Ghost posts
I do not remember what my point was here, why I thought to post an innocuous enough letter to the Oregonian from an identified seventh grader (now, presumably, eighth grader). The point of this blog has long fallen to something along the lines of: try to say something mildly interesting about something mildly interesting. Does it work? That depends on your definition. The only time I’ll get comments back when the “something interesting” topic is off-kilter (the “I’m the only one with a blog post about it” idea), or I’ll find a response from a ghost post of over a year ago.
I have no idea. The only thing I can add is that in the seventh grade, I would not have wanted to have a letter to a newspaper identified as coming from a seventh grade student. But beyond that, I think there was this cluster of misgivings — a couple of “viral” youtube videos of kids — oh, about fourth or fifth grade — yelling mildly profane and vulgar rants about Bill O’reilly. But a quick look and it appears to be a conversation had between a Christian and an Atheist through their children, with Bill O’Riley doing a segment about the obnoxious Atheist — not showing the any footage on him or of the Darling Christian. Not terribly cute or illuminating. The other item of terrible silliness was the spectre of that 13 year old kid at CPAC, and the question: “Okay?”
Ta-Nehisha Coates had roughly the right answer on that “wunder-kind”.
Recalling the vast expanse of, oh — let’s say roughly seventh grade through high school, and moving past these pockets of pro-marijuana legalization sentiment (can you call that political, really?), I can’t figure anyone much political, certainly not in any true partisan sense. The two students I could identify as strongly Democratic and Republican happened to come from parents who were strongly Democratic and Republican — it was funny how that worked.  Myself, it’s almost not worth pegging those things — I think I’ve lost some strideny and absolutism in terms of civil liberties and separation of church and sate. I recall an eighth grade assignment from the English teacher to draw a political cartoon. I was not an idiot like a few other students, though I guess I was less of one than my Algebra teacher. My Algebra teacher said what a great piece of work some student or other’s was — that being a very well rendered copy of an editorial cartoon which appeared in a recent newspaper, and which was spot-lighted at the end of his presentation to the class of various student cartoons with the statement “And here’s three or four examples of plargirism.” I had the good sense to know the English teacher read the newspaper, and drew for the assignment something which was something of a mash-up of two political cartoons from more obscure sources.
Around my sixth grade so I must have said something negative about the very early goings of the Clinton Administration in one of our trips to our eldest brother. Because the next time we saw him, he imparted a joke from a Jay Leno monolouge about Clinton, and intoned sarcastically, “But Justin — I hear he doesn’t like Clinton.” Odd, though punctured more accurately from my middle brother “He’s not so much anti-Clinton as he is anti-Leno.”