one of our adviser's offices to see a freshman planning his schedule. I smiled to myself, as it brought back memories of all those years ago at my freshman summer orientation. Then I looked again to make sure I saw what I thought I saw. And there she was, a mother sitting next to her son, asking questions and making sure that everything would work out for the fall. I stood outside the door and listened. I heard her voice but never his.

That, right there, is what's the matter with college.

A professor, a rabbi and a priest walk into a bar

2011-09-12T22:23:00.004-04:00

Not really. I just didn't know where else to start.

So, what's it been . . . a year? Two? But so much has happened in the time since I last wrote on a regular basis that I felt it was time to get back to it. And, no, my return was never intended to coincide with Stephen Strasburg's comeback from Tommy John surgery. But, in some ways, taking a break from regular writing, even if you enjoy writing -- not that it's always evident -- as much as I do, is a good thing. Unless you are absolutely superhuman and/or uber-gifted, you eventually get burned out, just like you do doing anything too much, no matter how much you love it. As much I might like to think I walked away on top like the great Sandy Koufax, another left-handed Jewish pitcher of note, there was no top to walk away from. A comparison to Tommy John is more appropriate: my brain just gave out and needed some rest. No, I haven't taken a ligament from my thigh or abdomen and grafted it into my brain, although that might not be a bad idea. A little rest, plus the temptation of the absurdities, hypocrisies, idiocies and inexplicably stupid acts that occur in the world -- and incredibly close to home, literally -- on an almost-hourly basis, make it a good time to start pissing people off again.

My "schedule," such as it is, will be the same as before. Monday will feature the cartoon, Tom Tomorrow and links to another political cartoons of note; I'll write commentary on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays on the range of topics you see up top. Thursdays will feature music recommendations. I'd say albums, but no one knows what those are any more. Even suggesting that "you listen to the CD by The Band Featuring A Cover Of Three Skinny Guys and One Fat Guy Wearing Ironic T-Shirt Nursing Their Coffee While Staring Out a Diner Window" might be a risk, since not many people, as I know from personal experience, buy CDs anymore.

There you go. First pitch comes tomorrow. It will not be nationally televised. And it definitely won't feature Toby Keith singing during the 7th inning stretch with an American flag superimposed in the background.

No, Sarah Palin is not hot

2010-11-01T14:56:00.004-04:00

The question still burns, but the answer remains the same: Sarah Palin is NOT hot.

Among the stranger phenomena of our time -- stranger, I dare suggest, than the Cabbage Patch Doll craze in the 1980s, the popularity of the show "Friends" in the 1990s, the emergence of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer as an essential item in the modern hipster's portfolio of coolness, the rise of Bono and Angelina Jolie as roving international ambassadors of good will or the near improbability of the Boston Red Sox winning not one but two World Series, how Uggs and Crocs simultaneously became must-have fashion items in pre-schools, elementary schools, high schools and colleges and worn by the mothers (mostly) and fathers (sometimes) responsible for taking and dropping their children to these educational outposts near and far -- is how Sarah Palin, two years ago a name unknown to approximately 281,121,906 Americans (that's 281,421,906 minus 300,000 or so Alaskans, or about half the state's population. I'm assuming that at least half of all Alaskans, like most Americans, real or fake, don't know who their governor or mayor is) has emerged as the modern-day Marilyn Monroe -- or Lady Gaga, take your pick -- of American politics.

Granted, Palin cuts a more dashing figure than, say, Elizabeth Dole, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Barbara Mikulski or Condi Rice. But does Palin have that "it" factor that allows her to walk along side of Sheryl Crow, Julianne Moore, Sandra Bullock or her impersonator, Tina Fey, with first-tier MILF (or GMILF or VPILF) credentials?

Dear, God . . . no.

No, no, no and no again. And again. And again. And . . . again and again and again.

The Sarah Palin as sex goddess story line has some bizarre roots, if we are to believe Jane Mayer's account two years ago in the New Yorker on how a troika of conservative pundits in Washington, D.C. fell hard for the Alaska governor after a visit to her home during June 2007 for an afternoon and evening of dining and "flight-seeing." Bill Kristol, the know-it-all know-nothing editor of the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes, another conservative pundit whose most recent professional accomplishment was a fawning biography of George W. Bush and Michael Gerson, an insufferable and righteous Op-Ed columnist (and former W speechwriter) for the Washington Post who manages to find God's work in all things Republican and notably absent in anything Democratic, visited Palin during a stop-over on an Alaskan cruise for conservative contributors and activists. According to Mayer, these three permanent members of the Washington Establishment reacted as most high school nerds do after being summoned to the head cheerleader's house for a Homecoming float party, only to find out that he was the only one invited and her parents weren't home -- in utter disbelief that an attractive (in their view) woman would want to talk to them. Think about the visual cliche you see in almost every movie featuring the story line where the sweet but nerdy boy who has a secret crush on the girl/woman too good to be true ("Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club," any recent movie with Katherine Heigel or Seth Rogen, "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," "Manhattan," "Hitch," "Sideways," or, most improbably, "The Graduate"), and you'll understand how Kristol, Barnes and Gerson fell hard for Palin.

Of course, to understand how these fine men found their libidos reawakened by Wasila, Alaska's great claim to fame, you have to understand the completely desexualized nature of Washington, D.C. Picture this: You arrive in D.C. as Sarah Louise Heath as an 18 year-old veteran of beauty contestants and high school basketball with a full head of hair that actually falls past your ears. You decide you want to pursue a career in Washington, so you find the right internship and finesse the system to build connections. You're not motivated by anything other than getting into the game so that you can go to parties where people spend most of the time talking about themselves and the essential services they are providing to the nation. But unlike your peers, you don't trade your fashion-conscious pointy-toe heels that you bought at Pay Less for a pair of square-toed, thick heeled clompers that look like something the head mistress might wear at a German boarding school for gifted pianists. You keep your hair long, don't spend your evenings fantasizing about what it would be like to own a blue suit with matching faux pearls from Brooks Brothers, but you do wink and giggle when a guy says something he thinks is funny or insightful because you know -- just know -- that guys like girls who think they're funny and interesting. You might not be the smartest person in the room, but, because you grew up in the Alaskan wilderness, you understand the fundamental biological and anthropological principles of the mating ritual. You know that men are attracted to women who are, well, physically attractive to them. And you know that men will do stupid things to impress women they find attractive . . . so . . . you . . . run with it!

Is all this that hard to figure out? That men are attracted to women who fulfill some sort of fantasy ideal of the attractive woman? That women are attracted to men who fulfill some sort of fantasy ideal of the attractive man?

In Washington, sex is viewed as something to be viewed, at best, through spread fingers held up against your face, like an awkward scene in a movie that you just can't bear to watch, yet you can't look away from either. How else can you explain the obsession that Washingtonians in good standing in the political-media complex developed over Monica Lewinsky's dalliance with Bill Clinton, or Larry Craig's "wide stance" in an airport bathroom, the reaction of the gray-ladies- who-lunch over the scandalous sleeveless dresses that Michele Obama wears during the city's warm months or the alcohol-infused battles that rage late into the evening in happening bars across the city over who is gay and who is not on Capitol Hill? Why does the Washington Post's "fashion" columnist catch such hell for commenting on the length of Hillary Clinton's hair? Why, why, why?

Because Serious People don't think about sex or give in to their sexual impulses . . . no sir-eee, not in Washington, where selfless men and women have elected, in their minds, to forgo better paying but less worthy careers to promote the interests of the real, often forgotten Americans who are busy sweeping our floors, fixing our washing machines, selling us digital cameras or cheerfully refunding the price difference on that absolutely daring J. Crew sweater purchased 10 days before it went on sale. And when you are working 27 hours a day, 9 days a week on no sleep, fueled by endless supplies of Starbucks and Red Bull and subsisting on food that your palette was educated not to eat, you simply don't have time to worry about whether your boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or husband would ditch their L.L. Bean denim skirt or argyle fleece jacket for something more inviting. Such frivolity is beyond the bandwith of the Serious Washingtonian, particularly for women. If you want to prove your mettle in this great city of serious and tireless thinkers, demonstrate your concern for "the process," and prove once and for all that you've left those table-top dancing days in cut-off denim shorts and figure-flattering tops behind you for good, then, by all means, schedule that appointment with a Talbot's personal shopper and begin the process of desexualization.

And that's what Sarah Louise Heath Palin understands. Washington is a city of serious men and women who have little time for such unimportant things like fashion and style. Among the many things that struck me about Washington after moving here twenty years ago, more so than what seemed like a Volvo in every other driveway in Northwest D.C., where I first lived and also worked, was how people my age -- then 27 -- would want to decorate their apartments and homes with pictures of English hunting scenes or place scented candles in living rooms that smelled like vanilla or lilac or some other fragrance that reminded me of how my least favorite aunt's house smelled in 1968 or boast about the new stuffed red leather chair they just purchased for their "study" (not home office). A guy I once had more than one good time with just two or three years before beamed with pride when he showed me the fancy new globe he bought for his "study."

That's right. A globe.

He told me this on a Saturday afternoon while he was wearing a pressed dress shirt with dress slacks and loafers without socks. At the time, he was working as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill. Boy, did I feel stupid, dressed as I was in jeans, my Sambas and a pullover sweater, all proud of myself that I had hung, just a few weeks before, a framed poster of John Coltrane's first great album, "Blue Train," on the living room wall in our first apartment, thinking that guests arriving for the first time might think it was cool.

"Shit," I thought to myself, "I should have opted for that English country pheasant hunting painting I seemed to find in every Washington home I'd been invited into since moving here.

Not only that, I thought that perhaps I should start wearing soft-soled wingtips and my Timex Ironman running watch when I wore a suit, the better to fit in with what seemed like the dominant fashion sensibilities of the Washington professional. My wife often awoke a night, drenched in sweat that someone had kidnapped her, tore up her Bloomingdales and Saks charge cards and forced her into Joesph A. Bank at gunpoint and forced her to purchase a dozen blue and grey flannel suits with floppy bow ties or a skirt with pineapples on it. And worst . . . worst of all . . . someone had stolen all 34,894,85 pair of her shoes and replaced them with a pair of black and white Spectator pumps, some Topsiders for the weekend or black ballerina flats with a big gold medallion on the toe for just lounging around the house.

It took all of about 46 seconds, but my wife and I made a pact not to go down the L.L. Bean-lined pavement of dressing alike as much as possible. If my wife stole one of my shirts to wear around the house or, as was more likely, as part of a disguise to avoid being identified when she cut through Sears to get to her car in the mall parking lot, then it was for a good reason, not because we had decided to order matching attire from the Audubon Society catalogue. My wife's fashion sensibilities are great where they are, which they should be when you have 233 black T-shirts, 233 black slacks, 233 black sweaters, 233 pair of black boots and 233 pair of black shoes to choose from. I, on the other hand, have never been tempted to dress like a volunteer nature guide or a Deep South or Midwest college fraternity president on the weekends.

So Sarah Palin's hot to those men and some women who entered Washington's spay and neuter program after they arrived to start their busy and important work governing and instructing the country. Remember, this is a city wear men other than Nation of Islam members wear bow ties as part of their serious work attire, not because they're attending a Laurel and Hardy tribute show or auditioning for a part as Professor Kingsfield in a suburban dinner theater-version of "The Paper Chase." That a hard vow to take, especially in your early to mid-20's, when you can still laugh at the Cialis and Lipitor ads on television during sports events rather than squint hard at the lower part of the screen to read about their side effects in greater detail. After a while, the women start wearing theme sweaters with matching earrings, thrilled to play their part in celebrating the change of seasons, while the men start wearing red vests under their suit jackets from Thanksgiving through the New Year. And once you've gone down the road of seeing theme sweaters as something other than a put-on for an office gag party, there's no turning back. Nor is there a brighter horizon for men, who have had to trade their devil-may-care wardrobe of untucked shirts and ill-fitting jeans for "walking shorts" with matching shirts, usually featuring a breast logo identifying the exclusive resort where you vacationed last year with some other couples from the D.C. sub-culture of androgynous but very important professionals.

Sarah Palin is many things. She's inarticulate, not terribly bright or knowledgeable about the job she campaigned for two years ago or the undisclosed job she is campaigning for now or aware that the president has responsibilities that go beyond organizing the snack schedule for her son's Pee Wee minor hockey team. Palin is a xenophobe, uncomfortable around people outside her limited world view and not having ever given a serious thought to anything serious in her entire life.

I asked a gay male friend of mine, of whom Sarah Palin is apparently "very tolerant," whether he thought that she was hot.

"Are you kidding?" he said. "Why do you think I'm on this side?"

Hmmm. "Are you suggesting that Sarah's right, that you're gay by choice and you're just trying to get benefits from the government without getting married, which she doesn't think you should be allowed to do, even though she's willing to tolerate you?" I asked.

"You'll have to ask God," he said. "He decided it for me. That, and the secret gay gene that I was born with that I am honor bound not to disclose the origin of."

I started to ask a gay female friend if she thought that Sarah Palin was hot, but she hit me before I could finish the question.

Yes, Sarah Palin is many things. But hot? That is not one of them.

Evaluating the professor, or how French ice-skating judges have overtaken higher education

2010-10-11T15:57:00.004-04:00

Finally, four months after the spring 2010 semester ended, I am now able to answer my friends and family when they ask me, "So, how did your classes go last semester?"

"6.46 and 6.39!, unadjusted for wind or difficulty factor! Now, go ahead . . . ask me the capital of Missouri -- Jefferson City!"

And there you have it . . . a semester's worth of preparation, haggling, negotiation, grading, individualized consideration, pointless, random email from students with 3.44 a.m. Sunday morning time-stamps, questions such as, "Does a croissant count as food?" and "Will you really lower our grade if we don't turn in the work?"-type questions in response to specific written policies on the course syllabus stating that no food is permitted in class and I will deduct half a letter-grade if you miss more than a certain number of classes . . . boiled down to numbers more familiar from figure-skating and gymnastics competitions than suitable to how well professors teach their classes and how much students learn in them.

American University modified the student evaluation form about four or five years ago so that we are now evaluated on a scale of 1-7 rather than 1-6. The evaluations ranked us from poor to superior. Now, the numbers translate to "One of the Worst" to "One of the Very Best," whereas before we were just poor, below average, above average, superior, etc. I have no idea why the university changed the system or why it believes the new survey will yield a more accurate assessment of the "student classroom experience." But this much is clear: the student evaluation process, completely unscientific, hopelessly biased, lacking accountability and unable to capture nuance or account for important differences in how teachers teach, is more powerful than ever in determining whether untenured faculty -- whether on tenure-lines, renewable contracts or teaching as adjuncts --get to keep their jobs. The student evaluations are also central in determining promotions for faculty below the full professor rank and in allocating raises. Besides the obvious problems that exist with the surveys and their administration, there is one more -- perhaps the most bizarre -- element to this charade that goes undiscussed on my campus (and on others, to judge from my colleagues who teach in other universities). Professors are, as far as I can tell, the only employees on campus whose fate rests in the hands of those they supervise. Our administrative superiors do not visit our classes. No system exists for "peer evaluation" of professors by professors. We have something here called the Center for Teaching Excellence. As far as I can tell, the Center functions more like a charm school for professors than a place that tries to hold the line against the "customer service" mentality that now pervades the management of colleges and universities. All that the committees and academic officers have in their hands when they determine my "teaching effectiveness" and whether it merits a cup-of-coffee a week or a latte-a-week raise are these numbers. Since I cannot ascend any higher in professorial rank, I can afford -- literally and figuratively -- not to take seriously a process that doesn't merit serious thought. But my colleagues still working their up through the system do not have this luxury. An unintended consequence of turning over such a large degree of power to students over their professors is that it diminishes academic standards in the classroom and discourages professors from pushing their students harder than they are willing to go. From grades K-12, one parent after another (or this one, anyway) gives their kids the "I don't want to hear about how 'unfair' your teacher is; until you speak Spanish as well as she does just shut up and do the work" speech. In college, the reverse is true. Not getting a good grade? Complain, complain, complain, or just slam your professor on the course evaluation. In the end, the student wins because the student, like the modern American consumer, is always right.

* * * * * * * * * *

Professors are also the only employees in the university whose performance reviews -- another phrase we have borrowed from corporate America -- are available for anyone with a university email account to see. Around seven or eight years ago, the university began putting the teaching evaluations for all our courses on line. I still do not know who made this decision or whether there was even any faculty input. Had anyone asked me, something I don't remember happening, I would have said no, for no other reason than we -- professors -- are not permitted to see the evaluations of staff (from academic advisers to physical plant employees) or the periodic "reviews" conducted of the university's academic officers (from academic deans to the university president). Over the years, I have been asked in surveys to rate the performance of my academic superiors and interviewed for my "narrative" opinions of the strengths and weaknesses of the same. I have never seen the results of these reviews. Nor has any other professor I know. Placing our teaching evaluations on-line encourages colleagues to snoop on each other. Since our performance reviews, in part, are based on the student teaching evaluations, any professor who believes he or she was undervalued -- we are ranked in percentiles -- might want to know how a colleague was evaluated by students to get a sense of fairness. How do I know that colleagues of mine have looked at my evaluations? Simple. They've told me.

