Historiann

Can I choose "none of the above?"

Howdy!  Hellsapoppin’ here.  While some of you in the East may be shoveling yet more snow today, we in the West have got more than a few stalls to muck out today, and a lot of fences to mend.  Here are some items for your delectation and consideration:

• National Politics:  What’s up with our Transformational President?  Well, not his approval numbers, that’s for sure.  Jonathan Last offers an analysis that says it’s the Clinton primary voters who jumped off the bandwagon first, and looks at the recent election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts from that perspective.  Michael Lind writes that the Republicans have nothin’–but that won’t stop them from winning because of Dem fecklessness, diffidence, and/or incompetence:  “Buyer’s remorse is what the voters should feel when they vote for a party that promises a bold reform agenda and then acts between elections as though it were a lobby for the financial industry. But wait — which party are we talking about here?”  Meanwhile–there are open rumblings about the incompetence of the Chicago bubble that appears to have been more effective at getting President Obama elected than they are at governing.  (H/t RealClearPolitics.)
• Local Politics:  Our new U.S. Senator, Michael “Never Won a Single Vote” Bennet is sinking like a stone against Republican front-runner Jane Norton, and even against Weld County D.A. Ken Buck.  (OK, so they’re only Rasmussen and DailyKos polls, but wev–that’s all we’ve got.)  Gee–who ever would have predicted that it might be a craptastic idea to crown this guy Senator?  Meanwhile, a guy who actually ran a few successful campaigns and won a lot of votes is now in the lead to replace Gov. Bill “The Family Guy” Ritter.  Go figure!  Historiann might be voting Republican for the first time in her life come November–unless Andrew Romanoff wins the D primary, and even then, I might vote Republican anyway.  Why should I reward bad behavior by all of the d00dly d00dz who think they run this state?  (Of course, we’ll have to see how Norton and Buck play their hands, too.)
• Literature:  Leonard Cassuto considers J.D. Salinger’s Bartleby-like retreat from literary celebrity, and predicts Continue Reading »

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Maybe procrastination has saved me again?  I was going to buy a brand-new, decked-out Prius this winter until the news broke that the 2010 Priuses are going all HAL on people.  Creepy.  Maybe it’s not such a good idea to make machines that think they’re smarter than us?  Every time I get a new computer, I have to spend hours deselecting everything that Microsoft has automatically preselected for me without my consent, from the damned “grammar check” to the display of my folders, etc.  (I miss my Macs!)

Maybe I’ll go ahead and give my old car that oil change that’s 3 months and 1,500 miles overdue, and wash it for the first time in 10 months, since it looks like I’ll be driving it for a little while longer.  (I’ve been known to go for oil changes just once a year, or every 8 or 9,000 miles!)  Its tires are worse than bald, it looks like someone must be living in it, and it smells like a fart, but aside from the driver’s side front and rear windows not going up and down as they should, the thing has really given me zero mechanical trouble in the eight years I’ve owned it.  (And it was 4 years old when I bought it–so it owes me nothing, not even windows that go up and down when I press the button, especially considering my chronic neglect and/or abuse.) Continue Reading »

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Dear Readers:  I was contacted a few days after Christmas by commenter Lance Manyon*, a colleague of the late Don Belton, an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Indiana University who was murdered in his home on December 27.  Lance was, in his words, a “friendly colleague” of Professor Belton’s, and spent Christmas Eve with him at a party.  Today, he offers some thoughts about Professor Belton’s life, and the ways in which both small-town gossip and media narratives have distorted the memory of this funny, smart, and above all complicated man after his murder.  Like many of Professor Belton’s friends and colleagues, Lance is left with the “cognitively unimaginable” fact of the murder, trying to make sense of the many different versions of the story and what they suggest about the deeper town/gown divisions in his college town and in the wider world.

*”Lance Manyon” is a pseudonym for a person on the faculty in the humanities at IU.

Our Holiday Murder, by Lance Manyon

Two days after Christmas, Don Belton, an Indiana University Assistant Professor of English, was murdered in his kitchen. More precisely, he was stabbed five times in the back and several times in the stomach and the chest. Belton was a small, black, gay man with a wicked sense of humor, and could easily have been a character in a Wallace Thurman novel. He was a renowned novelist and scholar of the HIV/AIDS experience. He was gentle, thoughtful, and sweet: when he arrived in Bloomington two years ago, he asked one program secretary for a campus map, and then offered to pay her back for it. For now, his murder is a cognitively unmanageable fixture of our day-to-day.  For the foreseeable future, it will force us to think carefully about the intersection of race, class, and sex in our college town. Continue Reading »

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Don't we already have enough rich, white "Teds" in the Senate?

What????  You mean it wasn’t a super-duper awesomely fabulous idea to appoint a man to the U.S. Senate with zero political experience and without him ever having proven he could win a single vote?  Who indeed ever would have predicted this? 

