Dear UM Undergraduates,

I’ve accepted that it’s part of the social landscape now for you to walk into a wing of a library that is supposed to be used for study and instead use it as an open-air forum for your cell phone conversations, and I’ve accepted that some of you don’t care what you discuss on those cell phones in front of God and the world, whether it’s your bets on major league baseball playoffs, your breakups with the latest frat boy, your failure to convince your mother to loan you money for your trip to Cancún, your rage at your professors for assigning you so much work, your inability to skip a class to be at your girlfriend’s tryouts for some collegiate activity because you’ve already skipped four lectures in a row, your cretinous roommate and the noises that emanate from her alimentary canal, or your numerous and fascinating sexual dalliances.

But I must draw the line somewhere. One of you walked in this afternoon while I was sitting at the reference desk, and as though it were a perfectly normal and indeed necessary thing to do, opened your laptop, turned on your laptop’s MP3 player and speakers, and without so much as a hint of awareness that this might be anything but an act for which you deserved praise and applause, started playing — no, broadcasting — Alphaville’s “Forever Young.” I will admit to a split second of curiosity as to how a song that was released before you were born wound up on your laptop, because I thought that nowadays any song older than a few weeks is automatically suspect if not anathema, but I figured it was probably a track on the latest “OC” soundtrack or something.

I was limitlessly grateful to this young woman for cutting off the next MP3 on her playlist (a vapid re-recording of “Strawberry Fields Forever” by some anonymous latter-day stand-and-model outfit who wouldn’t be fit to lick the soles of Lennon’s shoes if he were still alive) before it got beyond the :30 mark. Thank you. However, in the future, if you feel the suuden, overwhelming urge to play Alphaville in a library, please use a set of headphones.

From our « Clueless Department »:

‘Delta Air Lines Inc. will likely ask its pilots union to extend an agreement to recall retired pilots to prevent staffing shortages as it ambitiously expands its international service while operating under bankruptcy protection, chief executive Gerald Grinstein said Tuesday. Grinstein made the comments after a news conference set up to launch new nonstop service to several European destinations beginning in May. The nation’s third-largest carrier has seen 1,190 of its pilots retire over the last year, many of them early. The mass exodus came as many pilots feared losing their pension benefits if the airline filed for Chapter 11, which it did Sept. 14. Asked if the Atlanta-based airline is concerned about its ability to maintain its new international schedule long-term, Grinstein said Tuesday that it wasn’t. He said Delta will likely ask the pilots union to extend an agreement first reached in September 2004 that allows it to recall retired pilots on a limited basis to help prevent staffing shortages. He said the current agreement runs out Dec. 31. “We expect to be able to man that equipment,” Grinstein told reporters gathered at the Atlanta airport. … Delta has said it would make international travel a bigger part of its operations as part of its effort to return to profitability. It has announced 50 new international destinations this year.’

Clueless, I tell you.

From our « What the ?! Department »:

‘A deadly bacteria listed among bioterrorism agents was detected in the US capital last month during a mass protest against the Iraq war, a top health official said. District of Columbia Health Director Doctor Gregg Pane told WTOP Radio late Saturday that biological agent monitors on the National Mall, an esplanade in downtown Washington, gave positive readings for a small amount of tularemia on September 24 and 25. The sensors are operated by the Department of Homeland Security, but officials were not notified of the potential hazard until Friday, according to Pane. “We’ve stepped up our surveillance and have notified doctors in the area about what to look for,” Pane told the radio station. He urged people who were at the Mall last weekend and who have been experiencing symptoms of pneumonia to immediately seek medical help, but added that there was no evidence that anyone had been affected by the bacteria. … The Washington Post reported Sunday that national security officials believe the bacteria was probably not intentionally spread. “There is no known nexus to terror or criminal behavior. We believe this to be environmental,” the paper quoted Russ Knocke, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, as saying.’

What the ?!, I ask you.

And lastly tonight … from our « The Dude is Obviously Insane Department »:

‘George Bush told the Prime Minister two months before the invasion of Iraq that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea may also be dealt with over weapons of mass destruction, a top secret Downing Street memo shows. The US [Emperor] told Tony Blair, in a secret telephone conversation in January 2003 that he “wanted to go beyond Iraq”. He implied that the military action against Saddam Hussein was only a first step in the battle against WMD proliferation in a series of countries. … Bush said he “wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation”, says the letter on Downing Street paper, marked secret and personal. No 10 said yesterday it would “not comment on leaked documents”. But the revelation that … Bush was considering tackling other countries over WMD before the Iraq war has shocked MPs. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have been close allies of the US in the war against terror and have not been considered targets in relation to WMD.’

Insane, I tell you. Obviously insane.

God help us all.

“These weren’t the works of psychopaths — they were people fighting against something intolerable that many of us know is there, but hasn’t been named yet.”

