Spring

Today's were high clouds. They rose up until they altogether lost definition, first being seen, then seen through, and finally seeming to not matter anymore at all. This would be the one thing you want from anything you look up to.

Iodine 131

Coverage of the nuclear crisis in Japan frequently includes images of people wearing masks--evacuees, mainly. I've also seen special coveralls and sheets being used when people are outside while rain threatens.

These images minimize the perceived threat from radiation because people see them and conclude that, If I can be protected with a surgical mask, it can't be that bad. With the aid of simple technologies such as specialized masks and fabrics, these images tell us, we will be safer. This is one rhetorical component of our technical control over nature.

Our radiation monitors are another component. Gauges and sensors tell us how much danger lurks here. Right now they are out there picking up traces in our milk, our rain water, and our fish. They see the unseen, then tell us what they see, their readings being interpreted by users as numbers and statistics; then the message is passed on to reporters who finally give us articles like yesterday's The New York Times piece "Dangerous Levels of Radioactive Isotope Found 25 Miles From Nuclear Plant". Articles like this also work to minimize the perceived threat from radiation.

According to this article, the discovery of an isotope miles away from the site is "raising questions", but not concerns, not fears. We are then told that the amounts detected would not cause acute radiation illness, and, thus, pose no "immediate danger". A senior scientist's concern is paraphrased, but then he is named as belonging to a group "that is often critical of nuclear safety rules"; in other words, even if nothing was wrong, this guy would be critical.

Moving on, the article gets even more dismissive, going so far as to claim that risks from the contaminated environment could be further minimized in ways such as paving over radioactive dirt and banning fishing in the radioactive sea. This is the tone and message I detect in most articles coming from major news outlets.

Coverage repeatedly assures us the low levels are safe. The idea of a safe threshold is the product of PR. The National Academy of Sciences, among others, says that no threshold is safe.

Article discussed: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/world/asia/31japan.html?src=twrhp

The official story

I watched President Obama's speech on Libya last night. On ABC, Stephanopoulos et al. claimed the major theme was success. I thought it was that due process had been followed, and I felt this message was aimed at the critics who charged that he'd acted without the consent of Congress. In his response he announced that " ... nine days ago, after consulting the bipartisan leadership of Congress, I authorized military action ... ". This was where the speech got rolling.

Now, Yes, his response was aimed at critics, but not only the Conservative and Progressive leadership who pitch sound bytes all week; he was also addressing a voiceless group with no articulated criticism to offer: The American public confronted with foreign events that are too ambiguous and dynamic to reach conclusions about.

Of course, most Presidential speeches of this sort address the public, and the public is typically composed of critics, both approving and disapproving. But in this case the public's role as critic is highly unusual. We ordinarily have our minds made up about things; not this time.

I think that, as a collective, people are not sure who our allies are right now, not sure democracy is for everyone, not sure what our country's role should be, given our problems at home and ongoing engagements abroad. Mainstream media has done a fine job portraying dissidents in Libya as victims, and the violence as one-sided. But the air of civil war hangs over this story, and the ink from Sunday's paper hasn't covered that smell completely. Large swaths of the public feel ambivalent about populations in other countries, especially the Middle East and Africa. So, last night, for the first time in a long time, the American President faced a population of critics with more questions than preformed opinions. His strategy?: Frame events within our claimed value system, and tell us how the winners will write history.

Hulking mess

Not long ago I found myself thinking about  the Incredible Hulk movies. I much prefer the Ang Lee version of Hulk starring Eric Bana. Besides getting to enjoy the delicacy and subtlety that comes with Lee, his version gives more food for thought because Banner's demons dwell within and Lee puts them in focus. He explores Banner's feelings about his father, his resentment and anger, his loneliness, and his own confused identity.  But in the second version, The Incredible Hulk directed by Louis Leterrier and starring awesome Edward Norton, the focus is mostly on Banner's external enemies. His fiercest battle is with the renegade demon hulk--Tim Roth's character--and their conflict so clearly demarcates good and evil that it diminishes the overall depth of the subject. Even Banner's own anger issue is externalized in the form of the pulse monitor he wears on his wrist--this annoying, beeping measuring stick he vigilantly watches.

