So, yes, I’m back from DC.  And it was quite a trip.  As you’ll note from this flash-photography-forbidden-on-pain-of-death photo, I paid a visit to the U.S. National Archives, and viewed the argon-filled laser-cut cases that preserve the printed constitution, even as its actual provisions are shortly to be rendered quaint.  (BTW: the Constitution and Declaration are now supposed to be refered to as “The Charters of Freedom,” as in “Operation Iraqi” or as in “-Loving” or as in the not Peace but Faith-based “Freedom Corps.”)

Washington was interesting, and sort of disturbing, in ways I’m sure you’d expect.  Everying is behind planters and little hydralulic flip-gates.  Camera-containing smokey domes sprout like gargoyles from the corners of every building, and you imagine that in some secure sub-basement, gargoyle-like figures peer out from these cameras, all twisted up as a consequence of maintaining their suspicious gaze.

And all around the place are shiny new fences, and on each fence is a metal sign: LONG FENCE.  As if a single LONG FENCE has descended across the capital.  Or sprouted from beneath it.  The pervasive and intense efforts at securing the place are visible everywhere.

But, still, my visit was grand.  Just for kicks, I tried posting a few pictures from the trip here on Flickr.  You’ll see 16 haphazard pics there, since I was a little confused about how to use the much-vaunted Flickr, and am a little too busy to re-arrange or post more pics at just this very moment.

The best part of the trip was seeing some old (and new) friends.  Perhaps the second best was the short film I watched in the National Archives prior to viewing the Declaration of Independence (as pictured above).  Washington was, umm, abuzz with the possiblity that the senate filibuster would be “nuked” by a Republican majority determined to install Priscilla Owen et. al. on the fedeal bench.  The film on the declaration (perhaps scripted by a Freedom-hating archivist?) mentioned that the buisness about “self-evident truths” and so forth at the top of the declaration had been for the signers mostly a rhetorical flourish, and that the substance of the document was the ennumeration of complaints against George III that comprises the bulk of declaration.  Complaints against the King’s tyranny, such as:

“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices”

Ah, yes.  The text of the Declaration is faded and nearly unreadable.  But you can take a look at it here.

Among the complaints against the Tyranical GIII:

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. . . .

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. . .

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences . . .

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

Meet the old George–same as the new George.  Or pretty close.  Especially if you view the Declaration through the lens of some of George V’s newer colonial posessions.

No posts today, it turned out.  Yet I cannot resist noting these diversions:

Only the cutest survive!  (be sure to check out the not so cute, too!)

and . . .

Life in these United States, hipster-style . . .  (stay away from the archives, unless you are seriously determined to waste large globs of time).

. . . but I’m here in the Panera in the Deer Park Town Center, somewhere in Lake County, Illinois.  A place built on the suburban model of opulence, in which only size and cleanliness really matter.

A couple of semesters ago, one on my students (a very sincere and well-meaning person) complained to me during office hours of his real anxiety at being in a place like Champaign, with poor areas, and places comparatively unclean.  I spotted him in the parking lot here a couple days ago, seeming perfectly at home.

Anyhow, the Jeffersonian rotunda at the center of the Deer Park “Town Center” is notably more clean than the one I visited in Washington, hoping to reclaim a sense of sanity.  And if this one is surrounded by Nordic-Track and Williams-Sonoma shops, it at least hasn’t been rigged with television cameras like those poking down from inside the dome of Jefferson’s memorial.

I’m getting anxious, since I’m still not back in Champaign working on my dissertation, as I really now want to be.  It looks like I’ll need to be here a few more days.  My Grandmother (in Madison, WI) isn’t doing so well lately, and I need to visit her before heading back to CU.  It now seems it will be impossible to get up there before Sunday.  Which means Thursday, Friday, and Saturday here in Palatine–an insanity inducing possibility.  I have reading to do and a laptop, but serious dissertation work is difficult here.  It’s all I can do to flee the house and hide out at the local Panera with a book, a laptop and an internet connection. 

Expect more writing on DC once I make it back to Champaign.  DC was excellent, and I have many miscellaneous comments and notes (and a few pictures, even) to post about my visit there.  For now suffice it to remark on the kindness and generosity of my hosts, who put up with me for longer than anyone should have to.  Back then to my work, and my questionable Panera tea.

I’ve installed the latest version of the Authimage CAPTCHA code that requires that a code be entered to leave a comment.

I’ll be trying to turn in grades today, before leaving tonight for Chicagoland.  From there I’ll be heading to D.C. for a few days of R&R with the Viper and a certain A. Imbroglio.  During the next couple of weeks, I may possibly post here now and again, depending on my proximity to a computer machine.

Just trying to swallow down the dregs of the semester, since it is required that these be properly digested.  Still some grading and computing of grades to complete.  Or excrete, if I’m stuck with my metaphor.

