I now kind of wish I stayed isolated from the news. Berlusconi is back in full swing and is sabotaging yet another trial for sex-trafficking in minor children to get elected?

What’s up with Italy? Is there such a shortage of politicians that even Berlusconi looks attractive? The guy has made himself the laughing stock of world politics many times over. I don’t think I have any Italian readers but if they exist, could they explain why Berlusconi just never seems to go away? Is there some hidden charm to this guy that we are not seeing?

Among the presidents in the photos, the one I dislike the most is. . . drumroll. . . JFK. There are several reasons why I can’t stomach the guy:

1. The horrible mismanagement of the Cuban missile crisis that put the world on the brink of World War III. For Pete’s sake, folks, Khrushchev turned out to be smarter than this guy and Khrushchev was never the sharpest tool in the drawer.

2. The entire situation with Cuba became one huge mess in a great part due to Kennedy’s pig-headedness. This is not just about Cuba, of course. Kennedy’s complete refusal to develop some understanding of what was going on in the region inaugurates the history of the tragic blunders of the US in Latin America that characterize the second half of the XXth century.

3. In my opinion, JFK also begins the sad tradition of what I call “the debased presidency.” Maybe I’m just imagining this, but I think that there was a point in time when the office of the President of the US carried some dignity. It wasn’t supposed to be the prequel to the Kardashians. And then the incredibly vulgar Kennedy family moves into the White House, and the insanity is unleashed. It’s no wonder that the popular imagination has associated (whether falsely or not remains to be discovered) Kennedy with Marilyn Monroe and even named him as the cause of her suicide. This is his fitting place: Hollywood, melodrama, soap opera, vulgar starlets dropping off in mysterious circumstances like in a cheap Dashiel Hammett novel.

Even when Kennedy is assassinated there is no respite from the vulgarity since his widow considers it a good idea to degrade herself with a very public sale of her body to an ugly old millionaire. And then the hugely vulgar children are inflicted upon us, so that the entire embarrassment never goes away. How can we be surprised when the media dedicate thousands of pages to the discussion of Michelle Obama’s forearms as if it were a normal topic of discussion? What else can we expect after Jackie Kennedy’s flaunted sale of herself performed in such a public way?

The tradition of a debased presidency where a president is frankly stupid, uneducated, and common as dirt yet gets elected precisely because of these qualities is continued by Nixon and George W. Bush. The latter is the culmination of the trend. When the McCain campaign tried to milk it by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, the trend finally backfired. This is good news because finally the American people are getting tired of political leaders who wink, smile, giggle, look cute, and think they know Russia because they can see it from their window. Maybe now the tragic Kennedization of the US politics can slowly begin to get reversed.

So: JFK, Nixon and Bush Jr. are the presidents I really dislike. They are all known for messing up the foreign relations, too.

Some people have suggested that I dislike FDR. This is not true. I actually respect him more than most American presidents. I can’t say that I know all that much about him, to be honest, so maybe I will change my opinion once I get to his presidency in my history textbooks. For now, however, I like him a lot.

As for Truman, yes the guy was a loser. However, as much as I hate him for being the only politician in the world to unleash a nuclear Holocaust against people, I can’t blame just him for it. I haven’t yet found a single person anywhere who would be as horrified by this act as I am. Normally, even the most progressive, enlightened folks tend to “Yes, but” it to death. And if even today, after the horrible consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been revealed, after everybody has seen the pictures and read the accounts, people still don’t widely condemn this, then the responsibility lies on them, not on a politician who only does what he has been hired to do.

I named my sister after:

A. A famous Russian poet.

B. My favorite doll.

C. A character from a book.

D. A classmate.

E. My grandmother.

F. A brand of electrical appliances.

G. A friend’s pet guinea pig.

I’ve been very sick, people. I knew that I would have just enough energy to finish out the semester, and then I would just collapse the moment the last lecture ended. And that’s exactly what happened. I worked on overload this semester, and almost never even whined about it, but there is a limit to everybody’s energy. As a good, responsible blogger, I wrote several pre-scheduled posts on Friday night because I knew I’d be incapacitated for several days after that.

