Last Thursday McCain spoke of the shallowness of self as compared to giving oneself over to a cause greater than oneself. He spoke of his love for his country and not much else. The next morning I wondered what loving your country or giving oneself to a cause has to do with education,the housing crisis, health care, or the war in Iraq. 

During a freewrite towards the end of the summer semester, using the prompt "the world is..." a student wrote: the world is a joke when your school hires an idiot to be your role model, and smirked, looking me directly in the eye as she read it. The class gasped. I looked down, cringed, and kept moving. Later, going over a handout on the fallacies or argument we came to a section on "name calling" and we got a chance to talk about the inability of labels to advance discussion in a productive way. Instead, dead ending it in a binary: no, I'm not / yes, you are, etc. Sarah Palin...

Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani seem like smart people whose imagination has failed them, leaving us with caricatures of people and ideas. It takes a lot of energy to paint a realistic picture. School started today and it will be good to get my mind out of the political gutter. On the bright side I finally got a San Francisco Giants hat for the low low price of one dollar. Finally the guy at the convenience store will get off my case for wearing an Athletics hat. He will be so proud!