An Early Weekend, But With Homework

Mr Fitz signals the start of a four-day weekend for the majority of folks. 

Or five, if the day before a major holiday is a blow-off, and while some offices go into overdrive to make up for the short week, an awful lot are like schools, where you have to show up but you don't have to be productive.

I never minded if a teacher held a for-real class before a holiday. Once you were out of bed, dressed, on the bus and in the building, whatever else happened was immaterial.

And that hasn't changed.

Speaking of school, I recently posted an Existential Comics with the comment that sometimes the gags there are more accessible to philosophy majors than other readers.

Now there's a new one up, and, while I'm not sure where the concept of "Sherlock Hume" fits on the scale, it's so ridiculous on so many levels that I'm passing it along. Go read the rest.

I was not a philosophy major and I might have switched majors if I had been, and thus required to take Hume and Berkeley seriously.

We were very interested in the concept of being "naturally stoned," however, and their theories were things that, to come from other people, would have required psychedelics, but they were also things that, as the psychedelics began to wear off, remained valuable chiefly as a measure of how good the stuff had been.

Hume had scored some dynamite stuff.

 

Similarly, today's Rudy Park assures me that the whole superhero thing has morphed into something so inbred and complex that it's like coming home after class and finding out that everyone else dropped acid about an hour and a half ago.

You could try to join them, but you'd never catch up. Better maybe to just roll a joint and go get a pizza.

 

Jen Sorensen sparks a less hilarious, non-chemical memory of college, when this kettling theory was applied to a demonstration at the campus recruiting office in the '69-'70 academic year. 

The Dean of Students ordered it stopped and sent the head of security out to collect names, from which they made a list of people who were to be enjoined from gathering under the Dome.

However, as Jen points out, "everybody present" is not the same as "everybody demonstrating."

I had taken off by the time it got to that point, mostly from a conviction that the overwrought sound bites in the local news would do more to pump up yahoo loyalists than the whole speeches would do to convert anybody at the scene.

I'd said something to that effect to the vice-president of the student body, who encouraged me to get up and say so before I left, which I did, and so I found myself a few months later subpoenaed to testify on behalf of him, and on behalf of the overall principle Sorensen points out. 

It pretty much solidified the contention that not only was the SBVP there ex officio, but that he had encouraged opposition to violent demonstration, and there were several such witnesses for nearly everyone on the list, except one guy who had not only said, "Maybe we need to break some windows" but had said it in front of the news cameras.

Not that any windows were broken, anyway, mind you. But the result was that the university spent its money for an injunction that kept that one guy from gathering in the area. 

The difference between Jen's cartoon and my memory being that, back in 1970, we were still a nation of laws.

And that, while making David Hume a detective is funny, making Jeff Sessions Attorney General is not.

And Joel Pett's cartoon fits in with the not-so-brave new world in which being heard and being believed is not the same as having anyone give a damn about you.

The GOP's "if it proves true" thing does sound like a defense of "innocent until proven guilty" except that it isn't, nor is it applied to anyone who doesn't represent a vote in favor of screwing the peasants.

 

Nor, as Tom Toles points out, is it even being whispered in connection with the fellow who stands poised to sign that new peasant-screwing law.

Meanwhile, the rightwingers are accusing Democrats of hypocrisy because they didn't believe the accusations flying against Clinton 20 years ago.

And they have a point, but, then again, they were the ones crying "Wolf!" with the endless, nonsensical stories of Vince Foster's murder and the nefarious dealings of Whitewater, and who finally settled for a case based on the fact that, if you ask a married man if he's having an affair, he'll deny it, particularly if he can get away with interpreting "sex" and "intercourse" to mean the same thing.

That's not much of a point, and the case of Roy Moore and the case of Bill Clinton are different things in different times.

As Francis Wilkinson points out

 (W)atching devoted Democrats rationalize the past does put the sight of Alabama Republicans rationalizing the present in context. White Christians in Alabama are busy triangulating the basis of their vote for skeevy Roy Moore, just as last year they rationalized their support for skeevy Donald Trump. No doubt they would prefer an honest senator who didn't molest teenagers. But they're going to the culture war with the candidate they've got, not the candidate they wish they had.

Democrats in the 1990s did the same, albeit with a man, unlike Moore, who had intellectual and political gifts that paid dividends for the whole nation. 

 

Mike Lester notes the flood of news, with the implication that it's becoming normal.

A friend suggested that powerful men will be afraid to hire women, but I think if a few more "ladies' men" are put out to pasture, there may have to be holes punched in the glass ceiling simply to keep the seats around the table filled.

 

Here's what we knew in 1967

(Note to the Satire Impaired: Mr. Zappa is not expressing approval)

Comments

[parnellnelson]

I have always thought that the main reason the Republicans were so adamant about pursuing Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinski affair was jealousy. Because deep in their hearts they knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that what happened between Bill and Monica (as shameful as it was) would never ever, ever, in a million years, happen to any one of them - unless they paid cash. Just sayin...