Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Donald A. Cress:

In Europe there is still one country capable of receiving legislation. It is the island of Corsica. The valor and constancy with which this brave people has regained and defended its liberty would well merit having some wise man teaching them how to preserve it. I have a feeling that some day that little island will astonish Europe.

What a delightful non sequitur. Of course, then there was Napoleon, who probably came as close as anyone to putting Corsica on the map.

Wikipedia can often be intriguingly and entertainingly blunt. On Chopin’s The Awakening:

Kate Chopin did not write another novel after The Awakening and had understandable difficulty in trying to publish stories after its publication.

That’s so blunt, so depressing, and so no-nonsense about the hostile attitude towards women writers at the turn of the 20th century. It’s even almost dismissive, though I presume whichever anonymous Wikipedia contributor wrote the sentence didn’t mean it that way. Women’s literature strikes me so much as a historical narrative of struggle (as a side note, I need to stop with this “historical narrative” thing. Someone accused me of Whiggishness the other day). And if there is anything particularly dispiriting about the struggle of a group with less power against a group with more, it’s that there is so often this assumption (even from the powerless group itself) that however hard they fight, it is not going to be possible to win. “Understandable difficulty”… what an assumption. What an assumption of hopelessness.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), as brought to my attention by Steve Benen:

Well, we just heard last week that the Federal Government now under the Obama administration is calling for a re-ordering of America’s food supply. What is that going to mean? Now will the White House decide how many calories we consume or what types of food we consume?

If the next speech Bachmann makes on the House floor invokes the words “precious bodily fluids,” I will not be the least bit surprised.

(cross-posted)

Over at the NYT college admissions blog, Harvard’s dean of admissions has been answering questions about the application and admissions process. I was struck by one comment that he addressed in his most recent post:

The sad fact is that students whose parents don’t help them with their applications are greatly handicapping themselves in the college admissions sweepstakes, at least at places like Harvard. They’ll be competing against other students whose applications, including the essays, have been exquisitely polished by parents, college guidance counselors at school, private college guidance counselors, and even essay editing services.

That came from an anonymous commenter, so I don’t know whether the person was stating this with any level of expertise or whether, as commenters on blogs often do, was just pontificating into thin air. My sense from having been through the process just a year and a half ago is that admissions folks can tell when someone has received too much help, just as teachers and professors can tell when someone’s plagiarized an assignment. My sense is that I can’t have been hindered too much by the fact that I wrote my own essays, and that I took the fact that I was writing my own essays very seriously. My sense is that can’t have worked against me, because I took some risks that someone who’d had professional college counseling advice would probably have been advised not to take. And, well, things turned out the way they did.

I don’t usually read the NYT college admissions blog because it feeds this insanity over admissions in the worst way. I’ve been interested in what William Fitzsimmons (Harvard dean) has to say, because Harvard’s admissions process is probably not vastly dissimilar from Princeton’s—but it’s not particularly relevant to most people’s concerns, questions, and interests, and it just reinforces this sense that it’s Necessary to apply to Harvard or its moral equivalent, which is most certainly not the case. That the commenter I quoted above was moved to make that comment is as much a product of this type of coverage from the NYT as any other systemic fault.

I have nothing to add to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ excellent point:

One of the great tragedies of the past half century or so, is how patriotism has been coopted by people who claim the Confederate flag, while black leaders, from King to Obama, are dismissed as communists/socialists and now Hitlerite. These are people whose heroes routinely flouted the federal government and assaulted black troops carrying the Union flag.

(cross-posted)

Sarah Palin sounds like she’s taking a leaf out of the Passover seder script:

FOX News’ Glenn Beck is doing an extraordinary job this week walking America behind the scenes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and outlining who is actually running the White House.

Monday night he asked us to invite one friend to watch; tonight I invite all my friends to watch.

Reminds me of such tried-and-true favorites like, “This year, not everyone is free. Next year, may everyone be free,” and “On all other nights, we eat sitting upright, but tonight we eat while reclining.”

I had no idea the ex-governor was of the Hebraic persuasion.

Embedded in Salon’s interview with writer Hannah Friedman is a perfect expression of what’s wrong with life skills/health classes in our schools, when Friedman is asked whether it’s an issue that she doesn’t condemn the drug use she portrays in her young-adult book:

I talk in the book about the research I did when I first started experimenting with marijuana. I really educated myself. I talk about the pros and cons, and I think I portray educated experimentation.

When I was in the DARE program, there was a very cartoonish characterization of drugs. Everything was bad. They showed videos of a joint and a heroin needle chasing kids around a playground. So when I saw people smoking marijuana, and they weren’t evil or violent, I came to doubt all of that information. If you teach abstinence-only sex ed and kids see that some of their experiences are contrary to what they learned, they’re going to think that everything that was taught to them was wrong. It’s dangerous to give kids half-truths.

Yes yes yes yes yes. It seems to me that whereas there’s a broad consensus on the left that abstinence-only sex ed doesn’t work, fewer people are criticizing the DARE program’s propagandistic approach to drug education. After my eight years in the California public schools and now, in college, it’s pretty easy to see that DARE didn’t work, or at least not for most people. Anecdotally speaking, I’d say that most of my peers have drunk alcohol underage or smoked pot. Some of them have tried hallucinogens, or cocaine. Scare tactics in fifth grade didn’t stop that, often for the reasons Friedman explains very well: DARE teaches that there is this amorphous entity called “drugs,” and they’re all very dangerous and very evil and very scary. If you get a little older, see a few more things, and realize that weed isn’t as dangerous as speed (rhyme intentional), you’re probably going to get curious and smoke a joint or two. Or several.

Plus, hell, this is teenagers we’re talking about. They’re going to try things out—particularly weed and alcohol, and possibly prescription drugs, because that’s what’s available to them. It doesn’t matter whether these things are illegal, and it doesn’t matter whether kids have been brainwashed against them. Just as abstinence-only sex ed doesn’t teach kids about contraception but neglects to realize that kids will invariably have sex anyway, abstinence-only drug ed thinks that by telling kids that all drugs are unilaterally bad, they can avoid having to tell you more nuanced information about safety that you otherwise have to learn through life experience and self-education. That’s not a good way to learn when you’re playing with mind-altering substances, and it makes kids careless.

I won the DARE essay contest at my elementary school, with a rhyming acrostic poem. It’s a pretty embarrassing artifact, but when I rediscovered it in a folder of my old schoolwork a little while ago, I was struck by the fact that the prevailing sentiment of the poem is “drugs are bad. Resist peer pressure.” Apparently I didn’t learn much about different kinds of drugs, what they look (or smell) like, what their effects are, which ones have significant risk of overdose, that sort of thing. By the time you’re in high school—or maybe even middle school; I led a sheltered life—those are pieces of information that are going to become very relevant. As Friedman indicates through the frankness of her memoir, it’s naïve to pretend that adolescents won’t run up against a situation where drugs (including alcohol) will seem very tempting indeed. And so it’s time life skills caught up.