Professors are not permitted open access to student academic records. From time to time, I will discuss a student's performance with an academic adviser to get a sense if an issue I am having with that student is unique or indicative of their academic performance. But can I go into an adviser's office and troll through student files? No. University rules and federal law accords students privacy rights over their records. A professor's classroom record, on the other hand, is the equivalent of a menu posted outside of a restaurant. That's a more charitable description than saying we are nothing more than prostitutes sitting in an Amsterdam storefront, allowing our customers to size up their preferences before plunking down their cash.

* * * * * * * * * *

And then there are the "narrative" evaluations professors distribute to supplement our quantitative assessments. These are little more than venting sessions, sometimes for good sometimes for bad, and sometimes just plain weird. They have absolutely no value as evaluative instruments, since the committees and individuals charged with assessing our teaching effectiveness do not read them. I know plenty of professors who just pitch them without even bothering to open the envelope, and I understand why. Since the process is anonymous, an aggrieved student can just let loose in extraordinarily personal and vindictive terms. And sometimes they do, letting us know that we're "stupid," "full of worthless shit," "a dick," or offering a psychological profile, i.e, telling us what we think, who we favor or don't favor and why and, of course, questioning our life outside of our professional responsibilities. Professors have no similar tool their disposal. We can't make comments on papers and projects that read:

"Your essay begins well. You offer a good and coherent thesis. But you do not develop your thesis's main idea as well as you could have. We discussed Author A's position on this in detail, and we spent two class periods discussing the differences in Cases A & B. Also, by not discussing Author B, you do not provide any evidence that you read her book, something you were asked to do. Worst of all, though, you continue to wear Birkenstocks to class despite that big black toenail that stares at me throughout the 75 minute class period. And what is with "I'm With Stupid" T-shirt that you wear every other class period? Have you ever thought that you were stupid? Please . . . please . . . please . . . take shower once in a while. You smell like beer and Doritos. It's evident that what drives your poor performance in class is the strained relationship you have with your mother. No wonder you don't have a girlfriend. And could please ditch the Crocs and stretch pants? You're twenty years old."

But students can. And they do.

For comic relief, though, nothing tops RateMyProfessor (or, more accurately HateMyProfessor), the website where anyone in the country can leave a comment about any professor teaching at any university in the United States. You don't even have to attend a university, much less actually take the course you want to rate. I had never even heard of this site until a student brought it to my attention a few years ago. My first impression was that it reminded me of the message boards for professional sports franchises, the kind of place where large, out-of-shape, angry, nachos-and-cheese drooling sociopaths who couldn't throw a baseball more than 7 feet or skate from the goal line to the defensive blue line without dropping dead go to issue death threats against their team or question the sexuality of rival players. If I wanted, I could, as a professor, select at random a professor teaching at any university, also selected at random, and leave a comment about that person. There is no control over comments, although the site reminds posters not to leave "libelous" comments about the professors they rate. Mmm-hmm, and the Supreme Court has said that sexually explicit material, taken as a whole, that lacks literary, artistic, political and scientific value, can be considered obscene and not afforded constitutional protection. Do a quick Internet search for sexually-explicit material and then tell me exactly what isn't permitted.

Here's one for you. A person left this comment, my all-time favorite (more so than the one that says there is a "special place for him in hell") on my RMP page, which a former student forwarded to me.

"Greg Ivers epitomizes the 'cool' professor. Young girls drool over his every word and spend most of class fantasizing about one of AU's few profs with tenured-DILF credentials. Unfortunately he knows it, and spends most of the class reveling in his rock-star status. Ivers has a LOT to offer, but sadly keeps most of it to himself."

Like, OMG! Where to begin with this one?

1. I spell my name with two g's on the end.
2. The only people who drool over anything I say are the seniors who play scrabble at the Jewish Community Center. That's usually in response to my asking, "Is anyone using this chair?" In fairness, they drool pretty much over everything.
3. A DILF? That's a new one. All I can conclude is that this person has just recently been released from a long jail sentence or just returned to land after an extended submarine tour of Antarctica. There can be no other explanation.
4. I am not a rock-star. I don't have the hair, the tatoos, the jail sentence, a secret X-rated home video or the stint in rehab necessary to qualify. Plus, I'm not rich, nor have I ever lost my fortune to shady business managers. I am a jazz drummer who loves funk and the blues. I must confess, though, I do have a weakness for progressive rock and complex time-signatures.
5. I don't share my medical records and the confidences of friends and family with my students. Besides that, I don't really keep much else to myself.

But the strangest thing of all is this: this post wasn't written by a student or even anyone in my class. Remember, nothing written in cyberspace in truly anonymous.

I did, however, receive a smiley face.

How stupid.

* * * * * * * * * *

Is there hope for a more reasonable assessment of teaching performance than the system we have in place now? I don't think so. That isn't to say that better choices aren't available. We could distribute the bubble and the narrative surveys so that a student's name and university I.D. number appear in the top corner. Our registrar could provide a correlation between a grade received and the score a professor receives. For the narrative portion, our dean's office could redact the names when they give us the evaluations to hide a student's identity. If the narrative contained abusive or inappropriate language, a professor could request to meet with the student or have someone from the dean's office do the same. If a student knew that he or she could be accountable for profane comments, the odds are they would never put pen to paper. We could also conduct peer review by asking professors from neighboring institutions to sit in on classes taught by professors in similar fields. Naturally, that might only work for one or two classes here and there. But it would at least permit professionals to evaluate professionals, something this is absolutely lacking now.

Don't look for any of this to happen anytime soon. Universities are businesses with a product to sell and customers to please. We might not have a pianist performing on the mezzanine while shoppers go about the business of buying and returning. But we are much more similar to the modern department store than the classical university model where professors once reigned supreme.

Over and out

2009-11-02T07:44:00.002-05:00

If you've come here for smart-ass, counter-intuitive, stick-it-to-The-Man commentary for the past three and a half years, you'll now have to go elsewhere to waste time.

PoliScope is now officially on hiatus, as I am now getting too knee-deep into my research project on jazz, race and the African-American civil rights movement to have the time I'd like to write for my blog. From time to time, I plan to post essays and comments on this subject through Facebook. If you are not yet fake-friends with me on Facebook, you can find me there and keep up with my occasional comments that way.

Thanks for all the support.

Red State update

2009-10-28T14:21:00.002-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap discuss the conservative Bible, prepare for Halloween, suggest the music that should be used for torture at Guantanamo Bay, and offer their take on the "Drunkest Guy Ever" You Tube video.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-10-28T14:12:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

That's why air is free . . .

2009-10-21T15:06:00.002-04:00

Two South Carolina Republican party chairmen remarked in a recent op-ed piece in a local state newspaper, the Times and Democrat, that Senator James DeMint (R- S.C.), was simply following the good example set down by the "wealthy Jews" by refusing to earmark funds for pet projects. Jews came into their money, according to these estimable historians of economics, religion and cultural development, by "taking care of the pennies and [letting] the dollars taking care of themselves."

Don't these outstanding modern 21st century men know why Jews have such big noses? Because air is free!

I'd suggest clicking here, here and here to learn more about how Jews control pretty much everything that is worth controlling.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-10-20T08:21:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Red State update

2009-10-19T14:56:00.002-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap prepare for Halloween, and worry that Obama's efforts to find health care for all Americans is "un-American."

Reefer madness, revisited

2009-10-15T17:19:00.001-04:00

Marijuana, like homosexuality, strikes many conservative cultural warriors as a late 20th

century phenomenon. Just as there were no gay people until the Supreme Court outlawed state-sponsored school prayer in the early 1960s (and yes, there are people who really do subscribe to this view), marijuana use is often portrayed as an unfortunate consequence of the Beatles transition from lovable moptops screaming "yeah, yeah, yeah" to sweater clad pre-teen girls to psychadelic pseudo-druggies no longer fit for anyone's daughter who made mysterious references to "tangerine dreams and marmalade skies."

"Someone was smoking something when they wrote those songs," my friend Michael's mother used to tell us when she would hear us listening to Abbey Road, usually the side 2 medley. It definitely wasn't what she was smoking, which was usually a Salem Menthol cigarette. "And it was him," she would say, pointing to a picture of John Lennon that Michael kept over his dresser. "I don't think the other ones wanted to do it. He was the bad influence."

How did she know someone was smoking "something" if she had never smoked marijuana herself? That was always the question we wanted to ask and never did. And she was wrong about John introducing marijuana to the Beatles. It was Paul; John introduced the Beatles to LSD. But at 12 or 13 years old, it's best to hold that information close to the vest.

By the time I started high school in 1975, marijuana was easier to find than beer, even though the drinking age in Georgia was 18. Like now, people who used marijuana operated under code terms. They "partied or "partook," were "cool," or were "into expanding their horizons." The common refrain when discussing a pot smokers went something like this:

"Hey, do you guys know anything about that new kid who just moved in down the street," someone would ask.

"Not much, but I did notice he was wearing an (Pink Floyd) Animals concert t-shirt the other day, so he must be 'cool.'"

So, in other words, he probably smoked pot. No word on whether he drank beer or mixed liquor with coke, sprite or some other soft drink to mask the taste. But, in my high school, drinking was assumed of everyone, with maybe the exception of the National Honor Society or Math Club members, until proven otherwise. Marijuana smokers, on the other hand, consituted a completely different class of people. High school high society-types -- jocks, cheerleaders, yearbook editors, student government geeks, the president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes -- always made it a point to let you know that they did not smoke dope.

"No fucking way I would get near that shit," I remember our star soccer player saying to me, breathing the remnants of Jack Daniels and Coke into my face before heading into the stands for a football game. "Do you know that you can kill, like, thousands of brain cells every time you take a hit? Do you think I want to end up in shop class making bongs like the rest of the freaks?"

And, of course, as soon as the coast was clear, the same lunkhead would seek me out behind the concession stand. "Ivers, do you know where I could buy a joint?"

"Why would you ask me?"

"You seem like the partying type, you know, since you're into Yes, Pink Floyd and Genesis. Aren't you friends with that guitar player?" A concert t-shirt does indeed make the man. And, by the way, my friend the great guitar player did not smoke dope.

"Can't help you," I'd say. "Dry myself."

"All right, but don't tell anyone we had this conversation," like we were Cold War spies floating a prisoner swap out of official view.

For as long as marijuana has been around, which is a lot longer than the last 39 years (Sgt. Pepper was released on June 1, 1967), it has carried a negative reputation. Marijuana, depending upon the era, has been the choice of Communists, 20s swingers, early porn merchants, African-American jazz musicians, white beatniks, 60s pop celebrities, misguided professional athletes, contemporary rock stars and other undesirables. Cool, smart, together, fun, attractive people do not smoke pot.

They drink. And drink. And drink. And drink.

Doctors tell us and the wine industry reminds us that red wine is good for your cholesterol . . . and your heart . . . and stress . . . and will make you incredibly hot and desirable, especially after you kick your Jimmy Choos off in your $65,000 kitchen and hop up on the buffet counter holding your Reidel glass. Scotch is the choice of the sophisticated, affluent professional. Who doesn't want to sip Johnny Walker Red sitting in an Adirondack Chair in the front lawn of a glorious Tudor home, while a fleet of Mercedes sit gleaming in the circular driveway? Laugh, smile and frolic by the beach while enjoying a glass of Italian Pinot Grigio?

But nothing says "U.S.A." like beer, the choice of the slacker, dumb guy sports nut who just wants to hang out with his buddies, wear his jersey, eat potato chips and pump his fists, except, in the case of "upscale" brews, when it's the choice of an impossibly good-looking, single, and presumably white collar professional man. A martian who sat through an hour of any televised sports event in the United States (with the exception of golf, which turns its nose up at such debauchery, preferring to bombard you with hedge fund and luxury car ads) could come to no other conclusion that the average viewer is a male alcoholic who suffers from erectile dysfunction. Drinking beer, and lots of it, holds the keys to the promised land for the demographic target -- the male loser who is crashing on someone's couch or still living in his parents' basement. Drink beer and women will dig you. Bring designer beer to a party and women will not only dig you, they will demand a turn with you right then and there.

Pot smokers are not so lucky. Advertisements directed towards them are not intended to glorify their lifestyles. No, not at all. The point of national drug control policy is to persuade pot smokers and anyone thinking of taking a hit off an herbal jazz cigarette not to do it -- at all. The little, bitty language at the bottom of beer ads on television and in magazines encourages people to drink responsibly, not to drink and drive and so on. But you can rest assured that no one is paying attention. If you can swig a few Heinekens and have a shot at Heidi Klum, what good is moderation?

Our national anti-marijuana policy assumes that anyone who smokes pot is incapable of moderation. Even the best of the anti-marijuana ads produced for the Office of National Drug Control Policy refuse to concede this possibility. I've seen two so far: Pete's Couch and Whatever (click here to see them). Give the ads credit for laying off the "if you smoke marijuana now and then, pretty soon you'll be dropping acide and craving heroin" approach. The prohibitionists seem to accept the medical evidence and pyschological research that rejects the idea of marijuana as a gateway drug to more evil doings. But they perpetrate the stereotype of marijuana smokers as chronically stupid, lazy and incoherent because they are always and without exception stoned to the hilt. In Pete's Couch, a high school age boy talks about his experience smoking pot. No, he didn't kill anybody or think about using heroin. Like his friends who did not get off the couch for the entire commercial, the boy just didn't want to do anything but just sit there and presumably stare into space. Perhaps his parents were lucky enough to have surround sound, and they broke out the 5.1 SACD version of "Dark Side of the Moon." Our hero learns his lesson: he doesn't want to be lazy. He wants to be a productive member of society, meet girls and ride his bike. Someone should have warned him to shy away from any hacky sack games in his new found enthusiasm for exercise. We all know where that would lead -- back to Pete's Couch. In Whatever, the good guy is a street-smart, clean cut African-American teenager who tells the camera that he has ambition for a real life -- college, a good job . . . the works. Unlike his stoner friends in the bag, who appear not to know where they are, our hero in this ad lets the world know that once he's gone his buddies won't have anyone to drive them around and get them through the day. Let his friends toke it up . . . he's moving on.

Okay, let's, for a moment, suspend our sense of disbelief and imagine a beer commercial that portrays drinkers as drunks, sans the occasional designated driver. A camera beams in on a group of guys at a baseball or football game. They're drunk as hell, courtesy of the vendors who have no problem selling them beer after beer as long as the cash keeps flowing. One is cursing up a storm while grabbing his genitals, oblivious to the little kids who are sitting in front of him. Another, having neglected to establish his food "base" before the game, is throwing up on the seat in front of him, while screaming at the hapless usher to "let me enjoy the fucking game you goddamn rent-a-cop" (I saw this once at Camden Yards). A third guy has stripped to the waist. And despite having failed his unsolicited audition for America's Hottest Bachleor, he demands that every woman around him "show me your tits." Then the camera isolates the responsible member of the group who says, "These losers can keep on truckin' after I leave for medical school next year. Let somebody else put them in a shopping cart and wheel them home after a night on the town."

Uh, no, that's not happening anytime soon.

There is something strange about criminalizing a drug that, when used in moderation, has never been shown to carry the health risks and social consequences (alcoholism and related illnesses; spousal and child abuse; chronic fatigue, to name just a few) of excessive drinking. And cigarettes? It's the only product on the market that, when used as directed, will either kill you or make you really sick.

People who smoke too much dope will turn to mush, no doubt. But there are millions of people making good grades, planning a future, paying taxes, mowing their lawns, staying involved in their communities, raising families, and living a productive life who prefer marijuana to alcohol as the relaxant of choice. They're no threat to anyone or themselves. In our current culture, it's perfectly fine to tell a friend at the office that you're looking forward to unwinding with a glass of wine or stopping off for a "pop" to brush back the day. You can't say in polite company that you're looking forward to sitting on your porch and taking a hit off a joint to take the edge off. Of course, if you did, your friend might well want to join you -- that is, unless the cool kids were looking.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-10-13T11:52:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Red State Update

2009-10-12T19:28:00.001-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap join the Gay Equality march in Washington this past weekend, and suggest a modest proposal to reduce health care costs.

Constitutional stupidity?

2009-10-08T23:47:00.003-04:00

As the Supreme Court kicks off its week hearing two interesting but not terribly difficult First Amendment cases -- one involving the display of a cross in a public park (unconstitutional) and a federal statute banning animal cruelty videos (unconstitutional) -- my former state of Georgia (no, not the one in the former Soviet Union) offers up its own entry into the free speech debate.

