In the past forty-eight hours, we’ve seen one thing for certain. The hour-glass clock is ticking. It’s ticking for the original American automakers. And I’m afraid no one’s going to be there to turn the hour-glass over this time around. Ford will likely be the only one of the remaining Big Two-and-a-Half to survive through the spring.

From the time I was three years old, I could look at an American car and tell someone its make and model. It was the only game that I played with both my mother and my father Jimme. I knew the difference between a ’68 Camaro and a ’70 Charger. I could watch cars drive down Adams Street in Mount Vernon and go, a Chevy Monte Carlo, a Chevy Impala, an Plymouth Dart, a Ford Pinto, a Buick Electra 500 or 520, and so on. Drunk or not, it made my father smile when I could pull the details of an American car out of a hat.

Of course, these were the days when American cars represented the standard car around the world. A two-door car, about as long as today’s minivans, with enough trunk space to fit two or three dead adult males, getting between six and ten miles a gallon. Those were the days when a gallon of gas cost about 35 cents. That was the fall of ’73. Then the OPEC oil crisis hit, and the long downhill roll of American automakers began. I remember the car lines in Mount Vernon, but only vaguely. We didn’t own a car. But many of my mother and father’s friends did. When the cost of gas went over $1 a gallon, I remember my parents’ friends complaining bitterly about the expense.

The only person I don’t remember complaining all that much was my mother’s friend Billie. They worked together at Mount Vernon Hospital. Billie just happened to buy herself a ’73 Kelly green Toyota Corolla. I rode in that car enough times to complain about how small it was. But I also remember how much Billie seemed to love her car. Millions of other Americans ended up doing what Billie did, most of them after the price of gas began its inevitable climb.

Even though the price of gas eventually fell and stabilized between 85 cents and a $1.05 a gallon, it was just too much for the dinosaur-like American automakers. They weren’t ready for the demand for fuel-efficient and safer cars, not really. They took a bunch of half-hearted measures, with the Chevy Citation and Chevette, the smaller Ford Thunderbird and Ford Escort, with new alloys and new paints that would chip and fade after three or four years. My favorite car by ’80 was the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, but they were shrinking the body for that car as well, but not bringing fuel standards anywhere near the Renault LeCar, much less a Corolla or Honda Civic.

By ’79, the writing was on the wall for AMC, American Motor Corporation. I used to joke that the company was conducting a geometry experiment. They wanted to see which of their cars could be the least inefficient, so they built an oval (Matador), a triangle (Gremlin) a semi-circle (Pacer). AMC would’ve likely tried a rectangle, but the Lincoln Town Car already cornered the market. They were a joke, and so was Chrysler. They were making soup cans with wheels by ’80. It explained the skepticism so many had when Lee Iaccoca went to Congress with hat in hand for a $1.5 billion loan to keep the company afloat in ’80 and ’81. That’s when they launched the whole K-car campaign, which helped, but didn’t exactly guarantee the company’s long-term future.

Something interesting happened in the mid-1980s. Chrysler came out with its Caravan minivan, giving them the bounce-back they need to buy the remnants of AMC. In particular, they got their hands on their American Eagle line, including Jeep. By the end of the ’80s, Iaccoca was a genius and Chrysler was comeback corporation of the decade. They inadvertently kicked off the last great boom in American automaking — the minivan and the sports utility vehicle. Not that other companies weren’t working in this area, particularly Subaru, Honda and Toyota. Or certainly, the Land Rover, Ford Bronco or Chevy Blazer. But Chrysler had taken two forty-year-old ideas and built on them to repackage the American car to American consumers who were dreading a future of smaller cars and Toyotas in every garage.

From ’87 until ’05, we entered a new age of the American automobile. Where one out of every four cars were SUVs, and at least half as many were minivans. Both built after the CAFE standards for fuel efficiency had been last updated in ’81, it meant that these cars could slip under the radar of government regulations. It meant that though a ’88 Chevy Monte Carlo (they were back in production by then) had to get at least ten miles a gallon, a Chrysler Grand Caravan or a Chevy Trail Blazer could be built without meeting any reasonable fuel efficiency or emissions standards.

By this time, I didn’t have any favorite cars. I briefly liked the Audi 5000 and the Nissan Sentra in the mid-’80s. But I’d fallen out of love with most American cars by the time gas was $1.30 a gallon. For most of the ’90s that was the price of a gallon of gas. Sometimes it dropped below $1.20, sometimes it rose to about $1.70. Meantime, American carmakers raked in the profits, forgetting that it would all have to end. I mean, people have been talking about oil running out my entire life, and it the business of automakers to pay attention to these things, right?

