Obama's education plan...

Like many people, I often need time for big ideas to sink in. And I listened to the State of the Union on NPR two nights ago, only watched it for a little bit...that guy plays the part well, I'll have you know. Nancy Pelosi was smiling so much I thought she was going to or had already pulled something. I thought that it was a pretty good speech, peppered with the inspirational motivation formalities that one expects from such a presentation. Some rhetorical moves that suggested that he was aware of Americans' wariness of putting money into the hands of banks, who, as far as I am concerned, have had their chance and should be broken up so that we can allow a couple of them to fail.

I was only sort of interested in the reaction by conservatives, especially since it was clear to me from listening to Jindal speak afterwards that they weren't going to be trumpeting his delivery. Presidential candidate? Methinks probably not. The only reaction that even had a chance of catching my interest was by Michael McBride at Townhall.com, and that was because his title was "The Presidency as a Series of Teleprompter Speeches." I thought to myself, "Thank god the new President can read."

Anyway, something that made my ears perk up figuratively was his call for all Americans to get some schooling beyond high school. My first thought was "more sections of writing/English would open up." My next thought was, "Wow, not everyone belongs in college." But on the whole, I think that it is a laudable goal, probably inspired by the GI Bill, itself a truly extraordinary piece of legislation.

Today there are few new jobs advertised that I would apply for. I need to consider drafting a more coporate version of my CV; if the academic market falls through, I will be pounding more traditional pavement this summer. I have tinkered with my CV so much, I'm scared to touch it.

In the mean time, here's the quote of the day, which I just stumbled over in the Masters of Deceit by Jedgar Hoover:

"Through the Communist Party, the mentality of the Russian Bolsheviks is being transmitted to America, together with the belief that man can be completely redesigned from a child of God into a soulless social cog."

My rejoinder of the day is a quote from WWII veteran Edmund Volpe, a college graduate and future literary scholar who recounts a day at Ft. Wheeler (GA) when he had been assigned to KP and watched platoons march by outside his window:

Under identical helmets, not one man was distinguishable from another. Each uniformed figure was a stamped-out cog in a gigantic marching machine. At twenty, I had never doubted my significance and future importance to the universe. But I knew suddenly I had metamorphosed into number 31337580. That day I enjoyed KP. At least for a few hours, I had escaped that inexorable maw that chewed up unsuspecting individuals and turned them into identical links in a never-ending human sausage for the delectation of the war gods.

HJ