Category: AAA-Very Very Best

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Tiger Woods

You have to give it to Tiger Woods– his “strategy” for dealing with his scandal was flawless. Controlled disclosure. Hide. Pro-forma confession and penitence. Chill. “Treatment”. Resurrection and resumption of endorsements. It’s all as if nothing had happened except– guess what– he’s now even more famous and thus worth even more than he was before. Even PBS Newshour had to do a story on him. That’s depressing.

I personally thought the Nike ad was brilliant. It was, of course, entirely manufactured by a pr firm (which at one time even included Ari Fleischer, press secretary to George W. Bush for a few years), but you have to consider the fact that a good pr firm would certainly advise Tiger not to undermine his own very expensive strategy by carrying on as if nothing had happened. I imagine they might have asked him– what do you want to do? Do you want to continue to philander as if there was no tomorrow? No problem– we can do that. We can do the George Clooney approach. Stay single and make no commitments to anybody. Choose carefully. Don’t, for God’s sake, promise anything.

The Nike ad was bold, brilliant, and moving. Don’t listen to the critics who claim–as if this was a revelation–that Tiger’s father was actually describing Tiger’s mother, not Tiger. That is irrelevant. It’s a work of art, not a documentary. The important thing is that it appears to confront the issue in a tasteful, dignified tone. What would you say to Tiger: what were you thinking? And the beautiful thing about it is that Tiger doesn’t give an answer. He doesn’t say anything at all. It’s as if he was above that sort of pedestrian give and take, the kind of thing the tabloids suck on. It’s as if a mere apology would be inadequate and demeaning. It’s as if no scandal, no matter how salacious, can touch the real Tiger Woods. It’s as if he took the paradox at the heart of the question– do you mean, about my behaviour or about the consequences of getting caught— and raised it, in his mind, to the level of poetry and religion. What is “is”? What is morality and ethics and principle when you make enough money to buy and sell entire nations? When you spend your spare time in a darkened casino in Las Vegas betting you can have even more money, instead of travelling, or reading, or supporting a charity– I mean, really supporting a charity, not that token foundation crap– No, Tiger says nothing. He might just be thinking, I had no idea how the media would try to cash in on the destruction of my family, with such self-righteous glee. I had no idea that the public would project themselves into my story except that would have had the luxury of pretending they really deserved it. He had no idea of how entitled the public feels to your soul, your dignity, your privacy, once they have bought into the image you fabricated just for them to substitute for the emptiness at the core of your talent.

Don’t forget– none of the scandalous stuff was anybody’s damn business in the first place. I heard a golfer state that he used to think of Tiger Woods as a role model and now he is so, so disappointed, and I wanted to slap him on the side of the head and scream: Tiger Woods was never a role model. He was a manufactured plastic robot intended to manipulate you into buying extravagantly worthless trinkets with his face or name on them. Then he took your money and gambled with it, alone, in Las Vegas, with his body guards to keep smelly, unimportant people like you out of his life; he spent it on nannies and maids and gardeners and publicists and lawyers and pr consultants, and the women… Anyone who would see Tiger Woods as a role model in the first place was always a fool.

But anyone who buys the repentance shtick, and the phony reconciliation, and the phony therapy– is even more deluded.

You want a role model? Go down the street and watch somebody work hard to support his family. Read about Bethany Maclean or Brooksley Born or Bernhard Schmidt. Never heard of them? Of course not.

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The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

“The Magdalene Sisters”(2002)

My biggest gripe with Hollywood movies, like “Shawshank Redemption”, “Freedom Writers”, “The Blind Side”, “The Fisher King”, and, most egregiously, “The Dead Poets Society”– and many others– is the way they try to convince their audiences that they are having a deep, authentic experience, by showing you things that seem edgy and profound, but which, in fact, have been carefully packaged and cauterized to remove anything that might be genuinely provocative or compelling.

They habitually simplify life into villains who practically announce their nefariousness, and angels who practically wear halos. You might think this is a benchmark of cheesey action flicks, but “The Blind Side” and “Freedom Writers” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus” and the rest all do it with just as much cheese. The audience is clued in on who to cheer for and who to hiss at. The villains conveniently stand and listen in humiliation as the hero makes his or her grand speech. Then they crawl away in defeat as virtue triumphs and goodness prevails. When the film is supposedly based on a true story, these straw men are often fictionalizations.

What happens to the audience? Because the film is careful to clue them in as to who is “good” and who is “bad”, the audience feels that they possess the ability to make those judgments in real life, even if the people they know don’t look like Morgan Freeman or George Clooney. (They feel even better if it’s Freeman– I am not a racist!)

In real life, however, the good guy, the misunderstood artist, the person with the disability, don’t have the charisma of George Clooney or Julia Roberts. So we treat them just as badly as they are treated in the film. If only a camera crew were around to record us, we might begin to recognize ourselves. But not in the roles we expect.

I believe it encourages hypocrisy. It encourages people to publicly embrace one set of values and believe they actually believe in them, while glibly practicing another. Hollywood actually trains us to look for certain simplifications and signals that don’t exist in real life. We are convinced that if we saw the right clues, we would make the right choices, but those markings never appear in real people. We believe we would know a Van Gogh if we saw him, but most of us buy our wall decorations from Walmart.

