I love the premise of NPR's new Guilty Pleasures series in part because I supoprt anything that may help to break down genre-guilt, but I found the recent piece by Brad Meltzer to be very problematic. Unnecessary gender-gauntlet-throwing aside, Metlzer proclaims his love for the Twilight series without actually saying why he does like the books. Fine: however, by doing so, he completely glosses over every reason to legitimatley dislike the books, which have absolutely nothing to do with their being young adult, or gothic fantasy, or any other reasons that often cause the Literati to defend their reading choices ("but it really transcends genre!"). 

Metlzer calls on women to give the Twilight books to their teenaged sons, nephews and husbands, to tell them the books are cool, that they'll like them. ( The thing is, I wouldn't even want my daughters (or nieces, or sisters) to read them, let alone the men... )

Sorry, Mr. Meltzer, but I won't be foisting Stephanie Meyer's anti-feminist, raceist pop-fluff on the guys in my life. Instead, I gave Ethan Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, which features an empowered-but-refreshingly-unspunky heroine, realistic relationship dynamics, and multidimensional characters. I'm sure he'll still grow up to be a Real Man.

W is for WaMu and Wachovia: 

So, of course I'm concerned about the Washington Mutual forced buyout (I am now a customer of JP Morgan Chase), because I just started checking and savings accounts there a couple of weeks ago (I need a debit card, so I decided to try out internet banking and my research pointed to them as the best on the web). Aside from the trickle-down effects of the financial crisis, here's why you should care: given that a prior bank failure had wiped out about one quarter of the FDIC reserves (these guys insure your bank holdings up to $100,000), if WaMu had been allowed to fail, it would probably have wiped out the other 3/4 of the FDIC. That means that anyone with money in an American bank (though not a credit union, as they're insured by a different agency) would have found themselves no longer backed up by the FDIC. Which means there would have been nothing between you and the Great Depression, if there was a run on the banks. Scary, huh? And now that Citigroup just bought Wachovia, most of our banks are now owned by just three companies: JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America. Anti-trust what? 

T is for Taxes and Texas: 

Also, I have absolutely had it with this Democrats-and-Republicans-lesser-of-two-evils crap, which is often (but not always) spouted by Libertarians. Someone who says that is obviously in a position of privilege: It's a privilege to not have to worry about your ability to have a safe and legal abortion, or to have to worry about paying for school, or whether you ahve access to affordable healthcare, or whether your little brother who signed up for the National Guard to pay for college will get sent to Iraq. Just because neither McCain nor Obama is going to let you grow pot on your gun farm own guns on your pot farm and take away your taxes does not make them both "evil," or "the same." That is lazy, privileged thinking, and those people need to grow up and realize that they share the nation with a whole lot of other people who have to worry about feeding themselves, drinking clean water, driving on paved roads, getting a quality education, and having access to a good, safe job.

F is for Funding: 

There have been some wonderful commentaries on and responses to the debates, which I won't go into. The scientific list-serv and blogosphere communities have been discussing one particular statement of John McCain's, and I really think it bears (no pun intended) sharing here: McCain brought up the Montana bear study during the debates as an example of out-of-control funding for the sciences. Later, he suggested a moratorium on funding for everything except VA and the military as a solution to the failing economy. Among the hundreds of thousands of things on the list of Everything (like highway maintenance, public schools, and the National Weather Service)  is science - the National Science Foundation funds studies like the bear research mentioned above.

The bear study is unprecdented in both its scope and the size of the dollars awareded, but some incredible data has come out of that research.  But let's look at the numbers: If you divide the cost of the $10 million bear study by the number of taxpaying Americans, the study costs the individual American less than a penny per person (9/10 of a cent, actually, or $0.009). The $700 billion bailout, on the other hand, will cost the average taxpayer $2300 per person. Cutting science spending will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, as scientists, graduate students, and universities rely on those funds to operate. And we won't get multi-million dollar severance packages like CEO's of failed banks are getting.

Dear Spoilers of the World,

Those of you who feel the need to "spoil" your own Harry Potter VII experience can stay the hell away from me. You're like kids at Christmas time, poking through closets because you can't stand the uncertainty of what could be under the tree. You know what? Most of us did that - once. We decided pretty quickly that we hated the feeling of ruining our genuine experience of the evntual Big Day, and that it sucked all the verve and magic out of something that would otherwise have been special if left untainted.

Those of you who continue to do so even into adulthood simply need to grow up. Your stunted maturity should not come in the way of my enjoying the living, breathing experience of this event as it unfolds for me, personally, in all its child-like wonder. You should certainly not spoil it for the millions of children for whom this experience has been ten years in the making. We live in a world that is all-too-often fractured, joyless, and without hope, and if you insist on taking a source of happiness and authentic experience away from them (and me), then shame on you.

