Not Teaching Cursive Writing a Disservice to Students

I ran across a recent item that cut me to the nib (pun intended). It seems that many schools no longer teach cursive writing. Many states have dropped it from their language arts core, the logic being that our keyboard society has made cursive writing a relic of the past. Many public school students now have no writing skills beyond printing, and some schools don’t even teach lower versus upper case printing–just block letters. (Catholic schools still demand cursive and good for them.)

A lot of my college students think it’s fine to rely on printing. They also think it’s fine to steal music. They’re wrong on both accounts. If you are an elementary school teacher, instruct your classes in cursive; if you’re a parent, don’t ask, demand that it be taught. Some of the things you read online–how ironic!–offer elegiac defenses of cursive writing. (Quite a few also spout the shortsighted party line that cursive is as archaic as vacuum tubes and print publications.) I suppose one could wax rhapsodic about creativity flowing down the barrel of a pen, links to our Western heritage, and developing motor skills, but there’s no need to go down those routes. A far more pragmatic argument is that cursive writing is, simply, a skill one needs to keep up in today’s fast-paced society.

My students swear to me that they can type far faster than they can “write,” by which they mean block-letter printing and that’s probably correct. They also use their electronic devices so frequently that they’ve come to expect there’s never a situation in which they won’t have one. That is, until the first time someone gives them a blue-book exam and tells them “No, you can’t type this on your laptop.” Many of my students cannot fill an eight-page bluebook in an hour, which means that their essays are superficial and they are graded accordingly. “Unfair!” they cry. I am roughly as sympathetic to that plea as math professors that tell their students they must do their own arithmetic rather than using a calculator. Are we being callous? I don’t think so.

In Logic 101 one learns that a syllogism with a flawed major premise yields illogic. In this case, the case against cursive rest on the assumption (major premise) that there are no longer situations in which one needs cursive. That’s simply false. The average accomplished typist does 60-80 words per minute (WPM). I can write faster than that even though I have a hand disability that slows me. Moreover, to hit 60 WPM, you need to know how to touch type, which is another skill that most students never acquire. I have observed students in lectures who simply can’t keep up on their keyboards. Some ask me to put my lecture notes on the Web, which I will not do. I happen to think that: (a) these things are my intellectual property, and (b) that a person with poor listening skills is ill equipped for the job market.   

One reason student are slow is physical. Just as a violin player can play faster than a cello player because they don’t have as much instrument to cover, so too can most people scribble on a piece of paper faster than they can go across a 12-18 inch keyboard (on which many students have to search for letters.)  Another reason is that we relate to screens differently. Put simply, a mind focused on a screen is less actively engaged with a detached speaker. (And this is before other temptations from the World of Wireless pops in one’s head. Try reading just one e-mail and see if you can refocus on a lecture.) Today’s students are very fast at retrieving information, but they are extremely slow when it comes to analyzing it, in part because huge chunks elude them, especially the connective tissue that relates bit of information to another. And heaven help them if their laptops run out of battery life in the middle of a class. You know what most of them do? Nothing! They simply sit there, stunned. The best students will tune in and hope to retain enough to transfer it to their computer once it’s recharged. Try that and tell me how well it works.

There are many circumstances in life where one has to jot down information in a hurry without the aid of an electronic helper–an employer calls someone into the office and gives details of an important assignment, a critic needs to take notes in a no-gadgets environment, verbal directions are given to someone who is lost, one is taking an exam that disallows computers as a potential cheating source (and this includes licensing exams for many professions as well as graduate school entrance exams), a therapist or doctor needs to focus on patients instead of a screen, a person wishes to send a note that is more personalized (sympathy cards, for example). Perhaps most important of all, if you really need to remember something, test subjects that write things cursively retain far more than those that print or type. (Typing surpasses only relying upon aural memory in psychological tests.) And, let’s face it; if you were an employer, would you hire someone who couldn’t write his or her own name?

One doesn’t have to be a Luddite or technophobe to defend cursive writing. Today’s world depends upon flexibility, suppleness, and adaptability. I won’t pretend that learning cursive writing is “fun.” I hated penmanship in grade school and my hand is indeed a poor one. I chuckle at those who defend cursive as an art form; no one will ever confuse my scrawl with art! But can we please can the if-it’s-not-fun-we-can’t-teach-it fluff of modern education? I didn’t like learning multiplication tables, conjugating verbs, or learning about syllables either, but I’m sure glad I swallowed the medicine. Do not let your kids get by without learning cursive; they will hate you now, but they’ll thank you later. 

