Category: Uncategorized

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Three Strikes and You’re a Witch

Ruling on Texas “three strikes” law in 1980, the court upheld a life sentence for a man who refused to return $120.75 he’d been paid to repair an air-conditioner.
The article in NYTimes.

We have a hard time comprehending why a group of adult men would want to seize a young girl and burn her alive at the stake because they believe her to be a witch.

Why? What’s so hard to understand? What the hell is hard to understand about human behavior that is barbaric, savage, cruel, and irrational? Like locking up a man for life because he refused to return $120 for fixing an air conditioner?

Even better: the justices in their dramatic robes, from their solemn benches, proclaimed that this was indeed rational and just and provided for good order in our society

I don’t feel any need to be diplomatic about the U.S. justice system: Americans who support it and perpetuate it are barbarians and idiots.

Update: Nicolas Kristof on excessive sentencing.

NY Times OpEd on the subject.

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Recovered Memories

If you lost your car keys a year ago and never found them, would it be possible for you to suddenly “recover” a memory, that, say, you left them in your hockey duffle bag?

We are not talking about fifteen minutes ago or a day ago or a few days ago.  Let’s say a year, but maybe more.  Would it be possible to suddenly find that experience in your memory, of, say, putting the keys in a tin can under the deck so someone could pick them up there, or under a mat, or even in your toiletry bag under the sink in your bathroom?  Would such a memory be reliably accurate?

I wouldn’t say that that never happens.  But if it does, it is very, very rare.  In fact, it is very, very, very rare.

Most of the time, if you can’t find something because you forgot where you put it, you will not, a year or more later, suddenly “recover” a memory of where you put it.  In fact, the further away, in time, from the moment when you lost the item, the less likely it is that you will ever remember where you left it.

And if you did, by some remarkable chance, suddenly think– oh, it’s in my hockey duffle bag– I remember— and you find your keys there, I would put it to you that it was purely by chance.

What you might recover, with the blatant encouragement of a counselor, is a constructed memory. Your keys won’t be there, except, by pure chance.  And the odds of the keys being somewhere you might store keys is not zero.

We don’t think of all memories at once. Never. Memories come into consciousness as they are prompted by the mind, in search of a missing item, a moment with a fondly remembered friend, a smell or sound, or a piece of music. Memories are not like tape recordings: we often blend elements of different past experiences or present perceptions into recalled activities.

There are many people who fervently believe that some memories, especially of trauma, can be “repressed”. These people are rarely not advocates for some social action of some kind.

I don’t believe it. I believe that bad experiences, in fact, provide vivid memories. You may choose to not bring them forward in your mind very often, but they are not hidden or buried.

Have you ever heard a Holocaust victim speak about his or her experiences? Have you read “Maus”? Or any of a hundred books on wartime experiences in Europe? If “repression” were possible, it beggars the imagination that these witnesses bear such voluminous, eloquent testimony.

They remember.

Because it really happened.

 

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Raging Kitsch

Best paragraph from a movie review this year (Manohla Dargis, NY Times, on “Extremely Loud a& Incredibly Close”):

But it’s an impossible role in an impossible movie that has no reason for being other than as another pop-culture palliative for a trauma it can’t bear to face. In truth, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” isn’t about Sept. 11. It’s about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies — or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers — and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.

Best line from a Wikipedia entry about a washed up former actress:

“I’ve just been robbed by the girl who played Kimberly on Diff’rent Strokes.”

From a 911 call, February 28, 1991. How did the police know she wasn’t kidding?

 

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I Don’t Want the Government Telling Me What to Eat

This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge. NY Times, 2011-09-25

The amazing thing is the way the fast food industry, heavily subsidized by the government, has succeeded in convincing so many Americans that being manipulated by a multi-billion dollar industry– at their own expense– is an expression of personal “freedom” while the very thought of the government doing anything to reduce obesity and diabetes and heart disease– like requiring fast food outlets to disclose just how many calories are in their foods– just makes them hysterical.

 

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Two Notes: Mass Incarceration and Abandoned Afghanistan

Those who believe that righteous indignation and protest politics were appropriate in the struggle to end Jim Crow, but that something less will do as we seek to dismantle mass incarceration, fail to appreciate the magnitude of the challenge. If our nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, we would have to release 4 out of 5 people behind bars. A million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Private prison companies would see their profits vanish. This system is now so deeply rooted in our social, political and economic structures that it is not going to fade away without a major shift in public consciousness. NY Times May 15, 2011

Yeah, not likely anything good is going to happen in that sector of the economy anytime soon.

