Over The River And Through The Woods, To The Radicals House We Go!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  Tenured Radical is off the interwebs for a few days, so take care, empty your pockets of all change when you see a TSA official or a person in need, and don't eat anything I wouldn't eat!

Department of Uniquely Tacky Political History Gifts

Seriously? Chia Obama? I saw this on TV tonight and couldn't wait to run upstairs and log in.

The good news is that Chia Obama is part of the "Proud To Be An American" series that includes Chia Washington, Chia Lincoln and Chia Statue of Liberty.  If you go to this part of the Chia Products website, you will see that Chia Washington has his green hair neatly trimmed colonial style, whereas Chia Lincoln, Chia Obama and Chia Liberty all have a neat 'fro.



We are living in amazing times. I don't think a sitting President has ever been honored with his own Chia, come to think of it. So buy one now -- for that historian who has everything. For a limited time only. $19.95 + $7.95 shipping and handling. Free shipping with two or more. Buy Chia Obama for the whole American wing of your department. It's never too soon to start thinking about the holidays.

Holiday Gifts for the Cheney, Bush and McCain Families To Express Our Gratitude for Their Public Service

Wondering what to get those special federal office holders for Christmas? An outrageous apologia from Bill Kristol? NO! Try this framed photo of Sarah Palin!* Lots of laughs around the Christmas Tree! And some bittersweet thoughts about what could have, you know, been...there. You know.



Or click here to purchase Parables of Pop Culture, a book that will help your favorite "old style" Republican pol talk to the family about how "the power of the words on the Burma Shave signs pale in comparison to the power of God's words to us in the bible." Well, yeah! I think so! And maybe God will also explain where the regulatory agencies were sleeping when the CFO buddies of the Bush-Cheney administration were siphoning money from every possible corner of the economy into their own pockets! No, don't be mad, God -- that's a JOKE! There are no regulatory agencies any more! Ha! Ha!

Or click here to purchase The Politically Incorrect Guide To The Civil War, a book that reveals a bunch of great stuff about the War of Northern Aggression that I bet you never learned from that there terrorist-coddling, pansy-liberal history professor of yours. Like, you know, "why Robert E. Lee had a higher regard for African Americans than Lincoln did; how, if there had been no Civil War, the South would have abolished slavery peaceably (as every other country in the Western Hemisphere did in the nineteenth century); and how the Confederate States of America might have helped the Allies win World War I sooner." Golly, true knowledge is such a gift in itself! You can't go wrong with this little item, no sir!

And for only $15.95 -- 15.95 ladies and gentlemen, plus shipping and handling -- you can send a Sarah Palin "2009 calendar featuring never before seen photos of Sarah, with Todd, Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig Palin." Just call 1.800.247.6553; when they ask for a sales code, shout "EAGLE!" Your favorite former Republican Presidential candidate (whoever THAT was! No I'm JOKING!) will receive this lovely calendar celebrating the woman who "has re-energized the Conservative base of the Republican Party. As a front runner in the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination, she is showing America that she is willing to reform her own party and politics as usual." And here's the best part -- the photographer selling the calendar is Judith Patrick, the former Assistant Mayor of Wasilla! Well, yay! Or go here get a gift subscription to Townhall Magazine for that special soon-to-be-former White House occupant who may be in need of something to read -- and get a Sarah Palin Calendar for free! Double yay!

Merry Christmas, Republicans, and have a ton of fun around the Christmas tree! Don't let the door hit'cha on the way out!

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*The photoshopped portrait of Sarah Palin was received over the internet this morning, courtesy of the Mother Of The Radical (MOTheR). I was led to all other items by the regular marketing emails I get from Human Events magazine, ads that are also shilling products by Ann Coulter, Oliver North, Patrick Buchanan, and a bunch of financial advisors you have never heard of.

It's Cyber-Monday

I learned two important things this morning on my drive to work.

One: the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest day of the year for Rotorooter. Does this tell you something about how much food Americans, as a group, waste? Granted, some of the visits are to pull silverware out of the Dispose-All. But many of the visits are just occasioned by the vast amount of food that we throw away, that then gets clogged in the plumbing, as we try to grind it up and make it go away. Yuck.