Every Day an Intriguing Novel that Probes Identity Questions

 EVERY DAY  (20120

By David Levithan

Knopf, ISBN 978-0307931887

* * * *

Remember the movie Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray’s character got stuck in a repeating loop in which each day was a fresh February 2 no matter how the previous day ended? Author David Levithan takes this to another level. What if you had no body of your own and every day of your life you inhabited someone else’s body and memories for exactly one day?

Every Day is classified as a young adult novel, but it’s a bit like The Hobbit or The Hunger Games series in that it’s well written and can be enjoyed by readers of all ages. Its protagonist is certainly among the most elusive of recent literature in that he/she/it is, by most measures, a rather typical 16-year-old who simply doesn’t exist corporeally and has no memory of ever having done so. For sake of organizing its own conscience independently of its hosts, it calls itself A, but it doesn’t spend a lot of time working a detailed identity. A has no control over where it will awake or inhabit. A has been male and female, straight, and gay. A has awoken inside athletes’ bodies, a Beyoncé look-alike shell, those of corpulent slobs, and those of drug addicts. A has been rich and poor, of different races, and a non-English speaker.

If you were A and had never known any other existence, would it seem odd to you? Would you try to break the cycle? Probably not, unless something snapped you to another level of awareness. In A’s case, it’s an encounter with Rhiannon. In the most typical of all sixteen-year-old experiences, A has fallen in love. Rhiannon is in a bad high school romance with a jerk named Justin, whose body A used and reformed for a day. Can A express love for Rhiannon? Once A thinks about it, who would believe such a story, let alone put up with the logistical problems associated with being with someone whose physical presence changes every day? Moreover, A has learned to erase (most) of the 24-hour memories of his hosts and adheres to a strict non-interference policy. In other words, A has always been a good houseguest. But there’s something about Rhiannon that calls A back to her. Can he violate his own code? Would doing so trip unleash chaos theory’s butterfly effect?

The novel is mostly about A’s relationship with Rhiannon, though it’s also a veritable sampler of the variety of sixteen-year-old minds. What is A? An alien? A demon? A trill á la Star Trek? A higher level of consciousness? A 24-hour virus? A parasite? Or just a normal 16-year-old who simply happens to have no body? Are there others like A? You read and you decide.

I steamed through this book is just two sittings. Is it a YA book or something else? The only label I’d slap on it is “intriguing.” --Rob Weir

Walter Strauss Guitar Virtuosity

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Walter Strauss

Planet Solitaire

Self-Produced

* * * 

Walter Strauss is dedicated to stretching the guitar’s boundaries, most recently through explorations of African music. On half of Planet Solitaire’s tracks his guitar emulates the kora. “Djimbashe” is a real tour de force, with cascading showers of notes, twisted and bent strings, and accented rhythms flying out of his hands. Africa meets Europe on “Gypsydish,” with the Spanish guitar melodies linked by fleet ngoni-like runs. Later he captures the feel of the tambura on a remake of George Harrison’s “Within In You Without You.” He even serves some country blues in a jazz-laced reworking of Woody Guthrie’s “The Great Historical Bum.” Both guitar and vocals are dreamy in ways that command close listening and occasionally feel unapproachable in their virtuosity and moodiness. But the talent speaks for itself.--Rob Weir

Strauss and local artist Jonathan Stevens will appear at the Signature Sounds Parlor Room on February 21.

Do Not Try This at Home

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Memories of the Winter of 1981

Alas, not the kind of VW I drove back in 1981! 

As those of us on the East Coast dig out from under the snows deposited by Storm Nemo, I am reminded of the winter of 1981, when I did something very stupid. If it’s not the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, it’s in the top two.

I was a high school social studies teacher in northern Vermont back then, a job I really loved (except for dealing with parents). But one day made me consider a career as a banana grower in Belize. To say that big snowstorms don’t faze Vermonters is akin to saying that police officers kind of expect that some people will break the law. If you live in that part of the world and you let snow get you down, you live in a state of constant anxiety from roughly mid-October to mid-May. I lived ten miles from the Canadian border and if less than six inches of snow were expected, local radio announcers forecast “flurries.” Teachers knew it took at least ten inches on the ground with more falling before schools would be cancelled.

