Or square tables, as the case may be.

Since today’s effort in futility featured so many pointless anecdotes disguised as and as cover for intelligent policy debate, I figure I’d regale you with one of my own from college.

I can’t take credit for the idea itself-that belongs to an ex-friend of mine-but my senior year in College I took a 400-level Sociology class. I forget the exact name of the class off the top of my head. Succinctly, the class was 20 kids sitting in class doing whatever we wanted to do while the professors took notes.

Seriously. That was the whole class.

So, being the rebel (or jackass if you prefer) that I am, I wanted no part of the little social experiment that was taking place and talked about how I could best throw a monkey wrench into the gears with the aforementioned ex-friend. After bouncing around a few ideas, ex-friend suggested that I just go to every class with a baseball glove and a tennis ball, turn my desk toward the wall and bounce the ball off the wall for the entire class.

So I did. And I brought my discman (this is 1999 folks) so I couldn’t hear a word anyone was saying.

Anyway, this was academia. If I wanted to, I could have participated in meaningless talk with a bunch of holier-than-thou idiots for 40 minutes, twice a week. Or, I could have done what I did which was throw the entire class off balance by performing an act that was so odd and inappropriate for the setting that I would become the entire focus of the class.

Which is precisely what happened.

After maybe 2 or 3 classes, I started getting looks, then finger pointing, then finally a tap on the shoulder. I responded to the query ‘what are you trying to accomplish’ with a monotoned ‘nothing’, at which point I put my headphones back on and continued bouncing my ball.

Well, this was just unacceptable to the rest of the drones.

Couple weeks later, after the rest of the class literally tried everything under the sun to understand, prevent, sympathize with, ridicule, etc., what I was doing, they rose en masse one day and demanded to know what it was that I wanted.

Now, looking back on it I probably should have done something cooler. But what I did was take over the class. I was literally the king. I pretty much told everyone there that they were going to do what I told them to do or I would just return to the rather pleasant activity in which I had been engaged for the past several weeks.

For the finale, I basically just stood everyone up in a circle, brought in a stopwatch and let them each speak for a minute at which point the next person had a minute, and the next…and so on. It wasn’t particularly enlightening and it really wasn’t all that entertaining. I was just having fun being the boss.

But my point as it relates to today’s exercise in useless gladhanding is that nobody did anything even remotely out of the ordinary. I didn’t watch or listen to the whole charade but I didn’t have to. The parts I did see or hear and the parts I read about at RR or elsewhere, were exactly what the 19 other kids in that sociology class were doing…nothing. They were doing nothing. And all the while the professors, or us in today’s scenario, were simply taking notes about them doing nothing.

This is academia folks. They are there to talk and do nothing.

This is Obama foks. He’s there to talk. The problem, however, is that he wants to do something. Doesn’t matter that it will put us on the fast track to national bankruptcy. Doesn’t matter that it will turn doctors into slaves. Doesn’t matter that costs and unemployment will skyrocket. None of that matters. He is going to do something. This is the problem when anyone from academia tries to do something. It almost always ends in disaster.

But today was nothing more than a useless episode in liberal academia. If you take nothing else away from today’s show, take away the fact that this is how academia works and that this is who Barack Obama is.

I would have preferred seeing the Republicans do the congressional equivalent of turning their chairs around and bouncing a tennis ball off the wall for six hours.

If nothing else, it would have been something else.

Russ

Update on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 6:19PM by Russ

Allah calls it a “freak show”.

Freak show…academic roundtable…comme ci…comme ca:

Yeah. The flaw in the Democrats’ bipartisan kabuki is that they’ve invested so much time in painting the GOP as brainless and feckless that the media — and public — almost can’t help but be pleasantly surprised. Yuval Levin’s also right that it’s not to Zeus’s advantage to descend from Mt. Olympus, because the lesser gods that surround him on his side of the aisle are … what’s the word? Ah yes — unappealing losers.

No matter what you call it, it was useless. Does anyone see any real political gain or loss for either side? I would hope, of course, that some fence-sitting “back-benchers”, as Levin calls ‘em, watched this and may have finally seen that Obama is as feckless a leader as you could ever hope not to have. If the polls don’t move in our favor a few percentage points though, I don’t think much anything of note actually happened.

I think T nails it:

Was today a success?  I call it a draw for all involved.  I don’t see that the lines have moved even an inch.

Like I said…useless.

Update on Friday, February 26, 2010 at 1:17AM by Russ

Here’s a tiny sample of the only 30 things you’ll ever need to know about Summitlympics 2010:

3.  Nancy Pelosi was the only Democrat – save for President Obama – who failed to stay on message with the act that was this day.  She just couldn’t end the day without showing her mean face – which thanks to plastic surgery is only slightly distinguishable from her “normal” face.

8.  Mitch McConnell was there so I’m told.  I saw a few pictures to prove it.

19.  Kathleen Sebelius is a good dresser – AND she used to be a governor…

26.  Henry Waxman likes to scare old people.

You gotta love Boom-Boom!

Dude…with Mandolin. Come on.