Newsweek Copies *Slate*
The Scrapbook knows more than a few former lacrosse players, including a couple here on staff. So when we read Dave Jamieson's "brief sociological account" of the sport, published on April 7 in Slate, we found ourselves nodding (and laughing) in agreement.
"They can be spotted driving SUVs with 'LAX' stickers affixed to the rear windows," Jamieson wrote of lacrosse players. "Many grow addicted to dipping Skoal and wearing soiled white caps with college logos on them."
Newsweek's Susannah Meadows and Evan Thomas must have enjoyed Jamieson's piece, too. Or maybe one of the five reporters and researchers who contributed to their May 1 cover story on the Duke scandal did. For when Meadows and Thomas tried their hand at a bit of sporting sociology, here's what they came up with in their depiction of lacrosse players:
"They can often be seen driving in SUVs with LAX decals, their dirty-white college ball caps turned around, a pinch of Skoal in their mouths."
The Scrapbook thinks Mr. Jamieson's version, besides being first, was better written. Small wonder someone at Newsweek chose to borrow it. Pity they didn't give Jamieson credit.
Patrick, We Know Ye All Too Well
Everyone has an off day now and then. But Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy has had an off 20 years, going back to his cocaine-addiction rehab stint in 1986. The Overshadowed Kennedy--son of Ted, nephew of Uncle Jack, cousin of Maria--never fails to unimpress, if that's a word (and if it's not, it's one the malaprop king has probably used himself; Kennedy, for instance, once lamented middle-class Americans' inability to "make mends meet").
Who--besides the Rhode Island electorate that mysteriously returns him to office--could forget Patrick trashing his chartered yacht, or announcing that "I am on a lot of different medications, for among other things, depression," or shoving a female airport security guard when she tried to make him check his bag.
Fresh off of a career high-point earlier this month, in which Patrick was hit in the mouth with a hammer while watching a demonstration of Impact Gel shock-absorbing material at a trade show (he got six stitches and didn't even cry!), Kennedy has again handed his bête noire Howie Carr, a Boston Herald columnist and radio host, fresh material.
On April 15, Patrick's car was T-boned as he hurriedly pulled across an oncoming lane into a CVS pharmacy in Portsmouth, R.I. Carr was particularly taken with Patrick's handwritten account in the Portsmouth Police Department report. Not for what the mostly illegible one-sentence explanation said, but because of how it was written (see below).
While the officer on the scene reported Kennedy "appeared normal," such as it is, Patrick's handwriting looks like it was scrawled on a cocktail napkin at an open bar in a Gravitron. Or as Carr delicately put it, "It looks like it was written by a chimpanzee, or a 2-year-old. Or a Kennedy."
At least, writes Carr, it was only a fender-bender by Kennedy standards. "Not only did a single blonde not die, no one was even paralyzed or raped."
Fake Tocqueville Lives!
Ours is "the greatest country the world has ever seen," writes Lawrence B. Wilkerson on the op-ed page of the April 23 Baltimore Sun. And Wilkerson ought to know. Just look at his career: first, a 31-year active-duty stint in the Army; next, day-to-day management of the State Department as Colin Powell's chief of staff; and, currently, an extended post-retirement tour of the nation's television studios, during which Wilkerson has "estranged" himself from Powell but made many new friends among the outpatient crowd over at Daily Kos--by bitterly denouncing the very same Bush administration policies he previously helped implement.
No question about it: Only in America could Mrs. Wilkerson's little boy Lawrence B. rise to such political celebrity despite never really having learned to read and write.
Which is the unavoidable impression left by Wilkerson's Sun essay. So far as we can tell, the piece is supposed to be about how, when George W. Bush became president, the United States began to "cease being good" and descend into "neo-Jacobin" radicalism. But we can't be entirely sure about that because (a) the analogy is under-developed and hopelessly confused (Wilkerson appears to believe that Robespierre and Napoleon were both Jacobins), and (b) much of the piece is written in a weird pidgin subdialect that The Scrapbook's never seen before. For instance: "Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander-in-chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration."
Excuse me, Meester, where is I would enjoy to use thank you the bathroom?
Then there's this. "As Alexis de Tocqueville once said"--according to Col. Wilkerson and a thousand other hack pseudo--intellectuals before him--" 'America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.'_"
Of course, as Claremont McKenna College government professor John J. Pitney Jr. has tirelessly pointed out, here in our pages and elsewhere, this purported Tocqueville quotation is entirely bogus. But at least it's in standard English.
More Arguments for Homeschooling
We missed the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco earlier this month, alas. We would like to have seen 14,000 education researchers jabbering together. Happily, education researchers Frederick Hess and Laura LoGerfo, on their joint blog Hess-Lo, recorded some of the cultural and intellectual treasures we missed. These they helpfully divided into "the five major fields of educational inquiry: imperialism; ghetto culture; hegemonic oppression and right-thinking multiculturalism; cyber jargon; and the utterly incomprehensible."
Among the sessions: "Written on, Written Over, but Refusing to be Written Off: Indigenous Educators Teaching in the Empire," "Ho No Mo': A Qualitative Investigation of Adolescent Female Language Reclamation and Rejection," "The Formation of the Subjectivity of Mail-Order Brides in Taiwan and Their Educational Strategies Toward Their Children," "Resisting Resistance: Using Eco-Justice and Eco-Racism to Awaken Mindfulness, Compassion, and Wisdom in Preservice Teachers," "Discovering Collage as a Method in Researching Multicultural Lives," and "Queering Schooling and (Un)Doing the Public Good: Rubbing Against the Grain for Schooling Sexualities." There are many more where those come from--see hess-lo.blogspot.com.
The AERA calls itself "the most prominent international professional organization with the primary goal of advancing educational research and its practical application." We'll take their word for it.