Wrong, especially about the makers located in Detroit, and the autoworkers located all over the US, Canada and Mexico. I remember having classmates in Humanities in seventh and eighth grade who worried about their dads losing their jobs at the GM plant in Tarrytown, New York. Their fathers made an average salary of $50,000 a year at those jobs. In ’82! That’s about $87,000 in today’s inflated dollars. It was so much money back then that in many cases — not every case, but many — their mother’s didn’t work outside of the home. One salary at GM and a high school diploma was all one needed back in the ’60s to get a job like this. But from the ’81-’83 recession on, there were constant rumors that GM was about to close the plant. They finally did, in ’98, as part of GM’s ongoing effort to restructure and make more money.

By that time, I only looked at Japanese and European carmakers. It was between a Honda Accord and a Nissan Pathfinder for me by then. As the luxury SUV era reached its height, it struck me how wasteful and unsustainable the whole thing was. Between the Hummer and the H2 alone, our M-1A Abrams tanks might get better gas mileage than GM’s gaudiest SUVs. That’s the greatest mistake of GM, Chrysler and Ford. That this was going to last forever. They allowed themselves for the second time in my lifetime to not read the writing on the wall.

So here it is. Never has finally arrived in ’09. The impeding bankruptcy of GM and selloff of Chrysler is days or weeks away. It makes me think of two things. One, a Subaru commercial from ’05 that was introducing its crossover SUV, the Tribeca. The commercial shows its competition, other, gas-guzzling, luxury American SUVs fading from the road as the Tribeca drives by. The narrator essentially predicted the end of the SUV “as we know it” by ’09. How right he was. The other is of a Atlantic Monthly article from ’07 that predicts the decade-long decline of the American economy. James Fallows wrote that by 2012, GM would be bought out by Toyota, and Ford by Honda. Chrysler would be a distant memory.

We finally bought our and my first car in September ’04. A Honda Element. The car, with an internal combustion engine designed for the American market, gets as much as 29 miles to the gallon on the highway. The Ford Escape, with a hybrid electric-gas engine, gets between 28 and 34 miles to the gallon. Even now, an American Honda plant in Tennessee makes cars that are generally more fuel efficient, safer and more environmental friendly than the best the American carmakers can come up with. That’s it in a nut shell. I have no idea what my next car will be. I’m hoping to buy Honda’s hydrogen full cell vehicle, the FCV. Otherwise, it would likely be another Honda Element, a Lexus hybrid or a Subaru. It probably won’t matter, because there won’t be any American cars to buy by then.

If I could go back in time, say to my Boy At The Window years, what tunes would I take back with me? It’s not as simple as taking my iPod back to the ’80s. It would disrupt the time stream between that decade and now. But I could burn a CD, convert it to an audio tape, and take that back in time to the ’80s. At most, I could only record ten or twelve songs. Also, the music I take with me to the heart of the Reagan years can’t be from the ’90s, it’s too close in the time stream. So, what would I come up with, especially since I think much of the music from the ’00s kind of sucks.

1. U2 – “Beautiful Day”: For my days of puppy love and infatuation, or when I needed a pick-me-up. It would’ve been my favorite song in the spring of ’82, the three-month period of my first and greatest crush. It was all “sky falls, you feel it’s beautiful day” period at school and at home.

2. Coldplay – “Clocks”: This song’s right up there with “Beautiful Day.” It’s about infatuation, love, being in love, wanting someone to love you who probably doesn’t. That was ’82 and ’87 and ’88 for me. That sense of British male angst was closest to where I was in the mid to late-80s.

3. Mario – “Let Me Love You”: A rare R&B song in an era where three genres have integrated to the point where hip-hop, R&B and rap are often one, the same and stale. The song’s simple, romantic, and youthful — though I think “a dyme, plus ninety-nine” adds up to $1.09, and I’m not sure what that means. 😉

4. Eminem – “Lose Yourself”: Whatever any of you think about Marshall Mathers, he has much in common with the late Tupac — he’s a poet using rap to communicate, not the other way around. My music collection in the ’80s lacked anger — John Mellencamp and Boogie Down Productions were about the angriest folks I heard before PE at the end of the decade. But even their anger was muted compared to Eminem. This would’ve been good for me on many a day at 616 to nod my head to.

