Valhalla's War Room

January Updates and Sounds of Cinema 2011 Wrap Up

2012-01-22T23:31:00.000-06:00

A happy and very belated new year. This is my first post since the end of October 2011. My apologies for that. A collision of circumstances throughout the last quarter of 2011 made blogging nearly impossible. But I'm resolved to make regular contributions to this and the Sounds of Cinema blog in 2012.

On today's episode of Sounds of Cinema I counted down my picks of the best and worst films of the past year:

Best:

Margin Call
Shame
The Artist
Melancholia
Hanna
A Better Life
Page One: Inside the New York Times
50/50
Hugo
Warrior

Worst:

Jack and Jill
Your Highness
The Hangover Part II
Priest
Sleeping Beauty
Bad Teacher
Road to Nowhere
Mr. Popper's Penguins
30 Minutes or Less
Sucker Punch

You can find more information, including rationales for each film and lists of honorable mentions and cinematic trends of 2011, here.

Here is a clip of Margin Call director J.C. Chandor and actor Kevin Spacey discussing the film on Hardball with Chris Matthews:

Halloween 2011

2011-10-31T23:27:00.000-05:00

This Halloween I find myself watching the spirit of revolution emanating across the United States (and across the globe) and wondering how my favorite holiday fits into it. At first it would seem not at all; the current obsessions with economic and social justice and demands for civic consciousness seem at odds with a holiday that unapologetically embraces materialism and carnal distractions. But this fall, Halloween comes as a necessary relief and a reminder of what we really strive for.

I like to think of Halloween as America’s counter cultural holiday. Most holidays, by their very nature, celebrate a specific tradition or event. But there isn’t a single meaning to Halloween. In fact, there is no specific meaning to the holiday at all. Halloween is not attached to a national or religious mythology, it has no pure “spirit” to appeal to, and because of that the holiday has been able to survive integration into a capitalist system without losing its integrity. Because Halloween has no pretensions to profundity, it is an opportunity for celebrants to have fun without the guilt associated with other holidays. There is no demand that we think about the less fortunate, reflect on dead soldiers, or give thanks for our luck. This is the holiday that allows people to literally have their candy corn and eat it too. And that isn’t something to bemoan; it is something to celebrate.

Halloween is like New Year’s Eve in that it commemorates both the ending and the beginning. On December 31st we celebrate the conclusion of one calendar year and the start of another; on October 31st we celebrate the dance of Thanatos and Eros—the death force and the life force—and the way their desires and motivations intertwine like the limbs of lovers on a fall evening. While picking their costumes, men (who are the more fearful of the sexes, although they will rarely admit to it) may adopt an identity linked to death, whether it is a ghost, a vampire, a warrior, or a zombie, and proclaim their mastery of it. Women, on the other hand, often select a sexualized version of just about anything and thereby make an unapologetic display of their own sexuality. In both cases a taboo is turned into an outfit and by wearing it we are able to claim it as a part of ourselves and overcome our fear of it, if only for an evening. That mingling of characters symbolizing death and life, whether they gather at a polite party or grind against one another on a dark dance floor, is a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Halloween is important because it celebrates life in ways that no other holiday can, without the distractions that cultural traditions and narratives often create. Life is embedded in flesh and blood and its highest expression is not found in illusory transcendence of the physical but our immersion within it. A full appreciation of life requires an acknowledgement of death and the dramatic interplay between them. Halloween reminds us, whatever our broader political and social agendas, of what we are fighting for. At its best, the holiday reinvigorates our lust for life.

9/11 Film Series Articles

2011-09-21T00:49:00.000-05:00

Last week I coordinated a week-long 9/11 Film Series on the Winona State University campus. After the screenings I wrote posts for the Sounds of Cinema blog, reflecting on each picture. You can find links to those below:

United 93
"United 93 is not the only film dramatization about the attack. In fact, there have been at least nine films dramatizing the events of September 11th and of those, four have focused on the events aboard United Airlines Flight 93. Yet, United 93 is distinct among them. Although it is a dramatization, the film has a great deal of detail that makes it a mergence of dramatic and documentary filmmaking."

Osama
"When a group of people are attacked, they tend to circle the wagons and everyone inside the circle is considered an ally, no matter what divisions and rivalries existed previously, and those outside the circle are viewed with suspicion if not outright antagonism. That has serious consequences because the wartime mentality makes empathy for those outside of our circle increasingly difficult. After 9/11, this dualistic mind set took hold among the general American public who were traumatized by the attack but it also threatens to characterize the Muslim community if they feel persecuted and ostracized. And in that case dialogue goes down and tension goes up. This is where a film like Osama becomes so important."

Restrepo
"Restrepo is bookended by testimonies of the soldiers in charge at the post. In the pre-title sequence, Captain Dan Kearney admits that he did not do any research on the Korengal Valley before arriving there but that he was determined to go into the area and, in his words, "fix it." In the film's final sequence, as the soldier's vacate the valley, First Sergeant LaMonta Caldwell says "We've done our job. We did what we were supposed to be doing. And we're out of here." It is in the juxtaposition of those statements with what happens in between them that Restrepo is most revealing."

Taxi to the Dark Side
"There is a key image presented early on in Taxi to the Dark Side that sets up everything that that is to follow. The voice over explains that Abu Ghraib prison was notorious under Saddam Hussein's regime as a place for torture and the disposal of political enemies. This information is presented simultaneously with the image of a mural inside the prison depicting Saddam. The former Iraqi leader's face has been scratched off the wall and all that remains is his general visage. The mural looks very much like the stand-ups of famous characters often seen at theme parks and tourist traps, in which the head has been cut out and visitors stick their own faces inside for a photo. Later, as Taxi to the Dark Side features pictures of abused prisoners and American soldiers posing with them as though in a petting zoo or a frat party, the parallel is clear. Americans entered an atmosphere of abuse and became the new face of oppression."

The Messenger
"[The Messenger] continues the search for meaning in the post-9/11 (and post-Abu Ghraib) era and it dramatizes that search in the lives of the soldiers on a Casualty Notification Team and a widow of a recent casualty in the war. In The Messenger, that search is defined by the characters' interactions with each other and their gradual shift from isolation to companionship."

Four Lions
"In the context of this film series, United 93 showed us the devastation of terrorism, Osama frightened us with religion inspired oppression, and Taxi to the Dark Side startled us with its depiction of institutionalized torture. Four Lions invites us to laugh at this horror."

I have also written a reflection on the series that has been published at Winona360:
"Part of the reason I do this show is that I think movies are important. And not just high class Hollywood Oscar bait or prestigious art films but the cumulative effects of cinema from family films to grindhouse movies. It is important to remember that cinema can have consequences. We know, for example, that Joseph Goebbels used motion pictures as one of the primary tools of the Nazi propaganda campaign, especially in driving and shaping anti-Semitic attitudes that paved the way for the Final Solution. But we can also look at a film like Schindler’s List and appreciate filmmakers exposing the horrors of the Holocaust and coping with its legacy."

Bachmann, Sanity, and the 2012 Race

2011-07-11T21:45:00.007-05:00

Matt Taibbi has written a piece for Rolling Stone magazine on Michelle Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman who has recently catapulted to the national scene based on her popularity with the Tea Party movement. Although she has been around for a while, the crescendo in her popularity has hit a new peak as she began an official run for the presidency. In many respects she is emblematic of current trends not just in politics but in the culture at large.

Taibbi writes:

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

That last bit of that paragraph is important. Bachmann comes from the evangelical movement and like many in that movement, from the leaders down to the mega-church goers, she sees the entire world as a cosmic conflict between good and evil. There is no room for equivocation or subtlety; everything is black and white and all conflicts are part of a life and death struggle between the saved and the fallen. This is why otherwise mundane debates about taxes and health care take on such a vicious tone; in the mind of this segment of the public, these debates are really about America's soul.

In the current cultural environment, this kind of thinking has been enabled. The right wing in particular (although the left wing is guilty of this as well) are able to bathe in information streams that are made only of things they want to hear. Facts and opinions are interchangeable. And this provides the raw material for constructing a house and even a village of alternate reality where outside input is viewed as extraneous. In an abundant marketplace of ideas the rants of a person like Bachmann are forced to compete with more sophisicated ideas backed by research and facts. But when Bachmann and people like her are able to create their own space where no outside ideas are allowed in, those ideas live on, they thrive, and they even create their own reality. And subscribing to an alternate understanding of reality is essentially what it is to be crazy.

I'm no fan of Bachmann but it is dismissive and dangerous to call her crazy, even if she is. When we label a movement, an organization, or one of its adherents as crazy (I mean that in parlance, not as a psychological or psychiatric diagnosis), we mean that the group or individual's ideas are so far beyond what is considered normal that they do not deserve to be treated with any kind of credibility. Given some of her statements about economics, sexuality, and anti-American conspiracies, it's easy to label her as insane, crazy, a fruitcake, batshit, et cetera. And even though that dismissive response may be the appropriate retort when identical ideas are uttered by a drunk on a street corner or a patient in a mental institution, when these same ideas come from a politician running for president in this environment, our dismissal plays right into her hands.

As Taibbi indicates, a certain kind of crazy is appealing to voters. Bachmann's rejection by the mainstream is proof of her authenticity in the eyes of her fans, who are similarly suspicious about the broader world. And as her allies grow, Bachmann does not really qualify as crazy. The "right wing nut job" label is only meaningful if she is isolated on the fringe. But she isn't and even if she does not make the 2012 presidential ticket, her presence in the race and in American culture will shift the conversation enough that the ideas she represents will have to be taken seriously.

Sanity is a democratic process and crazy is a minority opinion. But if we do not take the ideas of Bachmann and her ilk seriously, we may wake one day to find that madness has recruited enough of the gullible and the disillusioned to establish its own reality and those of us who had been dozing comfortably in our sanity are outnumbered and labeled and crazy, insane, or even dangerous.

Freedom is Free, Civilization Costs Money

2011-07-04T23:08:00.000-05:00

Today is the Fourth of July, a day in which Americans commemorate the birth of their country and celebrate an abstract value that we like to call “freedom.” This year’s holiday celebration is tinted by recent events that have highlighted the limits to which the public at large have seriously considered what “freedom” actually means. Economic disputes among pundits and politicians, the labor protests in Wisconsin, and the shutdown of the state government of Minnesota have converged this July 4th in a nearly perfect parade of self-righteousness and absurdity. As is usual in the public discourse, the primary issues being discussed are a hustle for the more serious philosophical ideas underneath. At issue here is not really tax increases or spending caps. It is freedom – a word that Americans love to use but seldom understand.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau wrote, “Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains.” By this, Rousseau meant that man, free of society and in his natural state, has no moral or ethical obligations and he is not bound to follow any rule, edict, law, or principal. According to Rousseau, man gives up a degree of freedom for the benefits of living in society. This kind of thinking was radical at Rousseau’s time (in many ways it still is) and it led to theories of freedom by other thinkers such as John Locke, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Jefferson who provide the basis for the American conception of freedom.

But Americans’ contemporary ideas about freedom are oversimplified and undereducated. We idealize freedom as a concept, embodied by country western songs and bumper sticker slogans like “Freedom isn’t’ free,” as opposed to understanding or practicing it as a way of life. In American fantasies, freedom entails the ability of an individual to rise to great success and fame without the encumbrance of government or other social interference. Lurking unspoken in the background of that fantasy is the darker side of freedom. Often imagined as the pinnacle of personal responsibility, the more extreme or “pure” the conception of freedom, the closer it represents a state of amorality. The freest man on earth has no debts and no obligations. He is also free of morality or ethics, which are imposed on him by society. He is, in essence, what civilized people would call a psychopath.

In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm wrote that there are two kinds of freedom: “Freedom from,” as in freedom from oppression, and “freedom to,” as in freedom to vote. Importantly, Fromm noted that one kind of freedom cannot exist without the other and if one of these forms of freedom is missing, its absence ensures the destruction or surrender of the other. For instance, if citizens do not have the ability to feed themselves (freedom to self-sufficiency) they might well surrender other social privileges (freedom from oppression) to a dictator; this is essentially what happened in Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. If citizens have a great deal of wealth and comfort (freedom from poverty), they might surrender privacy or personal liberty (freedom to autonomy); this is an apt description of the culture in China.

Our lack of understanding of freedom has serious implications. The administration of George W. Bush failed to prepare for the rebuilding of Iraq after Saddam Hussein was deposed. Why? Because high ranking government officials believed that all that was necessary for a functioning democracy in Iraq was to “free” the people from a dictator and that a civil society would organically and instantaneously spring up. This is a mistake as was proven by the civil war that broke out in that country in the years following the invasion. A civil, peaceful, democratic society requires, among other things, a culture that values and protects freedom of speech and allows for public dissent without fear of retaliation. This cannot be built overnight.

A functioning society also requires a government that is stable and credible. The riots and other violence that occurred in Baghdad after the invasion were committed by people whose social grid had been smashed. The insurgency was not made of Islamic fundamentalists. It was made of disaffected and disenfranchised Iraqis who were out of work and unable to house, cloth, or feed themselves or their families due to the nonexistent rebuilding plan after the American invasion. The ideas of Rousseau and Fromm were at work right before our eyes.

These ideas can be applied to Iraq but if certain trends continue they could be applied right here in America as well. The right wing, informed by a half-assed understanding of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ideology, have begun an assault on the social safety net but frame the issue in terms of increasing freedom or staving off un-freedom. This is a smoke screen designed to get the masses behind policies that enrich the powerful at the expense of the weak. The powerful cannot and should not be blamed for that priority any more than a great white shark should be blamed for trying to kill and eat as many sea lions as it can. Powerful is what powerful does.

In the face of superior power there are two options: submit to it or try to take it for yourself. How we decide between those options is complicated and involves weighing many factors, both personal and social. But a man is only bound to submit to society’s laws if he receives the benefits of its protection. As those benefits erode away, so do our links to one another. While a totalitarian society degrades our individuality and turns us into one digit among many, a similarly nihilistic idealization of freedom degrades our community by turning each individual into the only number that counts.

And as the social contract erodes, those who have built cathedrals of power on the foundation of society’s stability will find cement turning into sand. The mobs of the hungry and the homeless will not stay confined to the alley forever. The underlying social pact that some of society’s most powerful individuals are attempting to subvert is the very thing keeping them in power. As they continue to subvert it, they weaken the very shield of law and order--and indeed the illusion of morality--that protects them.

And so this is the fundamental choice: what kind of society do we want to live in? Taken to the extreme in one direction is the society that the right wing claims to fear, in which personal liberty is completely overtaken by government. The other extreme is a non-society in which there is no government whatsoever and personal liberty is absolute. This is the freedom of which right wingers and the tea partiers sing. But, knowingly or not, the anthem for this brand of freedom was sung by school children in the pages of William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, as they danced around a fire and pledged to kill the pig.

As tonight’s fireworks explode and local bands serenade audiences with patriotic tunes let’s all remember that freedom is free but civilization requires investment. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we surrender freedom on a regular basis for the benefit of security. The ongoing question is how much of one are we willing to give for the maintenance of the other.

Thoughts on Rapture Hysteria

2011-05-22T23:13:00.002-05:00

Today is May 22, 2011, the day after what was, according to a small but well publicized group of Christians, supposed to be the rapture. This non-event is evidently a disappointment to the faithful, but I believe the failure of the end times to begin presents a great opportunity for the saner among us and for our culture.

A curious feature about the popular discussion of the rapture over the past few weeks was referring to it as “the end of the world.” However, that is not really what the rapture represents in Christian mythology. It is, if anything, the beginning of the end, in which the Christian god ushers his faithful into heaven. At some point after this, the people left behind either repent or perish in Armageddon. Belief in the rapture is taken most seriously by fundamentalist Christians although among them there are a variety of opinions about the order of anticipated end time events. The lack of a coherent or correct understanding of the event, paired with the derisive regard for the belief is encouraging, especially when compared to the Y2K scare or the Jim Jones cult, because it indicates that the majority did not take it seriously. We’ll see how this apparent sanity fares in December 2012.

But the failure of the rapture to occur creates an important, but time-limited, opportunity to really talk some sense into the public. To use a pair of popular clichés, it is both a teachable moment and a useful crisis.

One of the attractions of religious belief, even for people who ought to know better, is that it provides a sense of order and understanding in a world that generally seems disordered and unpredictable. Watching the television news, reading the newspaper, or just observing daily life makes the world’s problems seem big and unsolvable. And learning more about them is usually not helpful because it reveals those problems to be ever more complex and difficult to grasp. Religious faith, particularly of the Abrahamic variety, tells the believer that there is a plan, that there is a way to understand it all, and in the end everything will be fine, provided you follow the rules. It’s an attractive sales pitch that has served religion well for centuries.

Religion and faith have historically been tough competitors with reason because the latter cannot use those appeals to market itself. Philosophy and science also tell us that the world is understandable but with the caveat that the world is not created with individuals, or group of people, or even a particular species in mind. Although that is the intellectually sound argument, it is emotionally dissatisfying and emotional appeals are almost always more persuasive.

Reason also requires study and effort. Part of the allure of faith, especially in common practice, is abandoning or ignoring our critical faculties. And even if we do adopt the intellectual rigor required by reason, what we might find is that everything we believe about the world is wrong. It’s a tough sell.

The Achilles’ heel of faith is that is has to be right. That’s why it is usually applied to things that can’t be proven or it is claimed to be proven in hindsight by retrofitting our understanding of past events to fit faith’s narrative. But when faith tries to play in the sandbox of reason, it has to play by reason’s rules. And this is where it all falls apart.