Students sometimes ask me how I make up some of the case hypotheticals I use in class. I don't -- instead, I just read the papers.

Live Zeebop this week

2009-10-06T23:40:00.008-04:00

Live Zeebop this week and next . . .

Thursday, October 8th, Gaffney's, 7141 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, Md. Three sets of straight-ahead jazz from 7.30-10.30 p.m.

Saturday, October 10th, Clare and Dons, 130 N. Washington St., Falls Church, Va. Three sets of straight-ahead jazz with the Pablo Grabiel Quartet. 7-10 p.m.

Wednesday, October 14th, Epicurean, 4250 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. Three sets of straight-ahead jazz with the Duff Davis Trio. 6.30-9.15 p.m.

Zeebop is represented by Grabielismo Productions.

Thanks for your support.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-10-06T15:19:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Red State update

2009-10-05T15:40:00.001-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap review President Obama's failure to persuade the International Olympic Committee to land the Olympics for his adopted hometown of Chicago and get started on Halloween.

Bumper sticker bozos

2009-10-02T16:39:00.009-04:00

Like a lot of kids, I had a dog growing up. Her name was Sandy, after Sandy Koufax, and we brought her home from the Humane Society when I was seven years old. In those days -- by the way, is there any other phrase as damning as "in those days" to confirm that you are moving well past middle age into AARP territory? -- there were no leash laws where I lived, so dogs were free to roam the streets. Our neighborhood was full of dogs, and, as best as I can remember, they came and went -- and sometimes crapped and went -- as they damn well pleased. My dog, at first, was less social than most of the others -- shy, withdrawn and fearful of people not familiar to her. We were told when we adopted her that she had been abused -- hence, the limp -- and I wanted to give her a home where she would feel protected and loved. Sandy turned out to be a great dog -- smart, curious, loyal and friendly. She even buddied up to the cat my sister demanded after I refused to share custody of Sandy with her, insisting that she was "my" dog in the same way that my sister claimed that our mother bought the Count Chocula cereal for her and not me, and that if I ever thought about eating any she would tell all my friends that I used to practice my pitching motion in front of the TV in my footie pajamas, which wasn't completely true, but neither was it completely false.

As much as I loved my dog and, admittedly, my sister's cat, it never occurred to me to pester my mother to put a bumper sticker on our car informing all other drivers, pedestrians, meter-readers, construction workers and gas station attendants -- yes, "in those days," no one pumped their own gas -- that we (a) owned a dog; (b) owned a dog of a certain pedigree or (c) owned a dog of a certain pedigree that was smarter than dogs of other, presumably lesser pedigrees or (d) owned a dog that was smarter than a human being, much less an honor student at a nearby public school. Asking my father was absolutely out of the question, since he already had two huge magnets advertising his business on the driver and passenger-side front door panels of our Chevrolet Kenwood station wagon. Riding in that car was embarrassing enough, so there was no need to compound the humiliation we already felt when confronted by strangers and friends with the entirely reasonable question of why my dad's clothing stores were named "Out of Sight" and "The Cat Bag." And, no, I still don't have an answer, other than it was the late 1960s and early '70s.

Nor, despite spending the years between the ages of 8 and 18 playing baseball, football, street hockey, soccer, basketball and tennis or running cross-country did we ever have a sticker or magnet of any kind on our cars sharing my modest sports accomplishments with the broader public. No magnets with an outline of a pitcher holding a runner on, no sticker with a black runner striding through the woods against a white background, no sticker with my name and number framing the community sports organization to which I belonged and absolutely no sticker or magnet that proudly defined my mother or father's adult identity as a "BASEBALL MOM" or "CROSS-COUNTRY DAD."

Thinking about this not even a little more, we did not have any publicly displayed proof that we vacationed in exotic places, belonged to an exclusive club of some sort, thought that people, not guns, killed people, that my sister and I attended our local public schools (which we did) and excelled in them (which we didn't), or that I was loved unconditionally despite not excelling in school. And this was not just us. Bumper stickers of any sort were a rare occurrence when and where I grew up. Growing up, I knew my fair share of good athletes, honors students, cat and dog owners and people -- although not many -- who vacationed in places more than 15 miles from their houses and were generally loved and supported by their parents. I just never knew anyone who felt compelled to share their children's activities and accomplishments through bumper sticker boasting. To this day, I still don't get it.

Take, for example, a car that I sat behind at a stop light last week in the affluent Washington, D.C. suburb of Bethesda, where I live. Not one, not two, not three, but four -- FOUR -- bumper stickers adorned the back of the driver's car testifying to his dog's brilliance ("smarter than your honor's student"), athleticism ("faster than your soccer player"), attractiveness ("hotter than your girlfriend") and, finally, political prospects ("Greyounds make better presidents than people"). Frankly, I don't even get why a Black Lab owner needs to place a "WOOF" sticker on the rear window of her car. Silly, yes; creepy, no. But a grown man with four stickers on his bumper going on about his dog's perceived academic abilities and hotness quotient? That's just plain bizarre. There was part of me that wanted to follow him to see where he worked to make sure that if I ever came into contact with him in any professional context I would know to just get up and leave. Regardless of what he did -- fix my car, prepare the meal I ordered in a restaurant or lead the triage team in the ER closet to my house -- I don't want some guy so hung up on his damn dog that he thinks is smarter than me or more attractive than my wife having anything to do with me.

Vanity license plates are, to me, an extension of bumper sticker exhibitionism, which is, of course, a further extension of the real American exceptionalism, which is the constant need to engage in child-like, "look-at-me" behavior just to let anyone who might be watching know that, in a nation of 300 million people looking to stand out from one another, you . . . "LUV GLF," or "LUV WINE," or have "GRT KIDS," or believe in "NO YNIN," or have multiple degrees, "PHD JD," or have morphed from a "PTY GRL" into a "MILF," or feel the need to confirm publicly that you love your children or husband or wife or dog or gerbils by placing their initials on your license plate (I've often wondered if these public displays of affection are linked to family therapy of some sort, or the need to convince a reluctant parent/husband/wife that, yes, you do love your children and your spouse -- perhaps akin to the more recent alternative punishment movement of having shoplifters wear sandwich boards in public that say, "I STOLE FORKS FROM MACARONI GRILL").

And on and on it goes. Years back, my family spent an extended vacation driving through Eastern Canada, and the one thing I noticed right off the bat while navigating the roads and highways of our cleaner, more polite and generally more enlightened northern neighbor was the complete absence of bumper stickers and vanity license plates. My guess is that the Canadian aversion to self-promotion and braggadocio has more to do with the absence of this visual pollution than any law banning their use.

But I must confess that there is some social utility to these misplaced cries for attention. Any time either of my children misbehaves or does something to piss me off, I always come back with the same threat, "Do you want your name and number on the back of the car?" or "Do you want us to put one of those stick-figure families on the back of our rear window?" Shuts 'em up.

Every single time.

Liberal pets

2009-10-01T14:29:00.005-04:00

An organization called Liberty Counsel is sponsoring an outreach program called "Adopt-a-Liberal," which calls on all right-thinking conservative Christians -- there are, apparently, no other kind -- to save liberals from themselves through prayer and support. If this sounds suspiciously like an "Adopt-a-Puppy/Kitten/Hamster/Gerbil/Pirates Fan" pity program, think again. "Adopt-a-Liberal" is a registered trade mark of the Liberty Counsel, which means that everything time I mention the "Adopt-a-Liberal" program I have to remember to use quotation marks around the words or risk infringing on their legally protected name.

Clever . . . clever . . . clever.

Liberty Counsel was kind and thoughtful enough to provide a list of those "leaders" most in need of prayer and counseling. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg heads the list, followed by the "pro-homosexual" Barney Frank and Hillary Clinton, whose support for gay service in the military will mean that servicemen and women will bring their "unnatural" sexual preferences into combat with them. And since these armchair warriors are determined to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq for as long as possible so that we can convert them to our natural, Christian and democratic way of life, it is more important than ever to weed out the weirdos. Can you imagine what kind of strange sexual poses gay soldiers might demand of their enemy combatant detainees that managed to escape our fair-minded, natural heterosexual soldiers at Abu Ghraib?

You can? Holy shit. I guess someone has to place those ads in the back of the City Paper.

Naturally -- as opposed to "unnaturally" -- I was disappointed not to see my name anywhere on the "Adopt-a-Liberal" Most Wanted List. There is, though, at the bottom, an "Unknown Liberal" category that allows participants to pick their own "unique liberal" for prayer and salvation.

What's the old expression? "Takes one to know one." But that doesn't apply here. How about this? "It doesn't matter how you get invited to the dance as long as you get invited." Actually, that's not true either. Assuming you don't live in West Virginia, the panhandle of Florida or southern Mississippi, getting invited to the dance by your cousin, sister or brother doesn't quite hold out the same possibilities as getting invited by someone not related to you.

Oy, veh!

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-09-29T11:45:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Red State Update

2009-09-28T21:48:00.002-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap discuss whether President Obama is a racist, and whether not liking the president makes you a racist.

The amazing Ringo Starr

2009-09-25T11:59:00.004-04:00

The release two weeks ago of The Beatles version of Rock Band and the remastered versions of their 12 album catalogue in mono and stereo has, once again, reinvigorated interest in the greatest band that has ever walked the face of the Earth. Of course, few people, if any, question the unsurpassed legacy of The Beatles' multiple gifts to popular music -- the songs (real quick: has any band ever produced as many memorable lyrics to accompany the mind-blowing sophistication of their music? Some bands or artists produce great lyrics and modest music; some produce great music with lyrics that say little. The Beatles did both), the arrangements, the production values, the creativity, the stunning growth from album to album and the absolutely perfect chemistry between John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. And time has cemented among the civilian population what musicians have known for 40 years -- that Paul McCartney is easily the most influential bassist in the history of popular music, and that George Harrison deserves his place among the most important guitarists of the founding generation of modern rock music. John Lennon is justifiably never really discussed as an instrumentalist of any real import, since his major contributions came as a songwriter, singer par excellence and visionary. As a rhythm guitarist, though, Lennon is much better than people are willing to give him credit for.

So that, of course, leaves Ringo, who couldn't really write music or sing very well. For many years, I would hear know-nothings suggest that Ringo's vocal take on "With A Little Help From My Friends" was his best because he was singing from the heart -- here was this average drummer fortunate to ride the wave of his much more distinguished colleagues. Good 'ole Ringo, just tapping out those simple beats while Lennon, McCartney and Harrison weaved their magic spell.

If only this were true.

Let me be real clear about this: Ringo Starr is among the greatest drummers to ever sit behind a drum kit, regardless of genre.

Period.

What makes Ringo just so damn incredible is that was, above all, a musician first and a drummer second. The Beatles were a band that wrote and produced songs. They were not a shredders collective in which the musicians competed to see who could play the fastest, longest and most meaningless solos. No Beatle ever produced a recorded solo of more than 16 bars. In fact, the most commonly quoted George Harrison solos were eight bars over the bridge. There wasn't room for much more in songs that rarely exceeded three minutes and only three times exceeded four minutes ("A Day in the Life," "Hey Jude" and "I Want You [She's So Heavy]"). But in every single case Ringo created the perfect pattern for the song, and, most importantly, never overplayed just to show off. Compare, for example, the Dave Matthews Band -- a true song band and a great one -- with The Beatles. A DMB song just starts to get going by the time that "She Loves You," (2.15 minutes) "Day Tripper," (2.58 minutes)"Fixing a Hole," (3.16 minutes) or "Let It Be (3.50 minutes) are all done. So, sure, a drummer like Carter Beauford -- whose playing gives me a headache and gets in the way of some really great songs that would benefit from a chance to breathe -- gets a chance to show you everything he has in just about every song. But I wonder how Carter would fare if were asked to come up with the drum pattern in "In My Life." I don't think he could top Ringo. And I bet if you asked Carter, he would agree that you just leave Ringo's stuff alone.

Just the other day I had to explain to a pretty good 15 year-old drummer why Ringo is so great. (Proud parent moment: I have never had to explain this to my son, a good drummer, who gets it, and one of his best friends, an exceptionally good drummer, Ringo's greatness). Indeed, as I drove them to and from the DMB concert this summer in Hershey, we spent a great deal of time listening to different Beatles recordings at their request. And they weren't just listening, but explaining why such-and-such a song was so amazing (neither can get over Ringo's playing on "Strawberry Fields Forever).

To the point: here is what I told the young drummer who "doesn't get" Ringo.

1. Ringo was the drummer for The Beatles. The two greatest pop/rock songwriters ever, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, could have picked anyone on the local music scene to play their songs. They picked Ringo, who was the most sought-after drummer in Liverpool and even points beyond.
2. Ringo was the first pure rock drummer to appear on the world stage. Most drummers that played on pop, rock, rockabilly tunes before Ringo were trained in jazz, big-band and other kinds of traditional music. Ringo was the first real drummer to hit clean and hard, use a matched grip and really push a band. He also brought the "rim shot" into rock drumming so you could hear the snare drum above the amplified instruments. Remember, Ringo's drums were not miked in the early days of The Beatles' live performances.
3. Ringo was the first rock drummer to play a "swishy" hi-hat. Drummer before Ringo played the hi-hat tight. Ringo opened it halfway and filled up the sound. Listen to "She Loves You" and you'll get the point.
4. Ringo had perfect time while keeping a loose feel. Listen to "A Hard Day's Night," "Rain," "Drive My Car." "Tomorrow Never Knows," and "Fixing a Hole" just for starters. And he had an unmatched knack for choosing the right tempo. Remember, too, that these were long before anyone knew what a click track or loop was.
5. Imagine what "A Day in the Life," would sound like with any other drummer. You can't. No one can play like that. I can play Steve Gadd's solo in "Aja" note for note. I can play "Tom Sawyer" by Rush (and Neil Peart) note-for-note. I cannot play "A Day in the Life."

6. Ringo was the first drummer to close-mike the bass drum. Listen to how the bass (kick) drum sounded before "Sgt. Peppers." Listen to it on the that recording and on most rock recordings after "Sgt. Peppers." The standard boom-snare-boom-boom-snare" definition you hear? All Ringo -- his idea. He also "standardized" much of the muffling and tuning techniques that are now the norm in rock drumming.
7. Ringo picked perfect patterns for every song. He never overplayed or felt the need to show off. Moreover, his dynamics -- his understanding of when to play loudly or softly or not play at all -- was peerless. Take all the instruments away and you would still know it was Ringo.
8. The backwards roll with that hi-hat "clatch." Drummers will know what I'm talking about.
9. The drum solo on "The End," one of the few quotable rock drum solos ever.
10. Finally, and most important, you know who Ringo is after the first bar -- not first few bars, even. There are dozens and dozens of rock drummers (and jazz drummers) with amazing technical proficiency but no stamp of individuality.

Sure, Ringo benefited from a little help from his distinguished friends. But he gave them as much as help as he got, and, in some cases, a bit more.

Nobody plays like Ringo, and no one ever will.

Live Zeebop this week

2009-09-24T15:09:00.003-04:00

Live Zeebop this week (and next)

Thursday, September 24th, Gaffney's, 7141 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda. Two sets from 9-11.30 p.m. Free parking to the side and rear of the venue. Gaffney's is also three blocks south of the Bethesda Metro Station.

Friday, September 25th, Clare and Dons (with the Pablo Grabiel Quartet), 130 Washington St., Falls Church, Va. Three sets from 7-10 p.m. Free parking. Weather permitting, we play outside.

Saturday, October 3rd, Maggianos, 5330 Wisconsin Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. Three sets from 7-10.30 p.m. Across the street from the Friendship Heights Metro Station.

Thanks for your support. And don't forget to pick up a copy of our new CD, "Twisted Standards," available at all shows and now through CD Baby.

Zeebop is represented by Grabielismo Productions.

Jimmy Carter is (mostly) right

2009-09-23T21:48:00.006-04:00

Of all the things in the modern world that irritate kooky conservatives, nothing -- not science, not Europeans in socks and sandals, not the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, not the Canadian national anthem sung at NHL games and not even sex -- gets their sensible shoes shaking more than Jimmy Carter. To this day, I don't know if was his decision to return the Panama Canal Zone to Panama as part of the Panama Canal Treaties, the Camp David Accords, which established peace between Egypt and Israel and at least tried to create a framework for Middle East peace, forged the SALT II treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, making good on his problem to create a separate Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services, failing to rescue the American hostages held in Iran for the last fifteen months of his presidency, his interview with Playboy magazine in which he confessed to "lust in his heart," rather than lust in a bus or airport restroom, bailing out Chrysler or . . . just perhaps, his refusal to schedule emerging Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell for a match on the White House tennis courts. My own take on Jimmy Carter is that he was neither among the best or the worst of American presidents. While there is much to debate about Carter's legacy, one is hard pressed to conclude that Carter was either dishonest (i.e., Richard Nixon), clueless to the point of sheer wonderment (i.e., Ronald Reagan) or dishonest and clueless (i.e., George W. Bush). And one other point I would always defend in any discussion Jimmy Carter is that he is among the brightest and most observationally astute men to hold the presidential office. Agree with him or not, when Jimmy Carter says something, whether about the Middle East, energy independence or domestic politics in the United States, he usually has a point. It just seems like most of the time Carter's comments tend to cut against the grain of the conventional wisdom peddled and, of course, embraced without skepticism by the political-media establishment in Washington.

