Month: April 2001

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The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that four con artists can’t be extradited to the U.S. to face charges because the prosecutors in the case, who have wide discretion over sentences and terms, have threatened to see to it that the malfeasants are sodomized in prison. They can do this because “get tough” U.S. crime laws give them considerable discretion over which charges, exactly, will be laid, how long the prison terms will be, and where the terms will be served.

My friends, the United States is a backwater, sometimes, of spiteful hicks and idiots.

What happened? What made these guardians of public morality so damn mad?

Well, these guys simply decided to fight extradition. The prosecutors (shall we have the evidence now, or after sentencing, your honor?) were hopping mad. How dare you exercise your legal rights! They made threats, including the afore-mentioned sodomization.

Well, it cost them. The four were sure to be extradited until the Supreme Court of Canada got wind of the threats, which, in it’s honorable opinion, amounted to a kind of extortion. The suspects were being asked to give up their constitutional rights, now, this minute, or else face cruel and unusual punishment.

The Supreme Court of Canada, bless their hearts, ruled unanimously that the men don’t have to face that kind of U.S. justice. It’s a start. I’d be quite happy if they would make a blanket ruling that Canada, as a civilized country, never sends anyone to be tried for any crime in the U.S.

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The Master of Soul-less Self Sufficiency

When Timothy McVeigh, sentenced to death for murdering 276 people in the Oklahoma bombing, dies, it is reported in Salon, he intends to quote the poem “Invictus” by William Henley:

I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul

Now now– that’s not traditional. You’re supposed to turn to the families of the victims and say, “I am truly sorry.” But McVeigh isn’t sorry. He believes in what he did. He believes he was right to do it. It was good and necessary.

The Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, believes that it is an act of compassion to grant, to the families of his victims, the privilege of seeing Mr. McVeigh get murdered himself, on that peculiar cross-shaped table upon which they will strap him before this charming little game of “which tube contains the liquid cyanide” that they play when they put him to death.

When they executed people by firing squad, they used to put one blank in one of the rifles, so each of the shooters could go home that night thinking that he might not have been the one responsible for the man’s death. How honorable, for an institution that claims to pride itself on honor, courage, and integrity— how honorable, to cop out at the crucial moment: I might not have done it. I can sleep at night.

What a great idea. What a great way to help people– men (do you know of any female executioners?)– feel better about themselves. It’s cheaper than Prozac or Zoloft.

What amazes me is that they don’t do this in war. Why not?  Every soldier gets a gun but some only fire blanks. Every air plane gets bombs but some are duds. One in five torpedoes carries only the admiral’s laundry. That way, after committing hundreds or thousands of atrocities, we can all go home and say, I didn’t do it. When our children ask us what we did in the war, we can all say, “fired duds, mostly”.

Why didn’t they think of this when they dropped the nuclear bomb? They could have sent ten planes with ten similar fat bombs and they could all have dropped them at the same time and then they could all have gone home and said to their wives, “mine was a dud”.

Of course, the real captain of the Enola Gay, Paul W. Tibbets, is actually proud of the fact that the dropped the real bomb, and I guess his wife didn’t mind, so, in that instance, the idea is wasted.

Anyway… Ashcroft wants to give the relatives of the victims the “sense of closure”– or is it vicarious thrill? — or “satisfaction”– of seeing McVeigh die. The language is nebulous– no one wants to admit they are simply out for revenge, since our society knows well enough that “revenge” is not a noble virtue. Nobody really believes that McVeigh’s execution will stop anybody else from doing the same thing– not, especially, when we have suicide bombers in the world.

Revenge is an attribute of pugnacious, small-minded thugs and felons. But we are not thugs and felons. We are honorable and pure and we want to watch McVeigh die so we can get a sense of …. “closure”.

After the grandmother of one of Floyd Allen Medlock’s victims witnessed his execution, she expressed disappointment. It was too quiet, too peaceful. She wanted to see him die but our society, at cross-purposes with itself, now resorts to the antiseptic ritual of lethal injection. Not enough horror for her, I guess. More to the point: his death didn’t bring back her grand-daughter, and didn’t remove one ounce of the pain she suffered and didn’t prevent a single crime from being committed. It just added to the total sum of misery in the world.

I know this seems strange, but she reminds me of those fanatic Palestinian mothers who raise their sons to become martyrs to the faith. These devout boys strap explosives to their bodies and then get onto buses or wade around busy market places and set themselves off. Their mothers approve, so it appears. They wish death upon their own sons.

The deaths of their sons help them bring “closure” to their anguished feelings about the atrocities the Israelis have committed upon the Palestinians.

Do you buy that? Or do we prefer: they will feel closure about the deaths of their sons when every single last Israeli citizen is driven into the sea?

And the biggest joke of all: McVeigh announcing, as he is helplessly strapped to a table and poisoned to death, that he is the master of his soul, the captain of his fate. He is now the master of nothing. He is utterly helpless and useless and impotent. He is less important than a beggar on the streets who, at least, could beg or not beg, or cross the road, or not cross the road. He could imagine he is the King of Spain and prance down the alleyway singing at the top of his lungs.