For those of you who wonder what could possibly be taken away from the experience of reading the books just because some small detail (such as the death of a character) has been leaked to the public: I don't know what to say in the face of such blatant disrespect. You can choose not to read the books, or you can choose to watch the films alone, but do not presume to understand my reading experience. Just by making such statements, you reveal yourself to be ignorant of something I cannot even begin to explain to you. Suffice to say that yes, these spoilers do indeed have an impact on my reading experience, just as much as knowing the outcome of the World Series would change how someone watching a game in June would feel about the plays. How dare you presume otherwise?

I am happy to leave you alone to whatever joy you find in your cynical, self-centered lives. So please do me and the millions of Harry Potter fans the courtesy of leaving us to ours. Go be a bloody Muggle on your own time.

Love,

Jacquelyn

Dear Mr. Tucker of MSNBC,

I've never seen you before today, but as I was walking by a television in a cafeteria of my school's Student Union I could have sworn I was listening to Fox News. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I am proud of my university's decision to allow Professor Kevin Barrett to teach his course on Islam. Your comments were insulting to my University and the community, especially one that strives to foster intellectual freedom and the sharing of ideas at a time when such actions are increasingly restricted by the present administration.

First of all, I don't appreciate the condescending tone with which you dismissed the 40,000 individuals who attend this school as "children" who don't need to hear the "paranoid delusions" that Prof. Barrett has to say. We are adults, and we would appreciate being given enough credit to decide for ourselves what we believe when presented with new and challenging ideas. We should be forming our own opinions at this stage in our lifes, not reiterating those of our parents or ego-inflated talking heads.

Secondly, the class he is teaching is not a platform merely for his personal ideas; as the university Dean stipulated, he is allowed one week's worth of class to address the concepts (of which he is not the sole representative), and only if students were allowed to challenge him. The essay he wrote that is so controversial may or may not appear in a book that will be assigned for his class- and no, students are not "required to buy" any textbook; they can get them from reserve shelves, or share with a friend, or even sell them back at the end of the semester if they so choose. You might not have gone to college yourself, because if you had you'd remember that professors write textbooks quite frequently and routinely assign them in class. I can assure you that the books published by small a small radical or university press rarely generate much revenue for the author.

Thirdly, you overstated your case regarding Barrett's comparison between Bush and Hitler, and in so doing perpetuated an untruth: Namely, Professor Barrett did not call President Bush "Hitler," as you and others have misquoted. The actual sentence in the essay reads as follows:

“Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies."

Let me draw your attention to the use of the word "like." You may recall from grammar school that "like" is used to make a comparison between two things, but is not necassarily a signifier. I can say that the moon is "like" a wheel of Swiss cheese without implying any kind of dairy-related origin to lunar material. As Barrett himself explained,
“That's not comparing them as people, that's comparing the Reichstag fire to the demolition of the World Trade Center, and that's an accurate comparison that I would stand by." Thus your "Where are the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust?" is irrelevant.

I would like to remind you, Mr. Tucker, that this is a pubic university, funded by the taxpayers of the State of Wisconsin. People like you would like to use that as a reason to control the flow of ideas and information, because you don't believe your money should go to supporting the sharing of ideas that you dislike or disagree with. I would like to argue that this instead creates an even greater mandate to protect the rights of the minority in our schools as equally as in the government that funds them, and that all taxpayers have the right to support a range of ideas that represent their beliefs, or at the very least they should be allowed to support democracy with the money that democracy collects and distributes.

In closing, I would like to draw your attention to the words of Edward R. Murrow, who wrote them in response to another Wisconsinite:

"I believed years ago and I believe toda that mature Americans can engage in conversation and controversy over the clash of ideas, with Communists anywhere in the world without becoming contaminated or converted. I believe that our faith, our conviction and our determination are stronger than theirs and that we can successfully compete, not only in the area of bombs but in the area of ideas."

If Mr. Murrow is right, than we have nothing to fear as long as we allow as wide a range of ideas to be expressed as possible. If Murrow's ideas no longer hold true for modern-day Americans, however, and we can no longer be trusted to handle "dangerous" ideas and decide what to do with them, then Professor Barrett's essay is the least of our problems.

Respectfully,

Jacquelyn Gill

Thanks to angrybunnyman for pointing this out: As the Republicans struggle to mediate damage control in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, which could potentially cost them the vote in some key states, Fox News has come up with an ingenious plan: