A President Who Reads

In a recent White House email, with “You Tell Me” in the subject line, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Nancy-Ann De Parle sent out an open request for ideas on ways the President can put Americans back to work without waiting for Congressional approval. Since Congress has refused to offer the President anything but hate-speech since the Koch Party took over, opening a dialogue with the American people directly seems like a reasonable strategy. Here’s what I suggested: Full story »

With cover adornments like “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry” and “Poet Laureate of the United States,” Ted Kooser’s Delights & Shadows (2004) lured me in like a will-o-wisp. Hell, there was even a single white streetlight—maybe a faerie light—in the painting used as cover art. I’m a sucker for that stuff.

But the book’s first poem, “Walking on Tiptoe,” offers a promise of seeing in the dark. In fact, through the whole book, Kooser seems very much concerned with what we see and how.

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I still can’t believe I got a dude with a harelip for a roommate. And his name is Roger. Fucking Roger. I walk in and he’s already claimed the top bunk, his computer the only thing up and running besides my blood.

He introduces himself as Roger F. McAlister the Third, son of douche bag blah blah blah blah. I stop listening.

I throw my bags on the bottom bunk – an old hockey bag with a faded Whalers team logo on the side, and my backpack, at this moment, full of flip flops and extra guitar strings. I prop my guitar case up against the side of the bunk.

The room’s not as claustrophobic as I expect. I thought it’d be a cinder block. The walls are white and no doubt concrete, but the beds take up only one corner, the built in wall-length desks only one side of the room. The rest is open, and the closets aren’t too bad. Full story »

“Iran regards utilizing nuclear weapons as forbidden in Islam,” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, once said. On another occasion, he declared: “The Islamic Republic of Iran, based on its fundamental religious and legal beliefs, would never resort to the use of weapons of mass destruction.”

In 2008 a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll revealed that, while 81% of Iranians favored nuclear energy, 58% agreed with the Supreme Leader’s statement, while only 23% supported a nuclear-weapons program. In fact 63% expressed approval that Iran was still party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Presumably, those polled responded truthfully. But, in light of the International Atomic Energy Agency report presenting more evidence that Iran is acquiring the know-how and technology to build nuclear weapons, who — left or right — really believes the Supreme Leader’s avowals? Full story »

See update at the end

I’ve been keeping my head down ever since the news broke that Jerry Sandusky, former defensive coordinator for the Penn State Nittany Lions football team, was arrested and charged with multiple accounts of child sexual abuse. I needed time to process how I felt about everything, and yet every time I seemed to get close to grasping onto something, events would send my thoughts and emotions careening beyond my reach again. The Penn State mess has made a stressful period of my life harder for a simple reason: between August of 1991 and May of 1995, I attended the Pennsylvania State University, aka Penn State. And when you spend the four most formative years of your life at a university that is under assault from all sides, it hits you in places and in ways that you’re not prepared for.

What follows is my attempt to make sense of a small part of what I’m feeling right now. Full story »

Penn State, like many of the big schools, is focused on sports and football as the big ticket event. Sports is so big at Penn State that it is home to the John Curley Center for Sport Journalism and the Knight chair in Sports Journalism and Society. Sports is endemic. It’s part of Penn State’s  DNA as Philadelphia Daily News columnist John Baer reports.

Though, as awful as the situation is, Penn State is not alone in revering athletics. At a lot of schools, in the Big Ten, the Big 12, the PAC 12 and so on, athletics is number one to its students, its alums and its board. The likelihood of blind eyes being turned for other matters (hopefully never sexual abuse) would not surprise me. It’s what happens when the questionable decision of elevating athletics over academics occurs. Full story »

I just found out an amusing fact about old Shane MacGowan, the brilliant songsmith who founded one of Celtic rock’s most celebrated bands and is somehow still with us after years of reckless merriment, spirits having literally preserved him.

Another influential musician (albeit in a different genre) recounted something from his youth in England that involved the mischievous Mr. MacGowan:

At my previous school in London I was good friends with Shane. He and I used to sit together in the back row of English Lit. He was extremely smart.

On one occasion during a boring reading of some classic novel or other, the teacher spotted me and Shane nattering. He singled me out saying something like, “What figure of speech is ‘indubitably’… Robertson?”

Shane whispered under his breath: “It’s an onanism.”

Ha. “IT’S AN ONANISM, SIR!” I blurted out.

Deadly pause.

“Robertson, please come up to the front of the class, take down the OED and read out to the class the definition of the word onanism.”

Which I did. Much to the delight of Shane and the rest of the class.

This little gem was recalled by one Thomas Morgan Robertson, who was famously blinded in 1982 (by something other than incessant onanism).

The City of Portland and the Occupy movement are both to blame for Portland’s impending Sunday morning, at 12:01 a.m., dismantling of the Occupy movement’s tent city in downtown Portland.

They’ve both blown an excellent opportunity for the protection of both free speech and the community’s rights. Here’s why:

Basically, though parks are part of the streets, parks and sidewalks that have been traditionally protected as free speech public forums, the government has a well-established right to regulate the time, manner, and place of the speech.

So, scratch the right to be in the park making your point after closing hours. And there’s even no right to pitch a tent, if the regulations say you cannot.

End of considerations. And all those Occupy people who complain about it are just a bunch of whiners.

Actually, here at the end is where it gets interesting, and possibly lengthier than we had thought at the beginning when we compressed a good century’s worth of free speech principles into a short paragraph.
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There are still nights when the nightmares take me. I am in the shop I made, standing behind the till. My wares are on the shelves and I wait for customers who never come.

