Fear and Loathing

Posted on August 21, 2006 by Pat Greene

I’ve been angry, lately.

Well, more than lately, but you know what I mean. I suppose I have become one of those “angry bloggers” that you read about in the newspapers. My anger comes from pain and sometimes intense fear, but how it manifests says as much or more about me than about the objects of my anger. And I find myself saying, how can I say things like that?

I was reading Adventus this morning, and at the end of a long and thought-provoking post about human nature and whether there is a need for meaning, he ends with

What life have we if we have not life together? And what does “together” mean, if it doesn’t include all of humanity, in an increasingly intertwined, “global village” of a world? We all want to feel good about ourselves. But if Donne was right, and “no man is an island,” perhaps no man includes no woman, too; and no child; includes everyone, everywhere. Which is no real solution; not in the real world. But there are worse sins you could commit, than to love your enemy.

Far worse; like to not even try. What kind of meaning would that give your life, to just try, every day, day after day?

Good question. It led me to hunt up his previous posts on loving your enemy, here, here, here, and here.

Folks, he’s a better person than I am. I grapple with this issue, and time and time again run into it headlong, with little success.

I look at my last post: “If you accept torture as a valid means of controlling people, rather than as a means of information gathering from a single individual, you are morally bankrupt, and rational people should not waste breath on engaging in debate with you.” I believe wholeheartedly that that is true, but who am I to decide that they are beyond redemption?

Evil exists in the world. People are capable of believing evil things, and committing evil acts. Yet, I often am able to separate the evil people do and their innate worth as human beings. But not always.

Part of it is that loving your enemies has fallen out of vogue. Hell, civil public discourse, which is but a frail shadow of loving your enemies, seems to have gone the way of the dodo. Anger towards people is a form of self-protection, political or otherwise. But that allows them power to define you, rather than you defining yourself. You become a mirror of those you hate.

You can see this in the current political scene. The hardest task facing Democrats, as they find their voice, and speak with the anger and passion fueled by what they see happening in the country and around the world, is to stay focused on policies and messages, not on personalities. (Attacks on Ann Coulter’s looks are out-of-bounds, forceful objections to her hate-filled speech are not.) While it is neccessary to respond — and respond forcefully — to attacks equating opposing the president’s unconstitutional wiretapping program with supporting terrorism, e.g., it necessary to do so with strength and calm. (If for no other reason than to do otherwise would be playing right into their hands, as Digby observes.) Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming like the angry voices on the right who are so hate-filled. Contrary to media protrayals, Michael Moore is no Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility for such a person to come to prominence. To those who claim that it’s just not possible, because we believe in tolerance and individual rights and everything good and noble, well, you have more faith in human nature than I do.

It is more complicated than that.

I am opposed to capital punishment. I do not view murderers as monsters, even though I recognize they do great evil. I do not view non-violent racists, sexists or homophobes as irredeemable, even though I recognize that they do great evil. I am angry at what they do, I do not hate them.

Those who support torture, I view as monsters. Those who would silence liberals and others and generally stifle free-speech, I view with deep loathing. Those who advocate physical violence towards gays and lesbians, minorities, or women, I detest.

The difference is fear.

I fear those would silence me. I fear those who pose an actual threat of harm to me or those I love.

I most fear those I am afraid of becoming.

I am in no danger of being tortured. No one I know or love is in danger of being tortured. Yet those Americans who support or encourage torture engender deep disgust and often abject hatred in me. I am afraid of becoming like them, of listening to the siren’s song they sing.

The song which says, “if we just do this one intolerable thing,” we will be safe. That it is possible to hold at bay mortality. That all it takes is to make that one little concession, place one’s personal safety above everything else, and we will not suffer by it. That morals are for the living — and all bets are off when following them might increase by some small amount your chance of not meeting a violent demise.

Maybe it’s not torture — I’ve never been tempted to torture anyone. But maybe it’s saying it’s okay to decimate the Fourth Amendment, as long as we’re safe. That it doesn’t matter if we hold people without counsel, as long as we don’t have to worry at night. That most of all, we don’t have to look too hard at what we’re doing, that we can turn our heads and pretend that nothing is wrong, because we’re talking about national security, right? That we can stop when we want to.

That we won’t lose our souls.

And that’s what scares me the most, friends. Losing my soul. And sometimes I worry that with all my anger I have lost part of it already.

Posted in Blogging, Justice, Who I am | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Torture: once more with feeling.

Posted on August 20, 2006 by Pat Greene

In the comments to my post “Obscenity,” Anonymous asks

Are you REALLY REALLY saying that you would not torture One person to SAVE the innocent lives of many THOUSAND others.
We will never hide behind our children but we really have to get over the fact that others do.

Would I torture one person to save the innocent lives of many others?

No. I wouldn’t. Not ever.

Torture is immoral and reprehensible. Dictators and tyrants engage in torture; free and democratic people reject it as being the tool of despots. To suggest that we as Americans should engage in torture is to turn from our belief in just methods of punishment as enshrined in the Eight Amendment. For America to embrace torture means that the terrorists have well and truly won: they have turned us into the sort of monsters we fight wars against.

There are several reasons states torture, among them to gain information or to instill fear into subject populations (whether that be prison detainees or POWs or religious minorities) so as to create submissive and compliant peoples.