So I recently re-watched “The Magdalene Sisters”, and I was struck at a number of times it refuses to cater to that uplifting feel-good Hollywood spirit. For example, one of the “victims”, named Bernadette,– whom we’re supposed to root for in the Hollywood version– is caring for an older woman who is dying. This older woman was not as cruel to the girls as the nuns were, but she did supervise the girls. Bernadette, listens to the older woman ramble on about how she herself had a child out of wedlock years and years ago, and she didn’t want to go to the hospital, and she wishes someone would stay with her. But Bernadette is impatient to get on to her other jobs. She says she has to go. The older woman begs her to stay and comfort her for a while. Bernadette hisses at her: the nuns don’t care about comfort. They only care about getting the work done. They don’t care about you and I don’t care about you either. “So why don’t you do us all a favor and hurry up and die”.

It’s a stunning moment, shocking, and yet utterly believable, and powerful. But wait– Bernadette is one of the “victims” of the movie– she’s supposed to be admirable and virtuous, so we can give her a rousing cheer when she escapes in the final reel.

But of course, that’s not life. It’s not the reality of life. It’s the rose-tinted picture we are given by Hollywood, and, all too frequently, by the news, but it’s not reality.

So when I read this review of “The Magdalene Sisters” by Steven D. Greydanus, I was puzzled by his distress:  [2022-05-09 update: I believe Mr. Greydanus has revised his review since I first read, possibly in response to my comments which he acknowledged reading.  Fair enough.  So I give you a link to his apologia for rejecting the film.]

the film simply presents its nuns, priests, and parents as cruel, judgmental, and evil — end of story. Its sole interest in them is insofar as they are responsible for the unjust suffering of the girls.

Well, we know that the Magdalene laundries existed, and we know that up to 30,000 girls were imprisoned in them, and we know that many of them treated the girls abusively, like slave labour. There’s not much dispute about that.

So whatever does he mean? Does he believe that the girls’ memories are wrong– that actually, it was all more like “Bells of St. Mary’s”?

I found the portraits of the nuns convincing and very believable. No, the film wasn’t about the nuns, so it didn’t spend a lot of time looking into their background or their personal lives outside of the convent– but, seriously, does Mr. Greydanus believe they might actually have been nice?

In fact, I thought the strength of the movie was that it tried very hard to create a feeling of authenticity by leaving things in the movie that are not easily explained. At one point, Crispina takes her night gown and soaks it in cold water. Then she puts it on and goes back to bed. Why? We don’t know. It isn’t explained to us. The Hollywood audience walks out– I don’t get this movie.

But it struck me as exactly the kind of inexplicable detail a person would relate to somebody in real life. When the real life listener asks “why”, the answer is, “I don’t know”. To leave these things out of the movie, would be to create a false sense of logic and linearity to the plot that we never, ever experience in real life. Real life is full of little puzzles and unpredictable turns of events. In real life, events are often directed by hidden compromises and arrangements that aren’t revealed to us by a narrator.

Astonishingly, Mr. Greydanus then proceeds to compare “The Magdalene Sisters” to “Birth of a Nation”, D. W. Griffiths’ tribute to the KKK. I don’t have enough bandwidth to explain to you why that is unimaginably perverse if you don’t already know. But Mr. Greydanus feels he has to defend Christianity against this film– which is truly absurd. Real Christianity has as little to fear from this film as capitalism has to fear from the sub-prime mortgage scandal. Wait a minute…

At one point in the film, Sister Bridget decides to “treat” the girls to a showing of “The Bells of Saint Mary’s”, the saccharine Bing Cosby/Ingrid Bergman picture about saintly nuns and priests helping disadvantaged youth in Brooklyn. Sister Bridget introduces the film by confessing a “shocking” sin: from the time she was a young girl, she has had a secret love…. films. It tells you something about Greydanus that he sees this as a token, inadequate attempt to “humanize” the nuns. In fact, it is clearly a revelation of just how twisted they have become. Sister Bridget expects the girls to find this “confession” endearing, and we see just how this has more to do with her own deluded self-image than with any genuine attempt to be kind to the girls.

It is a direct comment on those ridiculous lives of the saints stories that are in endless circulation wherein they try to tell you that St. Stuffedwig or whatever was not always incredibly pious and devoted, but could sometimes actually be mischievous and fun-loving. Aaaahhh. So you see, Sister Bridget (a wonderful performance by Geraldine MacEwan) is not really the stuffed shirt she seems to be. Greydanus got it completely wrong, just as he got the entire film wrong.

And that’s when I realized that his criticism that the film was not realistic was actually criticism that the film was not Hollywood enough– it didn’t give you a single evil character who was responsible for the evil that happened to Bernadette and Margaret and Crispina and who could then be vanquished by the forces of goodness in the end. The problem with the film, though Greydanus doesn’t admit it, is that it places blame squarely within the institution of the church. The sisters are cruel to the girls because that’s what they do: they try to bend the recalcitrant back to the will of God through brute force. That’s what the church stood for when it built these institutions, and that’s what the nuns and priests were trained to do by the church. If Greydanus wishes to be an apologist for the faith, he is right about one thing: this film, unlike cartoons like “Dead Poet’s Society”, is a genuine threat.

Sure enough, Greydanus likes the very Hollywood “The Blind Side”, though even he has to acknowledge that Michael Oher is merely a prop for the Tuohys’ amazing virtue, even though he doesn’t admit that the scene of Mrs. Tuohy charging onto the field to encourage Michael to defend his quarterback is a far more ridiculous distortion of reality than anything in “The Magdalene Sisters”.

