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Doctor Impersonators

Stephen Kai Yiu Chung, 60, was arrested in Ancaster yesterday. Chung has been practicing medicine in Ancaster, Ontario for 15 years. I’ll bet you think he’s a respected member of the community and that everyone was shocked when he was arrested?

Well, not everyone. You see, the main problem is that Mr. Chung is not a doctor. He was licensed by the ever-vigilant College of Physicians until last month, but not everyone who is licensed to practice as a doctor is a doctor. They discovered that he actually had no medical training, no medical degree, and no qualifications to practice medicine.

Well, I’m not one to be picky. And who knows, if I ever lose my present job, I may want to go into medicine myself. Obviously, it can’t be as difficult as it looks. If Mr. Chung can get by for fifteen years without raising any suspicions, I figure I could last for five at least, maybe ten.

So how did they finally catch up with the ingenious Mr. Chung? Did someone finally notice him reattaching hands backwards? Did he prescribe expensive drugs of dubious medicinal value? Did he ignore his patients needs and see them only when it was convenient for himself? Did he recommend useless surgeries to pad his OHIP billings? Did he ridicule and attack cheap, readily available natural remedies? Did he recommend that his patients ignore the causes of their illnesses and just pay him for treatment instead?

No. You see, none of those things–aside from attaching the hands backwards– would have actually raised any suspicions about him actually being a doctor. Just as every person who tries to seek compensation for you after you have suffered grievous harm at hands of a heartless, criminally negligent corporation, and then impoverishes you with his own absurdly excessive billing, is not necessarily a lawyer.

No, they caught Mr. Chung by pure chance. It appears that some other guy in London, Ontario, named Roark, embarrassed the heck out of the College of Physicians by doing a little heart surgery on the side without having actually acquired any training to do so. After this public humiliation, the College decided to get right on top of things and try to find out exactly how many of our respected doctors are actually… “qualified”.

By the way, some woman has charged Mr. Chung with sexual assault. This happened five years ago. It’s nice to know that not only can you practice medicine without any qualifications for fifteen years without being caught in Ontario, but you can toss in a few assaults and forged documents while you’re at it.

Nobody will notice.

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You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic*: The Myth of Sybil

More unconscious humour: at one point, the real Sybil (Shirley Mason) wrote a letter to Dr. Wilbur insisting that she did not have multiple personalities. Some critics have made much of the letter and Wilbur’s dismissal of it. But then again, which personality wrote the letter…. (To her credit, Dr. Wilbur published the letter in “Sybil”. )

Multiple Best Seller Disorder

About 25 years ago, I read a book by Flora Rheta Schreiber called “Sybil”. It was about a woman with multiple personality disorder. The good psychiatrist. Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, was able to identify 16 different personalities within the consciousness of one troubled young woman. Some of the personalities knew about the other personalities; some did not. The personalities came into being as Sybil’s way of coping with dreadful abuse at the hands of her own mother. It was an awesome book– I was fascinated.

The book created a sensation. It spawned a television movie starring Sally Field, and host of television talk show episodes. It was a big factor in the gradual popular acceptance of the idea of multiple personalities and repressed memories, both caused by child abuse, which, indirectly, led to a lot of the ideas about repressed memory syndrome and the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare in the 1980’s.

Some experts in the field have never accepted the idea of repressed memories, and, as more evidence emerges, many more people are beginning to have doubts. At the very least, most professionals have become cautious about it.

And now it looks like we should start to question the idea of multiple personalities as well: it seems that “Sybil” is a fraud.

First of all, a psychiatrist who worked with the real Sybil, wrote a book questioning the idea that she had multiple personalities. Now a psychologist, after listening to the tapes of the sessions Dr. Flora Schreiber had with Sybil, has concluded that the “multiple personalities” were actually constructions by the psychiatrist to help Sybil explain why her behaviours seemed so strange to herself. It seems that patient, doctor, and writer got carried away with the idea, and, hey, it made good television (and lots of bucks), so why not go with it?

It should be noted that Shirley Mason had read “The Three Faces of Eve”, one of the first books on multiple personality disorder (or Disassociative Identity Disorder, as the DSM called it for a while) before becoming multiple personalities herself.

Well, every time you get tempted to think we humans are pretty smart, it helps to think about something like this. A lot of people, educated and not so educated, were completely fooled by “Sybil”, and, to this day, there are a lot of psychologists out there eagerly diagnosing patients as having multiple personality syndrome or as having repressed memories, on the basis of bad science. And, remarkably, a lot of patients who insist they are MPD– remember– an acronym means it’s true– which of course makes ridiculous the claim that they are…. MPD.

*This title is borrowed from the album by Ian Hunter.

Update April 2008:

An impressive interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a psychiatrist who treated Sybil for a short time, and refused to participate in the book. He observes that the idea of Multiple Personality Disorder only took hold in the U.S.

Links to More Information about the Sybil Myth

Other Hollywood Disorders
Recovered Memories

Update: May 2003

Someone reading this website recently asked me a few questions about this story. I confess that I didn’t provide enough details for anyone to check into the facts, or to do an intelligent search on the subject. Here they are:

Sybil’s real name was Shirley Ardell Mason. She was born January 25, 1923 and died of breast cancer February 26, 1998.

Her psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, died in 1992, so she isn’t around to defend herself. But other analysts who have listened to tapes of her sessions with Mason say that Dr. Wilbur was suggestive in her therapy and that she used hypnosis.

Flora Rheta Schreiber, the author, also died in the early 1990’s.

The psychiatrist who also treated her and concluded that the multiple personality disorder label was a fraud was Dr. Herbert Spiegel. I read an interview with him in an interesting article in the April 1997 New York Review of Books, in which he stated that Sybil was merely a “suggestible hysteric”.

Another analyst, Dr. Robert Reiber, actually listened to tapes of the sessions between Sybil and Wilbur and concluded that
Wilbur planted the idea
of “multiple personality”
into Sybil’s head, possibly out
of some kind of misguided
therapeutic strategy, and possibly for dumber reasons.

Wilbur claimed that Sybil was “cured”– the book and movie both build up to that startling miracle moment when she “reintegrates” her personalities, but, as in so many similar stories that have been popularized on TV and books, that is not quite the truth. Shirley Mason followed Wilbur to Lexington, Kentucky, and continued to receive therapy for many years.

I would check the archives of the New York Review of Books.   [Wait a minute: has it been removed?  It would not surprise me.]

You could certainly argue that no popular book about mental illness has done more damage to more families than this one: Sybil. With the exception of the infamous medieval text Malleus Maleficarum.

Who profits? The royalties from “Sybil” were split three ways, between Sybil, Schreiber, and Wilbur.

According to the Associated Press, Sybil wrote a letter to Wilbur denying that she had multiple personalities.

“Wilbur had decided she was going to make the Sybil case into a book, because she couldn’t get it published in professional journals…” From an interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel. My emphasis.

But then, Dr. Spiegel “believes” in hypnosis. But then, Dr. Spiegel describes hypnosis as something more like a some kind of self-induced “trance” state– not what you see in the movies.

Incidentally, in the same letter in which Sybil denies having multiple personalities, she also admits to making up the stories of horrendous abuse.

Where do you put that?

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What a Karacter!

Robert Sibley, a columnist with the Ottawa Citizen, tries, as many Republican and conservative Christian leaders have tried, to argue that President Clinton has significant character flaws that make him unfit to govern.

Aside from this rather brazen snub of the electoral process– the voters have consistently indicated that they approve of his job performance– his argument is seriously flawed in one other significant respect: the greatest presidents of the 20th century all possessed character flaws similar to those of Bill Clinton. If you asked most American voters, and most American historians, who the most effective presidents of the 20th century were, they would almost certainly include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy (though his term was cut short). They might also include Ronald Reagan, though he left the office after quadrupling the deficit, and Lyndon Johnson, who, in spite of his unpopularity in 1968, had the most aggressive and successful legislative agenda since FDR. All of these five are known to have been unfaithful to their wives.

