my nephew's teeth

Grades are done and it's the first semester in four years that I didn't fail a single student. Yay. Twas a hard working class. Now to pack and be off to the middle west. Please enjoy this picture while I am gone.

In the paper on Sunday was this editorial entitled "What Happened To Obama?" by an academic named Drew Westen, who teaches psychology at Emory University. The editorial is a kind of psychological analysis of Obama's political decisions, and more or less trashes them/him. It's a powerful piece of writing, talking about how Obama has lost his sense of self and is bullied and how his language has lost its poetry, and how all of the above contribute to his failure of leadership. Westen makes this observation regarding the Democrats in general:

In fact, the average American had no idea what Democrats were trying to accomplish by deficit spending because no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, "stick."

Which I think is key, making sure there are real world analogs to go along with the sound "reasoning" of the left. That our two wars were launched not on the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans (a fraction of how many Americans die, say, of obesity yearly), but on the image of airplanes crashing into New York City. Or at the very least because of a combination of the two. The importance of poetics, or poetry as a memory aid. Numbers are unreal and unconvincing, and if you want to move people you have to tell a story. At least that is part of Westen's argument.

But who are we to make pronouncements about the person of the president? I guess it's a public office and one puts themselves out there, but if the president were standing in the room with me, of course I wouldn't have the nerve to criticize him on that level. A couple weeks ago I wrote a little about the Women's World Cup Final (Japan won, the US lost) but what I posted here, under my own name, was heavily edited compared to what I posted semi-anonymously on the comments page of the Times. That to call someone out is easy when you're sitting alone with some cats on a sunny morning in Oakland. Regardless, the article is interesting, as is this editorial on Westen's editorial.
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This Friday I'm off for the glory of Madison Wesconsin in August: crickets, humidity, warm nights, and a relatively empty downtown. Of course there is my mother and step-father, which is really why I'm going, to visit for four days and then, driving down (in my aunt's car) to Indiana (via Chicago) to visit some professors and current graduate students at Purdue's composition and rhetoric program. The one I'm applying to this fall. Then to Kentucky (Ken-tuck) to see uncles and cousins and sister and clan, and then I'll be headed back to 'sconny' for a day and then back here for a week and a half of pre-semester meetings, adjusting curriculum and hanging out in Oakland. That is to say I'm going to be gone for a little bit.

The semester gets over this coming Wednesday and it's been a challenging one. In part because I've been really stressed about money, not having as much work as I need to pay bills. Imagine if your college teachers had to pick up painting jobs on the weekends to make credit card payments. Imagine John Boehner picking up dog shit. Imagine buying a BMW on a whim. Imagine, wait, actually you don't need to imagine any of this. Two comments from the article linked to just a few lines above, Otis writes:

"So sick of these comments about the rich not paying their share. Do folks know that the top 10% of wage earners pay 70% of all the taxes collected? Do you know what percentage the bottom 50% pay in federal taxes? 2%. That's right 2%."

And Kevin responds:

"Do you want to know why they pay 70% of all the taxes? Because they own 85% of all the wealth. Pretty straight forward. What if they own 100% of the wealth and pay 100% of the taxes? Would that still be unfair to them?"

Unbelievable. I was having dinner with Amy last night and naturally, we were talking about debt ceilings and the economy and the turned worm of America's fortunes, and man I wish we let those investment banks fail when we had the chance. Hardship for all, possibly, but from my perspective, I really don't have much to lose. I've been out of college for twelve years, and have been working in two of the least valued fields in the country: education and art. Asides from my two years in graduate school (a full scholarship that was barely enough to live on, but was still a step up from what I was making) I've had one job that provided health insurance, and I'm not even going to talk about my debt. If it's like this for me, a person of relative privilege and very relative talent, what's it like for everybody else?

As our global rank declines in terms of education, income, livings standards, health, and obviously, happiness; where exactly are we headed? In the last couple years I've transitioned from a vaguely optimistic, though cynical perspective on politics and opportunity, to being sullen and bitter and straight up angry at the obliviousness we are invited to marinate ourselves in. The best advice I ever got was from CD (Wright), during a workshop somebody was ripping into somebody else's work, and she said, "Put your anger into your work." I find this advice, and this kind of propellant, to be helpful.