We are a nation of idiots

As you know, our nation is nuts. And so is our county: the "OC."

Yeah, and so is the city of Orange, with its wacky Orange Unified School District, one of the county’s many occasional “culture war” hot spots. Tom Fuentes and his operatives have been known to hang around OUSD board meetings, stirring up right-wing trouble.

One of the trustees of that board, Steve Rocco, is a lunatic. You don’t even have to talk to him to understand that. See his pic?

Today’s OC Register recaps Rocco’s colorful school board career:

Rocco…is known for winning his seat on the school board without campaigning, his often-present beanie and dark sunglasses during meetings, and his conspiracy rants and personal attacks on other trustees during board meetings…. An appellate court recently ruled that Rocco and his co-plaintiffs must pay the $37,000 in legal fees it cost the Orange Unified School District to respond to a lawsuit claiming the district violated his freedom of speech.

He’s a freaking train wreck. So then why was he elected?

(Why was Bush elected? Twice?)

We are a nation of idiots, is why. Voters are clueless. Politicians are worthless. Everyone has a cell phone or iPod. We see idiots on TV and smile.



Qua lunatic, Rocco just keeps improving. Here’s the latest: on Saturday, Rocco “was detained and cited for allegedly stealing a bottle of Heinz ketchup from Chapman University's cafeteria.”

That’s right. A security guard saw him take the bottle, hide it on his person, and then escape on a bike. Or so said Sgt. Dan Adams of the OPD.

No word yet on whether Trustee Rocco plans to bring the bottle to the next board meeting. I hope so.

Missed opportunity for ATEP?

I came across a story (LA Times) about the recent purchase of the Boeing plant in Long Beach. It looks like it will now be converted to an enormous film studio: a million square feet!

One of the names that came up in the story was familiar. I do believe that the people who are going forward with this project are among those turned down by our Board of Trustees in the course of development of our district’s ATEP facility on 68 acres of the old Tustin helicopter station.

As I understand it, our board was not convinced that these people were for real, moneywise.

Well, clearly they were.

So it looks like our efforts to develop ATEP will now proceed with a tad less “dearthiness” in So Cal, filmstudiowise.

KABC’s story (from a week ago: Long Beach airplane hanger goes Hollywood) includes a brief video of the Boeing facility and its new owners.

NOT LONG AGO, a reader requested that we present some Curtis Mayfield. Evidently, Mayfield's "Move On Up" has become somewhat of a semi-official Obama campaign song. Here's a performance from 1987:

MOVE ON UP


I've never been much of a soul fan, but I do have my favorites. This one could be my all-time fave:

James Carr's DARK END OF THE STREET


This one goes out to My Own Private Idaho! Be well, be happy,  ST.

Review of Arellano's "History"

Luis Alfaro reviews Gustavo Arellano’s history of the OC in the LA Times:

IF SURREALISM has an address, I think it exists in Orange County.

The fifth-largest suburban county in the U.S., and the nation's second-most expensive housing market, Orange County is framed on television shows like "The O.C." and "The Real Housewives of Orange County" as a money-grubbing, social-climbing, xenophobic enclave of the super-rich.
…
It's hard to imagine that one region could be home to Rep. Robert Dornan and Mickey Mouse, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and extraterrestrial basketballer Dennis Rodman, not to mention the largest community of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. Here we have but a few of the parallel universes that one experiences while exploring the county's 789 square miles.

These odd juxtapositions and contradictions exist at the center of Gustavo Arellano's warm memoir-cum-history lesson, "Orange County," a familial journey of immigration interwoven with a hilarious dissection of the region's history. Arellano, who writes the syndicated "¡Ask a Mexican!" column for OC Weekly, is a satirist at heart, and his brand of humor and bold subject matter has its critics and supporters among Latinos and non-Latinos. He is irreverent, very funny and willfully liberal—a distinct irony coming from a region once referred to by Ronald Reagan as the place where "all the good Republicans go to die."….

For the entire piece, go to 'Orange County: A Personal History' by Gustavo Arellano

GUSTAVO EXPLAINS:

Social Sciences/Humanities and Languages party

Bea gave a party to celebrate our new hires in these two schools. It was a success! The party, I mean. The hires? They're young!

Boy could this crew use some new blood. For a while there, I think they were contemplating merging the schools and calling the resulting school the AARP.

Don't know why these pics are so jumbled on the page. But I like the jumbelosity. Here's Melanie, who has a great sense of humor.

During the party, the big debate played in the background. It was hard to miss the fact that this was mostly an Obama crowd. People did not disguise their contempt for "that clueless, mean-spirited geezer" on the TV.