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Violent Extremist Tree-Huggers

Only the shameless hooligans behind George Bush Jr. could have the effrontery to try to paint Bill Clinton, the moderately right-leaning president who killed welfare, as an environmental “extremist”.

In the past thirty years, the average wage of the top executives in the United States has risen by several hundred percent. At the same time, the average wage of people who actually work for a living, has stagnated. Only those same shameless hooligans would foist upon us the idea that those over-paid fat-cat executives need more money, and the average working stiff needs less roads, less education, less health-care, and a poorer quality of life.

What a tax cut does, of course, is remove government services that benefit everyone and reward people who have the least need of financial assistance.

But that’s not really what Bush is up to. Do you think Exxon and Bristol-Myers and Dupont would be content with being taxed less? By God, you have no idea. The real goal of this Republican administration is not only to reduce the tax liabilities of the rich, but to get them government subsidies, in the form of additional tax breaks, reduction of liabilities, and tort law reform. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And Mr. Bush is going to be in a big hurry to get this agenda through because conventional wisdom is that the Democrats will retake Congress in the 2002 elections.

One example: there used to be a rule that the government would not contract with companies that were in violation of environmental laws, or work-place health and safety regulations. Well, no more! Why on earth should the government hold these private corporations to such onerous and expensive obligations such as not dumping toxic wastes into your drinking water or cutting back on safety equipment, at the expense of a few mutilations, just so they can get some of that government largesse?

The Republicans seem to believe that allowing corporations to not spend money on cleaning up the toxic wastes that helped them make enormous profits– which means that you and I, brothers and sisters, get to pay for it– is what is known as “tax fairness”. Anyone who thinks otherwise is, of course, an “extremist”.

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The Rash Hysterical Itch

From the New York Times: In New Jersey, two second graders in Irvington were suspended and charged with making terroristic (sic) threats last week after pointing a paper gun, in what they said was a game of cops and robbers. In Jonesboro, Ark., an 8-year-old was suspended for three days for pointing a breaded chicken finger at a teacher and saying “Pow, pow, pow.”

What kind of insane people are running America’s schools? A second grader is about 7 years old. Seven-year-olds, unlike most adults, so it seems, have an imagination that is not limited by constricted prurient inhibitions. Everything they see or hear is raw material for play. Arrest them!

A few years ago, a kindergarten student was charged with “sexual harassment” for kissing a classmate. What kind of insane world do we live in? What kind of people sit at their desks with serious expressions on their faces and pronounce that this child is a danger to the community and must be stopped? What kind of complete idiot thinks that this kind of “zero tolerance” is going to have any effect whatsoever on the number of school shootings or assaults we have in our society?

Isn’t it obvious? When a seven-year-old is arrested or suspended for making “threats”, aren’t we in fact contributing to the aura of power and importance that disturbed, potentially violent misfits are looking for?

On the other hand, someone with a brain lives in Fort Huron, Michigan. When some students made a threat (of dubious sincerity) to bomb the school two years ago, instead of installing metal detectors and banning back-packs, the school decided to have the principal and teachers sit down and have lunch with students and parents at least once a month. This won’t guarantee that there won’t be any incidents, but I’ll bet it makes for a better school and school community.

There’s something else to keep in mind. Almost every media outlet refers to a “rash” or school shootings, or the “increasing” violence in the classroom, or the “epidemic” number of sexual assaults. Why? Do you, the naïve reader, assume that they have conducted research and produced some rational analysis that actually shows that there is a “rash” of anything, other than the itch to sensationalize and pander to a kind of hysterical paranoia in our society?

We have a little-understood impulse, within ourselves, to want to believe the worst of others. I think it is rooted in the desire to believe in ourselves, that we are good, honorable, lovable people– because they are not. It’s a basic human impulse. It’s why we have to believe that a five-year-old that kisses a fellow student is some kind of pervert. It’s because we are the sick ones who believe that a kiss between children can be perverse.

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Jesus Christ Superstar (Film)

Looks, let’s get this straight about Jesus Christ Superstar. It is not what most people think it is. I don’t think it is even what Norman Jewison, the director, thinks it is. Least of all is it what Andrew Llloyd Webber thinks it is, though he wrote the music– nothing he did elsewhere in his career substantiated the promising intrigues of this modest little opera and film.

In short, some interpretations I’ve heard, which I think are wrong:

1. the movie is very “spiritual” and has led a lot of people to Christ. Look, it may be true that the movie has led some people to Jesus, but it’s not a very spiritual film at all. It’s very much about politics and power and organized religion as a social force. But God makes no appearance in this movie– he is conspicuously absent. The cheesy image of the sheep at the end (I’ll bet Jewison wishes he could take that one back.) is misleading. Jesus dies on the cross and, in this version of events, he stays there, leaving his followers and antagonists to wonder just who he really was.

