Last night, sometime around 9.30, there was a knock at my door.  I live in a faculty residence on campus, so I knew that this was going to be a student, but I also knew immediately that something was wrong, because my students never just drop by.

Standing on my doorstep, visibly shaking, was a white student of mine who has been particularly active in anti-racism organizing on campus—he’s been actively involved in the movement to develop a general education requirement on the Dynamics of Difference and Power, and he’s organized workshops for white students who feel solidarity with students of color on campus but who have never learned how to discuss questions surrounding race.  He asked me if I’d been out in the parking lot lately, and then told me what he knew of what had happened.

What had happened was this:  a visiting professor in social psychology at the college just immediately north of ours had spoken yesterday afternoon at a forum on hate speech, and quite volubly decried the covert racism and apathy she found on campus.  Sometime after the forum, but before about 8.00 pm, her car was vandalized.  Her tires were slashed, her windows were smashed in, and the words “K*ke Whore” and “N*gger Lover” and “Shut Up, Bitch!” were spray-painted on the car.

Our crack local police force has, in a triumph of deductive logic, managed to classify this as a hate crime.

Last night, students, administrators, and a few faculty members gathered around the car, and then in one of the dining halls, to discuss what was happening.  Our president has cancelled all classes for today.  Meetings, marches, sit-ins, and community meals have been scheduled in their place.

I am convinced, after a restless night of self-examination, that a tacit community acceptance of the earlier racist events as somehow being less than serious, not intentional, “just an insensitive joke,” and so forth, has allowed the racism that dwells in our midst to feel comfortable enough here to make itself plainly visible.

I’m too upset even to cry.

My satellite TV provider has dropped a slew of channels from its offerings overnight, due to a contract dispute with Viacom.

The channels?  No biggie:  BET, Comedy Central, MTV, MTV2, MTV Espanol, Nickelodeon, Nick Games & Sports, Noggin, VH1, VH1 Classic and CBS.

The good news, of course, is that my provider is, as always, looking out for my best interests.  And in compensation for this loss of service, they’ll be refunding me a shiny new dollar each month!

Time, I think, to do a little service-shopping.

Because today, I am Easily Amused:  The Man Project.

I’m taking a poll, of all two of you who are reading these days.  What do you think of the name MediaCommons for an online scholarly publishing imprint, focused (for the moment, at least) on full-length texts about new media?

My obligatory conference day-of-hooky has come a little earlier than usual; under ordinary circumstances, I usually burn out on panels on the third day and zip off to do some shopping or sightseeing or other non-session related activity.  Here, it’s turned out that today’s the day, for a whole series of reasons, mostly that I’m presenting tomorrow, and the main panels I want to see today were scheduled for 8.30 am and 5.00 pm.

But I also went to the book exhibit this morning.  I now find conference book exhibits deeply depressing—both in the too-muchness of interesting work I’ll never get time to read, and in the too-fewness of publishers by whom I’ve already been rejected.  To recuperate, I decided to take some time off and do a bit of writing and thinking.  I’ll post some of those thoughts soon, but do want to post my notes from this morning’s session.

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What follow are my notes from this afternoon’s plenary address by Mark Crispin Miller.  Miller’s title, as listed in the program, was “Mediating Tomorrow’s History:  Live Coverage and Documentary in the Digital Era,” but in fact his talk had nothing whatever to do with that title, so I’m assuming there was a change of plans somewhere along the line, though no replacement title was announced.

I want to front-load Miller’s conclusion, though, making sure it’s above the fold.  As he said, before concluding on what he called “an apocalyptic note,” his conclusion makes it sound as though he’s more than a little paranoid (actually, what he said was that it sounds as though he wears a tinfoil hat while coming up with this stuff), but a little googling, and… well, it’s unfortunately not crazy, just scary.

The main story of Bush’s presidency, he argued, is not a stupid president, or the manipulations of the oil industry; the main story is that the Bush/Cheney movement is a radical theocratic movement (with the caveat that W. is perhaps not a sincere Christian, but he still talks with God and believes he was chosen).  In fact, Bush’s strongest supporters are the Christian Reconstructionists, a radical wing of the religious right, who want to see the U.S. transformed into a theocratic state based on the book of Leviticus.  Miller cited, as evidence of the Christian Reconstructionist incursions into the Bush agenda, the Council on National Priorities (which Miller called the steering committee of Christian Reconstructionists; I’ve attempted to find this group, and think that Miller must have meant the Council for National Policy), the Traditional Values Coalition (and particularly its director, Rev. Louis P. “Homosexuality Is a Social Disorder” Sheldon), the International Mission Board, which has been conducting conversions in Iraq in conjunction with its ostensible charitable aid, and a welter of Bush administration policy ranging from its harping on abstinence, the Defense of Marriage Act, and so forth.

But the most frightening bit of recent policy that Miller pointed to was the Help America Vote Act, which mandates touchscreen voting.  Much has been written in the blogosphere about the scandal surrounding Diebold’s knowledge of the unreliability of such systems.  What hasn’t gotten much press is that the main venture capitalist backing both Diebold and ES&S, the two primary manufacturers of computerized voting machines, is Howard Ahmanson, a Christian Reconstructionist who has said openly that he has the goal of imposing Biblical law on the US.

The end message:  Vote while you can, my friends.  Vote while you can.

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What follows are my notes from the first session I attended today.  They’re a little sketchy and a little incomplete (I got there about 10 minutes late), but they’ll at least remind me of what I heard.

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Just as things in Claremont begin to slow a bit, my travel schedule picks up.  I’m headed to Atlanta tomorrow morning, to attend SCMS.  I’ll be speaking on a panel put together by the Wordherders’ own Chuck Tryon.

Appropriately, given the nature of the event, the hotel offers free WiFi, so I’ll hope to blog the conference in some fashion.