Yeah, I liked it. I will admit it is a bit self-indulgent, melodramatic, and slightly trite, but I give it a B, or B+.

I have them read a short story by Updike, “A&P,” and make them consider in an essay whether Americans love non-conformists as much as they think they do, and have them draw on both of those sources, plus others that they read throughout the term.

I made the essay up about 15 years ago, and the department still uses it for all 11th graders. It came out of my musings way back then about how even non-conformity is commodified in this culture. Punks go to the mall to buy punk clothes and hair dye. And with all the anti-heroes in our culture that we lionize, I started to wonder about what happens to people who actually march to the beat of a different drummer. So they read Huck Finn, and Catcher in the Rye, and watch Cool Hand Luke, and then they write about it.

I actually think most of those characters took stands for basically selfish reasons with the exception of Huckleberry Finn, who makes his decision believing that his choice will literally condemn him to hell. I think Charlie Dalton in DPS, and Sammy in “A&P,” made their stands more to impress other people than out of principle, and Holden Caulfield and Luke were non-conformists because they COULDN’T conform, not out of much principle.

I will have to show my class this clip tomorrow.

Was that last night?

I just showed that movie to one of my classes who had to write an essay on it for the final. Most kids had never heard of the movie.

nittany ram wrote:

Zooey wrote:

I’ve used boiling water, but it’s not practical for large areas.

I have a big patch of poison ivy growing next to the house that I’m going to dig out today. It’s labor intensive but digging them up (must get the majority of the roots too of course) is the quickest and most effective way to manage weeds.

Of course it is. It just takes a lot more time. And I have 3/4 acre of yard that is all overgrown and needs to be brought to heel.

Fuck

Wealthy people are more ideologically balanced than academics and journalists? He states that as a statement of fact; he doesn’t even need to back that up. It’s just true, apparently.

Cuz academics and journalists are liberal. Studies say so.

You know what else studies show?

Studies show that EVERYBODY is liberal. That’s the weird thing. Large majorities of people think global warming is accelerated by human activity and that we should do something about it. Large majorities of Americans are in favor of national health care, more spending on education, less spending on the military, more protections of the environment, and on and on.

So one wonders…why do they always single out academics and journalists? Would it be to imply that one can’t really trust the two segments of society that are more highly informed than other segments?

So we have this weird society where people don’t trust what they themselves believe.

Besides which, I still don’t know how money = speech. I would think speech is speech, and money is money, and they are different things. But one thing I am pretty sure of is that the authors of the first amendment did not even conceive of corporations having “speech rights.” I doubt the concept would have made any sense to them in any way. For the same reason it makes no sense to me.

And if the cost of getting corporate money out of elections means getting union money etc. out of elections, sign me up. Only humans should be able to individually contribute, and institutions are welcome to pay for advertising on their own…but not directly contribute to the political process.

NFL owners poised to award Los Angeles a Super Bowl next week in Charlotte

See, that’s what happens when Deborah Wasserman Schultz is put in charge of Super Bowl nominations.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 9 months ago by Zooey.

I forgot that you were a Republican. Now that you mention it, I remember, but you’ve articulated so many progressive perspectives so well, for so long, that I forgot.

Well, it’s nice to have you in the Loonie Left.

Hillary is also in favor of invading Syria to set up a “safe zone,” and confronting Russia along the border of the Ukraine and Baltic states, and has compared Putin to Hitler. She is cozy with Netanyahoo, and wants to kill the detente with Iran and put bombing them back on the table. She is all in favor of regime change.

And, if anything is done about the democracy, it will be to make it even harder for populists to gain traction. If she makes any changes to the system at all, she is likely to make it worse.

In the mean time, President Clinton is likely to mean that progressives will have to wait until 2024 to run a candidate again, even if Clinton is clearly vulnerable going into 2020.

I think 2024 is too late to save anything, and the job then will be about trying to salvage.

Trump, meanwhile, is less hawkish internationally – the Republican neocons are not going to endorse him – and a progressive can run in 2020 as the country may well decide it is time to give some democratic socialism a shot. I don’t know. He is also less likely to fast track the country to the TPP, and the complete obliteration of the working class. And in this scenario, I just sit there hoping that our legal system can stop Trump from doing insane things to non-whites.

This is just an awful, awful place to be. I cannot vote for either one of these people. I just can’t.

waterfield wrote:

I know there are few is any here will agree but for the sake of discussion I’m posting it because it articulates precisely how I feel about the comparison.

I skimmed over that op-ed last night, and I have to admit, I barfed a bit. For a couple of reasons. And I’m not going to do a point-by-point on this that nobody wants to read. There are a lot of points I disagree with in here.