I was hoping to be done in time for Jeff S.’s “going away to a great job” party tomorrow, and maybe even to drop by the GEO thing as well.  I’d probably know only a handful of folks at the GEO event, but it might be worth braving the unfamiliars to bid Sanjay and Rosemary a proper fond farewell. 

I’m off to grade some more.  Enjoy an unrelated link to the latest in sleep communications.

Because all of us Chaps and Chapettes must decide: are we to be good eggs?  or bad?

[NOTE 1: link via  Ghost of a Flea]
[NOTE 2: Chap Magazine is not to be confused with English Cut, which takes its Chappiness deadly serious.]

Who is the least favorite recording artist?  Who’s the most derivitive white girl in the musical neighborhood?  Well, the answer is too obvious, and I don’t really want to mention her name here.

But why then have I been listening to her latest single for the last hour and a half?  I’m often a sucker for horrible music, but I’m not sure whether I’d have been quite entranced without first seeing the video.  It’s a rip-off from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 2,  but it seems somehow an authorized one.  S tefani reprenents a kind of empty, clean, and empowered banality that finds high expression on high school football fields, and that makes a  claim to a weird undeniablity. 

So then, do not listen to this sound file.  There are only two possible consequences of doing so: 1) sad pity for one who could be so taken by such a glob of sound, and 2) you yourself might end up hyptonized by a sousaphone.

[related topic]

. . . one, two, three;

Turning taxis from across the sea.

Hmmm.  So Matt Drudge is complaining today that Howard Dean and the Democratic party are endorsing Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders for the Senate  — the rub being of course that although Sanders is always refered to as the House’s lone “Independent,” he’s also a Socialist.  I didn’t know this until today. 

But where will Bernie Sanders be tonight?  He’ll be sitting in front of my newly healed eyes, along with Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein and a few others at the Follinger auditorium.
It’s amazing sometimes the sort of people who on occasion end up here in the middle of flatland, nowhere thanks to the univeristy.  The occasion, today and tomorrow, is a conference on media consolidation, which will include not only folks like Hersh, Sanders, and Klein, but also ones like Dennis Swanson — the Chief Operating Officer of Viacom’s Programing Divsion. 

I’ll surely try and catch tonight’s talks, and perhaps some of tomorrow’s, too.  Maybe I’ll see y’all there.

Sometime it’s dangerous to be too much on the cutting edge.  Ever since making this post (or rather a longer version of this post that included some comments of mine), this here poor website has been thronged by people searching for clips from the show I discuss here, I’ve had to repeatedly cull nasty and dumb comments from the thread.

So I removed the show’s name from TDQ, and it seems that Google’s cache has finally stopped pointing this show’s fans (and enemies) from finding their way to this dark secret corner of the web.    The sort of thing that does illustrate the advantages of less search-accessible weblogs.

Matthew Iglesias and Zwichenzug have been considering the place of economic populism within the Democratic party.  Both of them are pretty harsh on Dick Gephardt, who was my favorite candidate of the bunch.

Despite Zwichenzug’s comments, Gephardt did not run as a simple protectionist, but rather as one who wanted international trade agreements to include provisions for labor rights, environmental standards, and wages.  Protectionism?  In a sense, but a far cry from slapping tariffs on cheap goods from other countries.  He was not running as a old school protectionist..

Iglesias rightly points out that in the last election it was Dean who was painted as the Liberal, while Gephardt came off as middle of the road.  This, it is true, was an amazing inversion.  Gephardt supported universal health-care, an international minimum wage, a huge alternative energy program–real New Deal Democrat stuff.  And he terrified Republicans, who knew that this stuff could sell.

It was amazing therefore that the media and everybody rallied around Dean as the Liberal savior.  The whole traditional left-right distinction seemed to have been lost on a media totally unable to conceptualize or consider class as a important issue.  Two reasons I’d note for this:

1) Bill Clinton.  8 years of empathetic identity-based “Liberalism” that ripped popularist politics right out of the Democratic party. 

2) As Bob Somersby’s excellent columns revealed, the political landscape portrayed by the media reflected the media’s own outlook on the world.  Bill Mahr save-the-spotted-owl-but-fuck-the-working-stiff type politics predominate among this pampered class.  In this sense, I think Republicans are *right* to complain about a “Liberal” media.  But it’s emphatically not a “left” media.  Thus the political spectrum has come to be drawn between a media that is liberal insofar as it approves of environmentalism and (sort of) affirmative action, and disapproves of homophobia, and a right that stands for the values of the traditionally bigoted Christian. 

Is there a space for ecomomic popularism in US elections?  In a word: yes.  People are working longer, for less money, spending more and more on health care costs that are just a form of price-gouging.  Dropping the estate tax, while cutting social security benefits?  There’s a sense in the air that we could be doing much much better than we are.

Now, the media is less and less dominated by Chris Matthews and Cookie Roberts-types, and  popularism in its best tradition is ready to make a comeback, if you ask me.  And all the Terry Schavio’s in the world won’t be enough to stop it.  If Karl Rove wants to cling to power, he’d better pray for more terrorism, and fast.