Carter's latest faux pas? Asked for his thoughts at a town hall meeting at the Carter Center in Atlanta about the yo-yos, yokels and yahoos who marched on their hated nation's capital a week or so ago, and, in particular, their characature of President Obama as part-Nazi, part-African war lord and part-gorilla, and, separately, South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson's "You lie!" invective directed at Obama during his State of the Union speech, Carter said that "I think it's based on racism."There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president."

Uh-oh.

"No, no, no and NO," shouted back the tea-party loonies, the right-wing cable mafia who cheer them on and those ever-patriotic Birthers dedicated to proving that Barack Obama was born in a diamond mine somewhere on the coast of Africa. "We are simply expressing our 'policy differences' with our nation's 44th president, who we respect immensely," comes the standard response. "Why else would we take the time to portray him as a Nazi or flatter him by calling attention to his heritage is such a good-natured fashion?"

And these patriots do have a point, don't they? If you think about it, perhaps there is nothing at all racist about a conservative protester raising a sign that features our first African-American president's head Photoshopped into the guise of an African tribal warrior, with a reference to the old Soviet Union underneath. Perhaps these are just honest policy differences articulated by concerned Americans who were mysteriously undercounted in the November 2008 election. Perhaps these are the same concerned Americans who nodded their heads in agreement with the assessment of the Republican party's foremost intellectuals, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, who labeled Obama's first (and now confirmed) selection to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, a "racist" because of her "honest policy differences" with them on the nuances of modern constitutional jurisprudence, and not because she was a Latina who acknowledged that her life experience was relevant to her world view. And, as we all know, only minorities and women bring their "life experience" to bear on their decision-making in the judicial and political worlds. Well-to-do white, Christian men who have navigated the nation's most elite academic, professional and government institutions since they were in short pants and sailor suits, on the other hand, are scrupulously neutral in their understanding of law and politics.

Yes, yes, yes, indeed . . . there is that view, that "honest policy differences" expressed throughracist language, cartoons, photographs, broadcasts and protests are just that . . . honest policy differences. Or there is the very real possibility that a substantial number of Americans beyond the right-wing wacko fringe continue to labor in serious denial about the powerful role that race plays in our politics . . . and our culture and just about everything else that touches on American life.

Take for example a recent exercise conducted by Charles Lane, an editorial writer for the Washington Post. In a recent comment on Carter's remarks, Lane, whose name is not familiar to me and whose work I do not know or normally read, disagreed with the former president and offered the following analysis to demonstrate why the anger directed towards Obama, whether by someone like Joe Wilson or a plucked-from-the-line-at-Home Depot-American, is not fueled primarily by race.

"An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward Israel is based on the fact that it is a Jewish state. I think it's bubbled up to the surface, because of a belief among many non-Jews, not just in the United States but around the world, that Jews are despicable and a Jewish state is inherently illegitimate. I think it's based on anti-Semitism. There is an inherent feeling among many that the Jews should get out of Palestine.

Actually, I do not believe this. I’m altering former president Jimmy Carter’s own words -- substituting "Jews" and "Israel" for "blacks" or "African Americans," and "anti-Semitism" for "racism" -- to illustrate what was both true about his statement blaming white prejudice for the most intense opposition to President Obama, and what was so irresponsibly wrong about it."

First, I think Lane picked a terrible example. As an American Jew who is about as dovish as one can be on the Israeli-Palestinian question, I am nonetheless prepared to disagree with Lane that one who rejects the legitimacy of the Jewish state is somehow not motivated by anti-Semitism. Personally, I find it hard to reach any other conclusion, just as I am prepared to agree with the sentiment that opposition to a Palestinian state and the rejection of Palestinian nationalism is motivated by something other than a deep contempt, if not outright hatred, for the Palestinian people.

Second, by drawing a straight line from the experience of African-Americans in the United States to the legitimacy of a Jewish state, Lane's example employs a conventional and very common fallacy that undermines the point he is trying to make. African-Americans and Jews share a common experience in the United States: discrimination at the hands of private and public authorities that was rooted in our nation's birth culture, albeit in very different forms. And, yes, while Jews were denied the ballot in numerous states well into the 19th century, were prohibited from buying homes in "white" (i.e., Christian) neighborhoods, were prohibited from attending many colleges or, if they were permitted to attend them, only in small numbers, were barred from employment opportunities and forced to comply with Christian religious ceremonies in public schools (and often terrorized if they did not), the American Jewish experience nonetheless pales in comparison to what African-Americans have experienced in this country since they were brought here in chains to the shores of Jamestown, Virginia in 1609. And that comparison applies not only to Jews, but to women (white, black, brown and beige), other religious minorities, Asian-Americans, Latinos and any other ethnic minority, and gays. I will make this as clear as I can: nothing, and I mean nothing, compares in indignity, tragedy, brutality and outright hostility brimming with hatred with what African-Americans have experienced in the United States. No other population in the United States was systematically enslaved and emasculated over a period of almost 350 years and then, almost overnight, expected to hop ride on the mainstream American cultural horse of work, money and consumption with nary a peep of anger and resentment. Remember, this is a nation that once viewed Martin Luther King, Jr. as a threat, so much so that our own F.B.I. spied on him, harassed him and once sent him an anonymous letter encouraging him to commit suicide.

My point: you cannot substitute words for experience, and you cannot substitute the experience of one group that has historically suffered discrimination as a group for the experience of another group that has historically suffered discrimination as a group. It is a testament to the hope that America can offer to almost anyone that we are willing to learn from our mistakes, correct them in public and then watch as the previously despised and disrespected enter the culture, work from within it, and somehow manage to get elected president of the United States. That said, the experience of African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans and the 20th century European immigrants of Catholic and Jewish descent in the United States is not the same. The experience of men who have encountered and suffered from discrimination is not the same as women. And, to use a more recent example, the barriers that gay men and women face in their efforts to achieve social and legal parity in the United States are unique to the discrimination they face. Substituting gay for African-American, or Jewish for gay not only fails on the basis of a non-shared experience, it poses the wrong question. And a wrong question will not yield a wrong answer; rather, it yields no answer at all.

I don't know the precise percentage of people who are pissed off at President Obama because of "honest policy differences" versus those who are still apoplectic that a black man is the president of the United States. I don't know that we'll ever have any real reliable indicator of which is which since Americans are notoriously dishonest when it comes to confessing prejudice to pollsters and other professionals who investigate this stuff for a living. Perhaps it is a product of being born when I was and growing where I did (1961; Atlanta) that I simply cannot embrace the mainstream media-driven post-election narrative that Obama's election ushered in a new post-racial, post-partisan society. Although Carter has me by several decades, I, too, grew up around people who confuse white supremacy with patriotism, understand well the verbal codes and nonverbal rituals that define their world view and had little or no contact with African-Americans except as socially compliant inferiors, and still . . . still cannot grasp that a world that was once legally tilted and politically enforced in their favor no longer exists. I do believe that most white Americans reject the manner and substance with which the tea-party wingnuts are expressing their honest policy differences with President Obama. But I also believe that many of these same people have a substantial investment in the post-racial, post-partisan fairy-tale because it gets the nation off the hook of having to continue to confront our sordid and shameful history of racial discrimination. And a problem of this magnitude will never be solved by the same minds that continue to sustain it by turning a blind eye to the racial hatred that continues to fester in our midst.

Red State Update

2009-09-22T15:49:00.003-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap eulogize Patrick Swayze and offer an alternative to Obama's speech to public school children two weeks ago.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-09-22T15:45:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Are the Republicans the Yankees or Bad News Bears of American politics?

2009-09-16T22:40:00.009-04:00

As Major League Baseball winds down the 2009 regular season, I find myself, an Atlanta Braves fan, nostalgic, even teary-eyed for the second term of the Bush administration.

For that was the last time the Braves made the National League playoffs.

After 14 consecutive trips from 1991-2005 to baseball's post-season by virtue of winning their division -- not once during this streak did the Braves need the wild card birth created in 1994 to advance to the playoffs -- resulting in nine NLCS appearances and five trips to the World Series, the Braves failed to advance in 2006.

And 2007. And 2008. And, now, 2009.

Look at this very carefully and what do you see? Well, one thing is rather obvious: the Atlanta Braves have a much better likelihood of making the playoffs when there is a Democratic administration in power than when Republicans control the White House. The Braves advanced to the NLCS eight consecutive times from 1991-1999, including every year the Clinton administration was in office (with the exception of 1994, when MLB came to halt after failing to workout a labor agreement; naturally, President Obama's first appointee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, negotiated the settlement between the players and owners that put MLB back to work in 1995. The Braves continued to prosper during the first George W. Bush administration, just as they had during the last two years (1991 and 1992) of the first and only George H.W. Bush administration. But like many Americans, the Braves began to tire of W and his policies, so that by 2006 they no longer had the inspiration -- nor the pitching, hitting or fielding -- to play post-season quality baseball. So rapid has their fall from prosperity been that the Braves have not finished above .500 since 2005. But thanks to a rejuvenated pitching staff (and a division with the New York Mets and the Washington Nationals) that ranks third in the National League and is among the best in all of MLB, the Braves will finish above .500 in 2009. Once again, there is a reason among the 200 or so Braves fans still with the team to have hope for the future. And if Barack Obama is re-elected, the Braves stand an even better chance of returning to the top of the National League East, since we now understand the clear linkage between presidential election outcomes and the Braves' success.

But there could be a real problem in my analysis, based on some the political commentary I've read about Barack Obama's rapidly crumbling presidency, the convergence of millions (or 20,000, take your pick) of angry, "real" Americans on the Mall in Washington to protest the Muslim socialist jihadist policies of our first African-American president, who just happens not only to be a Muslim socialist jihadist, but a Nazi as well, the now nakedly transparent effort by the Obama administration to destroy Medicare by threatening either to (a) withhold government support for Medicare or (b) increase the government's commitment to Medicare or (c) both and his decision to "fix" -- not "repair" but "fix" as in the 1919 World Series -- the Afghanistan and Iraq wars by making it impossible for the United States to prevail, thus promoting the cause of Muslim-Nazi jihadist socialism in the Middle East and back home in places like Paducah, Kentucky and Opelaka, Alabama, where a gun-less, God-deprived people unable to pray in school will be defenseless against this coming assault. In the true spirit of one door opening as another one closes, Alabama and Kentucky produce more high-grade marijuana than any other state in the United States outside of California, so at least there is a support structure in place to help deal with the consequences of having their lives torn apart.

Indeed, according to the narrative rapidly emerging among the Deep Thinkers who hold forth on such entertainment programs as "Meet the Press," "This Week With A Former Administration Official," "Why It's Better to Be Conventionally Wrong Than Unconventionally Right," "Bland Balding White Men And How They Know So Much More Than Everybody Else," and "Serious People Don't Question Authority," and, naturally, Bill Kristol, Obama is falling faster than a pre-teen girl for a Jonas Brother or a nerdy college freshman boy for Jenna Jameson. And as Obama falls, so falls the fortunes of the Democratic party in the House and Senate, where the well-mannered and thoughtful outburst of one Joe Wilson, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, during President Obama's speech last week represented, according to the thrice-divorced, formerly drug addicted, multi-millionaire Everyman Rush Limbaugh, the true feelings of real Americans. And Limbaugh's statement today, after reading a report about a fight between white and black students on a school bus, that "[w]e need segregated buses . . . This is Obama's America, presumably reflects the opinion of "real" Americans on matters of race and equality as well.

Somewhere later today, a conservative commentator will disavow Limbaugh's remarks, claiming that his (or her, but probably his) "problem" with Obama isn't the new found sense of empowerment among African-American teenagers to fight their white classmates on school buses, but the "failure" of Obama to make good on his "bi-partisan" commitment to promote a "post-partisan" agenda. Although there was no real concern during the W years to hold the White House accountable for its promise to unite and not divide America, out-of-power Republicans now insist that losing the 2008 election across the board did not represent a rejection of the Bush administration and the Republican party; rather, it represented a deliberate effort to create a new opposition party to oppose the proposals of the Obama administration and the Democratic agenda in the House and Senate. Just look at the results of the election and you'll see how this argument makes perfect sense.

Barack Obama: 365 electoral votes
John McCain: 173 electoral votes

Popular vote margin: Obama by 9.1 million votes, the sixth largest margin ever and the largest ever by a non-incumbent.
States flipped between 2004 and 2008: (nine, all in favor of Obama).

As usual Bill Kristol had his finger right on the pulse of the American voter, correctly predicting in 2006 that Barack Obama would not a single primary against Hillary Clinton and that John McCain would win "huge" against Obama. Can there be any doubt why Kristol is the Washington Post's go-to-guy to explain why the Democrats cannot and should not prevail on anything?

Back to the standings . . .

Senate: 60 Democrats; 40 Republicans (this includes Arlen Specter's switch). Net gain: 7 seats. In November 2008, the Republicans did not unseat a single Democrat.

House: 257 Democrats; 178 Republicans.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Right now, the best team in MLB by virtue of winning percentage is the New York Yankees, whose winning percentage of .639 puts them four full percentage points ahead of the second best team in baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose winning percentage of .599 puts them in an almost statistical dead-heat with the Boston Red Sox (.597) and the Los Angeles Angels (.593) but comfortably ahead of the Philadelphia Phillies (.583). The distance between .599 and .583 might seem slight, but, at this point in the season, the Dodgers are four games better than the Phillies. That's a lot to make-up with just 16 or so games left in the season. Remember all the people that thought the Obama's lead going into election night was fragile and unstable? If the polling data reflected the population of Ms. Fountain's 3rd grade class race for room president, then, yes, maybe, a single digit lead might be precarious. But were millions of people going to change their minds three days before the election? No.

So, continuing this scientific analysis of baseball and politics, think of Barack Obama as the New York Yankees, the Senate Democrats as the Phillies and the House Democrats, with a 79 seat margin, as the the new Red Sox Nation (or Chavez Ravine, you decide) of congressional politics. Obama won almost 200 electoral votes more than McCain, 9.1 million more votes among all voters and 28 of 22 states. He flipped such Republican strongholds as North Carolina, Virginia and Indiana. And, like the Yankees, he had almost bottomless well of money with which to make his case. Conservatives, who believe that money is speech because how it's spent reflects a person's (or corporation's) opinion, should be genuflecting before Obama rather than insisting that his "failure" to cure the world W made in six months reflects an abject, James Buchanan (or George W. Bush-like) presidential disaster. The Democrats currently rest atop the congressional standings with a winning percentage of .600 in the Senate and .590 in the House. And the record intake of Obama during this presidential election season means, according to the speech-money paradigm, that our current president is the most revered president ever, since more people spent more money to support than any candidate ever.

In Republican-world, that's not the case. The real winners in MLB this season are the following three teams:

1. Washington Nationals (.345)
2. Pittsburgh Pirates (.382)
3. Kansas City Royals (.400)

If Missouri reflects the nation's heartland, and the nation's heartland reflects the opinion of "real" Americans -- as opposed to fake Americans in . . . where else, New York (the Yankees) and Los Angeles (the Dodgers and Angels) -- then the Republicans are the Kansas City Royals of American politics, since the winning percentage of the Republicans is virtually identical to the American League's worst team. The Pirates are either the Green Party or Ralph Nader; the Nats . . . let's see . . . . either the American Communist Party or the American Independence Party (George Wallace in 1968 and 1972). But that's not good news for the Republicans, since the American Communist Party and the Green Party, attracting even fewer Americans to their positions, possess even greater veto power over public policy than they do.

And just where are the Braves? In baseball's forgotten middle-class, good enough to remain competitive but not good enough to enjoy the prosperity of a previous generation of Braves teams.

* * * * * * * * * *

Now, I admit that not a bit of this highly technical, sophisticated, robust and serious modeling of how the relationship of campaign outcomes, right-wing political analysis and Bill Kristol to professional baseball can be understood by people who are not professional political scientists. And I also admit that this post is biased towards people like myself who have a Ph.D and aren't afraid to use it. Going into the post-season, let's just hope that Bud Selig, for all his other faults, is a Democrat. If, God forbid, he is a Republican, rather than seeing the Yankees, Dodgers, Angels, Phillies, Cardinals, Red Sox and Tigers advance to the post-season, you'll get the Nationals, Pirates, Royals, Diamondbacks, Mets, Cleveland and Orioles.