The belief that the rapture was going to occur on May 21, 2011 was a matter of faith masquerading as reason. The slogan and web domain for the believers was “We can know” and the date was pinpointed based upon pseudo-mathematical drivel. This façade of reason is easily punctured; the belief that there would be a rapture at all or at any time is a matter of faith and rooted in superstitious traditions. The attempt to pinpoint a date and time is just a bastardization of reason. But by attempting to adopt reason’s methods, the rapture claim was held to reason’s standards and like many matters of reason, it was proven wrong by observable data, as May 21, 2011 came and went without a mass resurrection.

On the day after the day that was supposed to herald the end of the world, the faith of many of these believers must be shaken. For those who bought into the nonsense of a spring 2011 rapture, May 22 and the days and weeks to follow will be a period of reorienting themselves to a new reality caused by the head-on collision of superstition and reality. This can create a fissure in a person’s armor of faith. It is into that opening that reason can enter. It is a narrow space of time; it won’t be long before the very people who predicted a spring 2011 apocalypse will announce some mathematical error and begin all over again. After all, the most recent hysteria about the rapture was instigated by Harold Camping, a preacher who had previously predicted that the rapture would occur in September 1994 (Note: He was wrong then, too).

I do not generally advocate proselytization. But for those of you who have loved ones who suffer from this abuse (and that is exactly what it is) from figures like Camping, this is an opportunity to stage something along the lines of an intervention. I am in no position to offer advice on how; that is for you to figure out based on the specifics of the case. But I can say this: if I had a close friend or loved one who was involved in stories like this one in which believers did damage not only to themselves and their finances but also to their family, a confrontation in the aftermath of their complete and unequivocal defeat would be a first priority. I don’t say that as an opportunity to sneer in ridicule but as someone who holds intellectual inquiry in the highest regard.

But there is another, and broader, element to the rapture story that applies to all believers in supernatural hokum. It is easy, especially now, to point and laugh at a group of people who thought that the rapture was going to happen yesterday. But a belief in Armageddon is an essential part of the Christian argument and there is little or no dispute among believers that it will happen one day. What separates the believers being ridiculed and the believers doing the ridiculing is a matter of timing. To call one’s self a Christian and to claim a belief in the Bible, and specifically the prophecy of the Book of Revelation, requires it.

This may be the most difficult thing for people to learn from this event but it is the most essential lesson if we hope to break out of this superstitious rut. The non-event that was the rapture of 2011 is fundamentally no different from the belief that the world will end in the distant future. For that matter, believing that the image of Mary the Virgin appears in a burned piece of toast is no different from believing that bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ. If, in the aftermath of the tension and hysteria of the past few weeks, we can look back and see illusions and wishful thinking—in a word, faith—for what they are, then we stand a chance of emancipating ourselves from doctrines and traditions that have retarded our ability to think critically about the world and about ourselves and finally achieve the kind of enlightenment and higher consciousness that religion has always advertised but never delivered.

Steve Simon on Gay Marriage

2011-05-04T22:55:00.000-05:00

As you may have heard, an amendment to the constitution of Minnesota banning gay marriage will appear on the 2012 ballot. State representative Steve Simon (DFL-St. Louis Park) gave the following testimony against the amendment.

Essay on 'Lake of Fire' at Winona360

2011-04-19T18:28:00.000-05:00

As a follow up to the screening of the abortion documentary Lake of Fire, I have published an essay at Winona360 reflecting on the film. Here is an excerpt:

Before screening Lake of Fire at Winona State, I introduced the film to the audience and read a short excerpt from The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. He writes, “The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.” This quote could well play as an epigraph to Lake of Fire as it encapsulates the underlying theme of the film. It also answers one of the main criticisms of the film: that it focuses on the extremists, particularly on the anti-abortion side of the debate.

It may be true that most people who hold opinions about abortion one way or the other (which accounts for the majority of Americans) are not violent nor do they approve of violence toward those who hold opposing viewpoints. But the loudest voices have been those who have declared the abortion debate a holy war and their battle cries drown out the rational or moderate voices. In that respect, the extremists are setting the tone. Because the moderate voices cannot get a word in, they are like a television program that no one watches or a blog that no one reads. This source may have the best material or the most accurate information but if no one receives it, then it may as well not exist at all. Perception is reality and the extremists, by dominating the discussion, are in the process of reshaping reality, for themselves and for the rest of us, to fit this holy war perspective.

You can find out more about the film here.

'Lake of Fire' Screening on April 5th

2011-04-04T18:59:00.003-05:00

The abortion documentary Lake of Fire will be showing on the Winona State University campus on Tuesday, April 5th at 7pm in the Somsen Auditorium. The event is open to the public and admission is free. The film is not rated but viewer discretion is advised.

This screening of Lake of Fire is sponsored by Sounds of Cinema. Find out more about the film here.

O'Donnell: "Many of the things [Bachmann] says are truly breathtaking demonstrations of ignorance levels previously unimaginable in a member of congress or a graduate of an American elementary school."

2011-03-16T03:05:00.001-05:00

Watch Lawrence O'Donnell attempt to explain the stupidity of Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, and try to account explain her pattern of ignorant statements. He looks to the people of her staff, who ought to protect her, and the voters who elected her for some kind of answer but finds none.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Despite O'Donnell's tendency to indulge a condescending tone, he is right to point a finger at the voters of Minnesota. This woman is an embarrassment to the state and her supporters confirm the most damning criticisms of democracy: that it is an organized version of mob rule and that it rewards mediocrity.

Mr. Ellison Goes to Washington

2011-03-10T18:13:00.001-06:00

There is a lot going on in the world (as there always is) and lately I've been struggling to keep up with all of it. Over the next week or so I plan to publish some comments about the various stories that have been occupying my thoughts.

But for now I wanted to draw attention to the Homeland Security Committee's hearings on radicalization in the American Muslim community. Minnesota representative (and the first Muslim to be elected to congress) Keith Ellison made a statement to the committee, which can be read in full here.

Here is Ellison's thesis, and probably the most important point of his testimony:

Today’s hearing is entitled, “The extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s response.”

It is true that specific individuals, including some who are Muslims, are violent extremists. However, these are individuals – but not entire communities. Individuals like Anwar Al-Aulaqi, Faisel Shazad, and Nidal Hasan do not represent the Muslim American community. When their violent actions are associated with an entire community, then blame is assigned to a whole group. This is the very heart of stereotyping and scapegoating, which is counter-productive.

This point is at the heart of my testimony today. Ascribing the evil acts of a few individuals to an entire community is wrong; it is ineffective; and it risks making our country less secure.

Solutions to the scourge of domestic terrorism often emerge from individuals within the Muslim community—a point I address later in my testimony. However, demanding a “community response” (as the title of this hearing suggests) asserts that the entire community bears responsibility for the violent acts of individuals. Targeting the Muslim American community for the actions of a few is unjust. Actually all of us—all communities—are responsible for combating violent extremism. Singling out one community focuses our analysis in the wrong direction.

There are many reasons to criticize Islam. For that matter, there are many reasons to criticize Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and all other religions. Religion--as an ideology--is a poisonous influence on contemporary society as it retards culture, encourages anti-intellectualism, and promotes violence against those who do not share identical beliefs.

However, there is a distinction to be made between between Christianity and Christians, just is there is a difference between Islam and Muslims. One identifies a belief system and the other identifies a group of people. We should--and we must--be critical of the former. But we must also take care not to turn that criticism of dogma and ideology into an excuse for the persecution of an entire community, especially when that community is made of individuals with a wide range of opinions about their shared ideology.

These congressional hearings are being held as a result of institutionalized fears of Muslims in particular and of foreigners more broadly. This fear is understandable. As Ellison readily admits, there have been acts of violence committed by members of the Muslim community. And the impact of these events has been amplified by sensational news coverage that characterizes Muslims as a homogeneous group of barbarians intending to overrun western civilization.

But there has also been a great deal of violence committed against members of the Muslim community and yet congress has not conducted hearings about the religious and ethnic identities of those offenders. And that may be the biggest misstep of the committee's hearings. There was actually a golden opportunity here to make inroads of support for law enforcement and encourage interfaith and interracial cooperation by highlighting the differences between various Muslim groups and the ways members of the community have stepped forward to foil terrorist plots. There was also an opportunity to show how the actions of terrorists have caused difficulty for the Muslim community at large by staining their image.

But that was not the goal of today's hearings. Instead, congress went the route of lumping the many peaceful Muslims in with the few violent individuals. And this just makes things worse. Among the causes of radicalization is the perception of marginalization and persecution. These hearings, by their very design, alienate the community, isolate them as a villainous other, and accuse all members of sharing responsibility for the acts of a few. And as an ultimate result, these hearings may actually encourage those few who are on the fringes of radicalization to abandon hope for being a part of American society and attack it as though it were an enemy.

Best and Worst Films of 2010

2011-01-16T11:04:00.000-06:00

On today's episode of Sounds of Cinema I listed my picks of the best and worst films of the past year.

Here are my picks of the 10 best films of 2010:

Black Swan
The Social Network
Creation
Restrepo
The Kids Are All Right
The Town
Toy Story 3
Easy A
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Inception

And here are the 10 worst films of 2010:

The Last Airbender
My Soul to Take
Cop Out
Grown Ups
Killers
The Other Guys
Skyline
Devil
The Switch
Legion

You can find arguments for each film plus lists of honorable mentions and trends from the past year by clicking here.

Today in Censorship

2011-01-05T18:09:00.001-06:00

Last night two of MSNBC's prime time programs ran stories about censorship.

First, Countdown ran a story about a new version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by a professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, in which the "n-word" (I'm self censoring out of respect for the sensitivities of potential blog readers) is replaced with the word "slave." MSNBC calls in Melissa Harris-Perry to discuss the foolishness of this revision.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Second, The Last Word featured this story about a court decision that has overturned a fine that the FCC imposed on ABC affiliates for a nude scene on NYPD Blue in 2003. This is an exciting and interesting development because it may well set a prescedent for the dissolution of the FCC's ability to censor anything on television. The clip includes the offending footage.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Report from the Front of the War on Christmas

2010-12-14T11:46:00.000-06:00

Check out this special report by Frank Conniff, broadcasting from the front lines of the War on Christmas, featured on last night's edition of Countdown on Keith Olbermann:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Taking a WikiLeak on Your Parade

2010-12-03T03:16:00.000-06:00

Anyone watching the news cycle in the past week has undoubtedly come across the story of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. His site "dumped" secret communications between the United States and other countries into the public sphere and as a result the chatter circuit has been literally screaming for Assange's head. Sarah Palin suggested Assange be hunted like Osama bin Laden and Mike Huckabee has called for Assange to be executed. (I think this says less about the severity of Assange's actions and much more about leading Republican's lack of respect for due process.)

But as Glen Greenwald points out in this article at Salon, the anger at Assange is misplaced, inconsistent, and hypocritical. Greenwald writes:

The ringleaders of this hate ritual are advocates of -- and in some cases directly responsible for -- the world's deadliest and most lawless actions of the last decade. And they're demanding Assange's imprisonment, or his blood, in service of a Government that has perpetrated all of these abuses and, more so, to preserve a Wall of Secrecy which has enabled them. To accomplish that, they're actually advocating -- somehow with a straight face -- the theory that if a single innocent person is harmed by these disclosures, then it proves that Assange and WikiLeaks are evil monsters who deserve the worst fates one can conjure, all while they devote themselves to protecting and defending a secrecy regime that spawns at least as much human suffering and disaster as any single other force in the world. That is what the secrecy regime of the permanent National Security State has spawned.

As Greenwald intimates, the outrage seems like a superficial excuse for a deeper offense. For the politicians and governments involved, the anger seems less about any actual security breach or empowerment of anti-American movements and more about Assange's audacity to demand transparency and honesty. Some of the anger is to be expected. Much diplomacy is based on controlling perceptions and misdirection. WikiLeaks is like a friend who gets too drunk during a night out and inadvertantly spills all of your embarassing secrets to the girl you are trying to impress. But to suggest that this is some kind of major security risk, when most of what was exposed in this installment amounts to geo-political water cooler gossip, is rather ridiculous.

But the mainstream news media also appears caught up in this hysteria over the leak. In their case, the outrage seems more like scoop-envy. Traditional media institutions have yet to reclaim the trust of the public after the embarrassing cheer leading session that passed for news coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq. And rather than attempt to recover their credibility in the aftermath, most mainstream media sources have all but blocked out coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan from daily news reports despite the fact that 2010 has been the deadliest year for American troops. Assange and his sources have disrupted the media's complicit silence on this story and reminded reporters and consumers alike that a responsible press must take risks to get at the truth, even if it is unpleasant or damages advertising income or comes with the threat of legal action.

Ultimately, Assange is no Daniel Ellsberg, but he's not Julius Rosenberg either. A previous WikiLeaks dump exposed the extent of cruelty and misbehavior by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan but they also included the actual names of American allies on the ground in Iraq. This is an instance where the safeguards of old media would have been beneficial, as they would have been able to disseminate the necessary and news worthy information while also using editorial judgment that would protect sources. And yet, I think the public and the world is much better with Assange and people like him in it especially if hackers and anarchists are the last remnants of a responsible press.

Yeffet: Pat Downs and Body Scans Don't Work

2010-11-18T20:52:00.000-06:00

Check out this interview with Isaac Yeffet, the former director of global security at El Al Israel Airlines. He comments on current airport security guidelines and calls procedures like pat downs and body scans worthless:

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Exorcism Conference

2010-11-13T14:01:00.000-06:00

I've previously blogged about the resurgence of exorcism in the Catholic Church here and here. Now the Associated Press is carrying this story about a Catholic exorcism conference taking place in Baltimore next week. Here is an excerpt:

Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference, said only a tiny number of U.S. priests have enough training and knowledge to perform an exorcism. Dioceses nationwide have been relying solely on these clergy, who have been overwhelmed with requests to evaluate claims. The Rev. James LeBar, who was the official exorcist of the Archdiocese of New York under the late Cardinal John O'Connor, had faced a similar level of demand, traveling the country in response to the many requests for his expertise.

I would speculate that there is some connection between the Church returning to these medieval roots and the rise of secularism and religious plurality. Church attendance numbers are dropping off, diocese are being forced to close their facilities, and the religious character of America has become less defined by traditional sectarian labels. When the Enlightenment threatened the Church, it dragged fears of witches and devil worshippers out of the basement to frighten the masses. The same thing happened in the 1980s with the Satanic Ritual Abuse hoax. And now it's happening again.

This Week in Blackness: George Bush Doesn't Care About Earthlings

2010-11-10T19:39:00.017-06:00

In response to George W. Bush's memoir and his claim that Kanye West's criticism was the lowest moment of his presidency:

And check out this piece by Melissa Harris Perry about Bush's reaction to Kanye's comments. An excerpt:

President Bush describes Kanye West's statement as his presidential low, a personal nadir. Recall that the nadir of American history is the time between 1877 and World War I. These are the decades immediately following the end of Reconstruction. . . . Empirically, racism may be as American as apple pie, but morally, ethically and philosophically, racism is a betrayal of America. In this sense, when Kanye West pointed to the Bush administration's non-response as an act of racism, he called Bush a traitor.

* * *

As an observer, I find the 2010 midterms uncomfortably familiar to the era of Redemption that followed Reconstruction. Current calls for small government and states rights during the administration of a black president sound suspiciously like nineteenth-century efforts to weaken the state so that racial terror could be enacted with impudence against the black men who were then governing. After the aggressively anti-immigrant and more subterranean anti-black sentiments of the healthcare debate and the midterm election, I have wondered if we lost our ability to be shamed by open displays of cultural bigotry and political action motivated by white anxiety.

In this sense I welcome President Bush's comments. At my most optimistic, I can read his comments as an assertion that nothing is more harmful than racism, nothing more embarrassing, nothing more un-American, nothing we must more fully and completely renounce. I know that is not exactly what he said, but I take a glimmer of hope from the idea that President Bush has reminded us that to be called a racist is not a badge of honor.

Halloween 2010

2010-10-31T22:34:00.000-05:00

Today is Halloween, one of the most widely celebrated holidays on our calendar and one of the most unique.

Most holidays in American culture can be divided into two categories, religious (Easter) and historical or national (Independence Day, Thanksgiving), and there are a few that overlap and exist in both categories at the same time (namely Christmas, which simultaneously exists as a religious holiday but is widely celebrated in a nonreligious fashion). And like most holidays and traditions, they serve a cyclical function in the culture as they remind and reinforce our myths and beliefs about ourselves. Every Thanksgiving we reenact the mythology of the Pilgrims and their feast with the Native Americans, even though the facts of history have little to do with the story that we keep retelling each generation. Christmas, in the religious version of the holiday, retells the story of Christ’s birth and represents renewed hope; the secular Christmas, in its most positive incarnation (as opposed the crass commercialism of the season), expresses a vision of America as a giving culture that cares for the unfortunate (while simultaneously giving Americans an excuse to ignore those in need in the other eleven months of the year).

Halloween is unique in that it is not explicitly religious—spiritualists who actively celebrate the holiday in a religious or semi-religious manner are few in number—but it also isn’t historical, at least not in an American context. There is a tradition of American Halloween celebration but it is not deeply rooted in our identity the way Thanksgiving is. There isn’t a cultural story or myth about Halloween that is attached to it like the story of the Pilgrims or the signing of the Declaration of Independence. No figure of national importance represents Halloween the way George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are linked to Presidents Day, although references to Hollywood movie monsters like Frankenstein and Michael Myers often suffice. And yet, Halloween has become one of the most popular holidays on the calendar.

Halloween’s rise to cultural prominence has been largely based on economics. The holiday is extraordinarily profitable for retailers of all kinds. But that isn’t all of it.

The rise of Halloween to the cultural status it now possesses primarily occurred in the 1970s through the present day, and it plays out against a background of seemingly contradictory cultural trends: the rise of politically active conservative Christianity and the collapse of traditional religious structures in people’s lives.

