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To all the twits:Twittledeedumface is lying to you, or haven't you all figured that out yet. I guess if you're the type of people who still haven't figured out that Obama has sold us all out, then you also haven't figured out yet that this website sends information about you all over the planet for a few shekels profit, and sends messages to your friends and to total strangers asking them to let you(you? Me? WHO??) 'add them as a friend' in order to continue to expand this cluster poke that they call a 'social network'.Please.It's worth it to log on again to this tweedledee site to further clarify that I hate twitface. Though I won't get paid my proscribed 112 dollars an hour for teaching, class is in session anyway. Let's contemplate this lesson.Calm down? 'Laugh out loud"? (is that as opposed to laughing silently--which in fact it is, sense no one can hear you laugh in the vacuum of a twit or a text).To have contempt for (as I do) any and everything that continues to lead us all away from writing letters to each other and posting them (many people can no longer write letters, I've read in medical journals, because our manual strength and dexterity with pencils and pens is atrophying), that excuses us in such overwhelming numbers from calling each other on the phone to hear each other's voices, that curtails intimacy; to be witheringly sarcastic and contemptuous of that is the calmest possible thing we could all be doing (though we don't--we love what takes us away from intimacy, because intimacy requires pain, vulnerability, risk, and also WORK. Why actually inetract in each other's lives when we have liquid display screens and PROZAC to do the heavy lifting, eh?According to the lobotomy-baby favorite, "Wired" Magazine, we are approaching a culture of total digital reality in which we will seldom see each other RealFace to RealFace out there in ANALOG reqality, but will lie in chairs in the dark hooked up to cerebral dramatizers that will allow us to work, interact, and communicate 'with' each other in our twit personae. Wired also opines that the majority of people who twit, tweet, twiddle, and twiz are sitting bored in their florescent lit office cubicles playing the latest generation of role playing games with one eye peeled for their boss to stride round the corner and catch them, imagining ever more complex combinations of 'emoticons' to hairpin to their emails, and firing off twits while sucking down vile office coffee. I don't work in an office, my bosses are usually frightened of me because I tell them where to stick it, and my job may be frightening as a colonoscopy, but it sure ain't boring, still, those of you who twit for this reason have mu sympathyWhat gums up my baud rate and attenuates my band width is rather, that one particular group of twittlers: the young, sea breeze face splash consumers and boca burger eating switchback free climbers, or else the ones who twit in their college dorms, a beer in one hand, who wear campy t shirts that read "I saw Twilight Ten Times!" and who eat granaola and rycycle to save the planet but don't seem to know that the most ferociously reactionary Republican/fascist in America is Whole Foods chairman and CEO, John Mackey, and that the natural foods industry leaves as large a carbon footprint on the planet as Ford Motor Corp. Oh, and the Easte Bunny ain't real either.I spend an embarrassing number of man hours every week standing in front of college students in their twenties who haven't the slightest clue as to what motivates Hamlet to pretend he's mad, why no one will believe Cassandra when she warns the Greeks that tragedy is coming, why the attached photos here of you, Lillian, and You, Ms. Oli, are pictures of beautiful women while the universally idolized Beonce Knowells is a no-talent, cyborg with less beauty or singing ability in her whole body than Abbie Lincoln has in her left nipple. On the day that I notice that some of the twits on 'my twitface ' are seriously discussing Abbie's song, "Avec Le Temps" rather than prattling on about their furniture, picnics, 'social networking' and whatever else this short attention span enabling site fosters, I'll log off of FindLaw, NYTimes.com, and BlacklistPub.com and join right in with the twits exchanging face.But something tells me that ain't gonna be the case. My students informed me last Thursday at Wayne State University, sitting in the same classroom where I had taken a course in the history of the holocaust back when I was a young undergraduate at Wayne, that the torture and murder of innocent Iraqi civilians at Abu Ghraib does NOT make Americans like the Nazis because we won WWII. So, right and wrong is determined by who has the power and who wins? I asked them. "Yo, yeah, Professor Waller," they replied. "It's Darwin's law that the strong survive and the weak get tortured."Never mind that this is a woeful misunderstanding of Darwin (there is no 'Darwin's Law', nor is social Darwinism a legitimate theory of Darwin--it's just a lame ass excuse formulated by the robber barons who raped our grandparents in the twenties to justify sticking our grandparents into tenements, and murdering them in coal mines and on factory floors because they were clearly too 'weak' to deserve human rights);And never mind that they all display just as woeful misunderstanding of concepts (like monetary policy, genetic evolution, the structure of atoms, HUMAN REPRODUCTION, the history of the constitution, and various other things I learned in high school though for some reason they still lack these things even as college students);And never mind even that they scoff at and mock suffering, poverty, yearning, desire, and despair in literature and in the annuls of history. Never mind, in fact, that my 'white' students haven't a clue that they are not white (because in America, less than 4% of the population is descended from the Pinta, Nina, and Santa Maria, and thus 'whites' are actually white ethnics, whose grandparents spoke Polish, Italian, Irish, Yiddish, Spanish, and Armenian, yet they tend to be ashamed of their grandparents and want to pretend to be Paris Hilton, or failing that, Paris Hilton's dog.And finally, never mind that African Americans, who are now "free" to buy ipods, laptops, and flatscreens (and my Black students tell me all the time that democracy and freedom are about being able to buy things--I shop, therefore I am--only because our ancestors suffered four hundred years of lynching, being burned alive, being castrated with pliars, being disemboweled, having living fetuses torn from their wombs by 'white' night riders, and watching their children die of starvation in projects, tenements, and ghettos) and proclaim themselves no longer subjects of history because they are waiting for "God" to take them up to 'the wheel in the sky' and their reward in the afterlife (which will feature plenty of shopping malls, I suppose).Never mind all that. What it really comes down to, my twit friends, and all the twit strangers whose entreaties, messages, tweets and twitters keep popping unbidden into my email in box even though I never heard of you--is that most Americans of college age cannot tell you where Macedonia is , where the Court in the Haig is located, who sits on the Security Council of the UN, or even what state is west of Virginia, if they can even tell you who their state representative is.In short, read a book. I suggest anything by Thackeray, such as "Vanity Fair" so that you can learn to tell the difference between someone who needs to 'calm down' and someone who is sounding an alarm just before you hurtle over the edge into idiocracy,But then, I guess its all good, as long as we have our cell phones with us so we can text each other once we get there. In fact, we AREN'T like the Nazis. Nazis could read and write and knew geography and history.Happy Birthday, Lillian. I'll talk to you out in the world.Tweet.