In addition to being more visually poetic and richer in substance, Lee's version has few if any clumsy parts. His use of story board frames plays well with the film's comic book origins. Contrast this with the wild leaps in the second version; for example, how about the scene in which Hulk fights the army on the college campus?: The helicopter crashes, debris flies, and quite suddenly the bright, sunny afternoon becomes a dark and stormy night, rain pouring down on the wreckage and the Hulk as he cradles Betty Ross. And the plot? To deal with the Hulk, the army attempts to make another one? Experimentally? Nah.

How like herrings and onions

The article "Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It's the Only Choice" in Monday's The New York Times discusses results of recent and previous surveys on free will and determinism. Responses showed an acceptance of both concepts, depending on circumstance. While addressing this apparent conflict in opinion, the article quotes a Florida State Professor as saying,

It’s two different kinds of mechanisms in the brain ... If you give people an abstract story and a hypothetical question, you’re priming the theory machine in their head. But their theory might be out of line with their intuitive reaction to a detailed story about someone doing something nasty. As experimenters have shown, the default assumption for people is that we do have free will.

Here, he speculates. But while the author and the surveyors hope to identify majority opinion in this debate, the real story lies in the answer to the following questions: Why and How did respondents develop this binary concept? And why is free will the default?

The article does not address these questions directly, but does mention a correlation between a belief in free will and better job performance and honesty. If the correlation is also causation--if believing in free will leads to better job performance--then consider this: One who believes in free will self-disciplines and self-censors, thereby reducing the will, attacking the will, and deferring to the will of authority. (This civil behavior is not unlike the civil code of conduct proposed by Kant in his answer to What is Enlightenment?) This is mind control.

Later the author, with support from academia, suggests that we're all compatibalists. Then the piece concludes,

Some scientists like to dismiss the intuitive belief in free will as an exercise in self-delusion—a simple-minded bit of “confabulation,” as Crick put it. But these supposed experts are deluding themselves if they think the question has been resolved. Free will hasn’t been disproved scientifically or philosophically. The more that researchers investigate free will, the more good reasons there are to believe in it.

Odd conclusion. Neither the research discussed nor the author offer any "good" reasons". If we follow a few leads, we may conclude that believing in free will benefits power; but that is not a good reason. It seems to me the only people "deluding themselves" are the ones who claim to have free will as they wake to their alarm clocks, go to work and login to their machines.

The article discussed above is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/22tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Maybe some other time, some other place

I'm abandoning a book: Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change. Ninety pages and a few days in, I concede that the book's loosely structured, note-like narrative is a problem. So is the actual train of thought Burke is on.

Written during the Great Depression--between giant wars and amid economic turmoil--one of Burke's major themes is that people's orientations are changing. But not simply that; he elaborates a great deal on a great many things. The specifics of his ideas, however, are fixed in the time during which he wrote, and don't resonate enough for me now, which is odd both for me as the reader and for him as author, given that he emphasizes context so much.

I suspect I misread him, though, given the book's title, because I find myself wishing he had written more generally, that he had supposed not that our orientations were changing right then, but that they are always changing. Right?

I've read some of Burke's other stuff, very much enjoyed it and plan to revisit it soon.

Framed!

This blog/editorial posted on The Economist web site discusses the framing of current violence in Libya and the subsequent US/UN response. The author argues that the violence is in fact a civil war and not merely a popular uprising; furthermore, the implication of this, he writes, is that the US/UN intervention is the deciding of a civil war and not an attempt to protect innocents from violence. The latter, however, is how the media and US government have portrayed the matter.

But when the author guesses the media's motivations for framing events as such, I can't tell if he's being sincere or sarcastic. Probably the former, I'm afraid.

The Economist blog/editorial: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/03/rhetoric_intervention

Two documentaries, one with humanity

Recently watched Grizzly Man directed by Werner Herzog. Along with filmed interviews of people in and around the action, Herzog uses footage shot by Timothy Treadwell during the thirteen seasons he lived amongst wild grizzly bears in Alaska. We are shown that Treadwell is a troubled man; we see him cuddling a fox in one scene, awestruck by bear dung in the next, and later we see him in a tent, cursing God in Heaven for the drought. This film works for me.

