Why do they call them “snickerdoodles” if they don’t contain Snickers? I don’t get it.
Tag: ‘questions’
Musings about a world on fire
Monday, October 9th, 2006Well, it’s Monday and I’m back home in Austin for three whole days before I set off for another conference in Fort Worth. I think I left my sunglasses on the plane last night (either that or they’re on the floor under my seat in the Phoenix Airport – if anyone happens by gate D1, would you check under the seats in the boarding group B area?). I called the local baggage office to see if anyone had found them, but no dice. It was a long shot anyway. This, of course, is why I never pay more than $20 for sunglasses. I’d be hysterical if they were actually expensive.
Anyway.
I had an interesting meeting at work today – well, it would have been more interesting if I’d been more awake (I got home around 11 last night), and in the mood for pointless speculation.
The question at hand was: how do we increase the level of understanding between the United States and the Middle East? More specifically, is there a way to convince the Arab world that we’re not the bad guys?
The short answer is “no,” because the question is one sided: we can only offer information, but we can’t alter the lens through which it’s taken. That’s something completely out of our control. We can better understand that lens, but the bottom line is that we, as the United States, cannot influence or alter perceptions in other parts of the world simply because we’re the United States and there’s a whole lot of baggage associated with that.
This is a long conversation boiled down to its salient points, and I hate to be the pessimist on things like this since global understanding falls into my job description somewhere, but you can’t make people like you. You can’t make people care. And you can’t easily convince a people with a long history of being dominated that this time it’s going to be different.
And then I got home and flipped on the TiVo and watched the third season premiere of Battlestar Galactica. It aired on Friday night, but for all of the amenities at Harvey’s casino and resort in Lake Tahoe, the SciFi channel wasn’t one of them.
If you’re not watching Battlestar Galactica, you’re missing out on something rather profound on television, and that’s not a word that I tend to use when describing TV shows. If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking of the late 70s scifi show with the weird robots running around with the LED lights on their helmets muttering in monotone and Lorne Green acting all weighty and melodramatic. It’s certainly what I had in mind when Ray got hooked on the show and slowly convinced me to start watching.
Strike that. The series has been re-invented as an edgy, moody, politically relevant drama. The human race has been reduced to a population of just a few thousand (events played out in a two hour miniseries that plays out far more realistically than the end of the world scenario in recent dogs like War of the Worlds) in a battle with the Cylons, a race that humanity created to serve them. Originally robots with artificial intelligence, the Cylons have developed into — cyborgs? It’s not entirely clear — humanoids who are indistinguishable from their human parents.
Where the series becomes frighteningly relevant is in the setup that occurred at the end of the last season: humanity had settled on a marginally habitable planet, only to have the Cylons re-appear a year later and occupy the planet.
In the third season premiere, it’s half a year later, and an insurgency is raging. Security restrictions have the population’s movement controlled. Suicide bombers strike with no warning. Those who are believed to be in collaboration with the occupying forces are also targets for the insurgents. There are elements of a holy war at play with the missionary Cylons who preach obedience to One God, while the humans are led, in part, by a president who views herself as the fulfillment of a religious prophecy. Sound familiar? At all?
The episode was actually painful to watch — there are rumors that the occupation will only last a few more episodes, and then the whole program moves back into space to continue the cat-and-mouse game that took up the bulk of the first two seasons. Then we can get back to other interesting questions such as: with humanity so greatly reduced in numbers, should abortion be legal? Producer Ronald D. Moore has even promised to figure out how to addressed homosexuality in the new season (and it would be even better if it somehow involved the hunky captain Apollo, although that’s a pipe dream if ever there was one).
I’m telling you, Battlestar could take on The West Wing as the most politically relevant show on television any day. And you should be watching.
Such an easy word …
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006It’s my own fault, really.
I had a hellish day at work. I worked through lunch, and by about 4:00 in the afternoon my brain had just had enough of working overtime, and I found myself dabbling around on my computer at work. This is when I do things that I will eventually regret.
My sin, if we can call it that today, was that I surfed over to a Web site that I shouldn’t have. No, not one of those Web sites (get your mind out of the gutter). I won’t do this particular Web site the privilege of naming it outright, partly because I don’t want anyone who works there to discover the reference on my site and start monitoring what I say here. The people that keep this particular Web site up do that sort of thing.
Let’s just say that it was a neo-conservative Web site that was up and running long before having a neo-com Website was cool among people that think neo-con Websites are cool. It likes to criticize people who work in my field who don’t espouse their particular brand of neo-conservative ideas about what the United States should be doing in the rest of the world. If you’re crafty and have figured out what field I work in, you could probably find it in a few quick strokes over on Google.
Anyway, I read a few articles on this Web site and it had the usual effect on my blood pressure, which made me grateful for once that I’m not the one in my house who has the high blood pressure problem (yet). Because a lot of the columns on this Web site read like the angry rants that they actually are, and they make frequent use of one word in particular.
The word that I am referring to in the title of this post is traitor. It gets thrown around a lot, and as much as I as a liberal would love to sit on my left facing love seat and claim that it’s a word that only neo conservatives use, it’s not. (This is why liberals always lose arguments and debates: we’re willing to admit our own faults, and we’re willing to admit when the other side has a valid point.)
Everyone is a traitor these days. You can’t watch C-SPAN these days without watching the Democrats call the Republicans traitors, and the Republicans call the Democrats traitors, and sometimes the President comes out and uses words that his speech writers have looked up in Microsoft Thesaurus™ that aren’t ‘traitor’ but mean the same thing.
When I was in South Padre over the weekend, staying at the Bates Motel, I caught a glimpse of Fox News – which loves to use the word – in which some conservative pin-up female anchor was going on at length about how Noam Chomsky’s book was at the number one position on Amazon.com because it had been cited by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in a speech at the U.N. denouncing the United States.