To the victors go the spoils, unless you decide that, because you were not victorious and have no spoils, they don't.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-09-15T14:49:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

The quitting point

2009-09-14T15:12:00.002-04:00

A few years ago, the social critic Malcolm Gladwell published, "The Tipping Point," a book that tried to explain when fads became social trends. My first reaction was jealousy and anger. I'd always wondered about such things as when "everyone" added a North Face fleece jacket to their wardrobe, when rental car companies started "upgrading" their customers for no obvious reason, or how 9 year-old visitors to my house began asking me for sushi as an after-school snack, as if it came in a box and could be ready in 10 minutes. Of course, like so many great ideas I've had over the years -- pre-mixed tuna with celery and mayonnaise and just a hint of chopped pickles with juice being my best one -- I never followed through. As false consolation, my friends tell me I wouldn't be able to manage the tax problems that would come with new found riches. "Not quite," I tell them. "My wife is a CPA. This woman knows exactly how many kernels should be in a bag of Smart Food popcorn. If the Smart Food people don't include exactly 4 servings per bag, trust me, they will hear about it." A tax problem isn't the issue. Getting distracted by the next great idea is.

Gladwell was on to something, though, and his book, like "Blink" and "Outliers" is fun, interesting and easy to read -- precisely the kind of thing that academics like myself would do if we hadn't been trained in graduate school to be pensive, boring and write in impenetrable prose. And although he offers no clear empirical explanation to explain social trends, Gladwell does offer the reader a lot to think about. But I find myself using the tipping point metaphor in other contexts, most recently while waiting for my 10 year-old teenage daughter to come bounding out of the front door of her school to tell me "this has been the worst day ever." Except the social phenomenon I see around school, around my neighborhood, indeed, almost anywhere where you find the parents of young children, is something I'll call The Quitting Point.

Sitting in the sun on some raised bricks underneath a small oak tree in front of my daughter's elementary school, something hit me as I watched mom after mom (and one other dad and an older man I hoped was a grandparent) come up the sidewalk, eagerly seeking out their social circle for gossip and chit-chat before their young charges came running out with their list of demands for the afternoon.

"Did you get the email from Ms. So-and-So about pumpkin math," asked one who must have, in her elementary school life, been the student selected to make the morning announcements over the intercom.

"Yes, I did!!! And I am so excited! I just love pumpkin math," said another. "I think what we should do this year is to divide . . ." and then I just checked out of the conversation. Pumpkin math? Excited? Like an aphrodisiac? How . . . why . . . for whom? Dear God.

Then I looked across the plaza and saw a relentlessly smiling young mom wearing a grey, oversized sweatshirt with "MINNIE," as in the mouse, on the front, She was talking to an equally cheerful mother wearing a Salty Dog Rehobeth Beach t-shirt, one at least two sizes too big, who seemed nonplussed by the other three children she was hauling around. "Yes, they're all mine!" I've heard her say on more than one occasion to disbelieving other parents. "The Lord's blessed us five times."

"No," I thought. "I think someone wasn't paying attention in sex ed class all those years ago." Then again, she strikes me as the type that attended one of those schools that banished sex ed from the curriculum and encouraged their students to write letters to Nancy Reagan supporting her Just Say No initiative or sign an Abstinence Pledge in exchange for complimentary in-class pizza parties.

The dad, of course, was standing by himself reading a magazine. Moms don't talk to dads unless there was a prior social relationship in place before their children began attending school together. Now and then, we get the gentle reminder from the Room Moms who circle the school at drop-off and pick-up like the Queen Bees they either once were in high school or are now determined to become telling us "you do know there is a PTA meeting tomorrow night, right? It's in the all-purpose room. Do you know where that is?" The dad will remind no one of George Clooney, clad as he is in his "Mets-Yankees Subway Series 2000" t-shirt that, based on the grease stains up and down the front, doubles as his lawn maintenance outfit. At this point, entering year eleven -- our children only overlapped by one year -- at our local elementary school, no one really knows to make of me. I'm sort of like the person who isn't asked to contribute to the Disease-of-the-Week jar when I leave the grocery store or sign a petition of some sort demanding higher or lower taxes. By and large, I'm left alone.

So here it is: When did grown-ups just quit caring? Was the woman in the MINNIE sweatshirt sporting the high-waisted-over-the-knee hemmed denim shorts, half-calf white socks with the Champion logos facing out and clunky running shoes born that way, or did something just happen one morning and she decided to throw in the towel? It couldn't always have been like that. In an earlier life, some guy had to see her from across the room, or make unnecessary trips to her cubicle pretending to need another pencil, or notice that she stopped for coffee at the same place he did every morning and work up the nerve to ask her out. A woman had to nudge her friend when she saw the guy who, by now, probably hasn't bought a new shirt in five years and said, "Do you think you could find out if he's seeing anyone?" There had to be those first few moments of infatuation, the ones where you think to yourself, "Okay, be cool, this could be it. Don't overeat; don't talk about how pissed off you are that you've been demoted from the lead-off spot on the company softball team; and DO NOT talk about your non-existent old girlfriend, even if she makes a reference to the "bad place" she was in until she wanted to go out with you. There had to be that first shiver at the first touch of their hands, the "where is this going to go" feeling after the first kiss. There had to be, right?

No, I am not excited about pumpkin math, not now, not ever. I especially hate Sally Foster gift wrap season and all the other beg-a-thons that go on during the school year. If I ever, ever see Sally Foster's car broken down on the side of the road, I'll simply drive by and wave . . . enjoying a cheap form of revenge for her extortionist tactics. During my one appearance at a PTA meeting five or six years ago, when my now "teenagers-just-don't-their-homework-or-take-showers-or-anything-else-anymore" 15 year-old son was a much more charming first or second grader, I suggested that the school simply assess a student activity fee, similar to how colleges assess their students, based on a projected budget for extracurricular activities over the course of a year. This way, we'd have no overpriced wrapping paper, unused pizza kits, strange "smoothie" concoctions that require no refrigeration and disgusting "flavored" popcorn cluttering up our houses. The school could also eliminate any overhead, which meant that all contributions went directly to school programs and not Sally Foster.

"Your Max's dad, right," came the icy response from the PTA president. She looked at me as if I had just walked into her church and, before an outraged priest, yelled, "No, you prove God exists. I'm good where I am." "We just don't do things that way here, she said, gradually raising her voice. "If you'd have come to SOME OTHER MEETINGS BEFORE THIS YOU WOULD KNOW THAT."

Ouch!

And thank you Celia Hodes.

Many years ago, I used to wonder about my older friends who referred to things like a night out with their wife as "date night," or justified an extravagant vacation alone or with their husband as "cheaper than therapy." What is up with that, I'd think? How much fun can that be? Where's the spontaneity, the romance, the feeling of not knowing where you're going or when you'll be back? Now, I get it. Reserving time for yourself is simply a way of sticking it to Sally Foster. Putting on a clean shirt and pants that don't look like you pulled them off the clearance table at Costco is a way of reminding yourself that, at least once upon a time, it wasn't always like this. These are the lessons I try to remember when the quitting point tempts me. Why, or why, does the Quitting Point beckon so many people who should know better? Why do I get such an evil stare of a "who's that" look from people for wearing a shirt that buttons up the front or a combination that appears color-coordinated? Why do I threaten my children with wearing a "Muffy's Mom" hat or a fleece vest that proudly boasts my son's membership on the AA Peewee Travel Hockey team rather than wear one as part of any 47 year-old's wardrobe? What happened to the idea that, at some point, you were supposed to dress differently than your children instead of like them? Or brag about not having purchased a new dress or suit since college? Or view Back-to-School Night as the social event of the season?

Yep . . . perhaps I should just stage a one-man protest against the infantilization of contemporary adult culture. That is, as long as I don't have to turn in my Sambas.

The high cost of high living

2009-09-10T23:22:00.004-04:00

Now that the academic year is up and running -- in other words, the drop-add deadline is upon us -- the big-foot media have now turned their attention to some of the perennial questions in higher education.

No, no, no . . . not, "Can I get better weed on the North or South side of campus?" or "Where can I buy Adderall for exam period?" or "What was that guy/girl's name that went home with me last night?" Yes, yes. . . . those are important questions. But so are these . . .

Why does college continue to cost so damn much even as the economy remains shrink-wrapped?

Why do public colleges in the United States graduate the lowest percentage of their students of any university system in the West with the exception of Italy?

Why are so many students dropping out of American colleges and universities?

If you want to learn which colleges graduate their students at what rate, click here.

"Twisted Standards" is now available!

2009-09-09T22:25:00.002-04:00

"Twisted Standards," the first CD from my band, Zeebop, is now available through CD Baby. To learn more about it, all you need to do is click here.

The CD retails for $10. You can also purchase the mp3 version of the album for $7.92.

We hope you will check it out, and enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it.

On Sunday, September 13th, Zeebop will headline the "Jazz in the Park" program of Adams Morgan Day in Washington, D.C. We'll kick things off at noon and play until 1 p.m. The event will be held in the Kalorama Triangle. Best of all, it's free. And, naturally, CDs will be available for purchase. Stick around for plenty of great music throughout the day.

As always, thanks for your support.

The new patriotism

2009-09-09T16:13:00.003-04:00

I don't care about sick people, old people, poor people, unemployed people or homeless people.
(unless the sick, old, poor, unemployed or homeless person is me)

I don't care about black people, brown people, yellow people, blue people or foreign people.
(unless they're mowing my lawn, taking care of my children, fixing my roof, cleaning my toilets, painting my kitchen, shining my shoes or building my house)

I don't care about who is getting killed or maimed in what country for what reason or why.
(unless the person being killed or maimed is American).

I don't care that my fellow citizens believe my American-born, Christian president, who has spent his life using the American political process to advance such worthwhile goals as community empowerment (damn, did I just use that phrase?), universal health care, peaceful conflict resolution and cross-cultural understanding (damn, did it again!), refer to him as a Muslim socialist dictator and secret Nazi.
(unless that president is a Republican)

I don't care if the president encourages our schoolchildren to stay in school and work hard, since all their jobs and education are being taken by illegal immigrants and affirmative action.
(unless that president is a Republican)

I don't care if four times as many Americans will die this year from handgun violence than were killed in the September 11th attacks, as long as I get to strap my gun on my leg and stand outside the building where the president is giving a speech.
(unless the president giving a speech is a Republican; then the person should be branded a terrorist and thrown in jail)

I don't care if my favorite TV commentators spout lie after lie night after night, because even if they're telling lies they're really telling the truth. Free speech is what great patriots have died for.
(unless the people on TV and radio are liberals or disagree with anything I believe, in which case they should not be allowed on TV or radio, much less allowed to talk)

I don't care that my government permitted our military and CIA officials to torture prisoners held in places that I don't even know about for crimes they haven't been accused of committing.
(unless the persons being held in places that I don't know about for crimes they haven't been accused of committing are Americans. Then we should demand their surrender or blow them to Kingdom Come)

I don't care that my government lied to me about why we went to war in Iraq or keeps telling me we're winning when we lost years ago.
(unless . . . unless . . . unless . . . unless . . . hmmm?)

I don't care about the environment, air and water pollution, natural resources or corporate contamination of our food supply.
(unless someone comes for my gun or gets my fishes sick from dumping chemicals in my lake)

Nope, I don't care about any of this stuff at all.

Why?

'cause I'm just a patriotic American!

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-09-08T07:40:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Red State Update

2009-09-07T20:46:00.002-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap offer their views on President Obama's scheduled speech to the nation's school children this week.

A life in music

2009-09-04T19:51:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine included me in a Facebook distribution of "50+50 bands/artists I have seen live." Normally, I ignore just about everything that comes to me through Facebook -- the annoying quizzes ("Lowell just took the, "What kind of nuclear weapon are you?' quiz. Lowell is a 100 zillion megaton nuclear bomb."), the creepy "updates" involving the young children of new parents ("How come I'm tired after 47 straight hours of watching Courtney throw up on me? Hmmm . . . sounds like a trip to Starbucks is in order!!!" or "For the first time, Austin got his first choice for third grade teacher. Woo-hoo!!!" and, most frightening, "Buster has a fever of 101.5. Any suggestions?"), the navel-gazing, acid-flashback induced rhetorical questions about life's limits and possibilities ("Am I the only who noticed that Tide's new environmentally-conscious reduced plastic packaging didn't come with a reduced cost, just less detergent?").

Thanks for sharing. Really. Just so, so interesting . . . what would I do without all these important updates into the lives of little kids and their pooping habits or why, no matter when you go to the grocery store, you always get stuck in the worst line with the cashier who's new but trying.

Sitting down to catalog all the artists and bands I've seen over the years was something I should have done a long time ago. Since I'm not really the type of person to write things down, much less make lists, I saw this as a somewhat work-related task -- to improve my organizational skills; to think through the different periods of my life when I saw a particular musician, and where I was in at that point in my life -- thus justifying an exercise that, for people who are required to be accountable in their jobs, would just be a sneaky yet enjoyable form of procrastination.

So I put together a list and posted it on Facebook. Judging from the non-response, no one cared. Perhaps I should have prefaced my list with something like this, "I just discovered my son is making crystal-meth in our basement and attempting to pimp out his sister. Suggestions?"

Here is my life in music (not necessarily in chronological order):

1. The Beatles (really)
2. The Osmond Brothers (sad but true)
3. Janis Joplin/Jimi Hendrix/Joe Cocker (free!)
4. Yes
5. Genesis
6. Emerson Lake and Palmer
7. Jethro Tull
8. Aerosmith
9. Pink Floyd
10. Led Zeppelin
11. Bad Company
12. Kansas
13. Allman Brothers
14. REO Speedwagon
15. Rush
16. Cheap Trick
17. Donovan
18. The Who
19. Weather Report
20. Pat Metheny Group
21. Dixie Dregs
22. Sea Level
23. Renaissance
24. Gentle Giant
25. Jackson 5
26. The Temptations
27. The Spinners
28. Gladys Knight and the Pips
29. Diana Ross
30. Brand X (with Phil Collins)
31. Michel Petrucciani
32. Lyle Mays/Marc Johnson
33. Wynton Marsalis
34. Branford Marsalis
35. Kenny Kirkland Quartet
36. Dizzy Gillespie
37. Gary Burton
38. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
39. Steve Kuhn
40. Cedar Walton
41. Buddy Rich Big Band
42. Art Ensemble of Chicago
43. Bill Bruford
44. U.K.
45. Ahmad Jamal
46. Joe Zawinul Syndicate
47. Paul Bley Trio
48. Keith Jarrett Trio
49. Don Byron
50. Dave Holland Quartet
51. Dave Holland Big Band
52. John Scofield Trio (w/Steve Swallow and Bill Stewart)
53. John Scofield Quartet
54. Aquarium Rescue Unit
55. Derek Trucks Band
56. Caribbean Jazz Project
57. Steely Dan
58. Donald Fagen
59. The Syn (w/Chris Squire)
60. Todd Rundgren
61. The Police
62. Sting
63. Andy Summers
64. Roy Haynes
65. Christian McBride
66. Wayne Shorter
67. Terrence Blanchard
68. Benny Green
69. Kenny Garrett
70. Jeff Watts Quartet
71. Mike Stern
72. Dave Weckl Band
73. Niacin (w/Dennis Chambers)
74. Jon Faddis
75. Herbie Hancock
76. Freddie Hubbard
77. Wallace Roney Quartet
78. McCoy Tyner
79. Pat Metheny Trio (w/Antonio Sanchez and Christian McBride)
80. George Adams/Don Pullen Quartet
81. David Murray Octet
82. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
83. Paul McCartney
84. Brad Mehldau
85. Billy Joel
86. Stevie Wonder
87. Asia
88. The Pointer Sisters
89. The Rock 'n Soul Revue (with Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald)
90. Jean Luc Ponty
91. Stanley Clarke
92. Cassandra Wilson

and hopefully many more to come.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-09-02T09:10:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Red State Update

2009-08-31T15:18:00.002-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap did not take a vacation this summer. You can find out what they've been up to by clicking here . . . some comments on the relationship between George Bush and his boss, Dick Cheney, health care town halls and many, many other things.

And so it begins . . . .

2009-08-31T15:16:00.003-04:00

School's in . . . and with that, here is the schedule for Poliscope.
__________________________________

Monday: Red State Update

Tuesday: Tom Tomorrow

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: Comments, essays, reviews and other heavily opinionated thoughts

Saturday and Sunday: Maybe, maybe not

Not fishin' but still gone for the summer

2009-07-10T09:47:00.003-04:00

I'll be away from PoliScope for the rest of the summer, returning August 31st. I'll be doing some light traveling to research and interview persons for the book I'm working on about the relationship between race, jazz and the civil rights movement in the American South during the 1950s and 60s.

