“Live bears” across Missouri breathed a sigh of relief this week.

Student Body President Chris Polley announced the University has squashed the Student Government Association’s plans to bring a “live bear” to football games. No reason was given outside the administration’s discomfort with the idea.

I’m glad this “live bear” idea didn’t materialize because I don’t think keeping a bear captive for our amusement is something an institution of higher education should do.

But the effort to capture, collar, and cage a “live bear,” though misguided, was aimed at addressing a legitimate issue. That issue is the lack of school spirit among the students. Granted, every third freshman is wearing maroon, but what does that mean? How does that manifest in a sense of community as students?

The activities email I get every week has events the University is putting on and some by student groups. Where is, for lack of a more precise term, the voice of the students? I don’t mean things done for students, but actions taken by students, as students and not as some group.

For example, there were a few articles about the controversy last year with SGA and the money for Eagles tickets, but widespread protest? Calls for accountability? None.

Earlier this month, many campuses demonstrated in solidarity against a wave of cuts in education funding and tuition hikes. It’s not just California and their 32 percent increase.

Michigan, South Carolina, and Colorado students are looking at increases. Our freeze isn’t going to hold forever. There were over one hundred protests nationwide. Nary a word here.

Now we have this new fitness center being built while everyone holds their breath, waiting for budget cuts. Does this make sense? Even if the fitness center money was “set aside” by a student vote, doesn’t that call for a review and change of the system for allocating these funds? We shouldn’t be locked into spending millions of dollars by students who aren’t here anymore and barely gave a second thought to a building being constructed five years down the road.

RHA is considering converting Brick City into loft style “on campus” housing. Meanwhile, we’re plowing under actual “on campus” land to build special swimming pools in our new fitness center.

We have to slash our budget and risk tuition hikes somewhere down the line so we can fund this fluff. Is housing located further away from campus really what we need? How will that help build school spirit?

Students shrug it off for the most part. They are passionate in their own little spheres, but as a student body, they are uninterested in the course set for the University by the administration.

What would a “live bear” do? Bears live their lives almost entirely alone and spend a good chunk of that time sleeping. It’s somehow fitting that we would think to bring a solitary, territorial predator to try to draw people together.

Low attendance at some sporting events isn’t due to lack of spectacle. It is a symptom of a deeper lack of community among the students.

Until the root problem is addressed, all the “live bears” or maroon t-shirts in the world won’t make a difference.

Welcome to the discussion! Whether you’ve been with us since the beginning or just picked up The Underground for the first time, thank you. You’re the reason we do what we do.

Since you’re reading an alternative newspaper, I don’t have to convince you of the sorry state of the news media.

If they aren’t framing every story as a left-right shouting match, they use the shield of so-called objectivity to quietly condone the status quo.

It’s no wonder viewers, listeners and readers are seeking alternative media more than ever.

Readers like you look for something more than just the standard fare when it comes to news. You’re naturally curious; you like to look into different sources of information.

You’re a discerning reader; you don’t take things at face value. You search for unique stories, moving stories and divergent opinions.

In other words, whether you know it or not, you were already an Underground reader before you picked up this newspaper.

As smart, savvy, independent thinkers, our readers possess all the necessary qualities to be great journalists.

Take the next step. Join us as an Underground writer!

Famed independent journalist I.F. Stone got his start with a newspaper he created in high school called Progress.

From such humble beginnings, he went on to found I.F. Stone’s Weekly in 1953, a pioneering newsletter that fought McCarthyism, racism and was the first American publication to question the official account of the Gulf of Tonkin. There are now half a dozen awards for independent journalism named after Stone, given by organizations from Harvard to Berkeley.

Missouri native Walter Cronkite dropped out of college at UT Austin to take a job reporting for the Houston Post. Of course, his later contributions to television news were lauded at length after his death last June. His work that struck me the most was his coverage of the moon landing. Cronkite’s palpable excitement belied his curiosity and thirst for knowledge.

Neither of these men had formal training or journalism degrees when they started. What they had is what you have, a discerning eye for information, natural curiosity and a love of the truth.