I am not going to discuss the second reason. If you accept torture as a valid means of controlling people, rather than as a means of information gathering from a single individual, you are morally bankrupt, and rational people should not waste breath on engaging in debate with you.*

As a means of information gathering, torture does not work.

Everybody here familiar with Alan Dershowitz’s “ticking time bomb” hypothetical? That is would be okay to torture as long as we had “torture warrants” to insure the right person was being tortured, and it was only used in the most extreme of emergencies?

Terry Karney, a professional army interrogator and a voice of sanity and reason on the issue of torture, explains why it doesn’t work:

In the scenario you give, it won’t work. Unless the bomb is going to go off a long time from now, all the guy has to do is 1: hold out until it goes off or 2: tell a good lie, and trust that the situation won’t be resolved until it goes off (a healthy lead, into the area the bomb is would be the best at this, the assumption would be he told the truth and the EOD guys either failed to find it, or to defuse it.

And that is a situation in which you are sure you have the right guy — what about the situation in which you don’t? If you bring in a suspect who in fact has no knowledge of anything, all torture will do is elicit information that is worse than useless: plots that do not exist will be revealed, involving innocent people. Precious time and resources will be wasted on investigations that would be better spent elsewhere. And the potential for injustice multiplies, as innocents named by the first torture victim are brought in, perhaps for their own dose of “interrogation.”

Fairness compels me to add that Terry’s opposition to torture is based upon more than its failure as a method of interrogation. Terry has been, as he put it in the link above “a still small voice” proclaiming the utter evil of torture, and in addition decrying it for the effect it has on torturers as much as on the tortured.

Often, people who support use of torture against terrorists feel that those of us who do not aren’t facing reality. Ah, but we do face reality, and understand that reality is complicated: life does not present us with cut and dried factual scenarios. We don’t always know what is going on. This is not a law-school exercise.

When faced with a reality where facts are often unknown and guilt and innocence are murky, all we have, really, to keep us from falling into evil are our moral values. They are who we are. Without them, we are lost.

Lately, some of us have been willing to abandon our principles wholesale out of fear. In the comments to my prior post, I said to Anonymous that there are fates worse than death. Many people would think living under tyranny is one of them. I don’t know if that is right, but I do know becoming an agent of tyranny is another.

We, as a country, could be headed toward that fate, unless we step back and reclaim the values that we have always said we stand for.

And if we don’t, the terrorists will have won. Completely.

*Although it should be noted that methods such as torture have a way of creating terrorists on the other side: every relative of every torture victim is a potential suicide bomber.

Posted in Justice, Politics, Who I am | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Healthy Anarchy.

Posted on August 19, 2006 by Pat Greene

I went to a college which had an exchange program with MIT. There was this one MIT student who used to hang around my dorm sometimes — he dated two different women on the same floor (generally considered tacky, but then again, he didn’t seem to care). He was… unique.

His senior year he occasionally engaged in performance art — I’m not sure if this was out of his own artistic impulses or for some class or simply because he could. On one occasion he sat under a box on the Quad to see what people were saying about the box as they walked past. Another time he hung an effigy of himself in front of the art building, all the while standing next to the effigy wearing identical clothes. After that last stunt, Campus Police escorted him off the campus and told him that he would be arrested if they ever saw him again.

He later went on to be a leading Internet entreprenuer and activist.*

In the rock opera Rent, Tom Collins is a computer genius and anarchist who gets kicked out of MIT for “reprogramming [their] virtual reality equipment to read ‘Actual reality! ACT UP! Fight AIDS!'” Aside from the technical and security issues involved, I have absolutely no doubt that could happen. I have met geek anarchists.**

Many geeks are anarchists at heart.

I have yet to meet a geek who did not enjoy creatively breaking things. Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules, beyond those imposed by Newton and Einstein. Purpose? Do we need a purpose to do these things? Nah. It is enough, as Edmund Hillary allegedly said of Everest, that they are there.

Mostly, there is also a desire to figure out how to make things work better. But not always. Sometimes there is simply a desire to thumb one’s nose at authority or one’s opposition. Engineering schools, especially Cal Tech, have made the college prank into an art form, with the zenith being Cal Tech’s Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961.

Sometimes there is the simple joy of … explosions. Or smashing things. Or dropping objects from large heights — the messier the better. (Pumpkins work very nicely in this regard.)

A little healthy anarchy is a good thing: breaking the status quo can lead to new and better technology, and often greater understanding about how the world around us works. People who say “Why can’t the system (whether the system is technological or social) do this?” and don’t accept “because it can’t” as an answer often end up creating new systems that do do “this.”

In America, we have been lamenting the fact that our students are falling behind in math and science. We bemoan the threat that this poses to our position as a leader in technological development, when in fact there is a greater threat to our ability to turn out scientists and engineers looming on the horizon.

The threat to our next generation of technical innovation is… our current goal of creating students who can give the right answers, rather than creating ones who can ask the best questions. We prepare, and test, and test again to a fare-thee-well, to show how well our kids are being taught the concepts … on the standardized tests.

Quick — which is easier to teach quickly, math facts, or critical thinking skills? Which is easier to test?

And which is less threatening to the adults in charge?

