Dennis Fox’s Weblog

For a week now I’ve been too busy to sit and blog. In addition to intermittent preparation for my Israel/West Bank trip and a variety of family and other projects, I’m getting ready to move my little home office downstairs to the basement. So I’ve been going through papers piled on my desk and table and book shelves, filling up my waste basket with old news clippings, meeting notices, and other things I no longer feel the urge to do anything with.

My paper-reducing effort hasn’t yet elicited too many nostalgic aha! moments like those I had in 1998 before moving from Illinois to Massachusetts, when I had to sort through more than a decade of packed filing cabinet drawers. But I have come across items that now seem relevant once again. There’s the four-year old Boston Globe op-ed piece by Robert Kuttner, for example, titled “Bush Picks An Extremist for AG,” referring to the selection of the now-departing Attorney General John Ashbrook. I don’t know if Kuttner used the same title for Bush’s selection of Ashbrook’s replacement, Alberto Gonzales, but he might as well have.

Then there’s the June 2002 Globe article on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision approving public money for school vouchers, with an accompanying analysis titled “Decision gives few hints of how high a wall remains” between church and state. Bush hopes to appointment judges inclined to dismantle much of the remaining wall. Another article that same day explained that many states have stronger barriers between church and state than the federal system now requires, a topic much in the news in the wake of the latest election’s Red State/Blue State disparity. For some time now, civil liberties activists and others rebuffed in federal courts have focused on state courts instead. That trend will now escalate, with liberals rather than conservatives demanding state’s rights rather than single uniform federal standards. There’s some danger in that, but also some opportunity.

Another 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that same day in 2002 allowed public schools to test students engaged in extracurricular activities for drug use on a random basis rather than only when suspicion exists of actual use. The conservative assault continues. Perhaps that’s why I also saved the clipping titled “Magazine picks Vancouver as pot lover’s paradise.” There’s been a lot of post-election talk of how much better it might be to live in Canada. It gets tempting.

Canada was also mentioned in a Globe column by Christoper Shea after the 2002 congressional elections. The piece, “Class truce: Why the poor won’t soak the rich,” notes that residents of Canada are more likely than those of the United States to end up better off economically than their parents. Despite the American myth of Horatio Alger successes and the media’s focus on the relatively few who make it, our own system is more stratified by hard-to-break class lines than most of us are taught to think. The Democrats are not going to emphasize class war, but someone should.

My desk-clearing continues.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Blogging, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.