The · Continuing · Adventures · of · Alexander · Supertramp

Too long gone, but I needed to say thank you to all who voted yesterday.  For many it was your first Presidential and one to always remember. Now the real work begins.
             I know I need to write more, and I will, but tonight its back to the books.  Goodnight..

I'm still alive, even if absent. 
I was admitted into the PhD program at KU and I'll be teaching two sections of Freshman English each semester--woohoo.  
Kansas storms are totally freaky.
I went to a roller derby match in KC.  WE HAVE A LEAD JAMMER!!!
The new Indiana Jones is terrible!
Speed Racer: visually stunning mindless fun.
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters:  two thumbs up!

two oldies on DVD
1) Paris is Burning: Amazing documentary about New York gay dance culture and voguing.  I miss Madonna :(
2) Your Own Private Idaho: Henry the IV (II) on drugs, queer sex and Keeanu Reeves. Can you believe it's even better than it sounds!

Peace

I went Paris over spring break--completely amazing.  The weather was a bit cool, so I think I'll wait until May next time.  I've fallen madly in love with Paris, and I've begun plotting my escape. First, I need to learn some French...

I caucused for Obama on Tuesday.  I love to caucus! Throw out the voting machines! It feels like your doing something secret and shameful behind that curtain in the voting machine.  Hmm...that's an idea. Nevermind! Anyway, at the caucus you get to talk politics with people for two hours and you actually get the feeling that you're doing something. We were also all in a very large cattle pen which was very cool, and very Kansas. 

I was trying to convince my neighbor to abandon the Edwards camp and join the mass of Obama supports, when two Clinton supports tried to influence me to join them. It’s funny because I agreed with everything those Clinton supporters were saying: Bill and Hillary, together, presided over one of the greatest economic expansions in US history, reduced the deficit, created a budget surplus and stabilized social security. But, they also signed and campaigned heavily for NAFTA (literally, millions of manufacturing jobs were lost), deregulated the banking industry (the sub-prime mortgage collapse), the utility industry (ENRON) and the stock market (the Tech bubble, Worldcom, TYCO and others).  They abandoned Al Gore and the Kyoto global climate change treaty, and turned the Democratic party into a corporate financed machine that could compete financially with republicans, but could only win elections on the coasts and had no room for grassroots organizers or progressive agitators like Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards. 

I’m supporting Obama because I believe he understands that he can’t make the changes our country (our planet!) needs on his own, that he needs to enlist Americans in a purpose higher than shopping and inspire us to something greater than fear.  I’ve seen young voters engaged in this process in a way I’ve never seen before, and corporate influence and money effectively pushed aside and exposed as a limited source for both fundraising and building political coalitions.  Sen. Clinton has had to dig into her own pockets for 5 million dollars in the last couple of weeks, while Sen. Obama has raised more than 7 million dollars since Tuesday (in 36 hours!) from small donors and families.  In short, I am supporting Barack Obama because I believe he is actually supporting this important attempt to take back the Democratic party and our government, and when he is elected he will be indebted to working families, community organizers, progressives and young people and not Walmart, Pfizer or United Health Care.

In the end, I brought my neighbor over.  The Clintons are still holding out.

“In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather”--Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984)

You know, Rudy can keep his "Islamo-Fascists," I want somebody to save me from the people most likely to hurt me this holiday season: gun loving teen-age boys, and their NRA assault rifle hoarding lunatic uncles.  Seriously, ever hear the story about the guy who ran into a McDonalds and stabbed 22 people to death? Me neither.  It's time to outlaw bullets and ammunition magazines.  Sure, those second amendment fucks can keep their fucking guns, but I want those bastards pouring black powder down the muzzle after each shot, so I can duck into the Old Navy and escape.  When will enough be enough?

How's everybody?  Man I'm swamped with classes coming to an end.  I'm writing a paper on Blake right now, but I thought I would take a minute and Luke's suggestion and type a bit about the candidates this year. Tell me what you're think and who I should vote for.