Throughout the 1980s, social conservatives pushed back against Halloween, decrying Halloween celebrations in public schools and putting forth urban legends of razor blades in candy bars and satanic ritual abuse. The result was partly effective. The tradition of children trick or treating, a staple of Halloween celebrations in suburban neighborhoods since the 1950s, went on the decline. In the short term, it would seem that the social conservatives had won.

But while social conservatives of the 1980s were taking Halloween away from children, the holiday adapted into an adult celebration. As open expressions of sexuality became increasingly accepted in mass media and by the culture at large, retailers found that they could profit off of it and provided the means for the public to indulge it. As the demand grew so did the supply—and vice versa. This of course had an escalating effect that lead to Halloween becoming the carnival of flesh that is has become today.

At the same time, religion’s place in the traditional social structure continued to erode. Church attendance was and is in free fall and the number of people publicly identifying themselves as atheists has risen. The effect of this on the culture is wide ranging, but the angle of it that relates to the rise of Halloween is the search for something sacred. In an environment where the traditions and symbols of spirituality have had their meanings diluted, the culture is in search of something to believe in. Robbed of the myths that traditionally gave them comfort, Halloween has been adopted as a replacement.

The various ways we celebrate Halloween reveals an attempt by a post-religious culture to retain its sense of wonder and mystery. Gathering around the television set to watch horror movies is not all that different from sitting around a campfire and listening to an elder convey the myths of our ancestors. And horror films often create the most visceral reactions in the viewers, either of fear or disgust, making them emotionally rather than intellectually stimulating. Dressing in costumes while drinking an elixir that undermines our mental faculties and then parading, strutting, and thrusting about on a dance floor has all the characteristics of a “primitive” ritual. In these acts we construct a sort of post-modern sacrament, using the same signifiers but always conscious that it is a cultural ritual.

It’s not that the culture is regressing. In fact, it is at some level maturing as it adjusts to a world after the death of the gods. Mankind, for all his technical achievements and philosophical advancements, still has, and perhaps always will have, one foot in the cave. Halloween provides an outlet for Eros and Thanatos to work themselves out. It’s true that not all of this is healthy; our month long love affair with fear and sex can be a bit like binge drinking behavior. But like an inexperienced drinker who overcompensates, hopefully we’ll eventually reach a point where everyday has a healthy recognition and acceptance of desire.

What we see in the present day Halloween is a new sacrament emerging. It is Dionysian in its values and post-modern in its orientation, but it also represents the emergence of a uniquely American holiday. The liberation of American culture from the tyranny of superstition while also allowing for the satisfaction and pleasure that indulging superstition brings could be the most sacred thing of all.

It's 1692 Somewhere

2010-10-25T02:45:00.001-05:00

Just in time for Halloween, Salon features this story about the new book Spellbound: Inside West Africa's Witch Camps by Karen Palmer.

The villages Palmer writes of are not recreational get-togethers for actual witches, but refugee camps for women who have been driven out of their homes under under the accusation of witchcraft. From the article:

At Gambaga, the town Palmer moved to when she decided to dedicate a couple of years to the subject, there are more than 3,000 accused witches living in unenviable conditions. The residents aren't prisoners, exactly, but they can't go home. Unless they can convince their former neighbors that they've given up cannibalizing other people's souls in the spirit world or flying through the night in the form of a fireballs (a common practice of Ghanaian witches), they're likely to be beaten or stoned to death if they return.

Should this story get the attention it deserves, I hope that it shuts down some of the cheap shot attacks on Delaware's Senatorial Candidate Christine O'Donnell, namely referencing her asinine comments about dabbling in witchcraft as a teenager. While I am no fan of O'Donnell (far from it), the liberal wing of the media needs to realize that it is engaging in essentially the same game as right wingers who try to "slander" President Obama by labeling him a Muslim. This example from West Africa shows where this kind of rhetoric can lead.

Supplements for "Cannibal Holocaust" Screening

2010-10-24T11:18:00.000-05:00

I have made two items related to the screening of Cannibal Holocaust publicly available.

First is the audio from the panel discussion that followed the screening. The panel includes Nick Ozment and Andrea Wood of the Winona State English Department and they discuss the controversy of the film and how to evaluate and understand it. You can download the audio file here.

Second, I have published an essay about Cannibal Holocaust on Winona360.org. In the essay I explain why I screened the film and why I think this is an important movie. Here is an excerpt:

Cannibal Holocaust is not troubling to the audience for any one charge made against it, but for its cumulative effect. The barbarity of the animal killings, the display of economic and sexual exploitation, and the parallel acts of violence craft a vision of humanity darker than the stories of Joseph Conrad or William Golding. There is a totality to its nihilistic presentation of humanity that stamps out hope.

When a viewer watches a horror film, he or she intentionally submits him or herself to trauma. Most mainstream horror films like Jaws or Psycho scare us and thrill us but in the end leave viewers knowing that good has triumphed over evil and all is right with the world. More challenging horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes do not offer quite the same solace of a closed resolution but generally there is a survivor who we can empathize with and whose self preservation is a source of relief. These films have a cathartic effect on the viewer, allowing him or her to experience terror and fear from the safety of the theater seat or the living room sofa and then walk away to carry on with his or her life.

Cannibal Holocaust refuses to engage in this kind of pattern. It piles on the awfulness and as the rapes and murders accumulate, the film abandons all unwritten agreements of propriety between the filmmaker and the audience. For those who expect to see a liberal humanist notion of human decency emerge from the darkness, the film offers a moral black hole. For those who demand a meaningful resolution where death is not in vain, the film offers none. And for those who want to preserve hope in humanity, Ruggero Deodato cinematically gives his audience the finger. In short, Cannibal Holocaust tells the truth.

Cannibal Holocaust Screening Oct. 18

2010-10-17T18:20:00.000-05:00

Remember that your chance to attend a free screening of Cannibal Holocaust occurs tomorrow, October 18th, at 7pm in Science Lab 120 on the Winona State University campus. A panel discussion about the film will follow.

Please keep in mind that the screening is limited to viewers over 18 years of age.

More information on the film and the screening can be found here.

Meghan McCain's Sarah Palin Problem

2010-10-07T19:41:00.001-05:00

Meghan McCain has written this interesting piece for The Daily Beast about the reaction to the book, Dirty, Sexy Politics, and what she refers to as the "fetishization" of Sarah Palin by the media. Here is a key excerpt:

I thought two years after the election there would be something or someone more interesting. But there isn’t, and now the question remains will there ever be? Must we, as Republican women, clone ourselves in every way as Sarahbot’s to have a serious chance of running for office? And if so, what kind of dangerous message is this sending young women? It isn’t that there is anything wrong with Sarah Palin as a politician per se, it is that there apparently isn’t any room for anyone else in 2010 and beyond. The majority of the questions I was asked from the people I met during my book signings were not about Sarah Palin. And this is important to note because it seems that the media’s obsession doesn’t necessarily correlate to what Americans want to know.

October Programming on Sounds of Cinema

2010-10-06T19:55:00.001-05:00

It is October and Sounds of Cinema is in Halloween mode. Here is a run down of this month's episodes and events:

October 3 - Friday the 13th and The Shining
Released within weeks of each other in the spring of 1980, Friday the 13th and The Shining came from completely opposite ends of the film making scene. Since their release, both of these film have become classics of the horror genre and represent both the beginning and end of respective eras of the American horror film.

October 10 - Psycho and Peeping Tom
Psycho and Peeping Tom were released in 1960 and the two films are remarkably similar in their examination of psychologically disturbed characters. Although both films are now considered important entries in the horror genre, Psycho was tolerated by the critical establishment while Peeping Tom was not and the failure of the film critically and financially ended director Michael Powell's career.

Update: Those listening to the show from 89.7 KMSU FM in Mankato will hear a special pledge drive edition of Sounds of Cinema on October 10th.

October 17 - Bride of Frankenstein and The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Universal Studios released an entire catalogue of horror films such as Dracula, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and all of their sequels and spin offs. Widely considered among the greatest of these films is Bride of Frankenstein. Influenced by Bride of Frankenstein as well as many other monster films of the 1940s and 50s, Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in 1975 to a disastrous reception but in years that followed it became the ultimate cult film.

October 18 - Film Screening: Cannibal Holocaust
A public screening of Cannibal Holocaust will be held at 7pm in Science Lab Auditorium 120 (between Pasteur and Stark Halls) on the Winona State University campus. Admission is free but no one under 18 will be permitted to see the film. A panel discussion will follow the screening. Find out more about the film and the screening here.

October 24 - Cannibal Holocaust and American Psycho
This episode will take on two films known for their controversial material. Released in 1980, Cannibal Holocaust quickly became one of the most widely censored films of all time. Its highly realistic scenes of human murder as well as actual footage of animal cruelty were cause for protest and even legal prosecution. In years since, the film has gained renewed relevance as a commentary on documentary films and the exploitation of developing cultures by industrialized cultures. In 2000, director Mary Harron adapted Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho, probably the most controversial piece of literature in the last quarter of the 20th century, into a commentary on the culture of greed of the 1980s. On the tenth anniversary of the film's release, that commentary has found renewed relevance.

October 31 - Lucifer Rising
Lucifer Rising was one of the final films by experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. His production of Lucifer Rising was complicated by rivalries and disasters big and small. This episode will include the complete score for Lucifer Rising composed by former Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil.

Remember that you can find out more about the show at http://www.soundsofcinema.com/

Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck

2010-10-03T19:11:00.000-05:00

Let Me Entertain You

2010-09-27T02:54:00.001-05:00

The Congressional Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and Border Security invited Stephen Colbert to testify--in character--about the working conditions of illegal immigrants on America's farms. Colbert participated in a United Farm Workers awareness campaign, and spent a day laboring at a vegetable farm in New York in August 2010.

Here is Colbert's statement to the committee:

You can find the entire two-hour hearing here. At 1:56:43 in the video you can find California congresswoman Judy Chu's exchange with Colbert (including her point that Clint Eastwood and Sesame Street's Elmo have testified before Congress and his very serious points about the gravity of the immigration issue).

Colbert's testimony comes on the heels of Lady Gaga's rally to end the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell policy, in which Gaga made salient points about the injustice of the law.

Celebrity activism is often ridiculed and sometimes it ought to be, especially when arguments are made on the basis of star power alone. But we should not slip into ad hominem arguments and refuse to engage with important and relevant arguments just because they come from someone in the entertainment business.

The documentary Poliwood, directed by Barry Levinson, explores how the celebrity and the politician have merged into a single entity; there is no clear distinction between the two anymore, if there ever was one. The celebrity adopts and dramatizes public issues, the politician is required to present their arguments with the skills of an entertainer, and both are required to perform on camera.

Some have bemoaned this development, as evidenced by both Fox News and MSNBC's negative reaction to Colbert's testimony. Both shamed the appearance as detrimental to the integrity of the instituion. But I have to wonder if Colbert's testimony, especially his final exchange with Congresswoman Chu, was really worse than condemning immigration reform to superficial lip service. For that matter, it is hard to argue that Lady Gaga's remarks--and her tendency to scream them into the microphone--were really more crass than representatives enabling homophobia by upholding the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell policy.

Outside of the primary issues at hand, Gaga's rally and Colbert's testimony are very good indications of where we are as a people and how media has so saturated our lives. At the risk of sounding cynical, it seems like only a matter of time before our elections take the form of reality television. But if the entertainers are making better arguments than our politicians, then we might as well take them more seriously.

Race, Age, and Taxes

2010-09-23T02:45:00.000-05:00

Check out this article by Ronald Brownstein at National Journal Magazine on the projected changes in America's ethnic makeup over the next few decades and how it relates to our economic future. Here are a few key excerpts:

Two of the biggest demographic trends reshaping the nation in the 21st century increasingly appear to be on a collision course that could rattle American politics for decades. From one direction, racial diversity in the United States is growing, particularly among the young. . . . At the same time, the country is also aging, as the massive Baby Boom Generation moves into retirement. But in contrast to the young, fully four-fifths of this rapidly expanding senior population is white.

***

Although cultural disputes often generate the most heat, government budgets are likely to become the central point of conflict between younger minorities and older whites. At the state level, where governors are grappling with persistent deficits, the strains revolve around the choice between raising taxes or cutting spending. At the national level, Congress faces not only that familiar debate but also the competition between investing in education and other programs that benefit children, or spending on those that benefit seniors, primarily Medicare and Social Security.

* * *

This competition for resources takes place amid a stark divergence in the political preferences of the old and the young. . . . And yet, as Davis and Rosenberg both note, Republicans are generally pushing to retrench entitlement programs that benefit the senior population that is increasingly leaning toward them. Democrats, meanwhile, resist constraints on entitlement costs that could help fund investments in the younger, heavily minority, generation that has become the foundation of their electoral coalition.

* * *

"The Baby Boom has a tremendous stake in investing in the education of young Latinos and African-Americans so they will get good jobs and we can tax the daylights out of them to support [the Boomers'] retirement," [Stephen] Klineberg, the Rice University sociologist, says. "The [racial] gap in achievement has to be narrowed if there's any serious hope for American competitiveness in the global economy."

Indeed, Frey projects that if the U.S. does not significantly improve college completion rates for African-Americans and Hispanics, the overall share of American adults with college degrees will decline "very sharply in the next 10 or 15 years." That's an ominous trend in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.

* * *

If anything, the nation's evolving demography may wind these tensions even more tightly. While the share of the population represented by young people is expected to stabilize at just under one-fourth, the senior share is projected to steadily rise from about one-eighth today to one-fifth by 2040. By Frey's projections, that will slowly shrink the working-age population -- those who provide the tax base for young people and seniors alike -- from about 63 percent of the society now to 57 percent by 2030.

In that world, the generational and racial implications of the choices between tax cuts and spending reductions, and between public spending aimed at the old or the young, could grow increasingly explicit and explosive.

Al Franken on Don't Ask Don't Tell and DREAM

2010-09-22T02:33:00.000-05:00

Here is Senator Al Franken's full statement, made on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday, calling for the end to the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy and the passage of the DREAM Act.

No Porn for You

2010-09-10T02:45:00.008-05:00

On the subject of empty political posturing, the Winona County Board has altered its employee travel policies, requiring its employees to choose from a list of lodging services that do not offer pornographic pay-per-view programs.

The implication here is that employees were previously allowed to watch pay-per-view materials on the county's dime. Putting a stop to that, whether the employees were watching HustlerTV or Nickelodeon, or at least making them pay for their entertainment out of their own pocket, is reasonable.

But let's have a quick reality check. First, the county's new policy doesn't just forbid employees from ordering porn in their hotel room while on business; it forbids them from staying in a building that has porn available. So let's say an employee travels to a location where there are two hotels available, and one is significantly less expensive than the other but it has porn accessible in the room. At a time of tightening budgets, where services are being cut for lack of funds, the employee would be bound to spend more of the county's money just so they can stay in a room that doesn't offer porn.

Second, pornography is really in the eye of the beholder. To carry on with the earlier example, an employee may spend more of the county's money to stay in a hotel that does not carry pay-per-view porn, but what if the hotel they patronized had HBO or Cinemax? Or what if the employee decided to relax after a hard day's work with an in-room screening of Blue Velvet, Basic Instinct, or Lolita? Already it should be clear that the board's new ruling is capricious and does little to curb the behavior it's seeking to stop.

Third, despite some local organizations petitioning the county board to the contrary, there is no causal link between pornography and violence. That's not to deny the existence of violent pornography but for the policy's advocates to say that this measure will protect women is nonsense. In fact, the March 2010 issue of The Scientist included an article that showed an inverse relationship between the consumption of pornography and the rate of violence. To say it simply, the more pornography society uses, the less sex crimes it has.

While I can commend the board for having it's heart in the right place, clearly its head was somewhere else. And all of this will be a moot point in months and years ahead as the hotel pay-per-view industry is dying out anyway. But as admitted by council member Marcia Ward (who abstained from the vote), the policy has further implications. Should the county also file restrictions that employees, while traveling on county business, cannot drink or smoke or stay in hotels that have bars or smoking rooms? And what purpose does this serve?

If the board was really interested in really helping women it could do so much more. But this isn't about helping women. It's about politicians conspicuously polishing their good-guy badges.

Maddow: Stop DADT Now

2010-08-12T20:27:00.000-05:00

Here is the wrap up to last night's episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, in which the host calls for an end to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and questions why, if the president intends to end the policy, why he does not at least suspend anyone from being discharged for their sexual orientation.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Setting aside the ethical problems of DADT, consider this quote:

"The $25 million that you and I, the taxpayers, have spent on Victor Fehrenbach's training as an F-15 fighter pilot is down the tubes. The decade of investment that you and I paid for that built Jonathan J. Hopkins into a striker brigade combat team commander -- that's down the tubes. That's over. The $350,000 investment that you and I made in building Cadet-Sergeant Katie Miller into a top-10-at-West-Point, Yale-caliber scholar who could also bench press you, if need be - that's down the tubes. All of that is over."

With the faux-hysteria about out of control government spending, this argument ought to be enough of a reason to abolish this policy.

Hef's Revolution

2010-08-03T21:40:00.001-05:00

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel is a new documentary about the founder of Playboy. This piece by Andrew O'Hehir at Salon doesn't have very positive things to say about the film but it does have some interesting perspectives on Hefner and his importance to American culture. A couple of excerpts:

Hefner's near-naked pictures were revolutionary in the '50s, no doubt about it -- but in a specific and limited way. There was no subjectivity to those girls, who were lovely in an almost identical style. Like they used to say about Miss America, Miss October was "the symbol of all we possess." You, the reader, were of course supposed to be the bon vivant who had so impressed this young lady that she was now, for some reason, standing in the empty bathtub wearing only a fuzzy cardigan and high heels. And just to prove -- to her? to yourself? -- that you weren't some small-minded creep only interested in what happened between the sheets, she came wrapped in 18,000 words by Norman Mailer, or a conversation between Alex Haley and Malcolm X.