5. Maxwell – “This Woman’s Work”: It’s a cover version of Kate Bush’s ’88 signature hit, but Maxwell kind of makes it his own. It’s … pretty, and the only artist in the ’80s who could’ve made a song so pretty was Prince.

6. Green Day – “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams”: Troubled White guys capture angst better than anybody, in this country at least. It would’ve been a perfect and dissonant response to Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” hit of ’87. For me, it encompasses my moodiness from the eighteen months between high school graduation and the middle of my sophomore year at Pitt.

7. U2 – “Walk On”: You can’t stay in angst forever, and if I needed a song to pull me out of a Green Day mood, this would be it. Plus, it sounds a bit like ’80s U2.

8. R. Kelly – “I Wish”: I generally don’t like R. Kelly, and his private life isn’t to be condoned. But we all have major issues in our lives that we struggle with. We all have weaknesses that we can’t quite overcome. We all have suffered loss, whether in the form of a loved one’s death or some other emotional trauma. It’s a good, cry-for-help song.

9. Celine Dion – “That’s The Way It Is”: This is borderline, and not just because the song came out in the last months of ’99. It sounds like pop music from the ’80s with a ’90s diva feel to it, not to mention it’s Celine Dion, right? Oh well. If my tape falls into the wrong hands, this song might fool some folks into thinks that this is an underground tape.

10. Anthony Hamilton – “Comin’ From Where I’m From”: This song is the story of my life. If this had come out in ’86 or ’87, I might’ve been the only person to buy it, as it borders between ’70s soul and neo-soul. If Groove Theory hadn’t done “Boy At The Window,” I might’ve used this song for the title of my book.

11. RENT Soundtrack – “Seasons of Love”: I picked this over John Legend’s “Ordinary People” for two reasons. One, between Mario, John Legend, Maxwell, and Anthony Hamilton, I’ve kind of privileged Black males here — oh well! Two, because Tracie Thoms knocks it out of the box with this song. It’s so ’00s and ’80s at the same time, and it puts a smile on my face every time I hear it.

12. Sting – “Desert Rose”: This last one was a tough one. I thought about picking Moby’s “One Of These Mornings,” symbolizing my leaving Mount Vernon for greener pastures in ’87. Or Moby’s “Extreme Ways,” but it felt too good for the decade of bad music from continental Europe. I thought about Ashanti’s “Rain On Me,” but her voice is so weak, too weak to take back to the ’80s. I wanted to pick another U2 song, like “Original Of The Species” from their ’04 album. But since twelve is the limit, picking the ever-eclectic Sting’s foray into world music seemed the proper choice.

I don’t know if my life would’ve been better if I had owned a tape like this. But I’m sure that my state of mind would’ve been better in my worst of the worst times with something like this in my Walkman. Now if I could only send some money back in time, too…

We live in an age where we overuse labels for folks whose works really don’t warrant it under any circumstances. “Beautiful” is one. “Off da hook” is another. But one that really gets under my skin more than any other is “genius.” Given the mediocre rot that is prevalent in our world, we are way, way too quick to anoint someone as a genius when at best, they’re brilliant. Maybe. Or have shown a flash of brilliance, exhibited shrewdness, or played the game in their profession like a violin or fiddle.

We need a reality check, though. Genius may well be relative, but it’s not that relative. For instance, would someone stand out as a genius if they were using their genius as one of the last two people on the planet? Or is it more obvious among six and a half billion people than it is among a few?

I’ve been hearing so-called authority figures in their fields or in general describing others as geniuses nearly all of my life. Some labeled as “genius” — like Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Yo-Yo Ma, even Michael Jackson and Prince — are obviously so. Part of their genius is that their work is unquestionably beyond the grasp of most people, universally brilliant and, at times, hopelessly complicated. Genius is harder to translate than define, and while all of these artists have enjoyed overwhelming popularity, their work has at times suffered because genius tends to go into uncharted territory, places where even their most avid supporters can’t follow. I can’t stand Miles Davis, but I recognize his genius. Was Jesus a spiritual genius? Was Gandhi? One could make that argument, I suppose. Madam Curie and Anna Julia Cooper were so brilliant and profound that their genius literally bordered on insanity. That fine line between genius and insanity might be the best way to know the difference between someone who’s brilliant and someone who’s a genius.