Not to mention that nonconformity is not tolerated as it once was. Zero-tolerance is the watchword, and while it is ostensibly aimed at drugs and violence, its implementation is in many places taking on insane overtones. In 2001, the American Bar Association argued that zero-tolerance policies basically made students into criminals, by taking methods originally intended to control adult criminal offenders and applying them to children. There have been instances of children being charged with “making terrorist threats” for yelling at other children in the lunchroom, and being arrested for writing papers deemed too scary or violent.

Schools do need to keep students safe, and we do need to assess how our schools are performing. But in many cases it seems that we as a society have abdicated our critical thinking skills — or as it used to be known, plain common sense — to rely on arbitrary brightline rules devoid of any real room for contextual evaluation. It saves us from thinking, from making difficult calls, from having to support our decisions. And yes, the vaunted litigiousness of American society accounts for some of this, but not all: zero-tolerance policies are, in some cases, being so rigidly and ridiculously enforced that they invite litigation from students unfairly expelled.

We seek to mold students who are quiet, studious, never question authority, and are good test-takers. The danger is that we might succeed too well.

We can’t afford to lose that small, healthy streak of anarchy.

*No, I’m not going to identify him. I don’t think this story would get me into any trouble — unless he’s changed drastically, he has a wicked sense of humor — but I really would rather not find out. (And he may well have told the story himself somewhere, but I’m not going to check.)

** I lived one summer in Senior House, at MIT. Admittedly, this was twenty-five years ago, but even then it prided itself on its anarchistic tendencies. Or at least its strangeness. The first time I saw the place, there was a fire in the courtyard (as there often is). Several people were rolling a large wooden spool — the type used by the phone company for cable — across the fire. “How stupid,” I thought. “That thing’s going to catch.” (Not realizing, of course, that seeing how long it took for the thing to catch fire was the whole point of the exercise.) It wasn’t until I got much closer that I noticed that there was a person curled up inside the spool as it was being rolled over the fire. It was that sort of place.

Posted in Culture (popular and otherwise), The World | Tagged | 1 Comment

Rent, San Francisco: a review.

Posted on August 17, 2006 by Pat Greene

This post is going to be of limited interest because it is of a production that has already closed. Oh, and it has spoilers. And it is really, really long. But I have to write it anyway, because I’m obsessed.

I am a Renthead.

Obsession is never a pretty thing, but this one is relatively innocuous, as long as you don’t live in my house and have to listen to “Rent” and “What You Own” on the car stereo all the time.* (The only other public evidence of my obsession is the Jonathan Larson quote over to the side, from “La Vie Bohéme.”) I am pretty much older than the standard age demographic for Rentheads, but that’s okay… it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, as they say; or an angst-ridden, creatively-challenging, bohemian, early-adulthood, as the case may be.

I came rather late to the party, having been introduced to the music by the Rent, the movie . I had gone to see it because Jesse L. Martin (Collins in Rent, Detective Ed Green on Law & Order) is on the short list of actors I would pay good money to see read the phone book. The fact that he can sing the phone book — and wonderfully — is merely lagniappé.

I liked the movie. A lot. Then I got the soundtrack for Christmas. Not the movie soundtrack, but the complete Broadway soundtrack.

I fell in love.**

Rent is close to an opera; listening to the soundtrack, you can understand much of the plot. That’s not surprising since it is based on Puccini’s La Boheme. When my husband got us tickets for the last week of its San Francisco run (third row center, yet!), I was delighted to have an opportunity to see it on the stage.

I left the theatre vaguely disappointed.

Why? Was it overfamiliarity with the material? Was I mentally comparing the actors on stage to their screen counterparts?

No. I was not bored by the material, and the performances I loved the best (by Warren G. Nolan, Jr. playing Collins*** and Tracy McDowell playing Maureen) were the ones that deviated most from their screen counterparts. And there was the joy of seeing “Christmas Bells,” my second favorite piece from the soundtrack (which was missing from the movie) actually performed.

Part of it was that Jed Resnick, who played Mark Cohen, the chief protagonist, sang in a very clipped manner, making it difficult to hear him clearly. But mostly it was a matter of chemistry. As in: there was none between the two most significant characters.

You might think, given the play’s origins, that the central relationship is Roger and Mimi. It’s not…. it’s Roger and Mark. Unless you can believe that the two of them matter to each other, that it is more than a relationship born of convenience and the high cost of living in New York, the play loses its emotional center.

In the production I saw, Roger and Mark seemed like roommates, not friends. They were like the people you roomed with freshman year in college and then never really saw again once you moved out and got a room of your own. In the play’s climactic confrontation between the two in the moving “Goodbye, Love,” (a number which was criminally cut from the movie), Roger should be lashing out in frustration and anger at a friend who is forcing him to face his tendency to run from unpleasant situations. Mark, likewise, should be hurt and angry, but not pitiful. Instead, in the production I saw, Roger was annoyed and disdainful, Mark was … pathetic, like a puppy cringing, expecting to get kicked.