And you don’t face nearly the obstacles those men did. You don’t have to start your own publication. Zach and Jenny Becker, our Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, respectively, have done that for you. You don’t need to quit school to write for this paper, either. In fact, we would specifically recommend that you not do that.

This is a newspaper in the old style; a community meeting place rather than a dry listing of the day-to-day machinery of the University. If you have a story to tell, if you have something to say, reach out to us. Shock us. Make us laugh or bring us to tears. Give voice to the voiceless. Satiate the burning desire to communicate. Being part of the discussion means being part of the solution.

Stone and Cronkite are gone now. They are passing the torch to you. Come tell your story.

Missouri State University President Michael T. Nietzel discussed his intention to step down as president at a press conference on November 3.

Nietzel, 62, said he would remain in the post through December 2010 to allow adequate time for the Board of Governors to find his successor.

Nietzel began thinking of leaving the presidency early this year, and he came to the decision to stay resign in August.

“I know Dr. Nietzel has been wrestling with this since early in the summer,” said Paul Kincaid, Nietzel’s chief of staff, in a press release. “It has been difficult for him, but he is confident that it is the best decision.

Nietzel mulled the decision over until last Friday, when he first informed the Board of his intention.

Photo by Jenna Drew. MSU President Michael Nietzel speaks during Legacy Day during August.

He then informed the administrative staff, followed by a mass email sent to campus the following Monday, informing them of the decision.

“At both the personal and professional levels, I want and need a change,” Nietzel said. “The presidency of MSU is a very public, demanding, and complex job. I have concluded that I cannot continue to do that job at a level of achievement that I want from myself and that the university has every right to expect from its president.”

When asked what role his wife’s illness played in his decision, Nietzel said the personal reasons for his decision were personal, and he would not elaborate on them.

Nietzel mentioned interest in a teaching position with the psychology department at MSU, but said he had no definite plans and no one had approached him about a job before or since the announcement.

Board of Governors Chair Brian Hammons said the Board will develop a plan for the search process in the near future.

“He has been a great leader for the university and a strong spokesperson for higher education in the State of Missouri,” Hammons said in a press release. “By any measure, the past four years under Dr. Nietzel have been tremendous years for Missouri State. He will be missed and he will be very difficult to replace.”

Nietzel (pronounced KNIT-zel) was hired in July 2005 after a national search for the ninth president of what was then called Southwest Missouri State University. Before that, Nietzel served 32 years at the University of Kentucky.

“Like all of us, I think his goal was to leave the university in better shape than it was when he arrived. He definitely succeeded,” Kincaid said.

This video is worth half a semester of a media class. Seriously. Is media supposed to simply be a mouthpiece for those in power?  Or do the people charged with disseminating information have a responsibility to the truth?  If they don’t, who does?

Missouri State University graduate and filmmaker Jonathan Stratman released the DVD of his film Roberto and the Robot for sale this week at the Moxie theater in Springfield and online.  The film was one of two major collaborative senior projects produced by MSU’s Electronic Arts program last spring.

Stratman said the most rewarding part of his experience making Roberto and the Robot was his collaboration with many talented people, both inside and outside the Electronic Arts program.  “The [Electronic Arts] program is great because they highlight your interest, but also focus on collaboration, which is a key part of all electronic arts generally and films specifically,” he said.

“Springfield has a great film community,” Stratman said, “You mention that you’re shooting a movie, and the word gets out, and people start calling you to be part of it.”

Stratman also praised the faculty and facilities at MSU in helping to create the film. “In fact,” he said, “a couple of teachers came up to me on the first day of shooting, wished me luck, and gave me $50 a piece.  That bought food on the first day of shooting.”

According to Stratman, the entire production cost around $3,000. Most of this money came from donations.  The rest, Stratman said, is on credit cards he’s still repaying.

The DVD has a very low price tag, which Stratman said is set just to cover the cost of making the DVD. Stratman described the DVD sales as “non-profit.”

The Roberto and the Robot DVD includes a commentary track recorded by Stratman, a behind the scenes featurette, and three other shorts produced at MSU: Roommate Wanted, American Psalm, and Circumvolve.