Who were the worst presidents? Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and George Bush. Unfortunately for Mr. Sibley’s argument, these four were probably, by his definition, the ones with the most “character”, and are believed to have honored their marital vows. Too bad they couldn’t lead.

Sibley goes on to blame Clinton for the nightly news reports on stained dresses and adulterous liaisons. The fact is that the media in Canada rightly regard such activities by Canadian politicians as outside of the public interest and do not report them. It is Kenneth Starr who has decided that the President’s private life should be invaded, and the U.S. media, especially CNN, dutifully– and gleefully– report the salacious details. The Canadian media, rightly and honorably, respects the fact that even politicians are entitled to private lives.

And by the way, isn’t righteous CNN host Larry King working on wife #5?

Neither Newt Gingrich nor Bob Dole, the leaders of the Republican Party, are married to their first wives. But hey, Mr. Sibley, Dan Quayle is! And he is reportedly optimistic that a Republican candidate can defeat Bill Clinton in the year 2000. That would be remarkable indeed, since Bill Clinton can’t run in 2000, having already served two terms.

Nobody likes what Clinton did, but most Americans at least have the good sense to tell pollsters over and over again that they don’t believe they need to hear about it. Maybe they believe that real character includes other attributes, such as respect for privacy, concern for the environment, sound fiscal management (Clinton has the deficit under control), and respect for the expressed wishes of the electorate. Rome is burning while Starr and his Republican satyrs play their twisted fiddles, hoping and praying that what they could not achieve in a fair election or honest discourse can be won with devious snitches and brazen hypocrisy.

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A Coup’d’etat

I haven’t hear the phrase “coup d’etat” used in a headline since the 1960’s, in connection with Greece, Chile, and other Latin American countries. It’s time to bring it back into popular usage. What we are seeing in the U.S. right now is either a coup d’etat, or mass lunacy on an unimaginable scale.

Ask yourself this: does the American public have the right to know details about the sex lives of political leaders? Yes? No? Only if the sex includes criminal behaviour? How do we know if the behavior is criminal? If there is a victim, a plaintiff. Is there a plaintiff in the Lewinsky scandal? Not that we know of.

The Republican’s argue that… well, their arguments are so absurd they don’t bear repeating. They always turn the discussion towards the salacious, without offering any details of what exactly the President has done that is so evil that the entire mechanism of government must be brought to a halt in order to confront it. That’s because no such issue exists.

Ask yourself this: do you want the President of the world’s most powerful country to spend his time dealing with the economy, international affairs, and national security, or explaining to a bunch of partisan Republican pit bulls the details of his sex life? This is not as trivial a question as the media would have you believe right now. In fact, this question is an insane question. If you feel that this is a legitimate question, with all due respect, I think you are insane.

I think most people think that this issue really is important because the national media spend all their time and resources covering the story, instead of, say, the fact that Saddam Hussein once again is defying the United Nations arms inspectors. The media cover the story with preposterous obsessiveness because, well, how often do you have a pretense to discuss the President’s sex life on TV? Almost never. But here you have an Independent Prosecutor actually investigating the President’s sexual behaviour and leaking it all over the place– it’s a tabloid’s dream come true. Even Dan Rather came rushing back from Cuba to breathlessly report on the semen-stained dress. Is he insane? Has he lost all perspective? Is he an idiot? I’m beginning to think so.

Yet, most Americans continue to insist that they don’t think it’s important. They’re not sure why it’s in their face every day, but they watch, and then, again, wonder why it is so important? Every time CNN does a “town hall” on the issue, most of the “average” citizens say they don’t care, and the polls confirm that the vast majority of Americans continue to feel that way. Maybe the vast majority of Americans are smarter than you think.

The essential dynamic is this: through the existence of the Independent Prosecutor and their majority in the House and the Senate, partisan Republicans are able to keep the investigation going no matter how utterly, incomprehensibly absurd the whole thing becomes. This is a classic example of what Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, called “the big lie”. You take an absurd proposition, that the President of the United States should be prevented from exercising the functions of his office because an idiot independent prosecutor thinks he may have had consensual sex in the White House, and you simply stand around for seven months and act as if it is unimaginable to think otherwise.

