“A sudden withdrawal of our coalition would dissipate much of the effort that has gone into fighting the global war on terror, and result in chaos and mounting danger,” the vice president declared. “And for the sake of our own security, we will not stand by and let it happen.”

CommonDreams.org article

It makes me wonder who he refers to by ‘we’. I think that I am not part of that ‘we’. It is not my security that needs to be protected, and further staying in Iraq does not protect me from harm. It makes things worse.

When I hear that word, security, I don’t really think of physical safety. I think that he means in the sense of being secure. Secure in power, secure in sources of funding and secure in the structures that maintain those things. And, if he is talking to his allies, with all their political and economic goals about security, what it says to me is that he and they are feeling more insecure about it.
I like it. I want them to feel insecure about their hold on power. War is nasty and people who make money off of it are nasty too.

Check out Talking Points Memo, their muckrakers have good tools.

I am generally against an academic bill of rights, at least how it is usually phrased, because the very idea illustrates a misunderstanding of how higher learning works. Studies which investigate political leanings of professors generally show that more professors are democrats. Conservatives often complain that this is especially true in the humanities, like anthropology. They look at the data and say that this is wrong and biased. With some caveats I give them that. But, they don’t try to understand why this is true. My guess is that people who are more interested in business, more interested in being productive members of society(for various values of productive) don’t want to go into those areas of study because they seem pointless to them.

I realize that that is a pretty big generalization but I think that there is some truth in it. So, I think that using bills like this one to try to get more conservative views into all places of the university system miss the point. What would be a better tactic, and I think that some conservative schools of thought are already doing this, is to show that the humanities can be valuable from the conservative perspective. The only way to get more conservative views into anthropology and the like is to make highschool students more interested in the fields. I think that that would be beneficial for humanities studies as a whole to have more people working on them with different ideas.

The problem I see though, is that radicals-on both sides-often eschew logical thinking in exchange for arguments that support their ideas semantically but have no foundation. Some of these people have a contempt for fact. That is politics, winning and defeating the opponent is more important than respecting reality.

But I digress.

The Bill

• does not accomplish anything important
• does not change anything directly
• is vague in its purpose
• puts a burden on the university system to
• write a yearly report
• and possibly create new policies
• adds a burden to the education and local government interim committee to have hearings on intellectual diversity
• puts a burden(cost) on the university system, without providing funding to offset it
• creates a new political football in the form of an annual report

It seems to me that the purpose of this bill is to see if further changes could be pushed through to limit expression of opinions on university campus’. I think that some of the complaints people have about the system now might be valid, but the path this bill begins is not the best possible solution.

During the summer, her columns started to come less frequently, I read she had relapsed into cancer. She was going through chemo and lost her hair. But she kept writing in the same fiery tone.

Suddenly, the columns stopped altogether. For two months, I checked common dreams everyday and read my op-ed columns, but none from her. I guess I had thought that she would get better, that the stubborn, take no quarter spirit would prevail over the cancer.

Then, last week, after not checking common dreams for a while, I read Maya Angelou’s essay.

I will miss that fiery spirit. I will miss that stubborn will that always spoke truth to power. I will miss the hope and the anger her writing made me feel. But, the mistakes and abuses she wrote about continue and it would not do justice to her memory to merely grieve.