about nobody

I thought I smelled Grandmother today. This made me feel far away for the first time in awhile. There was winter, now it's summer, and there was no interruption.

something about "Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

Billed as "The Uncensored Oral History of Punk", Please Kill Me testifies to punk rock's NYC birth in the mid-1970's. The book organizes quotes from a cast of people who were there--participants and witnesses, and these people describe the scene, say who's who, and, of course, talk about the sex and drugs. But noticeably missing in these quotes is elaboration on the rock and roll.

There is no date or period anchoring the end of this telling, but the notable event in the final pages is the death of Johnny Thunders, former guitarist of the New York Dolls and, later, The Heartbreakers. These bands--the Dolls, in particular--dominated the genre's salad days. The Stooges (aka, Iggy and The Stooges) and the New York Dolls are the book's favorites, followed by the Ramones and the mostly derided Sex Pistols. The Dead Boys get minor coverage, too. But the deaths of Sid Vicious, Stiv Bators, and, as noted, Johnny Thunders serve as the conclusion to punk's story--at least in this version, even though Bators and Thunders died 10 years after the core of events described in the book.

If you're really into the music of any three of the above-mentioned bands, then Please Kill Me is sweet, truthy gossip. If you're not, then the quotes and people fast grow petty and irrelevant--the narrators sometimes indulge the "more punk than you" pissing contest that strips punk of its cultural relevance by pretending this raw, resilient music that crackles with energy belongs only to them, those self-important members of their own inertly private country club.

Converge perform "Glacial Pace" at Saint Vitus +1

from opinions rendered in Maryland v. King

Justice Kennedy penned the majority opinion in Maryland v. King, which ruled "... that DNA identification of arrestees is a reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure ..." This means the cops can swab the inside of the cheek of someone who gets arrested, so long as that someone is being detained for a "serious offense". In giving the majority opinion, Kennedy goes on at length praising the role of DNA in identifying people. He points out that, had Timothy McVeigh been swabbed when he was stopped for not having a license plate hours after he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, then the cop could have known it was McVeigh. Or, had one of the 9-11 hijackers been swabbed when he was ticketed for speeding days before the atrocity, the cop would have identified him, too. Of course, nevermind that these identifications would not have prevented anything, and that neither terrorist was being arrested at the time. Kennedy's reasonings are impressively dense. And Justice Scalia calls him out for it.

In the dissent, Scalia writes, "The Court’s assertion that DNA is being taken, not to solve crimes, but to identify those in the State’s custody, taxes the credulity of the credulous." Then he goes on:

... while the Court is correct to note (ante, at 8–9) that there are instances in which we have permitted searches without individualized suspicion, “[i]n none of these cases. . . did we indicate approval of a [search] whose primary purpose was to detect evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing.” Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U. S. 32, 38 (2000).

Just how intrusive is the cotton swab? Maybe that's beside the point, as Scalia notes:

And could the police engage, without any suspicion of wrongdoing, in a “brief and . . . minimal” intrusion into the home of an arrestee—perhaps just peeking around the curtilage abit? See ante, at 26. Obviously not.

And what of the purpose of identifying people? Is identifying someone really so innocent? No, Scalia argues:

At points the Court does appear to use “identifying” in that peculiar sense—claiming, for example, that knowing “an arrestee’s past conduct is essential to an assessment of the danger he poses.” Ante, at 15. If identifying someone means finding out what unsolved crimes he has committed, then identification is indistinguishable from the ordinary law enforcement aims that have never been thought to justify a suspicionless search. Searching every lawfully stopped car, for example, might turn up information about unsolved crimes the driver had committed, but no one would say that such a search was aimed at “identifying” him ...

But what if the State really is just identifying people without intending to solve crimes for which no probable cause to search exists?

The truth, known to Maryland and increasingly to the reader: this search had nothing to do with establishing King’s identity.
...
DNA testing does not even begin until after arraignment and bail decisions are already made. The samples sit in storage for months, and take weeks to test. When they are tested, they are checked against the Unsolved Crimes Collection—rather than the Convict and Arrestee Collection, which could be used to identify them.The Act forbids the Court’s purpose (identification), but prescribes as its purpose what our suspicionless-search cases forbid (“official investigation into a crime”). Against all of that, it is safe to say that if the Court’s identification theory is not wrong, there is no such thing as error.

So, all that said, what does the majority's errant ruling promise for the future?

The Court disguises the vast (and scary) scope of its holding by promising a limitation it cannot deliver. The Court repeatedly says that DNA testing, and entry into a national DNA registry, will not befall thee and me, dear reader, but only those arrested for “serious offense[s].” Ante, at 28; see also ante, at 1, 9, 14, 17, 22, 23, 24 (repeatedly limiting the analysis to “serious offenses”). I cannot imagine what principle could possibly justify this limitation, and the Court does not attempt to suggest any. If one believes that DNA will “identify” someone arrested for assault, he must believe that it will “identify” someone arrested for a traffic offense. This Court does not base its judgments on senseless distinctions. At the end of the day, logic will out. When there comes before us the taking of DNA from an arrestee for a traffic violation, the Court will predictably (and quite rightly) say, “We can find no significant difference between this case and King.” Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.

about "Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France" by Michel Foucault

Abnormal is largely about the concept and perception of the abnormal person--the pervert or rapist or peeping Tom, for example--from the 19th century to present. In this lecture, Foucault begins by saying that, when an individual has power, he often becomes an object of ridicule (i.e., kings were often portrayed as fools by the peasants, at times). Foucault then explains how psychiatric opinions delivered in court conjure the character of a delinquent alongside the accused--a delinquent doppelganger to the author of the crime. So, it follows, the respected expert psychiatrist on the witness stand is also an oaf because he assesses and prescribes moral instruction as if he were a child, and he describes danger as if he himself was irrationally afraid.

