We asked, and they acted. Change.gov, the Obama Transition Website, is now published under a Creative Commons license. I'm pretty amazed at how quickly this change happened. The Obama Transition folks heard the call and answered quickly.

Link via Lessig Blog.

Given how lovely the market is this year, I wonder how faculty who earned tenure in the '50s and '60s and '70s will respond to up-and-coming scholars who slummed as adjuncts or lecturers during the Great Recession of the December 2007 and Counting.  Will they convince themselves they marketed their wares when the state of the nation was equally bleak? 

Or will they admit that the prospects for the current crop of newly-minted doctorates are sufficiently dim that the ban on hiring anyone who deigned to take a position because he liked food and needed shelter should be lifted?

This post remains 100 percent correct. 

Doesn't mean I'm not discouraged.  (I am.) 

But the solace normally accorded those who are 100 percent correct eludes me when I think about the disastrous nature of my present and future finances. 

Not that I'm worried.  (I am.)  Not that I'm panicking.  (I am.) 

I know from state-wide hiring freezes.  I know from bad economies. 

Fortunately, I also know from solutions:

Not Waits' best, but his most apropos in our dire now.

I started blogging just under five years ago, and for the first few months, I kept marveling at my brand new toy.  The record of this marveling, unfortunately, is still in the blog archives for all to see: there are entire posts that read, Whoa!  Check it out!  Somebody responded to something I wrote! and d00d!  Twenty thousand readers in one month!  Inconceivable! This Inter-net is an amazing thing! Yes, I really did hyphenate “inter-net.” It was supposed to be really funny, you see, like something from the early twentieth-century issues of The Onion in Our Dumb Century.  Because whenever I want to suggest in shorthand that someone my age or older is clueless about new technologies, I refer to the “auto hyphen mobile,” after Our Dumb Century’s “auto-mobile,” and . . . oh, never mind.

The point is that sometimes, the internet really is an amazing thing, in which you write a blog post that takes issue with Peter Singer’s characterization of the capabilities of people with Down syndrome, and then find, a few weeks later, an email from Peter Singer in your inbox.  Last month, Singer wrote to say he’d come across my post about the SUNY - Stony Brook Cognitive Disability conference.  He said he was delighted to hear that my son Jamie has a wide range of abilities, intrigued to learn that Jamie understands a range of theories about why humans eat some animals and not others, but sorry that neither Jamie nor I appreciate Woody Allen movies—though he admitted that the recent ones have been disappointing. 

Surely you’ll recall—my post was only two months ago!—that in the passage at issue, Singer wrote, “To have a child with Down syndrome is to have a very different experience from having a normal child. It can still be a warm and loving experience, but we must have lowered expectations of our child’s ability. We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player.”

Well, Singer wrote to me to say that my reply to this passage suggests that he is wrong about Down syndrome, whereas in fact it takes more than a couple of exceptional children here and there to challenge the general rule.  After all, the passage speaks of expectations, and although people do win the lottery now and again, it would be unreasonable to buy a lottery ticket and expect to win.  Professor Singer then asked me to direct him to some evidence that would indicate that Jamie is not anomalous—and, he said, this is not an idle challenge: if he is mistaken about Down syndrome, he will correct himself in the future.

I wrote back a few days later.  And then, after we’d exchanged another round of emails, I asked Singer if it would be all right with him if I posted my initial reply (but not his initial email) to the Inter-net. Of course, I don’t have to ask permission to post my own words, but I don’t believe in replying to someone’s private email by making a blog post out of it (even if I don’t publish the contents of the email).  Singer said thanks for asking—some people would have simply gone ahead and posted his letter along with the reply.  And I said, oh yes indeed, I’ve dealt with some of those people.  (That’s one reason why I eventually got a blog of my own!) But I think it’s important to go public with arguments about what we can and can’t expect from people with Down syndrome, because those expectations play such a large role in debates over prenatal testing, reproductive rights, and “selective” abortion.