The soundtrack will also be available at the Moxie and online, featuring eight original rock tunes written and mixed by MSU student Isaac Crawford, who is also the sound designer for Roberto and the Robot.  Crawford cites early Rolling Stones and Velvet Underground as inspiration for the songs he wrote for the movie. “As the film progresses,” Crawford said, “the music also changes, adding the synthesizer sounds of the robot.”

Stratman expressed concern MSU’s Electronic Arts program might be seen by some as too difficult to join.  It should require a commitment, he said, but should also encourage a wide variety of students to join to enrich the collaborative process.

Stratman’s advice for students interested in the program is to start early. “Don’t wait to take a class you want to take, don’t wait to jump in and help with other people’s projects,” he said, “and don’t let people scare you off from trying to apply for the program.”

You can find out more about the movie at robertoandtherobot.com. DVDs are available at kunaki.com.

The author of this article participated in the production of Roberto and the Robot.

I feel pretty drained right now. I’ve been turning out writing at a pretty good clip. Some pals and I are going to shoot a movie I wrote called “Live and Let Spy.” That should be in internet form for consumption in a few months. It’s pretty short too, so no excuse for not seeing it!

I feel like the writing part of my brain is on auto-pilot, and is doing pretty good. But the political part is numb. The fire has kinda petered out. I don’t know how some of these people can keep at it day in and day out. It’s exhausting. I kept thinking maybe I need a better system to organize my time and effort and what not in order to get more articles and the like, but maybe I only have one a month in me.

Like the Schumer amendment, which would have given us a gimpy public option in the finance committee bill. It lost because of three Democratic senators. Those Senators are from North Dakota, Arkansas, and Montana. Each of those states has less than a million people. Combined, they are less than 1 percent of the population. Those states are all less than 30th in GDP, compared to other states.

I’d be cool with Senators having so much power, 6 year terms, filibuster, etc, if they were smarter and more responsible than most House members, but Senators are just as dumb as any other legislator. At this point, states are just arbitrary political organizations. Why should the 600,000 people in Montana get as much say as the 20 million in New York? Because of lines drawn on a map 100 years ago?

But, honestly, I’m not that pissed about it, not pissed enough to actually try to convince other people. If anyone objects to my analysis here, I’d just think, “Sure, whatever.” I mean, this seems so obvious to me that it doesn’t make sense to argue for it. It’s like arguing for how grass is green.  If someone tries to argue grass is transparent, it doesn’t sharpen your argumentative skills by arguing with them.

But moreover, I don’t want to argue with anyone. I just want to kick back with some beers and not have to face the real world, or the truth. It’s easy to see how post modernists can argue against the existence of reality when you regularly encounter people with views that are so divergent from yours that they don’t make sense. I think we all accept that other people have other opinions, but how is it that other people can have other “facts”?  Other “facts” then build other “realities.”

I posted a screed about healthcare a while back, here and on Facebook. I hoped my sister Colleen, who works in healthcare, would respond. She didn’t for a couple of weeks, so I guessed she didn’t read it or didn’t care. I happened upon that note the other day, and saw that she did reply much later. She wrote one sentence, basically saying she was disappointed at how little I knew about health insurance.

I wonder now if she felt the same way I do. We both have our divergent set of facts, building our own realities, but they are opposed to each other. Rather than try to hash it out, and risk crumbling those realities, we just don’t talk about it. We keep filtering our information so it reinforces our worldviews.

I’ll be back in form soon enough. Just thought I’d try to get some of these thoughts out while I’m here.

Following up on my column, “How Dumb is Congress?” I found that Laura Flanders has taken the idea of preventing an organizations under investigation from receiving federal funds to the next level. Wasn’t there something in the rule book about those without sin?

How about this great new website?  I love it.  I wasn’t blogging here as much before, mainly because the old format would have put my blogs up on the front page, knocking out other stories.  Now maybe I’ll feel free to post more.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of hoopla lately about President Carter attributing much of the fervor at the 9-12 march to racism.  Some have suggested there people are misinformed, and so driven to fear by ideologues. I think the media that have taken the protests seriously have focused on opposition to Obama and the Democrats.