Clinton: I've never liked the Clintons.  As you might have guessed, I have little patience for those who compromise when I think they should stand on principle; yet I have to hand it to them sometimes, they sneakily manage some wonderful things, like SCHIP for example.  Still, NAFTA and the Kyoto failure still looms, as does the disaster that became "Don't ask don't tell." She's also too hawkish on Iran.  We are way pass due on a female Prez though... C'mon Hillary, seduce me with some of that old school liberal charm. Whisper single payer health-care again. I so want to love you.

Obama: Ok, anyone who turned Oprah into a citizen has to be good, right?  Too moderate for my taste, but could he really get past the Boomer gridlock as the Atlantic article suggests? A Black Prez would also be amazing.  C'mon Barack seduce me with edgy policy, any policy.

Edwards: To quote Men at Work, "you speaka my language," but why do I think you're lying?

Biden: You're so smart and funny.  Why did you have to be a white man?

Kucinich: I love you but you'll NEVER get elected, even if the UFO endorsed you.  PS--your wife! God damn!

Richardson: Strong environmental policy, and the minimum wage for teachers is a great idea, but I HATE having to listen to you. 1...2...3..

Dodd: read Biden (minus the funny)

Ron Paul: When will my leftist friends see you for the evil bastard you really are?

Huckabee: I'm starting to fall for the Fair Tax thing. Am I crazy?  He also has the best healthcare plan and a substantial green policy.  How are you a Republican? Oh yeah, you don't accept evolution.

Hey there kiddies. Now that you’re spread across the upper-Midwest does the world feel bigger or smaller? Sorry I’ve been out. I should write more. Here’s a bedtime story to make it up to you. Did anyone see “Into the Wild”? It’s funny, after teaching the Chip Brown essay half a dozen times, the light finally came on.  I had been reading Chris McCandless in the same way I read Thoreau, Joe Gould, and that crazy cat from the Grizzly Man.  Certainly, they all were lodging complaints against American materialism and consumerism, and I can be a sucker for that shit. But I should have been thinking of Aguerra.  It strikes me now that Alexander Supertramp escapes capitalism by driving himself even deeper into the humanist ideology from which that Capitalism has sprung.  For those of you who would like a primer, we can think of Humanism as exemplified by the philosophy of Descartes, who, as you might remember, decides that the foundation of existence develops from human thought: “I think, therefore I am.”  Now out this Descartes does all kinds of crazy shit (which is to say he pretty much agrees with everyone else he knows that the Christian God rules!), but more importantly, out of Descartes we nod in agreement with some notion of ourselves as removed from the world, as a singular, stable mind, as individuals, as “I”.  I probably also need to say this leads to all kinds of problems, like the assumption we have “freewill” and even worse, that others have “freewill”. But we don’t. And they don’t. And you don’t. Sad, I know.  You and “I” are only free to act within the limits of our ideology, which masks our material (economic—read: social, political, group) existence.  It is as though we’ve been locked in a room before our birth (our culture and ideology certainly proceeds us) and are left to think--actually we’re repeatedly told--that we can do whatever we want, but we are never “free” to open the door, no even seems aware that there is a door.  Some of us will resent the way others act in the room, and the rules they establish, and declare ourselves “outsiders,” but the limit of our rebellion is clearly defined by the limit of the room, in that we are always inside of our ideology.  And so it is with Chris.  He hates the hypocrisy of Modern Life and material culture but he is still locked into that ideology that says that honest people know themselves, that there is only one self and that the “false being within must be destroyed,” that honest people are free, that honest people are self-reliant.  He’s read “The Fountainhead” and believes in Shakespeare, and if not Shakespeare, at least Thoreau. But when he gets out to the wild it becomes clear that there is no "self" outside of the community, that he is several people, a legion, Chris, Alex, Son, Brother, Friend… All this makes the iconoclast Sean Penn nervous though, so he insinuates that Chris dies because he wasn’t careful enough in his application of reason; he was careless with his freewill; Chris eats a poisonous berry so that Liberty might be preserved!  I can see now though that Chris was mad long before he was choking that monkey on a raft, mad thinking not buying the HDTV  (that resistance) is “freedom”. 

Good night