Spinning Yarns

In less than a week, it will be Election Day for us, the lucky citizens of the United States of America. And, no, I’m not being sarcastic, I really do think we’re lucky. For all its faults, I think the United States is a really great place to live, and while I’d like to see us work on some of the things we do wrong, I’m happy to be a citizen here. Unfortunately, I don’t feel quite so lucky about the choices we are being presented with on the ballot for our Chief Executive — I feel as if once again, we are being asked to choose the lesser of two evils.

On the right, we have George W. Bush, the incumbent Republican, whose mandate for the office is justifiably seen as dubious, given how narrowly and contentiously he came to office in the 2000 elections. Broadly speaking, the Republican agenda should appeal to my Libertarian side, since the party ostensibly stands for minimizing the role of the Federal government, and protecting the rights of the individual spelled out in our Constitution. Unfortunately, ostension is about where it ends; the Bush administration reduced taxes for a few key constituencies, but at the same time, Mr. Bush has presided over a massive fiscal overcommitment in a variety of areas, not the least of which are the massive troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Combined with the signing of the USA PATRIOT act, Mr. Bush is now directly responsible for one of the largest expansions of Federal influence in recent memory. Set aside, for the moment, arguments about whether you feel these things were necessary — the point is, this is an almost unprecedented increase in the role of the government, and quite contrary to the stated Republican agenda:

“The role of government is not to control or dominate the lives of our citizens. The role of government is to help our citizens gain the time and the tools to make their own choices and improve their own lives.”

On the left, we have John Kerry, a long-time Democratic Senator from the state of Massachusetts. Like Bush, he’s a well-to-do Yale alumnus with ties to the Skull and Bones society, but his public carriage suggests he got a bit more from his education than Mr. Bush did. Like any Washington insider, Kerry’s voting record is riddled with compromise — to the point where he has been painted as a waffler by his opponents. The comparison is not entirely inept, either, although when you hold him up against the uncompromising black-and-white rhetoric of the incumbent Executive, you could also make a strong case for the idea that demonstrated ability to compromise can be a positive thing. Kerry’s voting record on environmental issues suggests that he has a slightly more mature perspective on the necessary balance between pure laissez faire free-market capitalism and the ethical dilemma of the commons than Bush and his advisors. Unfortunately, he also seems to think that the correct way to solve all the social ills of American society is to write people cheques from the Treasury, and that makes me fairly uncomfortable.

In the middle, there is the usual spate of minor-party candidates such as the Libertarian nominee Michael Badnarik and independents like Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo. Unfortunately, as I’ve already argued, our plurality voting system basically disenfranchises anyone who votes for a third-party candidate. Philosophically, I agree that people should be able to vote for whomever they most prefer, but in practise, doing so works counter to their own preferences. So what we’re left with is a choice between the two major party candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry.

It seems as if we’re damned either way. However, I’m going to argue that the better choice in this election is John Kerry. This is not because I particularly like Kerry, although I do think he would be a marginally better representative of the United States among the leaders of other world nations than George Bush has been. But the real reason I think Kerry is preferable is that the policies of the Bush administration have been so divisive, so blunt, and so uncompromising, that I think we run the risk of alienating many of our allies and permanently damaging once-strong international relationships. We are, it is true, an extraordinarily economically and militarily powerful nation. But our military is so reliant upon high technology that the stability of the military depends critically upon the strength and productivity of our economy. We do not have massive brigades of inexpensive footsoldiers — the American G.I. is highly equipped and trained, and requires a prodigious overhead for maintenance in the field. Furthermore, the strength of our economy relies to a great extent upon our ability to export and trade intelligently among the other industrialized nations of the world, and to retain a steady inbound supply of petroleum distillates to keep it all running. So, while it may be true that we can do as we wish, the enmity of the other industrialized nations of the world is a very dangerous crop to cultivate.

Within the United States, the purpose of the election is to select a Chief Executive — but to the rest of the world, this election is a referendum on whether or not the People of the United States agree with the policies and actions of the Bush administration. If we re-elect Bush, we are also, in a very real sense, saying to the rest of the world, “Yes, we think the things he did were appropriate, and we would like for them to continue.” Even if you are a staunch Republican, it is clear that George W. Bush’s policies contradict the very things the Republican party stands for. To elect him for a second term would be, in my opinion, a great detriment to the nation. The issue isn’t that Bush is a Republican, it’s that he’s a terrible leader, whose policies are harmful to our position as a nation in the wider world.

For this reason, I think we should replace George W. Bush in the forthcoming election, in the hopes that a Democrat in the White House can at least counterbalance some of the instability created in Congress by off-year Gerrymandering in Texas and Pennsylvania. Otherwise, I predict we’ll be sending off our children to die for the next fifteen years in the Middle East.

Filed by Michael at 16:00 under Diatribe, Political
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Albert Einstein is supposed to have said once, “When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second; when you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.” Whether or not he really said that, I do not know, but either way, the message is surely true. Sweet Sunday afternoons pass in the blink of an eye, when you’re with the one you love, but when she’s gone, the clock grinds away so slowly you’d swear the anticipation is going to kill you. It may be true that time flies when you’re having fun, but it practically bloody stops when you’re stuck in traffic. C’est la vie, I suppose.