In 1989, after helping defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, partly by funding the activities of one Osama Bin Laden, the U.S. walked away.

I have seen references to this fact over and over again in discussions of why Afghanistan– and Pakistan– is still a mess of anti-western agitation. The U.S. helped knock out the Soviets and then walked away and allowed fundamentalist Islamic elements to take over. To this day, apparently, Pakistan does not trust the U.S. to provide stable support in their struggle against radical Islam and that is why they hedge their bets by maintaining links to the the Taliban leadership.

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On “Book of Mormon” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Some connected with the production have been monitoring the reaction of the Mormons, but so far, the church has put out one bland statement, and some Mormons who have seen the show told reporters they were pleasantly surprised. At least it doesn’t dwell on polygamy, they said, and its ribald humor seems braced by traditional values and affection for the Mormon characters. NY Times March 27, 2011

Braced by “traditional values”?

From Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the authors of “South Park”? Well, yeah, I suspected as much.

You might think that the creators of an animated series that famously uses every expletive in the book and has an unhealthy fetish for excrement might be rather liberal on social, if not economic, issues.

But Stone and Parker’s secret is that they believe that swearing really is transgressive, and that’s why I think they think it’s really so funny, and never stops being funny, to them, even after the 25,487th time.

I have no idea of why they thought “Team America: World Police” would be funny to anybody. Sometimes people forget what happens when you parody something that is already a parody of itself, like Sean Penn, or Michelle Bachman, or Kim Jong Il. You look clumsy and mean. Which characteristics of Kim Jong Un are you going to exaggerate for comic effect? That he actually believes that for all the ranting and raving from America he could count on America doing absolutely nothing to stop him, even as he starved his own people to death? Because there is no oil under North Korea? Let’s make fun of him. Let’s have him try to get a nuclear bomb, knowing full well that only an insanely amoral and psychotic country would ever use one.

And the parodies of Hollywood liberals might have been funnier if Parker and Stone were not equally amusing as heartland redneck conservatives who know better than Hollywood liberals because, geez, Dick Cheney says these guys are really bad– are you stupid or what? Don’t you know that there really are bad people out there? Don’t you know that global warming is a hoax?

It’s not that there isn’t some amusement to be had at the expense of Hollywood liberals who believe that making a serious movie with Denzel Washington in it qualifies as enlightened or progressive. But it’s not as funny as Stone and Parker think it is because the underlying progressive outlook doesn’t look much worse than their own smug right-wing attitudes, as when they mocked Al Gore for believing that there was such a thing as “global warming”.

It may well have been the worst, least interesting movie I saw that year. Why or why doesn’t someone do a parody of the kind of humour that relies on bodily function jokes for a cheap laugh whenever they realize that their political or social commentary has become dull and lifeless?

In earlier South Park episodes, which were funny and original at times, a character would sometimes voice the moral of the story at the end in a clever, self-mocking tone, as if Stone and Parker were just too cool to not be self-mocking. I suspect they’re not, really.

And there was implied sex…

The language was also very offensive, and there was also implied sex. From a Christian point of view, I was very, very disappointed. My Ratings: [1½/3]  —Annie, age 21

From www.Christiananswers.net, a review of the film “The American President”.

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Five Perfect Movies

Five Perfect Movies:

  1. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin)
  2. Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman)
  3. Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick)
  4. The Third Man (Carol Reed)
  5. The General (Buster Keaton)

Okay — it’s much harder for a movie to be “perfect” than a song. There is so much more material to deal with and it’s easy to have a moment or two go out of balance.

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Subversion of American Institutions

The cause of anti-communism, which united millions of Americans and which gained the support of Democrats, Republicans and independents, was undermined by Sen. Joe McCarthy … McCarthy addressed a real problem: disloyal elements within the U.S. government. But his approach to this real problem was to cause untold grief to the country he claimed to love … Worst of all, McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-communism. He discredited legitimate efforts to counter Soviet subversion of American institutions. William Bennett

So says William Bennett. It’s wonderful how conservatives struggle mightily to salvage some kind of useful propaganda from even the most scurrilous, scabrous, contemptible expression of their ideals: “legitimate” efforts to combat communist subversion? “Legitimate”. Such as what? The House Un-American Activities Committee? The blacklist? The Viet Nam War? The Coups in Guatemala, Iran, Chile? Attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro? Spying on Daniel Ellsberg? Censoring American history books? What? Which “legitimate” efforts?