So, then, this was my reply:

Dear Professor Singer,

Many thanks for noticing that blog post, and for taking the time to write.  Thanks also for your kind words about Jamie.  I do, in fact, enjoy a handful of Woody Allen movies here and there; Broadway Danny Rose is a wonderful piece of work, and I’m fond of Bullets Over Broadway as well.  But I do think “we cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen film” instates a distinctly Upper West Side-y performance criterion, and is worth critiquing on those grounds alone.  More seriously, I note that in the 1920s we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning to speak; in the 1970s, we were told that people with Down syndrome were incapable of learning how to read.  OK, so now the rationale for seeing these people as somewhat less than human is their likely comprehension of Woody Allen films.  Twenty years from now we’ll be hearing “sure, they get Woody Allen, but only his early comedies—they completely fail to appreciate the breakthrough of Interiors.” Surely you understand my sense that the goalposts are being moved around here in a rather arbitrary fashion.

I do appreciate the fact that you’re not issuing an idle challenge.  I don’t think you would do that.  I have three responses to it.

The first is nitpicky, and has to do with the meaning of “we cannot expect.” You apparently take your phrase to mean “we have no reason to expect” X, any more than we can expect to win the lottery.  I take it to mean—and, unfortunately, all too many people take it to mean—that a child with Down syndrome will not be able to do any of the things you mention.  (This matters, of course, when it comes to the kind of information prospective parents receive after getting a positive result on an amniocentesis.) I think there’s all the difference in the world between saying “we cannot expect” and “we should not expect”; the former suggests absolute certainty, and the latter suggests the kind of probabilism you want to convey.  Accordingly, I take the former to be falsifiable by any person with Down syndrome who demonstrates one of the abilities you say we cannot expect him or her to have.  If you do want to revise the passage ever so slightly, you could always say, “there will no doubt be exceptions that prove the rule, but as a rule, we should not expect etc.”

The second is more substantial.  The larger point of my argument with your claim is that we cannot (I use the term advisedly) know what to expect of children with Down syndrome.  Early-intervention programs have made such dramatic differences in their lives over the past few decades that we simply do not know what the range of functioning looks like, and therefore do not rightly know what to expect. That, Professor Singer, is the real challenge of being a parent of a child with Down syndrome: it’s not just a matter of contesting other people’s low expectations of your child, it’s a matter of recalibrating your own expectations time and time again—and not only for your own child, but for Down syndrome itself.  I’ll never forget the first time I saw a young man with Down syndrome playing the violin—quite competently, at that, with delicacy and a sense of nuance.  I thought I was seeing a griffin.  And who could have imagined, just forty or fifty years ago, that the children we were institutionalizing and leaving to rot could in fact grow up to become actors?  Likewise, this past summer when I remarked to Jamie that time is so strange that nobody really understands it, that we can’t touch it or see it even though we watch the passing of every day, and that it only goes forward like an arrow, and Jamie replied, “except with Hermione’s Time-Turner in Harry Potter,” I was so stunned I nearly crashed the car.  I take issue with your passage, then, not because I’m a sentimental fool or because I believe that one child’s surprising accomplishments suffice to win the argument, but because as we learn more about Down syndrome, we honestly—if paradoxically—don’t know what constitutes a “reasonable expectation” for a person with Down syndrome.

The third goes to the premise of your argument.  You’re looking for things people with Down syndrome can’t do, and I’m looking for things they can.  We each have our reasons, of course.  But I don’t accept the premise that cognitive capacity is a useful criterion for reading some people out of the human community, any more than you would accept the premise that we should grant rights to animals on the basis of whether humans think they do or don’t taste good with barbeque sauce.  I stand by what I said in response to Jeff McMahan’s paper and at the end of that blog post: I hope we have learned enough from our own history to understand why it’s a bad idea to read anyone out of the human community.  (This doesn’t mean, by the way, that we have to extend life support to people like Terri Schiavo against the wishes of their legal guardians.  One point of my remarks about surrogates and guardians, in my response to Martha Nussbaum’s talk, was to challenge people in the disability-rights community who would strip guardians of the right to determine whether their charges would in fact want to be sustained in such fashion.) Better, I think, to add some animals to the category of rights-bearing entities without kicking any humans out.  It needn’t be a zero-sum affair.