Orin Hatch is now a stand-up comedian. He looks like Buster Keaton with his deadpan face, solemnly intoning into the camera, “Yes, we may have to impeach the leader of the free world if it appears that he has lied about having sex.” I can’t watch him without imagining that the minute the camera goes away, he’s going to collapse into hysterical laughter.

What the Lewinsky scandal and Kenneth Starr’s investigation really means is that the Republicans care so little for the legitimate governance of the state and have so little respect for the electoral process that they are willing to go to almost any lengths to sabotage the Clinton administration. Having lost the election fair and square, they refuse to accept or respect the results. They are using any means at their disposal to destroy the presidency. This is the real story, and the press should be exploring the profound political implications of what is happening here. When is the last time anyone on CNN discussed the following issues:

1. Will the electorate lash out at the Republicans this fall and give the Democrats a majority in both houses of Congress?

2. Will the Democrats take revenge when they do get control of Congress, and thereby chairmanship (and agenda) of the committees that investigate these matters?

3. Will the Democrats bring down the next Republican President the same way? Have you thought about that? The Republicans have established a new benchmark of political brutality. The Democrats are not likely to forgive and forget, and one almost wishes they wouldn’t. Do you think it would be any harder for the Democrats to find a pretense to cripple the presidency of, say, (ha ha) a Dan Quayle?

4. Will the next Presidential campaign focus almost entirely on the sexual behaviour of the candidates?

5. Do you really want a president who can survive this kind of microscopic examination of his personal life?

6. Of the presidents who served in this century, here are the probable or definite philanderers: Franklin Roosevelt,  Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton.

Here’s the “pure” non-philanderers (as far as we know):  Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Walker Bush.

Well? Who do you prefer?

One last absurdist note from the irrepressible Dan Quayle. He thinks that the Republicans should be able to find a candidate in 2000 who can beat Bill Clinton. Well, yes, they might: Clinton can’t run in 2000– he’s already served two terms.

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Stealing Ideas and Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola just received $20 million from a Superior Court Jury in Los Angeles because they jury believed that Warner Brothers stole his idea of a live action version of Pinocchio.

Do you ever get paid for your ideas? I’ll bet. I’ll bet you never got $20 million. But then, this is Hollywood, which will spend $120 million on a movie about Kevin Costner riding sea-doos around an old oil rig.

So a jury decided that this idea– to do Pinocchio with live actors– was so good, so brilliant, so original, that it was worth $20 million. Suppose that just by reading this you got an idea. Suppose you thought, hey, why not do a remake of Bambi with live actors? Or how about a remake of “The Ten Commandments” with a live actor instead of Charlton Heston? Or how about a remake of “The Love Bug” with a DeLorean instead of a Beetle? Or with one of those new sexy Beetles that just came out? With all of the remaining Spice Girls stuffed inside? There– that wasn’t hard.

Now all you have to do is find a lawyer and wait for Hollywood to steal your idea. Wait– you might have to prove that they stole the idea from YOU in particular, and not any other person they might have had lunch with. The trick is, you have to have lunch every day in those exclusive Hollywood restaurants frequented by producers and directors and script-writers. As you’re having lunch, just talk loudly about your great new idea. Someone is sure to turn up. Be sure to keep track of who might be stealing your ideas. And believe me, it is a lot less painful than spilling hot coffee in your lap.

Well, Warner Brothers, hold on to your pants. Here are some ideas that I think are way better than Coppola’s idea about Pinocchio, or even my idea about “The Ten Commandments”.. But don’t try to steal them, or I’ll be suing your asses for more than $20 million!

1. The Three Stooges, in an all-new adventure: Curly, Larry, and Moe star as Microsoft software engineers. Starring Jim Carrey, Reg Varney, and Rip Torn as “Moe”. Come to think of it…

2. A lobbyist from the tobacco industry courageously fights prejudice and injustice and succeeds in bribing 50 Senators to vote against a restrictive tax bill that would deprive us of our freedoms and liberties and prevent gas stations from selling cigarettes to pre-teens. Starring Tom Bosley as Newt Gingrich.

