I have a goofy schoolgirl crush on my representative. He's the only physicist in Congress, and used to teach at Princeton--what can I say? I've always had a thing for geeks. One time I wrote to him about a bill that would have put crazy limitations on academic freedom--basically requiring all international studies and area studies programs to retool to function as voc-tech schools feeding into the foreign service and CIA. Republican congresscritters were waving around the name of the late Edward Said as if he were some kind of academic bin Laden. What an ugly piece of legislation it was. In my letter, I made some wisecrack about how things would be going very differently in Iraq if anyone had ever made Rumsfeld read Edward Said.
Rush Holt sent me back a big parcel with several pages of the Congressional Record, with his part in the debates highlighted and annotated, along with a copy of the much-amended legislation as it eventually passed, and a letter explaining why he had decided to vote for the bill, based on its having been thoroughly revised between the day I wrote him and the day the vote was called. Handwritten on the letter was a note about how he, too, now had to wonder if assigning Said to Rumsfeld might not have helped.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-04-25 07:48 pm (UTC)Rush Holt sent me back a big parcel with several pages of the Congressional Record, with his part in the debates highlighted and annotated, along with a copy of the much-amended legislation as it eventually passed, and a letter explaining why he had decided to vote for the bill, based on its having been thoroughly revised between the day I wrote him and the day the vote was called. Handwritten on the letter was a note about how he, too, now had to wonder if assigning Said to Rumsfeld might not have helped.
Swoon.