Meandering Ruminations…

The last month has been fully populated with landmark events, from my tenth wedding anniversary to SWMBO, WMD#2 6th birthday, a Double Toastmasters district win, work projects, plus the regular time commitments that come with a wife in grad school and two kids playing sports.

While the full content hiatus comes to an end shortly, there are a few things that have been bugging me recently I thought I should toss out to show Bwana ain’t dead yet.

**Lindsay Lohan is back in rehab.  What a shock.
**Cindy Sheehan is cracking up.  What a shock
**Aint’ it funny how all policy comes down to whose ox is being gored?  Liberal groups came out out against various death penalty additions saying they were not needed, as we already had a death penalty.  Conservatives say it is needed to give additional protection to certain categories of public officials due to criminal attitudes..  At the same time, conservatives come out against special penalties for actions that are considered hate crimes, noting there are already crimes against assault and battery and other crimes against the person.  Liberals reply these additional laws protect classes of people who require additional protection due to certain societal attitudes.
**Anyone heading toward the OBX this summer beware of the I-64 stretch heading west just east of Hampton. The road narrows from five lanes to two…and the merge tain’t pretty at all.
**By the same token, while at the OBX you cannot lose by eating at The Blue Point or the Red Sky Cafe. Also, Zero’s subs, legendary creature of Virginia Beach, has made it’s appearance with a store in Corolla…visit it and ask for Russ…still serving the best subs on the eastern seaboard!
**Months ago I urged the GOP to adopt and elocute a vision for where they want to lead Virginia. Amazingly, I was ignored. Now the Senate primaries are full of challenges between the “status-quo” incumbents and the energetic anti-tax challengers…and still no vision is being offered by either side.
**The public debate is regretably enhanced by the silence in the Virginia 37th senate race.
**I miss Ginsu knives.
**The old fashioned general store with all sorts of things you had no idea you needed until you happened upon it has been replaced by the “As Seen on TV” stores popping up here and there.
**Read the book “Made to Stick”. Well worth your time.
**Sanford’s “Invisible Prey”-excellent read.

That is about it for now…more later.

Cuccinelli and Oleszek=Dumb and Dumber

One of the saddest things in the world is the person who tries to be funny, but isn’t.  This quality is topped only by those who are so lacking in humor that they cannot recognize a bad joke.

Both of these qualities were in play recently in the Virginia 37th Senate District, and hopefully-but unlikely-for the last time.  I hope that when Election Day rolls around The Cooch and Janet Oleszek (who in keeping my preferred nickname status will now be referred to as J-O-K***) will be focusing on real issues instead of playing Dumb and Dumber.

Recently State Senator KenCen sent out one of his period “Cuccinelli Compass” campaign E-mails.  I read through it, hoping he was in the midst of reconsidering the Bwana suggestion that the State GOP needs to create and enunciate a vision if it hopes to maintain majority status in the General Assembly.  No such luck…

…instead, he took off on a relatively bizarre rant about going to Williamsburg to hear and see Queen Elizabeth II as part of the Jamestown 400 year anniversary.  Among his observations:

I don’t mind telling you that it feels a little underwhelming to be going to Richmond on May 3rd to be hearing from the Queen. However, it is a nice gesture, so I’m leaning against trying any parliamentary maneuvers when she gets up to speak…”

I wrote it off as a really bad attempt at being funny, and assumed that J-O-K, the presumptive Democratic nominee, would score him for bad manners. After all, Queen Elizabeth is coming at the invitation of the USA and the Commonwealth of Virginia, and The Cooch’s comments do display fairly bad manners.

Also included in the email was a silly suggestion for starting the day off right…create a word file titled with the name of a liberal democrat (he suggested Hillary Clinton and then Nancy Pelosi), delete the file, then empty the recycle bin.

Instead, J-O-K comes up with her own reaching attack at Raising Kaine. Posting at Raising Kane and raising the question “What is Ken Cuccinelli Thinking?”, she says:

While Ken was down in Richmond voting against every transportation bill that came across his desk for the last six years (except one ill conceived Republican plan) we were all sitting in the same traffic. And when Governor Kaine came back with an amended bill that would finally provide Northern Virginia with at least some relief, Ken went back to his old ways and voted against the final bill. Well, now we know why: he is far too busy “trashing” women in power, like Hillary Clinton (NY) and the first female Speaker of the House in our nation’s history, Nancy Pelosi (CA). Oh, and don’t forget the other woman he bashes, a figurehead from the United Kingdom. Obviously Ken just doesn’t have the time to focus on the problems we face here in the 37th.

Gosh…

First, the answer to your question is ” Ken Cuccinelli is thinking he is funny”. He clearly is inaccurate in his thinking.

But then J-O-K bashes The Cooch for voting against the The Gov’s transportation amendment, forgetting to note that had The Cooch not voted for the plan in its original form-which was also supported by numerous NoVa Democrats-there would have been no plan, as the Democrats decided to put ambition ahead of responsbility and offered up no real transportation plan, hoping the GOP would deadlock.