My perception of time has been shaped by age and experience. When I was five, a day was practically an eternity, and the idea of planning from one week to the next was more or less completely alien to me. Nowadays, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to be doing several months in advance. It’s not as though I have my schedule planned out in detail, but the fact that I can make confident predictions about my activities many weeks into the future is something I would never have dreamed of when I was a child. The unfortunate down side of advance planning is that it tends to take over your life, however. As a child, you could get bored, if you didn’t find enough interesting things to do, to fill all that time. Adults constantly scrape the bottom of the barrel for wasted seconds, and make grumpy comments about how children don’t realize how goddamned good they’ve got it.

As a teacher, I have to pay a lot of attention to the passage of time. I don’t mean this in some kind of abstract philosophical sense — I’m talking about things like making sure I don’t run over-time for lectures and such. When I first started teaching a few years ago, my main concern was not whether I’d have enough time to cover all my material, but whether I’d have enough material to fill all the time. That first term, I was always afraid I’d wind up with fifteen minutes left over at the end of my lecture notes, and nothing else prepared. What the heck happened? In just a few short years, I’ve gone from having too much time, to having far too little! Now, the class hour never seems quite long enough — there’s always one more good example left over at the end, that I wish I could have gotten to. I try to take care not to run over our assigned time, but sometimes you just can’t help it.

Another place where time impacts my teaching is when I’m making up an exam, and I’m trying to figure out how long it will take the students to complete it. First off, coming up with good exam questions is damned difficult, that’s another subject entirely — but even assuming you have that part figured out, it’s practically impossible to gauge how long they’ll take to answer. When I first started graduate school, and I was working as a teaching assistant, it wasn’t so bad — the professor would make up the exam questions, and I would sit down and take the exam myself to get an estimate of the time. Since I already knew the material quite well, I could usually do it much faster than the students in the course, but I found that if I multiplied my time by 4, I got a pretty good approximation of how long the students would need. If I could do the exam in half an hour, I could reasonably expect them to finish it within two hours.

But when you make up the exam questions yourself, you simply cannot take the exam objectively enough to use that as a timing estimate. Or, at least, I can’t. The way I make up test questions is this: I start from some general concept I want to test the students on, and then I try to figure out what kind of an answer would allow me to discriminate between the students who understand that concept, and those who do not. Once I’ve got that, I make up a question to go with the answer. As a direct consequence, by the time I’m done writing the exam, I’ve also written the answer key, since they’re part and parcel of the same basic structure. And that is why I can’t really take my own tests objectively — not only did I make up the questions, but I made up the answers first, so I can’t even imagine the questions without their answers, by the time it’s all written up. Short of letting somebody take the exam early, there isn’t much you can do to figure out how long it is, except to kind of eyeball it based on intuition.

Anyway, now that I’m done writing up the exam that was the inspiration for this particular line of thought, I think I’m going to get a few hours of sleep before I have to give my morning lecture. What am I doing awake at this hour? Those damned kids. They don’t realize how goddamned good they’ve got it.

Filed by Michael at 04:19 under Personal
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When I went outside this morning to take a breath of fresh air, the morning dew had frozen on the windows of my car, and settled in a whitish rime along the edges of the grass on the lawn. The cold, sharp tang of morning frost takes me back to my childhood, waking up in the darkling grey before true dawn, in time to walk down the hill to catch the school-bus. Waking up before the sun has lifted her shining rim above the northeastern horizon is, to me, a harbinger of oncoming winter.

My trouble with winter is not the cold and snow, although both of these make their presence well-known to me, when I have to shovel out the driveway on the morning after a long snowfall. The thing that troubles me most in winter is the shortness of the days, and the grim greyness of the world throughout much of the season. To be sure, there are brilliant bright days with clear blue skies, and the sun shining madly over fields glistening with snowfall, but the primary association I get when I think about winter is the picture of stark, charcoal-coloured trees standing against a bleak grey sky, and the hissing of the wind as it picks up tufts off the tops of snowdrifts, and lashes them into my face as I walk. So, while I don’t mind the cold, and I actually enjoy the snow, I could certainly do with a bit more light and colour in the world, during the long nights and short days of winter.

I gravitate toward the indoors in the wintertime, the cozy brown colours of wood and warm woollen sweaters. The sharp tang of wood smoke and the gentle rumbling of logs burning in an iron stove bring me great comfort when the weather turns cold — it’s probably just an instinctive gravitation toward shelter. Whatever the cause, this is the time of year when I begin, even more than usual, to covet long hours curled up in the corner of the couch, reading novels and sipping a mug of hot tea with honey in it (and, sometimes, at the end of a long day, a little dollop of brandy).

But now it is morning, with all the day ahead of me — and in the words of Robert Frost, I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Filed by Michael at 08:58 under Personal
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