What, then, must we do?

I don't know what to do with the rage.

We have to provide a $700 billion dollar bailout for all kinds of financial snafus that I can only just barely begin to comprehend.

There's no real plan for what this bailout is going to involve.

CEO's of the worst institutions are still doing just fine, no real problems for them.

Our investments are--well, I can't even bring myself to look.

I don't know that this country has the intellectual capital to come up with an effective plan for somehow getting our economy to be of a more rational composition.

I'm thinking of Billy Kwan (played by Linda Hunt in the picture on the right) in The Year of Living Dangerously. He is in despair because he sees his country and everything he believes in chaos, run by selfish people. He types over and over, "What, then, must we do?"--a line from Tolstoy I think. Then he performs an ultimately fruitless act of protest and is killed.

OK, I'm not at that point. But I'm still left full of rage at people I don't know and will never have anything to do with but who have profitted greatly and reprehensibly from others' suffering.

I wish I could figure out a meaningful and nonviolent way to express this rage.

Jury duty

I had jury duty this past Monday. While I wasn't eager, I was resigned, but I also figured a liberal college professor wasn't going to be too high on any attorney's idea of the perfect juror.

We had to be at the county court house by 9:30. There were well over 100 of us, milling around on the 3rd floor, fanning ourselves in the unair-conditioned waiting area.

It's funny, but I had sort of dressed up--skirt, shirt, sandals with heels, make-up. Others did not feel that need. Lots of tee-shirts and flip-flops. I was sitting on the stairs, along with about 15 or so others, so I could watch the group as we waited to find out what was going to happen. I laughed aloud when I saw a woman in cropped pants and a tee-shirt that read "I have multiple personalities and none of them likes you." I had to wonder if she has picked that shirt to send a message to the attorneys so she wouldn't get picked or if it just happened to be clean and she didn't think anything about it. She disappeared after a while, so I don't know what her story was.

After about a 45 minute wait, we were herded into an air-conditioned court room where we were told what to expect. We were all selected to go through the voir dire process, and anyone who absolutely couldn't serve had to go up and tell the judge. A lot of folks lined up. Fortunately, I had brought a book (when would I not bring a book?), because this took another hour. Then we were told to come back in just under 2 hours for the voir dire.

When we all came back, there was more waiting, but finally we were told to line up outside another courtroom where our names were called in random order and we were assigned numbers. I was #42.

The voir dire process takes forever as the prosecutor asked every single one of the 106 people there whether or not we could be impartial. It was a sexual assault case. I used to be a rape crisis counselor. I had to say no, I could not be impartial. That guy was guilty, guilty, guilty. How do I know? Because the majority of women who are sexually assaulted don't choose to press charges. If they press charges, they may drop them once they find out what an ordeal the trial is going to be for them. Then the district attorney has to feel like he has a strong chance of winning the case. And then the case has to go before a grand jury for indictment. And there was a detail of the assault that was icky and that no woman would make up. So I knew that man was guilty, without a shadow of a doubt. And there was no way I could be impartial.

I also had to say that I would never agree to a probated sentence should the guy be found guilty. Nope. Jail time for sure.

I was surprised at the number of folks who wanted to be picked for jury duty. I wasn't surprised at the number of folks that were sort of dim. My populist point of view got tested.

What I found interesting was how similar the pedagogy that attorneys have to employ is to what I do as both the prosecution and the defense struggled to frame questions that would elicit good answers without leading the jury pool to the answers they wanted.

We were dismissed at around 5:30, just in time for a powerful thunder storm. I got soaked, but I was very happy not to have to go back the next day for the trial.

However, a couple of nights later I ran into a friend who's a jury selection consultant, and he told me that the prosecutor did such a lousy job that the guy was found not guilty, so now I feel like I should have lied or something so I could have pushed to convict the man anyway. The young woman is, of course, devastated, and her family is beside themselves with grief and anger.

It ain't right.

Fear and trembling and Sarah Palin

I begin with a photo from the great Andre Kertesz to soothe me. It has two things that soothe me: one is that it's set in France, and I love France. The second is that there's someone reading on the other side of the window, and I love reading.

I need to be soothed because I'm anxious about the presidential race. I know, I know. Obama is ahead in the polls. But I don't trust McCain, the Republicans, and I've already described my terror in the face of Sarah Palin. And God help us, now she's resorted to winks and nose wrinkles. Mean girls flourished in high school and never got caught. Why should that change now? Civilization as we know it is doomed.

I watched the debate between Biden and Palin, and certainly Biden won, but this isn't UIL debate competition, now, is it? It's an ideological tug of war, and I don't have the kind of faith that can help me believe that the left will pull as hard as the right. And I know the right will do anything--and I mean anything--to get their side in the White House. I'm afraid that in a couple of weeks we'll be wishing that mud were the only thing flying.

At the end of the last presidential election, M and I escaped into books--the ripping yarns of Patrick O'Brien to be exact, and we read our way through the entire lot of them, sad to see them end.

I escaped a bit early this year into a WWII spy novel (Blood of Victory by Alan Furst--not as ripping a yarn as O'Brien, but plenty absorbing) just because I find Palin so upsetting and because I'm really worried that there's something seriously wrong with McCain. I've read that the older we get, the less our social filters work, and that's why old people can be heard to say things like "How'd you get so fat?" or "Is your friend ever going to go home?" Seeing his public performances lately, I'm thinking his filters are going fast.