On the other hand, there are cases, far too many for my tastes, where using the term “genius” bumps into other terms, like “hyperbole” and a “bold-faced lie.” One vivid example of this was in high school. At various times, I heard my teachers describe our eventual Class of ’87 valedictorian and salutatorian as geniuses. Geniuses? Really? Now, I’m not taking away anything from the two people in question. They were virtually straight-A students with weighted GPAs of 5.45 and 5.17 respectively. They were both much more involved in school and community-related activities than I was or could’ve been in those years. But geniuses? I don’t think any of us approached “brilliant” in our Humanities years, much less genius. You could argue, though, that some of us were on the verge of non-genius insanity.

Another more vivid example was during my second year of grad school at Pitt, the spring of ’93. Four of us were lucky enough to serve as grad student liaisons on a academic search committee. The History Department was hiring for an assistant professor in Modern European history. It came down to two choices. One was a recent PhD from the University of Michigan whose research examined socialist movements in five European countries in the 1930s (France, Germany, Italy, UK, and Sweden). The other was another “freshly minted PhD” from a lesser known history program whose work concentrated on some aspect of twentieth-century Italian history. We attended the job talks for all four original candidates. We went out to lunch or dinner with them. We read all of their doctoral theses. While I can’t speak for my former colleagues, I didn’t see any of them as especially brilliant, and certainly not geniuses.

At the faculty hiring meeting — where we were allowed to attend, but not speak — a huge debate erupted over the top two candidates. The University of Michigan candidate, a White male with a background in German who also managed to pick up Swedish, French and Italian for his archival work, was labeled a”genius” by a few of my former professors. Yeah, right! I take nothing away from a man who was somewhere around proficient or fluent in five languages. But his research on socialist movements seemed rather pedestrian. His final chapter — the last thirty pages of a 600-page dissertation — took a combination of several theories to explain what happened to each nation-state’s socialist movements during the 1930s. His conclusion, based on on all of this research and theoretical application, was that the different trajectories of the socialist movements in these nation’s occurred by chance.

Despite one professor singing the praises of this candidate for the “depth and breadth of his knowledge” and language skills, if this dissertation was an example of “genius,” then I was a writing genius at the age of eleven. In the end, after a couple of impassioned speeches by senior professors in the department — including one where a professor said he wouldn’t “vote for any of the candidates” — the female candidate with the thesis on Italian history was hired.

It’s not that I don’t think that there aren’t geniuses among us, whether in the world of academia or in music or other places. I just think that the word shouldn’t be reserved for White guys who look like Clark Kent or for people who have doctoral degrees. Some of the least intellectually curious people I’ve ever met have PhDs, including two of my former advisors. I’ve met folks whose analytic abilities approached genius who never finished high school or college, much less a PhD program. There are barbers in barbershops from Mount Vernon to Pittsburgh to Chicago and Atlanta whose intellectual capacities would rival the best in academia, if they had the same platform for using theirs.

Genius is about much more than pure analytic ability or learning more than one or two languages. It’s about producing works, ideas, materials of such brilliance that others have to wear sunglasses in order to begin to see and understand the details. I think Toni Morrison, Nick Lemann and Eric Schlosser are writing geniuses. That Barry Sanders and Jerry Rice and Joe Montana were football geniuses, as was Jordan and Magic for basketball, Gretzky and Lemieux for hockey, and Navratilova in tennis. That Coltrane was as much as genius as Miles, and both as much as Mozart and Beethoven, if not more so. Like God, genius is no respecter of persons, or academic degrees, for that matter.

All I know is that I’ve met few actual geniuses in my life, and all of them were “outside the box” kinds of people, as eccentric and weird as they were normal and abundantly gifted. Genius, real, true genius, is rare. As much as we rush to confer the status of genius on to other, we should all take a deep breathe and put the term back in our pocket for the right person and the right moment.

The generation that either grew up in “the ’60s,” or “marched with Dr. King” or against Vietnam in the ’60s is a privileged generation. And they haven’t let us forget it for the past forty years. I should know. I’ve spent most of my adult life — and some of my growing-up years — swimming upstream against this pro-60s tide. The only thing about the ’60s that I can claim was that I was born in the ’60s, which is technically true. Then again, being born on the last Saturday in ’69 barely counts at all.

But that’s hardly the point. The optimistic sense that I felt during the mid to late-70s was a consequence of the ’60s, which, depending on which generation one is technically from, lasted from ’60 to ’68 or from ’64 to ’72. If you were a hardcore drug addict, then it lasted until you either died of an overdose or until you got clean. For most folks I’ve met who were part of that scene, the ’60s lasted until ’98. Again, I digress. The disappointment I sensed from progressives and Blacks and women and gays creeped up somewhere between the second half of ’78 and ’82. Then there was a mood shift, where those who lived the ’60s as kids or as revolutionaries had by the mid-80s exchanged their idealism for realism, and attempted to past that on to my generation.