In an interview with Sirius Satellite Radio host Seth Rudetsky, Rent Executive Producer Kevin McCollum once said that it was vitally important that the characters in Rent never be portrayed as pathetic. Confused, yes, and struggling to find their way, but never pitiful. And he was absolutely right: once the characters become pitiful, you stop caring about them. And I didn’t care about the Mark I saw — I wanted to smack him and say “Get a grip!” (Which is interesting, in a way: in watching the movie, it was Roger –played by Adam Pascal — who I kept wishing I could slap and say “Snap out of it!”)

The magic of theatre is its ability to draw us into other people’s lives. But first, those people have to let us know their story is worth caring about. That just didn’t happen for me, at least not with Mark. And as good as the other stories were, his is the lens through which the other stories are filtered.

My disappointment with Mark notwithstanding, I still found joy in the performance. There were many wonderful moments: “Christmas Bells” provided a kaleidoscope of sound; “Take Me or Leave Me ” had two divas standing toe-to-toe and not giving an inch, singing fire at each other; and “Light My Candle” — an intricate conversational duet with a Latin beat — oozed sensuality. “I’ll Cover You”, with Warren G. Nolan and Ano Okera as Angel, was joyous and exuberant, everything a love song should be; its reprise was heartbreaking.

The most stunning moment was the most unexpected. In the movie, the song “Will I Lose My Dignity?” is sung over a shot of the support group for people with AIDS, showing people around the circle disappearing. It is about people dying from this very grim disease. Very sad. Very moving. Very detached.

In the play, the song is begun by one person in the support group, then another, and then picked up by all the characters… even those without AIDS. The song is not about “them,” about people who are dying…. it is about us, about all of us:

Will I lose my dignity? Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?

Not just about AIDS, but addiction, loneliness, poverty, depression … the human condition. Simple. Beautiful. Devastating. I started crying halfway through the number.

That number underscores one of the reasons I adore this work: its charitable and loving view of people. There is a great line (among very many) in “La Vie Boheme” which says “To anyone out of the mainstream… is anyone in the mainstream?” — a recognition that we are all individuals and none of us fit nicely into boxes.

My love for Rent remains, my less than spectacular night at the theatre notwithstanding. I’m sure I’ll have a chance to seeitagain sometime. And if not? I still have the music. That glorious, challenging, heartrending music.

Viva lá vie Bohéme!

* What you don’t hear on my car stereo, at least when my kids are in the car, which is almost all the time, is my favorite number, “La Vie Bohéme.” I figure that I can live without getting calls from my youngest son’s school saying he is going around singing “Sodomy…it’s between God and me…” Given my youngest son, he would, too. It’s a catchy melody, he likes to sing — what’s the problem?

** And fell out of like: after hearing the entire Broadway soundtrack, I became really irritated with the movie. The producers played it safe, choosing to do a more traditional “musical” rather than an “opera.” One of the consequences of that was the searing “Goodbye, Love,” part of which is a confrontation between Mark and Roger: the director said that they couldn’t keep it in the movie because they hadn’t had Mark and Roger singing together before. The reason they hadn’t, of course, was that they chose to jettison the opera format. Cowards.

***As much as I love Jesse L. Martin, his Collins never rang quite true to me. Supposedly a genius computer programmer/anarchist who was kicked out of MIT, he always seemed too … cool for MIT, in a sort of street cool way. (Okay, yeah, I know, I’m stereotyping.) I could believe he went to Harvard, yes, but MIT, no. When I saw Warren G. Nolan as Collins, I thought “Not only did he go to MIT, he lived in Senior House.” His Collins was more … goofy, playful. I knew people like that who went to MIT.

 

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Obscenity.

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Pat Greene

There is profanity. You hear profanity a lot these days. My kids hear it in the streets and on the school buses. You see it on the Internet a lot. Comedy Central has quite a few shows which feature profanity — South Park, in particular, strikes me as being quite inventive in its use of the words you can’t say on television — except you can, since it’s cable and not broadcast.

As a parent, you are supposed to worry about profanity, and discipline your children when they use it, and scowl at adults who use it in public.

Far better, though, that they hear profanity than obscenity.

Obscenities are screamed all the time by all sorts of madmen: they are the shouts of hatred raised by violent extremists, the venom spewed forth by Fred Phelps, by Osama bin Laden. They are like rabid dogs, to be kept in sight and quarantined, but not to be reasoned with.

It is the obscenities softly and gently spoken that do the most damage. The calm voice reasoning that it is surely acceptable to torture one person if to do so would save the lives of many others. That those who allow terrorists to live among them are colluding with acts of terror, and therefore should expect no mercy. That “collateral damage” is merely regrettable.

And then there is …. the clear rational sane civil amoral voice which states that not only is it acceptable to kill children, it is a virtue to do so.

It is rare that a post has made me literally sick to my stomach, but this one did. The calm dismissal of objections as naiveté (stock-in-trade for most who utter these sorts of obscenities); the reduction of war to some sort of exercise in game theory (albeit with deadly consequences); the inability to see the other side as anything other than cardboard cutouts; the blindness to the long-term consequences of such an evil (there is no other word) policy; and, on a much more superficial level, the psuedo-intellectual use of dialogue a l&aacute Plato; all of it enough to make the skin crawl. (My favorite comment, by one Jason, summed up Grim’s argument nicely: “It was necessary to kill the children in order to save them.” Reading the comments, however, takes a bit of a strong stomach. I wish the commenter who said “Brilliant Satire. Very edgy, avant guarde. Thank god no one actually thinks this way.” had been right.)