I see them passing by the windows, looking in. Their faces, a mixture of curiosity and contempt I dare not interpret. My heart-beat is erratic. I am 10 kilos down. I sleep maybe two hours a night. I am exhausted.

These are the days and nights of the zombie business; too weak to live, too strong to die. Full story »

I love sports and have my whole life. Ask anyone who knows me. But thanks to my upbringing, I have never been one to lose perspective where athletics are concerned. My grandparents never let me think for a second, for instance, that playing was as important as studying and the lesson stuck. The state of big money college sports appalls me. That our society clearly values the contributions of jocks more than it does educators explains a lot about why we find ourselves in the predicament we’re in politically and economically. Millionaires and billionaires being unable to figure out a way to divvy up the GDP of Barbados has gotten so commonplace that you wonder why it’s even news.

So the Penn State sex abuse scandal, which last night claimed the jobs of university president Graham Spanier and head football coach Joe Paterno, at some level feels like more of the same. Full story »

Twitter.com/LeeCamp

“The cyclops woman squints at them, those who deem themselves unlovely, and knows that no one would look at them twice in a crowd.” - “The Cyclops” by Teresa Milbrodt…

We live in an age of integration. We mainstream, accommodate, and in other ways try to make up for the cruelty of much of human history toward humans whose physical, mental, and emotional characteristics fall outside the range of that which we in our blissful ignorance have long called “normal.”

Teresa Milbrodt’s new book, Bearded Women, is the writer’s attempt to make “otherness” part of “normal” human experience. This group of stories takes human characteristics which we would normally associate with “freak shows” and weds them to narratives about “normal” human problems. It’s a brilliant conceit – and Milbrodt executes it so well that the reader finds him/herself following each story not with the voyeur’s eye to the main character’s “otherness” but with the sympathy/empathy that we would show to anyone we encountered who was struggling with problems that we’ve either faced and solved ourselves or helped friends or family members face and solve.

A few examples from the book will serve to make my point here clear:

* In “Bianca’s Body” the main character is a woman with two lower torsos – surely freak show stuff. Full story »

I have no idea whether Herman Cain did or did not assault the four women who have accused him of sexual assault. But something he said during his press conference last Tuesday has me very suspicious. According to news reports, Cain said the following at least twice:

I have never acted inappropriately with anyone. Period.

Why does this statement make me suspicious, you ask? Simply put, any man who makes this claim and isn’t the second coming of Jesus is a liar.

I don’t know a single man who hasn’t acted inappropriately with regard to a woman (or another man, if gay) at some point in his adult life. Some men brag about their sexual conquests to their buddies or on social media. Some mime sexual acts to make their boorish buddies laugh. Some quote inappropriate comedians at socially awkward times. Some reveal personal secrets they were told by a woman in confidence. Full story »

The bar was overcrowded, and a thick mist of human perspiration hung limply in stale air.  There were a couple of thrash bands playing that night, and I’d gone with a handful of friends to see the show.  My buddy Dusty and a couple of his girlfriends hung back in the crowd, opting to avoid the seething belligerence that was mounting amongst that predominantly male audience.  I planted myself right at the edge of the mosh pit, from where I could see the bands and assess the chaos.  I knew some of the guys dancing.  They’d taken off their shirts, and were doing their best to incite all of the audience into a frenzy.  Some were too drunk, and the aggressions inspired by violent music were beginning to verge on assault.  These guys weren’t my friends, and on the best days they’d barely give me a nod passing me on the street.  I was afraid of them.  They were rippled sociopaths, with proclivities for steroids and methamphetamines.  Adrenaline astir, heart rates accelerated, they metabolized their booze quickly, impairing their judgment in ways they wouldn’t otherwise have anticipated.  The guys in the mosh pit were all buddies, and it seemed to me that they were just waiting for an interloper to stumble into their madness.  Hands clenched, those fists were starving. Full story »

I had my editorial all planned out in my head. First, Mississippi was going to be the first state to approve the thoroughly idiotic state constitutional amendment defining a fertilized egg (a zygote) as a person. Second, I… well, I never got past that first step, because Mississippi voters did the smart thing and voted down an amendment that would have made pregnant women second-class citizens at best, and livestock at worst. Full story »

“And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion. I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.”
         - Henry V, Act II, Scene 2

King Henry V was addressing Lord Scroop, a childhood friend who had sold him out to the French just before the English invasion. If the King couldn’t trust Lord Scroop, who could he trust?

These are tough times for a smartass like me. I want to mock the Kardashians and Newt Gingrich and whatever Twilight movie is about to be released (2 parts? Really? Does she need 2 parts to decide on a crib?). But all I can think about is Joe Paterno. Full story »

by Matthew Record

“In the immediate aftermath of the Twenty-sixth Amendment’s passage, nearly eleven million new voters joined the general electorate. Full story »

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It’s the end of the line for JoePa. You can slice it and dice it, wring your hands and tear your hair, chastise and moralize all you like, but in the end it boils down to one word: recruiting.

Penn State has a long and distinguished history, as both a football program and as an actual, you know, university. Its athletics program has never been tainted by any sort of scandal before, and that may well be because they have not, in fact, cheated (as opposed to the method employed by so many other schools, which is to cheat but not get caught). But make no mistake, Joe Paterno’s unprecedented run as head football coach, which dates back to the early 17^th century, has far less to do with integrity than it does winning. Full story »