You've still got time
It's hard to believe so many claim to have made up their minds when virtually nothing separates Obama and Hillary
That's as technical as I can get -- beyond lies incomprehension and magic. Like you, I do not know how it all fits inside an iPod clipped to your shirtfront. Silicon is involved.
That's as technical as I can get -- beyond lies incomprehension and magic. Like you, I do not know how it all fits inside an iPod clipped to your shirtfront. Silicon is involved.
Also amazing -- if a tad more explicable -- is the tendency of people to think like computers, in absolute, 0 or 1, either/or terms. Democrat or Republican. Barack or Hillary. Pro-life or pro-choice.
The gray regions, the inevitable complexities of reality, of our nuanced and ever-changing world, tend to be ignored.
I've heard many pundits express wonder that anybody could still be making up their mind whether to vote for Obama or for Clinton. To me, the wonder is that anybody already has decided, locked in by some overarching bias -- old-line feminism, perhaps, or race-uber-alles myopia -- that shunts aside all other considerations.
There is nothing wrong with processing new information, with occasionally hauling out your old convictions and examining under a new light. That isn't indecision -- it's intelligence. Clinton's foray into strident, scorched earth politics left me plumping for Obama, whose mind and oratory are extraordinary -- "I'd rather hear him explain his mistakes than spend four years listening to Hillary crow about her successes," I'd tell people.
But Hillary was talking on CNN the other day, and she had a realness, a practical directness that suddenly made Obama's rhetoric sound canned, fake. And I felt myself drift in her direction, a little.
That felt good. And my heart paused to pity the zealots, those who say that if their opponent -- be it Clinton or Obama -- wins the nomination, why, then they won't vote at all, out of irrational and self-defeating spite. The truth is, shorn of surface qualities, the two Democratic contenders are practically the same, especially when compared to John McCain.
Being humans, we can think. In theory. Our brains are electro-chemical organs more subtle and complex than any machine. The ability to pause, to re-evaluate, to ponder, is something that no computer can do. If you never entertain the possibility that you might be wrong, then you probably are. Leave the 0s and 1s to the machines.
I must admit, as Northwestern Class of '82, that I do not view the school with the kind of warm affection and gratitude one directs toward a loving mom.
On the other hand, I try not to be Mr. Bitter Alumnus either.
So when the dean of my school fudged student quotes of praise for himself in a newsletter, I ignored it as inside baseball.
And if the NU law school wants to bring Jerry Springer to give its commencement address? Well heck, the students picked him. Maybe it's a prank.
I considered lighting a candle for my favorite professor, Abe Peck, who is retiring with the risible title, "Chair of Journalism and Cross-Media Storytelling." But maybe that's me, being old. Maybe the undergraduates don't giggle into their fists at "Cross-Media Storytelling." Maybe it's hip, or the bomb, or whatever phrase is being used nowadays. Maybe, to others, it doesn't reek of desperation and bogglement over the rapid media changes that are drowning us all.
But with these various gripes scorching on the back burner, the Wall Street Journal weighs in with the story of Priya Venkatesan, an English teacher at Dartmouth who cut a swath of dislike with her offbeat use of literary theory to critique molecular biology, her view that supposed "scientific fact" is just more repression by the male patriarchy, and her sensitivity to perceived slights.
Venkatesan insists that the rejection and ridicule she received from her students amounts to a hostile working environment, and at one point was threatening to sue her colleagues, her superiors and the students themselves. In the meantime, she has left Dartmouth and -- all together now! -- is working at Northwestern.
Alas, the expert in both "French narrative theory" and "ecofeminism" will fit right in. College campuses are game preserves for loopy, strident deconstructionism and the kind of radical feminism that died out in sane society 20 years ago, and I don't know if NU is any better or worse in this regard.
But I certainly remember the glittery-eyed, crazed, paranoiac feminist professors they inflicted upon us in the late 1970s, and the dismal experience of having to dip a toe into their joyless, gender-obsessed world.
Even the most lapsed alumni like to take a certain residual pride in their old school. And I'd never ask or expect that NU avoid the nauseating postmodern gender nonsense that has so poisoned higher education. But you'd think that, having endured decades of humiliation due to Arthur Butz, the Holocaust denier who is a tenured electrical engineering professor at NU, they'd be a little more careful about hiring litigious radical wackos who can't even hold the respect of a freshman English class. C'mon guys, everybody's watching. Let's try to make a better show of it.
"Yeah, I guess so," I said, unenthusiastically. "People seem to like when I do it."
"Don't you?" she asked.
"What's there to like? You sit in a chair and talk to yourself, fielding questions from honked-off cops, trying to explain to them why you don't hate the Police Department."
Anyway, I'll be at suntimes.com from 11:30 to noon today.
There's no shortage of college jokes. This definition, from Henny Youngman, seems apt:
