Memo from the Office of Compulsory Volunteerism

Or, Better Living Through Pay Cuts!

[Written for and cross-posted at Kritik, the blog hosted by the Unit of Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Kritik is running a series of posts called "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut" in response to a first round of faculty and staff furloughs at Illinois this semester. Roxie's World was invited to weigh in with advice on how to make do with less while maintaining one's dignity and good humor. Our sincere thanks to Lauren Goodlad for letting an old -- oops, dead! -- dog run loose in Kritik's well-maintained yard for awhile. Click on over there and read the whole series. You'll be glad you did.]

Esteemed Comrades of Shampoo-Banana,

You know you’re in a pickle when a dead dog is called in to give you advice on how to negotiate the political and economic challenges of your work life. Never fear, kids – Roxie is here, and the furloughed shall not succumb to furloughisme, though succumb they must to something, eventually. Alas.

Permit me to introduce myself. I am Roxie, a wire-haired fox terrier late of the People’s Republic of Takoma Park, a hippie-turned-yuppie enclave on the outskirts of Washington, DC. For nearly sixteen years, until my untimely demise on the penultimate day of 2009, I kept company with a couple of cranky English profs at a big state university we like to call Queer the Turtle U. For the past four years, I have held forth regularly in the blogosphere on the subjects of politics, pop culture, and basketball, with occasional forays into the vicissitudes of higher ed. Why? Well, as my typist is fond of saying, because tenure means never having to say you’re sorry.

The moms, as I call the human companions of my embodied years, are experienced in the ways of the furlough, because QTU was on the leading edge of this damaging wave of short-term cost-cutting maneuvers. They endured a first round of “temporary” salary reductions in the spring semester of 2009 and are going through a second right now. The possibility of a third round looms for next year, because Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a fauxgressive Democrat whom we call “You, Sir, Are No Jack Kennedy,” plans to campaign for re-election by bragging about the “tough” decisions he made in order to balance the budget, which he opted to do on the backs of 70,000 state employees rather than advocating for the more equitable solution of, you know, tax increases.

The preceding paragraph offers an important lesson in furlough-ness for you who are having your first exposure to this particular pedagogy of the oppressor: Furloughs are habit-forming. If furloughs were a drug, they would come with warnings about how highly addictive they are and a long list of extremely pernicious side effects. Listening to the ads for them on TV, you would wisely say to yourself, “No, thanks, but the supposed cure sounds worse than the disease.” Feeling sad? Take furloughs! They may or may not make you happier, and taking them may cause vomiting, diarrhea, jaundice, impotence, flatulence, and suicidal ideation! Not to mention a significant depression in your bank account.

We have followed with interest the stories of how you Urbane-Champaignians have adjusted to the crazy catastrophe-a-day dynamic that seems to have taken hold out there – scandals, resignations, strikes, a fiscally derelict state government, the shame of a politically incorrect mascot. And now furloughs! We think teach-ins and long, thoughtful blog posts that historicize and contextualize and problematize the whole furlough phenomenon are all well and good, but Roxie’s World firmly believes that serious times also call for unserious responses. We think at least one of the “Fifteen Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut” should involve high degrees of snark and smart-a$$ humor, so we thought we’d weigh in with some helpful hints on matters you might not have paused to consider what with all the rabble-rousing you’ve been involved with recently.

For example, Challenge #1: How to dress for your furlough. Academics tend to be fashion-challenged to begin with, but the double whammy of reduced income and lowered self-esteem is a recipe for sartorial disaster. Over at the left, you see a kicky pink number guaranteed to brighten up those dreary mid-winter furlough days spent at home. Slip into this slinky getup, and you won’t be the least bit tempted to engage in any illicit work or work-like activities. That’s right – No sneaking off to the computer to check e-mail or write a letter of recommendation. No curling up with the latest Žižek hidden inside your copy of Entertainment Weekly.

Alternatively, you could take a page out of this guy’s fashion book and continue to dress the part of a fully employed and compensated professional as you while away your furlough days. Nothing says success like a crisp white shirt and a carefully brushed head of Elvis hair! It’s true that not being under indictment might diminish your chances of proving your testicular virility by going out and lecturing on the ethics in business circuit, but, hey, perhaps you could pick up a bit of extra income holding forth on the vital importance of the semicolon to the future of Western civilization. That’s what folks expect from English profs, so stand and deliver, grammar geeks.