I was especially interested in hearing Herzog's reflections--he has a quiet infatuation with Treadwell and his footage. Throughout the film, Herzog's voice-over describes the story as he sees it. And he sees a great deal.

Treadwell gained measurable fame by living with the bears, and now he has become immortal largely because he died with them when one ate him in 2003.

I enjoyed this documentary much more than I did The Parking Lot Movie. The latter gives voice to the various attendants working in a busy college town parking lot. There is a two-way street of dehumanization traveled by these drivers and the attendants.

Making sense of being more punk than you

Grant Hill penned a fascinating response to Jalen Rose's controversial comment heard in The Fab Five, a new ESPN documentary about the very talented and successful University of Michigan men's basketball team of the early 1990's. That team, which included Rose, were then and now noted for introducing the game to hip-hop's edge. They were all young, black men who could play, and who could look good and talk trash while doing it.

In the film, Rose charges that Duke recruited "Uncle Toms". Hill, having played for Duke against Michigan, justifiably feels his blackness challenged. In this reply, Hill infers that his middle-class (probably upper-middle) upbringing by two educated parents is the reason for the insult, and the reason Rose doesn't immediately include him in the society of "real" blacks.

In his defense, Hill briefly chronicles a trend of upward mobility in his family, sharing a generational rags to riches story. He notes that Henry, his middle name, is a family name; he shares one of his mother's sayings; he names a family heirloom; and he thanks an African American History professor he studied under. In other words, Blackness, to Hill, is found not only in struggle, but in the fruits of struggle. There is transference. Hill calls this "tradition".

I'll take great liberty here and assume and summarize Rose's argument. For Rose, his single-parent childhood in Detroit matters. Blackness in part comes from living the struggle. First hand experience matters. That experience is a uniquely Black experience (i.e., growing up poor and White with one parent in Detroit is not the same).

For Hill, Blacks rising out of poverty for their children's betterment is the tradition. For Rose, living in poverty--maybe even staying in poverty--is the tradition.

Hill also defends Duke, claiming their interest lies in finding and shaping excellence. He names other Black Duke players, enlisting them in his defense. Finally he stakes a claim on character. Up to this point, I found Hill's response brilliant, a rhetorical achievement. But, in discussing character, I can't help but wonder if he is implying that people often mistake "acting Black" for lacking character. He might as well call the Fab Five knappy-headed thugs.

The New York Times published Grant's response March 16, 2011:
http://thequad.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/grant-hills-response-to-jalen-rose/

Corporate Jabs

Did not enjoy reading Company by Max Barry. Jones, the protagonist, a young, recent grad entering the corporate world, soon finds himself smack dab in the middle of a conspiracy and class struggle in which competing values come to blows.  Jones looks for meaning and finds temptation. But Barry does not explore temptation, and his narrative is predictable, the characters are flimsy, and his humor isn't funny.

Perhaps of interest is the author's treatment of the lowly assistants, those chafing in their entry-level positions, gophering in and around cubicles in service of their masters: Middle and upper management. While the workers are, for the most part, the good guys in this struggle, they are so primarily by virtue of being the unwitting victims in this game. They aren't noble people, likable on their own merits; they are fearful, cowardly, weak. But they are also beaten down, leaving you to wonder if they could do better given the right opportunities.

Talking about conversation

This week's Washington Post article "Rep. Peter King's Muslim hearings: A key moment in an angry conversation" shows an example of news creating news. Such articles argue a point, create information, and fabricate historical record. This is big media's privilege, done in service of privilege.

There is something particularly egregious about this article, too. Offering a slight elaboration on their bizarre headline, authors Farenthold and Boorstein offer this:

On Thursday, the discussion about Muslims' place--and Muslims' obligations--in American society will move to Capitol Hill. The hearing, called by Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), could be a key moment in one of the country's angriest conversations.

Who is having this angry conversation? Not me. Not most people. And, of those who are regularly discussing the place and "obligations" of Muslims, only a fraction of them have it angrily. But the article goes on:

Public opinion about Muslims hasn't changed much in recent years. In the fall, a Washington Post-ABC News poll asked whether mainstream Islam "encourages violence." Among all respondents, 31 percent said yes, slightly less than the recent high of 34 percent in 2003.