But classifying the protest in any one way, or even characterizing it as mostly this or that cannot be done. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post (again!) about the confusion surrounding Glenn Beck’s political views and his followers.

I think there are legitimate complaints and anger being expressed there, but that anger is channeled through such a broad spectrum of political language that it’s hard to know what they are arguing for. If you argue for small government and against domestic spying, is that left or right?  Against corporate welfare and for laissez faire economics?  GOP leaders were quick to hop up on stage and speak to the crowd, but many of the protesters opposed the vast increase in government during the Bush years.

Just as the left has been wrestling for years with frustration with trying to work through the Democratic party to get things done, I think there is a small, perhaps incoherent, but growing voice on the right, distinct from movement conservatives, close to libertarians, that are dissatisfied with the GOP.

The thing is, I think both these groups have much the same complaints about government. That it’s corrupt.  That it doesn’t answer to the people.  That it’s wasteful. That it serves largely to take money from the poor and middle class and give it to the rich. That there is too much influence by powerful special interests on government.

I really think each side, right and left, can look across at each other and see much of the same argument. I think they can look over and perhaps say, “Those guys are right for the wrong reasons.” How long will we be bogged down in the reasons?  How long until the struggle between the haves and have-nots, the elites and the ordinary citizens, bubbles to the surface to transcend the system of labels that serves the status quo?

Last Thursday, a funny thing happened in our House of Representatives.

The House passed an amendment to a bill saying no federal funds may ever go to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, otherwise known as ACORN.  ACORN itself is an umbrella organization of groups that help the poor, including doing voter registration drives, helping people access benefits, find jobs and housing, etc.  You may have heard some insane rhetoric about ACORN being Obama’s shock troops or whatever, as if the poor and powerless are a threat.  As if there is a threat to this country outside Wall Street.

Nevermind that Wall Street has an open account at the treasury, measuring in the trillions, and ACORN has received 53 million dollars from the federal government over the past fifteen years. Stack a handful of fraudulent voter registrations (which are bad) against the hundreds of millions of our money poured on K Street by Goldman Sachs and AIG, and you tell me which one has more influence on our political discourse.

So what’s funny about this amendment?

First of all, federal money isn’t distributed to individual organizations by Congress itself.  It’s not as if someone in Congress decides the United Way gets X amount, Raytheon gets Y amount, etc.  They have competitive bids for projects, or sometimes hand out no bid contracts.  But the budgeting and contracting is done by the agencies or states receiving the cash, not the Congress itself. For example, the State Department, not Congress, hired the Wackenhut guards that were recently caught drinking vodka out of each other’s butts.

The contracting process is supposed to be a level playing field, and the choice is supposed to be based on merit, not political affiliation.  The federal government has passed laws saying, for example, anyone receiving their dollars cannot practice discrimination in hiring and that sort of thing  But it’s highly irregular for them to order that their money not go to a specific organization.  (And there’s a good reason for this, as we’ll see below).

Now the Senate version of the this amendment is a little more tame.  It says that no organization under federal indictment can receive federal money, and “ACORN counts as an organization.”  Oh yeah, that’s actually in the amendment.  It specifically says an organization, ACORN, is an organization.  It doesn’t list all the organizations in the world to point out they are organizations.  Only ACORN is named, and for no apparent reason other than political spite and to confer perceived guilt of imagined crimes.

But the House bill outright says no money can go to ACORN.  It’s actually self defeating.  Time and effort will be wasted by other organizations trying to do the things ACORN was going to do anyway.  It’s not that Congress doesn’t want there to be free tax advice for the poor, it’s just dirty, filthy ACORN can’t be involved.

This is the reason money isn’t distributed directly by Congress, because insane political nonsense in Washington could seriously hamper efforts to spend the money effectively on the ground.  I thought the people who hated ACORN didn’t want Washington getting involved in local affairs.  Don’t we know best how to spend money, not Congress?