Here’s the twist, though. It was passed on as a warning to keep our lives and minds on the straight and narrow path to financial and career success, as part of the “do as I say, not as I did” parenting and educational methodology of our era. No wonder my generation was labeled as slackers long before anyone from it could make their mark on the world. Mixed messages kind of have a confusing effect on kids as kids or students. Even when those from Generation X did follow that advice, they found that the jobs their parents had were either filled by folks from the privileged generation or weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

A former boss of mine once asked me was my high school class a political one. The question nearly made me choke on my spit. The general answer, of course, is no. There were moments of mobilization, I suppose. Like to get new textbooks so that folks could take them home after school. Or complaints about teachers who weren’t doing their job. Or about class sizes being too large for a Humanities class. But not much more than that. After all, the closest thing to Vietnam in the ’80s was divestment from South Africa, and that was more of a corporate/college issue for mobilizing people. Singing “We Shall Overcome” seemed silly when MLK Day had been put into law in ’83.

More than anything else, the contradictory behaviors and statements of the privileged generation in large measure explains the lethargy and apathy that my generation grew up in and had only recently distanced itself from. The privileged generation consistently claims the mantle of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, yet consistently made excuses for institutional discrimination, racist rhetoric and biased practices in our schools and in their jobs. The privileged generation argues that they were highly energized for politics and community like none that had preceded it, yet the voting record for these former radicals has been both contradictory — Reagan and Bush I — and low when compared with their numbers. Not to mention the utter lack of etiquette and community that exists in most of the country these days. Those from the privileged generation say that they sacrificed so much for my own, yet it is obvious based on everything from public services to education to jobs and housing that the only sacrifice they made was of their ideals.

Now I realize that I’m making gross generalizations. That not all folks who lived or experienced “the ’60s” was a progressive or into shaking up the system or into “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.” Regardless of what one says about ’60s folk who weren’t radicalized by civil rights or Vietnam, their plans for political and economic domination have been consistent for more than forty years. Those who’ve spent years gloating about the good ol‘ days about Grace Slick and Marvin Gaye, hashish and oregano brownies are nothing more than blowhards who may have done something of significance in the past, but certainly not now.

I just want the idea that if you were born after the ’60s, that you have nothing worth contributing to our nation to die a quick but painful death. It would mean forcing more of these radicals — real one and ones who are legends in their own minds — out of power. It would mean shifting the media’s and popular culture’s ’60s paradigm, which we have in some ways. Bottom line: we need to move away from privileging the ’60s itself, as well as the generation that we’ve given too much credit for what happened in it.

This isn’t just about beauty in the feminine sense, but let’s start there. It’s something that I’ve found interesting over the course of my relatively short life. The inverse relationship between beauty and insecurity. Everyone has them. But it seems that women and men who are universally considered “attractive” tend to be more obviously insecure than so-called average looking folks. I haven’t met someone who is seen and sees themselves as attractive and hasn’t show a sense of vanity or ego with it. From hair (or lack thereof) to nails and clothes to affect, it’s a pretty common theme. And it seems to get worse with age.

I’ve seen it firsthand. With my wife. With former girlfriends. With handsome guys suddenly finding themselves over thirty, thirty-five or forty with receding hairlines, bald spots or graying hair. Not to mention love handles. It’s a shame, because out of the span of an average life of seven or eight decades, we really stay in peak physical attractiveness for twenty or thirty years. Forty if we work hard at maintaining the physical plant. There’s got to me more to life than this.

And it’s not just the phenotypically gifted that show overt signs of worry. The mentally gifted do this, too. Oftentimes long before any signs of intellectual wear and tear are evident. When someone can no longer recall the Pythagorean Theorem, you know it’s all downhill from there, right? Of course, the beauty and the nerd in our culture have insecurities for different reasons — really two sides of the same coin. Attractive folks tend to be popular and often know only for how they look, even when they have other gifts. That could make almost anyone both arrogance and neurotically self-conscious. Plus, many people hate, actually hate, their highly attractive peers. That doesn’t help matters.

For the highly intelligent, the opposite is true, especially in the growing up years. The combination of pure analytical talent, heightened inquisitiveness, when combined with any critical thinking skills at all, makes them standout in the most uncomfortable of ways. Most folks prior to college don’t value these gifts, and in fact shun the folks who do have them. They’re uncool until college, then cool to exploit until grad school, and then envied once they make it to twenty-five or older. That could make even the most social awkward brainiac a bit nervous about themselves and others in their lives.