He also loves “Star Wars”, perhaps one of the most trivial popular films of all time. He even gave “Episode VI: Return of the Jedi” an A- ! Perhaps because Darth Vader, as opposed to Sister Bridget, is such a richly developed, nuanced character.

In a separate review of a film called “Amish Grace”, about the willingness of an Amish community to forgive a man who murdered their children, Greydanus is dissatisfied with the depiction of some journalists. His comments are instructive:

A subplot involving a TV news crew investigating the sincerity of Amish forgiveness is the film’s most notable weakness. These outsiders are meant as bridge characters mediating between the audience and the Amish, but their merely journalistic investigative curiosity about the facts of the case is an obvious screenwriting foil. A more effective approach might have been to give the journalists complacent, dismissive assumptions about the Amish, about whom they presumably know little or nothing, and then gradually challenge and overturn those assumptions over the course of the story.

Here we have the naked Christian reviewer: he openly admits that a “true story” should have made up, out of whole cloth, a negative depiction of the media.

Here we have a reviewer actually suggesting that the film would have been improved if the film-makers had only reduced a character to a stereotype. He wants them to cater to that conservative Christian canard about the “liberal” media and it’s alleged bias against true religion and traditional values.

My personal experience is that a lot of journalists have more respect for the Amish, who appear to at least be sincere about their religion, than they do for two-faced bigots like Michael Medved.

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Kitty Cat: Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenin”

“The Shcherbatskys consult doctors over Kitty’s health which has been failing since she realizes that Vronsky did not love her and that he did not intend to propose marriage to her, and that she refused and hurt Levin, whom she cares for, in vain. A specialist doctor advises that Kitty should go abroad to a health spa to recover. ” From the Wikipedia synopsis of “Anna Karenin” by Leo Tolstoy.

“Anna Karenin” is allegedly the greatest novel of all time. Well, on some lists. “The Brother’s Karamazov” is often at the top of the list, and so is “Ulysses” by Joyce, and Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, and “In Search of Lost Time” by Proust.

So Kitty needs to go to a spa to recover. That, in essence, is the problem I have with Anna Karenin. The whole book is about extremely privileged people committing stupid acts and then having nervous breakdowns and scooting themselves off to a spa or an estate somewhere to “recover” from their awful, horrible, traumatic experiences. It’s sounds like a Russian “Gone With the Wind”. We all want to be rich and privileged just so we can have such beautiful crises.

In the film “The Last Station”, Sophia, Tolstoy’s wife, is informed that Tolstoy has run away from home. Yes, he did, at 80, fed up with his wife’s nagging him about giving her the copyrights to his books. There are a lot of terrible flaws to this scene that are emblematic of the entire film.

Firstly, Sophia immediately becomes hysterical and tries to throw herself into the pond. But you thought, he just left on a train, right? And she’s been married to him for 30 years, right? It’s simply hard to believe in that reaction. Dramatically, that moment cries out for a few moments of “what do you mean he left on a train? Where to? Why didn’t he tell me?” You would expect some annoyance on her part, rather than this immediate, overwhelming despair.

She really does throw herself into the pond and sort of drowns. It’s a silly scene. It’s not like she picked some lonely time and place where no one was likely to rescue her. Her family and friends haul her out and turn her on her side, but she hasn’t swallowed any water and doesn’t vomit, and then, later, she reacts comically when she is told that Tolstoy was merely concerned about her. You do wish that someone would grab her and shout, “don’t be pathetic!” Send her to a spa.

I started reading Tolstoy again because of a reference by Philip Yancey, and because of the recent movie “The Last Station”, which, by the way, is as melodramatic and overwrought as “Anna Karenin”.

“Vronsky, embarrassed by Karenin’s magnanimity, attempts suicide by shooting himself. He fails in his attempt but wounds himself badly.” Wikipedia Synopsis.

Is this tragic or comic? When I first read this novel back in the 1970’s, I thought it was gloriously, beautifully, astonishingly tragic.

Now, I find it a bit ridiculous.

My personal list of the best novels ever written?

1. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

2. Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

3. Beautiful Losers (Leonard Cohen)

4. The Stranger (Albert Camus)

5. The Pearl (John Steinbeck)

6. The Castle (Franz Kafka)

7. Animal Farm (George Orwell)

8. Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

9. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.)

10. Anna Karenin (Leo Tolstoy)

But don’t put too much weight on my list: literature is not American Idol. There is no point to this competition, except perhaps to draw peoples’ attention to great books.

“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel is also a great book. So is “Life of Pi”.

More uptodate:  Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and David Foster Wallace “Infinite Jest” and “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”.

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There is a War: Necessary Evils

“Perhaps,” he added, “they should clarify it. We were in the middle of a war, and there was no teaching on that. But the church only gives general moral guidance, and people of good faith have to interpret that guidance.”

Reverend Brian W. Harrison, Catholic Apologist for Torture, NY Times, February 26, 2010.

That’s lie number 1. Reverend Harrison, defending a Catholic defender of water-boarding, rather glibly qualifies his stance: we were in a war. In a war, torture is allowed. In a war, water-boarding is not torture. In a war, human dignity doesn’t count. In a war, all the things we live for, all the things of the greatest spiritual and moral significance, don’t matter.