What's different now is the tone of the discussion--in Congress and across the country.

As evidence, the article cites comments made by Representative King, as well as a "string of incidents"--which means two incidents within eighteen months--and an increase in arrests of "violent jihad suspects from May 2009 to November 2010".

This is a non-issue made into an issue. To my mind, the real story here is the rhetorical social and political function of articles like this and hearings such as King's. They get people talking about terrorism again. And at a time when politicians want to cut spending on public pay and services, and on the same day a mass of public workers in Wisconsin are stripped of bargaining rights, terror talk helps keep defense cuts off the table, and public attention directed towards a meaningless sideshow.

The Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/09/AR2011030905750.html

Speech Act

In Snyder vs. Phelps the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of Westboro Baptist Church members' right to protest at a military funeral. In this case, "at" means something like 1,000 yards away and possibly in accordance with other locally devised and enforced rules. The issue was evaluated by the Justices in terms of  free speech, and whether the speech was injurious or injury was only the fallout.

I agree with the majority. The protesters intended to hijack one rhetorical situation--a military funeral--and introduce a second rhetorical situation in which state policy is the target. They did not silence or prevent the funeral. And while their speech act insults the mourners, the inflammatory signage is tactical first and foremost.

The policy under attack concerns gays serving in the military. The soldier being buried was not a homosexual. What if he had been? Could the protesters' intent to injure then be more easily argued?

This American Life

This week I was surprised to read Senator Jim DeMint's op-ed about defunding NPR. I like some of the podcasts and shows from NPR and PRI but their news I can barely stomach. Anyhow, DeMint sums up his argument against continued funding:

Public broadcasting can pay its presidents half-million and million dollar salaries. Its children's programs are making hundreds of millions in sales. Liberal financiers are willing to write million-dollar checks to help these organizations. There's no reason taxpayers need to subsidize them anymore.

Fortunately or unfortunately taxpayers subsidize many other fairly successful industries, which probably includes tobacco grown in DeMint's South Carolina. Moreover, his argument implies that the wealthy neither need nor deserve assistance--this is an argument DeMint probably does not want to extend to other areas of policy, such as taxes.

DeMint's Op-ed: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703559604576176663789314074.html

White Line Fever

Finished reading White Line Fever, Lemmy Kilmister's autobiography. I never worked Motorhead into my music collection but the book and musician's personality seemed promising. Too bad, because the prose is conversational but colorless, the stories, dull. Not to mention there were no themes, clever insights, or juicy gossip about other bands. The best autobiographies I've read to date include those by Larry Hagman and Miles Davis.

I've started the next book--Company by Max Barry. Early in that book the narrator says there is something wrong with you if you are a salesman. Lemmy wrote that there is something wrong with you if you play guitar. He, of course, plays bass.

Alienation to alienated

When reading Madness & Civilization, know that a lot of people considered normal today would have been diagnosed mad in previous centuries. For example, Foucault spends a great deal of time discussing melancholics, known today as people suffering from depression.

Anyway, finished reading Madness & Civilization. The closing of chapter IX, "The Birth of the Asylum", includes this wonderful sentence--the parentheticals are mine:

He (Freud) did deliver the patient from the existence of the asylum within which his "liberators" had alienated him; but he did not deliver him from what was essential in this existence; he regrouped its (the asylum's) powers, extended them to the maximum by uniting them in the doctor's hands; he created the psychoanalytical situation where, by an inspired short-circuit, alienation becomes disalienating because, in the doctor, it becomes a subject.1

Here, I think Foucault is saying something like this: The structures and practices of the asylum gave doctors moral authority over the mad; doctors objectified the mad in those asylums, thereby alienating them, making them outsiders in the real world of reason. But once patient care fell to psychiatry--most notably with Sigmund Freud--doctors' authority transferred from those structures to the personage of the doctor. The doctor then exercised his authority in the psychiatrist's office. There, the alienation that was, in the asylum, only a side effect of being the anomaly became itself a neurosis to be studied and speculated on.

Pure rad.

His arguments probably don't play well when taken in pieces like this, but one can see how rich the content of his writing is. I could spend three days unpacking this one sentence and still not feel the thing fully fleshed out.