Oh yes, evidence that might change your mind if the above paragraphs won’t.  The National Down Syndrome Society is full of useful information about what we can and can’t expect, and online, the Riverbend Down Syndrome Parent Support Group is an amazing resource for everything from research on language and math skills of people with DS.  Finally, there’s the book Count Us In by Jason Kingsley and Mitchell Levitz (1994).  The book includes, among many other things, one of Jason’s high-school essays, written when he was seventeen; the topic is his mother’s obstetrician, who in 1974 had advised the Kingsley family to institutionalize Jason because he would never grow up to have a “meaningful thought.” Of this obstetrician Jason writes:

He never imagined how I could write a book!  I will send him a copy . . . so he’ll know.  I will tell him that I play the violin, that I make relationships with other people, I make oil paintings, I play the piano, I can sing, I am competing in sports, in the drama group, that I have many friends and I have a full life.

So I want the obstetrician will never say that to any parent to have a baby with a disability any more.  If you send a baby with a disability to an institution, the baby will miss all the opportunities to grow and to learn . . . and also to receive a diploma.  The baby will miss relationships and love and independent living skills. . . .

I am glad that we didn’t listen to the obstetrician. . . .  He will never discriminate with people with disabilities again.

And then he will be a better doctor.

Anecdotal evidence, sure.  But good to think with, all the same.  Oh, and Jason’s not the young man I saw playing the violin.

All best wishes,
Michael Bérubé

_______

* Just for the record, for people unfamiliar with things I’ve written on these subjects:  my position on prenatal testing and selective abortion is here, my position on liberalism and selective abortion and l’affaire Schiavo is here and here, and Janet and I weighed in on the Schiavo debate here.

And since I believe in things like a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy and a guardian’s right to withdraw life support from a charge, I think I should probably keep posting things in this vein every so often.  Because as I said in my contribution to the Cognitive Disability conference, I also believe in the right of people with developmental disabilities to eat too many donuts and take a nap—even as Janet and I insist to Jamie that he can have only one soda when he gets home from school.  I’m still working out just how much paternalism and liberalism and libertarianism I want in this mix, and I might as well work it on out in this medium, where I find myself with so many interlocutors.  And as Ophelia Benson pointed out a couple of years ago, I appear to have extra extra trouble working this out when children and religion are involved.  Funny how that works.

x-posted to Crooked Timber, just like my first post on the conference.

Tim O'Reilly recently suggested putting change.gov under revision control. After a recent dust up about content on Obama's Transition website being taken down and then re-posted, many have questioned the transparency of the site. O'Reilly's suggestion of revision control is interesting because it would better allow members of the community to see what's changing on the site. However, I'm not sure I'd go as far as O'Reilly's suggestion that the site be run on a Wikipedia model.

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In the summer of 1968, Charles Schulz—born yesterday in 1922—decided not to take the path of least resistance.  In the first months of the Presidential race, the politics of Peanuts were as inscrutable as ever:

The political positions of the birds—one of whom Schulz would christen “Woodstock” two years later—are literally cryptic.  (Snoopy later embraced of identity politics via a nifty collapse of signifier into signified, but let’s not lit-crit these panels quite yet.)  For Schulz, the campaigns of Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace were less important than baseball:

This dead-pan surrealism here is Peanuts at its artistic best, but at a time when America was at war and a segregationist was a viable Presidential candidate, dead-pan surrealism wasn’t the order of the day.  So Schulz sent Charlie Brown to the beach:

This strip’s a fairly typical example of Charlie Brown’s half-hearted exasperation with an unfair world.  The next?

Not only does the world cease its relentless, playful torment of Charlie Brown, but the boy who tamps it down is black and can swim.  Because on 31 July 1968, Schulz introduced the world to Franklin.  May not seem like much, but it’s as explicitly political as Peanuts ever ventures.  Until, that is, 1 August 1968:

The father of Franklin, the black boy who swims, is over in Vietnam.  That second panel neatly illustrates how far Schulz strayed from his comfort zone.  Charlie Brown’s father “was in a war, but [he doesn't] know which one.”  That’s the extent to which contemporary politics typically intruded the most popular daily comic in America.  But for some reason, Schulz felt the need to contradict conventional racist wisdom that summer.