No, it’s just torture. Torture is torture is torture. Torture is the act of a savage, a barbarian, of a people so utterly bereft of morality and spirituality and ethics, that they should be sponged off the face of the earth. I say “sponged”– not killed or beaten or abused or– heaven forbid– tortured. Sponged– sucked out of government and institutions; squeezed out of positions of authority and influence. Torture is what we, in that remarkable compact called “society” and “culture” and “democracy”, cannot abide, and the right to be treated with dignity at all times– no matter what the suspicion or crime or act– cannot be abridged.

It’s too late to undo much of the damage now. When America’s enemies capture a soldier or a scientist or journalist– why not torture? Reverend Brian W. Harrison, defending the American government, has declared that torture is morally acceptable, as long as it is necessary, and by God, when America attacks us, whether we are Muslims or communists or negroes, it is necessary.

Perhaps the most amazing facet of Reverend Brian Harrison’s remarkable hubris is the astonishing arrogance of it: I have the authority to proclaim that God himself approves of one of us violating the most sacred right of another of us, to deprive him of dignity, to extract whatever information he will give, to enact a sadism, an indignity, a violence, a cruelty beyond imagination for most of us.

Ye humble sinners: cower before Brian Harrison and quake with tremulous awed appreciation! Then go forth and torture, because it is something, according to Harrison, that Jesus would do, if necessary, and if Jesus were here today, he would find it necessary.

Reverend Harrison, like most apologists for torture, falls back on the canard that lives can be saved through torture. He proposes that a terrorist exists who knows where a bomb is located and when it will go off and he is caught and interrogated and refuses to hand over the information voluntarily and we will know when he hands over accurate information after we beat or cut or electrocute or nearly drown him. All we have to do is beat, or cut, or electrocute or almost drown him. God will forgive us because we will have saved lives. End of movie.

There is the argument that this actual scenario is extremely unlikely. How often do we find out a bomb has been planted and then catch one of the people who planted it? How likely is that? 

It’s possible. Just not at all very likely, except in the TV program “24”, a homage to the art of torture.

I suppose it’s possible. It’s one of those nice little moral arguments that college students like to play with, just to see how far the logic applies. What if you had to abort the baby to save the life of the mother?

It strikes me that Harrison might not like the argument that without an abortion, a vulnerable young woman might commit suicide, or physically abuse her child. Not really very likely, right? Not a good basis upon which to decide whether or not abortion should be legal. No, it’s not, is it?

Are we in a war, which justifies the use of torture, according to Harrison and many other torture apologists? Only if you define “war” as something that we are perpetually in. And if we are always in a war, than torture is approved– said the Mad Hatter.

We are not in a war. There will always be criminals out there willing to commit criminal acts. That is completely different from an organized, national government committing the resources and manpower at their disposal to an attack on another sovereign state. 9/11 was no different than dozens of other criminal attacks that have occurred over the past 25 years, other than the remarkable profile it gained through sheer spectacle.

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The Unspeakable Tragedy of Stefan Kiszko: “For a Laugh”

There is something about Stefan Kiszko’s story, among many, many stories of wrongful convictions, that is especially poignant.

The bare bones: on October 5, 1975, Lesley Susan Molseed, an 11-year-old girl from Manchester, England, was murdered on Rishworth Moor. She was not sexually assaulted but her assailant masturbated over her body.

(I don’t even know what a Rishworth Moor is but it sounds dark enough, and drab and dreary.)

The police needed a suspect.

They never choose a well-spoken, middle-class, white professional who knows how to get a good lawyer for these things. Virtually never. (An exception.)

Enter Stefan Kiszko, 26 years old, a Ukrainian immigrant, with a few strange habits. He happened to live nearby and awaited disaster. Kiszko lived with his mother and compulsively wrote down license numbers of cars that annoyed him. One of these license numbers matched the number on a car seen driving in the area in which the body was found.

Kizsko suffered from anemia and other medical complications.

He initially came to the attention of the authorities when three teenaged girls went to the police and claimed that Stefan Kiszko had exposed himself to them. The police picked him up and questioned him and quickly formed the opinion that this was just the kind of suspect they were looking for in the unsolved Lesley Molseed case. Take that as you will. Then they found the license number in his notes– case closed.

As always– and, as usual, without consequence– the police broke the rules. They questioned him without advising him that he could have a lawyer present. They did not inform him that he was a suspect in the Lesley Molseed murder. They denied his request for his mother to be present. They bullied and cajoled and intimidated and harassed him for hour after hour after hour and then they told him he could go home if he would only sign the confession. According to the Guardian Newspaper, Kiszko had the emotional and mental age of 12.

A smart police officer— well, let’s say, a conscientious police officer– would have realized that Kiszko was vulnerable and easily led and might have looked for something in the confession that provided independent collaboration of the story. A detail that would have been unknown to anyone but the perpetrator. No such luck. I don’t know if they even thought of it, but no such evidence was brought forward.

But that’s not the “industry” of policing. The “industry” of policing is the arrest and conviction of individuals blamed for specific crimes. Whether or not the individual actually committed crime isn’t always relevant to the “success” or goal of the industry. People should understand that. There is a reason why the police and prosecutors are so reluctant to give up on a prosecution even when there is overwhelming evidence of innocence.

As someone who is not in that industry, I think about that a lot. If I had been a cop, the first thing I would have wanted out of Kiszko, if he was going to confess, is something we didn’t already know. A type of knot. A weapon. An artifact. The position of the hands on the body. Anything. I think I would have been troubled if there was nothing like that in his confession.