Challenge #2: What to eat on your furlough. We’ll keep this one simple for you by suggesting that it comes down to a choice between bonbons and brown rice. Go with bonbons if sweets are your idea of comfort food and if you feel moved to affirm the perception that the profession of English is a leisure-class pursuit that seldom involves anything remotely resembling “work.” Chase your bonbons with a glass of fine port, while watching a selection from your box set of the films of Akiro Kurosawa, and you’ll win a gold medal for the perpetuation of damaging yet hilarious stereotypes. If, on the other hand, you are not a trust-fund baby and will actually miss the income lost through furloughs, pull your battered copy of the Moosewood Cookbook down off the shelf and whip up a batch of that Vericheesey Casserole (main ingredients: two cups brown rice, two cups soybeans, roughly half a ton of cheese) that enabled you to get through grad school on less than $7000 a year. Warning to the middle-aged: Cheese is a lot more fattening than it was back in the days when you burned 2500 calories just by getting out of bed in the morning. Better plan to spend part of your furlough days at the gym if you go with this dietary option.

Challenge #3: What music to march to in your next furlough day parade. We have long maintained that the soundtrack for higher ed administrators committed to pretending that you can cut costs without sacrificing quality was the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic from South Pacific, “Happy Talk.” Clearly, we need a different musical accompaniment for the new age of activism that has dawned on campuses this year in response to devastating cuts, fee increases, and administrative failures of various kinds. Fortunately, the age of the iPod means we can have a theme song for every mood and moment of the “Screw You and the Neoliberal Horse You Rode In On” revolution. “The Internationale” has history in its favor, but the sad truth is it’s not much fun to dance to. For that, we would definitely go in a disco direction, most likely opting for Ms. Gloria Gaynor’s righteous “I Will Survive.” For the tenured rockers among you, we might recommend the Pretenders’ gritty “Back on the Chain Gang,” but, hey, whatever floats your boat, kids. The musical world is all before you. Clench your fists, tap your toes, blend the voices of students, staff, and faculty into one loud perfectly harmonized chorus, and you cannot lose. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Finally, we come to Challenge #4: How to represent your furlough -- graphically, we mean. Image is everything, right? (Doubt a dead dog? Then, um, check with Chief Illiniwek, if you can find him.) Fortunately, Roxie’s World has taken care of this problem for you. In tandem with our blog pal, Historiann, we’ve designed a catchy slogan and a fake yet fabulous seal that elegantly conveys the weird combination of desperation and cynicism that we think characterizes furloughisme. Yes, Excellence Without Money is what the people and their elected representatives seem to expect in this surreal, prolonged period of declining levels of support for public higher education. Nobel Prize winners? Oh, yeah, we want those on the faculty. Small classes? Well, of course! World-class venues for the arts and athletics? Gosh, yes, gotta have those on our campuses! OK, but we might need to raise your taxes to help fund some of those worthy objectives. Hell, no! Then I guess we’ll have to raise tuition again. No way, buster! You campus fat-cats had better just tighten your belts. Cut the fat! Get rid of those wasteful programs that suck up resources and fill kids’ heads with a bunch of useless ideas about “diversity” and “critical thinking.” They don’t need thinking skills, darn it! They need JOBS!

Around and around and around it goes, my sweet misunderstood and under-compensated friends. Take heart, darlings. We’ll let you use the slogan and seal for nothing as a way of welcoming you in to the fellowship of the furloughed. You can even modify the color scheme to match your institution’s unfortunate commitment to blue and orange if you like, but, please, people, no feathers, OK?

Keep up the good fight. Roxie’s World is here for you and with you every step of the way. Peace out and a hearty PAWS UP for your dogged pursuit of the resources and institutional values that make true excellence possible.

Fab (at) Four

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
But that won't stop my dancing
On my Blogiversary!

That's right, darlings -- The early spring orgy of celebration continues today, as we pause to commemorate four years of Roxin' the blogosphere. Can you believe it? Four years -- of comic punditry, of sentimental indulgence, of work avoidance, of queer/canine/feminazi talk back, of meditation on the glories of sport, of eye candy and other pretty things? Who would ever have thunk that what was begun as the whim of a Sunday afternoon would have lasted so long and evolved into the hot mess of words and images in which you now find yourself?

Of course, none of it would have happened without you, my legions of inexplicably loyal fans, who have hung with me through thick and thin, not to mention the shock and inconvenience of bodily death. Rest assured, my pretty boys and tough yet tender girls, that I am with you today in all the ways that matter, which is to say that I am a part of that universal heart that cannot leak or fail or stop or break.

Thanks for being here. Love me do, sweet things, you know I love you. No sorrow today -- Let's dance.

Misery Would Prefer Less Company

But at least, according to this report in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, it's really smart, hard-working company:

One Third of Faculty Members See Dip in Their Salaries, in 2009-10. The average cut, for those who got them, was 3 percent.

Oh, and who's at the bottom of the barrel, salary-wise? Why, English profs, of course! There's a chart that lays out the sorry news in black and white, but we don't recommend looking at it without the support of a good stiff drink. (The data is from a study by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.) According to the Chronicle's reading of the data, the disciplines with the lowest average salaries across the ranks were "English, at $60,850; parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies, at $61,709; and visual and performing arts, at $61,898."

So, English profs make less than gym teachers? Wow, I always knew the moms were the wrong kind of lesbians. I just didn't realize it had significant financial implications.

That is all, beloveds. We are going to go drown our sorrows now, with something strong and, you know, cheap.

Twenty-Six Years of Queer Delight

Or, Love Without License

You are a smart bunch of critters, so let's start the week off with a mind exercise to give those brains (and possibly those hearts) of yours a stretch.

Imagine someone tells you you can't have something. It's an ordinary something that is generally available and widely thought to be good. Let's say it's ice cream.

Now, you're not told you can't have ice cream because you are lactose-intolerant or diabetic or anything else that would make eating ice cream hazardous to your health. You are told you can't eat it because you don't deserve it. You are not good enough for ice cream. Indeed, you are so unfit for ice cream that the mere thought of your tasting it poses a threat to the goodness of ice cream. Stay away, the Committee to Protect the Deliciousness of Ice Cream screams, or the rest of us won't be able to enjoy ice cream anymore!

How do you react to this bizarre prohibition, when you live in a world in which the vast majority of people are committed eaters of ice cream? The mature and reasonable response is of course to become an equally committed hater of ice cream. Yuck, you sneer every time you pass a crowded Baskin-Robbins, ice cream is horrible, and the people who eat it are fools! They are dupes of the ice cream industrial complex! I wouldn't eat ice cream if it were the last food on earth!

Time passes -- more than a quarter century, let us say -- and you construct a perfectly satisfying life that involves no ice cream whatsoever.

And then one day, suddenly and without warning, you are told that you can eat ice cream after all. (Well, you can't eat it everywhere, but you can eat it in your own state, although you have to purchase it in another state. Or district.) What flavor would you like? says the friendly young woman behind the counter. How many scoops? What do you say? What do you do? What do you want, and how is the condition of your wanting or not wanting changed by the lifting of the prohibition? It is, after all, one thing to say you don't want ice cream when you are legally prevented from having it, quite another to step up to the counter, take a close look at all thirty-one flavors, and then say, "Thanks, but I think I will stick with the cheesecake. It's really delicious." Or perhaps you say, "By golly, I would like a triple scoop of butter pecan with hot fudge sauce and a cherry on top. And sprinkles, please, a whole bunch of rainbow-colored sprinkles."

What do you do? You pause. You consult your heart. You consult your partner in a life full of cheesecake. Perhaps you consult your doctor to find out if there are risks or benefits associated with an abrupt shift to a diet that includes ice cream, especially if you become dependent on it before you can have it everywhere. You look back with a sense of awe at twenty-six years of sweetness without ice cream. You smile, thinking of the one who made it possible and all the friends and relations and critters who shared in the sweetness and offered their own delicious recipes for cheesecake and other yummy treats. You raise a glass of something bubbly and try to imagine the next twenty-six years. You chuckle, pondering the phrase, just des(s)erts.

And because you are musically inclined, you are reminded of a song, a song you have always loved, sung by one of the sweetest voices on dog's earth, a song which you have only now gotten around to realizing is a song about the desirability or non-desirability of state-sanctioned ice cream:

* * *

Happy International Women's Day and Happy Anniversary to Moose and Goose! Thanks to all of you for being a part of the fun. Have a bite of something sweet today to celebrate the many forms of love and its stubborn, amazing persistence. Peace out.

(See also "Twenty-Five Years of Queer Delight" and "Twenty-Four Years of Queer Delight" [in which I interview the moms on the secrets to the success of their partnership].)