On the whole, I much prefer profanity. I think I need to go take a shower now; I feel dirty just having read this.

(Link from Atrios)

Posted in Justice, Politics, Social Issues | Tagged , | 10 Comments

I don’t know how to quit you.

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Pat Greene

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave the Internet.

More importantly, I decided that I would be better off not doing it. Not this week, anyway.

I am terribly isolated, in many ways, and Live Journal and Blogger, not to mention other weblogs, provide links to the world of adults.

The isolation is a result of a combination of factors, some cultural (nobody around here knows their neighbors very well, me included), some health-related (I suffer from fibromyalgia which this summer has at times made it painful to even move), but mostly this week logistical: my husband was called away to Cleveland unexpectedly on business, and the live-in babysitter (a.ka., the angsty teenager; a.k.a., the not-so-little Drummer Boy) is at Band Camp. (No, I haven’t seen American Pie, but I’ve heard about it.) It’s just me and two pre-teen boys. I am not, for example, able to go do my weekly volunteer stint at a local arts agency, nor am I able to join my friend Carol for coffee. I love my sons, but I need to converse with adults sometimes — even if it is electronically.

The pre-teen boys decided as well that twenty dollars was not enough of an incentive for them to give up all electronics for a week. We all agreed we would talk about this again after school starts, when there are more stringent restrictions on television and video game usage anyway.

I feel rather sheepish. I do not feel particularly ashamed, however.

It was interesting to me too, how much I need the Internet for mundane things: I originally broke my “no Internet” pledge because I had to go online to get information about the high school band. I also had to go online to check my calendar, and to find benefit information for my health insurance policy. Once online, the siren call of the weblogs was simply irresistible:

It will only take a second…I won’t read any of the comments! Just Adventus, and the Mad Monk, and Fred over at Slacktivist, and of course, check out the big political dogs, Atrios and Digby….

Erm. Yeah. And then once I read, it was… I need to write about this…

Well, it’s true. I don’t know how to quit you.

Posted in Blogging | 4 Comments

Posted on August 12, 2006 by Pat Greene

I have a series of posts on capital punishment in draft form.
I have a post on why I love the music of Stephen Sondheim that I am about half through with.
I have a review of a local production of Rent written in my mind.

It all has to wait.

I have made a bet.

I bet my younger two children that they could not go an entire week without television, Game Boys, video games, or computers. For my part, I have to foreswear… the Internet. I am allowed to read email and use Word and Excel, but my web browsers have to remain firmly shut.

*whimper*

I’ll see you in a week. If I live that long without blogs, that is.

Posted in Kids in all their glory, The Internet and its perils | 2 Comments

Why I hate SUVs.

Posted on August 10, 2006 by Pat Greene

Screeech.

Thud.

Scream.

And there was a eight-year old boy struggling to his knees, then to his feet, his lower face a bloody mess. He had been struck by a young man in an Izusu Trooper who had been going too fast in a residential area and had been unable to stop in time.

I stopped breathing.

The boy was my son.

That was eight years ago.

I went to the E.R. (More accurately, was driven to the E.R. — I was in shock myself — after having dropped off my two younger children with a neighbor.) There are things you never forget in life, and that E.R. visit is one of them.

The doctor told me “The front of his upper jaw has been shattered. His coach saw one of his teeth lying there — we may be able to do something, but probably not — he’s lost three permanent front teeth.”

He paused. “He’s one lucky boy. Had that car struck an inch or two higher, he’d be dead.”

My son was lying in one of the rooms, waiting to have a CAT-scan done; they had not yet moved him to the ICU yet. When I came in, he turned to me and said “‘Ell, I ould al-ays ‘ee a ‘entilokist.” I started sniffling — the nurse started sniffling. “You’re not supposed to be trying to tell me jokes now, you’re not supposed to be trying to cheer me up.”

They repaired his jaw. He’s had a bridge for the past seven years, and in eleven days he goes in for bone graft surgery, the first step to having dental implants, and getting close to whole. We were lucky in other ways as well: there was no trauma to his neck or his brain.

The SVU he was struck by was not going fast at the time of impact (had the road not been wet, the driver might have been able to stop, even though he had been speeding) or my son would be dead. Had he been struck by a car, he would have suffered a broken arms or ribs.

The higher profile of SVU poses a direct threat to pedestrians.* A pedestrian struck by an SUV is more than twice as likely to die as one struck by a sedan.

So, aside from the ecological considerations, and the fact that a many of them are unnecessary (driven by people who need neither the off-road nor the cargo capacity), and the fact that they are a rollover hazard, SUVs are a menace. While I am willing to admit that there are people for whom it is appropriate and neccessary for them to own or drive one (living in isolated areas that get a lot of snow or mud, for instance, or having many kids with sports gear and needing to tow a boat), just as I recognize that double tractor trailer trucks are a necessary evil, I feel that people who own them who do not need them are engaging in anti-social behavior. Not that I’m perfect — I engage in my own anti-social behaviors. I’m working on them.

I find myself viewing owning an SVU as a sin needing to be forgiven. I do have friends who own them, and I keep my peace. I don’t say, “Don’t you realize what you’re doing?”