Maybe a cop thinks that no one would ever confess to a crime he did not commit. [Be it noted that Albert DeSalvo– the Boston Strangler– “confessed”, and allegedly provided the police with details “only the murderer could have known”; DNA testing proved that his confession was false. One can only conclude that the information only the murderer could have known was probably actually provided to him by the police.] I don’t find it so unbelievable. The psychological pressure on a suspect must be unbelievable. It must be like someone constantly poking at you with a pointed stick, jabbing you again and again, stopping for a moment, then starting again just as you begin to relax. And it will all end if you only please please please sign this piece of paper.

Kiszko was tried in July 1976. As usual in cases of wrongful conviction, his lawyer appears to have been incompetent. (Where’s the Hollywood Movie about this lawyer?) In fact, in express contradiction of Kiszko’s wishes, his lawyer made a defense of “diminished responsibility”. He didn’t do it, but if he had, he wasn’t responsible. Needless to say, this strategy undermined Kiszko’s alibi (that he was with his aunt at the time, and then in a store). His lawyer also failed to provide the court with evidence about Kiszko’s medical condition (a condition which made it unlikely he could have carried the body to where it was found) or, astonishingly, that his semen did not contain any sperm (sperm was found in the semen found on Lesley Molseed’s body).

That last fact alone should have disqualified Kiszko from suspicion.

The prosecution apparently knew these facts and failed to provide them to the defense, as they are required to do.

Philip Clegg, an attorney who assisted on the case, later admitted he had doubts about the confession and Kiszko’s guilt at the time. Bravo for you Clegg.  (Cue the sound of one hand clapping.)

The jury must have respected the police an awful lot because they didn’t see any flaws in the case and voted 10-2 for conviction (in Britain, the jury need not be unanimous). Did they think the evidence looked thin but the police probably had stuff they couldn’t show in court?

Awards, medals, and court appointments for all concerned!

A life sentence for Kiszko.

“We can find no grounds whatsoever to condemn the jury’s verdict of murder as in any way unsafe or unsatisfactory”. Lord Justice Bridge, on appeal.

After five years in prison, and innumerable threats from other prisoners, and several vicious beatings, Kiszko began to show signs of mental deterioration and schizophrenia.

He was denied parole because he continued to claim he was innocent. In fact, he was diagnosed as delusional precisely because he claimed he was innocent. All the same, he was denied effective treatment and was shuttled around from prison to prison, hospital to hospital, until he was pretty well destroyed as a human being.

Until he was pretty much destroyed as a human being.

Around 1987, a gentleman named Campbell Malone took an interest in the case, at Kiszko’s mother’s urging, and began to examine the evidence. It seems to take a long, long time to “examine evidence”. Years continue to go by. Kiszko sits deteriorating in prison and years and years go by.

But meantime… Kiszko’s very own lawyer, David Waddington, had become Home Secretary. He would soon be appointed to the House of Lords! David Waddington, you see, was pro capital punishment!

It didn’t take all that much work, really. With the help of a private detective, — why do years go by??– Campbell Malone was able to determine that strong alibis existed for Kiszko, that he was incapable of leaving sperm on the crime scene, and, most astonishingly, the three girls who saw him exposing himself had lied.

They did it, they said, “for a laugh”.

The Yorkshire Police and the forensic scientists involved in the conviction never apologized. Judge Lane apologized but didn’t think he’d do anything differently the next time.

In November 1992, Kiszko, emotionally and psychologically destroyed went home. He became a recluse. He was promised 500,000 pounds compensation but never received it. One year later, he died of a massive heart attack

In one of the few acts of true grace in this sad, sad story–as all the police and prosecutors blamed each other and insisted they were all good and wise and just– Lesley Susan Molseed’s sister had the remarkable good grace to attend Kiszko’s funeral in acknowledgement of his innocence: Kiszko, it turns out, was just another victim.

In October 2006, a man named Ronald Castree was arrested and charged with raping and beating a prostitute. A DNA test proved he was innocent. Ironically, it then proved a match to another specimen — in November 2006, Castree was arrested and charged with Lesley Molseed’s murder. His DNA matched that of the semen found on the body.

I am so pleased that today we have finally put things right.” Police Superintendent Max Maclean.

And that is quite possibly the most obscene statement of all. “We have finally put things right”. Police Superintendent Max Maclean, you are a fucking liar.

No, you haven’t. You never will. It’s simply not possible anymore.

Not until the little girls have had all their laughs.

* In the U.S., assuming Kiszko had been executed– a likely event– , no one would ever have found out he was innocent because no court action can be brought on behalf of a deceased prisoner.

Stefan Kiszko

“I started to tell these lies and they seemed to please them and the pressure was off as far as I was concerned. I thought if I admitted what I did to the police they would check out what I had said, find it untrue and would then let me go” Stefan Kiszko

Thank God– only in the U.S. could we still have the drama of an execution of an innocent man — every other civilized country does not practice capital punishment. Still, for Kiszko, given his idiosyncrasies, it might as well have been a death sentence. Maybe it was worse.*)

“I would like all the officers responsible for the result to be specially commended and these observations conveyed to the Chief Constable” Judge Hugh Park, after Kiszko’s conviction.