But what if a person is both beautiful on the outside and mentally gifted as well? Or at least, attractive with above-average intelligence? Beware of the person with multiple gifts and with the ability to hone them into skills. They can be arrogantly insecure on a scale that would scare the typically shallow — ala Tyson Beckford — or self-absorbed — ala Cornel West. They often don’t know whether their friends are their real friends or are hangers-on or are folks looking to screw them over in some way. Their enemies or foes tend to be obvious — at least at a younger age — and plentiful. With so many gifts, it’s no wonder folks blessed with them often feel like they don’t belong to anything or anyone, even with all of the success they garner in our world.

I’m overgeneralizing, of course. Because natural gifts aren’t evenly distributed. Parents play an important role in providing balance to the physically attractive or highly intelligent child-turned-tweener and teenager-turned adult. Peers who have more than coolness on their minds tend to help keep one’s head from getting too big or ego from being shattered into tiny pieces. Ultimately, having a vision for one’s life and the motivation and inspiration to live out that vision — based to some degree on one’s gifts and the guidance necessary for using them — is what keeps genius from venturing into insanity and beauty from total vanity.

I started writing this in response to the contradictions anyone can find in looking at Women’s History Month. Particularly the distance between feminist/womanist rhetoric about girls and women loving themselves loving themselves for who they are and not how they look and the everyday barrage of images about beauty and achieving it for others’ pleasure, if not for one’s own. Then I realized that this is an issue for women and men, boys and girls, regardless and because of race and socioeconomics. Then I thought that beauty isn’t the only insecurity folks who are blessed or gifted become neurotic about over time. Yes, we are all gifted in some way, but for folks who show some hint of talent at an early age, it can be a great burden. Let’s hope that we can find a way of losing some of this weight in time to enjoy our lives.

How’s the main line from Jon Secada’s ’93 hit “I’m Free” relevant to anything I have to say today? His often overwrought style — one that I still love, by the way — reflected my overwrought times fifteen years ago. It was this week in ’94 that I took and passed my PhD oral comprehensive exam. It’s not of particular significance in the whole scheme of things. Within six months of this exam, I passed my dissertation overview defense and officially became ABD (All [all coursework completed] But Dissertation [thesis]) at the ripe old age of twenty-four. Two years before, I completed my master’s degree in two semesters of grad school. The importance of this event, though, shouldn’t be weighed in degrees. It should be measured in terms of perseverance, determination and the ability to suspend reality.

It all started when I transferred to Carnegie Mellon in March ’93. I knew that I didn’t want to earn three degrees in History at Pitt, and I was a year into the doctoral program there at the time I announced my transfer to my then advisor Larry Glasco. I didn’t say this to him, but I had my eyes on things like fellowships, publications, conference presentations, teaching opportunities, and the academic job market when I made my decision.

In a department where the average amount of time it took for a student to earn a PhD was fourteen years, I knew that there was next to no chance for me to get articles published, pick up a research grant, present at major conferences, or to teach my own courses in the next couple of years. Heck, three months before, Glasco had told me how disappointed in me he was because he thought I was doing an independent study course using quantitative data from census records. Except I wasn’t doing an independent study course with him! My advisor didn’t even know my course schedule! I knew that I needed to leave before I’d find myself living the rest of the ’90s and well into the ’00s as a Pitt History grad student.

I probably should’ve applied to UMich, NYU or UCLA to finish my doctorate. But I went with Carnegie Mellon because of one professor, Joe William Trotter, Jr. It would be the first time I was to work with a quality Black history professor, and he was a tenured one with a respectable research agenda at that. So after taking a grad course in African American history with him in the fall of ’92, I applied to go to Carnegie Mellon, and easily got in. I don’t know what it’s like now, but they only accepted six or seven student in their doctoral program a year, providing full funding (tuition and stipend) without a teaching schedule for the first year. By the time I told Glasco about my move, I was hopeful about my academic future and career prospects.

A full twelve months later found me more humble and more appreciative of the opportunities I had before me than I’d been at any time since the months after my homelessness episode in August ’88. I suffered through a year of sparse dollars, six weeks of post-Pitt unemployment, only to take a job with Allegheny County paying $6 an hour, and found myself within a week of being evicted from my apartment in July ’93. None of my plans for academic domination had worked out that summer, except for me passing my written comprehensive exams that May before I officially began grad school at Carnegie Mellon. Even then, the week of my exams was also the week I had root canal surgery on one of my front bottom teeth. I was on 800 mg of Motrin the day I took my exams.

