I know a seagull. He watches me uncaringly. Sometimes when he flies the sky warms from a restless midnight ink to a delicate warm peach speckled heaven blue. He is overhead now. Hello again, Seagull.
I've been reading this Michel Foucault lecture series. In them, he reminds the audience that his concept of power has changed since he debuted with his seminal works on madness and punishment. Now he sees power not so much as represented in instances of repression, but rather as a flow or current between actors, a concept better represented as two actors engaged in battle. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault explores this concept of battle, of war and its historical relation to the role of the nation State and its population's identity.
We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.This change he refers to is a fundamental one concerning our culture and its relation to guns, individualism, and violence--something not easily changed. So how does a President / lawyer / legislator start us on the road towards such a change? Through legislation:
We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.The kind of legislation he has in mind, gun control, was not previously on his agenda, so to him it isn't the most appealing option, and he seems to doubt that it will even be all that effective; but he sees it as a means, the most obvious place to begin effecting a cultural change immediately:
If there’s even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try.
... We know that, no matter how good our intentions, we’ll all stumble sometimes in some way.
We’ll make mistakes, we’ll experience hardships and even when we’re trying to do the right thing, we know that much of our time will be spent groping through the darkness, so often unable to discern God’s heavenly plans.There you have it: although it may not work as intended, new gun control legislation is something he thinks he can start on now, but he hopes other, better options will be revealed in the days ahead. Of course, though he's not the first, last, or only person to ever float such a message, Obama's talk of cultural change fuels his many detractors, those Conservatives whose ideological allegiance grows with their sense that policies traditionally deemed Liberal are now destroying their way of life.
You know, someone once described the joy and anxiety of parenthood as the equivalent of having your heart outside of your body all the time, walking around.
With their very first cry, this most precious, vital part of ourselves, our child, is suddenly exposed to the world, to possible mishap or malice, and every parent knows there’s nothing we will not do to shield our children from harm. And yet we also know that with that child’s very first step and each step after that, they are separating from us, that we won’t -- that we can’t always be there for them.
They will suffer sickness and setbacks and broken hearts and disappointments, and we learn that our most important job is to give them what they need to become self-reliant and capable and resilient, ready to face the world without fear.
Note 1: After investigating the Benghazi attack at the US Embassy in Libya which left dead four Americans, including Ambassador
Christopher Stevens, the Accountability Review Board, appointed by secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has "concluded that the State Department suffered 'systemic failures' in providing adequate security". Security is a question in answer to a question; it asks, Is this enough? What else do we need to do? The question is unanswerable in definite.
Pairing sequences occurring almost twenty years apart, first circa 1945, then '65, Donald Ray Pollock cross-wires the impoverished paths of a number of strong Appalachian characters. The Devil All the Time is one of the best fiction reads I've had in awhile in terms of plot and character strength. Thematically the pages are consumed in the filthy marriage of poverty, religious faith, and depravity. Being from the region, Pollock has an intimate feel for the darker shadows of this landscape which he exploits to full effect here. The last four section/chapters were actual fucking page-turners.
The dozen short stories in A. L. Kennedy's What Becomes depict ordinary people caught navigating a few moments in extraordinary pain. Kennedy's prose is pure, a gentle blend of proper-sounding English and freshly worded insights, and her dialog and breaks are organized efficiently, so the reading goes smoothly. That said, the laser focus on these distracted and emotionally crippled people gets heavy after a few stories, despite a few spliced-in bits of humor. Great for people who want to read sad things.
It can’t be said too often, or too clearly, that the whole point of Lincoln is that he—and the Republican Party he then represented—marked the end of the policy of conciliation and compromise and cosseting that had been the general approach of Northern Presidents to the Southern slavery problem throughout the decades before. When the South seceded, Lincoln chose war—an all-out, brutal, bitter war of a kind that had never been fought until then.According to the film, Lincoln felt the 13th Amendment was a compromise. Had they not compromised, the radical faction of the Republican Party (and their abolitionist constituents) would have enfranchised black men immediately, given them the vote, legalized interracial marriage, etc. A huge portion of the film is dedicated to Lincoln's pissing off those radicals. (But this "compromise" means little when it obliterates an entire region's economic way of life, which is probably The New Yorker writer's point.)
The film is about one man's struggle for redemption, but what we see from our theater seat is a struggle for control of truth. In Whitaker's mind, his functionality, his brilliance excuses the
behavior that so many rush to judge irresponsible. That is his truth. But under threat of litigation and penalty for the lives lost, the airline and Whitaker's other adversaries use the discourse of medical knowledge, appealing to that discipline's knowledge-making authority, which justifies policies that were violated, and deems Whitaker unfit. The co-pilot, who chooses not to reveal Whitaker's drunkenness on record, appeals to the Word of God; God reveals the Truth, and Whitaker must face that truth.
America’s never been about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government. That’s the principle we were founded on.
This country has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military in history, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities, our culture are all the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores.
What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations. The freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for come with responsibilities as well as rights. And among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great.
White Noise follows events surrounding a Midwest college professor, with much attention given to his family, a Brady Bunch-type arrangement. Our professor, Jack Gladney, is known for his unique academic departmental creation, Hitler Studies; this bit matters because it embodies a major theme in the novel: information overload--how each and every thing is problematized and probed and its hidden data and meaning is wrung out, spilling out into the air. Each source is inexhaustible, but ultimately, exhausted, you wonder whether all this data mining yielded knowledge or pollution.
The producers and hosts apparently intended to limit the scope of the episode to the question, What was yellow rain? But during the show, the interview between a yellow rain witness, his translator/niece, and the Radiolab host and producer falls apart when the host pursues the witness about ambiguity in the testimony. After being pressed, the witness losses heart and, aided by his niece, implores the interviewers to focus on the death of their people in the proxy wars, and not the yellow rain.We were all really troubled by that interview. We talked about it for weeks, and we had arguments about it for weeks. What does it mean for the story? What does it mean for us personally?For the story, and for Radiolab: this is what concerns them. The vision of the show's hosts and producer got even more myopic in the end, somehow. Then the "conversation" ends with Radiolab essentially throwing up its hands at the controversy.
People who follow politics and political coverage often criticize the media for not explicating policy proposals and instead focusing on polls and swing states. Such critics see the media as too focused on distractions. Now, following Tuesday's Presidential debate, an online public hears Romney's "binders full of women" comment and amplifies it, silencing other discussions for a day or so."His discussion of work-life balance appeared condescending to some because of the reference to women cooking dinner."So the candidate must embrace gender difference but frame his embrace in terms of equality. Maybe most or all political discourse aimed at a specific segment of the voting public includes some version of outlining that segment, then erasing those lines, of conjuring their image, then making them disappear, but women are a good, current example of this, I think. The finessing and specific, pointed targeting of women leaves an impression that women are both foreign and essential to political discourse. A political writer in The New Yorker touched on all this when addressing political ads aimed at "women voters":
... that ad, like every ad targeted to women voters for the last half century, including those made by both campaigns this election season, assumes that women are wholly different species of citizen than men. The political imagination of American women, at least according to American political advertisers, begins with our cervixes and ends at the kitchen door.
