Dog-tag Days of Summer

I am swamped, between the odious move to another house and the summer courses, but still make time to do the traditional summer reading. NPR, yesterday, had a Georgetown professor on Fresh Air who made recommendations for summer reading that were for lack of a better term, "fiction lite." Yawn. For those nonfiction and non-lite readers, I have a few suggestions that I will post over the next few days.

My War: Killing Time in Iraq
Colby Buzzell
Putnam Press

An unemployed and unrepentant bad ass joins the military after a hard night of drinking, and, big surprise, is deployed to Iraq. What makes this self-admitted sloth different is that he can write, and write he does, much to his commanders' displeasure. Buzzell's book started out as a blog, straight from Baghdad, and the book connects blog entries by a narrative that gives them background and depth. Buzzell, for all his initial posturing, is a avid reader and a gifted observer and writer of the absurdities of the "War on Terror" in Iraq. Some of his entries are hilarious, some heart-breaking, and some just downright terrifying. I taught this book in my literary analysis course, and my students gained insight into a war that they are incredibly disconnected from, e.g. one student, I hazard to guess, mistook Iraq for Afghanistan and asked why Buzzell never mentioned bin Laden. As related by a myriad of emails, many students didn't sell back the book and gave it to friends and relatives. This, in itself, is a small miracle and speaks to what is so compelling about Buzzell's writing: it speaks to nearly everyone, in some manner, who reads it. He sugarcoats nothing, and is not afraid to portray himself as a complete idiot in a couple of entries (illicit liquor and the phrase "money" fuels one of the most hilarious and yet pitiful examples). Buzzell's book is a glorious page-turner, no matter what your position is on the war. His position, which I personally think is compellingly written, is complex, as complex as the problems that plague benighted Iraq.

Tighten the belt, tighten the noose.

Back in internet land. I have lived the last two weeks as I lived during my youth: with a TV that gets two channels and no internet. I, gasp!, had to read when I finished painting, and doing the stuff that a big move requires, at the end of the day. And I realized, once away from all the technology, why my students, for the most part, are poor writers. As a kid and a young adult, my primary news sources were papers and magazines, and I read avidly. I always had a book at my side, as well. After spending a couple of weeks working with a 20-something, who is renting my former residence (the one I have been refurbishing for future sale), and watching her nearly have a meltdown because of lack of internet and tv, I realize that most people born after 1985 have made the net their primary means of communication, reading material, and social medium, and tv consumes as much or more of their time. But by primary reading material, I mean Facebook or myspace. Although the 20-something working with me is a serious reader, she has a hard time reading for long stretches. She usually multi-tasks: reads, runs AIM, and myspace at the same time. Evenings crept by for her at a snail's pace, while I reverted to habits learned young: I read for hours.

This brings me to education. Our education budget in our state is taking a huge hit. Enrollments in state universities are down, we have a huge deficit, and the federal government is not helping one iota. The secondary schools in Michigan are in pitiful shape. In Detroit, only 24% of those who start high school finish, and in the entire state, only 59% of those who begin a four-year degree university depart with a diploma. Now we have state representatives who would rather shutdown schools, reduce support to state universities in a draconian fashion, and generally gut all education than raise taxes. So kids who are struggling now will continue to struggle, and ultimately will not raise revenue for the state because they will either have little education, poor education or will have left the state. It really bothers me that our country is willing to funnel 1 billion dollars a day to the fiasco in Iraq rather than educate the entire populace, especially the at-risk populace. An uneducated country is a country at risk itself.

But back to the net. It is a fantastic tool, a necessary one, but it shouldn't replace reading newspapers or books. One of the reasons that 18-30 year-olds have little interest in Iraq or Afghanistan (and more interest in the misdeeds of one heiress/celebrity) is because they tend to get news exclusively from the net, which doesn't give you the experience of reading one article and then discovering one right next to it that may pique your interest (or not). You have to select an article and hit links for others: not the same thing. We may turn out to have the most technologically advanced youth in human history, but also the most functionally illiterate youth as well. Something to ponder while sending out CVs to more affluent states, or ones that are not willing to sacrifice their children's future because they won't raise property taxes by 2 mills.

Sunday Round-up

Although I haven't turned on the cable yet, I was, through fiddling with rabbit-ears (antennas for those who are too young to remember life without cable/Directv) able to pick up a snowy-screened "Meet the Press." I could listen to it on podcast, but I like to see people's facial expressions and gestures—they are often more telling than their words. Anyway, today it was disappointing: a lot of "talking heads," such as the Frick and Frack/husband and wife political consultants, Mary Maitland and James Carville. It's really hard to take them seriously when they had a sitcom on HBO that parodied their own consulting firm (the cancelled "K street"). They were guests, along with a couple of other consultants that had run, sometimes disastrously, presidential campaigns. It almost wasn't worth the effort of manipulating the antennas.

But what struck me was that they were talking about the presidential election fifteen months before it occurs in a way that people used to talk about an election that was just a couple months away. Yikes! Also, Fred Thompson (of "Law and Order" fame, a tv show for those of you who are not familiar with the program) may throw his hat in the ring. He is a one-term, and an unremarkable term, congressman and actor who has a reputation for slacking. The consultants all agreed that he is a viable candidate for the Republican party, and that he may challenge Rudy and John McCain. I find this hard to believe, polls or no polls: people want experience or someone with a reputation for a good grasp of current and foreign affairs. I think nearly eight years of ignominious and ignorant stewardship has taught the majority of Americans that you had better damn well have a president whose best accomplishment is more than a role on a hit tv series. I could be very wrong on this point, but I certainly hope I'm not.

Whoever wins, from either party, will inherit two wars on two fronts, or now that we are firing missiles into Somalia, maybe more fronts. This is complex, and it calls for someone who can intellectually tackle the wars, not just lob more soldiers at it (or in Afghanistan's case, not enough soldiers). Fourteen more soldiers died in the last two days in Iraq. If this bloody pace keeps up at half the rate of the last three days, 709 American soldiers will have died by the time the election occurs in Iraq alone. Furthermore, there will be more American deaths in Afghanistan, along with the deaths of Afghan civilians. And who knows how many thousands of Iraqis will die; no one seems to be tracking their casualties very well. You can speak all you want about "fostering a new democratic Iraq," but when neither the Iraqi government or the American administration can really tell the world how many Iraqis have died, it screams "subaltern people."

Anyway, I hope all the consultants, or rather exorbitantly paid soothsayers, are wrong about both parties' candidates. And I hope that the next president grasps the fact that "al qaeda" is an ideology, not just a loose coalition of groups. And to combat a militant ideology, you must have a better ideology, one that provides jobs and stability as opposed to nostalgia for the 12 century. Militarism alone cannot fight an ideology. Turning on the electricity for twenty-four hours a day (especially during the summer) will be far more appreciated than someone ordering you to grow a beard or shaving your head because you aren't wearing a head scarf (as documented by "Treasure of Baghdad" and "Zappy" of "Where date palms grow"). I know that is easier said than done, but infrastructure should be paramount now, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Without this, as Yeats put it, from his poem, "The Second Coming,"

Things fall apart; the centre will not hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats, in 1919, was a prescient man.