It was a Friday toward the end of a February. It had already been a “tough” winter–Vermont understatement for the kind of cold and snow that would drive lesser mortals to the loony bin. Moreover, as any teacher will tell you, Fridays are not the optimal teaching days. Lots of us did review sessions, audio-visual presentations, and free-form discussions on Fridays–anything to distract our charges from the reality that the weekend began at 2:45 pm, not 8 in the morning. There was no reason to expect that this Friday would be anything unusual–a few flakes were falling, but so what? Except that by the time the buses starting arriving at around 7:30 the flakes were getting bigger and they were coming down exceedingly fast. And they kept coming.

By 10 am more than six inches of new snow had fallen and teachers and students alike were checking out weather updates. “Yup,” one of my colleagues proclaimed, “The radio says it’s gonna be a big one. Maybe more than three feet.” A foot of that had already fallen by lunchtime. Surely schools would be closed and they’d send us all home. Except “they” didn’t! Some faculty members quickly decided it would be a good idea to sit with the kids at lunch, something we often did anyhow because–no matter what the Tea Party tells you–most teachers really like their kids. But this time it was all about crowd control. Put bluntly, the kids were bouncing off the walls and we teachers were thinking, “Uh, oh–prime food fight conditions.” I recall grabbing the arm of one of my students who was about to launch some spaghetti and saying to him, “Hey man! What are you doing? Your mom works in the cafeteria and she’ll have to clean up this mess.” A quick, “Sorry Mr. W–wasn’t thinking,” and we were cool, but it was the longest single afternoon of teaching of my career. Forget the zombie apocalypse; my students had been transformed into little anarchists, each just waiting for me to turn my back before lighting the fuse and tossing a bomb. I did everything I could to distract them–jokes, videos, impromptu discussions about how local decision-making worked…. I recall that I actually showed one class a filmstrip (remember those?) hiding in the back of my desk; it was titled “Your Friends in the Tungsten Industry.” I invited students to come up with their own snarky commentary (and pretended not to hear anything NC-17).   

The only concession made to the weather was that the administration allowed teachers to leave the same time as students instead of staying an hour later to close up shop. By then it was hard to tell how much snow had fallen, as the winds had picked up–just perfect for my three-mile commute along the open banks of the Lamoille River and up the steady hill to my road. I had a VW Rabbit back in those days, more of a snow sled than a snowplow. It weighed less than a ton even when loaded with four adults. It took nearly an hour to navigate to the foot of the hill, which I inched up knowing that if, at any point, I began to spin, I’d have to back down and start again. I made it, but the day had taken its toll and I was fried. Then came the last horror! I turned on to my dirt road and beheld a driveway buried under approximately two feet of virgin white blanket.

It seemed so rational at the time. “I’ve had it!” I thought. “There is no frigging way I’m shoveling this sucker until morning.” The Greeks had a word for such defiance of the gods: hubris. Did I heed it? That would be no! I carefully backed up my car to the end of the road, dropped the transmission into drive and gunned the engine. I made an abrupt sliding turn into the driveway, sheering a spray of snow in several directions. The next thing I knew, I was staring at the sky as if I were Neil Armstrong inside an Apollo space capsule. My maneuver served only to lift the front end up the VW straight into the air with about 4 feet of snow resting under the car. I opened the car door and tumbled down my stupidity-built cascade.

The next step was to call a colleague who knew about cars and ask him if it was okay to leave the VW aimed at the moon. After he stopped laughing, he told me that would be a very bad idea as I had probably compacted snow around the engine block. That needed to be removed he told me, or the hoses would probably freeze and break, as might the radiator or perhaps even the engine block itself. By the way, he advised, I had to be careful to shovel the car level so that it came down evenly and not with a jolt. It was vital that I level the car and take a broom handle and gently tap away as much snow as I could from vital working parts. Need I tell you that the moon was high in the sky by the time I finished? I would add that it was also the moment in which I also decided that I didn’t want to be an astronaut. But Belize sounded like a good idea.--Rob Weir   

Searching for Sugar Man a Gem (I Hope!)

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN (2012)

Directed by Malik Bendjelloul

Sony Picture Classics, 86 minutes, PG-13

* * * * *

This documentary may be the best film of 2012, even though it may also be a bit of a put-on. At the very least, it’s one of the better films dealing with social class in recent memory.

