MindSpinner

In my neck of the woods, pandemic flu is hardly mentioned anymore. Sad, too, since the threat grows rather than decreases, despite the media’s short attention span. (In some places, such as Fort Wayne, Texas, the coverage is good and preparedness efforts are underway. In some other places, though, people are being left to believe that the threat came and went like Y2K or is hardly to be taken seriously.)

So then, just in time for the Halloween season, here’s some scary truth in the form of a Pandemic Flu Flyer to contemplate, investigate, and act upon. I hope you pass it on. Why wouldn’t friends tell friends in time for them to prepare, considering what the alternative might turn out to be?

A higher res version suitable for printing and copying can be found here.

Never mind that the wedding was never on or indeed that I’ve never met Michael Noer, it’s definitely off now. And he needn’t come crawling on his knees here to PoDunkville to beg for my hand despite the fact that I make more than $30K (alas not enough more than $30K), because I won’t be having him. He can vacuum his own digs, cook his own dinner and just go do that to himself which might otherwise have been better done by some sexy smart career woman whose stimulating intellectual, personal, and physical companionship he will now never enjoy ;->.

Check out Rebecca Traister’s take on Noer’s Forbes’ piece, “Don’t Marry Career Women.”

A state university in our red state has made the courageous move of offering health care coverage to domestic partners. It is the first public university here to do so. Defenders of marriage are, predictably, objecting. I really have no clue what defenders of marriage are defending. Nobody’s stomping on anybody’s right to go get married in the traditional way by opting not to stomp on what should be the rights of domestic partners.

I rather like the notion of “domestic partnership.” It implies an egalitarian arrangement and freedom to negotiate roles. (We have this option within marriage, of course, but the institution doesn’t give us a clean slate to start with. No. There’s a lot of engraved stuff that has to be sanded down before we can even begin to sketch what we actually want to commit to.) And in this part of the country, say you are married - certain segments of society will try to straitjacket you into certain roles and tell you how you ought to live and who’s the head of whom, and other such stuff and nonsense that gives me a headache and makes me claustrophobic.

Yes, given the choice, I’d rather have a “partner” than to buy into an institution so historically problematic as marriage. And if I could wave a magic wand and change the way the world works, states would recognize civil unions between domestic partners in any gender configuration, and marriage would be a kind of add-on option reserved for those who wish to defend it, consecrate it, and enter into it, according it whatever religious and spiritual significance they choose. The law would not care a hoot about whether I’d taken the additional step of making my civil union also a marriage, because marriage would be religious and not a civil institution.

Furthermore, I don’t think that my magic wand, if I had one, would make me an enemy of marriage, because it wouldn’t deter it. It would only be an affirmation of the fact that this nation is intended to be a democracy, not a theocracy. It is only in an atmosphere of freedom and tolerance that religion and its institutions can function without becoming something insidious. When religious doctrine, having insinuated itself into law, prevents partners from visiting a loved one in a hospital or having any legal status whatever in their lives, then it does harm, not good. Thinking people recognize this and are repelled. Indeed, those who would, on the basis of religion, dictate law, serve to sever many thoughtful people from religion altogether - and worse, yet, from the exercise of personal spirituality - because they recognize its fruits as being not faith, hope, and love, but intolerance, injustice and the thwarting of lives instead.

The real way to defend marriage would be to release that attempted doctrinal deathgrip on what it can be so that hearts can freely build together tents of shelter for lives lovingly entwined. Call this enterprise of hearts domestic partnership, call it marriage; it is a fundamental human right that has everything to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and nothing to do with telling other people how they have to live.

Anybody who cares about teaching, schools, and our what government really ought to be doing shouldn’t miss Michael Winerip’s NY Times piece today, “Teachers, and a Law That Distrusts Them.”  The sad part is that this piece concludes Winerip’s four-year stint writing about education for the Times. I wish he’d open out this piece into a book showcasing what education should be and debunking nonsense that passes for attempts at progress.

But don’t stop there.  Also read, at Creek Running North, Chris Clarke’s account of his wife Becky’s teaching experience in a school district obsessed with implementing “progress” from above. Somewhere buried down in the comments I put in my two cents worth, from which I’ve excerpted the last paragraph:

There’s something truly insidious about the kind of education Becky was being required to implement, especially if it’s stretched over twelve years.  It’s mind-numbing, and it rewards compliance.  It’s a torment and a deterrent to creativity and curiousity.  Who wants that?  I’ve begun to think that there are those who do indeed want to produce a skilled population of workers trained to comply and long discouraged from asking big essential questions like “Why are we doing it this way?” or “What are the larger consequences of this course of action?” These graduates are likely to depend on others to think for them without deeply analyzing and are thus fairly easily manipulated by those who know how to orchestrate their prejudices, fears, and desires to net votes at the ballot box.  One can fleece their futures and simultaneously make them grateful for crumbs, lead them off to war waving flags, keep them stirred about minor moralities instead of issues of global consequence.  The result can look like a democracy when really it’s a ruling class managing its sheep.

I’d love to think that Sidney Blumenthal’s argument in “The imperial presidency crushed” could be true: that the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the illegality of Bush’s miltary tribunals actually spells the end of Bush’s imperial presidency. I suspect it’s too early to tell how effectively he can be reined in during his remaining days in office. If it happens, the Supreme Court may have to chip away at the task whenever a chisel in the form of the case is handed to them. Congress hasn’t anymore collective spine than an overcooked noodle. Whether Blumenthal is prophetic or overly optimistic, I like his close, and I want a t-shirt emblazoned with the quote from Justice Stevens:

There are many monuments to presidents in Washington, but there is no Nixon memorial, only the Vietnam War Memorial. If there is ever a Bush Monument, it may be a cage surrounded by barbed wire, above which is engraved in marble the lasting judgment of Justice Stevens: “THE EXECUTIVE IS BOUND TO COMPLY WITH THE RULE OF LAW.”