Friday, January 20, 2017

Last blog post before the end of civilization as we know it

To paraphrase (or actually misquote) Alfred from Batman (1989), I have little desire to spend my few remaining years grieving for the loss of my country. I am considering simply burying myself in my teaching and my (?) work (?) on Kerr, though I realize that neither of those is disconnected from the world. Particularly the first--we just read "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" in my first-year writing class, and it occurred to me that we're almost coming full circle on some of the issues Gloria Anzaldua is raising in that text. For instance, the Anglo teacher telling a 7th-generation Mexican American to "go back to Mexico where you belong" for not speaking "American" sounds like the kinds of things you'll find (and worse) on Facebook comments nowadays. The more things change, ...

As for Kerr, well, I'm wondering what he'd think of Trump. I think I saw something somewhere that suggested that Kerr had supported Nixon. Oh, here it is: Kerr evidently contributed to Nixon's 1962 run for governor of California--see page 30. But I don't know what he thought of Nixon or the Republicans, generally, later on. I think that while he'd approve the Tsai-Trump phone call, he'd be suspicious of Trump's intentions. But this is all speculation. Anyway, perhaps instead of speculating on Kerr's possible view of Trump, I should focus more on what I can know about Kerr.

I'm trying to think of an ending for this post, but I'm not having any success. For sure, for the sake of my sanity, I'm going to be avoiding the TV news [update, 1/21: and Facebook?] for the next four years. One of the joys of living in Taiwan during the Bush years was not having to hear his voice whenever I turned on the TV news. (I remember coming to the US one summer in the 90s and being surprised to hear what some of the people involved in the Bill Clinton sex scandal sounded like. I had forgotten that they would have voices, I think.)

On that note...

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