« The Kinder, Gentler American Empire »:

‘… it’s a fairly powerful event to find a decent-sized book that does nothing but articulate a series of truths about the American Life you’ve hardly read about or spoken about, but just simply felt. Mark Ames’ Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion — From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond (Soft Skull, 2005) is such a book. Ames takes a systematic look at the scores of rage killings in our public schools and workplaces that have taken place over the past 25 years. He claims that instead of being the work of psychopaths, they were carried out by ordinary people who had suffered repeated humiliation, bullying and inhumane conditions that find their origins in the “Reagan Revolution.” Looking through a carefully researched historical lens, Ames recasts these rage killings as, essentially, failed slave rebellions.’
— Alternet

Mark Ames explains what’s behind the book:

‘What got you interested in American rage murders? Did you have an inkling about what their underlying cause might be before you started piecing the articles and background information about them together in a systematic fashion?
‘Columbine. I had just flown home from Moscow to visit a friend who was dying of cancer when Columbine happened, and my first, unmediated reaction to the news was something between sympathy and awe. Officially everyone was horrified, but a lot of friends I talked to, ranging from artists to yuppies, told me they had the same reaction, that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were like heroes, and we were all surprised it didn’t happen sooner. So I started to ask myself why I had this sympathy, why it was so widespread (and sympathy for the killers is incredibly common, just highly censored), and that led me to look at the larger phenomenon of rage murders. On my next visit there was a massacre at Xerox in Honolulu. At the time I was trying to cover the start of the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, and I felt overwhelmed by the intolerable insanity of the culture, and that feeling of being crushed, and then I remembered, “This is why I left the US for Russia in the first place.” That was when I finally linked the two, workplace and school rage murders. These weren’t the works of psychopaths — they were people fighting against something intolerable that many of us know is there, but hasn’t been named yet. There isn’t a Marx to give a name to post-Reagan middle-class pain. How do you fight against something horrible, oppressive, and debilitating before it even has a name? Especially when everyone, especially middle-class people, sneer at it and refuse to believe it’s valid. When you’re too deep in the culture, you start to think that the most horrible/mundane aspects are normal and just the way things are. When you’re outside of it for awhile, it’s a little easier to see the insanity and brutality for what it is.’

An « excerpt from the book »:

‘On April 20, 1999, the bloodiest of all school rage massacres took place at Columbine. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered twelve students and a teacher, wounded twenty others, and then killed themselves. Americans wanted to blame everything but Columbine High for the massacre — they blamed a violent media, Marilyn Manson, Goth culture, the Internet, the Trench Coat Mafia, video games, lax gun control laws, and liberal values. And still skipping over the school, they peered into the opposite direction, blaming the moral and/or mental sickness, or alleged homosexuality, of these two boys, as if they were exceptional freaks in a school of otherwise happy kids. They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime. In fact, a typical Columbine school day for Harris and Klebold was torture. Former student Devon Adams told the Governor’s Columbine Review Commission that the boys were regularly called “faggots, weirdoes, and freaks.” As one member of the Columbine High School football team bragged after the massacre, “Columbine is a good, clean place except for those rejects. Most kids didn’t want them there … Sure we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? … If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease ‘em. So the whole school would call them homos.”’
— Alternet

Quite interesting stuff.

“As with most of the Mayberry Machiavellians’ schemes, this is yet another one that is coming unraveled.”

Great national hero and former darling of the fascists, Pat Tillman, has, gasp the horror, been « outed as a Noam Chomsky lover » — and boy is Ann Coulter ever pissed:

‘“I don’t believe it,” seethed Ann Coulter. Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former NFL star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was “f***ing illegal” and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman’s death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as “an American original — virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article’s source was Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary. …
‘Tillman’s transition from one-dimensional caricature to critically thinking human being is a long time coming. The fact is that in death he was far more useful to the armchair warriors than he had ever been in life. When the Pro Bowler joined the Army Rangers, the Pentagon brass needed a loofah to wipe their drool: He was white, handsome and played in the NFL. For a chicken-hawk Administration led by a President who loves the affectations of machismo but runs from protesting military moms, this testosterone cocktail was impossible to resist. The problem was that Tillman wouldn’t play their game. To the Pentagon’s chagrin, he turned down numerous offers to be its recruitment poster child. But when Tillman fell in Afghanistan the wheels once again started to turn. Now the narrative was perfect: “War hero and football star dies fighting terror.” The Abu Ghraib scandal was about to hit the press, so the [Emperor] found it especially useful to praise Tillman as “an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror.” His funeral was nationally televised. Bush even went back to the bloody well during the presidential campaign, addressing his team’s fans on the Arizona Cardinals’ stadium Jumbotron.’
—The Nation

As with most of the Mayberry Machiavellians’ schemes, this is yet another one that is « coming unraveled » and as usual, it’s a long litany of deceit and treachery on the part of this government:

‘The battle between a grieving family and the U.S. military justice system is on display in thousands of pages of documents strewn across Mary Tillman’s dining room table in suburban San Jose. As she pores through testimony from three previous Army investigations into the killing of her son, former football star Pat Tillman, by his fellow Army Rangers last year in Afghanistan, she hopes that a new inquiry launched in August by the Pentagon’s inspector general finally will answer the family’s questions: Were witnesses allowed to change their testimony on key details, as alleged by one investigator? Why did internal documents on the case, such as the initial casualty report, include false information? When did top Pentagon officials know that Tillman’s death was caused by friendly fire, and why did they delay for five weeks before informing his family? “There have been so many discrepancies so far that it’s hard to know what to believe,” Mary Tillman said. “There are too many murky details.” The files the family received from the Army in March are heavily censored, with nearly every page containing blacked-out sections; most names have been deleted. (Names for this story were provided by sources close to the investigation.) At least one volume was withheld altogether from the family, and even an Army press release given to the media has deletions. On her copies, Mary Tillman has added competing marks and scrawls — countless color-coded tabs and angry notes such as “Contradiction!” “Wrong!” and “????”’
—SF Chronicle

It just never ends.