Can We Do It? No We Can’t!

A few days ago, I made the link between Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” chant and the key catchphrase-cum-moral-lesson from Bob the Builder. It’s an obvious association for any parent brain-damaged by too much kids’ TV. (So far, the combo of “Bob the Builder” and “Obama” has been the most frequently-searched terms leading to my blog. Maybe that ought to give me pause …)

Anyway, Bob the Builder featured a terminally negative mobile crane called Lofty, whose motto – never stated – might as well have been “No we can’t.”

I think we’ve found the Lofty candidate in this election cycle, showcased here in the bookend to the Obama “Yes we can” video. (Thanks to Rence for pointing me to the video, which y’all have probably seen by now. I’m not exactly on the bleeding edge.)

Lofty Lego image from Amazon.uk.

Update April 5, 2009: The video has been yanked from YouTube. More’s the pity. But by now we know this much about John McCain: No, he couldn’t.

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Who’s Afraid of Mike Huckabee?

Bizarrely, the Washington state Republican party has refused to tally all of the votes in the caucus it held Saturday. With only 87% of the vote counted and John McCain leading Mike Huckabee by less than two percentage points, state party officials simply declared the count over and McCain the winner. Unsurprisingly, Huckabee will sic his lawyers on the Washington Repugs.

It’s not just my inner six year old, still obsessed with fairness on the playground, who wonders what the heck is up with this. I mean, Huckabee frightens me, but I’m starting to think he scares the Republican establishment a whole lot more.

Mathematically, it’s still possible for Huckabee to win the nomination. A total of 1191 delegates are needed to win. CNN’s delegate scorecard (which omits the Louisiana and Washington results) says McCain has 723, Romney 286, Huckabee 217, and Ron Paul 16.

The odds are stacked tremendously against Huckabee. I’m not seriously suggesting he’ll sweep all the remaining states. But he won two out of the three contests over the weekend (and maybe three, though we’ll likely never know). If he keeps this up, he’ll expose his party’s deep divisions for all to see.

Media reports have oddly tended to portray Mitt Romney’s withdrawal from the campaign as removing the last potential roadblock to McCain’s nomination. Consider this AP report from last week:

Mitt Romney suspended his faltering presidential campaign on Thursday, effectively sealing the Republican presidential nomination for John McCain.

This overlooks the niggling little detail that McCain benefited hugely from Mittens and Huckadoodle splitting the conservative vote between them. And while Huckabee was widely portrayed as the spoiler, couldn’t you just as easily view it the other way around?

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The Coolest Nerd!

I always thought I was a pretty cool nerd, but now I have hard scientific proof. (Oops. I’m afraid that last statement just disqualified myself from coolness of any stripe.)

What flavor nerd are you? Take the quiz and tell me in comments. And don’t tell me you’re not a nerd; you wouldn’t have read this far if you weren’t.

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Cheney = Gandhi Redux?

A few days ago on the Today Show, Pat Buchanan stated that if elected President, John McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.” Every once in a while Buchanan is such an unfiltered loony that I have to think he knows something we don’t.

Maybe he was channeling fellow wingnut John Bolton, who later in the week endorsed McCain because McCain’s approach to Iran promises to be more “robust” than Bush’s has been? (In Bolton’s version of Newspeak, “robust” translates into “bombs away.”)

Watch the video and quake. The money quote comes at the end. Let’s hope we’ll never see Cheney barefoot and humble.

Update April 5, 2009: The video has been pulled from YouTube due to terms of service violations – which, while I respect people’s right to assert copyright, strikes me as pretty minor compared to the violations that Cheney orchestrated during his reign.

Video via Think Progress.

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Gardasil for Everyone!

When Gardasil, the vaccination against human papilloma virus (HPV), came on the market in late 2006, I figured it’s about 30 years too late for me. HPV has been proven to cause cervical cancer (as well as genital warts). But Gardasil is approved only for girls and young women aged 9 to 26, on the assumption that they’re less likely than older women to have already been exposed to all four strains of the virus covered by the shots.

So far, those of us over 26 don’t have any way to prevent HPV infection and its potentially disastrous consequences (other than abstinence – not bloody likely!). Yet we’re increasingly confronted with the knowledge of our HPV status, as testing for HPV gradually becomes routine. My ob/gyn offered it to me last spring, and my insurance covered it.

