And Another Thing

Tax cuts. Ok, dear republican friends, colleagues: G.W. Bush explained to Matt Lauer on Monday evening that the tax cuts that he is so famously reviled for were necessary to prevent an economic disaster following the events of 9/11. Ok, fine, so let's give that bullshit idea the benefit of the doubt. Why then were they still necessary in, say, 2006, when the economy was roaring along and the Dow was climbing to previously unheard of heights? What argument could possibly have been made to keep them in place then? Oh, to maintain the status quo you say, my republican apologist friend. Things were good, so why mess with taxes? Fair enough. But then, WHY THE HELL WOULD WE EXTEND THE TAX CUTS NOW? You cannot have it both ways Mr. Boehner. If the tax cuts should be kept in place, because without them American businesses can't create jobs, then where are all the jobs that those tax cuts are creating? Not sure why I bother with these rants. Maybe Mr. Boehner googled something about dropping out of grad school and stumbled upon this blog. Maybe I just changed his mind. Or maybe I'll have another glass of wine and go to bed.

As for the professional world: feeling pretty good about the grad school decision. I pretty much woke up one day and...felt...fine. I seem to be dealing with the normal sequence of events following a bowing out of academia. Step 1: freak the fuck out. Step 2: contemplate ways to reenter the protective cocoon of grad school. Step 3: question entire identity. Step 4: send feelers out into the non-academic world to see if it really does exist. Step 5: decide to teach English abroad if nothing else works out. Step 6: freak the fuck out again. How long until opening day starts? Nothing assuages existential crises like the nasaly sweetness of Vin Scully. Time for Dodger baseball indeed.

This May Be...No Really This Time it Probably is...

Is it possible that this next decade will usher in the end of western capitalism? The more I think about it, the more this seems to be a real possibility. Here is what I mean. If the republican controlled House enacts its own chosen legislative agenda, or even if it succeeds in blocking and obfuscating everything the democrats try to do, the middle and working classes of this country will be absolutely crushed. Social services ruined, tax policy favoring the rich even more, etc. etc. etc. This will result in only a couple of possibilities. One, a massive revolt by the lower classes. We've seen this kind of thing before, but it has been awhile since it has been anything other than cultural. The 60s provided a kind of blueprint for a nation-wide movement, but it was vague, unfocused, and mostly concerned with moral and cultural evolution. We need to look back to the massive worker-centered protests of the late 19th century that were fueled by labor unrest related to periodic economic swan-dives that rocked the nation in 1873 and 1893. Think Haymarket square riots, Pullman riots. I'm talking bloody, fiery, angry mobs that were sick of being exploited by the power class. It could and probably should happen again. The second possibility is one that I certainly favor, and which seemed likely to happen anyway until last week's election debacle. A further shift to a Scandinavian-style political and economic environment. This has been the lefts' dream of course for decades now and in some important ways, Obama almost heralded the dawn of this promised age. His watered down health care legislation and his equally diluted plan to create jobs via government investment in green industry pointed the way down this pragmatically utopian path. But this path was blocked last week by a resurgence of idiotic republican voters; a blockage that seems to be only temporary. The republicans have no plan, other than continuing to swindle, hoodwink, and bamboozle ordinary Americans into voting for politicians who will continue to legislate in favor of Wall Street and big business by sidling up to conservative America's fear of abortion, gun control, and, well everything really. This lack of a plan has to backfire, right? I think so. I hope so. I imagine that even conservative America will begin to realize that they have been dependent on government's teat for decades, and that the "free market" really just means the rich preying upon the not rich. Which, hopefully, theoretically, will result in a leftward movement among the American electorate. This could all happen within a decade. And, whether or not this movement is a violent, furious shift, or a ballot-box renunciation of the republican death-machine, there is a good, good chance that American capitalism will have a decidedly socialist flavor as a result.


Still applying for publishing/editing jobs, with no bites yet. Second private school observation coming up next week. The slog continues...

Also: the following link is a great summary of why I decided not to attend grad school next year. Watch and learn.

http://www.leavingacademia.com/2010/10/i-want-to-be-a-college-professor/

Things Will Not Get Better (regardless of what Obama or Dan Savage says)

Thomas Jefferson, possibly the most revered "founding father" was as affluent and elite as they come. Jefferson was fluent in three languages, had an insatiable thirst for French wine, built a fabulous and fabulously expensive estate, and was as comfortable in a Parisian court as he was in Virginia. Jefferson would have, in fact, preferred that the newly emergent American political and social system he helped create hewed more closely to the French model. Much of the same could be said for Ben Franklin, right down to his francophilic tendencies. Alexander Hamilton was terrified that members of the lower class would have any say whatsoever in the government, and he favored a radically aggressive governmental handling of the economy--this from the United States' first Secretary of the Treasury.

These men would be truly saddened to see how their political experiment has borne itself out, but not in the ways that republicans and conservatives assume. Elitists to the bone, the founders of this nation greatly feared that they risked ceding too much control of the government to the uneducated and the incapable. They knew that the masses were quite easily swayed, that passions inflamed were passions uncontrolled, and that in a democracy passions could be just as devastating as foreign armies. The very notion of the representation that is at the heart of our political system reflects this concern. The "people" are in no way smart enough or knowledgeable enough to run a government: hence the need for representation. It was once assumed that citizens of the highest intellectual talent and possessing the greatest education were naturally superior officeholders. It is truly, truly shocking that this faith in intelligence has actually receded.

The sad truth that republicans now have enough obstructionist power to idiotically wrestle the economy into the next Great Depression is probably less important than the powerful truth that should be evident to progressives nationwide: The United States is doomed. This election was not about anger, it was about fear. Conservatives, by their very nature, are a fearful lot, and they lack both the vision and, quite ironically, the hindsight to recognize their folly. Their desire to return America to a WASPY 1950s heyday will ruin us. Americans, read your British history. There we will find the blueprints for an empire in decay, and, unfortunately, our future.

