Shutting It All Down

I have been reluctant until now to blog about the government shutdown for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I wanted to get my facts straight. Times like this are always rife with people fulminating against this party or that concern. So, I wanted to make sure that if I was going to say anything about anyone, it would be factually accurate. The second reason is that I don’t want to be taken for a member of either party – oh, Brad’s only saying that because he’s a Republican/Democrat/Libertarian/Green. Actually, I’m none of the above and have no party affiliations. It leaves me free to give credit or to critique either major party without stepping on any interests of my own. Similarly, my views on foreign and domestic policy are both developed and articulate, and either major party would take issue with them at various points depending on the issue. That said, I’ll go on.

Everyone compares this shutdown with the last one – how is it the same and how is it different. That’s understandable seeing as there hasn’t been a shutdown in almost two decades. Still, this shutdown doesn’t remind me much of the shutdown in 1995 to 96. With its protracted duration and its relationship to healthcare-related issues, it reminds me more of the three government shutdowns that took place between September 30 and December 9 of 1977. All of those revolved around whether Medicaid funds could be used to pay for certain types of abortions. I don’t want to go more deeply into that, because I don’t want to spend any time talking about abortion or 1977. After all, I’ve written a whole cycle of blog posts about abortion, none as yet about 1977!
As I have read and read and watched and watched, a couple of things strike me as interesting. First, there are those who lambast President Obama for being a weak and indecisive leader. I’ve had conversations in which he was compared to Jimmy Carter and not favorably. In such conversations I invariably point out two things. First, because of the separation of powers set forth in our constitution—a document I’ve read repeatedly—it is Congress’s sole responsibility to pass budget bills, not President Obama’s, and all other conditions being equal, Obama probably couldn’t have done anything in the immediate past to forestall this particular shutdown. Secondly, President Obama’s refusal to budge--which is to say, he is refusing to allow a minority of lawmakers in one house of government to defund his landmark healthcare law as a condition of reopening the government—doesn’t strike me as weak or irresolute. I don’t agree with everything the man’s done, but liberal and conservative commentators alike seem to agree that capitulation on Obama’s part would be disastrous. Well, it doesn’t look like he’s giving in. Love the man or hate him, how is that weak? I ask you.
The second tendency I’ve noticed is for people to want to blame all of Congress. People talk about Democrats and Republicans acting like children, how the whole congress is to blame, etc. To an extent, this is understandable. There have been plenty of times when extremist elements on both sides of the isle have behaved unreasonably at the same time. Blaming both sides is an impulse that also stems from the American people’s deep-seeded cynicism about government and the people who make up governments. Mark Twain once observed, “politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reasons.” Finally, it seems that some people want to blame both sides because they hesitate to actually name particular groups or individuals. I don’t share this reluctance at all, the caution being that I still want to know what I’m talking about if and when I do name names.

Just the same, if all I wanted to do was name names, I wouldn’t have written this. I want to consider two key points about our government and how it functions or doesn’t function as the case may be. Consider, what does it mean to live in a representative democracy? Among other things, it means that the representatives of the people pass, for the most part, laws that the people want or need. That’s the theory. As with all theories that explain human systems, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Let me review some basic civics. A law passes both houses of Congress and goes to the president’s desk for a signature, and if the bill is sent to him during a congressional session, he has ten days excluding Sundays to sign it. If he signs or ignores the bill, it becomes law. If he vetoes it, called a return veto, it goes back to Congress and has to pass by a two thirds majority in each house if the president is going to be overruled. This majority is hard to come by. Out of 1497 regular vetoes, that is vetoes of the type that could have been overridden by Congress and excluding the pocket veto, only 110 have been overridden, about 7.3%. Just the same, in today’s case we’re talking about the Affordable Care Act, which passed both houses and was signed into law.
If a bill becomes law, there are two ways it can be done away with. One is for the Supreme Court to declare the law unconstitutional. The Supreme Court isn’t required to review any given law; it may decide to do so or else not. The other is for the law to be overturned by later legislation. This is the democratic process as the founders of this country designed it.