Luckily, the test showed I’m not currently infected with HPV. I’m pretty sure I had an active infection for several years in my twenties, when I kept getting moderately abnormal results on Pap smears. Most people eventually clear the virus spontaneously; I assume that’s what I did.

One nasty feature of HPV, though, is that it can be reactivated, a trait it shares with a number of other particularly nasty viruses. Some of these just cause great misery – like the varicella zoster virus, which causes chicken pox in kids but shingles if it’s reactivated later in life. But others, including Epstein-Barr (the mono virus), have been implicated in causing certain types of cancer.

I’m speculating a bit here, but it seems to me that reactivation is the most plausible explanation for at least some cases of cervical cancer in older women – those in their 50s or 60s and older who’ve been monogamous for decades, with a monogamous partner, and who probably weren’t actively infected for all those decades.

But maybe it’s not too late for me and my ilk, after all. A recent study by Merck, Gardasil’s maker, found that it reduced the rate of HPV infection and pre-cancers in women aged 24 through 45. I’m wondering if the vaccine might help the body keep the virus in check at undetectable levels, even though Merck’s press release on the study doesn’t suggest this. To qualify for the study women had to be free of at least one of the flavors of HPV that Gardasil targets. But the vaccine’s impact was so dramatic, it doesn’t seem plausible to me that its only effect was to prevent fresh infections:

Also as a primary analysis, GARDASIL prevented 83 percent (95% CI: 51 to 96%) of persistent infection, low-grade cervical abnormalities and pre-cancers, and external genital lesions caused by HPV types 16 and 18 alone (23 cases in the placebo group and four cases in the vaccine group). In a secondary endpoint, GARDASIL prevented 100 percent of persistent infections, low-grade cervical abnormalities and pre-cancers, and external genital lesions caused by HPV types 6 and 11.

The press release doesn’t say anything about the sexual habits of study participants – whether their sex lives were more like Samantha’s in Sex and the City, or more like, well, mine. Obviously this information would help us understand whether Gardsasil mostly blocked new infections or mostly prevented reactivation of old ones.

This isn’t just a theoretical question. It matters because if Gardasil hinders reactivation, then women of any age ought to consider getting the shots.

Gardasil might benefit men, as well. HPV has been pretty conclusively linked to oropharyngeal (mouth and throat) cancer, as well as cancer of the penis and anus. Having oral sex with six or more partners triples one’s risk of oropharyngeal cancer. What’s more, vaccinating men would contribute to herd immunity, thus reducing the risk to the entire population.

And no, I don’t work for Merck. I realize this is a new vaccine and it might still turn out to have some untoward side effects. So far, though, its benefits seem to vastly outweigh its risks.

Unless, of course, you buy the wingnut idea that immunizing young girls will turn them all into sluts. Lynn Harris at Broadsheet has brilliantly put their objections into limerick form:

Why block a vaccine? Here’s our answer.
Gardasil is no values-enhancer.
To prevent HPV
Causes sex, don’t you see?
And quite frankly, we prefer cancer.

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The Skinny on Male Fashion

Remember how Madrid’s Fashion Week banned emaciated models from the runway in fall of 2006? Madrid’s action didn’t change the bony face of fashion, but it did shine a spotlight on how female models are starving themselves.

Well, being cavernously thin has now become an equal-opportunity deformity.

The New York Times just ran a story in its Style section (not in Health, where it rightly belongs!) on the evolving standard for underfed male models. Or maybe this is devolution rather than evolution. Aptly titled “The Vanishing Point,” the Times story persuades as much with images as with arguments. Pictures like this one tell the whole tale:

It’s refreshing that men no longer need to look like they eat ‘roids for breakfast. If these skinny dudes represented just one possible image, I’d say fine. Lots of very young men are naturally built like this, and why shouldn’t they see guys who look like them?

But of course, in a high-fashion world that loves conformity even more than novelty, the new look is rapidly becoming the new dogma. The Times reports:

George Brown, a booking agent at Red Model Management, said: “When I get that random phone call from a boy who says, ‘I’m 6-foot-1 and I’m calling from Kansas,’ I immediately ask, ‘What do you weigh?’ If they say 188 or 190, I know we can’t use him. Our guys are 155 pounds at that height.”

If your 6’1″, you’d better weight 155? So we’re now ditching the bulky muscles but paring the men down to bare bones, all while maintaining the bizarre fiction of the hairless man.

To me, the most disturbing aspect of the trend is captured by a fashion expert, Kelly Cutrone, who told the Times:

“People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult.”

It’s not that this look is downright pedophilic, exactly, although it does lean in that direction. And it’s not terribly hard to find examples of ads that do go for the little boy image, such as this ad for American Apparel found by copyranter. (It’d be one thing if this were an ad for boys’ clothing, but it’s not.)

Here’s a revolutionary idea: How about male models who look like men? What if they actually had a normal amount of body hair? What if they looked more handsome than average, but otherwise rather ordinary? Now that would be sexy.

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Deep Throat

I saw my larynx today.

And no, it wasn’t nearly as titillating as this post’s title suggests. No one has ever confused me with Linda Lovelace. Although now that I think of it, the larynx seen from above has a distinctly lace-y, yet muscular appearance. Maybe that’s how she got her stage name.

My larynx looked a bit like the one pictured, except cuter, of course.

The experience was not so much a porn movie as an episode of House, with a few key distinctions. In my show, the patient, not the doctor, was irascible and prone to mask her vulnerability with humor. The doctor resembled Anthony Perkins more than Hugh Laurie. Sexy young assistants were nowhere to be seen. No one bled from the eyeballs or was wrongly diagnosed with lupus or Guillain-Barré. And the patient had self-administered a Vicodin prior to the procedure, while the doctor had not (or so I hope).

Even so, the patient was pretty much terrified of the procedure in question, flexible fiberoptic laryngoscopy. (Follow the link only if you want to see the instrument used, plus a more technical description that calls the patient “awake and relaxed.” Ha!) In crude terms, the doc squirts anesthetic up your nose with a device that’s half old-fashioned perfume atomizer, half garden sprayer. Once the drugs kick in, he snakes a 1/4″ tube up your nose and down your throat. It burns a bit as it goes around the bend. It doesn’t feel as big as it looks. (Maybe Linda and I did have something in common, after all?)

Then, remarkably, a little TV screen shows you everything from the interior of your nose to the base of your tongue to your vocal cords and epiglottis.

What the doctor found: swollen lingual tonsils, a part I didn’t even know I had. This is tonsillar tissue at the very base of the tongue, just above the epiglottis in the pre-epiglottal space (another anatomic discovery for me). It’s not removed during tonsillectomy, and it appears more likely to swell in people (like me) who lost their tonsils as kids. The swelling apparently accounts for the feeling I’ve had since last fall of constantly having a lump in my throat. It’s not a danger, just a nuisance.

Once I got home and googled all of this, I learned that this lump sensation actually has a name: “globus,” which is short for “globus hystericus.” Neurotic I may be, but I’m relieved to have a non-Freudian explanation. At least I’m not outright hysterical.

Larynx image from University of Pittsburgh Voice Center. Photo of Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House from E Online.

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Oh Crap! My Vote Will Actually Count

Okay, I’ll admit I’m secretly pleased that thanks to the Democrats’ split results for Super Tuesday, my vote won’t be totally irrelevant – even though my nerves may put me in the loony bin by the time my primary actually rolls around on March 4. This election is giving me worse belly-butterflies than I had for my dissertation defense.

But here’s the catch: I live in Ohio. Home of Diebold, evil maker of hackable voting machines. Epicenter of the 2004 election debacle.

Speaking as an Obama supporter, I think he may be able to swing Ohio, but it’ll be an uphill struggle. Our Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, has already pledged his support to Clinton. This will no doubt give Clinton an organizational boost on the ground in a state that’s already seen as tilting her direction. Even so, Obama’s campaign coffers are full, and I think people here are hungry for hope and change.

Speaking as a proponent of democracy (a radical position these days!), I worry about bigger issues. The voting machines throughout the state are frankly junk, and they’ll still be in place for our March 4 primary election. Last December, the New York Times reported

All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state’s top elections official has found.

“It was worse than I anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”

At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.

I’m not suggesting that Clinton’s people would try to hack the machines. But even short of outright fraud, the system is vulnerable to technical snafus. For reasons both financial and logistical, it’s highly unlikely that this equipment will be replaced by November, and there’s no chance of any improvements before March 4.