But I have a couple of questions for you, Waterfield, and they are sincere. I am not trying to bait an argument, or anything. I am genuinely…curious…or mystified, maybe. I am really curious…

1) Why do you (since you said you agree with all of this) classify “Medicare for All” as “utopian”? Dozens of countries have single-payer, government-regulated health care, and have had it successfully since WWII. Dozens of them. All without crashing their economies as the right claims it will, all without destroying quality of care, as the right says it will. Why is National Health Care utopian? Honestly, I cannot think of any reason that does not include the following assumption: corporations control our government, not people. And if that assumption is part of your answer, why don’t you want to support a movement that is trying to get democracy back in this country? I flat out do not understand this. I flat out do not understand how a “liberal” can say, “It’s okay that our democracy has been subordinated to the well-being of Wall Street, and we need to settle for ‘incremental’ progress.” I do not understand it. I’m serious, Waterfield. Why can’t we have national health care? Why is that dismissed as pot-smoking wishful thinking?

2) What makes you think that Hillary Clinton can accomplish more than Bernie Sanders? First of all, Hillary is hated more than Obama. More Than Obama. The Right HATES her. Don’t you think that they might try to obstruct her? Don’t you think her entire term will be One-Thing-After-Another in terms of rabid ugliness? And who is going to pressure congress on her behalf? The “Great and Passionate Incrementalists”? Who is more likely to apply pressure on behalf of legislation, Bernie Sanders supporters, or Hillary supports? You KNOW where the energy is. And Hillary has been in the thick of government for a long time, I will grant that. She has been in the trenches. But so has Bernie Sanders. He just hasn’t had the nationwide profile that Hillary has. Actually, he has been in national politics since he was elected to the House in 1990 whereas Hillary arrived in 1992. He is not the neophyte Hillary backers think. And his record of getting legislation accomplished is pretty good, especially considering his political views. He has respect on both sides of the aisle, and does NOT have the enormous negatives that Hillary has. Look at the political landscape, and explain to me where Hillary is going to get bi-partisan support for anything whatsoever.

These are honest questions. I don’t want a fight. I am just…befuddled by these beliefs.

I voted for Jill Stein in 2012, maybe in 2008, though that may have been McKinney. I don’t remember exactly. But I think the last time I voted for a Democrat was 1992 which was the first time California went for the Democrat after 6 straight times going Republican. As much as I was leery of Clinton, I was so desperate to see the end of the Reagan/Bush era that I voted for him. I have voted Green Party ever since.

We will see this year.

Good to hear from you. I will be pulling for the Blues over the Sharks.

bnw wrote:

Nice post. The tax rates on the wealthy were much higher back then but almost no one paid those rates as there were loopholes which were taken to great advantage. US manufacturing didn’t have much competition on the world stage since WW2 devastated both europe and asia manufacturing. Now with the ease of investing anywhere in the world via stock exchanges the wealthy can and do keep substantial wealth offshore working elsewhere. That is why Trump wants to make it easy for corporations and the wealthy to bring that money back to the US to invest in US job creation.

Right, and I wouldn’t expect that pulling out the Eisenhower tax code from 1952 and dropping it on the country today would work at all. The economy is dynamic, and it changes all the time, so tax codes, as well as import/export tariffs, and the myriad of other ways the game is managed are in constant motion, and need constant maintenance.

So…I am not simply saying, “Tax the rich.” It isn’t that simple, and I don’t think anybody argues that it is. But corrections of some kind need to be made. Maybe a $15 national minimum wage is part of that equation. Maybe increased taxes on specific types of capital gains. I don’t know. I’m a high school teacher, not a tax attorney, nor a professor of economics. All I know is the playing field needs to be tilted somehow so that all that prosperity that has been almost entirely absorbed by Wall Street gets significantly redirected towards the workers who are sacrificing to create that prosperity.

bnw wrote:

wv wrote:

I’ll tell ya though, people always want to talk about
the ‘middle-class’ and helping the middle-class. Politicians
just love talking about the MC. But I’d prefer it
if they’d talk more about the flat-out-Poor.

The emphasis on the MC kinda suggests the poor
dont ‘deserve’ help but the glorious middle-class does.

Middle class is the engine of job creation. It is also the largest group of consumers of means. It is also a reasonable quality of life which is why it is aspired to by the middle class and the poor. It is also a starting point with a certain level of inherent advantage in which to attain greater economic success. The concept of upward mobility is appealing to most people.

I am inclined to agree with bnw, here. And I think it is because I see the fortunes of the middle class and the poor more-or-less hitched together. You find huge disparity gaps between the rich and poor every so often. In those cases, the middle class has also been weakened like the poor. You don’t find big gaps between the middle class and poor, with the middle class’ prosperity tied to the wealthy and only the poor left behind. Unions were a great binder, but even in their absence, the two classes have more in common than they do apart in terms of the trajectories of their circumstances. I think, anyway. I think you will find that the arcs of their experience are pretty similar whereas the line denoting the wealthy will operate independently. Helping the middle class helps the poor. Helping the poor helps the middle class.