The Ivory Tower

[Today's entry is by Joel Cretan, a frosh at school, as told to me]

College: A time for minds to bloom. So when Dan asked me to contribute to The Enfranchised, I knew I could come up with something interesting to say. Until I couldn't. It was then I realized: college is a way to keep us down. I should be able to spin philosophical dialogue between Locke and Rousseau, but instead I spend all my time fighting between Ken and Ryu.

I'm not alone. If I were a sole soul lost in a sea of my own creation, you'd owe me no pity. But look at my peers: How many Nobel Prizes were lost to that bottle of Winner's Cup? How many Pulitzer Prize-winning novels have been forgotten while playing Halo 2? And since Devo was two decades ago, will I really be able to get any musical inspiration doing Whip-Its?

And so it seems that college is the Great Equalizer. Take an inspired young man, give him ten weeks of the Nintendo-and-Stoli prescription, and you make him turn his 20-unit Honors Quarter into a charade of 15 units (thank you golf and Band!) And while I'm out sipping my martinis and riding my polo ponies, the lower class can figure out how to throw off the yoke of oppression!

Except, it's not only been my studies that have suffered. I used to volunteer. I taught janitors how to read. Fuck. I would climb into trees and rescue kittens while at the same time performing the Heimlich maneuver on an infant. I was a Golden God. My Facebook profile still says that my interests include saving AIDS orphans from ethnic cleansing, but it’s been a while since I’ve gotten around to that. Now I just control a 1" by 1" pixilated rendering of an Italian plumber and call it a night. How are they going to set fire to the symbols of our bourgeois control when they can't read the instructions on the match
books? (Hint: "Close cover before striking.")

There comes a moment in every man's life, and I fear that for me it comes right now, when he begins to understand Trickle Down economics. So, to the rest of you, I give you this warning: skip college, and beat us up when you see me on the street. And to college: you have wasted the finest minds of our generations, and in so doing damned our society to perpetual similitude.

-Joel Cretan

P.S. In case you're wondering, Ryu always wins. Ken's such a pretty boy. For Ryu, the fight is everything.

Double, Double, Oil and Trouble

At first I was puzzled by Bentley's choice of topics. You see, I'm supposed to be the conservative foil to Mr. White's New Democratism. Indeed, White has appropriately taken on the blogonym "Leviathan", putting him in close company with everybody's favorite 17th-century New Dem', Thomas Hobbes. As for me, I admit I'm guilty of a certain kind of conservatism. For one thing, I objected to White being added as a contributor to this blog. Too hasty a change, I said. Will incite the proles. Nevertheless, I tend rather toward the Bull Moose on certain issues, which puts me in the interesting position of playing the tree-hugging progressive (?!?) to Mr. White's reactionary centrism. Truly a stroke of Bentleyian postmodern genius. So before I dive in, I just want to say kudos to our iconoclastic moderator for 'undermining privileged discourses of power and problematizing false binaries' in a manner befitting a Lit Crit. major at Stanford.


So.......energy, eh?

Let me start by saying it's nice to hear that Mr. White is so amicable to the Republican plan to drill for oil in ANWR. Its high time we saw some bipartisan support for bringing huge MNCs and hundreds of thousands of tons of wrought steel into federally protected pristine wilderness. If Mr. White likes the filibuster-immune 2003 budget rider on which the drilling plan is predicated so much, I've got another one for him: H.R. 1912 "A Resolution to Pry Open Teddy Roosevelt's Casket and Squeeze out a Cleveland Steamer on His Chest."

But let's be fair. I'm sure Mr. White's support for ANWR drilling is contingent on a few conditions. (1) The rig operators and Caribou-relocation engineers must be closed-shop union represented, (2) Nobody on site must be forced, asked, or allowed to pray to or mention the name of God Almighty or any lesser deity, and (3) Anybody who knows and/or likes Dick Cheney must be excluded from profit.

I take a cue from Dennis Miller when I say that I, for one, think drilling in Alaska makes about as much sense as Odin blowing Margeret Fuller at the Hartford Convention. And as for the perpetual drinky-birds, I quote the Tao of Homer (beer not epics): "In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics."

So what of alternatives? I think White misses the big picture when he bemoans the Mideast Oil-War nexus. The idea is that petroleum is made out of long-since-dead things. So more dead things, more oil. And these Islamic fundamentalists aren't killing themselves...er...right.....(bad excuse for a bad joke: "Is that an RPG in your pocket, or are you just Wahhabi to see me?). In the meantime, we can conserve by confiscating all the H2's in this country and issuing their owners vouchers for penis-enlargement surgery and hair plugs.

As for more long-term solutions, I jotted down a few things the Democrats might donate to burn instead of fossil fuel:

1. Red tape
2. Howard Dean
3. Copies of the Starr Report whose pages are hopelessly stuck together
4. Their souls
5. American flags
6. Clinton's "bridge to the twenty-first century"
7. Ted Kennedy's liver (who needs cold fusion?)
8. Pork barrels
9. Howard Dean's charred remains
10. "terminated" Fetuses (Fetii?)