* * *

But all revolutionaries run up against the limits of their imaginations at some point. Lenin imagined a workers' paradise, and instead handed off his newborn totalitarian state to a murderous monster. Hefner's legacy is more complicated: He helped create a world in which white people by the millions were willing to vote for Barack Hussein Obama, and one in which all teenagers have not merely heard of anal intercourse but have seen it performed. By midgets. In Croatia. He dreamed of a nation set free from generations of Puritanical repression. But American freedom so often degenerates into slimy Burger King self-parody, covered with dubious condiments. Now Hugh Hefner is an 80-something dude in pajamas who until recently cohabited with identical twins named Karissa and Kristina.

This article reminds me of a clip from the documentary Inside Deep Throat in which Hefner participates in a televised debate with feminists. In the clip, the participants talk past each other; Hefner is confused by why these women--who he views as liberated by the sexual revolution that he helped lead--are so antagonistic with him, while the feminists see Hefner as a dinosaur and part of an oppressive system that exploits women.

I think there is an important point here about revolutionaries and the movements they lead or participate in. Revolutions so often begin with the best of intentions and those intentions may even be accomplished. But the paradox of any successful revolution is that it becomes the status quo and its symbols and figures become a part of the institution. And in American culture, where revolting against the system is as ingrained in our national identity as apple pie and baseball, that can create a regressive situation that allows for the undoing of whatever progress a given generation or movement has achieved. (Tea Party and Prop 8 advocates, I'm looking at you.)

Revolutions are also, as O'Hehir indicates, subject to commoditization and commercialization. The symbols become t-shirts and posters and the movements are adopted by celebrities, politicians, and other public figures and are sold back to us. And as that happens, the symbols are diluted of whatever potency they once possessed. Think of t-shifts with prints of Che Guevara's image sold by retailers on the same racks as designer jeans produced in sweat shops or Hugh Hefner and the Playboy brand turned into reality shows selling us the celebrity lifestyle.

Is there a cure for this cyclical adoption of the revolutionary symbols? I'm not sure, although I tend to think no. It's an inherent part of cultural "progress," even when that progress is regressive. And most societies, especially the grand ones, tend to suffer from cycles of impressive cultural construction followed by its destruction in the name of progress. And where we are right now doesn't look good.

Mid West Music Fest in Winona this Weekend

2010-07-28T14:27:00.002-05:00

Mid West Music Fest will be held in Winona, MN from July 30th - 31st. Over eighty music groups from the region will be participating, playing at various venues in the Winona area.

Fish Frye, the official band of Sounds of Cinema, will be playing on Saturday, July 31st on the Winona State University grounds at 4:30pm.

You can find out more about the Mid West Music Fest, including schedule and ticket information, here.

My Take on Shirley Sherrod-gate

2010-07-25T21:40:00.001-05:00

Last week, the political news scene had one of its regular (and increasingly frequent) nervous breakdowns over the Shirley Sherrod non-scandal scandal. It was another example of news media not doing its homework and politicians and pundits racing to judgement without the facts in an effort to beat the pace of the news cycle.

For those not paying attention, video surfaced of this African American woman, currently an employee of the USDA, speaking at an NAACP function and her remarks were excerpted by right wing media hacks to make it appear that years ago she had denied aid to a Caucasian farmer based on racial tension between them. After the excerpt went public, Sherrod was immediately forced to resign but within days the full tape aired, showing that she did in fact help the farmer and in her speech she was using her own feelings of racial resentment as an example of what not to do. Her acceptance of a new position is still pending.

There is a lot to get upset about in this debacle, but Melissa Harris-Lacewell has written this piece for The Nation about it, finding the optimistic side of the story. Harris-Lacewell writes:

Do not miss this: when Shirley Sherrod's video clip was first released to the mainstream press, the NAACP denounced her; the USDA, with complicity of the White House, fired her; the white farm family against whom she had supposedly discriminated jumped to her immediate and vigorous defense. These white farmers were the first to speak on her behalf. While others were saying she should be ashamed of herself, they loudly declared her an ally and a friend for life. The defense of Mrs. Sherrod came most effectively and fully from the white farming community. She had been their ally for years. They did not hesitate to return the favor.

The roller coaster of this story and the sentiments it has stirred provoked my own sense of the rut that race relations and popular racial discourse have become trapped within.

America has moved very far in a few decades. To put it in some perspective, when my parents were born (in the post-war years), whites and blacks could not drink at the same water-fountains and lynchings still occurred. Now we have an African American president and interracial relationships have been largely normalized. That isn't to say that racism is gone but rather to say that the bell curve has shifted; the kinds of hideous racism that were normalized into the everyday have been largely driven to the margins of society.

This ought to give us a sense of pride, and rightly so. But the civil rights movement that had burned so bright and hot in the 1960s was largely diminished by the end of the 1970s. Important and permanent changes had been made, and although they had provided the basics (voting rights, equal protection under the law, etc.) the long term work of deconstructing institutional racism was left. And that is pretty much where we've stayed ever since.

Racism is America's most sensitive issue, the source of some of the ugliest moments of our national history, complicated by America's sense of being a "city on the hill." It is hard to square those two things together and our attempts to do so (especially in national and popular media) often succumb to an either-or fallacy in which America is either a hypocritical nation of false hopes or it is the beacon of national and cultural perfection. Of course neither of those is true and the absurd absolutes polarize people into ideological camps, unable to communicate.

What Harris-Lacewell's remarks point to are the positive: that among Americans there is generally a good will and a desire for reconciliation. But in order to get there, we're going to have to face some of the ugliness and we're going to have to give up this unattainable illusion of perfection, either for some post-racial utopia or of a nation without a blemish in its character or its history.

Maddow Responds to O'Reilly

2010-07-25T14:59:00.002-05:00

Watch Rachel Maddow respond to Bill O'Reilly's criticism. A couple of days earlier, Maddow ran a story examining how Fox News manipulates coverage to conform to political agendas. O'Reilly responded by impugning MSNBC's ratings, as though that matters or is in any way pertinent to the argument.

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Here is the money quote from Maddow's response:

You can insult us all you want about television ratings, Mr. O'Reilly, and you'll be right that yours are bigger for now and maybe forever. You are the undisputed champion. But even if no one watches us at all, except for my mom and my girlfriend and people who forgot to turn off the TV after Keith [Olbermann], you are still wrong on what really matters and that would be the facts, your highness.

"Identity politcs divides us, fiction connects." - Elif Shafak

2010-07-20T17:08:00.002-05:00

Here is the Ted Talk by writer Elif Shafak, author of The Bastard of Istanbul, in which she talks about the way stories can overcome national and ethnic divisions and how identity politics shapes the way we perceive stories:

Your Tin Foil is Showing

2010-07-14T21:59:00.002-05:00

Conservative group Minnesota Majority has put out a "study" claiming that felons voted in the 2008 election and their ballots put Al Franken in the U.S. Senate.

Except they didn't.

According to this article at Salon, Minnesota Majority "could only identify hypothetical felons on voter rolls by name and year of birth. Half of Minnesotans are named Peterson, Johnson, or Olson. There are plenty of Minnesotans with the same name, born in the same year. And Minnesota Majority didn't have access to changes in sentencing, meaning some of the people they correctly identified as felons could've had their probation reduced, at which point they would've become legal voters again."

And further, "270 of Minnesota Majority's 475 supposed examples of felons voting "were just not accurate." Which leaves 205 possibly illegal votes. Franken won by 312."

So members of a special interest group did not do their homework and manipulated their findings to adhere to a preconceived narrative. No surprise there.

But what's more important is looking at this claim in the context of the birther movement (claiming Obama is not a U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to be president), the "take our country back" slogans of the Tea Party, spurious accusations that the Gulf Coast oil spill was an inside job, and general animosity toward anything suspected of being "socialist."

This adds up to a view that the federal government of the United States, and specifically this administration, is somehow illegitimate. And while a lot of us look at Glenn Beck and the Tea Party and all of their shouting and tears as infantile and detached from reality, it's important to remember that they are serious and in all likely hood believe what they are saying.

During the Cold War, McCarthyism swept the culture and for years people's lives were destroyed just on the accusation that they were a communist or had communist ties. In the Middle Ages, the Inquisition tortured and executed people suspected of witchcraft; an accusation alone could be enough to get someone killed.

It is important to remember that anti-communists and inquisitors believed what they were saying, even if those beliefs had no basis in fact. Instead, reality itself was molded by authority and propaganda and what was a delusion shared by a few became a fact of life for everyone else. And when the leaders of those movements found themselves in positions of power, they were able to administer a reign of terror that was far worse than anything they were afraid of.

This hysteria over the legitimacy of our own government has the potential to be Red Scare 2.0. It isn't yet because the loudest advocates of it are limited to television shows, talk radio, and blogs. Although these media figures hold a significant sway on some segment of the population, they don't have legal authority. Should the upcoming elections in 2010 and 2012 turn out in favor of these new inquisitors, that bottle could be opened and there is no telling when or if we will get the cap on it again.

The Wisdom of Matt Taibbi

2010-07-11T21:15:00.002-05:00

Rolling Stone editorial writer Matt Taibbi has recently written two complementary pieces attacking the journalism establishment.

The first, "Lara Logan, You Suck," is a retort to Logan's appearance on CNN's program "Reliable Sources" in which she made accusations and insinuations against Michael Hastings' Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal. Logan's comments came as a disappointment to me; she has done some stellar reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq and has even made her own harsh criticisms of mainstream news. But her rant on "Reliable Sources" tasted like sour grapes.

Taibbi replied to Logan, saying:

Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn't mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here's CBS's chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that's killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag.

Taibbi then elaborates on the Pentagon's enormous public relations wing; according to Taibbi, it spent $4.7 billion in 2009 and employs 27,000 people. But despite the size of that impressive spin machine, the Pentagon has also brought most major media sources under its wing, granting them access in exchange for favorable treatment. The same holds true of political campaigns and coverage of corporate news. Speaking directly to the reporters in mainstream news organizations, Taibbi writes:

They don't need your help, and you're giving it to them anyway, because you just want to be part of the club so so badly. . . . Meanwhile, the people who don't have the resources to find out the truth and get it out in front of the public's eyes, your readers/viewers, you're supposed to be working for them — and they're not getting your help.

Taibbi's more recent piece, "The Five Funniest Things About the 'LeBron James: Global Superdouche' Broadcast," is related to his Lara Logan takedown. Taibbi reviews ESPN's special on James' decision to go to the Miami Heat and links the coverage of this sports story to broader news coverage. Taibbi observes that ESPN was paid by LeBron for the coverage (making this an infomercial disguised as sports news) and Jim Gray was selected as the host "because he has a 'special sales relationship' with one of the sponsors, the University of Phoenix."

ESPN's public immolation of its integrity for the sake of ratings, publicity, and star fucking is really not all that different from what "hard news" sources have been doing for decades by softening the impact of political and military stories and allowing outside or parent corporations to dictate the terms of news coverage. It's not doing a service to anyone and it's only bound to get worse. Taibbi concludes:

It's the prototype for all future news coverage-- one or two dominant news networks pushing sensational fairy-tale versions of reality in a race for ad revenue, competing with a few scattered hacks on the internet covering the much less important parallel "real story," i.e. the truth. In order for the networks to push their version most effectively, they have to genuinely believe that what they're spinning is real. Which is why you see them starting to mistake fake drama for real drama from time to time -- they're beginning to drown in their own bullshit.

And old media hounds are still surprised and confounded when newspaper subscriptions plummet, network news viewership dries up, and The Daily Show and Rolling Stone outmaneuver them.

Cave Men Were Sluts

2010-06-27T13:25:00.002-05:00

Salon features this interview with Christopher Ryan, the co-author (with Cacilda Jethá) of the book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Sexuality. Ryan argues that pre-agricultural mankind had non-monogamous sex lives and that our contemporary mixture of sexuality with absolute monogamy in marriage distorts both. Here are some excerpts of Ryan's comments:

Marriage in the West isn’t doing very well because it’s in direct confrontation with the evolved reality of our species. What we argue in the book is that the best way to increase marital stability, which in the modern world is an important part of social stability, is to develop a more tolerant and realistic understanding of human sexuality and how human sexuality is being distorted by our modern conception of marriage. Certainly growing up in the '70s and '80s there were very few kids I knew whose parents weren’t divorced at least once. The economic, emotional, psychological cost of fractured relationships is a major problem in American society — with single mothers and single-parent families. . . . The American sense of relationships and sexuality tends to be very informed by Hollywood: It’s all about the love story. But the love story ends at the wedding and doesn't go into the 40 years that comes after that. . . .And the American insistence on mixing love and sex and expecting passion to last forever is leading to great suffering that we think is tragic and unnecessary.

Statue of Jesus Falling Through the Ice Destroyed by Lightning

2010-06-15T14:17:00.005-05:00

Okay, so maybe he wasn't supposed to be falling through the ice, but that's what I think of when I look at this pre-lightning strike image:

Here is an excerpt from the story in The Washington Post:

The sculpture, about 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signaling a touchdown. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained Tuesday.

Church officials said they didn't know exactly what prompted the nickname commonly used by people in the area. The nickname is the same used for a famous mural of the resurrected Jesus that overlooks the Notre Dame football stadium.

The fire spread from the statue to an adjacent amphitheater but was confined to the attic area, and no one was injured, police Chief Mark Neu said.

Any chance we can get Pat Robertson to blame the strike on the church member's sinful ways?

Aren't They Arresting the Wrong Guy?

2010-06-07T15:58:00.003-05:00

According to this article at Reuters, Army Specialist Bradley Manning has been arrested for leaking the video of American soldiers firing on civilians in Iraq. An excerpt:

The video, which included an audio track of conversation between the fliers, showed an aerial view of the men moving through the square. The helicopter opened fire on the group, killing several people and wounding others.

A military spokesman said the helicopter crew mistook a camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Minutes later, a van approached and began trying to assist the wounded. The fliers apparently became concerned that the vehicle was occupied by militants and fired on it.

WikiLeaks said it obtained the video from military whistleblowers and had been able to view and investigate it after breaking an encryption code.

Some international law and human rights experts say the helicopter crew may have acted illegally.

It should not be much of a surprise. I just finished reading The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo, a book about how social systems may perpetuate unjust actions and condition those involved to fight to protect those systems. Zimbardo recounts how Warrent Officer Hugh Thompson intervened in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, saving the lives of civilians. Thompson was punished for it by his superiors and it was thirty years before his heroism was recognized by the military. The book also recounts how Joe Darby, who exposed the abuses at Abu Grhaib prison, was put in protective custody and his family members were harassed for what was viewed as treasonous activity. But his actions exposed and largely ended widespread abuse in military prisons under Bush and Cheney.

Like Prometheus bringing fire to man or Lucifer liberating Adam and Eve through fruit of the tree of knowledge, the real heroes of civilization are sometimes the ones who are perceived as a threat to it. They'll never appear on a Wheaties box, there won't be songs sung in their honor, and they won't make it into a textbook approved by the Texas board of education. But as Anton LaVey once wrote, "They say a villain is bad but an apathetic drone is far worse."

Andrew Roberts Defends Ayaan Hirsi Ali

2010-05-31T15:00:00.002-05:00

Historian Andrew Roberts has written this article for The Daily Beast, defending Ayaan Hirsi Ali and critiquing Nicholas Kristof's review of Ali's new book, Nomad. (You can find Kristof's review here.)

I have not read Ali's new book so I'm not in a position to evaluate either writer's claims about it. But this selection from Robert's piece leaped out at me:

The word “provocative” is often a term of approbation; here it is clearly intended pejoratively. The only people who could possibly be “provoked” by Nomad are Islamic fundamentalists who abuse women and beat children; much of the book is a passionate denunciation of the way violence is routinely used against children in the Muslim world. Of course, equally provoked are ultra-liberal Western commentators who regard any criticism of Islamic practices whatsoever, especially those specifically sanctioned by the Koran, as “provocative” and thus somehow illegitimate.

Roberts articulates a concern that nags at me both personally and professionally. As someone who has worked on multicultural issues in higher education, which is becoming increasingly more diverse, I worry that in our rush to create a peaceful and stable environment we end up sacrificing our ability to think critically about culture.

Meghan McCain on Rand Paul

2010-05-24T14:34:00.008-05:00

Meghan McCain has written this piece for The Daily Beast on Rand Paul's political faux paus over his comments about the Civil Rights Act (see Paul's full interview with Rachel Maddow here). McCain writes that although the Tea Party and the mainstream Republican party do share some ideals, they have very different ideas about governing. An excerpt:

With the midterm elections fast approaching, and the 2012 elections around the corner, let’s hope Paul isn’t a canary in the coal mine, if you will, for Republicans, but a cautionary tale. The lesson is clear: If we don’t nominate formidable candidates with wider appeal and a broader message, our party is dead in the water.

Yes, Rand Paul could just be an anomaly; the next Tea Party candidate who rises to national prominence could be the answer to the movement’s prayers. Yet I believe that Paul offers a lens into the Tea Party’s broader problems. While anger over the way the country is run is valid, when it comes to specifics—and to direct, clear solutions—things fall apart.

There is a difference between libertarianism and anarchism. The former advocates an extremely limited role of government but it does nevertheless allow for a government to do the business of governing. The latter is opposed to any government whatsoever. But many of those calling themselves libertarians, including elements of the Tea Party, are leaning much more toward anarchy than libertarianism. And if you want an example of anarchism in action, take a look at Somalia and how well it has worked there.

The biggest trouble with these anarchist-leaning libertarians is not racism or white supremacy; it's naivety. Listening to Rand Paul's interview with Rachel Maddow, he constantly states how he does not approve of racist activities but also does not approve of government intervention into private business. I am willing to take Paul at his word on this. But, since Paul claims to be an ardent supporter of the Constitution, I have to wonder how he squares government's role to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty" with the circle of anarchist ideology.