Matter Out of Place

Spring is in the air, and you know what that means: The birds are singing, the moms are walking, the snow is nearly gone -- and the audiovisual equipment that was for some reason abandoned in the park is there for all the world to see. And to photograph:

Hey, you know, it felt like a nuclear winter:

Ah, nature! culture! technology! CameraBag!

Breathe deep, walk tall, and keep your eyes peeled, darlings -- You will see the darndest things. Peace out.

(Photo Credits: Moose, on her iPhone, with ToyCamera [top] and CameraBag [bottom], 3/6/10.)

March 4th Day of Action

Updated below.

Being a Roundup of Roundups, Plus a Vid and Evidence Suggesting that Activism Makes You Happy (In the Unlikely Event That You Didn't Already Know That)

March 4 proved to be a Day of Not a Whole Lot of Action on the campus of QTU, where news of a small rally and teach-in was overwhelmed by ongoing coverage of street disturbances in College Park following the Non-Lady Terps' stunning upset of 4th-ranked Duke in basketball late Wednesday night. (Of course, the moms were there, silly, and, yes, somehow they managed to celebrate the glorious win over the Evil Empire without setting anything on fire or climbing up any lampposts.)

Plenty was going on elsewhere, though, as campuses across the nation responded to the call to defend public education in the face of devastating budget cuts and rising fees. We've got nothing new to say on the subject, so we will be content to direct your attention to a number of fabulous link farms that have already sprung up on Thursday's events:

Defend Education (.org), the folks who issued the original call for a day of action, have set up a good list of links that is strong on national and California coverage. It's here.

Remaking the University, run by our blog boyfriend Chris Newfield, is doing its usual kick-a$$ job of covering the story, with photos and links to darn near everything. Just go to his main page and let your fingers do the clicking.

Student Activism, run by Angus Johnston, has a series of posts reporting on events as they were unfolding. He did an amazing job of tracking the far-flung pieces of the picture and fitting them together in a more or less orderly way. Start here, then go here, then here, and here.

WaPo education reporter Jenna Johnson has a good roundup with links to coverage of the day's actions in campus newspapers. It's here.

The report in The Chronicle of Higher Ed focuses mostly on California but touches briefly on actions elsewhere. A Chronicle subhead writer felt a need to declare "protest fatigue," perhaps because students at Santa Cruz managed to shut the university down only "partially." The story is here.

Here is a vid of action at UC, Davis, which includes the effort by protesters to shut down I80 -- and the efforts of police to stop them. We don't go for that kind of high-risk maneuver ourselves, but, hey, if we got slapped with tuition increases of 32%, we might consider it:



San Francisco Chronicle coverage of the California actions is here.

Update: One of our sources on the ground in Shampoo-Banana sent us a link to this vid of a well-attended protest and rally at the University of Illinois. No cops on the scene, but no attempts to shut down major thoroughfares either.

Oh, and that evidence that activism makes you happier? It's right here, you little rabble-rouser. Click on that link, and have a better tomorrow. Peace out.

(H/T: Goose and the Shy One, for links.)

RIP Jon Swift

My typist was at work on a new, deeply satirical post when she stumbled across the sad news that a guy she never met and whose name she never even knew had passed away suddenly. Al Weisel, who blogged -- brilliantly and satirically -- as Jon Swift, "a reasonable conservative" who got all his news from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Jay Leno monologues, died on Feb. 27, according to a comment left by his mother on the last post on his blog. Weisel suffered two aortic aneurysms on his way to his father's funeral and died after three surgeries and a stroke. Moose read the news on Tom Watson's blog, in a post appropriately titled "A Death in the Blogging Family." Indeed.

We didn't know Al Weisel the person, but we closely followed Jon Swift the blogger. We had missed him greatly in the past year and worried about his prolonged blog silence. (That last post went up nearly a year ago.) He taught us a lot about the values of parody and satire, about political commentary that had a sharp edge but a good soul. We were the beneficiaries of his great generosity as a member of the blogging community, too. He listed us on his blogroll when we wrote and asked him to. He included our pieces in his annual list of best pieces selected by bloggers themselves. He nominated us for Weblog Awards that we never won because, we are convinced, those awards just don't have the right category for a comic dog blog obsessed with politics, pop culture, and basketball, but his faith that we were doing something worth nominating meant a lot to our humble crew of readers, writers, and internets trollers.

We did not know him, but we admired him and sought to emulate him and wish there were more folks like him in the blogosphere and the world. Dogspeed, Modest Jon. May you find kindness, fairness, and balance wherever you go. Dogspeed.