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. . . I’d see more students trying to talk their way into an over-enrolled course by expressing their passion for the subject matter. More typically, it’s “I need this course to graduate” (which is rarely true since almost every course I’ve ever taught has been one of several that would fulfill whatever requirement the student has in mind) or “Your course fits my schedule” — neither of which generally convinces me that the enrollment overload represented by the student in question is a good idea.

Mind you, an obviously insincere performance of “passion” for media studies (or whatever happens to be on the docket for the semester in question) isn’t likely to win me over either — but, in contrast to some of my colleagues around campus, I also generally teach courses where a genuine pre-existing interest in the course material isn’t exactly out of the question. And so I probably should have more students telling me about their love for, say, “popular culture” or “rock ‘n’ roll.”

But maybe I’m alone here. Do other folks who read this blog (there aren’t many of you, I know, but probably half of you teach comparable material) find that their “wanna-be” enrollees leave their “passion” at the door when they want permission to add your classes?

According to Newsweek, the most important news story of the week is the failure of the US invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and bring democracy to that corner of the world. As the story explains:

But the harsh truth is that five years after the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, most of the good news is confined to Kabul, with its choking rush-hour traffic jams, a construction boom and a handful of air-conditioned shopping malls. Much of the rest of Afghanistan appears to be failing again.

Of course, this is only the top story of the week if you’re reading Newsweek in Europe. Or Asia. Or Latin America. In the US, “Losing Afghanistan” is an example of “World News” . . . and so it ranks behind a puff piece on “The Next Generation of Karl Roves” (in which Rove is referred to quite matter of factly as “The Master”). And even the fawning portraits of Rove’s disciples take a back seat to the real news of the week: “Annie Liebovitz’s amazing ‘life in pictures.’”

I’ve got nothing against Leibovitz (quite the contrary, as I actually find many of her portraits to be compelling and appealing), and I’m certainly not going to make the case for drawing a firm line between “hard” news stories and “soft” entertainment features — even (especially?) when it comes to what counts as a legitimate cover story for a major news magazine. There’s actually a part of me that’s actually quite happy to see Leibovitz get recognized so prominently for her work and her art . . .

. . . but I’m still stunned that a lengthy story on one of the major failures of Dubya’s war on terror can play as headline news everywhere else in the world (or at least everywhere else that Newsweek deigns to print a “local” edition), but get shoved to the margins in the States so that we can all learn what a wonderful photographer Annie Leibovitz is.

[Tip of the blog-hat to the quirky and sardonic folks at Wonkette, which is where I learned about this particular journalistic oddity.]

Others — such as this one, which graced the cover of a catalog that arrived (unbidden) in today’s mail — don’t even pretend to try.

Fer the rest of the day, you’ll be rememb’rin’ to talk like the pirate that, deep in yer sea-lovin’ heart, ya know y’are — or else you’ll be scorned as a good-fer-nothin’ landlubber and forced to scrape the barnacles off the hulls of every schooner in the harbor with your teeth.

Yesterday, the local branch of the College Republicans planted flags on the lawn of the student union in commemoration of the lives lost on 11 September 2001. The impulse to honor the memory of those unfortunate souls is certainly a noble one, and I have no desire to impugn that facet of yesterday’s memorial.

I do wonder, however, about the “honor” inherent in such a display for all those victims of the 9/11 attacks who weren’t US citizens. The buildings that fell in New York, after all, were the World Trade Center, and the victims of the attacks claimed more than forty different nations as their homelands. Yes, most of those who died were US natives. But that’s no excuse to forget those who weren’t. Especially when it’s possible to make a memorial display that actually does reflect the full breadth of the world’s losses five years ago.

I’ve got a certain measure of sympathy for the outrage that people are expressing over ABC’s The Path to 9/11. If even half the charges about the production’s factual inaccuracies are true, then ABC deserves to have its feet (and then some) held to the fire . . .

. . . but I confess to being more than a little leery of the pressure being applied on ABC to cancel the broadcast. Prior restraint doesn’t exactly become more noble a practice simply because it’s initiated by citizens groups rather than government officials. And when prior restraint becomes a generally accepted tactic in the left’s repertoire, it becomes that much harder to call out the right for using the same tactic against movies they haven’t seen, music they haven’t heard, books they haven’t read, video games they haven’t played, and so on.