Why did I include a mini-civics discourse? I included it, because a small party of extremists in the House of Representatives seems to have forgotten their civics classes! What bothers me most of all, however, isn’t even that Tea Party extremists are leveraging power to keep the government shut down until they get their way including such notables as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Representative Todd Rokita of Indiana, Representative Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan, and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. What bothers me most is how this tactic seems to be regarded as a legitimate thing to do in the way of running a government.
A friend of mine who calls himself an arch conservative once put it to me like this, “they [presumably the Tea Party and its affiliates] know that shutting down the government is a valid tactic they can use, so they’re not afraid to use it.” If that’s true, and recent U.S. history suggests that it may be, then the question becomes, valid in what sense?
What might ‘valid’ mean in this context? Is shutting down the government valid in the sense that it is possible and not in violation of any laws? Given the right set of variables, those being a looming budget deadline and an extremely polarized congress with just the wrong apportionment of votes, yes, you can indeed legally shut down the government. It’s happened almost twenty times in forty years, and it’s happening now. Somehow, however, I don’t think that that definition of valid is the one we ought to go by. Consider this: by that set of parameters, Hitler’s ascension to power and his subsequent transformations of the state into one of totalitarian rule were quite valid. He used the constitution of the defunct Weimar republic against itself to gain power, and he did it legally. Yet, when German history refers to Hitler’s rise to power, the word almost always used is ‘die Machtergreifung’ (seizure of power). Interesting. That suggests to me that just because you can do a thing via the machinery of government, it doesn’t follow that you ought to.

One thing the Democrats have right is this observation, stated so often that I hesitated to include it. The Affordable Care Act passed both houses of Congress. It was signed into law by a sitting president. It was upheld by the Supreme Court, and it survived as a central issue in a national election. Clearly, most of America wants to give it a try. The solution if you don’t like it, then, is to vote enough people into Congress to overturn it through correct use of the legislative process. TO borrow a sound bite from the president, “don’t boo. Vote.”


In conclusion, I have no strong opinions about whether or not the healthcare act will work, because I don’t predict the future. What I can say is that there was vehement opposition to social security, Medicaid and Medicare when they were first passed, and yet millions of people have benefited positively from those programs over the years. What I can also say is that I have a ton of friends and acquaintances who work multiple part-time jobs, who have no access to health coverage and no prospects of any access to health coverage possibly except for the Affordable Care Act. There are millions more like them. Will the law help them? I don’t know, but if it doesn’t, we can always change it. Fairly, democratically and reasonably.
What we should not be doing, however, is allowing a handful of House republican extremists, including the speaker of the house, John Boehner, to use fiscal deadlines and funding stoppages as a means of forcing action on legislation they happen not to like, regardless of what the legislation is. No matter which party does it, that is not democracy. That’s power play with stopped paychecks and closed programs for consequences. I hope and pray that a spirit of reason descends on Congress and that we get back to business as soon as possible. I would have been happy to see the shutdown ended as I wrote this, making this blog post obsolete. ... It seems it's not obsolete.

Are Words Only Words?

As in most other communities and subcultures, the blind community has terms it uses to denote in-group members and out-group members. Conceptually, this doesn’t bother me. On the ground, however, I am bothered, because the terms used are either demeaning in and of themselves, or they, to put it plainly, sound silly and reflect poorly on the user. Let’s start with two in-group terms, blink and blindy.
As with a lot of contemporary slang, users may disagree on the boundaries or limitations of a particular word, and there’s really no reliable documented source to go to. However, being blind myself, I hope I have some idea of what I’m talking about as I attempt to set up these terms. Blink is a slang word for a blind person. It is mostly used by blind people to refer to other blind people, but not always. In an online blog, one person, presumably someone who can see, refers to himself as “an honorary blink.” O … k. Blindy gets a little more airplay. Twitter has a page styling itself Blindy.Tv, described television for the blind. I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence that some blind users of these terms consider there to be a difference between blink and blindy. Namely, a blink can allegedly be anyone who is anything ranging from being qualified as legally blind on to totally blind, whereas a blindy is usually described as being totally blind or having no functional vision. Interesting.
Let me move on. Sighty and sightling are interchangeable words used to designate a person who can see, one who is not legally blind. They can be derogatory, but they don’t have to be. It depends on the attitude of the speaker. If someone is frustrated and says, “the damned sighty kept asking me whether someone picks out my clothes for me,” then obviously it’s being used negatively. However, if someone says, “so when I couldn’t figure it out, I decided to see if I could find a sighty to help me with it,” the word isn’t being used derogatorily, at least in so far as the intent of the speaker has anything to do with the meaning of the word.
As a linguist, I know that many groups throughout history have taken intended epithets and made them sources of in-group identity. We’ve seen it in both the Gay and African-American communities, to cite two modern examples. However, I’m not at all certain that the four terms I’ve talked about originated as out-group epithets. So far as I can trace them, which is not very far, they originated within the blind community itself. TO my way of thinking that makes a world of difference.
As a blind person, I have to start by asking this question: are words like blindy and sightling the best we can do? Really? I’ve heard everyone from blind college professors to blind high school-age students use them, and I find that no matter the user, they leave a bad taste in my mouth. They sound demeaning and silly to my ear, and as an in-group member of the community, being blind, I ought to be qualified to make that judgment call. Moreover, I know I’m not alone. Most of my blind friends also reject these terms outright.
So what is the blind community trying to do by propagating these terms? Is it trying to create an identity for itself? Let me close on a humorous note. If I find terms like these offensive and inane, overcorrection in the form of ridiculous political correctness is also silly. I am not visually impaired, for example, because I have no vision to impair. I’m not handycapable, differently abled or physically challenged. I’m blind. More specifically, I’m a person who is blind, the relative clause making all the difference. That said, I’m not a blink or a blindy, thank you kindly. So, you might ask, which terms do I use? When I’m referring to someone I know has some range of usable vision, I’ll say visually impaired. Otherwise, I’ll say blind, that is if the disability comes up at all, and there’s no law saying it has to.
In conclusion, I want to reply to those who would say that these words are just words, and nothing more should be made of them. On the contrary. Words are extremely powerful. The bible calls the tongue a two-edged sword, for example, and we should take care in how we exercise it. Words matter. What people say about a group matters, and what a group says about itself matters even more.