Second: Expect the internet to be slower than usual today and, if you are a supervisor of people, your workers to be more unavailable. Apparently those who can no longer face standing in line outside Target at 4 A.M. waiting to get $150 off on a flat screen TV now jump online as soon as they get to work to get their holiday shopping done on the faster connections available at the office. Particularly men, which is a surprise, isn't it? Apparently the average male internet shopper spends between 15 minutes to an hour taking care of his holiday gift list. Go men!

And fortunately the Radical has made everything easier for your holiday decision-making too, so that you can all be like men in this respect. Click on the item to the left and buy a "Tenured Radical: The 2.0 Edition" tee shirt. That's right. And you can get it in many different styles and colors, not just the geeky one on the geeky guy that is being displayed on the Zazzle entry page. Gay men and butch lesbians will be interested in this model (for similar and different reasons):

This is called the "fashion tee." We'll see whether it's fashionable, won't we? But I wouldn't try to buy the fashion tee today, unless you really like the white: they seem to be all out of black tees in most sizes and styles right now. Wait until tomorrow. Then buy them for everyone you know, and your holiday shopping will be done, done, done. What a radical idea. And when you think about it, there hasn't been a great History Gift Item since the MARHO collective (publishers of the Radical History Review,which is so radical that your subscription often lasts for years because they publish it when they feel like it) stopped making those matchbooks that said "Become a Historian, Make Big Money."

In other news, did anyone but me notice this New York Times story, in which we are told that LSU has addressed its lesbian problem in the aftermath of the Pokey Chatman scandal by hiring a staff of married men to coach the women's basketball team? Because, of course, male coaches never have affairs with female athletes, so now the Lady Tigers can just play basketball and not worry about who they will have sex with and whether it will affect the starting line-up. Unfortunately, this peace of mind did not help sixth-ranked LSU yesterday, when they were shut down in the final minute by number seven, Rutgers, 45-43 on a hellacious steal by Matee Ajavon. Moral of the story: heterosexuality, or facades thereof, does not help you win basketball games.

Glad we got that settled. Now shop, shop, shop.

Gender, Schmender: Buying Miss Barbie

I just got off the phone with a woman friend whose daughter is having a birthday (note to the childless -- birthdays for those whose years number in single digits go on for days. If you are thinking about having a baby you need to know this.) The cupcakes that are going to school today came out of a box, but the cake for last Sunday's party, while it too came out of a box, was in the shape of a butterfly with multicolored icing. I thought this was a particularly grand gesture and said so.

Although she and her husband used a Williams-Sonoma butterfly cake mold, my friend admitted that the finished product was still a little sloppy around the edges, despite the fact that they both applied their many talents to it. I pointed out that it was the thought that counted, since the little girls were going to eat it anyway, and it was the pinkness and the sugar that really mattered at that age. (Whereas at our age, the cake would be the object of extensive critique, and probably a special issue of Social Text.) I suggested that she might want to try the ever-popular Volcano Cake one year, something a relative of mine makes for children which features a controlled explosion in the center. In this situation, neatness counts not only less, but not at all. However, as far as I know, the cake has only been tested on nephews, and the butterfly cake, despite a high degree of difficulty, was probably a better bet for a girly-girl party.

This led to the conversation all feminists have with their friends: how is it that many of their daughters wake up one day, refuse to wear anything but a pink dress, and insist that Barbie is a Goddess who must be worshipped by all?

"And then," my friend said,"I have to have the whole conversation about why we don't do Barbie."

"I support you completely," I said; "I would do the same thing with a daughter. Whereas boys are different. About this time ten years ago I was driving all over the state of Connecticut looking for Barbie's Mini-Van for my nephew."

"Absolutely," my friend agreed. "That would be completely different."

I hope this last point needs no explanation. Barbie is, indeed, the bane of many feminist mothers' existence, but there is good in everything, even if it is manufactured in China by labor that exists in a state of virtual peonage (which, by the way, I care about a lot, but Barbie doesn't give a hoot. Barbie accepts all servitude to her as natural and normal.) Barbie is the Original Drag Queen: she has Needs. And that Christmas ten years ago, she needed a Mini-Van. Why? Well, in the first place, all the other Barbies had one. But wait, I pointed out, dreading the trips from Toys R' Us to Toys R' Us, Barbie already had a Dream House, and her sister Skipper to do most of the housework, which she often did in the nude. Furthermore, Ken was constantly showing up asking for dates: sometimes it appeared that Ken's idea of a fun date included putting on Barbie's clothes and dancing with her, either standing up in the kitchen or doing a gentle, scissor-like bump and grind lying down. So with all this excitement at the Dream House, why did Barbie need a fully loaded Mini-Van too?