3. A courageous high school student brings a semi-automatic rifle to school and is able to prevent a tragedy by shooting 13 fellow students who were all planning to shoot their class-mates and teachers. Starring Sean Penn, and Charlton Heston as the compassionate, understanding, phys-ed coach, who encourages the student to keep lots of ammunition in his locker since you never know when you will be called upon to defend your freedoms and liberties against encroaching atheists, communists, homosexuals, and unarmed liberals. Ellen DeGeneres plays the depraved lesbian sex-education teacher.

4. Let’s see: we’ve had meteorites, volcanoes, tornados, earthquakes… what else is left? What else? I know. A gang of rugged, individualistic, violent, unshaven criminals (all of whom are the only men who could possibly save the world from some stupid massive improbable disaster or psychotic super-killer)- – form a gang and decide to take over the world and require all soldiers and policemen to carry three-hundred pounds of weapons and work alone when confronting enemies. This would be a short movie– about three minutes, or as long as it takes for them to make up a set of rules for the new world order and then break them because “rules only get in the way” and kill each other. Starring Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Norris.

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I was watching Larry King on CNN the other night. He had a theologian from some Southern Baptist Academy on, and Robert Schuller, and the President of the National Organization of Women. They were arguing about women, of course.

I learned two thing. Number 1, I will avoid CNN at all costs. The number of commercial interruptions was excruciating. CNN has no shame, no dignity, no self-respect, no honor, and no class. But if they hire any more of these luscious lips to read the news, I’m investing in the company that makes collagen.

Secondly, I am sick to death of these smug, conservative Christians trying to tell me that anyone who disagrees with their archaic social and political views is, therefore, disagreeing with the very word of God. Because, don’t you know, it says right here in Ephesians 22 that women are to submit to their husbands. Simple. Straight-forward. No interpretation required.

This discussion was a little better than most. From a Christian point of view, most feminists probably don’t spend a lot of time reading the Bible, so they don’t argue very well against people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. But Larry King knew his bible a little, and Robert Schuller knew it pretty well, and they pointed out that shortly after Paul tells women to submit to their husbands, he tells slaves to submit to their masters. Larry King asked the Baptist theologian whether he believed that slaves, nowadays, should also submit to their masters. Well, the theologian almost came right out and said that he did. He certainly didn’t clearly, unambiguously declare that slavery was wrong.

What ticked me off–pardon the expression– was his insistence that he wasn’t responsible for his own opinions. He was merely obeying God’s infallible word in the Bible and anybody who disagreed with him was going right up against the word of God Himself. That is a load of horse manure. But people like Dobson, Falwell, & Company say it all the time, as if they just happened to read the Bible that morning, and low and behold, it just happened to confirm my very own opinions.

The truth is that these guys are gut level conservatives. They were conservative long before they ever read the bible, and they only seem to read only the parts of the bible that coincide with their prejudices. They pick and choose whatever it is in the Bible they like and ignore the passages that don’t jive with their middle American patriotic right wing free enterprise presumptions.

There were lots of other verses that Larry King or the feminist could have asked Mr. Knowitall Baptist Theologian to explain. How about these. The point is that literal inerrancy– the doctrine that every word of the Bible (usually the King James Version, no less) is infallible– is pure nonsense, and the truth is that even the most conservative fundamentalists don’t act as if they really believe it. There is always a measure of interpretation, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It makes more sense to say that the Bible is an infallible guide to the will of the Lord, while allowing for the fact that none of the writers of the gospels foresaw the massive economic, social, and political changes that were going to occur in the next 2,000 years.

Given the social and economic conditions of first century Palestine, Paul would have been no more likely to suggest that women should take leadership positions in the church than he would have been likely to suggest that they go out and get jobs, or put grandma into a nursing home, or start a beauty salon, or go swimming on Sunday, or wear a pant-suit. These ideas would have been meaningless to his audience at the time. It doesn’t mean that women are forever forbidden from doing any of those things.

How do we know how the word of God applies today, then? It’s not all that hard. We know what Jesus means when he castigates the Pharisees, though, Lord knows, we still seem to put up with a lot of Pharisees today. And we certainly know what he means when he says, “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone”. No, he didn’t say it was okay to sin. But he did tell us a lot about those who are quick to reach for stones. I have a feeling that if Jesus met James Dobson today, he’d ask him a question: “How many hungry children did your $180 million a year ‘ministry’ feed today? How many poor inner-city teenagers have jobs, thanks to you? How many of the sick and destitute have seen the inside of your glorious office building in Colorado?”

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Boycott Compaq

Compaq Computers annually sells about 400,000 computers in Canada. I wish that number could be brought down to zero.

Compaq just bought DEC computers for $9 billion. DEC was profitable and the DEC plant in Kanata, Ontario, was among the most efficient computer system production plants in North America.

Do you remember these big corporations demanding tax cuts and a “hospitable” environment for big business? They told us that we had to be efficient and competitive if we wished to retain healthy economic growth. Just like the DEC plant (which manufactures Alpha motherboards for high performance computer systems). They said taxes should be reduced, just like Mike Harris has been doing, and workers need to be well-trained, just as the public education system in the Ottawa area has been doing.

Well, it turns out we were lied to. Efficiency doesn’t matter. Worker training, dedication and loyalty doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the universe of big business. Compaq is removing production of the Alpha systems from the Kanata plant and laying off 1,100 workers, with more cuts to come. Thank you and good bye.

Don’t get me wrong. Nobody should be able to force Compaq to employ workers it doesn’t want. But neither do we have to buy computers from a manufacturer who doesn’t give a damn about its employees. Some people would have you believe that corporations owe nothing to anyone, except for the bottom line. Astonishingly, among their friends are so-called Christians in the U.S. who believe that capitalism is ordained by the bible. Richard De Vos, one of the founder’s of Amway, donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican Party every year. He knows who butters his bread.

These people act as if their employees, their plants, the transportation infrastructure, the health care system, the education system, etc., comes from nowhere and costs nothing. They certainly act as if they owe nothing for any of these things that make it possible for DEC/Compaq to build a plant, hire trained, qualified employees, transport their products, and make piles of money. The minute they think they can increase their share values by dumping their own loyal employees, they will do it, without the slightest concern for these workers, their families, or their communities.

Well, we certainly don’t need Compaq. The truth is that there are many excellent competitors out there whose products are more reasonably priced in any case. Boycott Compaq! Send a message to the big fat corporate bosses who never cut their own salaries when times are hard: we will reward corporations that display some sense of responsibility towards the communities from which they get their profits.

Boycott Compaq.

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CNN

I saw something really cool today. In the World Cup soccer match between the Netherlands and Korea: a Korean player was given a yellow card for taking too long to take a penalty kick.

Just think: someone made a rule for this incredibly popular sport that requires players to hurry up and put the ball back into play. And this is a game which never stops for a commercial. If you watch only North American team sports and never watched soccer, I need to repeat that to you: they never stop for a commercial.

TSN, of course, does stop. So what do they do? They split the screen into two ugly boxes, one large one on top, and one tiny one on the bottom. They show a commercial, of course, in the large one, and boost the sound way up over the game.

May you never get used to such outrages. The owners and managers of TSN stink. They are pigs. They are greedy and despicable. There is a special place in Hell for them, where they will be strapped in chairs, their eyelids held open with steel clamps, and they are forced to watch 6,778,569 Tidy Bowl commercials over and over again.

***

I tried watching Larry King on CNN the other day. They had four guests on to discuss the Southern Baptist’s Convention’s decision that women should submit to their husbands. Larry King, by the way, has been married about five times. His latest wife is 14 years old. No, I’m kidding. I think she is 28. Larry King looks like he is about 60.

The theologian who tried to defend the statement was a liar. He said it doesn’t mean what we think it means: husbands have the greater responsibility because they are servants and must be responsible for Christ for the family. Really. Women should be happy that men have gladly undertaken this terribly painful, heavy responsibility.  In other words, it means exactly what it appears to mean: men are the boss.  Saying that being the boss is a burden doesn’t change that fact one iota.