Perhaps Mr. White can pass it along to Terry McAullife at the next DNC meeting miles below Cambridge, Mass in the bowels of Harvard college.

But, of course, if it's truly 'clean, alternative' power we're looking for, we might take a cue from our friend House Resolution 1912. Let's tap the graves of Jefferson and Adams and Lincoln, and hook the old boys up to generators. Surely, they're spinning fast and often enough to keep us all up in SUVs and tanning beds till Kingdom Come.

-The Lorax.

Pissing into the wind

I know nothing about energy policy. Absolutely nothing. The only area of politics I know or care less about is Medicare, social security, and the rest of that geriatric policy area. So this is going to be, as Foster said, an exercise in pissing into the wind. Since the point is to disagree and yell at each other, I can only hope my piss hits Foster.

So here goes.

I think the point of contention in energy policy is drilling for oil in the Arctic. I, for one, don't give a shit. As long as you're not drilling for oil in baby seals or Eskimos, drill away. I'm not too comfortable with us relying on Middle East oil, so at least with drilling in the Arctic we don't have to worry about propping up any pro-American dictators or invading any countries.

The dirtiest of the dirty hippies might object to this, since we're hurting animals and whatnot. But know what? I'd rather have a few polar bears covered in oil than start wars for control of oil. And I'll tell you something about polar bears. They'd kill you and everyone you know and love if they had the chance. Don't let those beady eyed, coca-cola guzzling killers fool you. They're only cute until they maul you to death for some drug money and a cell phone.

Not that I'm advocating killing animals, but the utilitarian in me just puts human lives over animal ones. I eat meat. I kill bugs. Hell, I poured salt on a slug only last week. Whatever.

I suppose there are some alternatives to oil as a source of energy. You have solar. That's pretty interesting, but it has it's limits. For example, the Polish-invented solar powered flashlight... That met the same fate as their submarine with screen doors.

Nuclear is another option, but Chernobyl taught us a little something about that. Plus that's really just an invitation for super-villains to steal our plans and blackmail us with a nuke. Or worse than that, free masons with nukes...(shudder).

Word on the street is that "scientists" have been working on "hydrogen fuel cells" for "cars."
I seem to remember Bush saying something about that in his State of the Union a few years back. Something to the effect of cars spitting out water instead of exhaust with this technology. Sounds pretty cool, but I don't see this sitting well with the fat cats at Poland Spring (which apparently is not in Poland!) I say, if they're going to work on converting exhaust, why not invent a butt muffler so my farts smell like roses. Or a reverse one where roses smell like farts. Haha. "Happy Valentine's Day, sweetie. What kind of flowers are these? Oh, I think they're navy bean roses."

If you ask me, what scientists really should be working on is a perpetual motion machine. Yeah, yeah, I know it's physically impossible, but there's got to be a way around friction. The United States will not seek a permission slip from the laws of thermodynamics to defend out nation! Those quasi-perpetual motion machines work pretty well--the ones with the four balls hanging that keep bouncing back and forth. Or better yet, what about those drinky-birds that bob up and down drinking water. They're almost perpetual. We'd just need to build an army of those, and pay some guy to tap their tails every couple of hours when the motion dies down. Now how hard is that, really?

So until we build a frictionless drinky-bird, magical water car, or just settle for having energy during daylight hours, I say drill away. And aim for that polar bear...he's eyeing my coke.

(Did the best I could with the topic and a headache. As for the name of this weekly feature, I propose "pissing in the wind." It has a nice ring to it).

same post, different blog

On the Internet, no one can hear you shout

Today on the Enfranchised, we begin a new feature! Arguing! No longer will our rants be monologues. Instead, they will be picked apart, thrown back at us, and then ground into our faces like we deserve. Every Tuesday, I will post a topic for discussion. Every Wednesday, one of my co-bloggers will respond. Every Thursday, the other co-blogger will explain to him and you exactly how he (the first he) was wrong. You may have noted that on the authors bar, there are now three of us. I'm proud to welcome Ryan Graham "Leviathan" White yadda yadda formal courtesy extended.

So, without adieu, the first topic: energy policy. Recent reports indicate that the Arctic seabed teamed with life at some point. Conclusion: somewhere down there, there's oil. Is this a viable strategy, to keep looking for oceans to tap and countries to invade? Is nuclear the answer? Solar? Wind? Lots of hampsters on wheels? Enlighten us, oh pundits.

So it turns out Rudy can fail...