You know what’s sort of fun?  Being sick.  Not “total agony” sick, or “I’m about to perish” sick, but just regular old sick.  It’s a break in Ordinary Time, sent from some beyond, to briefly transform things.

Yesterday — Friday — was my day to go to traffic court.  I was speeding you see, and had no proof of insurance, and I missed my first court date, and so was there to show that I really did have insurance at the time, and to ask that I not have to pay extra for missing my first court date.

Anyway, I think that everyone should go to court with monstrously red, inflamed watery eyes.  Truly, I was a monster heading into the courtroom.  To spare others the trauma of seeing my transformed self, I wore dark glasses into the building.  I’ll tell you, there is nobody cooler than some guy wandering the courthouse in very dark aviator sunglasses.  I was the coolest guy in the house.

The guys at the metal detector didn’t make me take them off, so I walked to the clerk’s desk, to talk to the skinny guy with whom I’d set this court date.  Last time he was chatty, telling me about the science-fiction writing classes he’d been taking at Parkland, and so forth.  But this time, he was a little freaked out–perhaps seeing dimly that something was wrong with my eyes.  I was to go into the first courtroom on the right.

So in I walked, wearing my dark, secret-hiding sunglasses, like the Terminator, after he had to cut away a chuck of his fake eye-flesh.  The courtroom is brand new, and beautifully functional — a space where nothing could go wrong and no person could ever die.  Lavender, plum, eggshell and woodgrain.  Before we walk-ins are handled, a poor fellow in stripped prison garb is marched out from in back and processed by the large, friendly, authoritative judge, with the help of his court reporter (or note taking person of some sort), a bailiff, and a couple attorneys.

After the inmate person is processed, a twenty-year-old woman approaches the bench to just ask if they could please not give her the ticket.  The judge lets her dad speak too, but to no avail.  Her strategy did not seem sound.

Next, my name is called, and I approach the bench, removing my sunglasses, exposing my diseased eyes.  I explain why I’m here.  I’m holding my ticket, and my proof of insurance.  I hear a voice from behind me — the prosecution wants to examine my documents.

I turn and head to the table, and put my papers in front of a rotund fellow, perhaps,  in his thirties.  I avoid eye contact.

From the prosecutor, an odd whisper: “Hey!”

I look down. “Hey!  Do you recognize me?” I don’t.

“We went to Jr. High School together!”

“Sorry,” I say, “what was your name?”

“Chris K—.”

And wow.  This was Chris K. — my friend from not just Jr. High, but High School, too.  Transformed by time, and cast by the state in the role of my merciless persecutor, Chris became suddenly recognizable.  I said I had an eye infections, and I asked if he was living in Urbana, and said maybe I’d see him around.  Not the best time for a long conversation, I think.  And probably my freaky eyes spooked him.  But it was nice to see Chris K. after so many years, even if we had no opportunity to reminisce about Model United Nations and endless sessions of Conquest of the Empire.

Then I went to the doctor who told me I have conjunctivitis and that I’m contagious and that I should stay in this weekend, and not go home for Mother’s day unless I’m planning to give the gift of infectious disease.  So here I am, taking in easy, chillin with the self, just set to watch Storm over Asia.  It’s a cool quiet evening.  Except for this annoying sore throat and my semi-functional eyes, things could be a lot worse, actually.

So, why so quiet?  Well, I ‘m sick as a sick dog today.  Sick with an interesting virus that is like a firework, blossoming into different forms, each more surprising and splendid than the last.  Initially a mere sore throat, is changed into a laryngitis-type of deep-voice sore throat, before returning to a regular hurts-when-you swallow sort of thing (made me realize just how often I swallows while trying to sleep . . .).  But yesterday, just when it seemed to be finally fading away, it made a stunning return:

I was trying to get my stupid new Squeezebox properly set up, when I began to notice how dirty my glasses were.  So cleaned them.  It seemed they were perhaps scratched.  I cleaned them again with different stuff.  Still cloudy.  Which is when I realized that the cloudiness wasn’t in the glasses, but in my eyes themselves!  Over the next couple of hours my eyes transformed themselves into pink puffy watery slits.  Oddly, when I blinked, I could see a brief flash of light from around my field of vision.

When I woke up this morning I couldn’t open them, until I made it to the shower, where I eventually oystered apart the lids.  Not fun.  And my vision is watery and blurred.

So I have a court date this afternoon (where I will show that I did indeed have auto insurance when I got a speeding ticket a couple months ago).  Then I’ll head over to the doctor’s office.  I do for now have medical insurance, so I suppose I’ll make use of it, even though I’m sure my new doctor (Stoll) will tell me to wait it out.  If you saw what I look like now, you’d send me in there, too!

I hope to soon be seeing and swallowing with my usual abandon, and to be rid of the small and unusual feaver I’ve been running.  But for now I am at least partially decommissioned, I’m afraid.  And lucky you, you now know all about it.