Seblog & ComPositions

Let’s see if I have this straight.  The U.S. government is trying to borrow $700 billion from China, Saudi Arabia and other saintly benefactors to buy up bad Wall Street debt, a goodly sum of which will go to reward Wall Street CEOs for their visionary and prudent fiscal management.  Sooner rather than later, they’ll be able to worm their way out of hock by speculating on carbon.  I guess that’s the logical evolution of the bubble concept, one literally made of air.  The possibility a carbon market coming onstream at the same time as a privatization of Social Security — with Sarah Palin waiting in the wings of the presidency behind a 72-year old, four-time cancer survivor — is very, very real.  Plus we’ve got a three-month orgy of “Get it while you can!” from El Presidente before he returns to the military/petroleum/narcotics complex from whence he came.  These sounds like long odds for even God to take care of, don’t they?

Canada, tell me you’re smarter than to re-elect a Prime Minister who’s in cahoots with these people.  Call me a northeast progressive snob (or worse), but in light of this, ahem, empirical evidence voting for Harper is a reflection of either a moral or genetic failure.

Lookee here, Billy Bryans posted a birth announcement for this wee blog:

“Welcome aboard dude. I forgot to tell you that blogging is insanely time-consuming, not worth a cent of income and you need to do it everyday for a year before anyone even notices.”

Hey, that sounds a lot like promoting, doesn’t it?  At least this stuff’s easier in terms of overhead, though.

My father, who generally speaking has quite admirably pushed aside his New England traditionalist leanings to embrace the blogosphere, shared this article from Chronicle.com entitled “Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind” by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein; in response to the news of his eldest’s new blogging venture. You have to admit, there’s a certainy irony to this article being posted in long form online in the first place.  Where’s the YouTube video?  Here’s the concluding paragraph of from article, which for the record I read from end to end without the use of a printer:

“So let’s restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off. Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students’ minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can’t do it by themselves, especially if every inch of the campus is on the grid.”

The essential place of the quiet, measured environment to grow the mind must be given its proper respect.  Then again, the advent of mass printing caused people to decry the inevitable downfall of oral storytelling traditions.  The idea of the Web being a poor media for reading the printed word isn’t exactly news.  Have we not redefined the concept of literacy to include all vehicles and mechanisms for the propagation of worthy ideas?  Shouldn’t we be grateful that everyone can publish their ideas with the click of a mouse, and the Library of Congress can fit on a standard-size hard drive – especially as we face the onslaught of the barbarians who have already stormed the gates of enlightened thought, torches in hand?    Digitalization also means democratization and access, and how people choose to burn ideas into their synapses from there is up to them.

Dad, I’ll call you from my cellphone to confirm for Scrabble next week.