20 Signs That You Attended a Massive Public University

20 Signs That you Went to a Massive Public University

1. You spent your first two years taking classes and you rarely if ever met an actual professor.
2. You learned the Greek alphabet by driving down fraternity/sorority row.

3. The word Campus Town was used to describe the dozens of square miles occupied by university buildings.

4. "Is that on campus," was a frequently asked question because: A. you just didn't know when campus ended, and B. a lot of local businesses set up shop between classroom buildings and kitty-corner to dormitories.

5. Half of your town's local businesses close between May and August and for a month starting in mid-December because the town's population seasonally drops by tens of thousands and can't sustain them.

6. Once admitted, you have to apply to a department in order to declare its major as your own.

7. University departments are so big that most classes in the major are restricted to those majors, because in terms of enrollment figures, they can afford not to give a flying flip about what you're interested in if you're not one of them.

8. You went through your major courses and never had the same prof twice.

9. When it comes time for grad school, you have to remind your letter writers about you and your achievements, because they've forgotten who you are completely.

10. The university police force functions as a heavily manned police department in its own right, patrolling the town at large.

11. The question, "are you a student at U. of X" results in a "yes" in three out of four cases no matter where you are in town.

12. There are so many bars that they can be rated using a likert scale, and so many social sciences majors around that someone is likely to have done so.

13. New apartment complexes invariably target students before townspeople.

14. There are enough graduate students so that they either have formed or would like to form some kind of union.

15. Nearby eating and drinking establishments can be divided into graduate or undergraduate hangouts.

16. Your library, invariably a massive, sprawling edifice, measures its collection count using 7 or 8-digit numbers.

17. Your dormitories average five stories or taller, and there are a ton of them.

18. You need more dormitories, always.

19. You have your own memes, and everyone in your part of the state, possibly in the entire state, recognizes them.

20. Everyone you meet is automatically impressed when you tell them where you go to school. So you can leave out the fact that you're failing that course and dropping out anyhow.

Loaded Language, From "Communist" to "Homophobe"