The racists responded in the manner befitting Wallace-backers: “I don’t mind you having a black character, but please don’t show them in school together.”

It must’ve sucked to be a racist.  Unless, that is, you’re a fan of Dennis the Menace:

That’s from 13 May 1970, two years after Schulz quietly integrated public schools.  There’s much to admire in the matter-of-factness of Schulz’s racial politics.  Not only is there no meta- to it, there’s no mention of it—Franklin arrives, befriends Peppermint Patty, and plays football.

(x-posted.)

Well, the San Diego gig was pretty fun and anticlimactic all at the same time.  Anne Neal is quite savvy about these things, as I expected she would be, and opened by disavowing the rock-em-sock-em-robots model of debate—after I had gone first and criticized ACTA for publishing pamphlets like this one, which go after what I politely called “a low-information conservative constituency, that is, people who can be counted on to be outraged that there are literature courses that deal with ‘masculinities’ and anthropology courses that deal with ‘the historical foundations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism.’” This was clever in at least two ways: it effectively announced that Ms. Neal was going to do the Daniel-among-the-lions thing not in the Horowitzian manner of claiming to be the lonely exponent of intellectual diversity in a sea of academic groupthink, but in a post-partisan, “let’s avoid predictable debates and look for solutions” mode; and it therefore forced me to take the tack Obama took in his first debate with McCain, that is, to mark my points of disagreement by saying stuff like “Ms. Neal is right about X; but there’s another point to be made here as well. . . .” Not that I did this with anything like Obama’s poise.  If I could, after all, I would be vice-president-elect right now.

For debate prep, I read this talk, which Ms. Neal had kindly sent me two years ago.  It didn’t come up during our presentations, so on the way out, I took the opportunity to thank her for sending it to me, and asked if I could clear up two little things concerning her remarks about the AAUP.  The first is her remark that the AAUP’s 1915 Statement of Principles “no longer appears on the AAUP website.” She makes the point a bit more polemically here, where she says, “Students’ academic freedom to learn was foundational to the AAUP’s conception of the rights and responsibilities of faculty.  But—tellingly—the 1915 statement no longer appears on the AAUP website.” The clear implication is that we have scrubbed the record. But the fact of the matter, I told Ms. Neal, is that Johns Hopkins UP, the publisher of the AAUP “Redbook” (officially, AAUP Policy Documents and Reports, now in its tenth edition), permits the AAUP to put no more than 30 percent of the book online.  The 1915 statement is still in the print edition, on pages 291-301.

And what’s so important about the 1915 statement?  The passage at issue is this:

The university teacher, in giving instruction upon controversial matters, while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal verbiage, should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.

It appears to be an article of faith on the right that, as Peter Wood’s rather overheated essay puts it, “the AAUP has long since attempted to distance itself from the 1915 statement” and “when the AAUP speaks on academic freedom today, it is in the awkward spot of invoking the authority of documents and traditions that it has, in substance, repudiated”—all because the 1940 statement and the 1970 interpretive comments don’t reproduce the same language about setting forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.  This despite the fact that the 1940 statement clearly says that teachers “should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject,” and the 1970 comment explains that

The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is “controversial.” Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster.  The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.

This isn’t good enough for critics like Wood and Neal, who believe that something important is lost without that “divergent opinions” clause.

Now, you could make a case that the AAUP should go back to insisting that every college professor handle controversial material by setting forth justly without suppression or innuendo the divergent opinions of other investigators—even if you suspect that this gives the right a handy device for declaring climate change to be “controversial” and insisting that the divergent opinions of denialists and cranks be included in college classrooms.  But it’s just a wee bit wingnutty for people like Wood to suggest that the AAUP has distanced itself, or repudiated, the idea of students’ freedom to learn—when in fact the 1967 Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students is much more detailed and robust than the 1915 statement of principles.