Apologists for the Confederacy have argued that the Civil War was fought not over slavery but over state's rights. And in some respects they are right: the war was fought to preserve the union and to assert the federal government's authority over the states. But on behalf of the Confederacy, the Civil War was fought to preserve the state and private industry's rights to engage in an activity (slavery) so heinous that even so-called libertarians like Rand Paul claim to be embarrassed by it.

The political can of worms reopened by Paul's interview with Maddow is essentially the same argument made in the 1960s over civil rights, and the same argument made during and after the Civil War. And in all cases some very smart people are able to make the anarchist-libertarian argument not because they view minorities as inferior but because they have turned a blind eye to the moral, ethical, or just plain practical implications of their positions.

Check out Maddow's analysis of Paul's comments and on the libertarian movement as a whole.

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The Muslim Miss America

2010-05-19T15:43:00.005-05:00

I'm not a fan of beauty pageants. I see them as an elaborate version of online "Are you hot?" quizzes, leading women onto stages to be evaluated like cattle at the state fair. They reinforce the idea that a woman's value is based on her physical appearance and embody the institutionalization of oppressive gender roles. What's worse, Miss USA and similar organizations have the pretension that they are something other than that, and to my eyes that hypocrisy makes them worse than the average spring break wet t-shirt contest.

So I have a mixed reaction to Tunku Varadarajan's piece in The Daily Beast which tries to spin the crowning of Rima Fakih, a Muslim American, as the newest Miss USA into a sign of cultural progress. According to Varadarajan:

So to have a Shiite Muslim girl from Dearborn, Michigan—born in a Lebanese village to parents who immigrated to the U.S. when she was 7—take part in a Miss USA contest is a cultural phenomenon of considerable interest and value. If you choose to come and live in the U.S., it is broadly desirable that you live in an American way. And that, for some, includes taking beauty contests seriously. After all, these parades of temptation are precisely the sort of exercise that hard-line Islamist zealots hate most about Western civilization, and which they deploy as cautionary ammunition in the repression of their own women: Were it not for the burqa, you would all be naked harlots.

Varadarajan has a point. A Muslim woman in a bikini--especially one getting an award for it--is a subversive action in the Muslim community. It flies in the face of sexual repression and is a freeing of the spirit. And it does cast an olive branch to the rest of (but mostly to white) America.

And yet I can't help but feel as though this is two steps forward and one step backward. Yes, it is assimilation and can be viewed as some sort of acceptance or validation. But is this the kind of validation that Muslim women are looking for?

"Congratulations, ladies," we might say. "You've moved out of the sexual repression of the 15th century and into the sexual repression of the 1950s."

I guess it's progress.

Maddow: "Some Dreams Are Bad Dreams."

2010-05-17T14:11:00.002-05:00

Check out Rachel Maddow's commencement speech at Smith College. She puts a new spin on commencement speeches; rather than telling students to blindly follow their dreams, she encourages them to think about the broader consequences of their actions.

R.I.P. Ronnie James Dio

2010-05-16T20:03:00.006-05:00

Hell's impressive musical roster has just increased by one.

Former Black Sabbath frontman Ronnie James Dio has passed away. From The Chicago Tribune:

Dio’s neo-operatic voice was one of metal’s most distinctive instruments, an over-the-top stylist perfectly suited for a genre that demanded excess.

He fronted some of metal’s most revered bands, including a Deep Purple offshoot called Rainbow, the second incarnation of Black Sabbath and his namesake group, Dio. As a result, he had a hand in a half-dozen of metal’s greatest albums, including Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell” and Dio’s “Holy Diver.” Most recently he was heard fronting a Sabbath offshoot, Heaven and Hell, which released a fine 2009 album, “The Devil You Know,” and toured extensively in 2008-09.

Dio’s piercing voice and equally flamboyant persona – he is sometimes credited with popularizing the two-fingered “devil’s horns” gesture – made him fodder for affectionate parody, most notably by the best-selling comedy duo Tenacious D.

Here are a few notable performances:

Holy Diver

Heaven and Hell

Rainbow in the Dark

The Devil Cried

Kickapoo - Tenacious D featuring Meatloaf and Dio

Pawlenty To Veto Gay Rights Bill

2010-05-13T15:14:00.005-05:00

As some of you might have heard, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty plans to veto a bill that would give same sex couples equal end-of-life rights as heterosexual couples.

The first paragraph of this article at Salon sums up the rationale behind Pawlenty's veto quite nicely:

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty isn't seeking re-election. He is seeking the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nomination. So he's no longer obligated to give a shit what his constituents think -- he's governing solely for the editors of the Weekly Standard and our nation's conservative newspaper columnists.

It's important to remember that this bill does not do any of the things that the "defenders of traditional marriage" are so scared of. It does not redefine marriage or recognize a second class marriage (a.k.a. civil unions); it's not even about marriage at all. It does not allow them to adopt children or require the state to approve of boys kissing. All it does is grant homosexual partners the same legal recourse as heterosexuals in matters of end-of-life care.

But Pawlenty has to limbo under the same bar as other 2012 Republican hopefuls, a bar that has been continually lowered by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party crowd. This is a race to the bottom, pandering to the worst in American politics.

AZ Immigration Law to Come to MN?

2010-05-07T11:37:00.003-05:00

According to this article in the Winona Daily News, Minnesota state representative Steve Drazkowski has introduced a bill similar to the Arizona "Show Me Your Papers" anti-immigration law. According to the Winona Daily News:

The bill, called the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, is designed to target the estimated 100,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota, said Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa. It would establish a Minnesota illegal immigration enforcement team with at least 10 officers, and includes the controversial provision that all law enforcement officials determine the immigration status of any person they have stopped, detained or arrested "where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States."

The Arizona law, as stupid as it is, can at least be understood as an overreaction to the drug-related violence and kidnappings on the Arizona-Mexico boarder. But there is no reason for this in Minnesota, unless Drazkowski is really worried about illegal Canadians. But the Minneosta bill is unlikely to pass, since there isn't much time left in the session and there are much bigger issues on the table right now.

Speaking of the Arizona anti-immigration bill, check out this report from The Rachel Maddow Show about the link between the Federation for American Immigrant Reform (FAIR), which had major influence on the language of the bill, and the white supremacist subculture:

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Feminism, Tina Fey, and Ivan Drago

2010-04-18T21:43:00.008-05:00

This article by Rebecca Traister at Salon summarizes a recent online backlash at Tina Fey, mostly by women who she resembles and targets in her comedy and public persona (educated, middle and upper class, professional, white women). Traister covers some of the accusations against Fey but then turns the tables on the critics, arguing that they have made a false feminist idol out of someone who never sought the mantle in the first place.

An excerpt:

In the eagerness to embrace a star who seemed to think briskly and amusingly about gender, who was not afraid of showing off her smarts or her ambition, who reminded some young professional women of ourselves, some of us may have briefly forgotten that she is not, nor was she ever, us. It is a testament to the paucity of role models available on the pop culture landscape that many young feminists – including me! – cleaved so quickly and so closely to a woman who made some pretty smart jokes about women. But Fey was not elected Celebrity thanks to the support of EMILY's List; I am not confident that she has ever read, much less written or commented on, a feminist blog. She has been far less voluble about her personal feminism than her compatriot Amy Poehler, who has done a lot more talking than Fey about her feminist beliefs. While it might be fair to argue that Fey has profited from a feminist embrace, she did not ever pretend to be a standard bearer for contemporary feminism. We're the ones who made her that, who overidentified with her, or with Liz Lemon, or with the Weekend Update host who declared that bitch was the new black, and attached to her a passel of our highest expectations and ideals.

This gets to the heart of a wider matter: the inherent short-coming of looking to art and artists as a symbol for political ideology. For many artists, but especially for those working in corporate owned mass media, their first allegiance is to create good work and the second is to net the biggest possible audience. For a comedian, this means getting a laugh wherever one finds them. This immediately sets up a problem for artists with an awareness of or a concern for social justice issues; in the case of a comedian, the biggest laughs may come from jokes that are contrary to their principles. In these moments, artists have to choose between getting the laugh or indulging and reinforcing systems of oppression.

There is a way out of this dilemma, however. And that is to change the joke in such a way to make the underlying issue the object of ridicule. The best moments of Chappelle's Show and South Park have done this, and Traister cites examples from 30 Rock (the premiere episode) and Saturday Night Live (the Brownie Husband skit) where Fey has done this as well.

But to return to the issue of adopting entertainers as symbols of ideology, divorced from the corporate realities, artists also must have some degree of independence from ideologies and social movements. If the artist--be it a comedian or dramatist--is really to penetrate society and critique it in his or her work, then they cannot afford to drink from the same Kool-Aid as everyone else. He or she must retain a degree of sobriety that gives him or her enough of an outsider's vantage point as to see society's short comings. And when the self-proclaimed standard bearers of feminism or any other organization, movement, or ideology adopt an artist who was never explicitly on their team, expect some response in that artists work, which will then be met with some kind of backlash like we are witnessing against Tina Fey.

But maybe Ivan Drago said it best:

(The clip is not subtitled but to translate, the Soviet bureaucrat scolds Drago because the crowd is cheering for Rocky, and Drago replies, "I win for me! For me!")

McKibben: Earth is Dead

2010-04-16T15:11:00.002-05:00

I guess we can cancel Earth Day: according to this article at Salon, environmentalist Bill McKibben has declared the planet, at least as we've known it, dead. An excerpt:

McKibben’s hair-raising new book "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," is a scrupulous and impassioned account of the severely compromised globe on which we now live. He lays out the myriad ways in which climate change has remade our world, but he also goes much further, chronicling its current and future human toll. He explains how droughts in Australia helped precipitate the 2008 food crisis and put 40 million people at risk of hunger, and how the rapidly melting glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas may soon threaten the water supply of billions. Our only hope for survival, McKibben suggests, is a reversion to small scale, local ways of life. "We simply can’t live on the new earth as if it were the old earth," he writes. "We’ve foreclosed that option."

This is not really a proclamation of the end of the world but it is a sort of apocalypse; McKibben's argument is that the reality and lifestyle we ("we"meaning the industrialized world) have been accustomed to is over.

ALA: Most Challenged Books of 2009

2010-04-15T02:14:00.004-05:00

This is National Library Week and the American Library Association has released their list of the ten most challenged books of 2009:

ttyl, ttfn, l8r, g8r (series) by Lauren Myracle
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twilight (series) by Stephenie Meyer
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things by Carolyn Mackler
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

I am somewhat surprised to see Twilight on the list since the books actually embody a conservative sense of sexuality. And it's interesting how some books like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple have remained on this list for so long.

Smokes on a Plane

2010-04-08T18:26:00.004-05:00

From The Guardian:

Two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled after a passenger apparently trying to sneak a smoke in an aircraft toilet sparked a massive security scare over the US last night.

Air marshals on board a Boeing 757 seized a Qatari diplomat who was questioned by security officials for hours after the incident. Investigators were told the man was asked about the smell of the smoke and joked he had been trying to light his shoes – an apparent reference to the 2001 shoe bomber Richard Reid.

I find this really funny. Maybe because his alleged smart-ass remark sounds like something I would do.

Happy Cruci-fiction Day 2010!

2010-04-04T11:50:00.006-05:00

It's that special Sunday of the year in which Christians get together and celebrate the torture, execution, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and look forward to the day he returns to earth to lay waste (read: commit mass genocide) upon those who refuse to honor and obey him.

One of the many ironies of religious life in America is the way that the totalitarian authority of the Christian (and for that matter Jewish and Muslim) god is either ignored or embraced by those who will readily scream and shout about the government taking away their liberty. Ancient notions of supreme gods are the template for fascism and totalitarianism: an unquestionable authority who demands absolute obedience and will punish anyone who refuses to submit. All aspects of life are controlled including our diet, clothing requirements, sexual orientation, and even our desires. The behavior of the Christian deity in the Old Testament is much more consistent with the acts of men like Joseph Stalin than any of the social workers who claim to do their work in the name of God. And Jesus Christ, whose message is supposedly about peace and love, exposes his true nature in the ending of the Bible by slaying all who refuse to recognize him.

Imagine if one of our political leaders proclaimed that Americans ought to love him without condition and anyone who dissented would be tortured and executed. Based on what has been seen recently, Americans would fill the streets with flags and guns and demand the surrender of such a leader, as they should. And yet many people readily accept a symbol of oppression under the guise of love.

But the Christian concept of love is not worth obeying. To draw upon a Biblical example, the story of Job is considered a prime example of Christian faith and devotion. For the unread, God and Satan make a deal in which Satan tortures Job, testing his faith while God watches. Job is mercilessly tormented with physical ailments and his children are killed, but he never gives up faith in God. In the end he is rewarded for his faith.

Now imagine a woman who is beaten by her husband on a regular basis. She could get away and her friends encourage her to do so, but she stays with her husband because she believes that he loves her, that the abuse will eventually end and he will treat her right, and that because she has entered into the marriage with him that she must never give up. The facts tell us that such a woman will likely end up dead.

The narrative of Job and this hypothetical abused woman are essentially the same story. Job has an abusive relationship with God and his reward at the end of the story is the mythical redemption that an abused spouse dreams of, but will never come. And although God does not torture Job directly, he enters into the agreement with Satan and stands by while Job suffers, making him guilty by proxy. This demand of devotion in contrast to loveless actions is consistent throughout the entire Bible and is ultimately the real definition of Christian love.

In short, such a god--if he actually existed--would not be worth loving. And now, with the history of violence and corruption stretching across the religious spectrum, the time has come to break the cycle.

Now This is Sex Education

2010-04-03T15:55:00.006-05:00

Alex Knepper, a columnist for American University's school newspaper, raised some hell on campus by writing a piece suggesting that "any woman who heads to an EI party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy's room with him is indicating that she wants sex." Knepper's point is that if a woman consents to sex but regrets it in the morning, that does not constitute rape, just bad judgement on her part. You can read the full column here.

Knepper is over broad in many of his criticisms, particularly of feminism, and his point is lost in a rather garbled prose style and a lack of focus. But what I found much more interesting was the appearance of Knepper on The Early Show on CBS in which he defended his views and exchanged criticisms with fellow student Carmen Rios.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

What strikes me about this exchange is how rational it is. Compare this to a Glenn Beck, Bill O'Rielly, Keith Olbermann, or Chris Matthews shout-down. Knepper and Rios' exchange is the kind of discourse that we need, especially on a topic like sexual assault. Just imagine if the health care debate had gone like this instead of the hysteric name-calling it degenerated into.

What We've Been Missing

2010-03-28T12:54:00.002-05:00

From the Associated Press:

The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year as Washington has added tens of thousands of additional soldiers to reverse the Taliban's momentum.

Those deaths have been accompanied by a dramatic spike in the number of wounded, with injuries more than tripling in the first two months of the year and trending in the same direction based on the latest available data for March.

So my question is, why are we just hearing about this now? Was there just no room in the past three months between bullshit stories on death panels, sex scandals, and celebrity divorces?

"The Pope Knew About This."

2010-03-25T20:55:00.002-05:00

Check out this extensive article at MSNBC about the case of Lawrence Murphy, a Catholic priest in Wisconsin who molested children. According to Arthur Budzinski, one of Murphy's victims, the Vatican was made aware of the priest's behavior and did nothing to stop him:

Budzinski, now 61, was one of about 200 deaf boys at the St. John's School for the Deaf just outside Milwaukee who say they were molested by the priest decades ago in a case now creating a scandal for the Vatican and threatening to ensnare Pope Benedict XVI.

Some of the allegations became public years ago. But they got renewed attention this week after documents obtained by The New York Times showed that Murphy was spared a defrocking in the mid-1990s because he was protected by the Vatican office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope.

The Vatican officials reveal the hubris that characterizes the Catholic Church. Notice that the church does not deny the allegations. But according to them, this is really just a smear campaign by anti-Catholics to strike at the pope. For them, it couldn't be about justice, about lives that were shattered, or trust that was violated. It couldn't be about rule of law or accountability. No, according to the Vatican it's just an attempt to make the pope look bad.

Try to imagine being a parent and your child is molested by a school teacher. Now imagine that you bring this to the attention of the school principal and he tells you that everything will be fine because they've relocated the teacher to a different school across town. So you go to the press and tell them what has happened. And when the allegations become public, the school district admits that the sexual assault occurred and that they just moved the teacher to a new school but then they attack you and your child for trying to embarrass them.

That is exactly what is happening and it's not being stopped because the Catholic Church does not care about its victims, past, present, or future. The institution only cares about its own survival and it will aid and abet rapists in order to do it.

Conservative Waterloo

2010-03-23T01:14:00.003-05:00

Check this out: Conservative pundit David Frum, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, on the fallout of the passage of health care reform and the Republican party's unwillingness to cooperate with it:

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

If conservative politicians take Frum's advice--and who knows if they will--we might be back on the path to a rational debate. But I fear that the Limbaughs and the Becks will overpower any attempt at civility or rationality and continue to steer the discourse into further chaos.

Satan: The Best Friend the Church Ever Had

2010-03-18T18:38:00.006-05:00

Grab your holy water and cue up "Tubular Bells:" the Vatican has let Gabriele Amorth, its chief exorcist (yes, they still have those), grant a series of high profile interviews in the lead up to the release of his memoir. And in the interviews he has blamed the church's recent spate of abuse and corruption charges on the work of Satan, going so far as to claim that high ranking members of the church are actually members of Satanic organizations.

I don't know if the church is thinking strategically, letting this quack off the leash to create a diversion and hoping that his accusations will create a new media circus for our attention-deficit-disorder press to obsess over, or if they didn't realize just how crazy he apparently is. Neither of these possibilities says much for the church. And I would hesitate to give them the credit the former scenario implies, given that they sold out Mother Teresa to make a buck off of her letters.