Commenting on loaded language is a tricky business, because you run the risk of being called the very things you’re talking about if and when you upset someone. Still, in seems to me that every era has particular terms that can be used by one side against the other to stop the public discussion and turn it ad homonym i.e., make what might otherwise be a legitimate airing of political views into nothing more than a vicious personal attack. For this commentary, I selected two terms that particularly interest me, communist and homophobe. I have to say at the start that this essay isn’t about political systems. Nor is it an endorsement of or a philippic against homosexuality either in the public square or anywhere else. It is, however, a brief look at these two words and their power to alter public perception and/or derail discussion. For much of the twentieth century, the quickest way to trash your political opponent and start fist fights in bars was to refer to the person as a communist. Other fashionable terms for a communist included red, used as a noun, pinko, commie fascist, and other such charming descriptors. From the first Red Scare, 1919 to 1921, to the much more widely remembered McCarthy era and beyond, dissenters were effectively silenced or ruined through the application of the sobriquet “communist.” In the early 1920’s, the media made a regular habit of portraying labor strikes and other attempts at collective bargaining as threats to the American way of life. If you were pro-union, you could count on being called a communist by someone at some point. The government also got into the act. In alleged crackdowns against militant anarchism, which really was a threat back then, the government arrested and deported quite a number of what it considered “undesirable” persons, applying the labels communist, seditionist or anarchist, for they meant just about the same thing, to them all. Here, though, I’m less concerned with what the government does than with what the average person or the average journalist, some of them being very average indeed, does. Consider this. Do you think southern segregation was wrong? Now, who’s going to answer no to that, right? As it happens, southern dixycrats of the 1950’s and 1960’s, in their fight against desegregation, argued vehemently that desegregation would irreparably harm the American way of life. Those who favored desegregation were often called, you guessed it, communists. Never mind that the desegregationist’s didn’t believe in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism at all and could prove it. Calling your opponents communists, whether pro-labor activists or desegregationist’s, was an effective means of framing them in public discourse as a threat to society. It shifted the discussion away from the pros or cons of the particular issue and turned the discussion to topics like national safety, the American way of life, etc. In so far as the individual so named was concerned, it effectively stopped the original discussion. The word homophobe strikes me as interesting, because even though its history is shorter than communist (Mariam-Webster traces the word homophobia only to 1969) it’s doing the same thing today. Regardless of your sexual preference or point of view, I think you’ll agree with me that gay rights is one of the hottest issues in the American public sphere today. With recent supreme court decisions about laws concerning marriage, states passing, banning and then unbanning laws against same sex marriage—hello, California,--I would be hard pressed to find another issue that is more before the notice of the American public than this one. That brings me to homophobe. Let me say up front that I’m aware of the radical right fringe. I know there are those who identify themselves as conservatives and who espouse nothing less than hatred or deep-seeded fear of homosexuals. There are, in short, genuine homophobes out there, just as there were those comparatively few who got called communists and who actually were. What concerns me now is those who are not homophobes, but who are being so labeled in liberal media, which is to say most media. I’m avoiding mentioning particular names for two reasons. First, I’m not interested in defending or criticizing any particular person or publication. I’m talking about the broad picture here, and people should be free to apply what I’m saying to whoever or whatever needs the application within reason. Second, the moment I drop a name, the discussion will turn from the merits of what I’m saying to a defense of or an attack on that person or publication. So for both reasons, I’m steering clear of names. What is a homophobe? The Free Mariam-Webster dictionary defines homophobia as, “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals.” Fair enough. That definition brings to my mind the image of sign-waving radical chanting about how homosexuals are hell bound. I don’t have any tolerance for that sort of behavior and would agree with my liberal friends and colleagues in terming it homophobic. Having said that, if the term homophobe was being applied only to that sort of person, I wouldn’t be writing today. Alarmingly, I’m observing a tendency in a number of media outlets, particularly online media outlets, to use the word homophobe rather loosely, and it’s starting to have an effect. Pretty soon now, if you voice anything other than unqualified support of gay marriage legislation in your state, for example, you will be liable to a charge of homophobia. If you voice anything other than unqualified endorsements of homosexuality in your churches, you will be liable to a charge of homophobia. My question is this: are we coming to such a point in our discourse that no divergent views on homosexuality will be tolerated? Those on the left, whether they’re called liberals, progressives, whatever, have a reputation for promoting fairness, tolerance and diversity. I should know. Being blind, I can attest to the fact that I’ve been most successful in more liberal environments, and I’ve had the hardest time making my way in very conservative ones. That’s very ironic, considering my strong Christian values often align me with those in whose communities I find it hardest to live and work. So, I have nothing against an atmosphere of fairness, tolerance and diversity. However, what I’m seeing vis-à-vis the use of the word homophobe is a growing intolerance for those with whom the left disagrees. This is deeply ironic, because the left often styles itself as being open to divergent points of view. Yet, labeling someone a homophobe does not seem to be reminiscent of tolerance, fair-mindedness and diversity. So then the question becomes, are we as a society now going to tolerate only those who agree with us? Are we going to demonstrate fair-mindedness and openness just so long as the other person doesn’t disagree with our point of view? As I asked in a recent Facebook comment, can you disagree with anything having to do with homosexuality itself or homosexuality in the public sphere, no matter how the disagreement is voiced or what the disagreement may be, without being labeled a homophobe? I’m coming to the fearful conclusion that you almost can’t. In conclusion, if what I’m talking about sounds like public suppression of opinion, it is. And yet—and I know this won’t go down too well in some quarters—public suppression, which is to say societal suppression, of divergent opinion is part of the American way of life just as much as the first amendment and its guarantee of free speech. If you look at our history, you will find this truth played out both on the governmental and the personal level. The use of the term communist in our public discourse is one proof of that claim. Is the term homophobe starting to serve the same purpose in the public square? I’ve told you what I think. The question is what do you think?

