It's Not Foie Gras, It's More Like Veal.

I'm going to draw a parallel here: you are aware of the people who decry games like tag in schools in some kind of misguided rush to avoid conflict during developmental stages when kids should be learning to deal with conflict? You are also aware of the people who decry the university professors who bring their politics to the classroom and make dissenting students feel uncomfortable at a time when said students should be learning how to debate effectively in hostile ideological environments?

Same team.

I fought my alma mater on a number of issues, and you know what? I consider that to be among the more valuable lessons of higher education: taking on an institution that holds all the cards. Because I hate to break it to you if you were unaware, but that's life, kid. When I was in middle school we played a game at recess called "Smear the Queer" wherein one kid had a ball and every other kid in the game (and there was no limit to participation) would try to take that kid out and take the ball from him (this was generally a boy's game, not by design, but by nature). The educational value of that game cannot be overstated. It's just you against an overwhelming force, success is only fleeting, and defeat is assured. When I was in college we played a game called "Divestment" wherein a small group of students with no money would try to get the university to stop investing in wealthy companies that conducted business with oppressive regimes such as those in Burma and Afghanistan. It was just us against an overwhelming force, success was only fleeting, and defeat was assured.

It is these experiences that foster growth, understanding, and character development. It is these scenarios that will recur ad infinitum throughout life, and those who are unprepared for them are weaker for it. So I say to those complainers, you are opposing the very thing that makes you strong. Your success will ensure the failure of those who follow you. Educational environments require these elements, for the same reason that gyms don't prohibit weights over 5 pounds.

No Greater Social Significance!

In local news, my band is playing the Fort Reno concert series tomorrow (Thursday). Fort Reno is a park in NW DC across the street from Wilson High School, about a block or so from the Tenleytown metro stop on the red line. They throw free rock concerts there every Monday and Thursday all summer, so that folks who are too young to go to bars or too poor to pay covers or too free as a bird, man, to go indoors and/or ever stop playing frisbee can go see some of the sweetest local shows in a friendly, safe, and all-around pleasant environment, twice a week if they so choose. Apparently this has been going on now for about 40 years, but our paths didn't cross until last week, when I managed to get there in time to see Greenland and pick up their recently released debut gem, Call/Message.

As far as I can tell, the protocol is as such: everybody sits around on the grass or on blankets, smiling, chatting, and glistening a bit, and picnics are consumed but no booze. Those guys from those local bands look around and nod at each other across the grassy expanse. A throng of underage kids packs in right up against the stage like pigeons around a bread machine and many a minor adolescent drama plays out almost imperceptibly in their midst. The cops sit on the hillside overlooking the stage like shepherds, lights slowly flashing. The stage itself is lit by a pair of streetlights, and the performers sweat like pigs. Everyone has a good time, from about 7pm till just shy of ten o'clock.

Sounds nice, right? It is. Just so you know, they survive off of donations and volunteers.

Exit, Staged Left

In the heady days of my youth, I played organized sports. Should our team come to the field and find that the other team was down a man, we would do the sporting thing and play down a man as well. Some folks never learned the finer lessons of sportsmanship, and they regarded this type of action as "the nice thing to do" or as a charitable concession on our part. They never quite caught on to the fact that, if we had not put one of our boys on the sideline, we left ourselves open to two equally unpleasant outcomes: either we won with an unfair advantage, and claimed no glory, or we lost, even with an advantage, and reaped an even more bitter defeat. It's not a selfless act, it's a Machiavellian political calculation.

Cindy Sheehan has retired from the protest racket, effective today. If her press release is to be believed, we will never again be subjected to the stomach-turning sight of her being carted off by stone-faced peace officers, the signature mawkish grin of hippie nostalgia plastered across her face. This should be cause for relief among the Forces of Goodness and Light everywhere, because frankly, the woman was terrible at her (self-appointed) job. More even than by the war in Iraq, Sheehan and Bush are bound together by a shared and ghastly combination of basically good intentions, glaring incompetence, and woefully unfettered access to the bully pulpit. Sheehan's agitation for peace, like Bush's attempts to ward off the threat of tourism, ought to have been met with the same response as a five-year-old who attempts to drive the car to the grocery store to pick up milk and eggs: Golly gee, what a very nice thought, don't ever try anything like that again, YOU. ARE. NOT. QUALIFIED. This is a grown-up thing, a tool not a toy.

When offered a position as dreadfully important as "face of the anti-war movement," the first thing one ought to do is engage in some vigorous introspection. The very first question on one's mind ought to be "Am I up to this?" When I first heard that there was a grieving mother camped outside of the president's Texas cowboy playpen, I thought a valid and time-honored statement was being made about the American people's disagreement with the choices of their leadership. And for one brief, shining moment, it was. And then it devolved, predictably, into a peculiarly American variety of celebrity farce. Hippocrates summed it up pretty well when he said "First, do no harm." Because, you see, if you're not up to the job, there's quite a lot of harm to be done. The fracturing and/or discrediting of the (vitally important) peace movement, for instance, not to mention the entire (albeit already rather fractious) left wing of American politics.

So now that Sheehan is bowing out, apparently more from her own exhaustion than from any ability to read the writing on the wall, we here on left are obligated to accept the resignation of an equally embarrassing faux representative from the far right. I will accept Malkin, Coulter, Hannity, or Gonzales, unless anyone has a better suggestion. It's really only sporting of us, you know.