The film opens in South Africa, where white Afrikaners that opposed the oppressive white-led regime speak of the various things that gave them courage in the bleak days before apartheid withered away in 1994. Young people were especially inspired by two albums that made their way from the United States: Cold Fact (1970) and Coming from Reality (1971). Both were on the blacklist, yet everyone knew the records. They were so influential that white South Africans assumed that the man who wrote and performed the songs, Sixto Rodriguez, was a superstar in America. Except, he wasn’t. In fact, the very record that went gold in South Africa when they were reissued in 1991 sold in the tens in the United States and Rodriguez was so obscure that he dropped from sight. In South Africa, though, various legends sprouted. Nearly all ended in Rodriguez’s death—either in prison where he was sent for murdering his wife; or from suicide on stage (either by shooting himself or by setting himself afire.) Musicians idolized Rodriguez, fans spread fanciful stories, and producers nicknamed themselves “Sugar Man,” the title of a favored track about drug dealers on the mean streets of America. After apartheid collapsed, Rodriguez’s albums were officially released in South Africa, his fame was rekindled, and everyone knew about him. Except, they didn’t! No one knew anything about the man at all–just the songs. He was an album photo–a man who appeared to be Latino, though he wrote and sang like Bob Dylan. The mystique about Rodriguez led devotees to take up the task of telling the “true” story of their hero. But they faced a huge problem: nobody seemed to know anything about him after 1971.  It was as if the man disappeared from the planet. Put simply, the legends were thicker than Rodriguez’s known biography.

So what does any music fanatic do in such a situation? He combs lyrics for clues and begins to follow the melodic crumbs. The first surprise was that the Mexican-American Rodriguez didn’t hail from the Southwest or California; he was from Detroit. The second revelation was even bigger–he wasn’t/isn’t dead. One of Rodriguez’s daughters spied a website created in South Africa and, in 1998, Rodriguez learned of his acclaim (and robust sales) in South Africa. Where had he been? In Detroit, appropriately enough, as that’s where a lot of American dreams go to die. He was an everyday blue-collar working stiff who did demolition work, lived/lives in a squalid inner-city house, and made do with the hand life dealt–not so romantic, but oh-so-real. Maybe!

Director Malik Bendjelloul can’t quite bring himself to abandon the legend. He shows us Rodriguez’s triumphant tours of South Africa and intersperses the film’s second half with interviews with the man, coworkers, and his daughters, but aspects of Rodriguez and his life remain mysterious. There is, for instance, no mention of a mother to his children. (Rumors hold that he has been married twice.) Equally enigmatic is what happened to all the royalty money earned in South Africa that was dutifully sent to his long-defunct record company. And perhaps most puzzling of all is Rodriguez’s calm acceptance of everything that happened. In fact, the man who penned songs loaded with symbolism vacillates between nonchalance and inarticulation on camera. He is either one of the world’s great Stoics, or he’s in cahoots with Bendjelloul to keep alive the Rodriguez legend.  Still another possibility–he is as he appears to be: a guy who had a brief shot at fame, moved on when it didn’t work out, and became another unknown victim of the hidden injuries of class.  In the end, the film’s disturbing images of Detroit squalor leaves more impact than his songs. (They are quite good, but they were also overproduced in the way that ruined a lot of records released in the early 70s--maudlin strings, contrived drama, studio whistles and bells….) Detroit is Michael Moore’s Flint writ larger and stripped of humor and hope.

I can’t tell you how much of this documentary is real–other than Detroit is every bit as awful as it’s made out to be–but whether the Rodriguez back-story as told here is completely true, half true, or inventive, it’s a helluva tale. In fact, it’s such a good yarn that I want it to be true. America is long overdue for a genuine working-class hero. --Rob Weir

Maryanne O'Hara's Cascade a Lively (though flawed) Novel

CASCADE (2012)

Maryanne O’Hara

Viking/Penguin, ISBN 978-0670026029

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An early 20^th century song posed the question, “How ya’ gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen gay Paree?” And how can you keep them there if the farm might be doomed to lie 150 feet under water? These questions are at the center of Maryanne O’Hara’s debut novel Cascade.

Enfield, MA--the novel's inspiration--before it was flooded.