But I want to.

*Many of the safety concerns about SVU are just as pertinent applied to pickup trucks with high profiles. And again, there are many people driving around who don’t need the cargo capacity of the trucks.

Posted in My life and times, Social Issues | Tagged | 4 Comments

Posted on August 8, 2006 by Pat Greene

They’re called “CAPTCHA”s — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. (That name, by the way, is trademarked by Carnegie-Mellon University, just in case you were wondering.) They are those distorted boxes of text that you see in many places where you have to enter the letters you see in order to prove you are not yourself a computer. It’s a whole lot shorter than asking you to, oh, give your opinion on the Iraq war, which would probably likewise prove you are not a computer, but would take longer than ten seconds.

I hate them. Passionately.

Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em. Hate ’em.

I can’t read the damn things. Last week, it took me four tries to get one right.

I hate them so much, I started this blog to try and get away from them. Didn’t work.

However, there is another thing I hate, too: comment spam. Little Anonymous comments have started showing up which are clearly automated because they all contain the same nondescript text and the same links. I ignored the first few but they are increasing. So far they are behind the times, not showing up in my most recent posts, and I’d like to keep it that way.

So, I am turning on the CAPTCHAs.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I hope this won’t keep anyone from commenting.

Stupid spambots.

Posted in The Internet and its perils | 1 Comment

A letter to Barbara Boxer.

Posted on August 8, 2006 by Pat Greene

Dear Senator Boxer:

When you campaigned for Senator Joe Leiberman during the Connecticut primary, I was appalled. Here was a man who had been a firm supporter of the war even after it became clear that the war was a disaster, who had been part of the group that refused to filibuster Samuel Alito, thus clearing the way for his ascendancy to the Supreme Court, and who had been willing to badmouth his own party.

It bothered me that you chose to place personal loyalty to a colleague above the best interests of your party — indeed, of your country. However, I understand that you have worked with Senator Leiberman for a great many years. I decided to view your campaigning for him as a favor done for a friend, as troublesome as that might be.

However, I call on you to respect the primary process. If Senator Leiberman launches an independent bid for the Senate seat from Connecticut, I call on you to support the Democratic Party candidate, Ned Lamont, or failing that, remain neutral. If you choose to campaign or support Senator Leiberman in an independent campaign, I will view you as placing personal considerations above your party and, even more significantly, as disrespecting the primary process and Democratic voters.

Should you choose to do so, not only will I not vote for you in 2010, I will actively work for any reasonable opponent* you may meet in the Democratic primary.

Sincerely,

A disgruntled constituent.

* One should never make promises one can’t keep: it is not true that I would support just any Democrat against Boxer. Hence, the reasonable qualification — I would not, for example, support a, um, Joe Leiberman-like politician.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Leiberman concedes in Connecticut

Posted on August 8, 2006 by Pat Greene

Thus continues the long, long slog to regain the soul of the Democratic Party.

Damn, this feels good.

One thing has confused me about all this — over the years when the left has bitched and moaned about the influence wielded by the religious right, we’ve been told that it’s because they organize and vote. They use direct mail, they energize their base. This is democracy, I’ve been told.

S0oooo….

How come now that we on the left are doing what they on the right did starting fifteen years ago, except that we use blogs instead of direct mail and church rallies, we are “blogofascists” leading an “inquisition” who are threatening the very existence of the party?

Give me a break. You want to know who’s threatening the existence of the party? People like Leiberman, and all the Senators who decided to campaign for him — even though he spent a great deal of time badmouthing Democrats and acting in general as a Republican lapdog. A man so committed to the democratic process and so respectful of the Democratic voters of Connecticut, that a while ago he announced he would run as an independent if he lost the primary.

And before you say “bipartisanship,” why, that’s been dead a long time and it sure as hell was not the Democrats who killed it.

Of course, all of what I have just written has been posted ad infinitum for the past however many months at just about any big lefty American political blog you can name. I’m just so giddy I don’t care if what I’m saying has been said before.

This is just the start. Those of us on the left have got a lot of work cut out for us.

Let’s roll up those shirtsleeves.

 

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

Posted on August 2, 2006 by Pat Greene

I have not been blogging much about the Middle East because a) other people are doing a much better job of it and I have nothing to add that would add much light to it and b) it’s very hard to type with tears cascading onto your keyboard.

All I can add are my prayers: for the people of Lebanon, and Israel, for peace. And an apology: for whatever part my government is playing in exacerbating this situation.

In the political circles I travel in, it is not uncommon for people to distance themselves from any responsibility for the government by saying “Don’t look at us, we didn’t vote for the guy. Either time.” I think that’s wrong.

The United States is a republic. We are responsible for the people who end up in power, even if we didn’t vote for them ourselves: there is such a thing as community responsibility. And so, I apologize for my country to those outside her borders. (I do not do so to those within her borders, who are themselves members of the community; to them I do say “Hey, don’t look at me, I didn’t vote for the guy.” Some members of the community are more culpable than others.)

Is this anti-American? I like to think of it as being adult. Adults take responsibility for the things that are under their care, individually and collectively. When they have done wrong, they apologize and seek to make amends.