Don't worry: I'll still have plenty of time to observe the absurdities of life, and make fun of them upon my return.

Have a good summer.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-07-07T20:20:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Social engineering, Roberts Court-style

2009-07-06T11:06:00.015-04:00

Now that a week has passed since the Court handed down Ricci v. DeStefano (2009), better known to the public as the "white firefighters" case, and the lawyers have had their back-and-forth over what this decision means for the law of Title VII, "disparate treatment" vs. "disparate impact," the professed standards of the Roberts Court on "judicial minimalism" vs. the Roberts Court's avowed preference for moving the law in any direction it sees fit and, naturally, whether this renders Sonia Sotomayor "unfit" to serve on the Court, this seems as good a time as any to offer some thoughts on what the Court's decision means beyond the narrow world of legal academia and those in the mainstream media who genuinely believe there is something called "the law" that stands apart from the political world that creates it.

* * * * * * * * * *

Sonia Sotomayor: If the conservative majority's 5-4 decision to reverse the unanimous opinion of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals decision affirming the federal district court's decision in favor of New Haven makes Sotomayor "unfit" to take Justice David Souter's seat on the Court, then more than one justice on the current Court better call College Hunks Hauling Junk and clear out their offices, starting with Chief Justice John Roberts.

In 2005, Roberts wrote the opinion for a three-judge panel for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Bush administration's decision to establish military commissions without congressional approval based on the theory that Article II pretty much gave the president the power to do what he wished in "times of crisis" and, secondarily, that the Geneva Convention was judicially unenforceable in the American judicial system. A few days later, President Bush nominated Roberts to the Court, and he was confirmed with little controversy, something, in retrospect, that should have been remarkable given that his view of executive power in Hamdan was without precedent. In 2006, the Court, with Roberts abstaining, reversed the new Chief Justice's opinion. Five members of the Court -- Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kennedy -- rejected in toto the Bush administration's theory of unbridled executive power, and, by default, the legal justification for the military commissions that Roberts, in his opinion for the D.C. Circuit, endorsed without reservation. Hamdan is perhaps the most important decision on the "inherent" power of the executive to take extra-constitutional action since the Pentagon Papers decision of 1971, and Roberts got it completely wrong.

Sam Alito should get packing, too. In 1991, Justice Alito wrote the opinon for a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upholding Pennsylvania's restrictive abortion law. Alito's decision to uphold the provisions requiring parental notification, a 24-48 hour "waiting period," and "informed consent" were upheld by the three justices -- O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter -- who helped formed the five member majority upholding the "core" of Roe -- and the Court's four dissenters -- Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and Byron White. But the section of Alito's opinion upholding the state's "spousal consent" requirement was rejected by a majority of the justices. Indeed, Alito's opinion upholding a husband's "right" to approve his wife's decision to have an abortion met with not-so-carefully disguised hostility from O'Connor, who, according to Jeffrey Toobin's book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (2007), was less than thrilled that Alito was nominated to replace her. I can only imagine why.

Perhaps Justice Stevens should go ahead and book a one-way trip on his own plane back to Florida to take the retirement that "veteran Court watchers" (Does that job description actually go on someone's 1040?) have been predicting for the last five or six years. This term, the Court, with Justice Scalia writing for a 5-4 majority, overruled a 1986 opinion on the right to counsel, Michigan v. Jackson (1986), that was written by Justice Stevens. Yes, the decision had been eroded over the years; but there was nothing to suggest that Jackson needed to go. But the Court's minimalist, restraint-oriented, non-ideological wing decided that, hey, why the hell not, as long as they've got the votes.

Compare Roberts and Alito's constitutional errors in their appeals court opinions with Sotomayor's alleged misjudgment. Roberts was writing on a blank slate, and got it so wrong that even Anthony Kennedy decided to vote with the liberals in Hamdan. Alito's opinion upholding the "spousal consent" provision of Pennsylvania's restrictive abortion was so offensive to O'Connor (and Kennedy and Souter) that it led her, for just the second time since coming to the Court, to strike down an abortion restriction as an "undue burden."

And Sotomayor? The unanimous three-judge panel for the 2nd Circuit issued a one paragraph per curiam opinion affirming the district court's "thoughtful" analysis of New Haven's decision to throw out the promotions exam. An en banc 2nd Circuit, 7-6, affirmed the three-judge panel's ruling. That means that 11 of the 21 federal judges who voted in Ricci agreed with New Haven and, by extension, the prevailing interpretation of Title VII in "disparate impact" cases.

Another quick tidbit I haven't seen anyone point out about Ricci: the vast majority of amicus support went to New Haven, including six states, the United States and numerous well established and reputable civil rights organizations. Contrast that with the support going to the petitioners: a handful of right-wing groups, including the Eagle Forum, the American Civil Rights Union and a few others that were obviously created for no other reason than to file a brief in this case. On top of that, not one municipal or state government submitted a brief in support of the petitioners.

Not even Sarah Palin's beloved Alaska, which supported New Haven.

Enough? So who is really out of the mainstream? Hint: It's not Sonia Sotomayor.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Title VII bars workplace discrimination. The law doesn't say that only employers who deliberately discriminate against their employees (or job applicants) are on the hook; it says, and the courts and Congress have been clear on this, that employers may not discriminate on the basis of race (or sex, color, national origin and, in subsequent provisions, many other categories as well). New Haven, like many other cities with majority African-American and/or Latino populations, employed firefighters in non-supervisory capacities; but, as you go up the chain of command, minorities become almost invisible. And, yes, exams are part of the selection and promotion process. But let's consider this: if minorities fail these exams at higher rates than their white counterparts, enough so that few, if any, are promoted, then we are left with two choices to explain this outcome:

1. African-American and Latino firefighters are capable of putting out fires, risking their lives in burning buildings and attending to all the difficult problems that firefighters face in their professional capacity. But African-Americans and Latinos stop short of having the intelligence and skill to command firefighters.

2. The examination process is producing results that are not accurately capturing the intelligence and skills of African-American and Latino firefighters in a way that makes them suitable to command their white colleagues.

Those are your two choices. Either African-Americans and Latinos aren't smart enough to get promoted or there is something wrong with the tests. Nothing else explains an outcome in which minorities come up so short.

The conservative majority on the Roberts Court -- and this includes Anthony Kennedy, who has never voted to uphold an affirmative action program created and administered by a private or public employer or public educational institution (he voted against the University of Michigan's law school admissions program that Justice O'Connor upheld in her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) -- likes to trumpet its true commitment to civil rights by insisting there is something called "colorblindness" in the law. By drawing no moral distinction between affirmative action and Jim Crow-type discrimination, the position that Roberts articulated in the Parents Involved case two years ago, the Court's conservatives claim that there is no place for "counting by race" in equal protection analysis. Not to sound like Maureen Dowd, but, for a Court that doesn't like to count by race, it sure likes to count by race -- as long as the racial group coming up short falls meets the criteria of whiteness.

Conservatives, leaving people like Charles Murray and Rush Limbaugh aside, have learned enough from the civil rights movement not to suggest that African-Americans and Latinos lag behind whites on standardized tests of all sorts -- from firefighter examinations to the SAT -- because they're less smart; rather, conservative usually respond by saying that affirmative action is just a quick fix, and a bad one, that doesn't address the "underlying" problems with substandard African-American and Latino achievement -- fewer educational opportunities, disproportionate poverty and . . . here comes their favorite one . . . a "culture" that looks down upon persons who aspire to something more than a life of crime. Fix those problems, say conservatives, and the test scores will come. But conservatives still live in denial on the fundamental force that accounts for so many of these social and educational pathologies -- the discrimination, sometimes subtle and sometimes not, that is still very much a part of American culture. Simply because the law makes it illegal to discriminate in an open manner doesn't mean that minorities, on average, compete on an equal footing with whites. Living, as I do, in an area where white privilege is the norm and not the exception, I am still amazed at how unwilling and/or unable so many affluent, well-educated whites are to admit that our children start with advantages that most African-American and Latino children do not. If I had a nickel for every time I have heard a well-heeled white parent congratulate his or herself on the great job "we" did getting their child into a selective college or securing a spot on the U16 National Bound Hockey Team or sending their child to the Poconos or Berkshires to work for free at a $4000 a month sleep-a-way camp, I could retire and live off the interest alone. In a sense, white privilege operates like compound interest on a savings account -- the earlier you start saving, the more you earn over a longer period of time. And when you start with an advantage that no African-American or Latino can -- race -- at an early age, from whether one parent should "opt out" of the labor force to avoid having to hire, ironically enough, a Latino or African-American to care for their children, clean their house and do their laundry, that position only strengthens over time.

Here's a question for the Court's conservative majority, the majority so concerned about equal opportunity without regard to race: Of the 112 13 and 14 year-olds who played in our Bantam House program in the Montgomery Youth Hockey Association during the 208-09 season, one was African-American. The only kids who spoke English as a second language were the handful from other countries, Canada (Montreal), France and Germany. Of the 90 or so kids who played in our Bethesda-Chevy Chase recreational baseball league this year, not one was African-American. The hockey club is open to anyone who wants to play; residency and neighborhood are irrelevant. If you want to drive here from Northern Virginia, Frederick or Prince George's County to play hockey, and many do, you can. Our baseball teams, on the other hand, are entrepreneurial in their creation. You round up kids from your neighborhood, your kid's school and, if you still need players, you get your kid's friend from another neighborhood to come on board.

So now the question: what accounts for the lack of local African-American and Latino players in these two sports?

Neither organization discriminates on the basis of race. Both organizations offer "sliding scale" fees to families who need help paying fees or acquiring equipment. Both organizations advertise extensively to the local community, although in recent years that advertising has more become Web-centric. The areas from which the vast majority of our players come are Northwest D.C. and Montgomery County. Neither area lacks for eligible 13 and 14 year-old boys who are interested in baseball and hockey. According, then, to the Court, since the traditional bludgeons of discrimination are absent, race cannot possibly account for the near whites-only population playing in these programs.

But we don't even have to go deep below the surface to understand why this is. To play house hockey in MYHA -- that's not travel, which is about a $1000 more per year -- you start by writing a $1400 check. And that's before equipment and incidental fees. Then you deal with the odd times -- 6.45 a.m. weekend game times and/or 6.00 - 8.45 p.m. practice times during the middle of the week. For families down the income ladder who do not hold jobs that allow them the degrees of freedom to leave their offices to get their kids to and from practice and games, or families with only one parent in the house and no spouse near-by to help with the driving, it is impossible to play hockey. As for baseball, there is very little racial integration in the Montgomery County public schools, and what little integration there is stems from white kids attending magnet programs at schools that serve predominantly African-American and Latino communities.

Forty-five years after the passage of the Civil Rights of 1964, there is still this unpleasant truth about the socio-economic mobility of Americans -- race correlates with income, education,two-parent homes, access to health care and social status. The further down you go on all these characteristics, the more likely you are to be African-American or Latino. New Haven, like every other city with a majority non-white population in the country prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was run by whites -- white mayors, white district attorneys, white police and fire chiefs, white utilities directors and on and on. Police and firefighting forces were reserved almost exclusively for whites and depended very heavily on patronage, ancestry and family ties for entry into those professions. Only in the last twenty or thirty years, as Justice Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, have majority non-white cities made meaningful progress in integrating and diversifying their police and firefighting forces. But now, thanks to the Supreme Court, New Haven, a city that is approximately 60% African-American, will have few blacks or Latinos in command positions. Something, then, is accounting for all this . . . and it's not a sign hanging in an employer's door telling African-Americans or Latinos not to apply.

Few can or should dispute that the United States has made meaningful progress in addressing the consequences of its Original Sin. But the answers to the deep problems resulting from the vestiges of slavery, state-enforced segregation that permeated every aspect of American life and a culture reluctant to acknowledge the power that white privilege still wields in our contemporary society have never come, nor will they, by treating racial discrimination as a math problem. A horrible, shameful stain on American society cannot be cleansed by treating the moral consequences of the deliberate choices made by our largest and most powerful institutions, public and private, as amoral.

* * * * * * * * *

President Obama was criticized early on for taking Sonia Sotomayor's background into account when he decided to nominate her to replace David Souter. Conservatives complained about the "empathy" that Obama believed was important for judges to have when deciding cases that deal with real people who have real problems. Conservatives who normally have no warmth for Justice Kennedy have praised his Ricci opinion as an exercise rooted in the law rather than "empathy" for the minority firefighters who still have no access to the command positions in the New Haven fire department. But Kennedy's opinion is hardly dispassionate analysis. Throughout his opinion, Kennedy makes multiple references to the hardworking firefighters who were denied their "merit-based" promotion because the test failed to yield enough minority applicants into command positions. We learned that Frank Ricci has dyslexia and worked hard to overcome it, and even paid out over a $1000 from his own pocket to pay for additional materials that would help him, as well as to compensate a neighbor who would read the materials to him. In a truly bizarre passage from his concurring opinion, Justice Alito spent several pages telling the story of a black preacher and self-professed "king maker" who more or less intimidated New Haven officials into throwing out the results and making sure that African-American firefighters got their share of the bounty. What any of this has to do with "disparate-impact" analysis is beyond me.

Then again, I have a real hard time relating to the world that Roberts, Kennedy and Alito inhabit, and an even harder time understanding and relating to the world that Roberts and Kennedy come from. Perhaps not coincidentally, these are the two justices who have written the Court's most recent and important opinions on race. Roberts wrote Parents Involved and the Court's big voting rights case this term; Kennedy, who, obviously, wrote Ricci, also wrote the opinion in Patterson v. McLean Credit Union (1989), a case that narrowed the "disparate-impact" analysis on Title VII in place since 1971 so substantially that it led Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to restore it. The 1991 law, not the "original" language of Title VII, formed the basis of the Court's analysis in Ricci. So there you go: another member of the Court's conservative bloc that found himself overruled, except this time by Congress rather than his colleagues on the bench.

As was well documented in their confirmation hearings, Roberts and Kennedy come from a world of affluence and privilege. Neither has ever confronted discrimination at any point in their lives. Elite education from the elementary level through law school, country clubs, well-to-do and privileged families, membership in their chosen professional cities most elite law firms (San Francisco and Washington), federal judgeships while still in their forties and an appointment to the Supreme Court by their 50th and 51st birthdays, respectively. For many who cling to the false calculus of American meritocratic achievement, the personal and professional lives of Roberts and Kennedy are often described as "impeccable" and "ideal." To me, their lives are and have been walled off, by design, from the world that neither has any hesitation in judging and correcting.

And, yes, I am a white male, and just six years younger than John Roberts. But the world in which he grew up could not be more foreign to me. By the time I was 12, I could stand on the street corner on a Saturday in Atlanta's West End and play the dozens with black guys twice my age. I could walk into record stores around the corner from where my father had his clothing stores in the 1960s and 70s and recognize the music coming through on the sound system. I knew my Motown and I was just starting to learn a little bit about jazz, enough so that I could say, "Holy Shit!" when I learned that John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, Cannonball Adderly, Wynton Kelly and Philly Joe Jones had all come through, at one point or another, my father's first store, which was located across the street from Paschal's Motor Hotel, which was the destination spot for black jazz musicians coming through Atlanta during the days of Jim Crow. Most of the men who worked for my dad as salesmen and managers were jazz musicians who needed steady day jobs. I could walk the streets of all these now-historic black Atlanta neighborhoods, have my regular stores to stop in and hang out, talk to all the street characters and black professional that befriended me because they knew my dad and never worry about anything. Hank Aaron, Lou Hudson, Orlando Cepeda and many other prominent African-American athletes were regular customers in my dad's store. It never occurred to me then that outside the world of black Atlanta these men were treated as second-class human beings and subject to racial slurs and overt acts of racism. Really, how could anyone not like Hank Aaron, who was an absolute gentleman (although he was a secret smoker. He used to smoke in my dad's store and I remember the first time I saw him light up I got so upset and went in the bathroom and cried)? Not until I was about 10 or 11 did I start to realize how deep and penetrating racism was in the world in which I was growing up.