Did you know there is even a web site devoted to very pious paintings of Ted Neely as Jesus? These are paintings of an actor playing Jesus, as if he really were Christ. Strange.

There are dozens and dozens of productions of this very expensive show– many of them by churches or religious groups. Even stranger. I mean, it’s agreeable– and certainly an improvement on the usual drivel many churches’ mistake for art, but it’s still somewhat surprising.

2. the movie is about a bad man, Judas, and how he grew jealous of Jesus’ popularity and betrayed him, only to be disappointed when he becomes a “superstar”. Oh please! Judas hangs himself because he realizes that he has caused the horrible death of an innocent man because he misunderstood the motivations of the Scribes and Pharisees. He thought Jesus was getting carried away with his mission and posed a threat to the foolish, innocents who surrounded him. When he realizes that the Pharisees and Scribes mean to kill Jesus, he understands that a) he has been just as foolish as Jesus, b) he has become the tool by which manifest evil will be committed, c) he is going to remembered as the man who betrayed the holiest man on earth.

3. the movie is about the different paths by which people come to find God. As I said, there is no God in this film. There are some stories about dark clouds blocking the sun during the crucifixion scenes, and about Norman Jewison running around modern day Israel pointing at archeological digs and shouting, “God is here”, but Jewison didn’t understand the opera, and tried to put a bit of a new age spin on things. Didn’t wash.

Significant Changes From Rice’s Original Script:

Original Caiaphas: “What you have done will be the saving of Israel,”
Movie Caiaphas: “What you have done will be the saving of everyone,”

Original Jesus to Pilate: “There may be a kingdom for me somewhere if I only knew!”
Movie Jesus to Pilate: “There may be a kingdom for me somewhere, if you only knew.”

Original Jesus, as he is mobbed by the poor and the lepers: “Heal yourselves!”
Movie Jesus: this angry, frustrated outburst is omitted.

Original: nothing
Movie: awful, schmaltzy song led by Peter and Mary on how they miss the guy: “Could We Start Again”. I believe the song was written for the original and then wisely omitted. The movie, needing an extra few minutes of scenery, resuscitated it, to ill effect.  The action, Jesus and Peter and Mary strolling in the hills, is cringy.

What does it mean? That Jewison tried to put a “correct” spin on the movie? Rice’s lyrics clearly imply that Jesus is deluded, and has begun to question his own mission. His irritated outburst at the mob of lepers and poor betrays a deep frustration with the demands put on him by an endlessly needy and desperate populace, and raises doubts about Jesus’ confidence in his ability to meet those demands. Then Jewison tries to make it sound like Jesus is one up on Pilate. And he tries to make it sound like Caiaphas is paying Judas an ironic compliment, when Rice meant to suggest that the betrayal is significant only to Israel.

What is the movie about? It’s about an extraordinary, complex man whose gifts and ideas generated intense responses in the people around him. The story constantly shifts focus from one constituency to another, from his disciples who hardly grasp what he means and hope to be famous some day, to Herod who finds him a curiosity, a joke, to Pilate who discerns the worth of the man, but sees him as a danger to himself, to Mary Magdalene doesn’t know how to love him, to the priests who see him undermining their legalistic authority. The utter clarity of the schematic should be apparent to everyone: all of the parties are self-interested, except for Jesus. Jesus is a shock to “Israel in 4 BC” as he would be today. He was the very definition of the word “provocative”. And you don’t have to believe that he was the literal son of God to understand this.

Without developing a theological treatise here, you could do worse than encapsulate the nature of his message thusly: blessed are the weak. This particular phrase has become a modern cliché, but it’s fundamental subversiveness should never be underestimated. All around us, we proclaim “blessed” are the strong, the successful, the rich, the able, the triumphant, the popular, the creative, and so on. To understand the subversiveness of Christ’s message, try to picture Pat Robertson standing in front of his earnest Republican cohorts, or Madeline Albright in front of the U.N., or Eminem at the Grammys, or Colin Powell in Jerusalem: blessed are the losers. Aint gonna happen.

On the other hand, picture former President Carter hammering a shingle on a house for Habitat for Humanity. Every president of the U.S. claims to be a God-fearing Christian, but Carter is the only one I know of who actually might be one.

The tragedy of the movie is that when Christ resists the temptation to play to the self-interests of those around him, they do him in. And so it will always be. I doubt if the reaction to Christ today would be any different. Those Christians who rave about how they can’t wait for his return have one serious problem: they won’t know him. If Christ returned today, he would not say, “blessed are the cheerleaders…”

And that’s what is being done to the original rock opera itself.

The movie was reasonably faithful to the opera (which was recorded before the show was produced anywhere) at least partly because it had to be: it was an opera. The terms were relatively fixed.

But do a quick search on the internet and you’ll find that it is being appropriated by people who don’t seem to understand or care what it means.