Who are we? In prison, Kiszko was repeatedly, brutally attacked by other inmates because he was a sex offender. Perhaps they are simply more naked in their impulses, but it is striking that they didn’t see themselves all that differently from judges and juries, really.

More Details about the Stefan Kiszko Case.

I stopped tracking individual stories of wrongful convictions years ago. Why? There were too many to keep up with.  It’s too depressing, not because we, as a society, make mistakes: but because of the glee with which police and prosecutors openly flout the law and good practice in their desperate lust for successful prosecutions at the expense of judicial integrity.

The enthusiasm with which many citizens continue to advocate for capital punishment, longer sentences, harsher penalties, is testimony to our insatiable desire to seem righteous and our unbridled faith in the police to solve cases and arrest the right person.

We will be ferocious and hateful, if necessary, to defend our sense of righteousness. We will tolerate any amount of abuse and torture to provide ourselves the chimera of safety and security.

It should be the policy of the national parole board from now on to disregard the issue of innocence or guilt once a prisoner approaches the end of his sentence– so we don’t get caught in these catch-22’s anymore, in which a prisoner will not be paroled because he won’t admit he is guilty. What’s the big deal? He has almost served his sentence. Why do we insist he now validate the judgment and righteousness of the prosecution?

Well, it’s obvious why, and it’s wrong.

[2022-05: it appears that the judicial system is actually taking up my suggestion– that the National Parole Board disregard the issue of innocence and guilt when a prisoner becomes eligible for parole.]

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The 2010 Grammys

I watched the Grammy Awards for a while. It was striking how much of the presentation consisted of spectacular lights and explosions and special effects. This is an acknowledgement of what the music industry really is about– making everything bigger and louder– rather than any kind of nod to actual musical qualities. If you want to impress the audience even more than the previous performer, God forbid you would do something more artistic. Hell no– just turn up the volume, get bigger amps, bigger lasers, bigger breasts, use a trapeze, strip.

The problem, of course, is diminishing returns. Like the previews at the Cineplex– eventually the amp is at 10 and then what do you do to impress? Tell a story? Develop a character? Couldn’t we just go to 11?

In the middle of all this— an award for Leonard Cohen– “lifetime achievement”. They couldn’t even spare a moment to actually perform one of the legend’s songs. Besides– how do you do a laser show to:

Suzanne takes you down
to her place near the river
you can hear the boats go by
you can spend the night beside her

At what point in the song do you set up the fireworks?

Well… you could. Why not?

Who was lip-synching? And does anyone care? Apparently Pink was not, even while drenched, hanging upside down from her silks. Beyonce looked to me like she synched. It’s pretty safe to assume that most pop/rock artists do. But I wish they would tell you before and during the performance. If you’re not ashamed of it, why hide it?

The Who did not appear to lip-synch their Superbowl appearance. They sounded awful all by their lonesome selves. Did Pete Townsend, 40 years ago, ever dream he would be doing a medley of his hits in front of 100 million people? A medley! I’m guessing that this appearance isn’t going to do much for their careers.

No longer hoping to die before he gets old.

 

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Shriek!

I recently heard that for every 17.5 million flights there is one terrorist incident. It may have been on the CBC or Associated Press or New York Times– I can’t remember. It’s an interesting piece of information. It tells you that a relatively small number of incidents have occurred that might or might not require a dramatic intervention, policy changes, new measures– money.

It’s a big world. At any given moment, people are getting into their cars and driving to work, hopping onto buses, walking. At any given moment, panhandlers reach out their cups for change, children starve to death, people suffer heart attacks, bridges collapse. At any given moment, people fall in love, fall out of love, decide to cheat on their spouses, leave their homes, return to their homes, gamble away their money, commit suicide, order another drink.

Out all of the things happening right now, the world– it seems–is aghast because one man tried to set off a bomb in an airplane in Detroit. The media take up shrieking: our airline security systems have failed. They are imperfect. They must be fixed. Spend money! Delay everyone. Surrender our civil liberties! Only stop another bomber from getting onto another plane.

Of course, if we were perfect and stopped every other potential bomber from getting onto every other possible plane and setting off every possible other bomb, we would still have the car accidents, the suicides, the murders, the accidents, the fires, the wars, the famines, the radiation leaks, the cancers, the psychos who don’t bother with a religion, the drunks who still want to drive, the politicians who vote against health care, the nurses who take too long on their coffee breaks, the Generals who believe more of the same will be different, the generals who believe more of the different will be the same, the adulterers, the preachers, the cult leaders, the activists and the passivists– and life would go on– and the bombers would start on the trains or the boats or the stadiums or the malls or the markets or the churches or the mosques of those who are similar but not quite like us must be prevented from being like us but not quite similar.

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At Seventeen

Janis Ian wrote “At Seventeen” in 1973, at the age of 22. She was already somewhat well-known for an earlier protest song, “Society’s Child”. “At Seventeen” — it seems astonishing to me now– became a huge hit, on the pops singles charts, eventually reaching #1.

Here’s a bit of interesting trivia: Janis Ian appeared on the very first episode of “Saturday Night Live” and performed this song.

I don’t know of any other song like it. How many singer-songwriters would write and perform these lines:

And murmur vague obscenities
To ugly girls like me, at seventeen.

About the same number as those who would write a song like “Donald and Lydia”.