This is one of the clearest cases of the church using the devil as an excuse to dodge taking responsibility, but it is not the first. There has been a major increase in the visibility of the Catholic Church's exorcists (which I blogged about previously here), including the construction of a new exorcism center in Poland. That this revival of demonology comes at a time when mass attendance is waning, when the cultural influence of the church is crumbling, atheism is more popular than ever, and the next generation of priests and nuns is not to be found should not come as a surprise.

The devil is often dragged out of the closet at times when Christianity's authority is in question. In reaction to the changes in social, sexual, and religious attitudes of the 1960s, there was a return of traditional Catholicism and the rise in fundamentalist Christianity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which cast Satan as a literal force of evil at work in the world. Darwin and his discoveries in evolution have long been cast as demonically inspired. During the Reformation, the Catholic Church portrayed Protestants as agents of the devil and the Protestants returned the favor. And going back to the late Middle Ages, the church facilitated an increase in the hysteria over witches, spearheaded by the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum (also known as The Witches Hammer) as the Renaissance approached and traditional ideas about god and the church were unsettled.

But there are two things that stand out in all these cases. First, the transfer of responsibility from the transgressor onto an unseen evil force. Second, the use of fear to quell dissent, either to slime the opposition with a label or by recasting the entire issue from a matter of human corruption to one of supernatural evil. After all, why should we be worried about a few naughty priests if the real threat is a supernatural demonic force attempting to subvert the world?

The devil does not exist so it was necessary for Christian leaders to invent him and from time to time reinvent him for their particular needs. And it would seem to me that the best way to get around this reliable defense mechanism, the way to render it moot, is to embrace the devil as one of our own. After all, Satanists never systematically molested children, flew airplanes into buildings, murdered doctors performing legal medical procedures, approved the abuse of women, told people that their best hope is to achieve nothingness, preached that a person's sinful nature is inherent either from transgressions by ancestors or actions in a previous life, or instructed others that the greatest achievement in life is to die in the service of faith. But if this what the righteous proclaim, may be it's good to be evil.

James Carroll on Catholic Abuse

2010-03-14T19:41:00.003-05:00

For the latest on the Catholic abuse cover up, check out this piece at The Daily Beast by James Carroll, author of Practicing Catholic and An American Requiem. An excerpt:

Yes, the depravities of the guilty priests are crimes—but they are also evidence of a broader dysfunction, a depth of systematic corruption that the old bigotries never imagined. The nearly universal response of church authorities to these crimes, rising to the level of the papacy itself, is so consistently to protect the abusers and re-victimize the victims as to qualify for the crime of co-conspiracy. Bishops and other leaders have not only obstructed justice, shielding perpetrators from civil law, but they have also become criminal abettors by enabling these perpetrators to continue their abusive behavior. And it has been happening everywhere.

And the parade continues.

Presidential Reunion from Funny or Die

2010-03-05T15:23:00.001-06:00

Funny or Die's Presidential Reunion from Will Ferrell

Let's Go to the Tape

2010-03-01T18:34:00.003-06:00

A few months ago, news organizations got up in arms over a video created by investigative journalist (and I use the term loosely) James O'Keefe, purporting to expose corruption in a Brooklyn ACORN office. More recently, O'Keefe was arrested for allegedly trespassing in a U.S. Senator's office, attempting to sabotage the phones. It looks like his luck isn't getting any better.

From Salon:

A four-month investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney found no evidence that the local ACORN office had engaged in any criminal conduct, despite the hype conservative media gave to tapes of a fake prostitute asking for help from the organization.

"They edited the tape to meet their agenda," a law enforcement source told the New York Daily News, which reported the investigation's results on Monday.

Although it's nice to see that the truth has made its way out, O'Keefe is really just a jackass with a video camera. The bigger players here are Andew Breitbart and Fox News. Breitbart funded O'Keefe and has set up new right wing pseudo-news sources and Fox News ran with the story, elevating it into a major story and attempting to make O'Keefe a populist hero. It is doubtful that either will take responsibility for their errors but maybe that doesn't matter since most of their viewers would happily accept an easy lie than a hard truth.

Sluts Save the World

2010-02-25T15:33:00.001-06:00

From CBS News:

A study of fruit flies by the Natural Environment Research Council in the U.K. has found that promiscuous females of a species may be the key to that species' survival.

The reason is that when females partner with fewer mates, the likelihood that they'll have all-female broods rises. A so-called "sex ratio distortion" (SR) chromosome exists that kills Y chromosome (male) sperm before fertilization. Female offspring carry the SR, which will be passed on to their male children until there are all-female broods born.
Short version: Do it more, widen your brood-load and reduce the risk of getting all-female broods. Species saved!

Olbermann: Help

2010-02-24T23:02:00.000-06:00

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Orca is Latin for The Bringer of Death

2010-02-24T19:21:00.004-06:00

From MSNBC:

A SeaWorld killer whale seized a trainer in its jaws Wednesday and thrashed the woman around underwater, killing her in front of a horrified audience. It marked the third time the animal had been involved in a human death.

Distraught audience members were hustled out of the stadium immediately, and the park was closed.

Trainer Dawn Brancheau, 40, was one of the park's most experienced. It was not clear if she drowned or died from the thrashing.

This is going to be a problematic story for the animal rights crowd which has championed whales as sentient beings. An incident like this has two possibilities: the orca knew what it was doing and is therefore guilty of an act of homicide, or it did not know what it was doing, or at least was acting instinctively, and is really no smarter or cognisant than other animals that we readily kill for food and clothing. Neither of these options bodes well for the dolphin.

But in either case, what fascinates me about this and similar incidents of cetacean violence is how it disrupts the new age notion of nature as a friendly, nurturing entity. Whales, perhaps beyond any other animal, have been bestowed with a public image of nature's benevolence and are paraded about as some defacto example of nature's moral goodness, and used to attack man's abuse of the earth. But the public image of whales and dolphins is as well crafted and stage managed as that of a politician and is the result of domestication, training, and myth making by the media.

Compare the public image of whales to sharks. Sharks do not lend themselves to domestication or theme parks; they don't click and whistle, they're not cute, and they don't jump through hoops. From the mid-1970s to the 90s, sharks endured very harsh public regard as a result of Jaws and its imitators (and for shark's tendency to occasionally attack people) but also because documentaries about sharks were always framed around images them feeding, attacking, or being menacing in general. Today much of that has dissipated due to a renewed sense of resonsibility for the enviornment and an awareness of shark's important place in the ecosystem. And ultimately, I think sharks may end up better off than whales because no thinking person would appeal to sharks as an example of morality. We have largely replaced fear with respect, which is what nature demands.

Those looking for morality should not look to nature. You just won't find it there.

Rules for Writing by Distinguished Authors

2010-02-23T23:25:00.003-06:00

The Guardian has this compilation of lists of writing advice by high profile writers. Here are some gems:

Elmore Leonard: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

Roddy Doyle: Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Helen Dunmore: Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

Anne Enright: Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

Richard Ford: Don't drink and write at the same time.

Jonathan Franzen: When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

Neil Gaiman: Write.

David Hare: The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".

Al Kennedy: Defend your work. Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work – especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away. Run away. The money doesn't matter that much.

Michael Murpurgo: The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time.

Ian Rankin: Get lucky.

Will Self: You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

Zadie Smith: Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

Sarah Waters: Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling.

Jeanette Winterson: Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.

You can also check out this article at Salon in which Laura Miller gives the advice of a reader to writers.

Is This a New Olympic Competition?

2010-02-18T22:11:00.004-06:00

Now this could actually get me to watch the winter Olympics:

According to this piece at the Huffington Post, about 100,000 condoms have been distributed to those involved in the games. According to the article, that works out to fourteen condoms for each of the 7,000 athletes, coaches, trainers and officials.

Maybe I should have learned to ice skate after all.

Glenn Greenwald on the Right Wing's Human Rights Blind Spot

2010-02-15T00:04:00.005-06:00

Glenn Greenwald has written this column for Salon about the defense of Baptist missionaries in Haiti who were arrested on child abduction charges. Pundits for Fox News and The National Review have been defending the missionaries and protested the conditions of their imprisonment while simultaneously advocating the continuation of Bush-era torture and incarceration policies. Greenwald concludes his attack on this hypocrisy as follows:

Would you rather be an American wrongfully accused of child trafficking even in the post-earthquake Haitian justice system (complete with lawyers, access to courts, and full due process), or a Muslim wrongly accused of Terrorism by the U.S. Government (and put in a black hole for years with no rights)? To ask the question is to answer it. The primary duty of a citizen is to protest bad acts by their own government. If you're acquiescing to or even endorsing serious human rights abuses by your own government, then it's not only morally absurd -- but laughably ineffective -- to parade around as some sort of human rights crusader when it comes time to protest the treatment of one of your own, however you might define that. It might produce some soothing feelings of self-satisfaction, but nobody will remotely take that seriously, nor should they.

"Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all." - Marquis de Sade

2010-02-14T19:50:00.008-06:00

Happy Valentine's Day (otherwise known this year as Black Sunday).

Is Your Vagina Shiny Enough?

2010-02-03T19:28:00.003-06:00

Yes, you read the headline correctly. Just in time for Valentine's Day, here is an article about various medical procedures available to women who think their vaginas just aren't pretty enough. "Improvements" include vaginal deodorant, labiaplasty, and bleaching.

And to think most guys are happy just so long as the vagina is attached to a body with a pulse. I guess we have to start raising our standards. Or maybe women need to seriously ask themselves who they are doing this for and why.

The Family Research Council Would Criminalize Sex

2010-02-03T04:03:00.003-06:00

This is an debate from Hardball in which Aubrey Sarvis, a former US serviceman who is also gay, debates repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" with Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council. Most of the segment goes through the same tired arguments on the topic except for the final minute as Chris Matthews asks Sprigg if he thinks homosexuality should be illegal. Quite amazingly, Sprigg says that he does.

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That John Lennon Was Full of Shit, Man

2010-02-02T04:07:00.003-06:00

Valentine's Day is on its way again and with it comes the predictable shaming of those of us who are single, whether by choice or by circumstance. My (admittedly and unapologetically male) perception is that the social disdain towards the single status is worse for women than for men because society beats into women from an early age that their whole purpose in life is to get married and live happily ever after, and if they have not done that then they are some kind of a failure. Men are actually expected to refrain from an interest in romance and only agree to it after a long and bitter resistance. Of course, neither of these conventions is true; women can be quite happy and unmarried and there are plenty of men who do like to indulge romantic ideals.

In this book review for The Daily Beast, Liesl Schillinger inventories the new "dating self help" (better described as why-you-are-an-unloved-sack-of-shit) book by Lori Gottlieb called Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, which tells successful but single women to lower their standards and settle down with a guy they might not like really like but comes close enough.

There is a lot to say about Gottlieb's argument but for this post, I'll just focus on this excerpt from Schillinger's review, as it applies to both men and women:

Many unpartnered women who grew up in Gottlieb’s era dated successfully for ages, but the relationships didn’t work out; others married and got divorced. Gottlieb moans about the misery of the sad, pathetic single woman, stuck at home with Netflix. But what of the misery of the sad, pathetic, partnered woman, stuck at home with a somnolent spouse or boyfriend who sits around watching TV and eating Chunky soup and won’t let her play her Netflix? What of the un-sad, un-pathetic single women who go to concerts, plays, films and parties, carouse with friends, date, travel, work out, dance, take classes, produce valuable work, and, generally, live life as if they were not coma patients? This is not to say that Gottlieb isn’t correct to assert that some single women are lonely (just as some single men are). This is merely to point out that a human being bears a certain amount of responsibility for his or her own entertainment; and that having a partner is no guarantee of a roaring good time or of a rich emotional life.

There is another thought I'd like to add to both Gottlieb and Schillinger's input: love and marriage inherently involve compromise. For that matter, all social interaction involves some kind of compromise. By having friends or significant others and sharing our time with them, we are inherently giving up some our freedom and autonomy. A completely single person with no attachments--familial, platonic, or romantic--would be the freest individual in the world, owing nothing to anybody. But human beings are also social creatures and to go without is unhealthy and probably not worth the benefit.

So does Gottlieb's general argument, that women (or men for that matter) should resign their standards, hold any water? In a way, yes, if she or he compromises on things that are ultimately negotiable and the benefits outweight the cost. But getting married just for the sake of having a ring on your finger and fulfilling some social expectation of having an elderly virgin call upon the imaginary space god to sanctify your sex life is not going to make anyone a better or happier person.

Fred Phelps Not a Fan of Lady Gaga

2010-01-31T23:43:00.003-06:00

This is a bit dated, but I just came across this photo and thought it was amusing:

Apparently, Fred Phelps, the right wing preacher known for leading demonstrations against Jewish organizations and making an ass of himself on college campuses while protesting homosexuals, thinks Lady Gaga is leading people to hell.

And by the way, I wonder if the poor girl in the photo realizes the irony of protesting homosexuality while wearing a sweatshirt with a fairy on it.

Send the Republicans to Their Room

2010-01-31T18:56:00.003-06:00

Lee Siegel has written this very amusing piece for The Daily Beast about heath care politics, comparing the GOP to a three-year-old child and the threat of a filibuster to a temper tantrum.

Take Obama’s original proposals for health-care reform. Child-rearing equivalent? Broccoli. Most effective strategy? Chocolate cookie. Now what do you do with this cookie? Mix it in with the broccoli? (i.e. weaken the public option into national exchanges?) No. Put it on the plate alongside the broccoli? (i.e. give each state the choice of rejecting a public option?) No. Offer it to your child as an appetizer after extracting his promise to consume the broccoli afterward? (i.e. commit $30 billion to continue the war in Afghanistan?) Nope. Do you suggest that tonight he have only chocolate cookies for dinner and tell him in no uncertain terms that tomorrow night he must eat all his broccoli? (i.e. abandon the public option, national exchanges, and a Medicare buy-in for people 55 and over?) Absolutely not.

Any one of these ploys will leave you with a plate of cold broccoli, a happy and triumphant child, and the cheerful expectation on the part of the latter that he will never have to eat any type of vegetable again for the rest of his life. The one thing parents know is never to give up anything valuable without getting something substantial in return.

And yet there is an event that looms ominously over every family dinner. In politics it is called The Filibuster. Parents know it as The Tantrum.

The conclusion of the piece is a little weak but the metaphor is apt, especially after watching how President Bush (43) would essentially threaten to hold his breath any time he didn't get his way.

Howard Zinn: 1922 - 2010

2010-01-27T18:57:00.002-06:00

From The Washington Post:

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist "A People's History of the United States" became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favorite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87.

Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Mass.

Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, "A People's History" was - fittingly - a people's best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including "Voices of a People's History," a volume for young people and a graphic novel.

Naughty Words

2010-01-25T18:43:00.005-06:00

I wish I was making this up, but according to this article from Salon.com, a school in California has banned the dictionary for containing offensive language:

Acting on a complaint from one parent after she noticed that the dictionary in her son's Oak Meadows Elementary School contained the phrase "oral sex," swift-acting school officials pulled the salacious work from fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms throughout the district.

District spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told Southwest Riverside News that after the mother complained to the school principal, the district decided to temporary remove the books. "We are grateful that the parent who saw something sexually graphic brought it to our attention," she explained. The district will now form a committee to "determine the extent to which the challenged material supports the curriculum, the educational appropriateness of the material, and its suitability for the age level of the student." That's right -- in certain places, one cranky parent can get the dictionary removed from an entire district's schools, even when the kids themselves haven't been running around blurting about ORAL SEX to their elders.

I don't know if the big shock here is the banning of the book or the fact that students still use a hard copy of the dictionary.

Joan Walsh on Game Change

2010-01-14T20:40:00.002-06:00

Finally, someone is asking the right questions about the book Game Change. Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com, writes about the book's use of anecdotes and its lack of sourcing or corroboration.

On Sunday I wrote about the book's "revelation" that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used the term "Negro dialect" referring to Barack Obama. I wrote then about my discomfort with the book's mostly anonymous sourcing – there is no index or source notes – as well as its strange practice of "quoting" inflammatory statements in mere sentence fragments, without full context, and Heilemann and Halperin's Bob Woodward-like zest for recreating thoughts and conversations they couldn't have been a party to. (I particularly enjoyed the opening scene, set in Obama's room at a Des Moines Hampton Inn just before the Iowa caucuses, when the candidate woke up anxious in the middle of the night, feeling like "the dog that caught the bus." Were they there? Now that's a story!) I have the book, and I'm making my way through it, but I'm surprised more people aren't asking the questions I have about it.
* * *
I have two points: At a time when we're fighting at least two wars, enduring double-digit unemployment, a controversial health care reform bill may or may not become law, and Haiti just had a devastating earthquake, how could we possibly be talking, nearly 24/7, about a gossipy book that reveals nothing serious about policy, hidden deals, corruption or conflicts of interest along the 2008 campaign trail? And if we must dissect such gossipy revelations, on the grounds that they tell us something about our leadership class (Ed Schultz's defense to me) how can we do so without constantly noting that the book's sourcing is stunningly opaque – about a topic on which all sources had a skewed, self-interested take on the "history" they recount?

Journalists often use confidential sources, and I'm not opposed to the practice, but the dependence upon those sources in Game Change makes it impossible to evaluate anything in the book. Feasibly, a writer could make everything up and claim that they are protecting confidential sources. That makes Game Change hard to distinguish from crap like Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi.

I have not read Game Change (and at this point my reading list is so long that I doubt I will get to it any time soon) but if what Walsh writes is correct, there is a better book to be written about the 2008 campaign, one that will benefit from some critical distance and the ability to evaluate the election and its winners and losers in wider retrospection.

Beinart: Harry Reid Was Right

2010-01-11T18:40:00.003-06:00

The pseudo-controversy blowing up talking head television this week is the report of Harry Reid's (D-Nevada) use of the word "negro" in a private conversation about Barack Obama. According to the upcoming book Game Change, during the 2008 campaign Reid said that Americans would likely vote for Obama because he has light skin and speaks with “no Negro dialect.”