Cascade, Massachusetts is modeled loosely on Enfield, the largest of five towns and villages dismantled and plowed under in 1937 to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir, which supplies water for Boston, sixty-five miles distant. (The other four are Dana, Greenwich, Prescott, and Millington, and the stream called “Cascade” is actually the Swift River.) These hamlets were dots on the map that collectively held around 3,000 people–inconsequential places to thirsty Bostonians, but home to generations of rural Bay Staters and the final resting place for 7,500 expired residents. O’Hara opens her book in 1935, when it was fait accompli that some part of the region would be flooded, but it was an open question as to which towns would disappear.

O’Hara’s fictional Cascade is the largest town on the river and one with an unusual history. The protagonist of the tale is Desdemona Hart, whose unusual first name evokes Shakespeare’s “Othello.” “Dez,” as he is called locally, is the surviving offspring of a colorful father, a well-known Shakespearean actor who built and operates an ornate summer playhouse that has for decades brought major talent and minor renown to Enfield. But, remember, it’s 1935–the depth of the Depression. Hart has done everything he can to keep the place running, including selling treasured memorabilia, and rare manuscripts. Even before he dies and leaves Dez buried under debt, the only way end can be met is for her to marry the family’s benefactor, local pharmacist Asa Spaulding. Her father mysteriously willed the playhouse to Asa. He does, however, leave Dez a small casket, a key, and instructions not to open the box until the playhouse reopens.

Enfield Town Hall--perhaps a model for the playhouse.

It’s a toss up which is more imperiled, the playhouse or Dez’s marriage. She is a serious painter who has studied in Paris, worked in Boston, and dreams of living in New York, and Asa can think of nothing more grand than living out his days in Enfield. Asa desires children right away; Dez is pretty sure she never wants them. He is conventional and she has her father’s bohemian heart. Try as she will, Dez sees Asa as a decent man, but as boring as drying paint. It doesn’t help matters when a former art school friend visits Cascade and pronounces it awful, even though she is a struggling New York City artist who hopes to secure a meal ticket with the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. Nor does it help when Dez meets the only other person who shares her aesthetics–a traveling Jewish salesman named Jacob Solomon. In rural Massachusetts during the 1930s, Jews were no more popular than in Germany as the fascists rose to power. There’s also a mysterious death of a water board official that threatens to implicate Dez and Jacob. Scandal, innuendo, accusations, and longing lurk around Dez, even as she launches a postcard and journalism enterprise that finds a New York publisher and brings national attention to Cascade’s peril. 

The novel proceeds to play out these threads. It raises issues of gender expectations in the 1930s, forbidden relationships, and the pull between desire and duty. Will Dez settle down, or take the next train to New York? Is she sincere about trying to save Cascade, or is she deftly undermining it? Is it even okay for a woman to be unconventional? Who can be trusted? What will happen to the playhouse, and what’s in the locked box?

This is one of those books that one reads quickly, even though it’s not fine literature. O’Hara often sacrifices believability in favor of lucky coincidences, and the tone–particularly passages of intimacy–is evocative of that of pulp romances. Some of the characters exude a plucky independent streak that seems more 21^st century than 1935. O’Hara doesn’t have a great ear for dialogue, nor is she a great stylist. What she does do with great aplomb is develop vivid background and set up thorny conundrums, so lets give O’Hara credit for storyboarding a very lively tale.

In case you’re wondering, Enfield was never an arts Mecca; O’Hara imagined that. But, as the Bard observed, all’s well that ends well. --Rob Weir

Time for an MYOB Amendment to US Constitution

Ask pundits what’s newsworthy and you'll get drivel like the Fiscal Cliff, Egypt, and Eric Cantor’s missing IQ. Ask Congress what America needs and its well-heeled minions will say reduced taxes for billionaires, school prayer, unfettered access to assault rifles and thermonuclear devices, and laws ensuring that no adult woman is ever again able to determine her own reproductive fate. Talk to real people and they might voice pie-in-the-desires for things such as better schools, roads with potholes smaller than Rhode Island, Social Security when they retire, modest gun control, and laws that won’t allow corporate fat cats to move their jobs to Banglawagecut. They’ll also tell you they want Congress to stop meddling in other people’s business.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the 113^th Congress to improve schools, save Social Security, take down the NRA, or rebuild American infrastructure, and I know it’s not going to force robber barons to create jobs for Americans. So how about throwing “The People” a bone and enacting a new Constitutional amendment? We haven’t had one since 1992, and it —forbidding Congress to raise its pay when not in session—was a real yawner.  There’s been no thrilling attempt to change the Constitution since the Equal Rights Amendment was trashed in 1983.