The song, if you’re not familiar with it, is about the judgments teenagers make about each other, about “those of us with ravaged faces/lacking in the social graces”, about excluding those who fall short– those who are too short or clumsy for basketball, who never receive valentines, and never get to hear those “vague obscenities”– the most rich and allusive line in the song. It is suggested that the beauty queens will get their comeuppance:

So remember those who win the game
Lose the love they sought to gain
In debentures of quality
and dubious integrity

The small town eyes will gape at you
In dull surprise when pain in due
Exceeds accounts received
At seventeen.

I’m not sure what that means. That the love you get for being beautiful is of “dubious integrity”? Temporary? Transient? I thought the song would have worked better if the “small town eyes” were “gaping” at the wrecks of the lives of those who were excluded because of their “ravaged faces” and who found solace in other places, like drugs, self-abasement, whatever. And I’m not sure that just because you’re beautiful you can’t have true love.

Either way– “exceeds accounts received”– is a clever line. Either way, your punishment, your suffering will never be the amount you deserve. Oh how badly we want to cling to the idea that you do deserve what you get. In almost all the movies about people with disabilities who overcome monumental obstacles to “succeed”, the person with the disability is glamorized. They are disabled, but beautiful, or charming, or peaceful and quietly stoic, like Michael Oher in “Blind Side”. They make you feel good because you tell yourself that you would have behaved decently to this poor, unfortunate soul.

Would we behave as decently to unfortunate souls who don’t have anything lovable about them? Who don’t agree to be the “canvas” upon which we paint our own virtue?

John Prine, an indispensable artist, wrote the song “Donald and Lydia” in 1971, and it appeared on his brilliant first album “John Prine” (which also included “Sam Stone”, “Flag Decal”, and “Hello in There”–three other great songs).

Here’s a taste:

Lydia hid her thoughts like a cat
Behind her small eyes sunk deep in her fat
She read romance magazines up in her room
And felt just like Sunday on Saturday afternoon.

Lydia and Donald are both ill-equipped to have any kind of success in society. They are unattractive, socially inept, and they know it. They’re like Janis Ian’s seventeen-year-old girl– desperate for a shot at love.

They are as real as your right hand, but they are very, very rarely the subject of music or song or film, in our society. We’re too busy selling phony stories that worship women like Leigh-Ann Touhy (Blind Side) while short-changing the very people she wants to help by reducing them, as they say, to “canvases upon which we paint the image of our own virtue”.

Lydia is just plain fat. Donald is just one of “too many”, a private first class in the army.

There were spaces between Donald
And whatever he said
Strangers had taught him to live in his head
He envisioned the details of romantic scenes
After midnight in the stillness of the barracks latrine

Donald and Lydia find each other– in their dreams. In a flight of fancy, Prine imagines them reaching out from their homely little enclaves of self-doubt, across the ether and flotsam of human insensitivity, to find each other and connect in some mystical, orgasmic union of lost souls.

They made love in the mountains
they made love in the streams
they made love in the valleys
they made love in their dreams
and when it was over
there was nothing to say
’cause mostly they made love from 10 miles away.

There are very, very few movies that deal honestly with the harsh facts of life for people like Donald and Lydia and girls with “ravaged faces”. Since most of North America believes that the function of entertainment is to allow you to escape from your dreary little life into fantasies…

Perhaps the best, still, is Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty” (1955), about a likeable Italian American butcher with no illusions about himself or his prospects.

Great Dialogue (from “Roger Dodger” 2002)

Roger: You can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick: Why not?
Roger: Because it’s a substitution game. You have to remind them that they’re missing something from their lives. Everyone’s missing something, right?
Nick: I guess.
Roger: Trust me. And when they’re feeling sufficiently incomplete, you convince them your product is the only thing that can fill the void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they go out and buy a stupid looking pair of cargo pants.

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Irreducible Complexity

It’s a red herring.

The main problem with the argument of irreducible complexity, as advanced by Michael Behe, for example, is far simpler than I think most respondents have described.

What Behe and others do is look at a complex organism the way you could look at an arrangement of thousands of marbles on a gym floor. You look at this arrangement, marvel at it, admire the different colours and patterns that are displayed, and then ask yourself, what kind of force could have placed all these marbles in exactly these locations?

It’s unimaginable: the effort, planning, and skill required to have every marble end up in exactly the place it ended up in! How could anyone believe that it was the result of a random process?

Behe implicitly assumes that the marbles were somehow destined to be in exactly the locations they ended up in. The goal of history was to put each marble in exactly that one place and no other. That is because he implicitly assumes there was a “creator” who intended all of the marbles to be exactly where they were. And he assumes that we humans, exactly as we are, are exactly what the end result of creation or evolution was intended to be all along.

But evolution doesn’t hold the view that the process of natural selection was designed or destined to produce a human being with all the characteristics we now have. The marbles ended up where they were through the process of being spilled onto the floor, hitting each other, bouncing a certain height, rolling and colliding with each other. Evolution holds that innumerable factors under extremely diverse conditions with almost infinite combinations of effects influenced the development of species in ways that may not have been consciously “designed” in a human sense.

Or might have been. Evolution does not claim to know why the marbles rolled onto the floor. They might have been rolled there by God, after all. Evolution doesn’t and couldn’t claim to know that. That is the purview of religion.