What really makes this funny is that while J-O-K gives The Cooch faltering credit in the RK post for voting for the GOP plan, at the time of the vote she complained that having come out against tax increases previously and signed a no-tax increase pledge, he was going against his word for voting for the plan at all. So she’s mad at him for voting for it, and now she is mad at him because he wouldn’t amend his vote.

Sounds to me like someone missed snack time…

Next she suggests partisan sniping of the type that has gone on in this country for centuries is actually “trashing women in power” in the form of Senator Clinton and Speaker Pelosi. Does this mean J-O-K would be cool with this if The Cooch had said Ted Kennedy and Steny Hoyer? Frankly, this seems harmless to me, and far less aggressive and abusive than a raft of partisan bumper stickers and blog postings I have seen over the last year.  And there is also a matter of “sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander” here.  Ms. Oleszek cannot really think that if women want to reach the political heights, they should be immune from the silly partisan brickbats that have been thrown for years.

Finally, J-O-K addresses the only sin The Cooch actually committed, and that is being a bad host.

I hope this gets better. Really, I do…because about all this whole exchange proves is this:

Senator Cuccinelli has a sense of humor, however misdirected, but is clearly not funny. Dumb move to send out that email.
Ms. Oleszek has no sense of irony or perhaps humor…Dumber move to respond to a dumb email. Better to stand back and let the world revel in The Cooch’s bad joke.  Instead, she tries to turn it into an attack on women.

Dumb and Dumber, indeed. Lord knows what the Autumn will bring in Va. Senate 37, but it has to be better than this…

 ***Lord knows this is a poor nickname, but it’s all I have at present.  Let me know if you have ideas…

When Did We Lose Touch?

Now and then I have these “scramble” moments…sort of like those old black and white WWII movies where the fighter jocks are hanging out, the air raid sirens sound, and the next thing you know the air is lousy with Mustangs and Spitfires and Messerschmidts and some brit sqaudron commander is yelling “tally-ho” to signal an attack.

Those moments are sort of an out of nowhere assault on logic and expectation, and I had one during a teacher conference the other day.

SWMBO and I were talking with a teacher and principal at WMD#1’s elementary school.  The principal allowed that she lived in Loudoun County, and not close hereabouts.  I made a light passing comment about it being too bad that teachers and school staff weren’t paid enough to live in the school districts where they taught.  The reply was that this person chose to live a long way from where she taught so as not to interact too much with the students outside the school…that to do otherwise could compromise objectivity.

To my wife’s amazement, I was able to keep my mouth shut…which was difficult, as my first instinct was “say what?”

I had not given it much thought until then.  I have come to find that this is the norm these days.  WMD#1’s teacher lives in our neighborhood, but she is the exception.  Apparently teachers are worried about becoming too close to students, having their objectivity potentially diminished, and also not wanting to have to worry about harrassment from students and parents in disagreements over grades, test scores, and discplinary measures.

I still thought “say what?”, because I was not sure who or what this concept shows worse against.  Teachers? Parents? Students? Society?

You see, back in the day when I was growing up in Manassas-which, of that time and place, more and more seems like  “Lake Wobegone South”-teachers were considered as much a part of society as doctors, lawyers, merchants, laborers, masons, carpenters, and everyone other trade or profession.  Teachers were members of local organizations, and of the hospital auxilary.  Their presence helped form an inchoate but living network-you never acted up in school, because you never knew when your teacher might pass the word to Mom in the grocery store, or at Rohr’s, or at the Fire Company Steak Dinner.  Teachers were treated with respect not just because of what they did, but because they sought a chance to be not just educators but also members of the community.

Apparently that is not the case anymore.  Apparently not being in touch with a community is part of the big game plan these days.

Sometimes I think I skipped a generation in community mores.  I got married fairly late in life, and at a time when my oldest is in second grade my college classmates are attending commencement exercises to watch their children get their diplomas.  When I see how things are done in schools, I often feel a disconnect between what I experienced in the mid-late sixties and into the seventies and how things are done now.

That being said, when did it become a bad idea for teachers to see their students outside of school?  When did someone start to get the idea that teachers effectiveness was diminished by living inside the community where they teach?  When did we start to lose touch…with ourselves, with each other, and with commonsense?

Being part of a community is more than punching a clock, doing your job, and then driving into another jurisdiction to go home.   Being part of a community means living, shopping AND working there. It means having a feel for the problems and crises of the area, and a sense of how that affects your students.  At old Bennet Elementary Mrs. Virginia Parks taught my father, my sister, and moi, and to each one she brought a different technique based on her experience and her understanding of what our lives and our shared community was like.

Apparently Mrs. Parks, who taught successfully in Manassas for over forty  years and sent children out of her classroom ready to push on and succeed in life, would be out of step these days.  More is the pity.