No, I'm not talking about Clash songs, I'm talking about Sean Astin, perhaps now better known as Samwise Gamgee. He put in an appearance at the Oxford Union last nite, strolling into the great debate hall in a smart three-button suit replete with half, nay, full Windsor pink tie, his lovely daughter Alexandra in hand. We managed to get seats on the floor, in a small section unified by, if nothing else, our support for the introduction of a measure to the effect that "This House believes Rudy is the greatest sports film of our generation." Of course, Oxfordshire is Tolkien country (The Hobbit was written about fifty yards from where I sit, in Staircase Two of Pembroke College), so needless to say there was about as much support in the room for the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame as there was for the Fighting Irish of Belfast. Thus was I fully prepared to see a species of nerdery different than my own take the day, and listen to Astin struggle in vain to satiate the tremendous demand for the inducement of childlike wonder among fan-fic writers and theatre-girls alike.

As chance would have it though, these Serfs of the Ring were doomed to disappointment. Instead, what we got from Mr. Astin was an eloquent, if not at times loquaicious and contrived, treatise on morality and world-view formation. Reading at first from "prepared remarks", Astin managed both to affect the American self-loathing commonplace among liberal apologists with European audiences, and to quote Malcolm X at great length. I will say of him that he is bright and intellectually curious (having worked his way through community college and UCLA on his way to a degree in American Studies), but I wonder in the end if he's really being honest with himself.

Two points struck me as particularly disingenuous. First, a comment about having "spent two-thousand dollars on books, about the war and the president and the politics" and thereupon "spreading them around my apartment, and reading the titles trying to make sense of my worldview"; suffice it to say that the reading of titles does not an education make; a studious trip to the Bodliean will save one both time and money if a spatial arrangement of similarly provocative epigrams is all one is after. But perhaps this is unfair--Astin was speaking in anecdotes, and we can only assume he's read more than just titles. Still, the second comment irked me, and as he was addressing it in response to a question posed by a friend Alex immediately to my left, I can't help but feel that my cringe at its utterance was both recognized by Astin, and cause for his retreat into safer waters.

You see, he was fresh from confessing to us his difficulty in "reconciling free market capitalism and democracy". Fair enough, Goonie. But as your new book, on your own account, deals quite explicitly with the pragmatics of movie deals, agents, franchise rights and the like, it seems as though you've got a working grip on how the market works, and how it works for you. But the the death knell, for me, sounded when Astin implored all of us to see The Corporation, a no-holds-barred documentary that makes Farhenheit 9/11 look like a soft jest from Cheney to Bush. (To be equitable, The Economist called The Corporation "surprisingly rational"). I do not doubt that we all should see this film, or more appropriately that we should avail ourselves to the truths presented therein. But perhaps Mr. Astin ought to see it again, and figure out if he can "reconcile" his admiration for it with the fact that his checks are signed by TimeWarner Inc.

I didn't intend for this post to get so long, and for it to be so unfunny. So I'll finish off by saying that, ceteris paribus, Sean Astin is one of the good ones. An Alec Baldwin or Sean Penn he is not, and he seems genuinely committed to public service (working, for instance, with President Bush's volunteerism board, the Secretary of the Army, and with the Carter Foundation). The case of Astin just goes to show how easily (unavoidably?) we slip into hypocrisy, and how unpalatable that hypocrisy can sound to a kid from Jersey whose parents were not, in any case, Gomez Addams and Patty Duke.*

-Citizen Foster

*I should also note that granting Astin a reprieve was made a great deal easier when, yielding graciously to my request, he helped us all to the Chester Copperpot speech from Goonies, and to a stirring rendition of Charles S. Dutton's famous "Five-foot-nothin, a-hundred-and-nothin" speech from Rudy (the greatest sports film of our generation).

Shitty Inheritances

My last name's Bentley. This means I get asked a lot if I'm "one of those Bentleys". Including when I'm at a Toyota dealership buying a Prius. Look, if I was one of those Bentleys, I'd save gas by converting my car to burn 100-dollar bills. But the point is, I'd love to be "one of those Bentleys."

So it kinda makes me feel for people with last names whose association is not of Old and Nouveau Riche, commuting together. But what about the Alzheimers' reunion at Disneyland? They can't get shirts. And if you thought, like I did, that the reason for their not getting shirts was not the fear of askance glances but because no one would remember to pick them up, you're going to hell too. But, hey, those names got their fear through study and effort, and that is to be admired.

It's the Shrapnels who bear the original sin of their progenitor. Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel devised a way to kill people that would be unsurpassed for 100 years. And so he became famous. But not in the, y'know, good way.

For the solution to this problem, which Harry could hardly have foreseen, we must turn to that great compendium of knowledge and sage advice: Professional Sports. Selling naming rights on his new invention would have yielded riches enough for him to endow a prize better than Alfred Nobel's. And he could have made more than mere stadia because everyone can agree on a negative. To wit: only GM would want to name a new pleasurable experience the, e.g., GM Orgasm. But every car company in the world that isn't Honda could agree to call a new munition the "Honda Accord Instrument of Death and Sadness."