As I said, the man is a liar. He has poor ethics. He knows very well that “submit” is exactly what the men of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. It is also, probably, what the women of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. They really believe that the immorality of our day and age is largely the result of women living independent little lives without any men around to make them submit to their leadership. Why don’t these people shows some guts and admit that it means exactly what we think it means?

CNN was more appalling than the Baptist. It cut for commercials about every 30 seconds. You might think there is a legal limit to commercials on U.S. television, but that’s not true. U.S. networks can broadcast as many commercials as they want. And if Larry King or any other broadcaster wants to keep his job, he better resist the temptation to look over to his director, drop his jaw, and say something like, “What? Another commercial already? We just had a whole pile of them?”

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Ani DiFranco: the Music Industry at Work

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Ever since the 1960’s, becoming a rock star has been the dream of millions of teenagers. To be rich, famous, and important. To be celebrated, worshipped, lusted for… What could be better? And for those who actually have some musical talent and the drive and determination to stay in the business long enough, the offer of a contract from a record company represents the ultimate dream come true. Who can resist it?

Well, the record companies know that. When they see a young, naïve talent emerging, and they think he or she might be successful enough to become a big star, they offer this person a contact and urge them to sign. If this person is smart enough to question the terms of the contract, the record company is often quick to inform this person that there are thousands of other hungry young talents out there and if he or she doesn’t agree to the terms and sign in a hurry, they will offer it to someone else. More often than not, they sign.

A lot of these contracts are pretty brutal. A lot of singers who you might think of as quite successful, because they have had hit records and performed on television, often come to the astonishing realization that they are broke. How can that be, they ask? I sold a million records last year. Where did my money go? The answer is that the record company has been deducting all kinds of mysterious expenses from their royalties. At this stage, the smarter talents bring in their own lawyers and accountants to examine the deal. What they frequently discover is that they are being mercilessly ripped off. With clever accounting and shrewd lawyers, music publishers are able to find hundreds of ways of adding “expenses” to an artist’s account. Furthermore, the artist finds out that there is very little they can do about the terms of the contract. It’s too late. They signed it. They are now obligated to continue to produce records for music industry executives they have rightly come to regard as vampires.

Ani DiFranco, bless her little heart, was smart enough not to sign. Instead, she formed her own record company– Righteous Babe Records– and is doing quite well, thank you. She discovered, to her surprise, that she could actually make pretty good money without the record company’s huge promotional machinery behind her, and without a beer company sponsoring her tours. How so? Well, you see, Ani gets to keep a fair share of the money you and I pay for each of her CD’s. No surprise promotional fees. No hidden charges. No mysterious administration expenses.

Well, bless her little heart again because when the big record companies saw how successful Ani was, they all came a’callin’ offering her big bucks to step up to the Major Leagues, Ani said NO. Politely, we hope.

Which brings me to a piece of news that filled me with anger and disgust. You see, some of those young, talented artists found that by declaring bankruptcy, they could extricate themselves from those evil contracts and negotiate new, more honest agreements with other record companies. It was the only weapon they had, against an industry and executives we can only regard with the utmost contempt. Well, Congress is considering a major revision of the bankruptcy laws. And low and behold, here come the music industry lobbyists, with big checks in their hands, demanding that the new law include a provision preventing these artists from using bankruptcy to escape their draconian contracts. Most of the Republicans, needing more of those big, fat lobbyist checks in order to get re-elected next November, were more than happy to oblige. Some, though not all, of the Democrats fought the amendment.

Your tax dollars at work, friends. Shame on the recording industry. Shame on the Republicans who sucked up to this deal. Shame on the voters who keep insisting, in poll after poll, that they want campaign reform, and then go ahead an elect the idiot who has the most money for TV ads. Don’t you realize where these liars get their campaign money from?!

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Beware of Young Girls

We’re all familiar by now with the Woody Allen scandal. Woody Allen, the 56-year-old director, was caught having an affair with his adoptive step-daughter, Soon Yi. Mia divorced Woody and sought custody of the children– excluding Soon Yi, presumably.

