Lesson #1 for agenda-driven interviewers: don’t fuck with Matt Damon. If you do, it’ll probably end up on YouTube. Case in point: Damon took time out from making a film to fly to Washington D.C. and give a speech at the Save Our Schools March on July 30, 2011. He was introduced by his mother Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education. Among the media covering the event was a libertarian outlet called Reason.tv, whose reporter and cameraman made the ill-advised choice to (you guessed it) fuck with Matt Damon. The result:

That, my friends, is what they call getting pwned. Even the jarring cut to the context-less moment from Good Will Hunting doesn’t diminish Damon’s (pardon the pun) schooling of microphone chick and the shitty cameraman.

As some readers already know,¹ I am the son of two teachers. I suppose I could therefore argue that my passion about our society’s devaluation of teachers is one teacher greater than Matt Damon’s; kidding aside, I’m very pleased that his celebrity, combined with his wit and eloquence on the subject, prompted this video to go viral on YouTube. As another actor (albeit a considerably less well-known one) born of educators, I’ll indulge the interviewer’s clunky comparison of the acting and teaching professions in another way.

The renowned actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen had the thesis that our society in general does not respect acting as a legitimate occupation. Acting is perceived as something which more or less anybody can do, but some people just have more talent for it than others. Everyone has played make-believe games as a kid, so everyone considers himself a valid critic of acting. It’s my contention that popular attitudes toward teaching have become disturbingly similar to this casual disregard for acting.

Everyone has to go to school, the perception goes, and everyone knows from experience that some teachers are more effective than others. It is thought that pretty much anyone who has graduated from school could teach, since there will always be at least a certain number of teaching jobs. Hence, everyone considers himself a valid critic of teaching. Don’t think so? Listen to microphone chick in this extended version of her Matt Damon encounter, in which she claims that having attended school in the L.A. Unified District qualifies her as an teaching expert equal to Damon’s mom.

The key difference between the acting and teaching professions is, of course, that public school teachers are paid with public money. To the libertarian/Tea Party crowd, “public money” is a hex. It’s their “Lord Voldemort.” With the ideal of eliminating essentially all taxes, these every-man-for-himself fanatics took aim in new, more pernicious ways at public school teachers during the year 2011.

Setting the tone was Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who interpreted his 52-47% victory in the 2010 election as an overwhelming mandate to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of his state’s public employees. Not all his state’s public employees, mind you — just the ones who weren’t policemen or firefighters.² That leaves what, about 95% teachers and 5% janitors and DMV clerks.

Fortunately Governor Walker’s anti-teacher budget touched off a substantial backlash. The most immediate reaction was a protest in and around the State Capitol that went on for months, at its height involving about 100,000 demonstrators. After the budget was passed, Walker’s Tea Party allies pursued their stated intention to recall Democratic Party State Senators who had fought against the measure. This plan backfired when the eventual vote resulted in the recall of only two State Senators from office, both of them Republicans.

The situation with regard to teachers and education policy is still crucially important, of course. It calls for more Matt Damon-style pwnage, whether or not it comes from Matt Damon himself. The countryside is still crawling with ignoramuses who think that the economy sucks because some teachers are getting tenure… as opposed to, say, too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks taking advantage of their industry’s deregulation to create securities out of bullshit, crash the global economy and stick us with the bill.

Over the last year or two, my most oft-considered theme on this blog may well be the vital necessity of humor to cope with the world around us. As the adage goes, sometimes there are no words — no literal words, that is. No direct response. There is first the intermediary of wit, whose words are oblique enough to make the matter minimally tolerable. Without this humorous buffer, my unfiltered response would be nothing but screams of rage and despair. That might be cathartic for me, but it would definitely not be constructive. To put it another way: if you ask me a ridiculous question, you’ll get a ridiculous answer.

“Sorry Lucretia, no way is that covered.
I mean… you were already naked.”

For the last decade plus, the agenda and tone of the exchange in Washington (or as I call it, our national miscourse) has been set by the Republicans, largely via their hyper-successful media arm at FOX News.¹ As the feckless Democrats stood by, the effective GOP creed has degenerated from Bush-era exclusionism (“We are the party of patriotism; we don’t work with Democrats for the same reason we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) to reactionary, teabagger-style xenophobia (“If it has Obama-cooties on it, KILL IT!”).

Yesterday, the trusty comedy filter The Onion produced what struck me as a perfectly timed all-purpose riposte, headlined “Republicans Vote to Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed for Earth.” Unfortunately, it turns out that even this wasn’t quite enough to address the day’s most egregious Obama-phobic extreme: the new GOP majority in the House, as part of their absurdly childish insistence on a do-over of the health care reform act, have declared it necessary to redefine the crime of rape.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I wondered. “Is this another satirical sendup of the ludicrous extremity of Republican obstructionism? Is rape the asteroid in this joke? …NO?!? Oh my God. Get me some comic cushioning, stat!”

A legitimate case is often made that there are certain things that cannot be joked about, and that rape is one of them, because rape is not funny. I agree — with the last clause. Rape, in and of itself, is no laughing matter. I respectfully disagree, however, with the statement as a whole. There are times when even things as terrible as rape must be joked about, lest we lose our humanity.