It was a rough second half of ’93. I dedicated myself to God, church and being the best grad student I could on a $750 a month stipend. I thought for a while that I’d made a tragic error. Carnegie Mellon’s professors wanted to put their stamp of approval on me, so I found myself taking a couple of first semester grad school courses I actually took when I was at Pitt. My advisor called himself “running interference” to keep my publishing and other career ambitions in check. And the campus as a whole was about as exciting as the typically dreary and cold weather of Pittsburgh itself. By the beginning of November, I saw myself wondering if I should just get certified and teach high school history instead.

What happened instead was a combination of what I saw as providence and my determination to make something out of virtually nothing. I simply changed my attitude. I started praying more, casting my burdens unto the Lord, and whining a heck of a lot less about the situation. I kept reminding myself about being in worse situations with fewer resources. Most of all, I began to act as if I knew that everything was going to work out, that I would be free of coursework and grad school sooner rather than later. That carried me through the end of ’93.

The following semester started with me surviving the coldest and snowiest winter I’d ever known with sneakers with holes in them. I ended up taking out my first student loans since my first semester of grad school so that I wouldn’t have to eat chicken and rice three out of every four week. It was a pitiful and monk-like experience for me, those days of grad student life at Carnegie Mellon. I made a point that semester to spend much more time on Pitt’s campus, even sacrificing some academic time for time to hang out with friends and colleagues. At least once the temperature got above ten degrees Fahrenheit. I didn’t realize how isolated I felt until I started studying and writing on Pitt’s campus again.

I managed to convince my paranoid advisor that I was ready to take my oral comps, as grad students like to call them. Trotter, of course, was worried that I wasn’t ready. True be told, I probably could’ve taken them before I left Pitt. But there were academic politics involved. I wasn’t a typical Carnegie Mellon grad student, and it had nothing to do with my grades. I was a free-thinker who didn’t adapt to the brown-nosing style of most of my colleagues. I hadn’t “paid my dues” and spent a full three semesters taking redundant courses before moving ahead with my doctoral thesis plans. I hadn’t gained the confidence of all of my professors. What I did in response was to put my foot down. I suggested that if that really was the case, then why am I here when I could’ve gone to another school — especially since Carnegie Mellon had literally accepted all of my Pitt grad school credits? In the end, my advisor worked it out. I was scheduled for a two-hour inquisition in mid-March.

I ended up with a group of professors who were and weren’t my biggest fans. One professor was a mealy-mouthed, Neo-Marxist type who expected her students to stick their noses as far up her butthole as possible. I had her for Comparative Working-Class History the previous fall (it was really US and Western European Working-Class History with a book on Russian women mixed in). I had my advisor for US and African American history, and another professor for History of Education. I spent my holiday break and the first two months of ’94 preparing for the comps, which, if I didn’t pass, would either have one more opportunity to take again — but not until the fall of ’94 — or I’d have to consider another potential profession.

The afternoon before the exam, I was trapped at Forbes Quad (now Wesley Posvar Hall) waiting for a late-winter downpour of sleet and rain to stop. I had no umbrella, and didn’t want to walk home or to Carnegie Mellon in the middle of the mess. I happened to have Jon Secada’s “I’m Free” on at the time. The rain stopped right in the middle of the song. Some clouds opened up and a gigantic rainbow appeared. It was the first time I’d ever seen a rainbow. I’m not kidding. This really happened, and it was a first for me. I took it as a divine sign that everything was going to be all right. And of course it was.

What I take away from this is that regardless of feelings, fears or circumstance, the ultimate thing that determines whether we succeed or not, make it or not, is us, our faith, our drive and determination. The signs are always there for us to see and act upon. The spiritual and mental resources are always available to tap into. It really is up to each of us to seize the moment, to take the right chances at the right time and in the right ways in order to make the near impossible possible and the difficult rather easy. We just have to free ourselves from ourselves, to get out of our own way and make what we want of our lives.

Far be it for me to comment on issues not directly tied to Boy At The Window…wait…who am I kidding! Everything I talk about relates to my manuscript somehow, even if the post is as loopy as a Berkeley, Greenwich Village or Takoma Park hippie walking around after dropping acid. I digress. I have some recent events to comment on, ones that are both amusing and disturbing. Like the difference between watching Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show last Thursday versus watching Bill Maher’s Real Time just 24 hours later. It was comic-turned-serious journalism at its best and worst, and just a day apart.

