The hour badly spent

Mark Erbacher believes that memorizing Revolutionary War documents makes one person more American than others.

As U.S. citizens, we feel we are well versed in our nation’s history and knowledgeable of its laws and practices. However, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute recently found - for the third year in a row - that a great number of Americans know very little about this nation’s history and government workings.

According to americancivicliteracy.org, of the over 2,500 randomly selected Americans who took the 33-question test, 1,700 failed. The average score was a depressing 49 percent. Possibly even more frightening is the average score of the elected officials that were surveyed: 44 percent. That means, of course, that the average person, according to this quiz, is actually more versed in American history and the government than those they have chosen to speak for them.

Eh. Once the "No Child Left Behind" generation grows up, those test scores should fly as high as a bald eagle. Of course this means once we have enough smarties we can take them off the endangered species list and hunt them in defense of our 2^nd Amendment rights.

Some of the results are simply awe striking. More than twice as many people knew that Paula Abdul is a judge on American Idol than knew that the quote “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is taken from President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, that, coincidentally, President-elect Barack Obama quoted in his acceptance speech.

Is this surprising? Paula Abdul has been fine since the 80s. "Of the people, by the people, for the people" has not characterized government in at least eight years. God damn America.

Almost 40 percent of people surveyed believe that the president has the right to declare war, when he or she doesn’t. Of those elected officials who took the quiz, 30 percent were unaware that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are inalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence. Also, 20 percent of these same elected officials thought the Electoral College was established to supervise the first presidential debates.

That’s quite a bit of information. Gee, I wonder where he’s going with all this.

I might be biased; I am, after all, a political science major and have studied a lot of these things more than most, but these results absolutely terrify me.

Part of me thinks my life would be much easier if Mark Erbacher was the standard by which my intelligence was measured. Think it’s tougher than going up against a fifth-grader.

So America, do us all a favor: pick up a newspaper, or a book for that matter, and learn something.

Whatever; books are for coastal liberal elites, like Erica Hateley. Presumably, many of us are reading your column. It might be helpful, therefore, to explain in an entertaining way, what your field of study (lol political "science") actually is and what sort of interesting useful reaganisms you learned in civics this week. Conversely, supercilious gasbaggery really won’t do us any good.

[K-State Collegian]

Wednesday afternoon Erica Hateley presented the colloquium "’It’s Not Just Cricket’: Sexual Colonization in Woody Allen’s Match Point and Someone Else’s Wimbledon." I decided to check it out because the flyer had the word "sexual" near Erica Hateley’s name.

Although she assured us this would be a "post-feminist rant," I wondered whether this would be delivered in saucy layman’s terms, or if instead we would be playing the poststructuralist drinking game. So I sat around for a few minutes and tried to get into the groove of whatever dialect she’s going with this afternoon.

4:06 PM "ideology founded on patriarchy."

4:08 PM "patriarchal heterosexuality." Okay, it’s gonna be one of those.

4:08 PM "psychology of patriarchal capitalist culture"

4:14 PM If Karin Friggin Westman wasn’t sitting right behind me I could just IM this right to all the English majors I know and THEY could play the drinking game along with me. What’s up with that? And why is Michael Donnelly over here too? The back row is for slackers and badasses.

4:15 PM ….

4:15 PM Oh.

4:16 PM "I’m looking at her skirt, not her arse." Tee hee!

4:16 PM "heteronormative patriarchy.”

4:17 PM "It takes a lot longer to find a picture of Anna Kournikova playing tennis than it does to find her…resting."

4:19 PM "destabilize the binary gendered logic of patriarchy"

4:19 PM "scopophilic patriarchy." Okay I FORFEIT the poststructuralist drinking game. Erica wins, because the patriarchy is oppressing us faster than I can type. At this point I decided to just listen, and only use my computer to google the big words.

4:20 PM Oh dear, look at the time! Erica never notices things like that.

4:21 PM There is a "been there done that" popular discourse of feminism internalized by female tennis players. Did I type that accurately?

4:23 PM "the sexualization of tennis-playing woman"

4:24 PM "containing women w/in acceptable patriarchal limits"

4:30 PM "body spectacle:" "pornography’s portrayal of orgasm." There’s something to google.

After she had thoroughly established that tennis is a tool of colonial and sexual repression, we started watching movies.

4:40 PM Heh, Erica said "Scarlett Yohansson."

I wasn’t sure how much I liked Match Point when I actually saw it, but Erica’s analysis pointed out that the film is aware of the colonial representations embedded in its characters, and partly because of that, the mood of the film prevents us from fully sympathizing with Chris Wilton. Uhh, I think that’s what she said. There were more big words too.

4:49 PM In Wimbledon: Why did we fast fwd through the part where Kirsten Dunst is nude? Wouldn’t it be possible to undermine my own internalized scopophilic patriarchal tendencies and make Kirsten Dunst’s ass a site of agency by normalizing her apodysophilia, or would this just reinforce them? Later on, after bumming one of Erica’s Marlboro’s, I felt a little guilty about joining the "I’ll eat out Luce Irigaray" Facebook group. Then I ate out Luce Irigaray.

4:54 PM "retroactive destabilization" what?

5:03 PM Time for questions. Why are these feminized, fetishized representations of America both blonde?

[Erica’s colloquium @Wordle.net]

Oil companies: as evil as the sweet black gold they pump from the deep, ancient heart of our planet, or just trying to make a buck in America like the rest of us? Earlier this week, Tim Hadachek weighed in on the issue, challenging us to put down our shrill, knee-jerk griping every time gas prices creep up a couple of bucks (what do you really need that for, anyway? You’re either giving it to Big Oil or Big Farm). We should examine this in terms of the basic principles of our economic system.

Oil companies want to make as much money as possible, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Our economy works best when everyone is free to make as much profit as their skills, intelligence and resources will allow them, as long as it is done fairly.

So why do Democrats want to punish oil companies for living out one of the greatest American ideals?

On average, the largest oil companies make only about 9.7 percent more than they spend each year, slightly above average for an S&P 500 company. Many companies have much larger profit margins.

Google, for instance, operates with a profit margin of about 25 percent, according to CNN on April 29.

I’ve always been disgusted with the way Google and their hegemonic “algorithms” rip us all off every chance they get, then use their leverage to choke the competition. Look what’s happened now! We have to pay whatever price the free search engine cartels wanna stick us with. They’re basically the internet’s warmongering Ritalin dealers. Who among us can honestly go without Ritalin? But, again: greedy as Google is, I can’t really fault them just for trying to make a buck in America.

Adding new taxes on oil companies essentially is punishing them for making money. But basic economics tells us they should make money. They produce a commodity that is of limited supply and in high demand.

Why penalize a company that is willing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to bring us energy?

Blaming oil companies for high gas prices is like blaming farmers for high food prices.

In the future, we will just outsource the functions of our government’s legislative branch to Exxon’s board of directors. We will outsource our judicial branch to the Mob. The only decision left for President Palin will be whether to waterboard the Liberals in a vat of boiling crude oil or to extradite them to a detention facility in Saudi Arabia, where Blackwater will sodomize them with WMDs.

 [Source: K-State Collegian]

When discussing how we can get a feel for ancient Celtic culture, one student at the front of the Thursday morning’s British Survey I class remarked that "in those days they had a magical world view."

Professor Matlock tactfully compared that believing in some dude up on his cross or whatever, just to show that people really haven’t changed so much since then.