On a lighter note: I've received some very positive responses to my C.V. from private high schools in the area, and have scheduled several observation days and meetings with faculty. And, mark your calendars, I will deliver my third guest lecture at Berkeley City College on November 15th. The theme will be U.S. economic history in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Also: After a recent viewing of "First Contact" I have declared, definitively, that not only is Jean-Luc Picard officially superior to Kirk, but that Patrick Stewart is the greatest...actor...ever.

Life is (is not?) a movie

I always feel this way deep down inside, but occasionally it occurs to me in a more straight-forward way that I view my life as if it were a movie. So I do what my character would, think like I assume he would think, and feel as though I'm supposed to act in this role. Then when I diverge from this role, anxiety comes crashing in. This, I suppose, was what Sartre was trying to tell us, and also Heidegger before him for that matter. We are all just playing roles, filling time, avoiding or filling the void. Knowing this provides little comfort. We still have to live here after all. Anyway, the movie thing. It is difficult to know what I should be doing in my current situation. Grad school (do I go next year at the end of my deferral? do I move on without it?) seems like this foe to be vanquished, a mountain to be climbed, a metaphor involving overcoming overwhelming odds. In the movies, my character is supposed to throw himself into the challenge, and we, as the audience, want him to because we have, at most, 2 hours invested in the struggle. Even if it is a failure, it is over soon and we can get up and leave the theater. But in real life, that failure carries enormous weight. So do the successes, though they, unlike in the movie, are not finite. Life unfolds further, presenting more and more of these kinds of choices, and before we are dead and gone, we will have faced so many of them that they blur together and become the history of our lives. What's my point? I think it is this: a friend of mine was listening to me struggle with my decision about going on to my PhD program and she told me that I sounded like I was living in a movie. "You are not in a movie," she said. "You don't have to slay the dragons or conquer the enemy or whatever. Do what feels right, not what you think you should do just because it is the hard thing." More or less. It seems to me that if one did not feel like they were in some kind of biopic about themselves, they would be far less likely to "act" as if they were being watched.

Yesterday I began to apply for jobs and internships. So far, I have applied to the SEIU as a researcher, and as an intern of some kind at an east bay company that works as teachers for supernaturally intelligent kids, the Doogie Howsers of the world. It is apparently a form of special education, which is interesting, because it just shows that our industrialized school system has few ways of dealing with kids on either side of the median intelligence line. I have also arranged for classroom observation at a local private high school, will be observing a humanities seminar. Think about that: a humanities seminar for high school kids.

I learned while tailoring my C.V. to each position, and while writing cover letters to each place that, by god, grad school has taught me some incredibly useful skills. I mean, after reading my cover letters alone, I would hire me. Writing, researching, editing, data organization, communication, teaching--all of this seems practical. To the point that I question those who finish M.A.s and Ph.Ds and then complain that they have learned nothing useful.

Finally, a little cultural side note. Margaret and I saw Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stanger at the Kabuki Tuesday night. How that man can do so much with basically the same story over and over and over again is astounding. Married man meets younger woman. Married woman meets interesting man. Monogamy is questioned, attacked. Affairs help nothing. We are all still crazy. I love that man.

So much to say so much to say so much to say

There's a little Dave Matthews Band there for you. I'm blogging again after spending a few years away from the sport. I just re-read almost all of my old posts from "What Have I Done?" and I came to two conclusions: that was a great fucking blog; and I was a terribly clunky writer. I think reading Dave Eggers everyday may have had something to do with the latter, a condition that has been effectively treated by the rigors of earning a graduate degree in history. Which, of course, is the ostensible theme of this blog--on a meta level at least. Life without grad school. When I wrote the first post, I assumed that that was a permanent condition. But, mercifully, I was awarded an un-asked-for deferral for (hopefully) a year. This should allow me time to live as a non-student, address some powerful neuroses that have, for lack of a better term, "wrecked shop" in the most important parts of the decision-making control centers of my brain, and at least afford me some kind of opportunity to see what...else...is...out...there. That sentence was so frightening to type that I had to drag it out--evidence that there is much work to be done. And by work I mean very expensive therapy sessions which will hopefully show me that life exists outside the twin confines of grad school and bartending. Though I assume there are an infinite array of other possibilities in between these two poles, having yet to grab hold of them weakens the mind's willingness to admit of their existence. That is the project this blogs attempts to chronicle.


In short, I hope to regularly (ha!) comment on San Francisco, and politics, and sports, and food, and bartending.

Please join me won't you?

The Beginning of the Rest of It All

This has truly been the summer of my discontent. After many months of soul wrenching internal and external debate, I have decided to (barring a deferral) suspend my graduate school career. No decision has ever been more difficult. Some of my hand was forced by severe mental instability. But that instability came as a result of trying to justify another half decade or more of grinding poverty, accumulating student loan debt, and a continually nonexistent job market. Why, I wonder, when professors of mine explained to me the extreme peril of pursuing a PhD in history did I not heed their advice when it was at its most useful? As it is, I just spent 3 years earning a MA degree that I am proud of indeed, but those years could have been much better served earning a graduate degree in a field with job prospects. This will be old hat to those who have considered grad school in the humanities, or have been around the block with someone who has. At the end of the day, it just seemed that, at 32 years old, there is simply no more time to waste. I could no longer bear the prospect of being in my late 30s and looking for my first job. Whether in academia or not. I am banking on one thing: those who are smart enough to get into a PhD program ought to be smart enough to find something else to do with their lives. In my case, I'm going to try to carve out a job in education at some level. Though this freedom that comes from leaving grad school is easily the most terrifying position I have ever been in.