Now I’m conscious again but still recovering. Today and tomorrow, I will have “beauty days” (meaning that I will lie in bed feeling beautiful) in order to recover completely. In the meanwhile, do tell me what I missed while I’ve been out of it. Have we already fallen off the “fiscal cliff”? If not, then why did I just get an email from the Human Resources telling us our taxes will go up because the Bush tax cuts will expire on January 1? Has that been decided in these 2 days that  I have been sick?

Also, I now wish I hadn’t placed any Catalonian writers on my syllabus for next semester. If they don’t want to be part of our Spain, there is no reason for us to promote their culture. We will have our Juan Goytisolo and Juan Marse back, thank you very much, and they can have their Carme Riera.

And good news: while I was sick, I was intermittently reading an article about somebody called Fred Halliday who seems to be precisely the kind of Liberal that I had despaired of ever finding: the kind who has the courage to accept that communism has no hope of succeeding and who has an even greater courage to denounce religious fanaticism. If anybody knows anything about him, do tell me whether I should read his books. Of course, the moment I found this guy, I immediately discovered that he recently died. Jewish luck.

As I’m sure you have guessed from the all-over-the-place tone of this post, I’m still sick, so it’s back to bed for me. Feel free to say, ask, discuss, mention anything in the comment section.

So what was it that made me choose Hispanic Studies as my career?

A) The first time I read Don Quijote.

B) A Colombian soap opera.

C) An affair with a man from Mexico.

D) Advice from my father.

E) A desire to be original.

F) Pure chance.

G) A suggestion from a professor I respected.

H) A trip to Spain.

I) A bet.

The Sister: come on, child, we all know that you know but let other people guess. 🙂

Here are the answers to the most recent questions of our “How well do you know Clarissa” contest:

1. When I was 13, my mother took her entire class on a trip to Moscow, and I went with them, too. It was 1989, and the perestroika was already transforming Moscow profoundly. My mother got us all tickets to see Gone With the Wind in a huge movie theater. This was when I saw Vivien Leigh for the first time and no other woman ever since could compete. So I had to limit myself to men since then. 🙂

2. I named this blog after my grandmother but, as for my real name, my mother named me after her favorite doll.

 

See more photos from this great collage here. The linked blog is in Russian but that doesn’t matter because the collage (titled “Motherly Love”) needs no words.

More questions and answers will follow. I’m keeping a tally with all the scores, so don’t worry.

Melissa at Shakesville is commenting a question that people asked of Bill Clinton and says the following:

That’s fucking gross when it’s a salesman who refuses to ask me a direct question and instead asks Iain, like he’s my owner and can read my mind. When it’s the Secretary of State being treated that way…OMG.

I’m not in any way disagreeing with Melissa but I kind of do the same thing as the salesman in her example. When I’m talking to a hetero couple, I always address the woman. Even if the man is my close friend and I barely know his wife, even if the question I need to ask is supposed to be answered by the man, I still turn to the woman and address my utterance to her. In the same way, I think it’s wrong when women address my husband and not me when I’m present. It feels rude when they do that.

The point of this post is not to say anything about the Clintons, politics, or anything of the kind. I’m just wondering if my approach is some sort of a cultural thing that I just do without even noticing it.

Which of these presidents do I dislike the most:

1. Harry Truman

 

2. JFK

 

3. FDR

 

4. LBJ

 

5. Bill Clinton

The one you immediately thought about is not here because that would make it too easy. 🙂 And the second one you thought about is not here either. But you can get extra points if you guess the names of these two presidents that I dislike even more but whose photos are not here. You need to get both of them, though.

While I’m sick with a severe cold, please enjoy this link encyclopedia:

A really REALLY really phenomenal idea on how to make the teaching of writing work. I say 1,000 yes to every word of this post.

One of my favorite bloggers is back with this amazing post on cheering death.

A student gets suspended for torturing cats. I’m guessing everybody else at the university is a vegan. If not, then these people’s hypocrisy is phenomenal.

