1. Went to a meeting about Assessment. The speaker did my absolute least favorite thing: she handed out copies of her PowerPoint presentation and essentially read from it. Do these morons think we can't read? She didn't have a whole lot (like, any) she added over and above the presentation; that could have been mailed to us, and then I could have slept this morning. Insult to injury: there really wasn't anything in this presentation I hadn't heard before anyway. I had to drag my ass out of bed on a Friday morning to follow along with someone reading a presentation of information I already knew. Makes me friggin' furious.
It was supposed to last from 9-11:30; at 9:45, I got up and left. That's the second thing this week I've left early. I never would have done that before maybe a year ago; I'd have been very dutiful and sat still and listened to the whole thing. I'm beginning to feel like I'm 42; life is short (no, I am not ill). I don't have to sit through everything anymore. If you are sucking time away from me, in many situations, I'm entitled to reclaim some portion of that time. If I let my life get away from me, that's nobody's fault but mine; nobody's going to protect my time but me.
2. Went on a signature-gathering campaign for the Arthur class; failed in three of the four attempts, so I have to go to that campus again some day this week and try again. Frustrating.
3. Finished another issue of The New Yorker and read this month's Harper's. There was a piece of journalism in the latter in comic form that's sort of haunting me; it deals with our training of the Iraqi troops. Essentially, we are (or we were; announcements earlier this week may indicate this has stopped) subjecting Iraqi troops to U.S. Marine training. Now I'll tell you the truth; I'm not overly fond of military training methods. However, I understand that part of the goal is the utter destruction of the spoiled, pampered American teenager and his or her transformation into someone worth knowing (and therefore being; yeah, that's an extreme wording, but I think the training has extreme intent). While I think the training is often Draconian and cruel, I also think there's a level of consent from the trainees; nobody likes Marine training, but most people have some sense ahead of time what's going to happen, and recruits tolerate it because this is the path to Marinedom, which is a desirable thing.
However, in Iraq, we're giving that same training to men who did not sign up to be U.S. Marines. They signed up to be in the Iraqi military or police force, which are very different balls of wax. Many of them have been removed from their family, who do not know where they are. Now they are being yelled at (and these rants consist of quite vulgar, humiliating things) in a language they do not understand by people who are supposed to represent freedom and democracy.
Way to capture hearts and minds.
Under those circumstances, training which is extreme but probably acceptable for American young people is at least a form of torture and probably a violation of the Geneva Convention. If this is the training that has been ended, I would fully support that.
But that begs the next question: this is the only way we know how to train a military, and it's not appropriate culturally, nor is it doing us any favors on the international front.
So now what?
When the Viet Nam comparisons started being raised (which was before we'd even invaded), I said to several people, "No, Viet Nam isn't entirely the right comparison. A better comparison is going to end up being Korea, I'm afraid; if we don't have grandchildren there, it will be because we were expelled in a civil war that resulted in an American bloodbath."
So now we're ending these extreme training measures for the Iraqi nationals, which I think is entirely appropriate, and Congress has passed a law (which will of course not be enforced, but the law passed, nonetheless) requiring that we leave Iraq by October. Those two things don't go together. Even if we continue training, all indications are that we're years from leaving.
Forgive my juxtaposition of the ridiculous (computer games) and the sublime (and the lives of American service members), but I don't think anyone in power has played many simulations like Civilization. Rule number one of Civ: if you're going to declare war, you can't be a Democracy, because Democracies won't tolerate war for very long at all. Never mind motivation or support for the cause; unless the fate of the free world itself is in peril (as it was in WWII), you'd better have a damned blessed good reason for keeping our sons and daughters and neighbors and nieces and nephews and parents and spouses and co-workers away from home. Extending their tours is exactly the wrong move in a 21st century Democracy. Making them pay for medical treatment for injuries incurred in the line of duty is exactly the wrong move in a 21st century Democracy. Providing them with substandard medical treatment in a dilapidated facility...well, you get the idea. They should have friggin' Cedars Sinai and Johns Hopkins, and the people who sent them should have to go to Walter Reed.
I'm sorry; I really didn't intend to go political. Some of the images in the Harper's piece, though, are haunting me. (And I'll try not to say "friggin'" anymore.)
4. Our next NetFlix movie, The Whales of August, came today. My Co-Vivant has wanted me to see this for some time, so we watched it this evening. Interesting movie, very sweet and understated; Lillian Gish, Bette Davis, Vincent Price, Ann Sothern. The acting style is different from I'm accustomed to; it's almost a style suited for silents, as if it were being acted in the sepia tones of the first flashback scene, but it's effective in this particular movie.
What else did we watch tonight...E.R. (I talked about that last week. There have been some episodes over the last few years that, to be honest, we have watched in fast forward with the captioning on and read. It hasn't been that bad this season.) 30 Rock. We started some comic, but we couldn't finish him. (If a comedian's act starts, "God knows I love ya, white people, but...", he's really going to have to make us laugh for us to finish that half hour. A few have. Tonight's didn't.)
I guess we just need to decide as a culture whether we're going to notice difference or not. We're vacillating on this right now; sometimes "Everybody's just the same inside; we all need the same things, and appearance is irrelevant," and sometimes "Everybody's differences are what make us special, and we need to celebrate those." I'm not entirely convinced those are mutually exclusive, but we haven't worked it out. Are we supposed to assimilate or separate? A hundred years ago, that was easy; with a few exceptions, the goal was assimilation. The inherent arrogance in that assumption isn't missed.
On the other hand, every semester, I have I can't tell you how many students who are brilliant but frankly aren't allowed to do well in school because doing too well would be perceived by friends and sometimes even family as "turning white," which is the cardinal sin. I think that's a hugely racist assumption; it boils down to, "Success on those terms makes you someone we can't accept"--but no alternative terms have been presented, so success is largely unattainable. There was one comedian who had a big chunk of her act devoted to "The Fake Bitch"--essentially, this major component of her comedy was based on her ability to code-switch, to switch back and forth between the language she needed to use in the office place and the language that she needed to use in her home neighborhood.
When classes read Rodriguez's "Aria," most of them are just confused--So why couldn't this family speak both English and Spanish to each other? Why did one have to be entirely removed? Why did they let someone else dictate that to them? And it's all but impossible to get them to see Rodriguez's ambivalence; the essay, like most other things for beginning college students, is either all black ("This family was robbed of its cultural identity!) or white ("Look how successful he is! He benefited from this!") No gray ("Yes, the kids benefited--but at what cost?")
So no, I don't think we have this worked out yet. (Oh, geeze, the war and race in the same day. I must be too tired to self-censor.)
I also skimmed more in the Oppenheimer. My colleague who introduced the book said the St. John part seemed to be the most problematic, and it's after the Kangaroo Court, so I'm actually going to read that part; I've skimmed to there.
5. Got another 20% of most of my Pogo badges done. There's one badge in which I'm supposed to win a lot of Pool games. I'm not good at the Pogo pool games.
6. Got my Human Paladin to level 22 in World of Warcraft.
7. The BigFishGame looked like another three-matchy, so I didn't bother. I was able to win the last round of The Apprentice. I also tested a game for a beta program I'm in. I'll talk about that one when it's released.
8. No cleany things today, but I brought home lunch after my campus foray and made dinner, so that oughtta count for something.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment