I was going to write a very compelling piece on What Commissioner Kappos Should Do About Tafas (which I care very, very much about in my scholarship and which is actually more important than this particular blog post), but I got distracted again.   This time, I was mourning the death of John Hughes, the filmmaker behind Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful. 

I love John Hughes.  I do.  I almost missed Hurricane Katrina descending on Oxford, Mississippi, because there was a John Hughes retrospective on the same day.  I had more important things to do than pay attention to rather persistent hurricane warnings, as well as my sister and my Grandma Rosa (who were all kind of suggesting to me that a major weather crisis was heading my way). 

Last week, I flew down to West Palm Beach, Florida for the Southeastern Association of Law Schools’ (SEALS) annual conference, which was a lot of fun. (Marquette just joined SEALS as an affiliate member.) On the way down, I flew out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport in mid-morning, over Atlanta’s outer suburbs.

I was amazed as we flew over miles and miles of half-finished subdivisions, carved haphazardly out of the wooded hills. Some were little more than cleared lots; others had houses in various states of completion, forming tenuous neighborhoods. The geographic impact of the housing bubble will be with us for quite some time.

As we continued to pass over these monuments to irrational exuberance, I was reminded of the closing lines of one of my favorite poems:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.