I wish he could see that he's not the ideal personality type to be president (dear god, I agree with George Will about something!), but egotistical men in the military and politics are not oddities, and I can sort of understand it. But, for the life of me, I cannot see how Palin can see herself as ready to be president. I didn't even see myself as a good fit to be head of my department! And I've got the experience to do it.

I don't understand anything.

Except a good book. I need to collect a comforting pile.

What weekends could be

This weekend was a good one.

It reminds me of what weekends can be. It reminds me of weekends from my first go-round at college in Denton.

M and I, along with two friends, went to tiny Winnsboro, Texas, a town with two main streets, and not many more traffic lights. There, we were able to enjoy wine at a small winery, have a delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant with a wood oven, and go to a small coffeehouse and see Ramblin' Jack Elliott himself. And we could have gone to another place in town to see more music after Ramblin' Jack's final set.

This is exactly what I want to see happen for Teenytown. And the only obstacle that I can see is money--ain't it always the case? Well, money and taste.

A good restaurant and a performance/exhibition space could make a huge difference. And I have to point out that our delicious dinner cost about half of what it would have cost at the mediocre Italian restaurant that's here in Teenytown, so the restaurant is not expensive at all. And it was beautifully appointed.

What I don't want: no more auto parts stores, no more dollar discount stores, no more metal buildings, no more antique malls, no more storage facilities.

What I want: life on the weekend that doesn't center on football, a good meal, a good glass of wine, a comfortable place to sit and talk.

Is that so much?

Calming down

Ike has passed us by. I bought ice, batteries, a couple of gallons of water, and we were ready to hunker down just in case.

Now I'm calming down. First Sarah Palin. Then the weather. I've got to calm my fears and myself. I've got to get in touch with my Big Mind and stop obsession over stuff I have no control over.

As Andrew Sullivan says, "Patience, steel, ... triumph." 'Nuff said.

Namaste.

Egghead intellectuals

As I despair over the level of discourse already evident in the first few days of the 2008 presidential campaign, I'm trying to figure out why intellecuals and ideas are so despised.

The arguments I heard from the Republicans were almost entirely binary--either you're for something or against it, entirely, all the way, no middle ground. Either you love guns in all their glory for everybody, or you hate them and don't want anyone, anywhere, at any time to ever even be near them. And so on. Let's just not mention abortion.

I have always considered myself a populist. I love teaching first-year writing classes where I get students to engage in ideas and surprise themselves by how they can look at an issue from many sides and have lots of smart things to say. I grew up in a working-class family, where for whatever reasons, I found myself to be a passionate reader, and then found myself at a friend's house where her family sat around the dinner table and talked about ideas! Without yelling! Even though they disagreed!! I was truly stunned by the possibility of such a thing. With that same friend, I met kids from other schools who didn't just read books, they talked about them. I loved it. I think I've always wanted to KNOW stuff, all kinds of stuff, and I'm jealous when others know stuff I don't. I want to know it, too.

So why do people hate intellectuals so much? Why is it that I find pleasure from ideas despite my background but others don't? Why do I like asking questions, and others don't? Why do I love to talktalktalk with others, and others see it as so much hot air? Is it something that is hard-wired into us? I have egghead wiring and others don't? I was raised in a church that did not encourage critical thinking, yet I still manage to think critically. Why don't others do that, too?

I'm really worried about the state of our nation. I've read enough history to know that our country has always included a majority of folks who don't value knowledge just for the sake of knowledge. And I know that American pragmatism fuels our collective need for practical solutions to practical problems. But the widespread passion for Sarah Palin makes me sad. I want to have someone in office who knows more than I do, is smarter than I am, is curious about issues, and can change his/her mind when confronted by compelling evidence. When I go to a church, I want there to be a minister who knows more about the Bible and the ways that particular church interprets it than I do but can also listen to my concerns and questions without telling me I'm going straight to hell on the express train. If I hire a plumber, I want him/her to know WAY more about how plumbing functions to make my life mess-free. Why wouldn't folks want a smart president?

I don't want someone just like me. For one thing, that's about the last job I want. And for another, Palin and McCain AREN'T just like us at all. They are both driven and ambitious--as are all politicians who are willing to run seriously for a major office. I want someone smarter than me who wants the job. I want someone who can listen and learn. I want someone who can appreciate the complexity of his/her job and the complexity of the people he/she seeks to serve as well as to lead.

It's going to be a long road to November.

Mean girls run for vice president

A while ago, I wrote about angry guys and tried to figure out what the female equivalent would be. Now I think I've got the beginnings of an answer: it's mean girls.

I still haven't been able to make myself watch the Tina Fey film "Mean Girls" because I remember vividly the mean girls I went to high school with, and even after lo these many years, they still get to me. They were always attractive and knew how to work teachers and boys alike so they always got what they wanted. They never got caught, things always worked out for them, and it drove the rest of us crazy. If we were ever insane enough to say something to some poor unsuspecting boy or to one of their adoring teachers, we were told we were just jealous, that we were being "ugly." A fellow "loser" friend said to me once after we'd been subjected to another demonstration of a mean girl's superiority at our expense, "Don't worry; she'll get her comeuppance some day." I said, "No, she won't."

Angry women don't get very far in our culture, but mean girls do just fine.

So I was trying to figure out why Sarah Palin terrifies me so much, and I realized she is one of those mean girls grown up. The nickname "Sarah Barracuda" says it all. I hope John McCain knows what he's gotten himself into because she ain't no Cindy. She can smile "real sweet" while she's saying things that cut her enemies off at the knees--or worse. She knows how to play it.

Don't turn your back on her, John.