a very old college paper of mine
The ongoing events in Iran have inspired me to post something on my main blog. In that post, I plan to draw on a paper I wrote way back in December 1993 for an undergrad class at Berkeley. If I'm going to ask readers to put any stock in excerpts of something I wrote back when I was 21, it seems only right that I should set aside my mortification over the shoddy punctuation and post the whole paper online where it can be scrutinized by anyone with an Internet connection and an appalling amount of free time.
So that's what I'm doing.
Besides, the obstacles to my eventual nomination to the Supreme Court are trivial: no law degree, no plans to apply to law school, no black robe, no desire to move away from Seattle. So it seems only sporting to post this paper and give some ammo to the would-be opponents of my would-be SCOTUS nomination. A college paper that includes the phrase "In fairness to Lenin, however ..." seems a decent place to start.
Joking aside, I'm not in any way embarrassed by this paper. I worked hard on it -- something I can say of shamefully few things I did in college. More to the point, the political events analyzed in the paper -- how French President Charles de Gaulle managed to weather weeks of protests that put as many as 1 million protesters on the streets of Paris at one point -- seem worth considering at a moment when the protests in Iran are making people dream bold dreams about the future of that country.
UPDATE: I did post something. It's here.
