Prelude (Note to my wife): This morning’s coffee, Chocolate Pecan, couldn’t hold a candle to yesterday’s more majestic “Grand” Pecan. Yet again, breeding trumps the libertine gimmick.

Anyhow…Normally about now I’d be using this space to wax triumphant about Geraldo’s latest daybreak cave capture — a blur of olivegreen, dust kicked up by the frantic rush of heavy-booted foot traffic, the cold Afghan sun glinting off bruised metal, hesitant gunbarrels poking into the crumble of yawning rock, that sort of thing — but not today. No, today I figured I’d use Mumia Abu-Jamal’s recent media swell to tell a li’l story about a sad memory I have from academia, a demi-meme for our teenculture’s relentless slide toward intellectual mediocrity.

I was giving a lecture to an argument class several months ago (I can’t remember the specific topic, but if it’ll help put you in the room with me, let’s say I was lecturing on, oh, affirmative action), when something I said raised the dander of one of my students, an outspoken baggypants-and-hooded-sweatshirt kid who’d evidently been taught by a teacher somewhere along the line that “participation” in class discussions is as important (nay, more important ) than what you actually have to offer the discussion materially — in short, the clear triumph of process over substance (and here I’m tempted to make some comment about “multilateralism,” but…well, I suppose this is that comment). At any rate, what this young brash buck offered the class, in the sneering tone and pitch representative of a whole meringue of overempowered Wiredmag-type knowitalls, was a mini-rant on the “hegemony” of the U.S. — it’s cultural exportation of Mc-Disney, Brittney, and boybandpop, it’s genetically altered wheat-‘n’-beef agri-imperialism, its invidious enviro-sins and Kyotododging, it’s faux piety, blah blah blah.

Now normally, my eyes glaze over, my lids clamp shut, and my jaw goes a tad slack the moment this kind of fevered progressivist litany begins to invade my transom…but one thing this kid managed to splutter out made my ears prick up:

“–the inveterate racism expressed in a kind of, of…global metaphor, in the emprisonment of Mumia–“

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt, but global metaphor? What do you mean?”

“Y’know, with Mumia.”

Sure, I know. Mumia. But…”Why a ‘global metaphor’? I’m not following you.”

“Because we support that corrupt regime. And because our doing so keeps all those Mumian peasants enslaved in sweatshops. The U.S. government,” (drumroll, please) “is by far the number one terror exporter in the world.”

…The saddest part of all this was not this confused boy’s mental morphing of a Philly Cop-killer into a geographical locale, some far-off Chomsky-esque nightmareland ruled by an ironfisted Kathy Lee. No, the sad part was, when I called him on it, he reacted with a practiced moral outrage, a cultivated and blistering disdain for facts doubtless nurtured by years of exposure to accomodating, coddling grownups.