Scrapbook
Scrapbook Newsweek Copies Slate THE SCRAPBOOK knows more than a few former lacrosse players, including a couple here on staff. So when we read Dave Jamieson's "brief sociological account" of the...
...We would like to have seen 14,000 education researchers jabbering together...
...Fake Tocqueville Lives...
...So far as we can tell, the piece is supposed to be about how, when George W. Bush became president, the United States began to "cease being good" and descend into "neo-Jacobin" radicalism...
...On April 15, Patrick's car was Tboned as he hurriedly pulled across an oncoming lane into a CVS pharmacy in Portsmouth, R.I...
...Who—besides the Rhode Island electorate that mysteriously returns him to office—could forget Patrick trashing his chartered yacht, or announcing that "I am on a lot of different medications, for among other things, depression," or shoving a female airport security guard when she tried to make him check his bag...
...As Alexis de Tocqueville once said"—according to Col...
...Kennedy, for instance, once lamented middle-class Americans' inability to "make mends meet...
...If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.' " Of course, as Claremont McKenna College government professor John J. Pitney Jr...
...Then there's this...
...But at least it's in standard English...
...There are many more where those come from—see hesslo.blogspot.com...
...The Overshadowed Kennedy—son of Ted, nephew of Uncle Jack, cousin of Maria—never fails to unimpress, if that's a word (and if it's not, it's one the malaprop king has probably used himself...
...Wilkerson's little boy Lawrence B. rise to such political celebrity despite never really having learned to read and write...
...But we can't be entirely sure about that because (a) the analogy is under-developed and hopelessly confused (Wilkerson appears to believe that Robespierre and Napoleon were both Jacobins), and (b) much of the piece is written in a weird pidgin subdialect that The ScRAPBOOK's never seen before...
...Ours is "the greatest country the world has ever seen," writes Lawrence B. Wilkerson on the op-ed page of the April 23 Baltimore Sun...
...So when we read Dave Jamieson's "brief sociological account" of the sport, published on April 7 in Slate, we found ourselves nodding (and laughing) in agreement...
...Happily, education researchers Frederick Hess and Laura LoGerfo, on their joint blog HessLo, recorded some of the cultural and intellectual treasures we missed...
...Kennedy has again handed his bête noire Howie Carr, a Boston Herald columnist and radio host, fresh material...
...And Wilk-erson ought to know...
...Patrick, We Know Ye All Too Well Everyone has an off day now and then...
...They can be spotted driving SUVs with 'LAX' stickers affixed to the rear windows," Jamieson wrote of lacrosse players...
...No question about it: Only in America could Mrs...
...Just look at his career: first, a 31-year active-duty stint in the Army...
...Carr was particularly taken with Patrick's handwritten account in the Portsmouth Police Department report...
...Excuse me, Meester, where is I would enjoy to use thank you the bathroom...
...The AERA calls itself "the most prominent international professional organization with the primary goal of advancing educational research and its practical application...
...At least, writes Carr, it was only a fender-bender by Kennedy standards...
...But Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy has had an off 20 years, going back to his cocaine-addiction rehab stint in 1986...
...and, currently, an extended post-retirement tour of the nation's television studios, during which Wilkerson has "estranged" himself from Powell but made many new friends among the outpatient crowd over at Daily Kos—by bitterly denouncing the very same Bush administration policies he previously helped implement...
...Jamie-son's version, besides being first, was better written...
...Fresh off of a career high-point earlier this month, in which Patrick was hit in the mouth with a hammer while watching a demonstration of Impact Gel shock-absorbing material at a trade show (he got six stitches and didn't even cry...
...Wilkerson and a thousand other hack pseudo-intellectuals before him— " 'America is great because she is good...
...Which is the unavoidable impression left by Wilkerson's Sun essay...
...next, day-to-day management of the State Department as Colin Powell's chief of staff...
...and the utterly incomprehensible...
...Pity they didn't give Jamieson credit...
...We'll take their word for it...
...ghetto culture...
...While the officer on the scene reported Kennedy "appeared normal," such as it is, Patrick's handwriting looks like it was scrawled on a cocktail napkin at an open bar in a Gravitron...
...Or as Carr delicately put it, "It looks like it was written by a chimpanzee, or a 2-year-old...
...Or a Kennedy...
...Among the sessions: "Written on, Written Over, but Refusing to be Written Off: Indigenous Educators Teaching in the Empire," "Ho No Mo': A Qualitative Investigation of Adolescent Female Language Reclamation and Rejection," "The Formation of the Subjectivity of Mail-Order Brides in Taiwan and Their Educational Strategies Toward Their Children," "Resisting Resistance: Using Eco-Justice and Eco-Racism to Awaken Mindfulness, Compassion, and Wisdom in Preservice Teachers," "Discovering Collage as a Method in Researching Multicultural Lives," and "Queering Schooling and (Un)Doing the Public Good: Rubbing Against the Grain for Schooling Sexualities...
...Newsweek's Susannah Meadows and Evan Thomas must have enjoyed Jamieson's piece, too...
...Small wonder someone at Newsweek chose to borrow it...
...cyber jargon...
...More Arguments for Homeschooling We missed the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco earlier this month, alas...
...These they helpfully divided into "the five major fields of educational inquiry: imperialism...
...THE SCRAPBOOK thinks Mr...
...Many grow addicted to dipping Skoal and wearing soiled white caps with college logos on them...
...Not only did a single blonde not die, no one was even paralyzed or raped...
...Not for what the mostly illegible one-sentence explanation said, but because of how it was written (see below...
...For when Meadows and Thomas tried their hand at a bit of sporting sociology, here's what they came up with in their depiction of lacrosse players: "They can often be seen driving in SUVs with LAX decals, their dirty-white college ball caps turned around, a pinch of Skoal in their mouths...
...hegemonic oppression and right-thinking multicul-turalism...
...For instance: "Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander-in-chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration...
...Or maybe one of the five reporters and researchers who contributed to their May 1 cover story on the Duke scandal did...
...has tirelessly pointed out, here in our pages and elsewhere, this purported Tocqueville quotation is entirely bogus...
Vol. 11 • May 2006 • No. 32