On Being Useless

There’s nothing quite as heartwarming and uplifting as being told that what you’re doing is unproductive, unprofitable, and useless. I’ve always said that. Further, at no time are you likely to be given this soul-stirring assessment of your interests, dreams and goals than when discussing your choice of college major. I’m leaving out graduate degrees, because for now graduate school still has a certain, if limited, prestige to it, and so we’re not subjected to quite as much abuse as undergrads. Note that I didn’t say we don’t come in for any ridicule at all, just not quite as much. There’s been a lot of talk lately about what the most and least useful college majors are. Site after site, from The Daily Beast to Forbes, has been publishing its take on what’s most useful and what’s least useful to aspiring work force initiates. What’s interesting is that Forbes and the Daily Beast used the same data provided by Georgetown and came up with differently ordered lists, but that’s a methodology question interesting only to those of us in the social sciences. The lists are based loosely on earnings data and projected earnings and growth in the field. You will notice that money, and only money, is the driving concern behind both of the lists I’m going to present as well as any others you may find. “How much will you make with that,” seems to be all that matters, and from a philosophical perspective (philosophy ranking somewhere on everybody’s list of useless majors) I find that interesting and discouraging. Here are the lists, ordered from most abominably useless, number 1, to merely unprofitable at the bottom. If you don’t want to read them, skip down to find the rest of my thoughts. The 13 Most Useless Majors From Philosophy to Journalism Published April 23, 2012 http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/04/23/the-13-most-useless-majors-from-philosophy-to-journalism.html 1. the fine arts 2. drama and theatre arts 3. film, video, and photographic arts 4. commercial art and graphic design 5. architecture 6. philosophy and religious studies 7. English literature and language 8. journalism 9. anthropology 10. hospitality management 11. music 12. history 13. political science and government The 10 Worst College Majors Published October 12, 2012 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/10/11/the-10-worst-college-majors/ 1. anthropology and archaeology 2. film, video and photographic arts 3. fine arts 4. philosophy and religious studies 5. liberal arts 6. music 7. physical fitness and parks recreation 8. commercial art and graphic design 9. history 10. English language and literature Did you major in anything on those lists? I double minored in two of those items and majored in a foreign language. I didn’t see foreign languages on either list, possibly because they fall outside the parameters the “researchers” were using. Honestly, these lists tell us more about the people who compiled the data and about our culture as a whole than they do about any value there may be in these majors. What does it say that value is defined by so many through earnings? Countless people, from the guy next to me on the bus to Governor Rick Scott of Florida, have called for the closure of departments like anthropology and philosophy and for increased funding to STEM fields, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. With those calls, a misperception of liberal arts is on the increase. College students and their families will talk about religious studies and English lit in one breath as they slam the liberal arts, and then they go on to extol the virtues of biology and calculus as though those subjects are outside the liberal arts. In reality, math and science have always been at the heart of liberal arts studies as well as language. Grammar, rhetoric and logic have been at the core of the liberal arts since the ancient Greeks. Rome gave their study the name Artes Liberales, and during the Middle Ages, the study of these three core subjects was expanded to include music, geometry, astronomy and arithmetic. So we see from this thumbnail sketch of history, another of the subjects deemed useless in both lists above, that subjects like music and language arts have been considered just as essential to the makeup of a person as science, technology, engineering or math. These lists, while they might appear convincing to some because of their use of statistics and projected earnings data, also don’t represent the whole picture even from an employer’s point of view. Carol Christ, president of Smith College, makes a few interesting points. Here’s her article, www.smith.edu/docs/president/Spring2012Christ.pdf. She quotes a recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and universities in which three quarters of employers surveyed indicated that the most valuable skills they seek in new hires are: strong communication, flexibility, creativity and critical thinking. Now, I ask you. In which subjects are those skills taught? Mathematics? I don’t think so. Physics? Not likely. Engineering, sometimes. You’re going to find those foundational skills taught and fostered in core required subjects: communications (public speaking), English, philosophy, logic, history, to name but a few. President Christ goes on to make another telling point. Even as we’re trying to narrow down the focus of education and slashing funding to certain liberal arts departments, our economic competitors, particularly China and Japan, are discovering the value of a broadly based liberal arts education: Surveys in China and Japan, cultures long held as supporting regimented learning, have begun to show that employers there are complaining about the inflexibility of a workforce educated without a focus on creativity or problem solving. Facing the same pressures of internationalization and innovation that have generated increased scrutiny of educational styles in the United States, universities in Asia are adapting liberal arts education as an economic necessity. You shouldn’t need to be the president of Smith College, where I applied for a job last year by the way, to know that other liberal arts apart from math and science have value. As a doctor, how are you going to make judgment calls about patients’ lives e.g., quality of life and the merits of continuing life support without a basic understanding of ethics? How are you going to communicate your scientific findings in a way that will land you that three million dollar grant without a good grasp of writing skills in general and of persuasive writing in particular? How are you going to find that creative solution in particle physics if you’ve never been taught to think outside the box? The short answer is that you’re not. Being able to think across fields and disciplines makes you a more valuable hire than having expert knowledge in one subfield of physics and that only. Leastways, that’s what President Christ seems to have uncovered. So where does that leave us with our handy lists of “useless” majors? It’s time we reconsidered the notion of value as being solely money-driven. The fact that a graphic designer might get paid less than a computer engineer is trumped, for me, by the possibility that it may be that designer’s logo that makes the computer engineer’s company universally recognizable, boosting sales, productivity and pay checks for those computer engineers. It’s worth thinking about.