Interestingly enough, because I was attending an AAUP meeting before my rendezvous with Anne Neal, I had a chance to ask some of my colleagues about this.  One suggested that the concept of student freedom has evolved over the past hundred years or so partly because the rest of the world has changed somewhat in the interim: in 1915, you couldn’t expect that students had access to “divergent opinions” on controversial matters, especially if they were arriving on campus from the sticks.  In 2008, however, when opinions on every controversial matter are available in an Intertube near you, it seems a bit infantilizing—of students and faculty alike—to specify that (and even how) divergent opinions should be presented in the classroom.  (Indeed, the 1915 statement repeatedly infantilizes students, particularly in the passage about “immature” students whose “character is not yet fully formed” and who must be introduced to scientific truth “with discretion” and “with some consideration for the student’s preconceptions and traditions.” Because, you know, it can be somewhat of a shock to show up to class only to find out you’re descended from monkeys.) Rather, it makes more sense to defend students’ rights to freedom of expression and freedom from capricious evaluation, as the 1967 statement does:

1. Protection of Freedom of Expression.

Students should be free to take reasoned exception to the data or views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion, but they are responsible for learning the content of any course of study for which they are enrolled.

2. Protection against Improper Academic Evaluation.

Students should have protection through orderly procedures against prejudiced or capricious academic evaluation.  At the same time, they are responsible for maintaining standards of academic performance established for each course in which they are enrolled.

Reasonable people can disagree about this, of course.  But no, the AAUP hasn’t retreated from the idea that students should have the freedom to learn.  On the contrary, we’ve tried to spell out their rights more carefully, and we don’t go by everything in the 1915 statement because, uh, it isn’t 1915 anymore.

The other issue I wanted to take up with Ms. Neal concerned her critique of the AAUP’s amicus brief in FAIR v. Rumsfeld, a case involving the Solomon Amendment.  (Dahlia Lithwick covered the proceedings in Slate.) Ms. Neal wrote:

The academy’s original concept of academic freedom—which centered on the intellectual purity of both professors’ research and students’ academic experience—is out of favor with contemporary educators.  The principle of the disinterested search for the truth has been supplanted by a conception that frequently views professors more as political actors than as teachers.

This perspective was vividly on display last fall when various elite college faculties, as well as the AAUP, submitted briefs opposing the Solomon amendment. These briefs consistently and reflexively invoked academic freedom and faculty autonomy as a foundation, not for the objective search for the truth, but as a foundation for espousing a particular political viewpoint.

Um, well, actually, academic freedom and faculty autonomy are kinda meaningless if they don’t cover professors who espouse a particular political viewpoint.  But sure, you can say it’s a bit of a stretch for the AAUP to file an amicus brief in which academic freedom covers universities that adopt anti-discrimination policies and bar recruiters from employers who won’t hire gays and lesbians.  Some people I’ve spoken to don’t think that academic freedom should apply to entire institutions in this way.  And certainly, the argument got smacked down by the Supremes.  But, as I said to Ms. Neal, there’s another (secondary but important) issue here too: the reach of the Solomon Amendment has been expanded considerably, and the AAUP is perfectly right to object to this.  As the amicus brief argues:

The government is likewise incorrect that the Solomon Amendment merely earmarks federal funds for particular purposes. To the contrary, as currently applied, it penalizes the entire university if any “subelement” deviates from the government’s demands—without regard to whether the subelement itself receives federal funding. The government thus uses funding leverage to coerce universities to abandon protected speech in areas wholly unrelated to its exercise of its spending power.

This feature of the Solomon Amendment ignores the wellsettled law of unconstitutional conditions. Under this Court’s precedents, a funding condition violates the First Amendment when aimed at expression wholly unrelated to the purposes for which funding is given. Government may not place a speech-restrictive “condition on the recipient of a subsidy rather than on a particular program or service, thus effectively prohibiting the recipient from engaging in the protected conduct outside the scope of the federally funded program.” Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U.S. 173, 197 (1991) (emphasis in original). That, of course, is precisely what the Solomon Amendment does.

Like the “equal-access” provision, this “subelement” rule is the product of changes to the original Solomon Amendment to make its consequences for universities ever more draconian. As originally applied, the Solomon Amendment limited any loss of funding to Defense Department funds, and to the particular “subelement” of the university found not in compliance. Thus, if a law school denied access to military recruiters, then only the law school, not the entire university, would lose funding. The Solomon Amendment has since been extended to cover funds from the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Homeland Security, and to provide that a violation by any part of the university triggers a loss of federal funding for the university as a whole.