Foucault then embarks on an overview of how power works in this discussion, referring to the phenomenon of how plague patients were partitioned off within society to be watched and studied (as opposed to lepers banished from society). But instead of plague victims, it is the abnormal who are watched and studied. The result of this partitioning and watching is the individualization of people--which is not to be confused with exclusion. All this is done for the preservation and productivity of society's healthy individuals, those whose potential is maximized.

Now, Foucault explains that, until the 16th and 17th century, a crime was conceived of as an offense against the sovereign, and punishment for the crime had to be bigger than the crime because it had to supersede the crime. But, later, crime in general was imagined as having a nature, a criminality, which leads to the question, What is the nature of a criminal? In a penal system that favors this question, the criminal's motive must be matched and nullified by the judicial system, and the medical community took it upon themselves to diagnose motives. Psychology supplies motives for motiveless crimes, and otherwise labels criminals as insane, thereby releasing the penal system from its obligation to punish.

A major development in criminology and psychology was the recognition and exploration of the concept of instinct. "Instinct" allowed for a power mechanism--the penal system with its need for knowledge--to engage with knowledge a mechanism--psychiatry and its need for power. The notion of human instinct helps make motiveless crimes intelligible; it also allows for the medical transformation of motiveless acts into pathological acts.

The notion of instinct came to dominate psychiatry, and allowed the field to expand its domain. Psychiatry soon became a form of family intervention; familial relations were pathologized such that antagonistic relations are deemed pathological. After 1850, a political dimension is introduced; much as history became a tool to politicize the past and present, psychiatry came to help distinguish riots from good revolutions by looking at the minds and motives of the leaders of movements. Madness opposed order, opposed family and personal relationships, and opposed stability; it was a characteristic of social immobility. Healthy behaviors and mentalities had to be conventional and voluntary; deviant behaviors and mentalities consisted of automatic and instinctual responses. All conduct was judged along a contimuum of voluntary vs. involuntary, all relative to the norm. Here, psychology grows beyond madness; psychology could now question all behavior, all people.

About the time that the state formalized support of marriage through policy incentives, homes started being built partitioned, with different rooms for each family member, separating families within a single home, separating kids from parents. This distribution of bodies helps dissuade the development of pathological, antagonistic, and/or incestuous relationships between family members. Foucault discusses the prototypes of the abnormal individual, the monster and the masturbator, and explains how the masturbator enabled psychology to become an authority on family, and link sexuality with illness in terms of masturbation or any other realization of the sexual impulse deemed immoral. Psychology's linking of sexuality with instinct opened a field that allows for masturbators and motiveless murderers to exist in the same conceptual space. Here, the sexual instinct is imagined as fragile, capable of becoming distorted and the cause of degeneracy.

Foucault discusses a rape case set in the 1860's that was referred to psychiatry for explanation. The controversial field outlined the offender's physical traits, and linked these to his deficiencies. He was described as having arrested development, rather than an exaggerated instinct or drive; likewise, his morality was arrested, according to the psychiatric experts.

In the early psychiatric conception of criminality, a patient's development goes wrong, and then the person becomes a criminal. But later psychiatry posits that the seeds of criminality are sown in the person's childhood. Psychiatry faced a dilemma when patients became depathologized because the practice no longer had the backing of medicine, and patients were no longer an suffering illness, per say. Psychiatry identified collections of eccentricities and behaviors and called them "conditions" or "syndromes". These collections of traits were previously considered predispositions, and a person could have a predisposition and still be normal (to the extent such a conception existed). But conditions and syndromes came to describe the abnormal, and any physical or mental illness can be associated with any condition or syndrome. Conditions refer to health but are not illness; they are non-health. Conditions are typically a case of arrested (moral) development or regression.

Foucault explains that a condition's causal background is the patient's heredity. In examining a patient's heredity, anything can cause anything. For example, Your uncle was a drunk? That explains your degeneracy today. Similarly--and this is the lecture's main point--a person's use of the sexual instinct for non-reproductive purposes, a person's having sex or masturbating for pleasure, is thought to point to a condition. This diagnosis is moralizing cloaked in medicine. Degeneracy grew increasingly medicalized. Furthermore, if conditions are a result of heredity, then the idea of finding a cure means nothing in psychiatry. So, this reveals that the field is not so much about the health of the patient, but rather about the protection of society from the effects of degeneracy. The heredity-based form of racism that sprang up at the end of the 19th century and reached its nadir with Nazism stems from psychiatry's social defense aspect.

This is a rich, winding lecture that recalls and elaborates on many of Foucault's major themes. Thoroughly enjoyable read.