I didn’t even laugh at the above clip when I watched it, but I did find it funny. So funny, in fact, that it kept me from breaking down into unabated primal protest. Losing my shit, as it were. And that, I think, may be the very definition of “pretty goddamned funny.”

Memo to Sen. Dianne Feinstein: thanks a whole big bundle.

Too well I recall the morning last November when I read your stated intention to vote in favor of confirming Michael Mukasey as U.S. Attorney General. It made what would have been a pleasant breakfast at a local café go down quite a bit less easily. I narrowly averted embarrassment, because your characterizations of Judge Mukasey as independent-minded and repulsed by the idea of torture were such stuff as spit-takes are made on. I couldn’t believe that you, my home state’s senior senator, had watched the same confirmation hearings as I had and not come away similarly disgusted at Mukasey’s craven dodging of the torture issue.

Your op-ed included a desire to see Judge Mukasey come before the senate panel again to have another chat about the whole Dick Cheney/Jack Bauer-iziation of American justice thing. Well, who’s back on the Hill today but your guy Mike the AG, front and center, talking waterboarding and destroyed CIA interrogation tapes. You must’ve been geeked, armed with a bucket of popcorn and ready to see The Muke torque up and bring the outrage, huh?

There are times when a mere “I told you so” doesn’t seem to cover it.

How bad was it? Let’s pick up the play-by-play with Mukasey’s questioning by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who was trying to find out whether the Justice Department’s current investigation into the destruction of the CIA interrogation videotapes would apply to the content of the tapes, or only to their having been shredded.

The AG had been saying that there was no evidence to suggest that the recordings showed suspects being waterboarded or treated in any other maybe-kinda-sorta illegal manner, or at least none that wasn’t – you got it – classified, and therefore off-limits for discussion in a public hearing. Whitehouse called bullshit, pointing out that all you had to have done was read the newspaper or watched a little CNN to have heard credible sources statements that the tapes had showed exactly that kind of thing. The Rhode Islander continued:

WHITEHOUSE:…So, then the question is, you know, where do we stand? Because I think anybody who even has a public view of what’s going on would suggest that there’s something that might at least merit the beginning of inquiry as to whether an investigation might be opened.

MUKASEY: All of that depends on whether certification was given, whether permission was given and whether it was permissibly relied on. And it would not — it should not turn on one person’s current view of what the statute requires or doesn’t require, because if it does, the message is, it all changes.

WHITEHOUSE: But aren’t there two questions here? There is no exemption under [U.S. Code, Title 18, Section] 2340(a) depending on whether the conduct was authorized by a supervisory official or not. There is no Nuremberg defense built into this criminal statute.

…And I’m just trying to get, which is this? Is it that there aren’t facts well-developed? That doesn’t seem credible. Is it because there’s authorization, we’re not going to look at this no matter what? If that’s your position, fine, but let’s just say so and then I’ll understand.

MUKASEY: That’s not my position.

WHITEHOUSE: What is your position?

MUKASEY: My position is that there is an ongoing investigation and that I’m not going to speculate on what might or might not have happened, particularly with regard to authorizations.

WHITEHOUSE: But the ongoing investigation, as far as we know, is only into the destruction of tapes. It has nothing to do with the underlying interrogation, unless you’re telling me that that’s the forum. Is that the forum in which this will get decided?

MUKASEY: That is in part dependent on what [the] investigation shows.

WHITEHOUSE: Well, let’s hypothesize that a little further. If it shows that waterboarding took place…

MUKASEY: Let’s not hypothesize anything.

WHITEHOUSE: Well, there’s only two choices. It’s not going to take us a long time to discuss the alternatives, either it did or it didn’t.

MUKASEY: It’s not a question of it taking a long time. It’s a question of telling agents out there that we are investigating the CIA based on speculation about what happened and whether they got proper authorizations. And I don’t think that ought to be the message.

(transcript via TPM Muckraker)

I’ll say one thing for the Attorney General: the guy can cover some ground. I mean, from the Nuremberg defense to the McGwire defense in one round of questioning? That is range, people.

Dianne? Chuckie Schumer? Barbara Boxer, my other California homegirl? Harry Reid, our sheep in sheep’s clothing? Congressional Democrats, please please hear this: we still have almost a year of Bush left. NONE of you have even NEARLY handed that blithering numbnuts the mop and pail you said you had ready for him, and the shit he’s strewn everywhere is just sitting there. Hell, he’s adding to it!

It doesn’t work. You know, inviting them up to the Hill and hoping they’ll just casually admit, “Oh yeah, we eviscerated the Constitution and lied the country into a disastrous war and horribly tarnished America’s standing in the world. That was us, we’re here to turn ourselves in.” That’s a little much for your average slip of the tongue. What do you think this Administration is going to say about any of this stuff? Here’s a hint: you’ve heard it a million times over the last seven years.

And speaking of hearing something a million times, I don’t know how many more futile I-told-you-so’s I have left in me. Let me save a few to use on the Bush cabal when (please, oh please) they one day have to pay for all the damage they’ve done.