We in America have given very much to the world. But right now we are vastly in the world’s debt: we have given grievance, have acted like spoiled, bullying children, and we need to be adults, apologize and change our ways.

We complain about human rights infractions in other countries while detainees are kept in Guatanamo Bay, with little chance to challenge their detention. We have invaded a country with no cause — Iraq (Afghanistan is a different story) — and have become worse than the tyrants we supposedly went in to destroy. We have acted with disdain toward the rest of the entire world, while basking in our sense of self-righteous superiority.

So, yes, we have much to atone for. I just want to state for the record that one adult, at least, is trying to change things, and that there are many more like me.

I love my country dearly. I love my country enough to want it to be the very best it can be in the world, not merely a piece of puffery. I want us to be the “fairest of them all,” in the sense of being the most just, the most merciful, the most honest.

But I want us to be that in reality, not simply for us to say that we are. And right now, we are not just, nor merciful, nor honest. Maybe we’ve never been, but at least we’ve made a better shot at it than we’re doing now. Maybe the words have always been rhetoric, but there have been times when they have not been completely empty rhetoric.

So some — many — of us roll up our sleeves and try to change things. We write letters, we talk to our friends, we vote. Hopefully, things will change sooner rather than later. But it may take time. (And big changes are not likely to happen before 2009.)

So, to the rest of the world, our apologies. We’ll let you know how the renovation work progresses.

Posted in History, Justice, The World | 1 Comment

Death and Madness

Posted on July 28, 2006 by Pat Greene

In a Houston courtroom a few days ago, Andrea Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the drowning of her five children. Although many conservative bloggers were outraged by Yates’s “walking free,”* most people recognize the verdict as a blow for sanity and justice.

When Yates was first convicted in 2002, many people questioned how in the world a woman that clearly crazy could be held accountable. But the jury had not a doubt that she should be: they only deliberated for three and a half hours hours before returning a guilty verdict. This was less than half the time it had taken a previous jury to decide she was competent to stand trial; and competency is a standard set so low that, according to one Houston reporter, “If you’re walking, you’re competent.”

The verdict was overturned on appeal because one of the prosecution’s expert witnesses, psychiatrist and television consultant Park Dietz, had testified that Andrea Yates had gotten the idea for killing her children from a Law & Order episode that he had worked on where a mother drowned her kids. Except, oops! there wasn’t any such episode. His bad. One of the most conservative appeals courts in the most conservative state in the union recognized that just perhaps telling a jury that there was a clear blueprint that the defendant was following when the blueprint didn’t even exist might be prejudicial to the defendant. Ya think?

In the second trial, the jury deliberated for thirteen hours over a period of three days. Not as short as the first one, but not a tremendously long time, either. (The Scott Peterson jury took ten days to arrive at a verdict.)

So, what was the difference? Was the Law & Order episode that crucial to the first jury’s decision? That seems rather strange. After all, Dietz is an expert who knows his stuff, and his misremembering about the episode was only part of a lengthy testimony, most of which had do with his perception that Yates had not been psychotic when she killed her children. He testified to that in the second trial as well.** (There were of course numerous other doctors who testified in Yates’s defense, saying she was psychotic. Given than one doctor who had treated Andrea Yates following a previous bout of postpartum psychosis stated that she was one of the “five sickest patients I’ve ever seen,” I tend to side with the jury on this.)

Maybe it was the fact that people know more about postpartum psychosis, to some extent because of the Andrea Yates case.

Or maybe it’s because the prosecutors were barred from seeking the death penalty.

They were barred from doing so because the jury in the first trial had refused to sentence Yates to death. I’m sure, had they been able to, the prosecution would have gone for the death penalty all over again. Even though at the first trial they sought the death penalty during the “conviction” phase of the trial, and endorsed life imprisonment during the “sentencing” phase.

Because “death-qualified juries” are more likely to convict than other juries. Furthermore, such juries are more likely to reject insanity defenses.

Think about that… the death penalty affects who gets convicted, not just who gets sentenced to death.

Yet another way in which capital punishment warps the justice system. Not only is it applied capriciously — you think not? God help you if you are accused of murder in Texas. Or Virginia. (For example, the rush to the executioner’s chamber leads to insane laws restricting introduction of evidence of innocence on appeal. Virginia’s is especially draconian — a defendant has twenty-one days to introduce new evidence of any sort. [Edit: further research shows that they revoked the 21-day rule last year. That leaves untouched other similar but not quite as short time periods in other states.] Any evidence that shows up later, no matter how strong — DNA exonerating the defendant, for example — is simply disregarded.) The tendencies of death-qualified juries to convict it makes miscarriages of justice — such as nearly happened in the Yates case — much more likely, as prosecutors are able to game jury selection in such a way that disadvantages the defense from the start.

And yet the majority of people support the death penalty in this country.

Is this madness, or what?

* Individuals who are found “not guilty by reason of insanity” do not “walk free.” They are sent to state mental hospitals, where they are locked away. The main difference between state mental hospitals and prisons is that the residents get better mental health treatment. They also tend to be locked away for longer periods than people who commit the same crime who end up in prison.

** Dietz testified in the second trial, but incredibly, the judge barred any testimony concerning his erroneous testimony at the first trial. This is staggering: defense attorneys almost always use prior testimony to impeach witnesses and throw doubt on their credibility. That the defense was precluded from doing so in this case was a boon to the prosecution.