Our society is so confused about sex. We don’t know what the rules are anymore. The various governments now award survivor benefits to gay spouses; couples bicker in court over frozen embryos; a woman sues the company that makes Viagra because the drug enabled her newly potent husband to leave her and find a new lover; an “independent” (read “Republican Toady”) investigator spends $30 million to discover whether or not sex between consenting adults took place in the White House; a 30-year-old grade school teacher has an affair–and a child–with a 13-year-old male student, and is sent to jail for seven years.

The one thing we do know about sex is that our society has a hysterical obsession with it. Freud would have observed that this hysterical obsession is due to a profound discomfort with the subject, and, indeed, with our own bodies.

The truth is, our society is grossly immature and childish about sex. We want it more than anything else and we get upset and envious when we think someone else is getting more than we are.

Why do you suppose preachers preach more about promiscuous sex than any other sin, including materialism, greed, and racism? Because sex is private. Everybody in the congregation can sit there comfortably and pretend to feel righteous indignation because they know that nobody knows what sexual sins lurk in their own hearts. If, on the other hand, the minister points out that our ruthless greed and materialism and conspicuous consumption is driving one third of world into abject poverty and starvation… well, gee… hope nobody notices my Cadillac or my Hummer in the parking lot, or my three tv sets, or my Rolex watch.

So Woody Allen has sex with his adoptive step-daughter. Some clarity here: apparently Soon Yi is the adoptive/foster daughter of Mia Farrow. After Woody and her became an item, he sort of became Soon Yi’s “step-foster” father. So when Woody has sex with Soon Yi, is this incest?

Well, not really. Incest is sex between a man and his biological daughter. I think our society is relatively straight on that: not allowed. Ever.

So, what is wrong with Woody having an affair with Soon Li? Well, he is in a position of trust over her, and she is a vulnerable young woman, half his age (or less). We frown upon that. We make it downright illegal in many cases, say, for example, a teacher and a fifteen-year-old student.

But wait, Soon Yi is 20-years-old. So she is the age of consent. So is Woody Allen, we think. Did Soon Li have a choice or was she pressured? It’s hard to believe she is not able to walk away whenever she wants. All right. Consensual. Like Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. In both cases, powerful, famous men had consensual adulterous relationships with young, naïve, but awe-struck women. I don’t know of any law against that, because, in our society, adultery is not illegal. It is grounds for a nasty divorce settlement, but not a criminal offense.

Well, let’s look at one more little aspect of this case. I’ll bet a lot of those tabloid readers don’t remember that Mia Farrow was once involved in a little scandal of her own. Mia, you see, is the daughter of John Farrow and Margaret O’Sullivan. Frank Sinatra was a friend of the family, more than twice her age back in 1965. And guess what? Mia and Frank had an affair. Indeed, they were briefly married, until, I think, Frank realized she was a Beatles fan. Since Frank was a friend of the family and more than twice Mia’s age, it might be fair to ask if he wasn’t sort of a father figure (or step-father figure) who took advantage of a position of trust to have a sexual relationship with a vulnerable young woman.

Then we get the kicker.  Mia Farrow, while living with composer Andre Previn and his wife Dory, had an affair with Previn– who was 39 in 1968 (Farrow was 23).  Dory had a nervous breakdown when she found out Mia was pregnant with Andre’s child.  After she recovered, she recorded an album that featured the song “Beware of Young Girls“.  Amazing.  (The song also predicted the fate of that relationship: “one day she’ll go away”.)

One last weird note. Frank Sinatra used to sing a song called “My Way”, which is the anthem of macho egocentric self-sufficiency, but which Frank, insufficient as he was, was not able to write himself. Canadian Paul Anka wrote the song, along with many others like the immortally offensive “Having My Baby”. Paul Anka broke into the business with a fabulously successful single called “Diana”, which, we were told, was a love song about his baby-sitter.

Just imagine a party at some Hollywood mansion. You show up with your wife and your daughters and Jerry Falwell, and circulate among these guests: Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow, Woody Allen, Jimmy & Tammy Faye Baker, Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, Paul Anka, Princess Diana and the other Diana, Prince Charles, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Charlton Heston (with his gun), and, just for fun, Dr. Ruth. The leading lights of Western Civilization.

Hey everybody… let’s play twister….