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Erich Reinhard
Erich Reinhard
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>If you’re crazy enough to switch majors at the outset of your junior year, or feeble minded enough to regurgitate others’ viewpoints while believing them to be your own, you’d not only fit the mold of a good many others on IU’s undergraduate scene. You wouldn’t just share something unexpectedly in common with me (at least occasionally). You might also be ripe for your latest superstition checkup. A superstition checkup would evaluate how addled your mind and spirit are by the travails and transitions incumbent on every college student and determine how vulnerable you are to parasitic scams, junk science and kooky conspiracy theories. It would be an introspective exercise, of course, but also entirely informal and individualized. It would not need to take place on any regular basis, only when circumstances truly called for it. All it would ask you to do is ask yourself some questions.“Superstition checkup.” You might snort at this, and perhaps rightly so. But I doubt it because quite a few of my religiously oriented friends have the modesty to acknowledge how their own faith could be taken as little more than superstition. They’re just as aware of the absurdity potentially coloring their beliefs as its legitimacy as I am with my most burgeoning convictions.One such conviction (although it hasn’t always “burgeoned”) is a belief in reincarnation. I’m more than happy to tell you why a superstition checkup could be necessary – even more necessary than, say, a dental checkup, whose function has been lost upon me because I treat my teeth with decency anyway.At the start of a new year, I think of myself now and then as the archetypal, idealistic, youthful scholar who cavorts across this sunny campus with books in arms and earnest love of life and learning in my heart. I didn’t see myself as a budding Bertrand Russell, blithely but boldly pondering my own role in and compatibility with society. Nor did I consider myself the reincarnation of some equally influential person.But there’s a chance I was some kind of gawky, spastic, quirky intellectual. I might have taught physics or philosophy at some far eastern university just a few decades ago. I could’ve emigrated to America after being exiled from Europe in the revolutions of 1848. I could’ve ... Oh, but you don’t care, do you? It couldn’t possibly spark the most negligible glimmer of interest.Then that confirms it. You’ve just completed your superstition checkup in advance, and vicariously, too. You didn’t even have to answer those questions I said you would. Having learned through me, however, you’ve helped honor the hyper-idealistic, cyclical, larger-than-life forces of nature I’ve just spent the last 400 words deriding. Congratulations. Come again soon (to your senses).
Editorial Cartoon
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>If you’re like me (younger than 25), your most reliable sense of history probably begins around the time you were born. Even so, our generation has filled out voter registration paperwork, watched CNN or Fox News daily and often perused USA Today or the New York Times (because, as students, we get it free) so as to pretend we’re reading something not spooned out for us on a digital platter.Nonetheless, please don’t adopt the attitude that 2008 really is some kind of historic or “watershed” year. It’s certainly nice to think so. And scientifically speaking, there’s always something going on, as the hot chick on the weather channel tells us. But is that something history? No. At least not the kind I’d like to read a book about some day, or have kids learn in school.So if you don’t mind, I’m going to place a moratorium on the superficialities spouted by our textbooks, professors and high school teachers under the veil of “history.” Then I’m going to breeze through a few fascinating “plot points” in the wondrous narrative I believe our history is and still ought to be.Let’s start with Fort Ticonderoga (“Fort Ti” for short), the crown jewel of educational tourist sites in upstate New York and a stronghold against the British in the second half of the 18th century. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison painted ennobling portraits of the former garrison on Lake Champlain in their diaries.In the year 2008, the New York Times had to report the site’s president proclaiming it “essentially broke.” The New York State Board of Regents forbids selling the fort museum’s artwork to settle debts, but its leadership, headed by executive director Nicholas Westbrook, have placed politics over principles enough to think they can afford to ignore the Regents’ statute. Surely, old T.J. would’ve cheered them on.Reflections on 1968 should indeed include the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Tet Offensive and “Tricky Dick” Nixon’s ominous rise to the presidency. Beyond that, the overrated psychedelic anniversaries and memoirs on magazine covers aren’t doing it for me. Just go back 20 years to the photograph of Harry Truman, beaming and brandishing the newspaper headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Dismissed and disdained by every major newspaper as a failure from 1947 to the night before the election, Truman’s whirlwind “whistlestop” tour of the country earned him not only sudden but genuine endearment to millions. He might have proved almost half the nation dead wrong. Isn’t that just as memorable, if not more, than the shadows of disillusionment cast by the Baby Boomers?Lastly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the most incendiary authors of the 20th century, died last month. His 18 years in the United States helped solidify his status as an eminent voice of individual rights, democracy and anti-censorship – exactly what today’s Russia is punishing every nefarious chance it gets. “Historied” out yet? Don’t be. It’s still a new century, and we’ve got 92 years to go.
IDS Editorial
Cartoon
Cartoon Editorial
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It was the single least-stressful day in my recent memory: fishing, swimming, lazing about and reading on a lake in northern Maine, followed by a delicious nap until dinner. I’d indulged in a pleasant lack of hygiene, having not showered in some time.This didn’t matter until I plopped myself down at the table, underestimating how my hair must have looked. It looked messy. By “messy” I mean something akin to a bloated tick or a scraggly mullet crowned by a giant leech. As eminently satisfied as I was, however, I could sit back and let my family ridicule me all they wished. And that they did.“Good God,” Dad crooned, “look at Erich!” Shoving a bony index finger in my face, he counted at least three unfortunate hairs across my pate. “White ... White ... White! Hah!”“No,” I cried, “they’re just really, really, really light brown.”Dad snorted. “They look white to me.” Dinner wasn’t over, but my pristine day was. I’d gone 20 years, eight months and a few days without facing this unequivocal fact of life: I’m gonna be old-and-farty, and soon, for the hairs do not lie. Which begs the question: Why do I have them? I’m not long enough in the tooth to have a beer, for Pete’s sake. But if you’d listened to my family, you’d be led to believe that hair-graying has nothing to do with age, which it damn well does. They bombarded me with conventional wisdoms, such as: “Some of it’s genetic,” or, “You can’t escape it, so just live with it.” These might be true to some degree. My eldest brother, for instance, has an unsightly receding hairline, borrowed from my grandfather. By his late teens, he was fretting over not only graying, but missing hairs, too. That was eight or nine years ago; it’s decidedly worse now. My maternal grandmother was said to be completely gray by 40, and Steve Martin’s hair has been white for almost that long. Last Wednesday, Barack Obama acknowledged how much “more salt than pepper” he’s noticed up top since his campaign started. Graying hair (as opposed to hair that is simply gray, white or some other soulless color) finds no shortage of examples in our promising 21st century.No matter how culturally infixed these ideas become, however, they fall frustratingly short of the truth. My hair is nothing like my brother’s. It doesn’t look, grow, feel or behave the same at all. And to insist on the propagation of fleeting genetic linkages is worse than stupid: It’s ignorant. I’m sure my mom’s mom never would’ve settled for a “scientific” explanation like “There’s my old Aunt Mildred catching up with me.”The most tenable alternative explanation (and most belabored) is found in that sinister, sibilant word we’ve all come to know and despise: s-t-r-e-s-s. Some say you can control it; others say it’s either nature or nurture. I’m not too sure about either, but I do know I’ll be old soon – and won’t blame it on any one thing or person.