Well … any white Republican male can tell you it would have been a fricking disaster to treat women as full adults. Still, given the fact that roughly 11 women voted GOP in the 2012 election, even the GOP might be ready to help women a little bit. How about a privacy amendment? Such an amendment would cross political barriers in unprecedented ways. Liberal lifestyles would get a boost and the self-proclaimed moralists holding the House of Representatives hostage might see it as a “mind your own mistress” bill. Libertarians would jump all over it, as would the Wired Generation.

I propose the following text for the 28^th Amendment, which is loosely modeled on the 15th Amendment, which affirmed the voting rights of African-American males:

Section 1: The right of all citizens of the United States to be left alone shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, creed, gender, national origin, or brazenness of act or opinion.

Section 2: Congress shall guarantee equal opportunity for all citizens to be left alone and shall have the power to enforce this article.

I fact, it’s a lot like the 15^th Amendment in that it would be a recognition on the part of Congress that the only way to deal with emotional issues is to legislate them out of existence–just like Congressional forbearers decided during Reconstruction.

            

The 28^th Amendment would give every American the right to do what advice columnists have been telling us to do for decades: tell busybodies to MYOB.  (Mind Your Own Business). Deep down, wouldn't you like to tell Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann, John Cornyn, John Thune, the I.R.S., and every telemarketer who ever called you at dinner time to MYOB? When members of the Bible Thumper Church of the Bloodstained Redeemer ring your doorbell, wouldn't you love to order them off your property with constitutional authority? 

A properly applied 28th Amendment could eviscerate conflict over Internet porn, abortion rights, gay marriage, and dirty art. The bill implies a total separation of public and private realms and gives citizens complete free will in the latter sphere. If Lady Gaga wants to touch herself suggestively with a chainsaw, or have sex with a herd of elk while spewing obscenities, that's her business.  And if we want to log on to watch, that’s ours. We can be—as 2 Live Crew once put—as nasty as we want to be. As for smut in public arenas, no problem. The public/private split would allow promoters to hire a hall and convert it to a private facility for the duration of the contract, much like some towns rent school auditoriums and stadiums for religious revivals, or close town halls for weddings, DAR fundraisers, and Elks functions not involving Lady Gaga. You could do whatever you want at local clubs and owners would be free from prosecution so long as they don't kidnap teens from the street and force them to dance to filthy rap music at gunpoint.            

Can you imagine? We could even heal America’s divisive abortion debate. It would upset those members of the GOP that want to insert probes into women’s uteruses, but they’d just have to get used to  that and any other objectionable” acts women might perform. But first a little PR campaign to get everyone on board. Recruit Monica Lewinsky to go on the lecture circuit and tout the fact that Section 1 of the 28^th Amendment guarantees every American’s right to perform oral sex on any public official of his or her choosing. That would have saved Larry Craig’s career, possibly enough to garner the support of Republican “moderates” (unicorns, griffins, and other mythical creatures). Of course, the tradeoff is that the same wording also protects the right of women to have abortions, as long as they don’t take place in public. By the way, Section 1 would also protect Barack Obama’s right to be publicly black–another thing conservatives will just have to suck up.

The sticking point is what to do with violators. There are some people–like much of the Tea Party–who simply can't mind their own business. We must enforce MYOB rights, as Section 2 stipulates, but it seems cruel to fine or imprison those with obvious psychological maladies. Creative alternative sentencing could come to the rescue. Busybodies convicted of violating the 28th Amendment can be ordered to take in film crews from 60 Minutes, a special prosecutor, and People Magazine subscribers. They would live in the homes of transgressors, scrutinize their past, and reveal embarrassing details on The Jerry Springer Show until an expert panel of bloggers, Internet chat-room ranters, and supermarket tabloid readers deems the violators too boring for further comment.

As time goes on, other incendiary issues can be doused by the 28^th Amendment.  Given freedom to do, view, and consume what they wish in private, Congress and pundits might actually address the problems ordinary citizens think are important. But little can happen until we learn to respect one another's right to be left alone. Some readers might wonder about me. Am I a left-wing crazy? A bat-shit libertarian loco?  A mush-headed New Age flake?  A pot-crazed lunatic?  MYOB!