Yes, I can

My, my...it has really been that long since I posted.

What better today than to return to something (intended as being) thoughtful and world-oriented as opposed to selfish and introverted than today.

If anybody has read this with any sort of regularity they will no doubt snicker at the irony of my prognostication of the electoral prospects of he who is now the President. Aside from offering a cheery, "Touche", to the reader, let me just briefly offer my own explanation (which you can freely call, "spin") before moving on to other rantings:

1. I don't think anyone can seriously question that the sudden and total economic collapse of last fall seriously contributed to Obama's win...at a minimum, no way he wins that sort of electoral landslide (Indiana? North Carolina?) without it.

2. The grim prognosis I gave Obama was firmly premised in that somewhere, somehow, some way, the John McCain of 2000 would show up. Instead, we got Joe the Plumber. Instead, we got a nursing home patient wandering off the grounds after hours. Instead, we got "That One." My analysis was grounded in the premise that the Republicans would nominate a candidate both weaker in ideological appeal than Barry Goldwater and weaker in charismatic appeal than Alfred Landon...in other words, a GOP nominee as weak as, well, whoever it was who ran against Woodrow Wilson in 1916. Given the fact that my now-deceased father (briefly a Republican) wasn't even born then, I thought the odds were fairly certain that they wouldn't hand the election to us. And I don't think too many fair-minded Obamaistas had such a confidence.

3. Here is where I missed something about Obama, although judging from his slogan-filled, telegenia-driven primary campaign, I don't know how, not knowing the guy, I could have picked it up: He more than matched his style with substance. Both by coolly addressing the economic Pompeii in progress while McCain behaved like any other extra in a 1970's airline crash disaster movie, and in doing a remarkable job of reaching to every wing of his party to form a cabinet that can truly be composed of the "best and the brightest" - I could say that the only flaw in his textbook campaign was perhaps not giving us a blueprint of just such an administration conceptualized, but I suppose one can't really argue with results.

Yes, you did. Job well done. VERY well done. Go to it, Mr. President.

I was a very lucky person in 2008, where lousy American political soothsaying aside, I did a lot better than a lot of others did.

I went abroad twice - paying for it every step of the way. I saw unchartered territory in the wee north of the Hebrides and rediscovered comfort food in a bistro in Montparnasse. I discovered the hauting beauty outside the run from Inverness to Kyle of Lochalsh and the simple, afterthought elegance of an intercity run between two world famous capitals, passing through an engineering marvel in the process. The first voyage was a nod to independence, the second helped wonderfully cement a very promising relationship.

What's more, Antioch may yet live. A letter of intent was signed which apparently sets in motion Antioch College being forever rid of the offspring that became its parasite - Antioch University.

During the summer, I took to drafting for this blog my experience of an e-mail exchange I had with someone who could only be described as a "wingnut" who wrote a "dance on the grave" piece about my alma mater for the American Thinker. When I challenged him on the notion that his vibrating the light fantastic for ideological purposes obscured the reality that people who had worked for years at this very private institution were losing their jobs, he quite conveniently chose to "invoke" (using only quotation marks, not in fact sharing any authentication, such as a copy of an email or a scanned document) an alleged "message" he had gotten from a "25-year tenured professor" which referred to the College's students as "degenerates," among other things. Needless to say, the professor was not identified by name. I sent him one reply, choosing my words carefully as to the quote's authenticity, which engendered a somewhat defensive response from the columnist, but again, no identification of this source.

I came to thinking that having a tenure of 25 years at Antioch would take one back to the very time I was a student there. And given the college's small size and the fact that, undeniably, not many had stayed, I forwarded my exchange to two of the four who met this biographical criteria (by my count, of the remaining two, one of them served on a Faculty committee determined to fight closure in Court; the other stayed in Yellow Springs to work on the "Non Stop Liberal Arts Institute" in town, which, I daresay, would rule these out as being people who would badmouth the institution to an obviously hostile voice). Of the two who I forwarded the exchange to (both of whom I had studied under), the revealing dichotomy is this: One of them had moved on to another institution, landing on his feet as Chair of the Department of International Relations at a college not far from here; the other (somewhat akin to being in steerage on the Titanic and surviving) remained associated with Antioch University - possibly the only one. The former Antiochian responded categorically that he had never met or known the right wing columnist. To my chagrin, the one associated with Antioch University never responded.

Thus, I cannot rule out the possibility that maybe someone really did harbor such a cynical attitude about Antioch. Was it this individual who wound up latching onto the University in order to keep his job? Only he knows. But I can also not rule out the possibility that the University was orchestrating such comments and leaking them to obviously hostile sources to advance its own agenda. I share that vignette to underscore that Antioch College never should have created Antioch University (and I can say that with all due objectivity, since technically it is the "university" which issued my bachelors' degree), and will never survive as a part of it.

The Mets blew it again...and for good measure, the Jets managed to do quite much the same thing. I suppose I can never stop being loyal to the colors and uniform. But the Wilpons are quite another thing. I have no plans to go crawling over others to Citi Field next year. If Jeff W. can say that after signing Santana, they "underachieved," I can give that statement about as much credit as one would give to so many of those uttered by our (ahhhhhh!) former President.

This was good. I missed doing this. Look forward to writing more.

Yes, I can. :}

The Brahmin