Like the “equal-access” provision, the “subelement” rule’s indiscriminate reach into every laboratory, library and lecture hall across campus is unnecessary to serve the government’s purposes. The government provides no funds for career services activities, and military recruiting at law schools is unrelated to the reasons the National Institutes of Health provide scientists funding for infectious disease research or the Education Department provides teachers in training subsidies for bilingual education.

Ms. Neal replied, if I recall correctly, that she understood that the AAUP files any number of amicus briefs that touch on civil-liberty issues, and that the real target here was the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule.  Both of which are quite true.

Indeed, the Solomon Amendment has been an important piece of American wingnuttery for quite some time.  It manages to combine three key elements of right-wing culturewarriordom: homophobia, of course, but also the determination to support the troops against the dirty hippie students and their patchouli-smelly professors and, perhaps most important, the conviction that the highest goal of any new policy initiative is to piss off liberals.  As Rep. Richard Pombo (R.-CA) said when he co-sponsored the thing, the Solomon Amendment will “send a message over the wall of the academic ivory tower.” That message:  “Colleges and universities need to know that starry-eyed idealism comes with a price. If they are too good or too self-righteous to treat our Nation’s military with the respect it deserves, then they may also be too good to receive the current generous level of DOD dollars.” And as the AAUP brief correctly notes, that price has gotten progressively steeper with time.

But that was over a decade ago.  Nowadays, as Nate Silver points out,

Public sentiment on DADT has shifted dramatically since 1993.  A May, 1993 poll by ABC News and the Washington Post showed that 44 percent Americans favored allowing homosexuals (their wording) who have publicly disclosed their orientation to serve in the military, as compared with 55 percent opposed. An identical poll taken in July, however, shows 75 percent in favor versus just 22 percent opposed.

Likewise, 471 of the Fortune 500 companies now include sexual orientation in their employment nondiscrimination policies, and even Mormon owners of hotel chains want nothing to do with this Proposition 8 nonsense.

So my final words to Ms. Neal, before we parted ways, were something like this: you know, don’t ask, don’t tell, Solomon Amendment, Prop 8—someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny.  Really.  You and I, we’ll still be debating about higher ed somewhere twenty years from now, and I’ll say, hey, remember the time when young gay and lesbian Americans would sign up to fight for their country, and the U.S. armed forces wouldn’t let ‘em?  And you’ll say hey yeah, remember when a bunch of linguists, including six who spoke Arabic, were dismissed from the military in the middle of a huge festering Middle East crisis because they were gay?  Weird, huh?  And I’ll say, you know, I tell my students this stuff, but they don’t believe me.  They say, “yeah, right, and next you’ll be telling us that we fought World War II with racially segregated troops.” And with that, we shook hands and wished each other safe travels.

I just hope I won’t have to bring too many divergent opinions on this into my classroom twenty years from now.  I suppose it’ll depend on how immature my students are.

Are commas, so difficult to control, that these people, these otherwise normal speakers, of English, have no choice but, to channel their inner Shatner, when they sit down to compose, a formal argument? 

human milk
formula
apple juice
applesauce (baby kind)
applesauce (adult kind with cranberry and raspberry)
rice cereal
barley cereal
prunes
pears
whole wheat toast
yams (at a restaurant I gave him a bite of mine)
hummus (ditto)
peas
yogurt
"green vegetables" with brown rice, which he hated
butternut squash, which he also hated
carrots
oatmeal (Quaker Nutrition for Women kind, vanilla cinnamon flavor)
smoothie (Naked brand, the green one)
bananas (both fresh and pureed)

Well, actually right now I’m in Washington for an AAUP meeting, but I have to leave early (like, mid-afternoon) and head out to San Diego to the National Communication Association conference to debate Anne Neal of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.  This should be fun!  A lot more fun than the NCA’s original plan for the event, that’s for sure.