Posted in Justice | Tagged | 1 Comment

When is a killing a killing?

Posted on July 25, 2006 by Pat Greene

In my LiveJournal, wcg makes the very reasonable statement that comparing fatalities is not useful; people are not potatoes. And, for the most part, I think he’s right. In this case, however, I think the comparison of numbers of fatalities, and more importantly, numbers of civilian casualties, goes directly to the issue of whether or not the Israeli response has been appropriate and proportionate.

Over the years, when talking with people in my family who unwaveringly support Israel, I am always told that the difference between Israel and the Palestinians is that the Israelis don’t kill innocent people. Suicide bombings kill innocent people; the Israelis only shoot suspected terrorists.

I think that statement is factually suspect. I think that the killing of the Lebanese civilians in the current situation also gives the lie to that statement, as well.

But the situation is more complicated than that.

For the last several years, Liz Mulford, an honorary member of the board of the Four Homes of Mercy in the West Bank in Palestine, has come to my church to talk about the Four Homes.* The descriptions of conditions in the West Bank were far different than what one heard of in the American media: grinding poverty which became worse every year, draconian travel restrictions which made making a living difficult, hours spent waiting at checkpoints — if one could get through at all, severely ill patients in ambulances headed to a hospital in Jerusalem being turned around and refused entry. Doctors being unable to get sorely-needed medicines. All a result of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians in the West Bank. (The travel restrictions were eased in 2005 [pdf].) If a patient dies because they are prevented from going to the hospital, my relatives would say that the Israelis would not be to blame.

Which raises a question, when is a killing a killing? Not when is a killing a murder, for that hinges upon justification, which an entirely different question. But when can responsibility for having caused death be said to have occured?

There is the legal definition, which applies to persons. Walking into a market with a bomb strapped around your waist and blowing yourself up, taking two dozen men, women, and children with you who were doing nothing more than trying to put food on their table is killing — and murder too. I will not argue that.

Locking someone in a house, with no means of escape, and limited food or water, resulting in their death would be killing, too, if those actions were taken by an individual.

What makes it so different when it is a nation walling off hundreds of thousands of people, destroying the power plant that makes it possible for them to get clean water, and increases the likelihood of diseases and cholera, disrupts shipments of food, and other actions significantly impacting the very existence of those people? Such as Israel did in the Gaza strip?

People are going to die as a result. You can’t say how many, and you can’t say exactly who, but someone is going to die. Probably a lot of someones.

And that is killing. Just as much as the suicide bombings are killing. You can argue that the action is justified — I would argue that it is not, inasmuch as it targets innocents — but you cannot argue that it does not kill.

Killing begets killing. What is happening today in Gaza will make it all the easier for the next generation of suicide bombers to be recruited.

And the cycle of death will continue.

UPDATE: wcg also pointed me to this very perceptive article.
UPDATE II: A letter from an Anglican Bishop in Palestine.

* Our church gives money every Christmas to the Four Homes: everyone in the parish foregoes sending Christmas cards to other people in the parish, and the money we save on cards and postage we give to the Four Homes, and the names of the donors are listed in a “Parish Christmas Card” printed in the weekly bulletin on Epiphany.

Posted in Justice, The World | 3 Comments

Posted on July 25, 2006 by Pat Greene

There is blame on both sides, people say. Israel has a right to defend herself, people say.

Hezbollah is at fault, the American government says. The Israelis define anyone who doesn’t flee before them as being in cahoots with Hezbollah, and Alan Dershowitz agrees with them.

All I know is this:

According to this morning’s San Jose Mercury News, 36 Israelis have been killed, 19 of them in the military. 381 Lebanese have been killed, almost all of them civilians, unless you accept the Dershowitz definition that means that anyone in the area by definition is not a civilian. That doesn’t even address the issue of the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have been given the choice by the Israelis: leave your homes, or die.

So you tell me, who has more blood — and more innocent blood — on their hands?

And that does not even touch on the situation in the Gaza, where the Israelis destroyed the only electrical plant in the area. Destroying the power plant is creating a humantarian crisis, causing a shortage of food and drinkable water for possibly over half a million people.

It was neccessary, Israel said, because darkness would make it easier to track militants who had kidnapped an Israeli soldier.

Let’s look at that calculus again, shall we? 1 Israeli soldier = significant misery, and possible loss of life for a large number of Palestinians, with up to half a million facing food or water shortages. Oh, but it works out — because the militants have ties to Hamas, the Palestinian governing body, so all those Palestinians, well, I guess they have it coming to them, don’t they?

That’s the way the U.S. is acting, at any rate. We’re not pushing for a cease-fire — let Israel kill more Lebanese, make more of southern Lebanon into a wasteland. Oh, nobody says that in so many words, but it comes across just the same.

We Americans collectively have blood on our hands, if for no other reason than we have kept silent when we should have spoken, stood still when we should have acted. And I find that the normal anger and disdain I have for my current government is replaced by something far stronger — a deep and burning rage: how dare you be complicit in such evil? How dare you, in my name, stand by while our allies do such things?

May God have mercy on our souls.

Posted in Justice, The World | 3 Comments