It’s an early poll, so take it for what it’s worth, but both Governor Bill Ritter and Senator Michael Bennet face an uphill battle for (re)election.  It couldn’t happen to more deserving white ruling-class d00dly d00dz!  Continue Reading »

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Here’s an update on the status of guns at Baa Ram U. from the Denver Post:  The “Board of Governors on Friday voted 9-0 to implement a policy that will likely lead to a ban on concealed weapons on the university’s campuses.”  (Good news, I suppose, but this sounds like just another example of university policies being written by the university counsel!)  Hillariously the story reports that “[s]tudent leaders say allowing students with permits to carry weapons means everyone is safer — especially women — despite what other schools have done or what an international study by law enforcement contends.” 

Well–what do actual women students, faculty and staff at Baa Ram U. think?  Does the reporter bother to talk to any actual XX chromosome people?  Continue Reading »

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Baa Ram U. hit the front page of the Denver Post this morning with an article about the ban on guns that Public Safety and the President’s Cabinet have recommended.  The students disagree, although the article does a very poor job of actually talking to students or showing any proof of this beyond the assertions by leaders of the Associated Students of Baa Ram U.  (I’m not saying they’re dishonest, I’m saying that the reporting for this story is lazy.)

The ASCSU student senate tonight is likely to pass a resolution that asks CSU president Tony Frank to keep current policy, which adheres to the state’s concealed-weapons law. It allows someone with a concealed-weapons permit to carry a handgun almost anywhere on campus.

Only in residence halls are weapons forbidden.

Frank will weigh the ASCSU vote in deciding whether to form a different weapons law for the university, said CSU spokesman Brad Bohlander.

Currently, 23 states allow public campuses or state systems to decide their own weapons policies, with nearly all choosing to be “gun-free,” according to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

CSU is one of the rare exceptions, deciding in 2003 to follow the state’s concealed-weapons law. The ASCSU points out that concealed weapons have been allowed at Blue Ridge Community College in Virginia since 1995 and at Michigan State University since June.

Longtime readers already know what I think about guns on campus.  They sure as hell don’t make me feel any safer!  But, it doesn’t really matter if guns are “banned” or permitted in classrooms, labs, libraries, and various public spaces on our campus.  Continue Reading »

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As I was running this morning, I thought to myself:  how strange and unlikely that I now live and work in a location where I am in proximity to more large animals than to small animals.  (I have two small animals myself, but cattle really are a big part of my life these days.  This seems strange, since I work in a Liberal Arts college and not Animal Sciences–strange but not unwelcome.  The big animals I run into (and next to) are penned or fenced, and well under control.  The animals I encounter aren’t part of big agribusiness, but are clearly free-range herds under the care of a small farm.

(Sorry for the craptastic photos–they were taken literally on the run with a cell-phone camera.  I wanted to get one that showed the mountains in the background, but the light and the cattle weren’t cooperating.  Besides the fact of my craptastic cell-phone camera!  But those of you who know me probably know me well enough to know that a new phone or digital camera is not going to be a priority on my Christmas list.) Continue Reading »

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Busy day here at the ranch!  I thought I’d throw you  few curves to help keep your day interesting:

• Roxie’s World brings us the heartwarming story of a non-gay pro-gay little boy in Arkansas named Will Phillips who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance at school until there truly is “liberty and justice for all” in these United States.  (Some of you may also want to weigh in on the pressing question raised by the insult this little boy hears now at school:  what is the proper spelling of “gaywad?”  Is it “gaywad,” “gay wad,” or “gay-wad?”)
• There’s a fun new gay blog I’ve found called Down and Out in Denver.  Actually, the blog proprietors Alastair and Blake hate Denver, which is why they started a blog to complain about the lack of urbane gay funky goodness there.  Continue Reading »

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I didn’t even bother posting photos or commenting on our pre-Halloween freak snowstorm of October 28-29 that left 8-10 inches of snow on the ground in my neighborhood.  Well, here’s evidence of our second “freak” snowstorm this past weekend, another 8 inches or so.  Wild!

I always have to reassure people who hear that I live in Colorado that we don’t wear boots, polarfleece, and parkas all year ’round in the Denver metro area, and that the vast, vast majority of the snow falls in the mountains.  Maybe I should live here longer before I am so quick to contradict these ideas.  (We moved here in the middle of some serious drought years, which meant that summers were unusually warm and the winters relatively dry and snow-free.) Continue Reading »

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Here you see the building that’s just across the parking lots where the Liberal Arts college (including the History department) is located at Baa Ram U.  How many of you can boast a stock judging pavillion in your immediate environs?  It’s just another charming detail of life on this High Plains Desert–like two feet of snow before Halloween, and then temperatures in November in the 70s.  Go figure!  (If only there were a rodeo ring there, too–now that would be fun.  They do occasionally park some bulls at the Stock Judging Pavillion, usually towards the end of the spring semester.)

Take a look at the boys over here on the right:  as Bill says to Jake in The Sun Also Rises:  “Must be swell being a steer.”  Consider that your eye candy (of a rusticated sort) for the day.  Sorry for the poor quality of the photos–I shot these with my trusty 3-year old mobile phone on the fly as I rushed to my veal-fattening pen office Monday morning.  Continue Reading »

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