I think the prevailing opinion is that Foucault was not much of a writer. I disagree, although I have only translations to judge by.

1"Madness & Civilization" by Michel Foucault

You say you got a real solution

Sifting daily through headlines, the word "revolution" seems to be missing from Middle East political coverage. I see "unrest", "protests", "riots", and "demonstrations", but not "revolution". When the public rises against state authority, seeking to replace autocracy and plutocracy with democracy, it’s popular revolution.

Power seeks to avoid using this word if it doesn’t suit them. Many facts and arguments are missing from Middle Eastern political coverage, and the word “revolution” is just a drop in the bucket.

Our National Tone

Following up on the shooting that killed six people and wounded thirteen others, yesterday the University of Arizona opened the National Institute for Civil Discourse. Civil discourse: We heard these words again and again in the days after the shooting; the President said them at the January memorial speech at the University: "And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse ... "

So these words are what politicians and news media grabbed hold of immediately after this political event. A line from this Reuters article retells the story pretty well: "The rampage renewed ... soul searching over whether the vitriolic tone of U.S. politics had encouraged violence against elected officials." So it is the tone in which words are said that is to be evaluated. The words themselves we can take at face value. This is the silent conclusion to this public dialog on What Caused the Violence in Arizona.

-Remarks by the President at a Memorial Service for the Victims of the Shooting in Tucson, Arizona: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/12/remarks-president-barack-obama-memorial-service-victims-shooting-tucson
-Arizona university founds civility institute, 02/21/2011: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/21/us-shooting-university-idUSTRE71K67K20110221

Quick Thrill

If I had to choose one by Foucault, I'd take Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison over his more noted Madness and Civilization. I seek the same kind of satisfaction from both, but they are very different in approach and style.

Now over two-thirds into the book, this week I read chapter VII, "The Great Fear". Heading into the 1800's, Foucault here describes how the public imagination began to see madness as "the strange contradiction of human appetites: the complicity of desire and murder, of cruelty and the longing to suffer, of sovereignty and slavery, insult and humiliation". This conception inspired both fear and attraction to the mad and to the houses in which they dwell.

And still every Halloween people flock to haunted houses in search of a thrill.

Diplomatic Puzzle

Today, a selection from the February 17, 2011 New York Times article "Unrest in Bahrain Presents Diplomatic Puzzle for Obama":

For the second time in two weeks violence has broken out in a restive Arab ally of the United States, confronting the Obama administration with the question of how harshly to condemn a friendly leader who is resisting street protests against his government ... At least five people were killed early Thursday when heavily armed riot police officers fired shotguns and concussion grenades into a crowd ...

... What the administration does with Bahrain is likely to be a telling indicator of how it will deal with the balance between protecting its strategic interests, and promoting democracy — a balance some critics said it never properly struck in its sometimes awkward response to the Egyptian turmoil. What will make this diplomatic maneuvering even more complicated is Bahrain’s proximity to Saudi Arabia, another Sunni monarchy with even greater strategic value to the United States.
 - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18diplomacy.html

I would suggest that the dilemma, as stated in bold above, suggests that the government always chooses one, and if the other follows, then bully for us.

* The above cited article was expanded later that day under the title "Bahrain Turmoil Poses Fresh Test for White House", available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18bahrain.html

Love Liza

The film Love Liza depicts the struggles of a new widower, his name is Wilson, played flawlessly by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Watching, I wondered if the film's use of comedy was aimed at emotionally rattling viewers. By letting me voyeuristically watch Wilson's most vulnerable moments, the film made me vigilantly aware of his intense loss, sadness, and isolation. But in and between tragic scenes, I often found myself laughing. The laughing always felt inappropriate, and quickly gave way to the uneasy silence after the laugh. Uneasy silence and inappropriateness are two grand understatements of what I imagine Wilson felt: This feels wrong, I feel wrong, I should not be feeling this. The film has one pivotal scene that speaks to this interpretation: In it, Wilson is seated with co-workers at the office where he works, and one co-worker is sharing an anecdote. A few co-workers chuckle when she finishes, but then Wilson lets go a long, uninterrupted laugh that continues after his tense co-workers have silently excused themselves. It is a laugh over a cry. Love Liza very powerfully relates that feeling and mania.