I thought I’d share with you a note I received from my secretary, who just got back from her vacation.
Thanks so much for the postcard. I’m glad you’re enjoying your vacation in the Catskills and I love that picture of the trout wearing a hat. I had a really nice time visiting with my family in California. Unlike what you’ve told me about your family, my family all thinks the same when it comes to politics, so there weren’t any of those family fights you mentioned your family often has.
Since I’ve been gone so long, I came in over the weekend and tried to catch up. The new list of 247 verbs you can use for Outcomes Assessment (you know, the ones that follow “The student will be able to…”) is lying right on top of your desk so you can plug them in when you return. And I’ve scheduled an appointment for you with the Associate Assistant to the Deputy Provost for Statistical Analysis of All Grades Below B-minus. You’ll also notice that the Tenured Faculty Club is sponsoring an AAUP benefit showing of the entire first season of Deadwood during an extended lunch hour in October.
I’ve caught up with your posts on Brainstorm, too. Wow! Did you hit a nerve with those posts on the McCain ad and Snapped! All those comments! You haven’t had so many since you offended all those can’t-get-over-it Harvard alumni who still wear their college T-shirts to the gym.
As to the McCain ad with Obama, Paris, and Britney, I thought you’d like to know that even I know that everything in advertising is super-calculated. I ought to know — when I was sixteen, I spent a summer working as a babysitter for an ad exec and his family and he told me flat out that shampoo bottles and deodorant containers look the way they do because, well, they look so much like you-know-whats.
I mean, the McCain ad guys could have put Obama in with any dimwitted celebs, but they particularly chose two specific dimwitted blonde females. Had to have been on purpose and for a reason more than the dimwitted part. I suppose Obama’s lucky those political-ad fellows didn’t choose Miley Cyrus. I guess they wouldn’t go that far — I mean, she’s underaged, and that would have been a scandal.
But the hullabaloo about Snapped is really unexplainable. I mean, first of all, people act as if it shouldn’t be on Brainstorm, forgetting that things that go on in our society, like TV shows, reflect what kind of society we really are and that professors should know about them. I think it’s good that you continue to write about stuff like that.
Plus, you were really clear in saying it was a feminist program “in a perverse and trashy sort of way,” not that it was an instruction manual on how women should get equal rights. Why are all these professors — or at least people who hang around an academic blogsite — so literal? And why are they all wound up so tight and just itching to be offended? After all, Snapped is on the Oxygen network, and the Oxygen network is aimed at a female audience, right?
I hardly ever watch the show, but I’m sure most of the women watching Snapped are the same as me when I watch it: They get a little sneaky, tiny, forbidden pleasure at seeing the guy done in for a change. I mean, when’s the last time anybody’s seen a movie with some weirdo with a meat cleaver chasing a man in skimpy underwear around a dark house?
It all made me a little uneasy, though. I asked my husband, who likes to cuddle up with me whenever we do watch Snapped, if maybe he wasn’t having sneaky thoughts about payback for payback. “You’d never do anything to me, would you?” I asked.
“No, sweetheart,” he said. “One word explains it.”
“Love?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Luminol.”
