Empire of Death

The collapse of the Soviet Union hit male life expectancy with the impact of a war. Average life expectancy fell from a peak of 65 in the mid-1980s down to 58 in the early 1990s. After Putin took over in 1999, life expectancy slowly recovered, reaching 63 in 2010 (female life expectancy is now 75, the highest in Russian history -- the huge gap is due mostly to alcoholism, homicides and traffic accidents, which kill lots of young males).

Now Russia's post-Soviet collapse has its eerie American echo.

This shambles which was once an Empire has lost the capacity to build or inspire. But it still has the most astonishing power to destroy.

One Up For Ground Zeroes

The branch of Occupy otherwise known as Chicago's hard-working teachers defeated the plutocrats despoiling public education in this country. In not unrelated news, KojiPro announced the studio's next anti-neoliberal epic - Metal Gear Ground Zeroes. Mission briefing incoming!

In The Time of Neo-Slave Uprisings

Historians of the future will marvel about how The Uprising started with a despairing fruit vendor in a dusty, forgotten Tunisian town. Who could know that one small light would set off 35 years of accumulated social dynamite?

Because we debt-slaves of this earth, we wage-serfs, we who have been suppressed, repressed, depressed and dispossessed by this horrible evil neoliberal system of planetary plutocracy -- we have HAD IT with the undemocratic, unrestrained, unregulated domination of the 1%.

From Aleppo to Cairo, Caracas to Jakarta, Nandigram to Barcelona, the class struggle has been going live. Now Chicago joins the ranks of hero cities. The indispensable Diane Ravitch, ferocious critic of the neoliberal scam of school testing and privatization, has all the latest on the Chicago teachers' strike (updates here).

From Small Beginnings...

So my life as an official media scholar begins at the beginning, a.k.a. the adjunct trail. The pay is about the same as when I was a grad instructor, but there are some nice perks to being a real professor (aside from the obvious perk of being able to teach, which I've always enjoyed.)

Psychologically, every graduate student wrestles with oceans of self-doubt. It can be a productive thing, because it keeps you honest and committed to learning. The down side is, years and years of self-doubt can be deeply caustic. On most college campuses, graduate students stick out like a sore thumb. They are the haggard ones, who walk not with the lackadaisicality of students or the complaisance of tenured professors, but that nail-biting freneticism of temp-workers everywhere, as if someone is charging them for every breath of oxygen (which, when I look at my mountain of student loans, is scarily close to the truth). To paraphrase a famous Half Life level, every grad student is an interloper.

That's why graduation doesn't hit you until you see your name on the office door: "Dr. Such-and-such". Then you realize, well, yes, come to think of it, I did defend my dissertation. I walked through the portal, after all, and now begins my second life. Now the game begins all over again. From small beginnings...