Nostalgia

I was reading Robert Day's article "We'll Always Have McSorley's" in The American Scholar online. It is an elegiac memoir of his time living in New York and visiting McSorley's pub. Day's writing were a nice start to this morning's thesis writing. But the ending seems almost a call to his girlfriend of the time, Lola, to meet him at McSorley's, today. Another scholar, Robert Wolff recounts how he rekindled an early romance later in life. Is there something about middle-aged scholars, or just men, that we wish to find some one who has known us so long that we are different from now until then?

With the ubiquitous presence of the internet, I never try to communicate with old flames or crushes. My name is unusual enough that they could find me in a minute via google, and contact me by email, social media or phone a moment after that. I confess I google old friends, to see what they are up to- but many have lives that don't revolve around the exchange of information virtually, and others have names that generate so many hits, it would be hard to find them.


 

Stupid is the New Smart

Anti-Elitism= Stupid Is the New Smart

The charge that one is a latté-slurping, ivy league, abortionating and generally miserable coward has lead to the favour of such figures as Jason Kenney, Stephen Harper, Sarah Palin, John Boehner and so on. 

Perhaps the classic example of  a bogey-man elite is that Skull & Bones, Yale-tutored, Massachusett's born, ex-military officer....George Bush? John Kerry? It describes both. The charge of elitism is meaningless, because it is used by people who by their very nature fall into it. Stephen Harper went to grad school, in economics and then worked in think-tanks afterwards.

Why do these people use the term? It seems to me that Stephen Harper, the Tea Party apparatchiks, et al use the term to artificially divide the polity into perceived antithetical groups so citizens don't get around to changing the system or challenging the manipulative jack-asses they have elected.

Any how, please wear my ironic slogan on t-shirts, buttons or where ever you think it will do the most good. Perhaps it will encourage people to think over the proposition that you want dumbies running your country.