Friday, January 05, 2007
Bush & High School
The president's current strategic planning in Iraq brings to mind certain episodes of my long-past and decidedly unheralded high school career. I'm sure most of you have done something similar in high school or even college. (I lucked out by the time I finally went to college - I'd gotten older and a bit wiser and rarely did such things.)
You know you're going to have that big important class project due by mid-term. The teacher would you let you know in the first few weeks that by mid-term you'd have to turn in some fancy project. A history diorama and biology plant collection are two that come to mind in my case - anyway... You know it's coming due - there's no getting around it. It's not like the class is going away or anything. That big project is staring you in the face. So, you use all that time to work diligently on it, right? Not even. You put it off.
The months left turn into weeks to go and still the big idea sits on a shelf in your room. Finally the weeks are looking like days and still you're no closer. Finally, Sunday night before it's due, you run around like crazy throwing crap together for this big important class project. If you get really, really lucky, you might get a C for the piece of crap you threw together overnight that should have taken you all semester to finish. Probably you'll get a D or worse. The teacher ends up disappointed, your parents are pissed, and you feel like crap as well.
In this case all that's fucked up is part of class. You can probably make up a lot of the grade with some extra credit work and a little brown-nosing of the teacher. Your GPA might take a hit, but that's really worst case.
In Bush's case, he's had, what, four years now to figure out what to do with Iraq? I'll have an answer by January, er, maybe February, er sometime anyway. Unlike a crappy bug collection for biology, this is a country where hundreds of people are dying every day. No amount of extra credit is going to fix that.