What concerns me most about Path is that ABC spent $40 million to make a miniseries on a topic that they knew would be emotionally and politically charged, regardless of which way they spun the story or how deftly they managed to balance their portrayal of the events. And unless they’re getting an extraordinary amount of money from advertisers for the “limited commercial interruption” that will be part of the broadcast, that $40 million isn’t an investment that’s likely to net them a substantial profit on the backend. So they’ve taken the most fraught historical event of the past decade (at least for the US, which is the network’s primary market) and spent $40 million to turn it into two unprofitable nights of dramatic “entertainment.”

The question I want answered — and it’s not a question I’ve seen anyone ask yet (though maybe I’ve simply not been looking in the right places) — is this: If ABC wanted to tell the story of 9/11 that badly, why did the network choose to tell the story as fictionalized drama rather than as solid, investigative journalism? ABC could have picked 20 smart reporters, given them each $2 million to cover their expenses for a year, and used the results to craft a week’s worth of well-researched, hard-hitting, long-form news broadcasts. Why do we get $40 million worth of actors and stage sets instead of $40 million worth of research and interviews?

On the whole, I liked the Coffee Cup theme I’ve been using for the past few months. But it was an awful lot of brown to look at on a regular basis. And so I’ve swapped it out — for now anyway — for the crisp blueness of AquaFluid.

It’s Labor Day here in the US, a national holiday where we honor the contributions of the ordinary worker to society by giving everyone the day off. Banks, schools, and government offices are all closed today. Most (if not all) of the big buildings downtown are empty (except, perhaps, for a security guard or two — but it’s their job to work when no one else does, right?). Simply driving around town, you can tell it must be a holiday from the sparseness of the traffic.

Unless you’re at the mall. Or Home Depot. Or Best Buy. Or Wal-Mart. Or any of the thousands of other stores across the country where Labor Day means big sales and big crowds. And therein lies what has become the major contradiction behind Labor Day: the people who the holiday is supposed to honor and celebrate are often precisely the people who don’t get to take the day off. After all, you can’t really hold a big sale at Williams-Sonoma (or the Gap, or Restoration Hardware) so that all those folks with nice white-collar jobs can get non-stick omelette pans (or pre-distressed khakis, or faux retro cabinet fixtures) at 30% off if you don’t have a full complement of salespeople on the clock to keep the shelves stocked and run the cash registers.

To be sure, a lot of traditional working-class places of business — factories, warehouses, stockyards, etc. — also shut down on Labor Day. And many of the white-collar offices that are closed today still employ people who are several steps down the income ladder from the lawyers and corporate managers and account executives who head those firms. So there are certainly a number of ordinary workers who get to sleep in today as well.

But the US economy is now dominated more by jobs in the service and retail sectors than it is by jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry. And so the bulk of the “grunts” among the nation’s workers — e.g., the people who do the basic, relatively low-skilled jobs that keep the larger wheels of the economy turning smoothly — can’t safely assume that their holiday actually is one they get to enjoy. While I don’t have hard numbers on this, I suspect that the vast majority of salaried workers across the nation officially have today off, while a substantial percentage of workers who draw an hourly wage have to put in a shift today: even if, by all rights, it’s these folks — the ones who get paid by the hour, rather on two-week pay-cycles — who should be first in line for this particular bit of vacation time.

This is also one of the many ways that the class divisions that exist in the US are rendered invisible. The mainstream media typically make much of this as one of “our” noble national holidays. Every year, it seems, you can count on a warm and fuzzy piece on the nightly news about the workers who built this country, and the sacrifices they made, and the glory of their achievements. And they’ll probably also run footage of holiday crowds lounging at the beach or enjoying picnics in the park. But the odds are good that they won’t have much to say about the sizable number of “us” who don’t get the day off at all.

In fact, this sort of news coverage helps to maintain a prominent image of “us” as a nation that simply doesn’t include working class folks — or, at best, it only allows them to exist on the margins of the national community. If “we” all have the day off, after all, then folks who actually have to work today are presumably excluded from the “we” that (allegedly) characterizes the nation as a whole. If this is what it means to have your contributions to society honored, I’m not sure I want to know what it would look like to have those same contributions ignored or dismissed.