Spaghetti Thoughts

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I spent the day tidying up my office. I organized the piles into folders, coiled some of the cords running between the various peripherals on my desktop, and recycled anything I could. I wish I could do as much for the swirling thoughts in my head. But my mental spaghetti cannot be untangled so easily.

I worry that I will give in to the despair that follows a senseless act of extremism, the sense that no matter how hard my cohorts and I struggle against adversity, there’s always a nut out there poised to do more than shoot down our arguments. The longer I am involved in politics, the more it seems that issues are never put to rest. We wrangle endlessly over the same ideas with merely incremental results.

The current campaign against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is a case in point. As the Senators dance the minuet of the confirmation process, the usual suspects are taking the usual positions and making the usual comments. All that has changed is the methods used as the Republicans back away from their “up or down vote” position and find nice words to say about the filibusters they decried during the confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito.

The hypocrisy has been breathtaking. That Rush Limbaugh would have the nerve to call anyone else a racist leaves me gasping. My husband likes to say that Republicans engage in political projection, accusing Democrats of bad intentions because that is how the Republicans would act if they were in the Democrats’ position.

I think they just engage in selective memory. Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that George Tenet is to blame for the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were allies is a good example of this. George Tenet did not cherry-pick intelligence to back up a belief he couldn’t bear to give up. Nor did he go on news show after news show to state categorically that there was such a connection.

Someone once asked me why I am a Democrat. I thought for a moment, and then replied, “Because Democrats care.” I wasn’t just thinking about Social Security, affirmative action, and welfare. I was thinking that the Democrats I have known have been concerned that what they say is both true and accurate. We not only know that life is full of nuances; we are determined to help others understand those nuances.

It is very difficult for the Democrats I know to limit themselves to sound bites and daily messages. They want what they say to make sense. They are not cynical about skirting the real story in order to tell the story they think will get them quoted in the newspapers and on TV. (This is one reason we sometimes have so much trouble winning elections.)

We don’t want to put out twisted statements that, like spaghetti, arrive tangled on the table.
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The Value of Her Education

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A funny thing happened while I was listening to KMUW this morning. On “All Things Considered” they were talking about, you guessed it, the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. One of the people interviewed was the woman who had the highest grade-point average in Sotomayor’s high school class. What was funny was when she mentioned the year in which they graduated: 1972.

Now, I graduated from high school in 1970. Both Sotomayor and I wound up at Princeton University. Clearly, we were there at the same time, she one year behind me. (I took a year off in the middle and graduated a year later than I should have.) As far as I know, our paths never crossed. And I think I would have remembered a name like Sotomayor.

I mention this to make two points.

First, I have reached the age when the professional people around me are younger than I am. It’s another “official old geezer” moment. As if I needed one.

Second, I’d like to refute Karl Rove’s suggestion that a woman who graduated second in her class at Princeton is either unintelligent or unintellectual.

It’s true that, like George Bush, I got through an Ivy League institution without either turning into a scholar or developing any better idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up than the one I arrived with, which was none. I don’t blame Princeton for that. I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and as I said above, I’m all growed up.

But to graduate summa cum laude, which means with highest honors, and second in her class at that, Judge Sotomayor had to put in a lot of hard work and even that wouldn’t have got her there if she hadn’t had the native intelligence to make all that hard work, work. Like most universities, Princeton is different experiences to different students. If you want to truly excel there, however, you have to take a track that is grueling. And you have to be willing and able to compete like hell.

So tell any of your right-wing friends (Come on, we all have them.) that they don’t have to worry about whether Sonya Sotomayor is smart enough.

She is.
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