She was practically in a state of advanced sexual gratification over the number of things she could label as traitorous actions: Chavez, as we all know, is a traitor (never mind that he’s not from the U.S. – he’s still a traitor); the U.N. is a traitor because it doesn’t do whatever the U.S. wants whenever the U.S. wants it done; Chavez actually denounced the U.S. at the U.N., which I think is the Fox News equivalent of calling someone a whore and then actually catching them exchanging sex for money; and we all know that just about everyone hates Noam Chomsky.
The conservatives hate him because he’s liberal. The liberals hate him because he’s a linguist who writes about political science. And college students hate him because his writing is so unbelievably turgid that it requires copious amounts of attention just to get through the dedication passage of any of his books. I’ve never read Chomsky, I’ve just heard the horror stories from students in the Linguistics department.
Anyway, our friend over on Fox News was going on at length about this ‘undeniable proof that left-leaning Americans are rushing out to buy Chomsky’s book in order to support Hugo Chavez.’ Wha-huh? How does that follow? (OK, we’re talking about something that was said on Fox News, but still … ) Why couldn’t it be some of the right-leaning Americans who want to see what the fuss is about? Or burn the book? And who the hell cares what’s on Hugo Chavez’s night stand anyway? (For the record, we don’t have to guess what’s on Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s night stand: he probably says so in his blog, but I can’t read Persian so I don’t know for sure.)
But the bigger issue here is this: at what point did it become acceptable for us as Americans to start labeling each other based on our own perceptions of what constitutes patriotic behavior? For a country that was supposedly founded on the free exchange of ideas, we have become remarkably intolerant – and I’m talking about both liberals and conservatives here – of people who espouse viewpoints different than our own. I admit it – I do it too. I’ve always been a trend-follower, rather than a trend-setter, but I have also been the kind of person who will call out stuff that I think is phenomenally fucked up. And this, boyses and girlses, is phenomenally fucked up.
What I’m saying here is part of what I deleted from the 9/11 retrospective post that never happened. For me, the legacy of 9/11 is that it marked a turning point: suddenly people didn’t feel the need to be tactful or diplomatic anymore.
Maybe it wasn’t a direct result of 9/11 – maybe it had been going on for a while – but it was after 9/11 that I actually noticed it because I was on the receiving end of quite a bit of it. Think Muslims are evil? Say it out loud! Want to go bitch slap those liberal lefties who want the U.S. out of Iraq? Put it on your bumper! Want the U.S. out of Iraq now? Stand on the Congress Avenue bridge during evening rush hour and make your voice heard! Afraid that multi-cultural education might be secretly recruiting our children for the hordes of Islamics (that’s pronounced “eye-slam-ics”) who are waiting in the shadows to turn this country into the United States of Mecca? Testify before the Texas State Board of Education and make sure that a Bible course gets approved for the high school curriculum. Want to make sure that people like that don’t get taken seriously? Start a blog! Why the hell not?
Have we forgotten how to be nice to each other? Have we forgotten how to be diplomatic? Have we forgotten what the American dream was supposed to be about? Have I had too much to drink tonight and am I writing myself into a corner? Probably.
I don’t have answers to any of this. I wish I could follow the example of Dean over at Aman Yala and command a piano to fall on their heads, but I’m not sure there’s enough pianos to go around – nor am I sure that one wouldn’t be coming for me … Besides, I’ve always been the sort of person who’s better at posing questions than finding answers.
See … just like I said, I’m willing to admit my own flaws. This is why I can’t win arguments. Not even the rhetorical ones I have with myself…
Like, and stuff.
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006Today was the Study Abroad Fair at work, and like a good little shepherd I went down there to hawk my wares since we do have a new program to announce for next summer. (Coming next year: Morocco and Sicily 2007)
I think I’ve forgotten repressed what last year’s event was like, because I did have slight flashbacks of it as I stood in the heat, wilting like a dying flower.
A lot of the students who come to the fair are trolling: they wander by and pick up everything they can get their hands on (Adam stopped by for a bit and asked in the most incredulous way: “Do any of them actually ask questions??”) It will wind up in a big pile on their desk, dresser, or dorm room floor, and at some point they may actually look at the first two or three items before the rest of the stuff winds up in the trash. These students will not read the three page, black and white photocopy that I provided them because it is not glitzy, glamorous, and printed on recycled paper. I mentioned to both Samer and Adam (next year’s leaders) that all of our advertising next year must include photographs of students partying and bare-breasted native women. Boobs and beer, that’s how to get them into your booth.
One of the staffers from European Studies — she was across the aisle from me, and we made faces at each other most of the day — would periodically compare notes with me to establish which one of us got the more ridiculous question. Among some of the winners:
- “Do you have programs specifically for Electrical Engineering students?” (No: all of our programs are open to students from all majors, but we’re a Liberal Arts program that has not, at any point in its history, had any students double major with Electrical Engineering, so it wasn’t high up on the priority list).
- “If I study abroad, do you know if I can take physics classes?” (I guess? But more importantly, is comparative physics a big topic? Do they teach different physics in the Middle East than they do here?)
- Do you offer any American Studies courses? (Well, we’re the Middle Eastern Studies department, so … have you tried the Center for American Studies? The name kinda gives it away … )
However, it was agreed by late in the afternoon that I had the ultimate winner. One of the students trundled up to me and said: “So, I’m, like, interested in studying the Middle East and stuff.” Oh, dear.
But I’m home now. The sun is shining, Ray is mowing the lawn, and the dog wants to go for a walk. And my vacation starts in two days …