I said “human sense” because I don’t believe there is the slightest obstacle, in evolution, to a belief in God, who may well have created the world in exactly the way science suggests it was created: with a big bang millions of years ago, with simple life forms adapting and growing more complex and splattering into diversity as conditions changed, and “evolving” into what we now call human, with the miracle of consciousness, and the inexplicable: a sense of humour, memories, music, and a capacity for tears. Where’s the problem, for the believer? There is none, except, ironically, for the limitations of human knowledge, demonstrated most vividly in the Intelligent Design movement which tries to solve a problem that does not exist.

How constricted is the Intelligent Design hypothesis? What is more amazing, and reflects more vividly the glory of God: the stunning diversity of life forms and geological shapes of the earth? Or those prudish zealots with their black markers and their wagging fingers who don’t know that they don’t know what the act of creation looks like.

I have a solution to the whole problem of religion vs. science on the issue of evolution.

The Bible says that God “created” the world. I hope that even devout, conservative, Bush-loving Christians might agree that the meaning of the word “create” is, at heart, a bit of a mystery. When we say someone “created” a house, we don’t mean he invented wood and glass. We mean he obtained or created a design, gathered all the necessary material components, assembled a crew, and put everything together into a “house”. It beggars, for example, the question of who created glass.

When we say God “created” the world, however, we mean he created the design and assembled the parts, but he also created the parts– from nothing.

We have as much reason to believe that he did it in one literal instant in a human sense as we have for the belief that he did it over billions of years, from a single point in space, outwards, and in a single point of time, outwards. Space did not even exist in a meaningful sense, nor did time, until God filled it.

How dare Michael Behe insist that he knows that “create” means “in the exact space and time in which we now live”?

Obviously, God willed creation into existence. What is the obstacle, then, to believing that science is merely the systematic study of the evidence of that act of creation? Science is the study of how God “created” the world. I would say that we know now that God probably did not make everything appear everywhere (where it is today) in one instant. He appears to have started the act of creation in one specific location, and the event spread outwards from there– and still spreads outwards today.

I need a name for this. How about: “Scientific Creationism”? “Ontological Intelligence”? Then I need to create a private Foundation and a text book and find some fat donors and give some speeches at gatherings of Republican Christians where I rail against homosexuality and gun control and those arrogant educated elites who think they’re smarter than us and the sins our age that are all the result of scientific atheism.

I will soon be rich.

Thank you.

Wiki on Irreducible Complexity

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Canada vs U.S.

It appears that most of the opposition to proposals for national health care reform in the U.S. stem from the belief that government can not do anything right.

Let’s let corporations decide, instead, when I should see a doctor, and how much I should pay.

As a Canadian, let me extend my sympathy. You poor Americans. You are so proud of your flag and your nation and your constitution– but so embarrassed by the idiots you elect to office every two years that you can’t trust them to run an insurance program. You call yourself the greatest country in the world but the citizens of this country appear to be the dumbest voters on the planet.

You see, we Canadians are very lucky. We actually elect reasonably good governments and then give them the power to execute their policies and then we enjoy the benefits— like universal health care coverage. Oh, of course it’s not perfect. You can always find a few Canadians out there who envy you Americans your vastly over-priced system that treats you quickly and then bankrupts you.

But how good is the Canadian system? Not a single politician in Canada will run on a platform of dismantling it. How simple is that? If there were any number of Canadians who were dissatisfied and wanted to move to the U.S. model, surely we’d have a member of parliament or two who would dare to campaign on privatizing health care. But even our conservative parties pledge to leave health care alone, or even to improve it.

That’s not the only thing our government does that strikes most Canadians as reasonably good. Your Social Security is a mess because Republicans won’t cooperate with reforming it and Democrats are terrified of being accused of raising taxes. Our Canadian government simply adjusted the rates of contributions a few years ago. Most Canadians probably barely noticed. But the result is that the Canadian Pension Plan is actuarially sound and all Canadians can count on receiving full benefits when they retire.

Oh and our banks. Did you know that our banks were the only banks in the developed world that did not need a single penny of bail-out funds? Not one cent. Once again, we happened to choose a government (the Liberals) who decided that the credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, and derivatives, were too risky. Our banks pleaded to be allowed to make the big money, like their U.S. competitors. The Liberals, under Jean Chretien, said “no”. Our government also wouldn’t let the banks merge so they could take on the big U.S. banks. Crazy, eh?

Do you Americans ever get sick of your two year election cycles? It seemed to take Obama forever to finally get to the inauguration. Well, we might have an election this fall. If it is called soon, the campaigns will start almost immediately and end six weeks later. Yes, six weeks! Isn’t that a gas! Done. Over. And much cheaper too.

No doubt our government could do better. We haven’t done very well in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. We didn’t get sucked into Iraq, but we are stuck in Afghanistan. Our top executives, like yours, get paid too much. The taxpayers bought the Skydome for the Blue Jays but the perception is that no major league sports team will get a tax-payer funded stadium ever again. (That’s why the Expos are gone, probably, and why the NHL doesn’t want to see any U.S. teams moving to Canada. Probably.)

But it’s a nice country. You should come visit sometimes. Our Conservative party would be roughly comparable to your Democrats. Obama probably would have gotten about 75% of the votes up here. Our liberals would probably find Obama a tad too “moderate” for our tastes.

You guys did invent the Internet– good for you!  Yes, your government invented it. And yes, Al Gore took the initiative, in Congress, to fund the proposal.

I personally thank God regularly that we don’t have anything like the Republican Party up here.

Bring your can-do spirit, your generosity, and your exuberance. But don’t bring your guns.