Small town, Champaign-Urbana?

As I write this, John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” has been playing in my head. After five years here, if I were asked to describe Champaign-Urbana, the description “pleasant small town” is the first thing that would come to mind. Calling Champaign-Urbana a small town, what with its population of about 123,000 not including the rest of the county outside the towns of Champaign and Urbana, is something of an understatement. Even subtracting the tens of thousands of University of Illinois students and faculty who leave each summer and Christmas, it’s still pretty big. So how can I get away with calling it a small town? It’s the atmosphere. The longer I live here, the more I like the personal touch you find at local businesses. The Urbana Garden Restaurant on Lincoln Avenue is one of my and my wife’s favorites. Whenever we go there on a date, the serving staff usually recognizes us and asks how we are. At my favorite Indian restaurant, Bombay Indian Grill on Green Street, they know how I like my vindaloo and my korma. Our preferred cab company, Orange Taxy housed on South Neil Street, keeps our debit cards on file. We know most drivers by name, and our favorite drivers, people we ride with whenever we can, never fail to treat us with friendly respect, and city bus drivers greet me by name. We live on a residential street across from a middle school and high school in Urbana, its population being half that of Champaign. When I catch my morning bus at the corner of Vine and Washington, I can usually count on at least one driver pulling up to the stop sign and asking me if I need any help getting somewhere or whether I’d care to cross the street. Lately, a lady drives by with her dog who’s always barking. At first, she apologized for the dog, seeing me standing there with Delaney, but now I simply wave to her when she pulls up and she greets me in return. Some part of this neighborliness may be chalked up to our blindness. I’ve noticed that people are often a bit nicer to me on that account. But I would be doing people a great injustice to suppose that was all of it or even a significant part of it. For many, my disability may play no part whatsoever. I rather think that much of it has to do with the kind of atmosphere that town residents, which is to say those who aren’t university students, want to engender in the town. I think the university and its student population get most of the attention when people write about the CU area, so I’m deliberately not talking about U. of I. itself. Neighborliness is a quality that hasn’t totally disappeared from America yet, though I suggest it’s on its way out. Getting ahead and staying there has become a driving force in our culture, so when people you do business with take the time and effort to remember your name without consulting a computer screen, it’s simply pleasant. Wouldn’t you say?

Where are They Now?