In a piece on The Daily Beast, Peter Beinart writes that what Reid said was correct. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs to the piece, which illustrate his point nicely:

There’s nothing Americans love more than demanding “honest talk” about race and then kicking the teeth out of anyone who engages in it. Thus the tale of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is now in political purgatory because he told authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann that white people were more open to voting for Barack Obama because he’s “light-skinned” and has “no Negro dialect.” Reid’s use of the word “Negro” was, to be sure, unpleasantly retro. But everything else about his statement is undeniably correct. Political scientists have proved it. Famous African Americans have testified to it. So now Reid must be punished, because he said things about the contours of white racism that you’re not supposed to say, except behind closed doors, where everyone knows that they’re true.
* * *
So if what Reid said was palpably true, why is he in so much trouble? Yes, his use of the word “negro” was unattractive. But overall, his statement was less an example of white racism than an analysis of white racism. He dared to discuss an aspect of race prejudice that people generally find too toxic to publicly discuss. But it should be publicly discussed. Because amid the triumphalism that has followed Barack Obama’s election—the insistence, particularly on the right, that his election proves that racism has all but died out—it is worth remembering that while Obama’s election constitutes racial progress, it is also, peculiarly, testament to how far America still has to go.

It seems to me that the knee-jerk reaction to Reid's use of the word "negro" was itself an indication of how far we have to go. Race is still so sensitive of a topic that just the use of a word--in a non-derogatory context, no less--was enough to get people calling for Reid's resignation. Reid's comments may have been coarse or impolitic but as Beinart points out, he was also right and should not be punished for that.

The Past Decade in Seven Minutes

2010-01-04T11:20:00.007-06:00

Here is a video from Newsweek condensing nearly every major news story of the past ten years into seven minutes. The only major stories I noticed missing were 2001's "Summer of the Shark," the Enron disaster, and the Valerie Plame scandal. And for all the coverage she got this decade, I'm surprised Paris Hilton was not in the mash-up.

The End of Broadcast TV?

2009-12-29T13:40:00.007-06:00

According to this MSNBC article, networks are considering doing away with free over the air broadcasting in favor of exclusive cable deals. An excerpt:

For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer.

The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks' programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.

This has some implications for television that are both frightening and filled with opportunity. First, this means that the public broadcasting, either from the CPB or from local public access channels, would be more important than ever. As of 2007, forty-two percent of American households do not subscribe to a cable service (and that number is prone to rise in poor economic conditions) and the proposed change to local channels would effectively force viewers to either get service or abandon television altogether.

This has further implications because the news is still largely broadcast and consumed via television, especially in an emergency event. Should something happen, we depend on television and local news to inform the public, possibly dispersing critical information. Without that a large segment of the population is at risk, especially vulnerable populations like the poor and the elderly.

There may also be an opportunity here. If local network affiliates end up committing themselves to cable, there may be a void in the local marketplace for local independent television stations to sprout, the kinds of stations that have become all but extinct. Someone innovative and with a few dollars in their pocket could feasibly take over a local station, broadcast over the air (and since their product is free they could call their organization a nonprofit) and use it as a platform for local issues.

Our Father, Who Art in Springfield . . .

2009-12-23T23:30:00.002-06:00

This is unexpected. According to this MSNBC article, L'Osservatore Romano, the semi-official newspaper of the Vatican, ran an editorial praising The Simpsons for its philosophical themes.

Religion, from the snore-evoking sermons of the Rev. Lovejoy to Homer's face-to-face talks with God, appears so frequently on the show that it could be possible to come up with a "Simpsonian theology," it said.

Homer's religious confusion and ignorance are "a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith," the paper said.

It commented on several religion-themed episodes, including one in which Homer calls for divine intervention by crying: "I'm not normally a religious man, but if you're up there, save me, Superman!"

"Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong," L'Osservatore said. "But these are just minor mistakes, after all, the two know each other well."

I'm not sure about the paper's conclusions. This reminds me of the study that found conservative viewers of The Colbert Report did not see it as anti-conservative satire.

Is Google Making Us Dumber?

2009-12-14T10:20:00.006-06:00

The Daily Beast features an article by Douglas Rushkoff titled "The Decade Google Made You Stupid." The piece suggests that the fragmented nature of the web has in turned fragmented our own thinking:

Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before.

Apparently not. Cliff Nass, director of Stanford University's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab (known as CHIMe Lab), has been studying the best multitaskers on the face of the earth: college students. "How do they do it? Do their brains work differently?" He, too, was shocked by his own research. "It turns out, multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They're terrible at ignoring irrelevant information. They're terrible at keeping information in their heads nice and neatly organized, and they're terrible at switching from one task to the other. This shocks us."

Nass split his subjects into two groups—those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking, and those who don't. When they took simple tests comparing assortments of shapes, the multitaskers were more easily distracted by random images, and incapable of determining which data was relevant to the task at hand. And just because the multitaskers couldn't ignore irrelevant data didn't mean they were better at storing and organizing information. They scored worse on both sorting and memorizing information.

So what does it mean if we multitaskers are actually fooling ourselves into believing we're competent when we're not? "If multitasking is hurting their ability to do these fundamental tasks," Nass explained matter-of-factly, "life becomes difficult. Some of studies show they are worse at analytic reasoning. We are mostly shocked. They think they are great at it." We're not just stupid and vulnerable online—we simultaneously think we're invincible. And that attitude, new brain research shows, has massive carryover into real life.

The dumbing effects of the web have been very apparent to me because of the specific time in which I began and ended my time as a student in higher education. I began my undergraduate degree program in 1998 and at that time the web was around and functioning but it was a foreign thing, a tool that we hadn't used before. Laptops were available but were very expensive, cell phones could only call other phones, and watching video online required a lot of bandwidth. Writing research papers for my freshman composition class still required me to use actual books and look up articles in actual physical journals. I don't write this to be nostalgic. Looking up information that way could be a pain in the ass.

By the time I finished my graduate degree in 2006 everything had changed. Students expect to be able to use Google or other search engines to find anything about everything and there is an unwillingness to dig beyond the first page of search results. The act of looking up a journal in a library's periodical collection is seen as tedious and reading a book requires a level of commitment and concentration that is asynchronous with new media where everything is split into sound bites.

Again, I don't think of myself as a Luddite. But the fact is that the Internet has changed the way we think about the world and how we regard one another. Our senses, particularly aural and visual, have been digitized and expanded through technology like cellphones and social networking sites have changed our interpersonal relationships; we are "friends" with someone but may never talk to them.

When MTV premiered in the early 1980s, a lot of filmmakers and musicians bemoaned its effect on the culture as images and artifacts were consumed and discarded with greater speed. The culture eventually caught up to that speed and in the past decade Youtube and Google have taken this a step further. My hope is that we learn to organize the information we are being bombarded with but my fear is that as speed and variety increase, our attention span and our ability to think will decrease.

Worst (Literary) Sex of the Year

2009-12-03T18:50:00.002-06:00

I thought "bad sex" was some kind of a contradiction, but in London the yearly "Bad Sex" literary awards were just given out and Olivia Cole of The Daily Beast was there to cover it.

From her article:

It’s a fine line between what’s sexy and what makes jaded literary hacks cackle. The body as territory to be mapped can be very sexy: think of all the cartography in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. And oceanic emblems are almost a trope. From Shakespeare (“Like as waves make towards the pebbled shore…”) to Robert Browning’s “Meeting at Night,” where the consummation of his marriage is all told in the lapping of the waves.

Sadly nothing can save [Amoz] Oz from not waving but drowning: “as though he has been transformed into a delicate seismograph that intercepts and instantly deciphers her body's reactions translating what he has discovered into skilful, precise navigation, anticipating and cautiously avoiding every sandbank, steering clear of each underwater reef.”
* * *
Like any circus, what’s done in jest plays on deeper fears. Pity the writers who spend their lives offering up their private thoughts. Even when there’s no sex to be found, writing requires a kind of nakedness. For novelists with their fragile egos, to be called a bad writer is perhaps almost as bad as being a called a bad lover.

Bob Saget on Thanksgiving

2009-11-24T13:40:00.001-06:00

Oratory and literary national treasure Bob Saget has written an essay for The Huffington Post about Thanksgiving.

An excerpt:

I do have a wish for you all. May all your holidays be filled with the blessings that life can bestow. And though, for all of us, in different ways, this has been a tough year, try to remember something my father taught me. Something I reflect upon that occasionally has helped me through a tough time... That at your moment of suffering, somewhere in the world, some unsuspecting turkey is about to have a fistful of gravy shoved deep into his ass.

Watch an American Bishop Make the Case for Theocracy

2009-11-23T17:35:00.001-06:00

Here is a clip from Hardball, as Chris Matthews spars with Reverend Thomas Tobin, the Bishop of Providence, Rhode Island. In it, Tobin and Matthews debate over the influence religious leaders seek over secular, governmental policy.

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Interestingly, the segment starts out with an excerpt of John F. Kennedy's religious speech, in which the former president explicitly affirms the separation of church and state. But at about 2:21 in the video, Tobin says that a politician's "first commitment must be to his faith," and "if your job gets in the way of your faith you need to quit your job," presenting a position diametrically opposed to the thesis of Kennedy's speech. Further, the point Tobin is really making is to say that unconditional obedience must be given to the church, placing it above constituents, laws and procedures, or any other person, group, or institution. This is, by definition, the essence of theocracy.

In this clip we get a brief but fairly complete enunciation and criticism of the power wielded and pursued by those in religious positions. Whether Tobin recognizes it or not--and his fumbling answers later in the segment suggest he has not thought about it--the implications of his position are not all that different from an Islamic fundamentalist who would institute Sharia Law. The church, as represented by Tobin, requires absolute capitulation to its decrees and the modification of existing laws to conform to religious dogma. This position would blur and ultimately erase any kind of distinction between the religious and the secular, with the former overtaking the latter.

Berkeley Protests

2009-11-21T14:36:00.002-06:00

Students in California are protesting the decision by the University of California's Board of Regents to increase tuition by thirty-two percent. According to the Los Angeles Times, the hikes will add $2,500 to undergraduate fees by next fall, bringing basic annual fees to $10,302. Room, board and books can add $16,000.

In response, a group of students occupied a classroom on the Berkeley campus and were later arrested. According to The Times:

Campus police entered Wheeler Hall about 5 p.m., and the demonstrators were taken into custody without incident, campus officials said in a statement. The protesters were charged with trespassing and released, the statement said.

The arrests ended a day of tumult that began before dawn when the students took over classrooms on the second floor and locked four exits. They unfurled a banner that read "32 Percent Hike, 900 Layoffs."

A rally outside Wheeler grew throughout the day, said Maggie Wheeler, a freshman at the campus. By early evening, hundreds of students and union activists were shouting slogans and banging on drums, Wheeler said.

Dozens of campus police in riot helmets were watching the crowds but didn't move against the barricaded students until late in the day, she said.

Campus officials said an attempt at negotiation was made but their efforts "were refused."

Three students were arrested earlier in the day and no injuries were reported, said Emily Strange, a media relations assistant.

Puck Lo, 29, one of the students inside the locked room, disputed the university's contention that the demonstrators refused to negotiate. Students were demanding that 38 custodians who lost their jobs be reinstated and that the protesters be given amnesty, Lo said.

Here are some Youtube videos of the protest:

Students hang the banner:

Protest at the front line:

Protests at the front line part 2:

Police try to hold back protesters:

An earlier protest from September 2009 over budget issues:

Obama Lost Without Teleprompter

2009-11-20T14:01:00.002-06:00

From The Onion:

By the way, the Onion news anchor used to be Fox News anchor. Make of that what you will.

Can Our Justice System Handle Them?

2009-11-19T18:45:00.003-06:00

From MSNBC:

SALT LAKE CITY - The case of one of four teens who were cited after rapping their order at a McDonald's in Utah appears headed for trial.
Police in American Fork, about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City, cited the teens for disorderly conduct last month after the drive-through rap.

The teens have said they were imitating a rap from a popular YouTube video, which begins: "I need a double cheeseburger and hold the lettuce."

Is a Military Base Right for Your Neighborhood?

2009-11-09T22:40:00.005-06:00

This article in the New York Times takes a look at the violence at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, the site of last week's shooting. The article finds:

Reports of domestic abuse have grown by 75 percent since 2001. At the same time, violent crime in Killeen has risen 22 percent while declining 7 percent in towns of similar size in other parts of the country.
Since 2003, there have been 76 suicides by personnel assigned to Fort Hood, with 10 this year.
A crisis center on base is averaging 60 phone calls a week from soldiers and family members seeking various help for problems from suicide to anger management, with about the same volume of walk-ins and scheduled appointments.
Col. Edward McCabe, a Catholic chaplain at Fort Hood, said signs of fatigue and other strains are “rampant” on the base. “The numbers of divorces I’ve had to deal with are huge, the cases of physical abuse,” Colonel McCabe said.
Crimes, especially domestic violence, increase when troop divisions return home.
Children of soldiers attending local schools suffer from not getting the parental guidance they need, leading to poor grades and behavioral problems.

We don't know the cause yet of last week's murder spree. The motive may be religious, mental illness, stress related, or some other reason. But regardless of what happened last week, these numbers give pause when we consider the help, or lack thereof, that soldiers are receiving as they transition from the battlefield to the home front. It also raises the question of what kinds of people the military culture breeds and how the presence of a military base may impact the local community.

Why We Fight

2009-11-04T19:52:00.004-06:00

The Daily Beast has an article by Lauren Sandler on a rift developing in the atheism movement. According to the article, there is a dispute over how aggressively atheists should make their case. On one side is a combative, in-your-face attitude that actively seeks to disabuse people of their religious faith. The other side is passive-aggressive, suggesting tolerance for all attitudes and perspectives.

These two philosophies are fracturing organizations at the top of the atheist activism food chain. Consider the Center for Inquiry, atheism's top think tank and one of the groups behind New York’s “Good Without God” campaign. The Center’s founder, Paul Kurtz, one of humanism's eminences grises, preaches maximum tolerance. His life's aim, he told me, is to “make it so a person can be a nonbeliever in our society and be respected and accepted.” As such, he thinks it’s counterproductive to preach against religion. “You can't begin by calling people names,” says the 85-year-old Kurtz. “It's self-destructive to nonbelievers.” When Kurtz’s own organization supported international “Blasphemy Day” in September (a day dedicated to openly criticizing all things God), Kurtz wrote a column in Free Inquiry magazine, an atheist publication put out by the Center for Inquiry, comparing the day to “the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era.” He continued, “There are some fundamentalist atheists who have resorted to such vulgar antics to gain press attention.”

One of Blasphemy Day's supporters was, in fact, Tom Flynn, Free Inquiry’s editor-in-chief and Kurtz's colleague at the Center. Flynn sees a loud, proud, and socially unacceptable atheism as the best chance to achieve Kurtz's declared goals. He also draws constructive parallels to the raucous gay-rights movement of the 1970s and ‘80s. “If you think back to deliberately outrageous activism like ACT UP and Queer Nation, somehow after 10 years, gay was mainstream,” he says. “There were gay characters on sitcoms. How did this happen? That brashness and outrageousness, it desensitized America. It got everybody over that taboo.”
* * *
Barry Kosmin, who directs the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, suggests that neither active approach will ultimately be successful in mainstreaming atheism. “My own belief is that actual religion will be hurt more by creating a climate of indifference,” he says, imagining a time when godlessness will be met by nothing more than a shrug. Kosmin says we're not far from that now, especially if you take a historical perspective.

It's easy to see why there would be a reaction against the proselytizing and combative elements of the atheist movement; the aggressive tactics resemble the kinds of obnoxious displays of faith of Christians and Muslims that spurred atheists to action in the first place. However, there are a few very good reasons to embrace the pro-active elements of the movement.

First, as Richard Dawkins states in the article, tolerance and politeness have been used for a long time and haven't gotten anywhere. This speaks to a larger issue of relativity and political correctness within the culture. As diversity appreciation has spread--which has been a mostly positive influence--it has had a side effect of creating a relativistic fog in which no one is allowed to criticize other cultures or religious beliefs; no one is superior or inferior just different. But if the point of the atheist movement is to convince people to abandon superstition, then they have to do just that, which means passing judgement on other people's beliefs.

Second, if atheists take the non-existence of god to be a matter of scientific fact (which it is), then the application of words like "proselytizing" or "dogmatic" do not really apply. The very thing that separates science from faith is reason. We cannot be dogmatic about the non-existence of god any more than we could be dogmatic about the earth being round.

Third, the "shocking" act of desecrating idols is important to making them relative. As Tom Flynn correctly asserts, the obtuse actions of gay rights groups in the 1970s paid off later to normalize homosexuality and overcome many stigmas, although much remains to be done. By exposing the flimsiness of the symbols of faith we can begin to break society's sense of reverence toward them.

Lastly, the stakes are simply too high. From the Crusades to the War on Terror, from the Inquisition to Al Qaeda, from the Scopes Trial to Proposition 8, religion has been an embarrassing handicap on human culture. It is not merely an annoying habit of a small group of people; these superstitions have powerful reach socially, politically, and economically across the world. And with nuclear weapons now in the hands of those who actively look forward to the Day of Judgement, we had better do our best to convince them that there is no paradise waiting for them over the rainbow.

Criticizing Hate Crime Legislation

2009-11-01T21:19:00.003-06:00

I've had some experience as a diversity advocate, first in my undergraduate college career and now as a GLBT ally and a supervisor of student workers of mixed nationalities. But I've recently found myself revising some of the ideas and positions that I've long held. My views on religious tolerance have shifted (ideas should not be above criticism, even--or especially--ideas of faith) and I've been disturbed by how popular and academic discourse is negatively affected by nice sounding but half-baked concepts of "equality" and "equal representation" (watch any talking-head-television show to witness false equivalency). I've long been uncomfortable with hate crimes legislation. The idea of a hate crime has always troubled me, as hate is a thought or an emotion and making that a crime is fundamentally a problem.