We all know the Stewart smackdown of Jim Cramer story. It might as well have been Pacquiao vs. De La Hoya from last December, only the ref would’ve stepped in after the second round instead of letting it go for eight. The reason it was such a slaughter was that Jon Stewart, for all of his irreverence and goofiness, cares about these issues. He certainly cares enough to study the material he needs in order to raise tough questions and poke fun at political and cultural issues simultaneously. Jim Cramer was about as prepared to respond to Stewart as I would’ve been — when I was nine years old! The Daily Show was already one of my favorite shows before the past week and a half of Stewart raging against the machine. Now I can safely keep the TV off of MSNBC — unless it’s Keith Olbermann’s Countdown — and CNN and only watch Comedy Central or BBC America for real news.

It also speaks to how little news we actually get from our cable news networks like CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FIX News, Headline News and so on. It’s no surprise that despite this past election cycle, most Americans have moved away from traditional carriers of news and endless oppositional commentary to looking up what they want on the Internet, and often through blogs at that. And since when is it news that good comedians are also very inquisitive and wonderfully smart people? From David Letterman to Richard Pryor, comedians get to ask tough questions because, in the end, a tough question is easier than their easiest joke. It’s in a good comedian’s nature to do so. I hope they’re paying Stewart enough money to stay on at least three more years.

Contrast Stewart’s brilliant performance to the one mailed in by Bill Maher last Friday night. Heck, saying that Maher mailed it in insults the US Postal Service. More like he barely showed up. Maher couldn’t remember the name of the conservative blogger he brought in to bite at Michael Eric Dyson’s ankles, couldn’t remember that Dyson’s been at Georgetown since the summer of ’07. Dyson’s a guest that Maher has on at least once in every split-season of Real Time since it’s been on HBO! Maher then spent fifteen minutes talking with Sarah Silverman about the Playboy Mansion. I love Sarah Silverman, but that segment couldn’t have been worse if Michael Richards was there interviewing Mel Gibson. Maher’s lack of preparation highlights the reality that even a talented comedian must work hard at their craft to stay at the top of their game.

But there’s more to this than simple sloppiness. Maher’s edge has dulled because Bush Jr.’s no longer in office, and President Obama has been pretty good so far. “Pretty good” compared to the previous resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is like comparing Julius Caesar to Nero. As much as there is to criticize Republicans, neoconservatives, or even the Obama Administration about, Maher had little to offer last Friday night. He didn’t even mention the Stewart-Cramer showdown in his monologue. At least it would’ve broken the monotony of his “New Rules” or tired “third rail” arguments about social issues and religion.

With Dyson and the conservative blogger, it was an attempt to spice up Real Time with a real good argument. Except it was much of the same oppositional bluster signifying nothing that Stewart has been so critical of in recent years. Plus, weren’t there other, younger folks available last Friday to talk more intelligently — or at least, entertainingly — about race or social issues or the future of American conservatism? Not that Dyson is old, at least physically. Intellectually, his ideas represent the early ’90s, the height of the so-called Culture Wars, and not an understanding of race in the early twenty-first century. Maher and company might have been better off with Kevin Powell, Rachel Maddow or — dare I say — Ross Douthat from The Atlantic Monthly on his show last week. Fresh faces, fresh ideas, more measured arguments. That was missing last Friday. I sense that this is a freshness that has been missing for at least a year.

Maher’s problem is part of a larger problem with the media over the past ten or fifteen years. If you listen to standard radio and watch TV news and cable edutainment long enough, you hear the same voices and see the same faces. You know what Pat Buchanan’s going to say ten minutes before he say it. You’re ready for Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post to take his pregnant “Uuuhhh” pauses before he actually opens his mouth. You’re sure that Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala will spin like crazy for their ideological perspective before you’ve stopped brushing your teeth in the morning. When’s the last time someone new and under thirty has made a big splash as a journalist, commentator, writer, or intellectual in the media of the media? Bottom line: the media elite — that’s anyone with an established name in publishing, TV, radio, cable, Hollywood and music, and to a much lesser extent, the Internet — spends so much of their time talking to themselves that they’ve long lost touch with what the rest of us see, think and say.

That’s why Stewart is so refreshing. He and his staff, through humor, sarcasm and actual intellectual curiosity, have their fingers on the pulse of many Americans disenchanted with this sorry state of media affairs. It’s part of the reason why I started this blog. I hope that Maher brings his “A” game in the coming weeks. Or this will be yet another show I’ll have to skip.