That, my friends, is what they call getting pwned. Even the jarring cut to the context-less moment from Team America 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.

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.”

photo: Aude/Wikimedia Commons

He was later made Special Adviser to the President on cybersecurity, but resigned from the G.W. Bush administration in 2003. A year later Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission; the Bush White House, knowing that his testimony would reveal their fuck-ups, undertook one of their trademark Karl Rove-style campaigns of character assassination. Some would disagree, but I believe an objective eye would conclude that the smear tactics damaged the Bush administration’s credibility far more than Clarke’s.

These days, Clarke runs a security consulting firm and serves as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This past Monday he was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, principally about his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.¹ After describing the serious threat posed by internet-based attacks, Clarke had this to say about the present state of our defenses against such attacks:

CLARKE: …Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and those railroads and the banks? The Obama Administration’s answer pretty much is, “You’re on your own.” [The Pentagon's] Cyber Command will defend our military. Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today. But everybody else will have to do their own defense.

That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.

GROSS: When you’re saying everybody else is on their own, does that include the electricity grid, the power grid, banking…?

CLARKE: Yes. What the Obama Administration is saying, and what the Bush people said before that, is, “The private sector doesn’t want the government defending it. The private sector doesn’t want the government telling it what to do. Therefore we will have, sort of, vague guidelines that suggest what the electric power grid should do, but we won’t really go out and do anything.” And if an attack happens, the government has no ability to stand up and do anything about saving the power grid.

GROSS: Why not?

CLARKE: Because of this philosophy that the government shouldn’t be defending the private sector, and a belief that the private sector doesn’t want to be defended by the government. Now, I think that belief is wrong. When I talk to CEO’s in the private sector, they say, “Heck, this is why I pay my taxes!” No one would have said in World War II, to U.S. Steel, “You’ve got some big steel factories in Pittsburgh. If the Nazi bombers come over, you’d better have some of your own guns to shoot them down.”

Sure, the CEO’s want their systems to be protected by the government — hell, I want our infrastructure protected by the government. Clarke’s only mistake here is to whom he ascribes the belief in this ludicrous no-defense philosophy: that mindset comes from the knee-jerk conservative teabaggers and the politicians on that bandwagon. The Obama White House is apparently too scared of being called “Big Government” or being accused of “taking over” private industry by crowds of morons carrying misspelled signs with Lipton teabags stapled to them.

photo: Flickr/Pargon

Terry Gross finished out the interview with a further query to Clarke regarding the current foaming-at-the-mouth political atmosphere. She pointed out that the day they were taping the interview (April 19) was the anniversary of the starting of the American Revolution with the battles of Lexington and Concord, but more ominously, also the anniversary of the end of the siege at Waco and of the Oklahoma City bombing. She asked Clarke what his feelings were about there being, as they spoke, several well-publicized anti-government rallies taking place, including one in Virginia with a pro-second-amendment emphasis to which attendees were urged to bring their guns.

CLARKE: Most of us who own guns are perfectly normal human beings who have those guns for legitimate reasons. But there is a small percentage of people who own guns that I find very scary, and they are the ideological remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, and the ideological remnants of the John Birch Society.

Throughout our history we’ve had right-wing people who say they don’t like the U.S. Government, they want to take down the U.S. Government, they think violence against the U.S. Government is OK. Since the election of Barack Obama these people have grown in volume, and I think they’ve grown in number. We have to remember, when we worry about Al-Qaida and foreign threats, that the second-largest and second-most destructive terrorist attack in our history, inside our borders, was done by these people. American, extreme right-wing, anti-government, violent people.

I think the United States has a serious threat today from those people, because legitimate public officials are egging them on. Legitimate public officials who are conservative, and who are Republican, aren’t criticizing them, or aren’t criticizing them enough. We need to de-legitimize these people, or we will have another Oklahoma City.

Really, I am flabbergasted. That is just plain inappropriate, and I can’t imagine what possessed him to say it. I know Biden is prone to gaffes, but this is major. Think about it: after scratching and clawing through the fetid political muck for well over a year, Obama signed the historic health care reform bill into law, and Biden says it’s “A big fucking deal?”

No I say, NO! Ho-ly FUCKING shit, it is a HUGE fucking deal! I mean, fuck me running, that is ass-kickingly goddamned big. Suck it, FOX News punditiots, because Yes We Did! This long-overdue victory for the sane majority and the good of all Americans is, quite simply, tits.

Of course, it would be way better if we’d got single-payer, or at least a public option. Then I would set off all seven of George Carlin’s words, lighting up the blog post like magnificent fireworks of profanity. For now I’ll take what I can get — I’m a reasonable man (which is more than I can say for the teabagging cretins who tried to thwart the bill).

As for Vice-President Biden, be more careful next time. I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of egregious understatement out of you.