"How else will she get to the Mall?" my nephew, who was four at the time, pointed out.

Silly me. So Barbie's Mini-Van was located by Yours Truly in some corner of New England State even more godawful than the one I happened to be living in at the time, purchased and delivered as if by Magic. This process required the expenditure of vast amounts of petroleum since -- you need to know this if it is your first Holiday Season of toy buying -- there is no point in calling Toys R' Us in December. Or ever, for that matter. The phone in the store is never answered, and the store employees merely gather around it, watch it ring off the hook and try to guess what the person on the other end wants until it stops ringing and they can go back to smoking dope and playing cards.

Anyway, there was a happy outcome for all when the Mini-Van was revealed on Three Kings Day. Great joy reigned in Nephewville for whatever period of time that lurid plastic items are capable of giving pleasure to dolls and the boys that love them.

But the lesson we learned was that if you give Barbie wheels, you've also got to watch her like a hawk. A year or so after that Christmas, when neither the nephew or I were paying attention, Barbie and her entourage skipped town and have never been seen or heard from again. Rumor has it that Girlfriend loaded Ken, Pepper and pink outfits for all into her Mini-Van (Skipper grabbed a thong before decamping from the Dream House) and moved to Florida, where we are told that they are living happily ever after in Barbie's South Beach Dream Condo. Rumor has it they have started a retro-disco club called Dream Club Barbie, that features a mirror ball and standards from the pre-AIDS era like "Last Dance" and "It's Raining Men." Or maybe they're in LA, or the Castro. We're not sure. When my nephew is a little older, say eighteen, we're going to go and take a look for ourselves.

What Would Jesus Do? Coping with Chrismukkah and Other Romish Plots

"Happy Holidays!" (Boo-hoo) "Happy Holidays!" (sniff-sniff!)

With this variation on a well-known lyric, the Radical gets ready to expound on a fraught subject for many: the inexorable approach of the holiday season. The Good News: Thanksgiving Break and it's five glorious days off will be here soon. The Bad News? The four subsequent weeks of holiday cheer.

In a town like Zenith, home to Zenith University, people have had plastic turkeys hanging from the trees in the front yard since they took down the fake cobwebs and ghosties on November 1. These are people who never seem to miss a chance to decorate. You have them in your town too -- they are perennial patrons of the Christmas Tree Shoppes, people who swooped in on December 26th, 2006, to purchase Blinky Santa on sale. These are the people who are really ready to rip down the plastic birds and get a full creche, with Kings sneaking around the side of the house, out on the lawn by Friday noon at the latest.

But you've got to think that many of them are probably decorating to stave off the rage and pain that some people feel so strongly that they have the opposite reaction: they are too depressed to even put out a napkin in December. And even if your feelings about the hols, like mine, are not negative but just ho-hum with the dollop of pleasure here and there, the whole buildup and non-climax can make the arrival of January 2 a true day for celebration.

You may, however, be someone who dreads the holidays for reasons that are not so mysterious: perhaps you are single, getting ready to trudge off to the 'rents in their Florida condo, and the holidays are a painful reminder that the world is made for families; you are involuntarily childless and every Chrismukkah (to cite a word just coined by my friend Mouse who, by the way has a spanking new site for her blog) causes you to pine for the toys you are not buying. Maybe you are actually in the family you want, a family of many or a family of one, and somehow, somewhere, you have just lost your grip on why everyone is supposed to have fun at Chrismukkah, given that it seems to only add to the obligation of being an overstressed, adult wage-earner.

"Stop!" you are shrieking. "Enough! I don't read your stupid blog to get more upset! Are you just going to pick scabs all day?"

No. Of course not. Calm down. Make a cup of tea. As usual, I will tell stories and give advice. The Radical is nothing if not predictable.