And there’s a strange coincidence here involving a tiny tangent from last week’s trip to Nebraska with Jamie.  You’ll recall (perhaps) that I took Jamie into the mountains of Colorado and the deserts of New Mexico last month, driving around and seeing stuff.  I was trying to broaden his horizons beyond the usual trip-to-the-zoo-or-aquarium thing we’ve done so often, now that he’s more mature and willing to visit museums and mountains and things.  Well, one of the places we stopped in Santa Fe was the New Mexico Museum of Art, which was quite cool, and which for some reason kindled in him a desire to ask the people in the gift shop if they had anything “about the Sioux.” (It took Jamie six or seven tries before anyone, myself included, understood his request; he was, as always, wonderfully patient about this.) I assured him, as he picked out a book about Kachinas instead, that although the southwest was all about the Navajo and Hopi and Zuni and such, there would be plenty of stuff about the Sioux in Nebraska and South Dakota. 

Unfortunately, you really can’t get from Omaha to the good stuff in western South Dakota—Wounded Knee, Deadwood, the Badlands, Rapid City, Mount Rushmore—in one day.  The state is too damn big.  We had planned, more modestly, to drive to Sioux Falls and back for a day trip, after stopping off first at Omaha’s Durham Western Heritage Museum, which, as you can plainly see, Jamie enjoyed.  (Irony alert: it turns out that the Omaha Zoo, which we visited on Friday the 14th before seeing that hockey game, is absolutely fantastic.  Wish we’d left more time for it—we only spent two hours.) But after driving approximately forever and getting only 30 miles above Sioux City, I saw two road signs: one said “Sioux Falls 48 miles” and the other said “University of South Dakota 6 miles State Museums 7 miles.” So, after deciding I didn’t want to drive seven hours round trip in one day, and then after getting Jamie’s approval, I bailed on Sioux Falls and went to USD where we stopped in at the very tiny and very cute W. H. Over Museum.  Jamie loved this too, I’m happy to say, and you know, it had some really strange stuff, too.  Like this in a glass case and this gazing down at you from the wall and this in the children’s “discovery room.” You don’t see those every day, now, do you?

And the important thing is that we got to South Dakota at all.  Now I have only Seven Unvisited States left:  Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, Utah, Arkansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina.  Hmmmm—wonder if there’s a pattern there somewhere.

But there wasn’t much else to see in southeastern South Dakota, save for signs like this on roads like this.  So we drove back to Omaha, where we learned that we were crossing the Mormon Trail.  Yes, the Mormon Trail—on which, as your National Park Service will tell you, “roughly 70,000 Mormons traveled from 1846 to 1869 in order to escape religious persecution before settling down in Utah and spending $20something million to make sure that gay people can’t get married in California.” Which is great, in a way, since the last time I checked in on Mormons In The News, it was all about this weird statutory rape farm in Texas.  Good to see the Church of Latter Day Saints has straightened itself out!  So to speak.

So yes, Omaha, Mormons, Proposition 8 . . . how does this have anything to do with debating Anne Neal?

Well, Proposition 8 is also one great big huge mess for the National Communication Association, as you can plainly see.  Yes, that’s right, the conference is taking place in the Manchester Hyatt, and the owner of the conference hotel, Doug “Papa Doug” Manchester (yes, his nickname really is Papa Doug.  I don’t make up stuff like that on this blog—I’m not that creative.  Is his son Baby Doug?) has dropped $125,000 of his very own money to protect heterosexual Californian marriage in its moment of maximum danger.  This was matter for controversy long before Prop 8 passed, of course—and now NCA members have to go and patronize this hotel and replenish Mr. Manchester’s pockets.  Unless, of course, they join the boycott.

Sigh.  This really sucks.  Many departments are moving their events elsewhere, but the big me-and-Anne-Neal debate takes place in the Homophobe Hyatt.  Where, of course, the NCA booked me a room, as well.  Well, I canceled the room, at least, and booked one at a hotel down the street instead.  That’ll save the NCA a few bucks, and I get myself a little suite.  It’s a win-win, I suppose.  Except for gay and lesbian couples in California.

Anyway, the debate is Saturday at 11 pacific.  Wish me luck.  As for Prop 8, I note that Moloch has already granted my morning-after-Election-Day wish that Gordon Smith and Ted Stevens be returned to private life.  We’re still waiting on Coleman and 8.