* * * * * * * * * *

From the age of 8 until I went to college, I spent just about every Saturday going to work with my dad, who, at one point, had two or three men's clothing stores around the Atlanta area. By the time I left for college, my dad was down to one store, called "Out of Sight," a homage to the black phrase that became popular in the late 1960s and gradually, like all black vernacular, morphed its way into the lingo of white-hipster wannabes and hippies. I still worked in my dad's store during winter and summer breaks home from college, and I remember how heartbroken I was when my father called me at school around the middle of my junior year to tell me he was closing down his business to move on to some other adventures. As I wrote two years ago, I went back and forth between the white world I lived in during the week and the black world I visited on the weekends. When I needed my first nice watch, I didn't head to a mall store near my house. No, no. I went to the West Side Loan Co., which was the fancy name for the pawn shop around the corner from my father's last store, and visited "Fast Eddie." True to form, Fast Eddie pulled me to the side and opened his jacket to display a cascade of watches, some of which grazed against the handgun he kept tucked into the slacks I recognized from our store (with no back pockets). After I picked out my watch, Fast Eddie refused to let me pay, mentioning something about an "arrangement" he had with my dad. My first stereo also came from the West Side pawn shop. So what if the serial numbers had been scratched off the receiver and the speakers? And once my friends got wind of the deals available at the pawn shop, they didn't hesitate to navigate their way down to this part of now-historic black Atlanta, even though more than one friend asked me if I had ever been mugged or assaulted. Thinking back on it, I'm pretty sure that none of my white middle-class friends was harmed or killed on their way to or from the West Side Loan Co.

This was the world I knew as a child, teen-ager and young adult. I didn't know anyone who belonged to a country club, owned a boat, went snow skiing, vacationed to foreign countries, had parents who drove a car fancier than, say, a Buick or Mercury. I didn't know what "preppy" meant until I went to college and sat next to a girl in my Introduction to Western Civilization class who was dressed in a plaid skirt that came to the knees, a green cardigan sweater, an add-a-bead necklace, knee socks and topsiders. I had never heard of the L.L. Bean, Land's End or original Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues, much less seen someone who looked as if he or she had just stepped off the page of one. I didn't know anyone named Courtney or Tucker, who had nicknames like "Muffy" or "Chipster," or called beer "brewski." And I definitely had never seen a guy my age walking around in shorts with whales or crabs on them who could walk up to a bartender and ask for "the usual," or a girl who, at 18 or 19, had already begun dressing like her mother or, even worse, her grandmother. That world was and remains a mystery to me.

Twenty years ago, when I moved to Washington, I thought I was moving to a city in which imagination, perseverance, creativity and a willingness to think and act independently would be noticed and rewarded and not, as it turns out, ignored or punished. I had no idea that entering the professional world and, later, parenthood, meant that I was supposed to devote every waking hour to making sure that my children -- and myself, for that matter -- would not have to associate with the riff-raff, whether in sports, education or in whatever feeble effort we made to introduce them to the "proper" culture. Moving here presented another culture shock for me. I had never seen so many Volvo station wagons carting around children whose educational pedigrees, and those of their parents, were pasted on the rear window. Nor had I ever heard of Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, Cape Cod or Jackson Hole, or knew that you could go skiing in Utah, much less have a second house in any one of these places. I didn't know that a three bedroom house with three bathrooms for a family of four was "too small." I never expected to draw looks of disbelief from my peers when I confessed that my children were attending public schools in the Montgomery County system rather than "securing" a spot for them in one of the ring of elite private schools that populate Northwest Washington and lower Montgomery County. I didn't know that children were supposed to attend "elite" sports or "knowledge" camps during the summer so they could distinguish themselves early enough to be competitive for admission to Oberlin, Swathmore or Harvard. I never anticipated that someone my own age would ask me to "coordinate" with their nanny to arrange a playdate with one of their children, since no one I knew growing up had a nanny or arranged playdates. We just walked around to each other's houses until we found something to do. I had never heard parents congratulate themselves as much as they do here for getting their children into the right private school, select sports team or elite college, then turnaround, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, complain about how "affirmative action" almost kept Rachel, Josh or Courtney from their birthright place in the University of Virginia's class of 2013. And I had absolutely no idea that teaching at the college level was something the accomplished, professional Washingtonian would find attractive once he or she "had made some real money."

Twenty years of living in Washington has not whetted my appetite to enter the world that John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy have lived in for their entire lives. As my own children move closer and closer to getting their own wings to enter a world that bears very little resemblance to the cucoon they have grown up in here in suburban Washington, I realize that the greatest gift of my childhood was not the signed baseball that Hank Aaron gave me when I was eight (which I promptly scuffed throwing grounders with my friends in the street), attending the 1972 MLB All-Star game or my first kiss from Terri Merlin in the 1st grade). Rather, it was exposure to a world that was completely unlike the one most white kids my age had ever seen, much less had the fortune to grow up around. And, that, more than any contemporary theory of constitutional jurisprudence or judicial decision-making informs my disappointment in a Court that cannot understand how the social, political and, above all, racial privilege it is determined to socially engineer from above does not, in any way, shape or form, serve the needs of American society.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-06-30T21:30:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Red State Update

2009-06-29T23:22:00.002-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap discuss -- wait, you knew this was coming . . . -- South Carolina Governor Mark Safford's affair with his Argentinian mistress.

Once an asshole, always an asshole

2009-06-24T21:35:00.002-04:00

As if the world needed any more evidence that Richard Nixon will always maintain his standing as the most narcissistic, sociopathic and morally bankrupt person ever to serve as president of the United States, new transcripts of the secret White House taping system made famous by Watergate give new meaning to the old phrase, "Once an asshole, always an asshole."

Commenting on the Court's decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), Nixon expressed some "concern" about a constitutional right to abortion, concerned that it might lead to "permissiveness." But what concerned him even more was this:

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.”

More here.

The burning building theory of constitutional law

2009-06-23T11:10:00.003-04:00

Last October, about a month before the presidential election, I wrote a piece for this blog called, "The abortion conundrum." My point was to suggest that the time had come to acknowledge that a constitutional right to abortion was not in danger, regardless of who was elected. Very briefly, I argued that seeing the "abortion-and-the-Court" debate as one that boiled down to the presidential selection of Supreme Court justices failed to take into account the complexities of judicial selection and confirmation. A moot point now, suppose John McCain had been elected. How high on his list would finding justices prepared to overturn Roe/Casey be, given that the voters who would have put him over the top were probably more inclined to support abortion rights than not? How prepared would a Democratic majority in the Senate have been to confirm a nominee with demonstrated opposition to abortion rights? Getting past that, how eager would that new justice be to provide the vote to overturn a right that had been incorporated into the social fabric of the nation for 35 years? Where was the clear constitutional mistake? Did the five Republican-appointed justices who comprised the majority of the seven-person majority in Roe, including Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart and Harry Blackmun, really so radically misread the Constitution or, more importantly, the political sensibilities of a nation that, in 1973, had begun to institutionalize the seminal changes in the status of African-Americans, women and other minorities that had begun in the 1950s?

Keep going. How eager would Republican governors like Charlie Crist of Florida be to sign legislation prohibiting abortions deemed constitutional under Roe and Casey? How willing would any governor interested in re-election or simply in maintaining political leverage outside of this narrow question be in alienating wide swaths of voters who might like Republican economics but cringe at the power of the Christian Right in their party? And how many doctors would stand for a state legislature's decision to wrest control of their medical practices? Do governors really think there is something advantageous about turning on the evening news to see doctors and female patients being led out of a medical building in handcuffs? Or worse, negotiating the blinding speed with which information is distributed on the Internet, including You Tube and other real-time websites and blogs?

Beyond the drama surrounding a post-abortion rights world, I also offered this take on the justices' approach to the abortion question:

Have you ever been in a conversation where you insisted that you'd go back in a burning building to retrieve your favorite things, rescue your or your children's cat, climb the fire escape to help the kindly old gentleman who lives four doors down from you and always remembers your birthday or to save the wheelchair-bound elderly woman who is always there for you when you need to discuss your personal problems? Of course. We all have. Yet, would we actually go back into the building to save a cat, rescue a person who isn't related to us or retrieve family photos? The only honest answer is that we don't know. Until you are actually faced with a choice that, until that point in time, has only been an abstract point of discussion, you really have no idea what you are doing to do.

My point, which I abbreviate here and made better in my previous post, is that, despite the misguided assurances of so many political scientists that we can "predict" the outcome of Supreme Court decisions by cobbling together sophisticated mathematical models that take into account personal attitudes, social background, political party, the number of questions the Justices ask the advocates appearing before them and so on, there are sometimes cases, arriving at a certain point in time and so fraught with social and political consequences, that put the Court in a similar position as the people standing outside the burning building. For lack of a more clever description, I refer to cases like Casey and yesterday's decision in the Court's most closely watched case of the term, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder (2009) as examples of the "burning building" theory of constitutional law.

In fairness to political scientists, lawyers commenting on the Court's decision to leave Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in place seem, as a whole, schocked -- as in, Casablanca . . . Rick's Cafe . . . gambling, prostitution in a bar "shocked" -- that the same five member bloc that equated "voluntary" desegregation in the Parents Involved decision of two terms ago with the state-imposed system of racial segregation declared unconstitutional 53 years before in Brown v. Board of Education, did not coalesce to strike down the various requirements of Section 5, including the "bailout" and "preclearance" issues. Even Dahlia Lithwick, who covers the Court for Slate and is by far the best at making sense of what the Justices do and why of any of the mainstream correspondents who cover that beat, seemed stunned that the Chief Justice Roberts of April's oral argument in NAMUDNO. Click here for her comparison of Roberts at oral argument with the kindler, gentler Roberts who wrote the Court's majority opinion. Several other excellent legal commentators, including Tom Goldstein at SCOTUS Blog, see Roberts's opinion as an exercise in "judicial minimalism," or the deeper-rather-than-wider approach to constitutional decision-making that first gained traction about ten years ago in Cass Sunstein's influential book, One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court. Sunstein's basic thesis was this: judges should approach cases from the narrowest perspective possible to minimize judicial intervention in the "democratic process," and leave the tough choices to Congress or the states (or, as in NAMUDNO, other "political subdivisions," such as cities, towns and counties). Judicial minimalism recognizes a place for judicial correction of legislative mistakes, provided those mistakes infringe upon constitutional rights; but takes the gloss of traditional liberal dependence on "enlightened" justices as Platonic guardians (think Ronald Dworkin) of our constitutional rights. Judicial minimalism, as a theory, is really not much more than an updated take on John Hart Ely's Democracy and Distrust (1980) of almost 30 years ago. But Sunstein, like Ely, had (and has) came at "liberal judicial activism" from the critical perspective of a liberal law professor with influence in high places. Sunstein, like Ely, might have a soft spot for the liberal progress engineered by the Warren Court. But he was the liberal's anti-Dworkin, and that made him appear less dangerous to conservatives and more politically appealing to post-modern Democrats like Barack Obama (who, of course, hired his former colleague at the University of Chicago law school after the election to work in the White House).

Four years ago, John Roberts appeared before the Senate judiciary committe and, disavowing his sterling, life-long and not-so-hidden credentials as a social, political and judicial conservative, embraced judicial minimalism as his preferred approach to deciding complex constitutional cases. Four years later, Roberts's record is hardly one that heeds to the "minimalist" philosophy. Not only did his opinion for the Court go much further than it needed to in Parents Involved, it demonstrated a lack of respect, even ignorance, at times, for the nation's history of forcible racial discrimination. On other constitutional questions involving free speech, religion and abortion rights, Roberts has not hesitated to climb aboard the conservative train determined to align the Constitution with the policy preferences of the right-wing of the Republican party. And why not? That's exactly why he was selected, his cynical insistence that he was simply there to "umpire" disputes on the "law" notwithstanding. No reasonable person with an understanding of law and politics should have believed him then, and no one, not even someone as smart as Dahlia Lithwick, should believe him now.

So why did Chief Justice Roberts back off his tough talk at NAMUDNO's oral argument and conclude that it was unnecessary for the Court to decide the constitutionality of Section 5? How was able to get the Court's four moderate-to-liberal justices, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, to join his opinion? These are, after all, the same four justices who have repeatedly dissented in the Court's string of voting rights cases making it harder for states to design majority-minority districts. (Side note: the Bush administration filed an amicus brief in NAMUDNO asking the Court to let stand a lower court's ruling leaving the Section 5 requirements in place. Why? Since the late 1980s, Republican justice departments have accepted the quid pro quo in many of the states covered by the 1965 law, exchanging solid African-American districts designed to elect black Democrats for white, suburban districts that have sent white Southern Republicans to Congress, thus breaking the back of the New Deal alignment between Northern and Southern Democrats that harkened back to Reconstruction. Republicans exceed the number of Democrats representing districts in the former Confederacy, although that moved in the opposite direction in the 2008 election. Every Republican is white; every African-American representing a Southern congressional district is a Democrat. This is no accident).

I think the answer is fairly self-evident. Too much was at stake in this case, coming down just eight months after the election of the first African-American president of the United States, for Chief Justice Roberts to risk his reputation over. Just four years into what promises to be a long turn at the helm of the nation's highest constitutional court, Roberts would be forever saddled with the monicker as having been the chief justice who presided over the demise of the nation's most important civil rights law. His opinion contains none of the moral equivalencies between race-based remedies and the pre-Brown system of America's public education system, which radiated the stench of state-imposed segregation far beyond the Southern states. Roberts spoke respectfully of the 1965 law's successes, which he called "undeniable," and acknowledged that it took that law to kick-start the 15th amendment's promise that the right to vote shall not be conditioned upon race, color or previous condition of servitude. And, quite honestly, his criticism of the current status of the law compared with the conditions that existed when the law was passed are quite reasonable. In fact, if the worst thing to come out of this case is that Congress has to clean up Section 5 and bring the "preclearance" requirements into line with the changes that the law helped create, that's actually a positive development. A Democratic Congress with 41 African-American members in the House and the nation's first African-American president are in a much better position to satisfy the Court's concerns about Section 5 than had this decision come down in the early 2000s or during Newt Gingrich's reign of terror in the 1990s. The lawyers reading the Court's opinion are right about one thing, though: Congress had better move quick.

After years and years of criticizing the 1965 law, a record that goes back to his time in the Reagan justice department, a department that was the most hostile of any presidential administration to the rights of African-Americans since the modern civil rights era began in the early 1950s, Roberts blinked at the opportunity to turn a professional lifetime of caustic rhetoric on race into the big victory that conservatives, in government and in the right-wing public interest bar, have wanted for years. No, this wasn't some legal theory driving Roberts's decision . . . judicial minimalism or, as disgruntled dissenter Clarence Thomas suggested, an ill-timed use of the "doctrine of constitutional avoidance." Rather, Roberts's rhetoric caught fire, and he chose to stand outside rather than enter a building that, engulfed in flames, would have burned his reputation to the ground.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-06-22T23:16:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Chief Justice Roberts blinks

2009-06-22T20:14:00.004-04:00

Earlier today, the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Roberts writing for an 8-1 majority, declined to pass judgment on the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important piece of civil rights legislation that Congress has ever passed.

I plan to write something for tomorrow after giving the Court's opinion and Justice Clarence Thomas's dissent another reading. For now, you can get the Court's opinion here.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-06-16T23:05:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Red State Update

2009-06-15T12:20:00.002-04:00

Jackie takes a stand on gun violence in America, while Dunlap argues that Americans should not give up their First Amendment rights because of gun nuts.

Domestic terrorism

2009-06-12T10:50:00.006-04:00

Just a little over three weeks ago, former Vice-President Dick Cheney and President Barack Obama gave "dueling" speeches on national security, terrorism and American compliance (or lack thereof, in Cheney's case) with the rule of law, both at home and abroad. Obama spent most of his speech attempting to persuade his supporters and critics that he would not back down from "foreign" terrorist threats; but neither would he "compromise" what he called "American values," which, in Obama-speak, can loosely be described as a hybrid between John F. Kennedy cold warrior toughness with a baby-boomer sensitivity to human rights, the rule of law and a belief that the United States cannot promote democracy if it stoops to the level of its enemies. The latter point is particularly important. A nation that wants to promote liberal democratic principles, which include not only a commitment to free and fair elections but an equal commitment to civil rights and liberties, must lead by deed as well as word. To emphasize the importantance of this latter commitment, Obama gave his speech at the National Archives, which houses the original Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

About a mile or so a mile away, Cheney gave a speech before a group of like-minded well-wishers at the American Enterprise Institute, an organization charitably described by the mainstream media as a "conservative think-tank." Twenty years in Washington has left me with a decidedly different impression of AEI. Not much thinking goes on over there. Rather, AEI functions as a disapora for right-wing propagandists killing time between Republican administrations. Lots of "serious" talk about the Framers' original intent, why free markets cure all problems, including bathroom mildew and funny car noises and, naturally, why war, or, at minimum, a "military response," is the solution to any sort of bad behavior by any country that either doesn't like us (Iran, North Korea, Canada) or network of "bad guys" that qualifies as a terrorist organization (al-Qaeda, SPECTRE, Nancy Pelosi-Barney Frank-Harry Reid). Since the November 2008 presidential election, the former vice-president, having spent a good deal of his two terms accusing anyone who didn't agree with him or the Bush administration of "treason" or indifference to "terrorism," has been touring the right-wing media or appearing before right-wing audiences like AEI to criticize the Obama administration's approach to national security, which, sadly, appears to sympathize far too much with the "terrorists" by insufficiently torturing them and suggesting that the United States should treat the world's Muslims with respect rather than as a 1.8 billion person sleeper cell.

