Interlude: Obama’s “New Draft”?

The upcoming Obama administration has created a website called the Office of the President Elect. On the site, the administration announces its intention to require/encourage community service among high school and college students. (Per the website, the administration would require 50 hours of community service from high schoolers and 100 from collegiates.)

Because the language smacks of conscription, conservatives like Greg Mankiw are crying out against it, going so far as to call it “a new draft”.

I can understand where these conservatives are coming from. Really, I can. Community service? As in service to the community ? That’s going a bit far. I mean, these poor kids are already required to learn basic mathematics and how to read! How far will they be pushed against their free wills?

We should let these kids choose for themselves. I propose that, as a first step, we let them opt out of learning anything about economics. Then they can choose their way out of mathematical literacy, out of appreciation of poetry and painting, out of the ability to discriminate a valid argument from a bogus one. And we won’t rest until the whole nation has opted itself into the kind of ignorance, apathy, and self-consumption that conservatives advocate. Oh, glorious!

What’s happening here is that conservatives, embittered by Obama’s election and the severe fragmentation of their party and their worldview, are falling back on their oldest ace: their threatened freedoms. (Interesting, isn’t it, that these “threats” never bloom into realities? As the Bush administration demonstrated, conservatives never see the real danger coming.)

That’s the twisted reasoning that can put a perfectly healthy proposal for mandatory community service to the plucking of healthy men and women from the domestic resource pool to put their lives at risk in the course of dubious and outrageously costly wars.

It’s strange: conservatives see the word “require” and they’re immediately up in arms. But where were they when their sometime golden-boy Bush was brushing aside the Constitution to bug the phones and computers of American citizens? Where were they when the Bush administration locked away crucial documents concerning his pappy and Ronald Reagan? Where were they when he was lying to the American public left and right in his service to an agenda the goal of which is still not clear to those whom he was morally and legally bound to represent to the best of his ability?

As a college student, I am always looking for community service opportunities, and I wish they were more frequent. I hope the Obama administration comes up with some good stuff for us.

Interlude: Doomsday for the Banana?

They've joined pandas, gorillas, and McCain supporters on the endangered list.

For those of you who haven’t heard, the cherished banana is endangered. Apparently, this most important of fruits is rapidly succumbing to a fungal disease.

For those of us in the U.S., this is bad news. But for people in less developed countries, where bananas are a nutrional staple, this is really, really bad news.

Find out more about the beleagured banana in David Koeppel’s book “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World”. Also, you can visit Koeppel’s banana blog, where you can learn more about bananas than you wanted to know, or even thought there was to know. (Seriously.)

Come to think of it, this banana doomsday shouldn’t come as a surprise. I think the Reverend David Jeremiah found a prediction of it encrypted in the Book of Revelation.

Interlude: Charles Barkley, Governor of Alabama?

He ruled the court during the 80s. But can he rule Alabama?

Retired NBA hall-of-famer Charles Barkley has announced his intention to run for the governor’s office in his home state of Alabama.

In an interview with CNN, Barkley expounds on everything from race to religion before confirming that he will be running for Alabama’s highest office in 2014.

Barkley also shows himself an acute political theorist, insisting that government has “three jobs. No. 1 they should fix our public school system, they should make sure our neighborhoods are safe and they should give people economic opportunity”.

If C-Bark wants to start his own country, sign me up!

As to his gubernatorial hopes, Barkley insists that he “can’t screw up Alabama. We are number 48 in everything and Arkansas and Mississippi aren’t going anywhere.”

For Barkley’s sake, I just hope Michael Jordan doesn’t set his sights on the same office.

Interlude: Inflation Everywhere!

On hearing the word “inflation”, most people think of worthless dollars and high prices (same thing, by the way). The science of economics defines inflation (roughly) as “too many dollars chasing too few goods”. Given the law of supply and demand, we have high prices/devalued monetary units. Thus we we find ourselves in paradoxical situations, such as not having enough money for gas because there’s too much money earmarked to buy gas.

