Month: May 2012
The Democracy Laugh Track
Desi Arnaz once said: “One of my biggest problems with comedy was that I did not understand some of the jokes.” I feel this way about American democracy.
Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers. (Aristotle)
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. (Oscar Wilde)
Oops. Now we’re back to Desi Arnaz.
**
From a notebook:
What the guide dog schools won’t tell you, or by turns, tell you imperfectly, is that guide dog teams will encounter public incomprehension and outright discrimination as they walk around. In my case this discovery came in New York City when I tried to get into a cab and the driver began screaming expletives. Despite this I got into the cab. His language and mine became an instant study in art for all the ingredients of creativity were present: tension, incomprehension, passion, and spontaneity.
Sitting stern as a tree in the backseat, I told him that the law permits guide dogs for the blind in all taxis–in fact guide dogs are allowed everywhere. Hell, I even had an ID card from the school with my picture and the dog’s picture and all the appropriate legalese. But the driver, my driver, did not believe in the bravery or happiness of others. He began revving his engine and revving up his shouting.
What can you do? My driver hated me and my dog and was refusing to budge. I was reciting the law. Oh the godforsaken wilderness of human rage. When you have a disability every moment of discrimination evokes all the others: you’re again the boy who was told he couldn’t play with others, couldn’t go to school with them, sat alone in a room.
**
In American democracy, contempt is the leavening agent. If the entire country is populated by people who are under the yoke of self-contempt, who will have enough heart for the nation? Chris Christie? Romney? Ben Bernanke?
NYTimes: The Right to Record
“The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department took an important stand last week, declaring that citizens have a First Amendment right to videotape the actions of police officers in public places and that seizure or destruction of such recordings violates constitutional rights.”
From The New York Times:
EDITORIAL: The Right to Record
The Justice Department took an important stand when it declared that citizens have a right to videotape the actions of police officers in public places.
Stephen Kuusisto
Director
The Renee Crown University Honors Program
University Professor
Syracuse University
The Smell in North America
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it. The line is Kipling’s. Here in America, which ostensibly is my own country, everything smells of fear. It’s an old smell hereabouts. Cotton Mather’s rotten breath, the sermons of slavery’s defenders, clergy all, the anthropological and racial exceptionalism taught at Harvard–consistent with subsequent massacres in the Philippines and Viet Nam–and now the post 9-11 militarized policing of the nation’s poor, it’s young, it’s people of color. The smell is thick as tear gas and incense.
Paul Ryan’s assault on social services smells like good corporate starch until you hang around, then it smells like bloody feathers. And what does a domestic drone smell like? I say it smells like Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Macassar, the one that kept the hair tonic off his favorite chair.
“Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?” (Nietzsche)
If you’re a raven there’s plenty of inspiration to go around. Especially with the help of Congress. Over at Buzzfeed they’re reporting:
“An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.
The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.
The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.”
It smells like greenbacks and the fear of foreigners, namely, our own people.
Reading Facebook
Friend W is rightly exerting his spleen at the loss of civil liberties in the United States. I click the “Like” button. Meantime, Friend B is photographing rabbits. I click “Like” again because I do like rabbits. But Friend F is lamenting the “war on women” just below and I click “Like” because I do not like the war on women but I’m too tired to write a proper comment. I need help. I need a bowl of old fashioned Finnish thistle soup. Something unspecified is ailing me, or might be. Damn, that soup was good. It made you want to howl in the cold. Campbell’s doesn’t make it.
Amen, Bertrand Russell
The harm that is done by a religion is of two sorts, the one depending on the kind of belief which it is thought ought to be given to it, and the other upon the particular tenets believed. As regards the kind of belief: it is thought virtuous to have Faith–that is to say, to have a conviction which cannot be shaken by contrary evidence. Or, if contrary evidence might induce doubt, it is held that contrary evidence must be suppressed. On such grounds, the young are not allowed to hear arguments, in Russia, in favor of capitalism, or, in America, in favor of Communism. This keeps the faith of both intact and ready for internecine war. The conviction that it is important to believe this or that, even if a free inquiry would not support the belief, is one which is common to almost all religions and which inspires all systems of state education. The consequence is that the minds of the young are stunted and are filled with fanatical hostility both to those who have other fanaticisms and, even more virulently, to those who object to all fanaticisms. A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. But at present, in most countries, education aims at preventing the growth of such a habit, and men who refuse to profess belief in some system of unfounded dogmas are not considered suitable as teachers of the young.
Plato, Why Won't You Scram?
Some days I wake to a memory of first books, by which I mean the first books I read in earnest and under the gun of a university education. By the time I was a sophomore there were two books that were heavily prescribed: Plato’s “Republic” and Eric Auerbach’s “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature”. The latter was the anodyne to the former, offering what Monty Python might have called “Plato’s good bits” but for all of Auerbach’s deterministic foregrounding of Platonic representation of “the real” –all of it as elegant as can be, I sensed the systemic cruelty in Plato and by turns I saw the academic wave of the hand, the moue of easy dismissal when students brought it up. These lines by Bertrand Russell were then, and now, important reminders of the cultural fallout as it were:
“That Plato’s Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history. Let us consider a few points in this totalitarian tract. The main purpose of education, to which everything else is subordinated, is to produce courage in battle. To this end, there is to be a rigid censorship of the stories told by mothers and nurses to young children; there is to be no reading of Homer, because that degraded versifier makes heroes lament and gods laugh; the drama is to be forbidden, because it contains villains and women; music is to be only of certain kinds, which, in modern terms, would be “Rule Britannia” and “The British Grenadiers.” The government is to be in the hands of a small oligarchy, who are to practice trickery and lying–trickery in manipulating the drawing of lots for eugenic purposes, and elaborate lying to persuade the population that there are biological differences between the upper and lower classes. Finally, there is to be a large-scale infanticide when children are born otherwise than as a result of governmental swindling in the drawing of lots.”
So I find myself reading and reminiscing just as Congress wants to legalize propaganda and the Obama administration is seeking to curtail press freedoms and the rhetoric of the Ryan budget is aimed at eliminating the poor fro health services and social security disability assistance.
Thoreau: From Walden
It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more.Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day. The whole of the day should not be day-time; there should be one hour, if no more, which the day did not bring forth.Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. But is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless study, or the idle read, the literature of the Russians and the Chinese,or even French philosophy and much of German criticism. Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
White House Sends U.N. Disability Treaty to the Senate for Ratification
|
|
Planet of the Blind 