Bennett includes Democrats in his list. How nice. McCarthy’s was famous for accusing anyone who didn’t suck up to him personally of being a communist, terrifying political opponents into pretending to support him. Bennett survey’s the wreckage of McCarthy’s cheap pandering and pronounces himself so pleased that the Democrats so cheerfully acquiesced. I’m surprised he didn’t claim that President Eisenhower, a conservative Republican who despised McCarthy, and who was also afraid of being accused of being soft on communism, wasn’t really one of McCarthy’s fondest admirers. Really. Seriously.

I can just imagine a Roman Catholic prelate in the 1600’s– it’s such a shame that a few Jesuits get carried away and brought discredit on our legitimate efforts to root out witchcraft…

 

Amen.

And now the present.

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Compared to Nazis

Probably can’t be done but it should really be illegal to compare one’s political opponents to Nazis in this country unless you can show that they actually advocate exterminating an ethnic minority.

If Americans are too stupid to toss these people– the politicians who can’t resist comparing their opponents to Nazis– out on their asses for this really, really appalling act of desecration of the memory of all those who died at the hands of the real Nazis, unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about it except consider the credibility of some bone-faced politician who glides easily into these kind of hysterical slanders.

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Mad Hatters of the Tea Party

It’s not that big of a secret that the real movers and shakers in the Republican Party are not Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle, or even Jim DeMint or Sarah Palin.

Well, I think it is to the Tea Partiers.

Listen to this comment by Trent Lott, Svengali of the Republican Establishment, now a lobbyist just raking in the dough, as was always his purpose as a Republican politician (if you receive the money afterwards, is it still a bribe?): “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them”.

“They” are the tea party. It won’t be difficult– “they” are Republicans. They actually believe that in America, the goal of government is to provide a level playing field so that companies can battle it out among each other to provide consumers with the best products at the best price. They are in for a shock. The first thing they will learn, from Trent Lott, Karl Rove, and the others, is that the purpose of Republican government is to pin down the young, the poor, the middle class, and entrepreneurs so that the corporations can ransack their pockets with impunity. The rich, powerful corporations actually control the legislative process through lobbyists who lob millions of dollars at every politician in the firm belief that their votes can be influenced.

What Lott is afraid of– and it’s an amusing scenario– is that some of these tea party candidates are what I call “true believers”. What if they reject the money and vote their conscience? Oh my! The horror! At what point will Sharron Angle realize that she is not voting to “level the playing field” on most legislation– she will be voting to confer fabulous favors and benefits upon powerful interests who will gladly, in return, pay for the expensive negative ads she needs to run in her next election campaign when, undoubtedly, she will be running “against” Washington.

Jon Stewart hilariously showed us John McCain, in a recent campaign ad, declaring that Washington was “broken” and needed to be fixed. Then he showed us McCain using the same line over and over and over again going back to his first election campaign 30 years ago.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…. three times… eight times… ten times… uh… doh!

For all the media hype, how much influence has the Tea Party had on this election? Well, name a single Tea Party candidate who won a seat that the Republicans would have lost without him or her?

That’s right– not one.

Why? That’s pretty straight forward: a “movement” unconnected with a particular idea is always going to fizzle. The Tea Party doesn’t really have a single coherent idea that isn’t

  1. already held, in emasculated form, by the Republican Party,
    too whacko to ever be implemented,
  2. too generalized and idealistic to have any real application.
  3. In August, CNN revealed that the percentage of Americans who actually call themselves members of the Tea Party? 2.

That said, what a shame that we won’t have a real tea party victory. A victory by the Tea party– by the true believers– would be as devastating to corporate interests and old guard Republicans as it would be to the Democrats. If Tea Party Candidates came in and cleared out the lobbyists, the backroom deals, the earmarks, and so on, we might all be better off than we would be under a victory by so-called moderate Republicans.  That is, if they do what they say they will do.

It’s a little puzzling that so much mainstream media– allegedly “liberal”, of course– have given so much coverage to the Tea Party, which, as the Washington Post discovered, is actually quite small and really insignificant.

Why why why? I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, so it must be because conflict and anger and spectacle make good news.

“Look at Lott’s lobbying clients: Citigroup, General Electric, Raytheon, Entergy and other Beltway bandits, subsidy sucklers and regulatory robber barons. These guys live off of bailouts, massive government spending, and earmarks. These are exactly the policies Republicans are supposed to oppose, but don’t. They’re also the very things Tea Partiers and Jim DeMint rail against most.”

Read more at the Washington Examiner.  [dead link: sorry.]

 

The picture, at the top, is of my feet, 1976, Calgary, Alberta, sitting in a basement apartment we rented for the summer while working for the United Grain Growers.