“I was homeschooled from kindergarten through high school. I grew up hearing that treaties like the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (which only the U.S. and Somolia, a country with no functioning government, have not signed) must be opposed at all costs because it would erode parents’ rights. This wasn’t some minimal thing. Michael Farris, the most well known homeschool leader in the country and the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, has been advocating for a parents’ rights amendment and fear mongering about UN treaties for decades now.”

“Should Barack Obama’s Life Been Destroyed By A Drug Bust. Obama did drugs as a young guy, and not just pot. Fortunately for him, he managed to avoid arrest and imprisonment. I have no idea why any sensible person thinks the enforcement of federal marijuana laws against the will of certain states deserves one cent or one minute of time.” I agree that federal marijuana laws are stupid, but, sheesh, what a ridiculous argument. It reminds me of those idiotic “the world would have been a worse place had Beethoven’s mother aborted him, so let’s ban abortion.”

How much should you publish in graduate school.

How to succeed in a PhD program in the Humanities.

Religious fanatics can be defeated: “Belgium’s Constitutional Court has ruled that the so-called “Burqa Law” that bans the wearing of items of clothing that completely or partially cover the face is not unconstitutional. However, the ban may not be applied to places of worship. The court ruled the law does not contravene constitutional guarantees on religious freedom.” Yay!

An unexpected but welcome victory for gay rights in Israel. Here, too, the religious fanatics are being defeated.

Hugo Schwyzer was asked this question by a “feminist” website: “How can society improve while success and power are the foundations of male attractiveness?” I haven’t seen such a blatant insistence that all women are whores in a very long time. That’s some “feminism” right there.

“Cuba’s government is banning reggaeton music from radio and TV as Raul Castro’s administration cracks down on “vulgar” songs in the island nation, government newspaper Granma reported on its website.” Communist governments are notoriously prudish. Reread Orwell’s 1984 if you are wondering why that is.

“In Manchester, England, a four-week-old boy bled to death after a circumcision.” But will that convince unhinged parents who want to carve their right to dispose of their children onto their very bodies? Of course not.

In order to answer this question, you have to ask yourself: what does Clarissa want to do the most? What effect does she aim to achieve? What does her every post try to do?

The answer is obvious. I want to subvert preconceived notions, to say and do something unexpected, something that nobody says on each subject. Of course, I’m not always wildly successful but that’s the goal. And which style of clothing will help me achieve this goal better than. . . drumroll. . .

THE 1950s STYLE!

Just imagine me, arriving at a conference (or a date, when I still used to date), in a dress that people associate with American housewives in the 1950s, with a full skirt and often even a big bow, Mary Janes, and sometimes even pigtails. Plus I’m blonde, blue-eyed, and have a Russian accent. So I sit in front of people and make the following facial expression at them:

Add some massive eye-lash batting, and what do you think people immediately assume? That I’m an idiot, of course. Then they begin to condescend like they are getting paid to do so. Some people even start speaking re-a-lly slo-w-ly to make sure the dumb blonde understands them.

I let them do that, and then I open my mouth and unleash what I usually unleash on this blog. The effect is priceless, folks. Remember that I’m also a pedagogue, and there is nothing I like more than educating. This is a great lesson in how judging people based on appearances might not be a good idea.

Everybody who answered that my favorite style is the 1920s was not that mistaken. I love it aesthetically but I couldn’t wear these clothes because I don’t have the body for them. They would make me look like an armoire.

And the style I hate the most is the 1980s. All those pulse warmers, white sneakers, acid wash jeans – brrrrr! The 1970s style also sucks like there is no tomorrow but the 1980s were the worst.

Here are the winners of this round:

Saia Sakira 1

Paranoid 1

Sarah 1

Evelina Anville 0.5

The Sister 2 (Of course, it was easy for The Sister who has known me for 30 years.) N. also guessed and how could he have not, if I wore a 1950s dress to our 2nd date?

Lindsay 1

Z 1

Amanda 1