I know what you’re saying, “What the heck is funny about this?”  Remember PLS 101?  Here is a refresher:

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, Limits on Congress, forbids Congress to pass Bills of Attainder.  Article I, Section 10 also forbids the states to pass Bills of Attainder, so you know they are a big deal.  What are they?

Bill Of Attainder is a legislative Act which declares a person or group as guilty of any crime, there by ordering punishment to them, without allowing them a chance to represent their cause or an unbiased trial to determine whether they are guilty.

Remember innocent until proven guilty?  Bills of Attainder were a cute way for the legislature to circumvent annoying “due process” constraints in the courts.  They would simply declare people criminals and punish them.

Bear in mind ACORN isn’t even under investigation, let alone under indictment, let alone convicted of anything.  People who in ACORN organizations were submitting fraudulent voter registrations in the past and it was ACORN who turned them in.  Even if they were under indictment now, they are innocent until proven guilty.  Even if convicted, Congress has no business singling them out in legislation.  Punishment is for the courts, not Congress.  Congress could only address all convicted groups as a class.  They can’t show preference or prejudice to this or that particular group.

Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York nailed it:

The Supreme Court has ruled a bill of attainder is a legislative act that, no matter what their form, applies either to named individuals or to easily ascertainable members of a group in such a way as to inflict punishment, and then without a judicial trial. That’s exactly what this amendment does.

It may be that ACORN is guilty of various infractions, and if so, it ought to be investigated, maybe sanctioned, whatever, by the appropriate administrative agency or maybe by the judiciary. Congress must not be in the business of punishing individual organizations or people without trial.

Eh, short sighted stupidity in Congress.  Violating the Constitution they claim to revere for the sake of scoring political points.  Not funny enough for you?

The amendment was passed and added to the House bill on September 17.

September 17?

The 222nd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution?  Constitution Day?

When I walk the crisscrossing sidewalks up to Blair-Shannon, or by the row of trees to the south entrance of Cheek, or up the steps to Meyer Library, what do I find when I get there? Three or four pairs of glass doors, with another set of doors just beyond. This double set of doors traps the air and keeps it from escaping the building, making it somewhat cheaper to heat and cool the air inside.

I see what they did there.

But more and more often, I’m seeing something else as I approach these storied halls. The automatic doors for the handicapped standing open.

The first time I saw this, I naturally strolled on through. I figured someone handicapped must have just used the doors. Or maybe someone with a cart or heavy load couldn’t find anyone to hold a door open.

I actually stopped and looked back at the doors, feeling the heat billowing in from the outside. No one needed them open anymore. I tried to shut them, the hydraulics were locked in place. I supposed the doors were just timed to stay open a really long time.

But they weren’t.

No, as time went on, I realized what was really going on. Students, faculty, maintenance personnel, visitors, mail carriers, a vast cross section, from all walks of life, were pressing the big, blue, square button and taking advantage of the automatic doors for the handicapped without any apparent need.

I see what they did there.

Of course, it’s a waste of energy. Of course, it thwarts the very reason for having a double set of doors in the first place; to keep the heated or air conditioned air inside the building…inside the building.

So why do people do this? Is it sheer laziness? Are these people so important or in such a hurry they cannot spare the half second it takes to push open a door?

And don’t give me the germ argument. Some people seem to think touching a door handle is like getting to second base with everyone else who opened that door. Wear gloves if you’re really that afraid or use a sleeve. Just be sure to scrub yourself down in the bathtub afterward, muttering the word “quarantine” over and over.

I have a suspicion it’s related to this strange impulse people have to use technology in utterly unnecessary ways. It’s the same part of the culture the electric scissors came from, or the Roomba or auto-tune. These are the people that get online to find out the current temperature… outside… right now. The inner child thinks it just cooler to make doors open by themselves.

Remember when you were six years old at the grocery store and you were walking in and out of the sensor, opening and closing the automatic doors, and your mom said, “That door is not a toy!” Neither are the automatic doors for the handicapped. So stop it.

See what I did there?

Also, push in your chairs when you get up from the table in the dining hall, for Pete’s sake!