I always liked Chrismukkah a lot until I went to college, and I think I can point to two things that were a turning point in that initial year of serious intellectual work, the first of which suggests that "the holidays" may be structurally foredoomed if you are an academic. That semester my exams and final papers were not finished until almost Christmas eve, and I had misjudged the quantity of work I had to do in a way that I have more or less continued to do ever since. So I was working balls to the wall, not sleeping much, and only vaguely tracked it that there was a holiday coming at all. The other thing was, when I was tracking the holiday and my responsibilities to it, there was almost nowhere to shop for presents in Shoreline. There was the Oligarch bookstore (where many of my classmates bought Oligarch sweatshirts and shot glasses for their families -- no kidding), a famous record shop, and that was pretty much it. Festive, no?

Indeed, I think it is this business of having exams before Chrismukkah, since I more or less never left school, that overshadows the season. There are still too many papers and exams to fill days that could otherwise be spent baking cookies and getting drunk at office parties hosted by wealthy clients. (And besides, the only wealthy clients we have are students, who never invite us to parties because they are too busy studying and writing papers. What a vicious circle.) To add to that, somewhat later in life -- like ten years ago -- I began to care a great deal less about receiving presents (although I still like to give people presents) which I think is the inevitable outcome of both making enough money that I can buy what I want, combined with the fact that I pretty much have what I want -- a dog, a house, a car, a girlfriend, a decent job, a New President, a research account, a Mac, a successful blog and an iPod. So Chrismukkah comes with the added burden of people who love me asking me what I want. What I want, now that my basic needs have been addressed, are things that cost either nothing (a kiss) or thousands of dollars (go live in Paris during my next sabbatical, solar electricity panels) or are without price (world peace, an announcement by the AHA and/or Tom Bender that history is an interdisciplinary field after all.)

See what I mean? However, I have some ideas about holiday gifting that will keep me sane over the next four weeks, and I offer them to you.

1. Think of things people can give you that don't cost much money. For example, I am going to ask my sister for a photograph of herself. I know she has lots of them, as she is a performer. She has no money and I do not have a single picture of her worthy of framing. This will cost her approximately $1.50 in postage; around $16.50 if she adds an inexpensive frame. And I won't have to worry that she has spent money she doesn't have for something I don't really want.

2. N's cousin -- of whom I am very fond and who has very little cash and a nice life in the country -- started a practice several years back of telling people that if they must give her a present, they should choose something they already own that they think she would like and give it to her. Sometimes she does the same. Last year she gave us a jar of relish, made from zucchini she grew in her garden.

3. Last year a nephew of ours, who is a high-level executive in city government (where gifting can get completely out of hand) baked all his employees a loaf of french bread. This sends a signal, too, that they don't have to shower him with expensive gifts that could also, down the line for reasons impossible to anticipate, probably ensnare him in one of the city corruption scandals for which my state is famous.

5. Make a gift of your time to do something fun and free with someone for whom you would ordinarily buy a gift. This has the added attraction, if you are so inclined, of allowing you to re-acquaint yourself with feeling good during the holiday season, without committing to the Chrismukkah spirit itself, since there are lots of free events during December that are also holiday-ish. Think church music, concerts on the green, skating, or even a walk on the beach followed by lunch.

Now, since we all know that Hannukkah is kind of a low-level Jewish holiday that has been elevated to create equal opportunity consumption habits, can we admit that it is really Christmas that is the issue here? And I can only offer one powerful suggestion about what to do with The Day itself. Tell your relatives you are spending the holiday with friends, locate other people who are dreading the arrival of Our Savior as much as you are, and do what that famous Jew, Jesus, would do if he were actually walking the earth today: go out for Chinese food and a movie. Click here for a biblical rationale for why eating Chinese food "can only be a Romish plot to destroy God’s true faith." If that can't get you out to Empire Szechuan with a smile on your face on December 25, nothing can, my friend.

Start planning now so you have something to look forward to.

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Mother of God. If things aren't difficult enough in this world, I clicked on University Diaries for my daily fix of bile and was told that "this URL cannot be found." Fortunately, I recovered my composure and googled UD, found it again, and recopied the link. The link to the left is now correct, although little different from the previous one. Our favorite curmudgeon is making some changes that are giving her minor league fits, and that may be what has undone the link somehow. Anyway: no matter. What was once lost is now found.