In the fall 2006 general election, our spanking new machines malfunctioned during the counting process right here in my little town. It took hours for a tech to be located who could service them – and he then hit a deer while driving into town. We didn’t know the results of our tightly contested Statehouse race for another two days. And the problems didn’t end there. (The linked article is by a friend of Kittywampus, Nick Claussen, who does excellent work reporting for the Athens News, our twice-weekly independent local paper. Read it!)

Yeah, some of this is just dumb bad luck. That doesn’t reassure me in the least. We’ve got lots more deer in them thar woods.

Map shows the distribution of voting machine shortages and other snafus. Note that my county isn’t even represented on it, so the map probably understates the scope of the problem. The map is taken from Wikipedia’s article on the irregularities in Ohio’s November 2004 election. Read the whole piece, and abandon all hope.

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The Tooth Fairy Is Such a Loser

On Friday my eight-year-old, the Bear, lost a tooth at school. First time for him that it happened there. He came home proudly displaying his new gap and toting his tooth in a tiny molar-shaped plastic box on a keychain.

Friday evening he goes to bed around 9:30. As is his wont, he refuses to stay in bed. He creeps down the stairs again at 9:45. And then at 9:52, and 10:10, and 10:27, on into infinity. Okay, I’m not quite compulsive enough to log the times, but you get the picture.

By the time the Bear finally stays put, it’s time for a nightcap, an episode of House taped earlier in the week, and then blessed, blessed sleep.

Next morning, the Bear appears bright and early, having slept just over eight hours.

“Mama, the Tooth Fairy didn’t come!”

This could have morphed into a major childhood trauma, except that he’s been deconstructing the Tooth Fairy and all of her colleagues since he was still a preschooler. It started with him questioning how Santa could visit all those kids in a single night. Two springs ago, he decided that the Easter Bunny just had to be a person in a rabbit suit; a week later he announced, “And I know who the person is. It’s Santa!” Last year, he told us that he knew Santa couldn’t logically exist. And with that, of course all the other imaginary dominoes fell, too.

Saturday, same scene, except with adults whose patience has worn wafer-thin. The clock ooches toward 11 p.m. and the Bear still requires a hot water bottle, a drink, cooler pajamas, banishment of bad thoughts. He also informs us that “sleep is boring,” his new mantra.

Sunday morning, I awaken again to an early Bear-alarm: “Mama, the Tooth Fairy still didn’t come!”

It turns out the tooth has been hiding. Instead of lying next to my son’s head or atop his dresser, it’s suspended by its keychain from the neck of a gooseneck lamp, which he and his dad cleverly thought would keep it from getting lost. Since the Tooth Fairy wasn’t informed of this, she didn’t get the visual cue she needed.

Sunday evening, it’s starting to look like we’re trapped in Kafka’s take on parenting, but with a twist: specifically, another tooth that’s so loose it twists. At precisely 9:42 p.m. (by the Bear’s accounting) the tooth finally breaks free. And for whatever reason, once the bleeding stops, the Bear is finally free to sleep.

The Tooth Fairy writes a groveling note on a Post-It, sticks it on the stack of dollars (one for each tooth, plus a buck in interest), makes her deposit, and flies off to the Imaginary Benefactor’s Hall of Shame.

And that’s why the Tooth Fairy is a ditz, a slacker, and an all-round pathetic loser.

Image from I Can Haz Cheezburger?
The real tooth fairy has a smaller brain than the one pictured here.

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Obama Meets Bob the Builder

When I first heard Barack Obama’s “Yes we can!” slogan, all I could think was

Bob the Builder: Can we do it?”
Scoop, Muck, Dizzy, Roley, and the ever-whiney Lofty: “Yes we CAN!”

But this video gave it a whole ‘nother connotation for me. Funny what a little music and rhythm can do.

Actually, the video suggests that part of what’s so compelling about Obama as a rhetorician is that you can, in fact, lay a rhythm track under him and dance to it.

Yep, I’m getting soft and sentimental in my old age, falling for this claptrap about hope and change. But watch it anyway, and get foolish and dewy-eyed with me.

Bob the Builder image from the official Lego site, but also available in deconstructed form on my living room floor.

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Peace, Feminism, and the #%*&@ Primary

I’d promised myself I’d write about sex since that’s what I’m teaching about this week – but with Super Tuesday looming, I just can’t get in the mood.

