et ceteras...

I've been looking for another place, preferably in Greenpoint (how I love Greenpoint) - staying in Fort Greene, it's an odd walk home with the Williamsburg Bank Building all wrapped up in scaffolding and quiet. No twenty-something hipsters in sight usually. Occasionally right along Fulton you'll see a couple of them briefly, but usually it's just some random stragglers coming home late.

The school year's been frustrating, but the kids seem ok, I have vague hopes for when things are more settled. Some women just came to my room a minute ago - it's late, almost six - and she said there were all these people downstairs talking about small schools. I'd never seen her. Then she said large class sizes are not the problem and left.

Why do all these morons come to my room and tell me dumb things? I've never met her and she comes to my room, looks at all the desks and then says class size doesn't matter. Lady, it does. Go away.

I still have to get some maps. A bunch of mine were torn down and disappeared. As well, I lost one of my favorite books. Casualties of the early school year insanities. I feel the Iraq War has entered its "Vietnam, 1971" point, where it's happening, people are dying, but the country itself is thinking about everything EXCEPT the war. A lot of people dying, they don't even count the numbers of non-sectarian dead it seems, but then you say, how do you decide it's a sectarian and it's all made up. Just a vast number of people who are dying from inertia.

I was in Philadelphia visiting a friend a few weeks ago, and she was defending some of the tenets of this administration and some of their contentions, but at this point, those arguments veer so quickly into the absurd, the untenable and the abstract as to be dismissed with barely the wave of a hand. But the results of these policies won't be nearly so easily dismissed, and I'm wondering how much future policy is already written on these contentions simply because some of them sound good and pro-American. Which is why, I guess, it's so important to start looking more closely at the laissez-faire principles that are so prevalent right now in corporate America. Well, that's the odd thing, is that it's not so laissez-faire unless the discussion is on these huge corporations that can ante in and act as yet another branch of government. Smaller businesses, traditionally more innovative, are squeezed out more and more quickly so that a typical block in Manhattan looks exactly like a typical mall in Schaumburg, Illionois or Orange County, California. The only thing that's missing is the sprawl.

Anyway, the point of that little half-informed screed is to suggest that a language needs to be constructed that can answer these various contentions, like the ones that suggest that decorum and polite language towards our generals are important when they are lying to us for political reasons. The betrayal of our highest military officers to the duty to country before political partisanship will be one of the main chapters of the histories to come about this war and about this era. I wonder if we have ever had a military so politicized as this one. Again, I think of Vietnam, General Westmoreland coming to give his little pep talks in November and December of 1967, mere weeks in front of Tet, and everybody applauding and happy, calling for reasons for optimism. It's enjoyable to go back and read some of the articles appearing around that time. It's different now, General Petreus and his ilk have very little credibility outside of the circle of true believers, but they do offer some shade to those afraid to be left in the sun, and who would like to toe the party line without being hung out to dry for doing so. Going to the American people and saying "I trusted a general" shouldn't wash, but it will in some places.

I'm thinking about this maybe a little after the fact, but I've been kind of turning it over in my head for awhile and while I don't have much to add to all the stuff that's out there, it is funny to me how even relatively unsophisicated viewers of the political scene, like myself, know all the steps to the dance to be done by those in the middle, who put careers and form above belief and values. Although the baldness of Sen. Vitters (R-LA) absurdity as an electable human being to any office involving any kind of voting by other human beings continues to surprise me. He seems to be trying to shore up some kind of base he might have lost by fcking various ladies of the night by taking some funds earmarked for education and earmarking that money for the Louisiana Family Forum, a group advocating creationism "to develop a plan to promote better science education." Again, old news, but news so indicative of a culture that has clearly lost any reason to move forward. America profoundly lacks any kind of real mission or real sense of national cohesion. It seems that even if a small number of actively involved citizenry had a kind of galvinizing mission we would be better off, after all, most of the time, most of the citizens of any state don't have any particular mission or real sense of coherent cohesion, and it's probably for the best that it's so, but there should be some sense emanating from somewhere for concepts like social justice, improvement in how the worst off among us live life and in educating a new generation not just of elites of but of all citizens. We are reaping a whirlwind otherwise.

It's late, I've been here too long and I've got to figure out some place to go.