I'm back, Jersey Exile Nation, and with both guns blazing. At last, it appears that my academic troubles are in the process of resolving themselves once and for all, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of my friend and former advisor at Boston University, Professor Stephen Scully. Steve is a rare bird, indeed, one of those classicists who didn't in the course of being ground through the mill that is the modern American academic-industrial complex forget what the Classics are supposed to be all about, a wellspring of humanistic inspiration for all time. With his help, the administrative obstacles hindering me from walking away from B.U. with both my pride and my diplomas simply vanished, and now instead of pulling out my hair about how to set right what had gone so far astray (hopelessly, I thought), I'm now actually contemplating what to do next. Now many of you out there probably don't browse through college catalogs and try on degree programs in your head the way I do almost every day, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that I'm positively giddy now whenever I think about my scholarly future. Yes, I am a geek. And proud of it.

You may have noticed that my recent posts have been suspiciously devoid of political commentary. Well, it's no accident. Recent events both at home and abroad have dispirited more than enraged me, and I wonder if Americans even want to wrestle with the life-or-death issues which have been thrust upon our collective plate. This month's elections do not provide an encouraging sign here, nor do recent House and Senate votes that overwhelmingly rubber-stamp our alleged President's increasingly unhinged agenda, such as the absolutely irresponsible 90-9 vote last night in the Senate to approve the "Homeland Security Bill", which will strip tens of thousands of unionized federal employees of their hard-won protections and effectively create a bloc of close to a quarter of a million jobs that the Executive Branch can dispense at will to its party faithful. Forget about making our country safer (we already have multiple so-called intelligence agencies, all of them already bloated and incompetent), this bill is a return to the Spoils System of yore - where the ruling party in Washington controlled who worked and who didn't in the federal government - and little more. But who really expected anymore from an administration whose idea of responding to the threat of al-Qaeda is to leave Osama bin Laden and his cronies alive and plotting in the wilds of Pakistan and turn our attention to a recalcitrant tinpot dictator and his pitiable arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction", most of which were at least partially-financed by our own government, back when Saddam was our buddy? Do we honestly need a whole other branch of the federal government from the self-proclaimed champions of "limited government", headed by an individual - Tom Ridge - whose brightest idea so far in his year-long tenure as Director of Homeland Security has been to color-code our fear? Where's the punchline here? Because I could really use a good laugh right about now.

There are other matters I'd love to discuss, local matters of free speech and the dangers of censorship right here in my own workplace, the World's Greatest University, but frankly I'm too worried about my job to do it (although I will link you to the relevant op-ed articles dealing with both incidents in the Boston Globe, here and here. I disgree strongly with the Globe editors on one of them, and agree with them on the other - I'll let you and campus thought police try and figure out which is which). That's what it's come to, ladies and gentlemen. I wonder what color that kind of fear is.