A group called New York Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama has come out in favor of Obama. Comprising over 100 prominent feminists, the group is heavy on academics. It includes some of the historians whose work I’ve admired since I embarked on grad school: Victoria de Grazia, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Linda Gordon. Emily Martin, Rayna Rapp, and Rosalind Petchesky have all influenced my thinking on women, embodiment, and reproduction. And Katha Pollitt still inspires me every time I read her column; her latest explains beautifully why she’s backing Obama.

But their status as feminist luminaries in my personal cosmos isn’t nearly as important as their compelling reasons for backing Obama, which are pretty much identical to mine: We need peace first, and everything else depends on that. Feminism is dead in the water unless we’ve got peace and prosperity. This means that we need need to get out of Iraq, stay out of Iran, break our oil addiction, and recommit to the rule of law.

The Iraq sinkhole has put us in hock for at least a generation, hampering our ability to spend on the domestic needs that most feminists care about, such as health, the environment, and education. Obama doesn’t have a foolproof plan for getting us out of there. No one does. But he’s opposed the war from the very start. Clinton has never even apologized for her pro-war vote.

Based on Obama’s consistent opposition to the Iraq war and Hillary Clinton’s steadfast support in the Senate for a “stronger” military, there’s good reason to believe he’ll be more cautious in using military force elsewhere, too. Obama has said he’d be willing to talk directly with the leaders of “rogue” states such as Syria. Clinton mocked the idea. I can’t see why that’s so ridiculous. Talk is a heck of a lot cheaper than bombs, and often more effective.

The New York group doesn’t mention Iran, but I’m worried that Hillary will take a hard line there, too. She’s already signaled this by voting for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. This puts us on a collision course with Iran that’s apt to end in military action.

As Christopher Hayes argued eloquently in the Nation last week, foreign policy is the area where presidential power is least restrained by the Congress or courts. And that’s precisely where the candidates’ differences are greatest.

Neither candidate has adequately addressed the looming energy and climate catastrophes, which together with our foreign policy constitute a monstrous three-headed beast. Neither has signed onto the goals of the Apollo Alliance. While this worries me, my gut feeling is that Obama is more likely than Clinton to pursue an innovative energy policy. He’s more willing to think outside the box. He’s less indebted to vested interests. And for what it’s worth, he’s been chatting with Al Gore.

Finally, I’m not at all sure Clinton will renounce the new presidential powers that Dubya has arrogated to himself. She equivocated when she was asked about this a couple months back. As a former professor of constitutional law, Obama is more likely to reject Bush and Cheney’s theory of the unitary executive and restore civil liberties. This, too, is essential if feminism is to thrive.

So if you’re reading this, and if (unlike us disenfranchised Ohio residents) you get to vote in Super Tuesday, I hope you’ll weigh these humble thoughts and consider voting for Barack Obama.

And now that that’s settled, I’m going back to thinking about sex.

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Blogroll Amnesty Day

One of my favorite bloggers, Jon Swift (satirist and “reasonable conservative”), and his buddy Skippy the Bush Kangaroo have declared today Blogroll Amnesty Day.

Jon lays out the whole backstory. Basically, they’re encouraging medium-sized bloggers to add smaller bloggers to their blogrolls, and so on down the food chain, with the idea of nudging some traffic to us small fry.

As one of the minnows of the blogsphere (please just ignore how that metaphor clashes with my cat theme), I can’t really go any further down the chain or I’ll land somewhere in the primordial ooze. Not that this has stopped me from visiting some of the smart and inventive people that Jon linked to, and then some of the folks they linked to.

It’s a hugely entertaining way to procrastinate instead of grading quizzes. Plus it’s a free pass on promiscuous shameless blogwhoring. Considering that someone has actually stumbled on this blog by searching for Porno Barbie, maybe it’s time for me to start soliciting people who might be interested in non-porn, non-Barbie themed stuff.

So far, I’ve added
Last Left Turn before Hooterville
The Political Cat
Blue Gal
and (independent of BAD, just ’cause I’ve been meaning to anyway)
Holly’s Self Portrait As

These blogs are all smart, political, and well-written – and not least, they’re all friendly to cats.

I’ll update this later, but now I’ve got to go explore some more new-to-me blogs.

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Countdown to Sleepytime

And I wants it.

That’s the sort of weekend it’s been here. The kitties – er, kiddies – have been running all a-wampus.

In fact, I think I saw that kitteh’s expression on each of my boys at various times today.