Inflation, however, pertains to more than just money. Indeed, the value of almost anything can be inflated, provided that the thing is used too much. For scarcity is the bedrock, a conditio sine qua non, of value. This is why Disney locks their movies away in a “vault”, only to “release” them every decade or so.

Think about it:What would be the value of “beauty” if everyone looked like Nicole Kidman or Brad Pitt?

Inflation is why we have so many non-conformists. The more alike people are to one another, the less valuable each one becomes.

Inflation is why you start out loving an underground rock band, only to loathe it as soon as its song hits Billboard. If everybody’s doing it, then it just isn’t as cool anymore.

The story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf is really a story about inflation. Each time the boy gives a false report of a wolf in the vicinity, the value of his report decreases. By the end of the tale, his word means nothing, and the whole town gets eaten.

As is well known, grades have been undergoing inflation for some time now. Colleges and universities have become like corporations, with students as their consumers. This situation gives students a great deal of leverage in negotiating grades (because the customer is right, or you’re out of a job, buster!). The more As rewarded for shoddy work, the less the value of an A.

Words can suffer from inflation, too. The more often a word is used, the less punch it carries. Consider the words “cool” and “awesome”. Just by looking at it, you can tell that the word “awesome” originally meant “awe-inspiring”. Now it’s what you say when you learn what’s for dinner.

The one that really pisses me off is “literally”. Originally, the word was meant to distinguish an image as non-figurative, i.e., non-metaphorical. For instance, someone would say, “I was up literally all night studying for my final” to indicate that she really had not slept at all, that she was not exaggerating the time she’d spent cramming instead of sleeping.

Now, though, people use the word “literally” to emphasize their metaphors! For instance, I saw a commercial recently in which a business tooted that they “are open literally around the clock”. The only thing that literally happens “around a clock” is the turning of the clock’s hands! My jaw dropped in disbelief at this blatant disregard for the obviously figurative nature of the phrase.

I’m not kidding. My jaw literally dropped! My girlfriend had to run me to the hospital to have it put back in place.

Interlude: Grasping at Straws to Break the Camel’s Back

Is Camel a consumer-minded innovator or an evil seducer of children?

The true colors of the anti-tobacco faction are finally showing. It is as we suspected all along: they are self-righteous prigs who are pathologically uncomfortable with people making choices they wouldn’t make.

See, the anti-tobacco coalition has an indestructible argument against smoking: second-hand smoke is unfair and immoral.

With ever more vigorous legislation against smoking in public places, however, the tobacco industry is slowly but surely moving away from “cancer-sticks” to smokeless products. R.J. Reynolds will soon be testing three smokeless innovations: Camel Orbs (a nicotine pellet), Camel Sticks (a nicotine twisted stick), and Camel Strips (dissolvable nicotine strips).

The anti-smokers have nothing left to bitch about. An orb can do no second-hand damage; a stick won’t spoil anyone’s dining-out experience; a dissolvable strip can’t blacken lungs from a distance.

Alas, the outcry has not ceased. Objections have already been made that the new products are marketed to children, “flavored and packaged like candy”.

As a proud user of smokeless tobacco (I enjoy Wolf Packs, myself), I applaud R.J. Reynold’s innovation and adaptation to the recent onslaught of anti-smoking legislation. This, after all, is what the market is supposed to be all about: finding new ways of reaching the consumer where she stands.

As for the idea that Big Tobacco can be blamed for consumption of their products by minors simply by putting it on the market, it’s naive in the extreme. I’m no expert in these matters, but I suggest that kids go to tobacco because they see people important to them – parents, siblings, friends – enjoying it, and they want to enjoy it, too.

Of course, the tobacco companies are obligated, legally and morally, not to market to children. That said, can’t we appreciate that they are making tobacco available in forms harmful to no one but the person who chooses to use it?

I certainly do.