The alarm is going off in the apartment adjacent to mine. Why am I not fleeing in terror, or at least caution? Because they probably just left something on the stove too long. Like most people, I’ve heard many fire alarms in my life but have never been around an actual uncontrolled fire.

When the alarm went off at work a few weeks ago, we ignored it for a bit, somebody finally called campus security and discovered it was an actual triggered alarm, and we lackadaisically evacuated the building. Even after we got confirmation that this might be an actual event, we were still reluctant to leave.

I guess they’re good for telling you that you might want to check the situation out?

From a Politico story about the big Tea Party shindig in Nevada:

Connie Soto, a 48-year-old interior designer from Lake Elsinore, Calif., said “we’re peaceful peopleâ€?…. She wouldn’t let a POLITICO reporter take a photograph of her with her handmade sign reading “Obamacrats: exterminate the vermin,â€? because she asserted it would be used to portray her as violent.

From a NY Times article on Tea Partiers:

When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care.

Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist.

Mr. Grimes also receives Social Security benefits while spending his copious free time as a Tea Party organizer. And then he says stuff like, “If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own.�

So: hypocrite, stupid, or evil? I know which one my money’s on.

This afternoon, I heard three people working in a taxpayer-funded library talking about how they’re opposed to socialism.

In Huntsville, I couldn’t count the number of government-hating libertarians who worked for NASA and military contractors.

The Washington Post has a story up about one of the guys inciting violence against those who voted for healthcare reform. Turns out he’s living on government disability payments.

So, seriously, what’s up with these people? Are they really unable to draw the line between their own personal well-being and government tax-and-spending? Is there something I’m missing? Or are they just stupid?

(Or is it just a matter of “It’s just fine for the government to redistribute wealth to me, maybe?)

When I started here a little over three years ago, I’d hear it a couple of times a week. The frequency seemed to be increasing over time, but it occurs to me that during this academic year I don’t think I’ve heard otherwise.

When you and I want something from a library, we ask to check it out. When we want to borrow something in exchange for money, we ask to rent it.

Among today’s undergraduates, at least on this campus, the verb “to rent” is used for every exchange. “I’d like to rent these books” still sounds bizarre and ugly to me, but it’s all I hear.

The image above is clipped from the Yahoo homepage, advertising a story about the tremendous success of a recently released album by Jimi Hendrix.

When you’re promoting a story about Jimi Hendrix, what comes naturally to mind? Why, Elvis Presley, of course! Let’s keep our priorities straight.

Putzes.

Roy Edroso has a post up about a mainstream conservative columnist’s recent revelation that rock and roll is the Debbil’s music. This is from the comment thread:

Be-Bop-A-Lula, a hit single for Gene Vincent in 1956.

Let’s Spend the Night Together, a hit single for the Rolling Stones in 1967.

Generations were short back then.

(OK, this post has been lying around for nearly a year now. I’ve thought about polishing and publishing it at least once a week, so I guess it’s time to finish it up.)

A good long while back, I was lurking in a gay.com chatroom devoted to the city I was visiting. It must have been around Pride season, as that became the topic of conversation.

A very conservative and vocal chatter proclaimed that he wouldn’t be participating in any Pride activities because he didn’t believe in it. He didn’t believe in Black History Month either, and for the same reason. It was stupid and unacceptable and downright anti-American to celebrate membership in a group of people, he said.

And there was rebuttal, and he went on, and I so very much lost interest. He continued predictably through “reverse discrimination” and into “special privileges”, and then he played his trump card: “It burns me up that black people and Mexican people and even gay people have holidays celebrating their ‘pride’ and ‘heritage’, but you’d never hear of white people getting to do the same thing. Can you imagine what we’d hear from PC police if we had a day celebrating German heritage?”

Ahem. You probably don’t know this, but Missouri has a huge German heritage. And because of this, most every Missouri town of any size has an Oktoberfest celebration every year. Every Missouri town including the one the chatter lives in.

When people talk about “male privilege” and “white privilege” and such, this is what they mean. They don’t mean that every white man is born with a +5 Spoon of Silver, they’re talking about being able to chug a stein at Oktoberfest while at the very same time complaining about how white people never get to celebrate their cultural heritage.

My school has a huge annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration. It’s a week-long thing, and the campus actually shuts down for three days because, really, it wouldn’t be worth it to go through the motions of holding classes. The St. Pat’s thing is integral to the school’s identity; it’s not just a holiday that pops up unexpected, it’s a topic of conversation year-round.

It’s also an engineering school, so the student body skews conservative. Know what this means? It means that a sizable contingent spends February snarking about Black History Month even while they’re gearing up for an outsized celebration of Irish culture and heritage.

That’s not privilege in itself. What’s privilege is that they don’t see, and don’t have to see, the disconnect. It’s not so much about getting some sort of material bonus just for existing, it’s more like living in a world that was designed with people like you in mind.

Just to be clear: Enjoying the benefits of privilege doesn’t make you a bad person, or even a skeezy person. It is worth paying attention to, because it helps reduce the possibility of being an unintentional asshole.

Her: I think you should be a high school teacher. I think you’d be good at it.
Me: God, no. I’d hate teaching.
Her: But you were in a teacher program for a year before you changed majors!
Me: …
Her: What? I think you’d like being a teacher.

Check out this Zippy the Pinhead cartoon. Quoting:

I saw th’ best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook! …starving for celebrity gossip, dragging themselves through one website after another, looking for a new conspiracy theory!

So you see the sentiment all the time, all over the place. People are making careers off it, even. But it still makes my blood boil ever time I see it.

The people who spout it, I just want to grab their lapels and shake, force their words right back up their gobs. I know–I know!–that these self appointed arbiters of the intellect are the exact same people who, one incarnation back, got their self-righteous jollies sneering at the unwashed masses killing brain cells with the National Enquirer and the TV Guide crossword puzzle. Two incarnations back they looked down their blue noses at the vast wasteland of television and the mind-rotting menace of comic books.

Three incarnations ago they…OK, there was a war on, and a Depression. I don’t know for a fact that the prematurely-greybeards of that generation believed that radio programs and jazz meant the imminent death of the Life of the Mind. We’ll give that generation a tentative pass. But four incarnations and, boy howdy, it was yellow journalism and ragtime and Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang and all that trouble-with-a-capital-T that heralded the death of the intellect.

So it goes without saying that they’re wrong, that they’re boringly and predictably and, ironically, mind-numbingly wrong. But the simple fact of their wrongness shouldn’t make me rage, and I want to know why it does.

I think it has something to do with the fact that they are at once transparent frauds and respected authorities, but that doesn’t seem sufficient. Maybe it’s that they’re tasked with the incredibly important job of explaining us to ourselves, but they’re lacking the understanding or the honesty (or both) needed to do that adequately. Or maybe it’s because they’re the representatives of a system, and the creators and continuers of that system, that I’d believed for most of my life was noble and essential, but they turn out to have heads of clay. Or maybe it’s something completely different.

Thoughts?