Last Sunday, I had a nice chat with my sister in California, whose kids are roughly the same age as mine (four and eight). As she signed off, she wished me a good rest of the morning.

“It’s already one o’clock here in Ohio,” I reminded her.

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” she said, envy in her voice. “You’re three hours closer to bedtime.”

I love ‘em with all that’s not shriveled and jaded in my heart. But oh, getting back to work tomorrow morning is gonna be so restful.

LOLcat from Facebook’s LOLcat application.

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Aw, Nutz!

First time I saw a set of these – attached to the hitch of a big bad red pickup truck – I thought I must be hallucinating. Or at least over-interpreting.

By now, I’ve spotted them three times here in Southeast Ohio. Apparently they’ve been around since at least 2005, but I first saw one a few months ago in my neck of the woods.

They evidently don’t attach well to sedans or minivans. I’ve only ever seen them swinging from ultra-butch pickup trucks. Probably the kind with four-wheel drive, although the drivers tend to stare back kind of menacingly if you look too long, so I couldn’t say for sure.

Just about anything I could say about masculinity, insecurity, and obvious compensation mechanisms would be – well, too obvious. Much like the Truck Nutz themselves.

Instead, I’d rather point out the missing, um, phallic signifier (as the my Francophile theory-head friends might say). And we might speculate what’s meant to take its place. The truck? Or are we supposed to assume it’s the driver who’s the dick?

The great thing about these Nutz is that anyone can have them. For us gonadally impaired gals, for instance, they come in a pretty, yet still macho, purple. Or if I’d prefer to be really subtle, they’re also available as dainty earrings.

The most “popular” color, according to one seller, is “flesh,” but those peachy boys – and every color except red – can be tastefully decorated with a lipstick imprint.

For the perennially frustrated, blue nutz are available too. They range from a classic matte blue through turquoise to a vibrant chrome blue. You can pick the hue that expresses your own predicament.

Camouflage nutz are the latest option for the ballsiest patriots on the road.

Maryland and Virginia lawmakers tried to ban truck nutz last year on moral grounds. Unsuccessfully, so far (though the link to the Virginia story marvelously shows the nutz blurred out). Anyway, it’s as pointless to try to ban this sort of speech as it is to try to ban hypermasculinity and stupidity.

Photo by Flickr user Vidiot, used under a Creative Commons license (see the original photo for conditions). For a rainbow of options, see Your Nutz: Ultimate Fashion Statement, link courtesy of Pharyngula. I’d like to post a couple of their designs directly here, but they’ve copyrighted every photo on their site and their vehicle clearly can beat up mine (a 2001 Saturn SL, which lacks even ovaries).

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The State of our Statements Is, ummm, Strong

… if by strong you mean – in a brilliant Orwellian twist – weak.

Today the president of my esteemed university delivered his State of the University address, proclaiming some great news: “I am very happy to report to you today that the state of our university is strong.”

Yeah.

If by fiscally strong, you mean that we haven’t yet heard what academic programs will be slashed to stanch the hemorrhaging budget.

If by academically strong, you mean that the university’s leadership has promised that faculty salaries will rise to match our peer institutions’ – but not delivered on this – and some of our brightest professors are being lured away by competitive salaries elsewhere.

If by athletically strong, you that mean our handsomely paid football coach hasn’t been busted for DUI since the end of 2005.

If by ethically strong, you mean that administrators’ awkward efforts to spin the publicity around a plagiarism case have now spawned civil litigation.

If by equitably strong, you mean that adjunct instructors with Ph.D.s earn $5000 in gross pay over three months with no access to health insurance for teaching two courses per quarter (a half-time position), numerous janitors have been laid off, and administrators continue to receive handsome annual raises.

If by democratically strong, you mean that the provost has not signed a single resolution sent to her by the Faculty Senate since the middle of spring 2007.

Say, this strength meme really rocks. All the embattled autocrats are grooving on it! I haven’t heard if Putin has picked up on it yet, but it’s been a constant drumbeat in Dubya’s State of the Union addresses since 2002, as the Daily Show found out. (The player may be very slow to load, sorry ’bout that.)

In that Orwellian vein, I could sure use a limp shot of weak whiskey.

more about “Moment of Zen – State of the Union | …“, posted with vodpod

Image of OU President Roderick McDavis from his official university bio.

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