Alright, so it’s been a while. In tech terms, it’s been forever. And why have I been absent? Life, like the Borg, has a habit of intruding and occupying one’s attention. I’m sure a good psychologist would have a field day with my life/Borg comparison. What have I been doing? That implies an update. After five months and four days, an update is due, to be sure. First, I finished my dissertation! Alright, I nearly finished my dissertation. That is to say, I finished writing the bulk of the thing and survived my doctoral defense on May 2. If you have never had the pleasure of enduring a doctoral defense, imagine a group of four or five professors who have read over a piece of your work and take it upon themselves to ask you the hardest, most trying questions their minds can conceive. Further imagine that your answers determine your fate, and imagine, lastly, that this exercise is done before the merciless gaze of the public. If you can imagine these conditions, you well imagine a doctoral defense. It happened. When it comes to my university endeavors, my wife is the most supportive person I know. Before the defense, she was trying to talk me out of my pessimistic view of the pending exam. She even joked that we would have to work on my “Pollyanna complex.” After the defense which she witnessed, all she had to say was, “I understand now.” Like most other dissertations, mine did not escape unscathed. I have revisions to do which are fairly minor and fairly inescapable. “Wife,” you ask? Alright, I got married. I told you I would, and I did on April 20. My stoner acquaintances were delighted. Being a German scholar, I didn’t think of weed and 4/20; rather, my first thought was that it was Hitler’s birthday. I decided not to let this ruin the day, because it’s also my paternal grandmother’s birthday, may she rest in peace. It was an excellent star trek-themed wedding and reception. We don’t have it on YouTube … yet. Suffice it to say that we chose not to dress up in costume, but all the music was from trek, with all four major series (I reject Enterprise utterly) being represented in the ceremony, and the preacher wove a number of trek references into his sermonette. Good for him! Being a graduate student and living on a graduate student’s pay, the planned honeymoon in Fiji will just have to wait. So, I’m married and the biggest milestone of a Ph.D.’s life, my defense, is behind me. Where are we now? What about the job market? … We’re still here in Illinois. To put it bluntly, this year on the job market has been a near total flop. Apart from the Boston interview (see the blog entry for January 6) nothing else has happened except a pile of reject letters. My professors tell me that this is not unusual, and now that I have defended successfully, I have raised my job prospects for the next round of applications. The department at U. of I., meanwhile, has offered me a final year of teaching so that I can do two things: finish my revisions with the help of Disability Services’ text conversion office, and make another run at the job market. It was kind of them to offer me that year of funding; they did not have to by any means. So this year I will teach and work on turning my dissertation into a pair of publishable articles. At least this year, if there are MLA interviews, they’ll be in Chicago, the site of the 2014 MLA conference. My advisor, meanwhile, is encouraging me to continue bolstering my application by submitting an abstract to the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference, which will happen in March of next year in Portland. I would be thrilled to visit Portland again, as my guide dog came from there and two dear friends live there. Aside from great memories and awesome trekies, this means no massive conference hotel expenses and no overpriced conference hotel food. Lastly, we’re moving. We’re moving into a duplex in Urbana so that we can pay less and get more. It’s a one-bedroom residence with a shared front and back yard. Delaney will be delighted. It’s also within walking distance of several stores and other things that will be worth walking to, not the least of which will be bus stops that will enable me to do certain things such as … going to work? My future students and current employer would appreciate it if I were to do that. Selecting this place proved an exercise in discernment and necessitated a crash course in CU apartment hunting. For example, when one place, a reasonably attractive prospect, waited until the tour to tell us about the mandatory $30 per month water bill, we rejected it. With all of this going, the logical supposition would be that I have not had any time for a social life or hobbies. That would be logical, though incorrect. I am still playing chess, still watching the news for blog topics, and still teaching at church. In fact I’ve recently started playing what may be the only respectable star trek RPG on the web. As someone who has done administrative work on online games, I’m impressed with the massive size and detail work of the gaming environment, especially the Enterprise. And as a footnote, I should add that playing a Vulcan is proving interesting, though with my decade plus of studying that race and its relatives, I should be able to manage it in a way that would be, as a Vulcan would put it, “satisfactory.” So, what topics of note interest me? Edward Snowden? Perhaps. Prop 8? Not really. I always thought that was a states’ rights issue. The George Zimmerman trial? Maybe. We’ll see. But it is time to start writing again. Now that I’m not writing a dissertation, working on this blog has again become possible. PS. I loathe the fact that the appearance of this blog site continues to change. I thought for a few minutes that it was inaccessible now.