Bea's kids are way cute. I think they're Republicans, though. Bea's house is in a gated community deep in Irvine. I saw guard dogs. Somebody sprayed Armor-All on the trees.

Mysteriousness and ominosity hung in the air. Don't know why.



Yemmy looked cool. We don't have a whole lot of coolitude among the faculty of these schools. Thank you, Yemmy, for being cool.





A newbie, introduced.

Brenda introduces Julie, a new writing instructor. She used to play V-ball.

Melanie and the Reb are being ironical or something. They do that.



This poor fellow (at left) was revealed to be a devotee of the dismal science, a fortuity that unleashed the evening's only ugliness. He was cornered and asked, "What do you people really know?" "Why don't you people fix this thing?" "Who do you people think you are, anyway?"

He was forced to make an impromptu presentation in defense of his so-called discipline. He managed to quell the growing violence. In the end, few were hurt. He slipped out the back door and got past the security gate, disappearing into the night.



New "Poli-Sci" blood.

We even had a cowboy. Not the "YMCA" kind. I managed to blur the pic, but so what.

Few are aware that there is a TIME WARP at the Portola exit of the toll road. Did we pass through unscathed? Who knows. Perhaps, today, I am in a new universe. This will mean nothing to you, of course.

When we got home (Modjeska Canyon), Limber Lou asked me if he could play with my car key. On and off went the lights, in the night. —In my new universe? Perhaps so.

No Comment: Sarah Palin Corn Maze

Irvine Valley College Reading Center "Open House"

IVC's new Reading/ESS Center held an "open house" today, and it was a big success.



There were free books and valuable cash prizes. Well, no cash prizes. But there were freebies in that basket.

Melanie and Beth can generally be found in the center. They seem to be pals.

The always-rowdy Academic Senate crowd dropped by and had some snacks. They were only asked to leave after that food fight broke out.


Melanie seems happy in her new digs. Here, we see her smiling, watching the Ac. Senate crew leaving Dodge. Whew!

Michael Chabon on Obama: Game On

Michael Chabon once taught here in the academic groves of Irvine Valley College. This was before the books and the short stories, the essays, the film adaptation with the original theme song penned and sung by Bob Dylan and then, of course, the Pulitzer Prize. Back then Chabon was just one of the many grad students who drove across town from the university to teach part-time. He was one of us for awhile.

Some faculty still remember his mop top of hair and every now and then an archival file is discovered and oohed and ahhed over. (See image to the right, a shrink-wrapped collection of readings dated fall 1988.) On rare occasions, desk copies still arrive addressed to Professor Michael Chabon.

Michael has an essay in the October 9th issue of the New York Review of Books: "Obama and the Conquest of Denver." Chabon accompanied his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman, a pledged Obama delegate, to the convention. He writes about it. It's something.


excerpt:

It was not that, arriving for the DNC, I now felt less faith or confidence in Barack Obama than I did back in February. Obama turned out to be the kind of man he said he was in his books, dogged and perspicacious, considerate, principled but pragmatic, driven, and oddly blessed with a kind of universal point of human connection, of the understanding of loss, in the place where the memory of his father ought to be. No one who could see history the way Obama saw history, or who read the man’s books, would have expected him to emerge from a nasty, bitter, all but eternal presidential election campaign with his dignity or his principles entirely intact; but Obama had tried, and for the most part, I thought, he had conducted himself with honor. There could have been only one way for the idealized Obama—the perfect candidate he never claimed to be—to escape the rough and tumble of history, and that was too terrible to contemplate.

The problem was not Obama; the problem was that at the instant when Hillary Clinton at last conceded, the nature of the campaign changed. It was, I considered (perhaps under the influence of the kind smile and exhortatory squeeze on the arm bestowed on me by Jimmy Carter, president of my darkest adolescence, as he passed me in the doorway of a LoDo Mexican restaurant), like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had done the impossible, against Sardaukar and imperial shock troops alike. We had brought water to Arrakis. Now the gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies and goths, a cowboy or two, sons and daughters of interned Japanese-Americans—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain.

Suddenly it was hard not to feel that we were, once again, teetering on the point of something momentous, but something different than the previous momentousness. It was time to get serious. It was time to put on a little Curtis Mayfield (whose “Move On Up” has been one of the campaign’s unofficial theme songs) and take stock of our forces, our resolve, and the odds against us. It was time to take the fight directly to the Padishah Emperor himself. Game on was the nerdy expression I kept hearing people use.

To read the rest, click here.