As you may have heard, last week President Obama signed the Matthew Shepherd Hate Crimes Act which expands the definition of hate crimes to include victims who are gay, lesbian, and transgendered. Feministing recently included a link to this compilation of critiques of hate crime legislation featured at blackandpink.org. I suggest you read the whole thing but here are two responses I find especially pertinent:

Hate crime laws are an easy way for the government to act like it is on our communities’ side while continuing to discriminate against us. Liberal politicians and institutions can claim “anti-oppression” legitimacy and win points with communities affected by prejudice, while simultaneously using “sentencing enhancement” to justify building more prisons to lock us up in.
Hate crimes legislation is a liberal way of being “tough on crime” while building the power of the police, prosecutors, and prison guards. Rather than address systems of violence like health care disparities, economic exploitation, housing crisis, or police brutality, these politicians use hate-crimes legislation as their stamp of approval on “social issues”.

Hate crimes don’t occur because there aren’t enough laws against them, and hate crimes won’t stop when those laws are in place. Hate crimes occur because, time and time again, our society demonstrates that certain people are worth less than others; that certain people are wrong, are perverse, are immoral in their very being.
Creating more laws will not help our communities. Organizing for the passage of these kind of laws simply takes the time and energy out of communities that could instead spend the time creating alternative systems and building communities capable of starting transformative justice processes. Hate crimes bills are a distraction from the vital work necessary for community safety.

Happy Halloween 2009

2009-10-31T16:30:00.003-05:00

Halloween, or Samhain if you prefer, is upon us again. As much as I like to engage in the fun of costumes and candy, as I get longer in the tooth I also find October 31st and the days preceding it to be a time for reflection as well. This year, I’ve been thinking about stories and the ways in which the act of consuming them has become a ritual for many of us in the way we celebrate Halloween.

When I was young, network television would run animated specials each holiday. Nearly every year around Halloween It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Garfield’s Halloween Adventure would air and nearly every year I would watch them. Now, thanks to DVD and Youtube, I’m able to rewatch these specials and I’m struck by the subtle subversive themes that are woven into them.

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown tells the story of Charles Shultz’s Peanuts characters and their Halloween adventures. As other characters go off to enjoy the festivities of the night, Linus spends the evening sitting in a pumpkin patch, waiting for the Great Pumpkin to show up. The Great Pumpkin is described in the same terms as Santa Claus; an imaginary being who delivers presents to well behaved children and who will reveal himself to the most fervent believers each year.

Rewatching the program, I realized that Charles Schulz used his special not just to entertain children but to actually make a statement against faith. That may seem like a stretch but consider this: When Charlie Brown compares The Great Pumpkin to Santa Claus, he says, “We’re obviously separated by denominational differences.” When Linus encounters ridicule for his beliefs he says, “There are three things I’ve learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin,” and later admits in a letter to the Great Pumpkin that “If you really are a fake, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” This is a stunning admission that speaks truth about our social traditions.

Throughout the middle of the story, Linus and Sally wait in the pumpkin patch, with Linus proclaiming that all he has do is be sincere enough in his belief in the Great Pumpkin to achieve enlightenment and revelation. At the end of the story, when the Great Pumpkin fails to show, Sally realizes how foolish she’s been and proclaims, “Trick-or-treat comes only once a year and I missed it by sitting in a pumpkin patch with a blockhead!” In other words, she spent the whole time abstaining from the real fun to be had while waiting for an imaginary figure to show up. And in the denouement, Linus continues to proclaim his beliefs in the Great Pumpkin, telling Charlie Brown that he just needs to find the most sincere pumpkin patch. Exactly how a pumpkin patch can be sincere is never explained, which is of course the point. The application of Linus’ delusion to national and cultural traditions and especially to religious beliefs ought to be fairly obvious. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown may not be Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell, but it is at least close to Mark Twain as a smart and subtle satire.

The other special I used to watch was Garfield’s Halloween Adventure. In it, Garfield and Odie go trick-or-treating while dressed as pirates and encounter a haunted house where the ghosts of dead pirates are returning to claim their treasure.

In the opening, Garfield actually spells out the appeal of Halloween: “It’s not like those other stupid holidays. I don’t get pine needles in my paws, there’s no dumb bunnies, no fireworks, no relatives. Just candy.” What Garfield says is the very reason Halloween has become one of the most popular holidays on the calendar and his comments subtly take a shot at religious holidays whose pretensions of spiritual importance are a hollow buzz kill.

In the course of the story, Garfield gets carried away with his costume and he and Odie eventually encounter the real darkness as the ghosts return for their treasure. This speaks to the tradition of a lot of horror stories—and this is a horror story, just one that has been made safe for children and families—of the gothic terrible discovery. But in that terrible discovery the characters of these stories also encounter some ugly truth. In this case it is the ugliness of greed when it becomes all-consuming, as Garfield’s obsession with candy and the ghost’s obsession with gold have become. Setting this theme of moderation and personal responsibility against the backdrop of Halloween, the holiday of carnality and gluttony, is a stab at the values of a capitalistic society.

When it comes to my intake of horror films, especially around Halloween, I can see a link between the stories that I consumed as a child and the ones I take in now. When I look at my favorite horror films like Jaws, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cannibal Holocaust, The Hills Have Eyes, or A Nightmare on Elm Street, these films constantly undermine the order of civilization or mankind’s ability to assert dominion over the earth. Instead they remind us of our own savage past that, in the history of the world, is not all that long ago and every once in a while comes boiling to the surface.

Earlier this week I performed a lecture at Winona State University on slasher films, exploding the assumption that they are inherently misogynistic and exploring what these films mean for us as a culture. While doing the research for the lecture, I reviewed some interview footage of Wes Craven, director of Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream. Although the quality of his output has been uneven over the years, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for this man and his work. Craven’s observations in the following excerpt demonstrate why his films so often stand above his contemporaries:

Craven’s comments about the ways in which horror stories adumbrate and shadow play the underlying nature of humanity illustrate how the genre may be subversive whether it takes the form of a razor fingered psychopath killing teenagers in their sleep or the animated adventures of Charlie Brown and his friends.

Stories are not unique in their connection to holidays; most holidays are rooted in the ritualistic retelling of a particular narrative and these narratives are often of renewal and reemphasize dominant ideologies and social structures, whether it is the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ at Easter or the cherry tree myth of George Washington on the Fourth of July. But with commercialization and secularization many people have disconnected these stories from the way they celebrate. Halloween is unique in that it is the only holiday left where the act of consuming stories—in this case horror stories—is still integral to the act of celebrating the holiday. And further, these stories actually undermine or subvert ideologies and social structures instead of renewing them.

So as we celebrate Halloween, I think it is safe to say that it is in many ways the anti-holiday. Where most holidays are about enhancing and renewing the foundation and illusion of civilization and its ideologies and social structures, Halloween is the night of the year in which people cast off those pretensions to acknowledge the darkness within themselves and within each other and let the animal inside off the leash or at least allow that leash a little more slack.

Athenaeum Presentation on Wednesday at 1pm

2009-10-26T18:41:00.004-05:00

On Wednesday, October 28th at 1pm I will be making a presentation as part of the Athenaeum speaker series at the Krueger Library at Winona State University. The presentation is titled "It's Only a Movie: The Politics of 1970s and 80s Horror Films" and it will cover films such as Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, addressing how this body of films was groundbreaking and represented a counter cultural statement that was later lost to commercialization. Attention will also be paid to the recent trend of remakes of these films.

Date: Wednesday, October 28th
Time: 1pm - 2pm
Location: The second floor of the Krueger Library at Winona State University.

The event is free and open to the public.

I Defend Fox News?

2009-10-22T18:36:00.003-05:00

The Daily-Beast has an interesting essay by Nicolle Wallace, who had served as a senior adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign and was director of communications for the White House under George W. Bush. Wallace comments on the Obama White House's anti-Fox policy and I think she makes some important points both for the White House and for other politicians:

The reasoning they’ve provided goes something like this: Fox News features some opinion programming, therefore the entire network should not be classified as a news-gathering operation. It is, in the words of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, an “arm of the Republican Party.”
Assume, for a moment that this is true, and apply the White House standard to MSNBC, a news network that also features some opinion programming. Going by the White House definition of a news-gathering operation, it stands to reason that the heavily opinionated prime-time shows hosted by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow would put MSNBC into the same category as Fox News. No Republicans are making this argument, but Obama would have been better off if he’d singled out opinion shows on both sides of the ideological spectrum. It would have allowed him to attack Fox News from a principled and bipartisan position. By singling out Fox News, he looks thin-skinned, political, and petty. . . . Instead of ushering in a post-partisan era, the Obama White House seems intent on doubling down on all the alleged sins of the Bush years by putting politics front and center—and offering no apologies for doing so.

Far be it for me to defend Fox News, but Wallace is right. Fox News is a news organization--they're a terrible news organization--but they are nevertheless a news organization. That Fox approaches stories from an ideological angle, engages in hyperbole and distortion, and often gets the facts wrong is reason enough for consumers to ignore them but not an excuse for a politician to do so. Had the Bush administration decided to quarantine MSNBC or CNN, critics would have screamed bloody murder, and rightfully so.

The essential question is: what is the White House's goal? Make Fox change its approach by ignoring them? That's not going to happen. Impair Fox's ability to report the news? The network already makes crap up anyway. Damage Fox's credibility? The people who watch Fox already think God speaks through Glenn Beck. Hurt the network's ratings? They're already through the roof. It seems that Fox has everything to gain and the White House has everything to lose in this strategy.

Catholicism Can Give You AIDS

2009-10-18T13:37:00.002-05:00

When I get into debates with Christians about the usefulness and value of their faith, they often fall back on the argument that religious organizations provide social services to the needy. This argument has two problems. First, charity does not require a belief in the supernatural. Secondly, the argument makes no account of the quality of the services or whether the service actually helps those in need. In fact, when social services are provided upon the basis of religous dogmatism, they may hurt more than they help.

James Carroll has written a piece for The Daily Beast about the Catholic Church's posture on contraceptives as it relates to the spread of AIDS in Africa:

Unlike Protestant and Muslim fundamentalisms, which are tied to fixed readings of holy texts, Catholic fundamentalism derives from a rigid defense of papal authority and boils down to a fixation on sexual morality. That has turned the Catholic hierarchy into a raging enemy of condom use—even when it comes to preventing the spread of AIDS. . . . A few bishops discretely promote condoms as a lesser evil, and one (Kevin Dowling of South Africa) has openly challenged the Vatican to change its teaching. But the overwhelming institutional weight of the Catholic Church continues to be thrown on the side of the virus. The result has been and will be the deaths of Africans. The virus of Catholic fundamentalism infects that beleaguered continent. At the Vatican, that, the church’s most grievous failure, is not being discussed.

Come On and Ride the Train

2009-10-05T21:28:00.003-05:00

The city of Rochester, MN has been trying to get a proposed Chicago-Twin Cities high speed rail train to come through their city and this recent story in the Winona Post cites a new study that strengthens their case:

Rochester has got powerful lobbyists working hard to bring high speed rail to their city, and now, it’s got a new study which conflicts with some state data, purporting that a rail line through the city would be faster than one along the river and attract millions more passengers.

But that same study confirms that a high speed passenger rail line through Rochester connecting Chicago to the Twin Cities would cost at least $139 million more than one that followed the existing Amtrak lines through Winona and along the river.

Rochester’s study claims that millions more passengers would travel a line that would cross its city because completely new lines, which would be needed to connect Rochester, could mean trains as fast as 220 miles per hour and a quicker trip time from Chicago to the Twin Cities than following the river through Winona.

As exciting as it would be to have a major line of mass transportation come through Winona, if this new study is correct it makes much more sense to begin by serving the greatest number of people; those living in Rochester are much more likely to be commuting to the cities for work and there is already an Amtrak line from Winona to Chicago.

October Activities

2009-10-04T13:09:00.007-05:00

I'll be involved in a number of Halloween and movie related items this month:

October 4, 2009: Sounds of Cinema - Cinema's Villains
This episode will feature music of films that feature some of the most memorable villains from a variety of film genres including science fiction, action, and horror.

October 11, 2009: Sounds of Cinema - Vampires
Vampires are as popular as ever and this episode will include music from various incarnations of Dracula as well as other vampire films like Twilight and The Hunger.

October 18, 2009: Sounds of Cinema - Lucifer Rising
Former Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil's score to Kenneth Anger's experimental and esoteric short film is an extraordinary piece of music and this show will feature the entire score as well as commentary on the film and its production.
*Listeners to 89.7 KMSU FM will hear a special pledge drive episode this week.

October 25, 2009: Sounds of Cinema - Twenty-Five Years of A Nightmare on Elm Street
It's been a quarter century since Freddy Krueger first appeared on movie screens and he hasn't left the culture since. This episode will take a look at every Nightmare film from the 1984 original to 2003's Freddy vs. Jason and consider the ongoing appeal of the series.
*Sounds of Cinema will move to a new 11AM time slot on 89.5 KQAL FM on this date.

October 28, 2009: WSU Library Athenaeum Speaker Series - It's Only a Movie: The Politics of the 1970s and 80s Horror Film
I will be giving a lecture as part of Winona State University's Athenaeum program in which I will discuss the horror films of the 1970s and 80s including movies like Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The Athenaeum series is held every Wednesday afternoon at 1pm on the second floor of the Krueger library at WSU. You can find out more about the series here.

October 31, 2009: Sounds of Cinema Halloween Special
Sounds of Cinema will air a special Halloween episode at 11 PM on 89.5 KQAL. Broadcasting of this special on 89.7 KMSU FM is still pending.

This is Beautiful

2009-10-03T14:27:00.003-05:00

Late last week, Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) went on the floor of congress and explained exactly what the Republican health care plan is:

Hyperbole? Not really. With the GOP blocking every attempt to reform a broken system and unable or unwilling to offer a serious counter proposal, Grayson's explanation is the logical outcome of their position.

The House Republicans naturally demanded an apology, and this was Grayson's response:

Some have expressed outrage over Grayson's use of the word "holocaust," but I think there is room for it. The word "holocaust" is defined as "a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life," and with 44,781 Americans dying each year because they don't have health insurance, the term applies. And the Republicans and other reform opponents, through omission of action, are allowing this to continue.

The bigger question is, do Grayson's comments help? Yes and no. For once, a Democrat is showing some spine, something that has been woefully absent in this debate. The health care issue is a gut-check for the Democrats. If they are not willing to fight tooth and claw for this, then all the promises made in the last two election cycles are proved empty and they don't deserve to stay in power. Grayson's comments invoke the ethical part of this issue, something that has been missing for the pro-reform side of the debate, but it is also the one that is the most powerful.

On the negative side, Grayson's comments turn the debate from health care and onto Grayson himself. This means that a news cycle is spent debating the man and not the message. On the other hand, if this minor spectacle on the floor ends up reigniting the reformers and ultimately refocusing the debate, then the ends will have justified the means.

I've joined Facebook

2009-09-27T22:54:00.000-05:00

Yes. Finally.

Maybe They'll Fight in a Water Fountain and Rip Each Other's Shirts Off

2009-09-24T19:10:00.005-05:00

This article by Samuel P. Jacobs on The Daily Beast tells of a war of words between MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough and Fox News host Glenn Beck. It's a minor controversy, as Scarborough called out Beck on his hate-baiting and has called for Republican politicians to do the same. Naturally, none of the politicians are rushing to join this fight, which makes sense since they would have little to gain from it.

But the piece concludes with this quote from Texas Republican strategist Denis Calabrese:

“People are for aggressive questioning of the government and aggressive commentary about it. In general, it’s okay to defend Beck,” Calabrese said. “But it’s distracting. Debating the messenger is not to your advantage if you’re a Republican. The policies are what people are worried about. And the messengers are a distraction.” [Emphasis added]

What Calabrese says here is bigger than Scarborough vs. Beck, or Olbermann vs. O'Reilly, or Couric vs. Sawyer (there is no open conflict between them yet, but I'm waiting for the media to fabricate a verbal cat-fight). Aside from the more invisible ways in which bias on the part of the anchors shapes the news, so much of the coverage, especially on cable news, has become about the person reporting the news and his or her rivalries with other personalities. The television news circuit has become a big high school lunch room where all anyone talks about is who-is-mad-at-who while in the kitchen the administrators keep serving the same old reheated meatloaf and telling everyone that it's good for us.

"A village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot." - Frank Schaeffer

2009-09-17T12:16:00.005-05:00

This is a long story from The Rachel Maddow Show, but it's worth sitting through. The first half gives an update of Joe Wilson's status as a right wing hero for calling the president a liar. The second half of the story is an assessment of the Christian right, starting with a poll in New Jersey where one-third of conservatives claim to believe that Obama is or might be the Antichrist. Following is an interview with former evangelical Christian Frank Schaeffer, who argues that this subculture has become a cult that will never be satisfied with any compromise with the left or with rationality.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Public Option Explained

2009-09-12T13:17:00.002-05:00

Here, in less than two minutes, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich explains exactly what the public option means:

My question is, where was this video five months ago? Although the politicians, commentators, and lobbying groups blocking health care reform deserve a lot of blame for spreading confusion and lies, the White House and those on the side of reform dropped the ball early on by ignoring a basic rule of rhetoric: the person who controls the frame and terms of the debate will win the debate. When reformers allowed terms like "public option" and "single payer" to float around without clarification or explanation, they let other terms like "death panels" become the issue. I just hope it isn't too late to reclaim the debate from the lobbyists and hysterics.