I didn't read the full transcript of Cheney's speech until just recently. Dishonest, accusatory, replete with double-talk and shamelessly self-congratulatory, Cheney's remarks are so appalling on so many different levels that only what the brilliant political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow calls the "Rightwingoverse" can possibly ascribe any seriousness to them. But one passage caught my eye, perhaps because I had read Cheney's speech so closely in conjunction with the most recent terrorist attack perpetrated on American soil -- the murder of a Holocaust Mueseum security guard by an 88 year-old white Christian American-born terrorist. I'll get to that in a minute. But first, read Cheney's remarks:

To put things in perspective, suppose that on the evening of 9/11, President Bush and I had promised that for as long as we held office – which was to be another 2,689 days – there would never be another terrorist attack inside this country. Talk about hubris – it would have seemed a rash and irresponsible thing to say. People would have doubted that we even understood the enormity of what had just happened. Everyone had a very bad feeling about all of this, and felt certain that the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Shanksvillewere only the beginning of the violence.

Of course, we made no such promise. Instead, we promised an all-out effort to protect this country. We said we would marshal all elements of our nation’s power to fight this war and to win it. We said we would never forget what had happened on 9/11, even if the day came when many others did forget. We spoke of a war that would “include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.” We followed through on all of this, and we stayed
true to our word.To the very end of our administration, we kept al-Qaeda terrorists
busy with other problems. We focused on getting their secrets, instead of sharing ours with them. And on our watch, they never hit this country again. After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed. (Italics mine)

Along the way there were some hard calls. No decision of national security was ever made lightly, and certainly never made in haste. As in all warfare, there have been costs – none higher than the sacrifices of those killed and wounded in our country’s service. And even the most decisive victories can never take away the sorrow of losing so many of our own – all those innocent victims of 9/11, and the heroic souls who died trying to save them. (Italics mine)

For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were neither innocent nor victims. As for those who asked them questions and got answers: they did the right thing, they made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.

Less than two weeks after September 11th, 2001, Bruce Ivins, a research scientist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, which is located about 45 minutes north and west from the White House and about 20 minutes south from the presidential retreat, Camp David, began mailing anthrax to news outlets in New York and elected officials in Washington. By October 16th, the first victim to come into contact with an anthrax mailing died. By the time Ivins's terror campaign came to a close, six people died and dozens more were sickened. Naturally, the Bush administration assumed that the anthrax terrorist was somehow affiliated with al-Qaeda, and Cheney led the charge: "I think the only responsible thing for us to do is proceed on the basis that it could be linked [to the September 11th attacks]," adding that the United States had ample evidence that bin Laden's followers were trained in how to spread biological and chemical weapons.

Missed that one by a mile, didn't he? Bruce Ivins sat, almost literally, in the president's backyard, and the Bush administration couldn't figure out where and how a terrorist attack launched within two weeks of September 11th originated or who did it. The Department of Justice finally tracked the attacks to Ivins, who committed suicide in late July 2008 after he learned that the FBI was about to arrest him for the anthrax attacks. For four years, the FBI pursued another research scientist named Stephen Hatfill, who was exonerated in August 2008 and awarded a settlement of almost $5 million for the damage done to his reputation and career as a result of government's wrongful prosecution.

I remember well the immediate period after the first anthrax letter turned up in NBC's New York offices. Work-study students in our office were opening mail with sanitary gloves and surgeon's masks, as if that would have prevented anyone from getting sick or dying. Families in my neighborhood sealed their mail slots and left letters for postal carriers asking them to leave the mail in a cardboard box on the front steps. My children's public school no longer accepted any mail from "unofficial" sources. And the list goes on and on and on. Ivins's planned, thought-out and carefully calibrated decision to attack innocent citizens by mailing deadly germs in an envelope brought the Bush administration's repeated warnings that al-Qaeda would use "weapons of mass destruction" to kill Americans to life. But once the administration lost interest in pursuing the source of the anthrax terror attacks, largely because it couldn't pinpoint it, you ceased to hear the word "terrorism" associated with anthrax. An occasional article might refer to Ivins's anthrax mailings as an "act of bioterrorism." Since Ivins did not have an "al"- prefix attached to his name or hail from a Muslim country, he was more often classified as just good old-fashioned homegrown American nutcase.

* * * * * * * * * *

During the eight years of the Bush administration, from January 20th, 2001 to January 20th, 2009, approximately 105,000 Americans were murdered by someone wielding a firearm. By any definition, the decision of one person to kill another person is an act of terror. Let's go further and say that any person who rapes, robs, sexually assaults, sexually abuses or beats to near death another person commits an act of terrorism. Over the past twenty years or so, many state legislatures and even Congress have defined some of these acts as "hate crimes." Hate crime legislation generally has a two-fold purpose: (1) to gather information on "targeted" crimes, i.e., those motivated by "animus" on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, sex, etc. so that law enforcement agencies can better locate and police these crimes and (2) to permit government authorities to ask for harsher sentences for crimes classified as "hate crimes."

The Bush administration position on "hate crimes" legislation? It opposed every such bill submitted to Congress, including the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would have authorized the federal government to pursue harsher penalties against the perpetrators of anti-gay violence.

On guns, the Bush administration continued the long-standing Republican tradition of supporting the right of Americans to arm themselves to the teeth. But Dick Cheney went an additional step that no other administration official, Republican or Democratic, had ever taken on guns: that the right to own a gun was guaranteed by the Second Amendment. In 2008, when the Supreme Court declared D.C.'s handgun control law unconstitutional on Second Amendment grounds, the Bush administration argued to strike the law down, but stopped short of saying that the Second Amendment guaranteed a right to own a weapon. Cheney was unhappy with the administration's more nuanced position, as reflected in Solicitor General Paul Clement's brief, so he signed on to brief submitted by over 300 members of Congress asking the Court to declare the D.C. law unconstitutional per se.

Indifference to the approximately 13,000 murders that take place in the United States every year is doing everything within his power to prevent terrorism? Or is American murdering another American not an act of terror?

* * * * * * * * * *

Think about that one for a minute. The vice-president of the United States freelances a legal position beyond the legal argument that his boss's Justice Department is taking before the Supreme Court. I looked to see if there was any precedent for that. There isn't.

* * * * * * * * * *

In late May, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a 24 year-old man from Little Rock, Arkansas, once known as Carlos Bledsoe, walked into a local armed forces recruiting center and started shooting at soldiers in front of the building. Authorities determined that Muhammad had "political and religious motives" to kill personnel working at the center. He is being tried for first-degree murder and 15 counts of engaging in a terrorist act.

On May 31st, Scott Roeder walked into a Wichita church and shot Dr. George Tiller, a local physician who, until then, performed late-term abortions. Roeder's thought out, religiously and politically motivated decision to kill a civilian doctor was not the first time that someone opposed to legal abortion had taken a shot at a doctor who performed abortions. Since 1989, there have been 23 attempted murders or murders of persons who work at abortion clinics -- 24, if you include Roeder's murder of Tiller -- and thousands of attempted bombings, assaults, break-ins, acts of vandalism, anthrax hoaxes (which soared, by the way, after Ivins lanched his anthrax terror attacks through the mail). Not a single person charged in any of these crimes has been charged with commiting an "act of terror." That includes Roeder, who is being charged with first-degree murder and aggravated assault.

* * * * * * * * * *
Just to see what would turn up, I googled (that is a verb now, right?) "shooting day care center united states." On the first three pages, I found shootings, some lethal, that had taken place at day care centers in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, a small town in Michigan, a town I had never heard of in North Carolina, a town in Alabama, another town in Texas and . . . and . . . more shooting in more cities and towns across the United States. I was going to google "shootings public schools United States" to see how often the Columbine scenario has played out across the country since that awful day in April 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold slaughtered 13 teachers and classmates and then killed themselves in an act of carnage that horrified and shocked the country. Eight years later, Cho Seung-Hui, a Virginia Tech undergraduate, turned his guns on 33 teachers and students before killing himself. Neither massacre was described as a terrorist attack or an "act of terror." They were alternately described as "mass murders" and "mass shootings," which they certainly were. But had the shooters been individuals of Arab surnames or self-identified with some "terrorist" group or cell, these events no doubt would have been labeled as "acts of terror." Since they weren't, they get demoted to "mass shootings" that "horrify and shock" the country, even though killing sprees like these have a long and ignoble history in the United States.

"American exceptionalism" is one of those manufactured myths that has a strong hold on the social and political culture of the United States. "Exceptionalists" believe that the United States is somehow better than any other country at pretty much everything, with the exception of maybe soccer, ice hockey and designing and manufacturing cars, for no other reason than Americans say so. The professed basis for American exceptionalism is our historic commitment to liberal democratic institutions, the protection of individual rights and the absence of formal constraints on economic and social mobility. The truth is much more complex and often not very pretty. This is a topic deserving of its own post, and that day may well soon come. For now, though, Americans can rest assured that their country stands at the top of the mountain in one place for all the world to see: the United States is by far . . . by far . . . the most violent democratic nation in the world. For sheer volume, no other nation comes close to the annual rate of approximately 12,500 murders per year that we do. But there's more -- Americans kill each other at a higher rate per capita than in any other country in the world.

Exceptional, eh?

* * * * * * * * * *

So let the deep-thinkers of AEI nod their heads as the former vice-president huffs and puffs about his "success" in making the country safe from terrorism. Nod away, boys (and they are mostly boys, offset by the occasional female scholar who warns against the evils of feminism, affirmative action, Hollywood and judicial activism while extolling the virtues of the free market from a perch funded by institutional donors and wealthy benefactors and thus largely insulated from those very same forces), as you're about the only people left who still believe that the Bush administration did anything positive during the eight years it unleashed one disastrous policy after another on the country. Let Dick Cheney take all the credit he wants for "preventing" people with Arab surnames or Islamic sympathies from entering the United States to kill innocent Americans. The ownership of language is a privilege that accords with political power. Now that the Bush administration is just an unfortunate memory, albeit one that has and will continue to have terrible consequences, perhaps we can now disengage the word "terror" from the convenient and stilted definition that the Cheneys of the world (and their enablers in the mainstream media) gave it and recognize the word for what it really means and the broad range of horrific, violent acts right here at home to which it equally applies.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-06-09T14:29:00.000-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Poor little rich hipsters

2009-06-08T15:50:00.002-04:00

Not even the Trustafarians are exempt from this recession. Have Chucks, a PBR, skinny jeans and a healthy disdain for conventional produce . . . but nowhere to go.

Red State Update

2009-06-08T10:59:00.002-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap review the weeks events, including President Obama's speech to the Muslim world, Dick Cheney's possible book deal and what he'll tell the world, and Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court.

Racists outraged by racism

2009-06-04T23:26:00.002-04:00

Earlier in the week, I asked a friend of mine who hosts a popular on-line "chat" program for a well-trafficked on-line newsletter/magazine/whatever something like this is called, whether his colleagues in the establishment Washington media truly understood the irony, if not absurdity, of asking such Republican celebrities as Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan and Glenn Beck, or air-head frat boys like Tucker Carlson, to comment on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's comments about how her ethnic heritage and background affect her approach to law and constitutional rights. In the case of Limbaugh and Buchanan, that's like asking Adolf Eichmann whether he thinks Woody Allen's movies are too Jewish. As for Gingrich, he's Exhibit #1 for the old Lyndon Johnson adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity for a politician, just no publicity. Naturally, if you add in an occasional albeit inexplicable observation that one day we will have a student exchange program, funded by the private sector, of course, with our Martian friends . . . in our lifetime, you become, in the eyes of the establishment media, an "interesting" person with "big" ideas. Not ideas that have any relevance to reality, or are the least bit workable, or are actually thought through. As long as you don't mention such phrases as "election cycle," "the process," use adjectives like "train wreck" or "Draconian," or mention how some obscure small state governor, like "30 Rock" Kenneth the Page act-a-like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, or a one term small town assemblyman represents the future of the Republican party or is a possible candidate for the Republican presidential nomintion in 2012, you qualify as a Beltway intellectual. Newt the Frewt is an intellectual like Mark Russell is a political satirist or the Capitol Steps are a comedy troup -- only in Washington.

As for Tucker Carlson, who knows why anyone would want his opinion about anything? Yet, and not suprisingly, there are those who do. Then again, these are largely the same people who thought Sarah Palin, who was the future of the Republican party either slightly before or after Bobby Jindal was the future of the Republican party -- I honestly don't remember who came first -- was hot.

No, really, Palin had Washington men getting all weak-kneed in their penny loafers and Washington women trading in their Spectator pumps, Hermes scarves and Talbots suits for something more racy to keep their men in check, like a Land's End skirt or outdoorsey and rugged, like an L.L. Bean Gore-Tex jacket with a silver triangle on the back.

. . . back to my friend. His answer: "I get 300 calls on a live chat for almost any guest I choose. For Newt, I get 5,000. It's all show business; not journalism."

At least he's honest. But isn't there some line that even a huckster like Gingrich, whose career long ago devolved into a "Spinal Tap"-like self-parody of himself, can't cross before being placed on that dreaded "DO NOT CALL" list of former administration officials, political strategists, kidnap victims and Capitol Hill insiders? Gingrich's public statement that Sotomayor was a "racist" for commenting in an old speech that her experience as a Latina woman gave her insight into certain issues that differed, by and large, from a white man revealed far more than his own stupidity. The episode also revealed the tired pattern of the establishment media relying on the same old hacks, frauds and has-beens for "commentary" on matters about which they know nothing or, even if they know something, are uniquely unqualified to assess.

Oh, there's so much more to say. But Joe Conason at Salon says it all much better here.

Downbeat at 75

2009-06-03T14:14:00.004-04:00

Downbeat, America's oldest magazine devoted to coverage of jazz, celebrates its 75th anniversary this month. The July issue, available to subscribers but not yet in stores, features interviews and profiles on musicians culled from 1934 to the present. There is a great profile on Benny Goodman's decision in the mid- to late 1930s to integrate his band and then subsequently dare promoters and club owners not to hire what was then then the nation's pre-eminent swing band; another one with Louis Armstrong, who believed that "bebop" might well ruin the audience for jazz; critical comments on Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, who were viewed initially by the mainstream jazz press as heretical and anti-musical; a terrific feature on Dave Brubeck, who responds now to articles written about him dating back to the early 1950s; a long piece on Sonny Rollins; and much, much more.

You can pick up some features on-line by clicking here. The 75th anniversary edition should be available in about a week or so.

Tom Tomorrow here

2009-06-02T22:09:00.001-04:00

Click here to see the new Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Bill O'Reilly's crusade

2009-06-01T11:42:00.004-04:00

Bill O'Reilly is never one to apologize for his outrageous, often racist, sexist and homophobic commentary. For years, he has targeted the Kansas physician, George Tiller, who was shot dead in his church yesterday by an anti-abortion rights lunatic, for special derision. Read here this excellent piece on Salon by Gabriel Winant, and then contemplate why such purveyors of such wretched vile like O'Reilly, Limbaugh and the like are considered "mainstream" voices who command a place in the Republican hierarchy.

And if you're thinking of responding, "Hey, Limbaugh and O'Reilly represent the outer-fringe of the Republican party and not the core of the conservative movement," think again. Yes, I'd be concerned if the words, "Newt Gingrich" and "Rush Limbaugh" were mentioned in the same breath as "party leadership." But the fact is that Limbaugh and Gingrich, who have never had a serious thought between them about anything, are the current faces of the Republican party.

Red State Update

2009-06-01T11:32:00.002-04:00

Jackie and Dunlap discuss whether Sonia Sotomayor is a racist, the Rush Limbaugh-Rick Sanchez challenge and Grandma's "dirty talking" on iTunes.

Live Zeebop this week

2009-05-31T21:59:00.005-04:00

Upcoming live Zeebop . . .

Saturday, June 6th, Red Dog Cafe, 8301-A Grubb Rd., Silver Spring, Md., Three sets of straight-ahead jazz from 7-10 p.m. If the weather's nice, we'll be outdoors; if not, we'll be inside.

Saturday, June 13th, Maggianos, 5330 Wisconsin Ave., NW, Friendship Heights, D.C. Three sets of straight-ahead jazz from 7-10.30 p.m.

Sunday, June 14th, Red Dog Cafe. 6-9 p.m.

To learn more about Zeebop, click here. Please join our new Facebook page.

Zeebop is represented by Grabielismo Productions.

Robes, rogues and racists

2009-05-30T23:21:00.003-04:00

See Charles Blow's column this morning on the New York Times Op-Ed page. Blow, for those of you unfamiliar with his work, is the best thing to happen to the Times editorial page in years.