October 2004 – Secretly Ironic

Locking People in a Box is Not a Good Idea

NYT:
In each case, severely mentally ill inmates at separate prisons died from ”decreased intake of food and water” — they starved, in other words — one after announcing a hunger strike and the other while on a suicide watch. The Commission of Correction was searing in its criticism: ”In both cases, the inmates had been identified as having significant mental-health and/or medical problems and were not afforded the care and treatment that these services are required to provide.” Significantly, the commission’s findings are nonbinding; they are often rejected or ignored.

I don’t know that I can say anything about this: there is no pity, no compassion, and no justice in this situation.

Phone messages

My brother sometimes calls me late in the evening and leaves long rambling messages. Now I’m getting back at him by posting an ogg of it.

Big Fish, Little Fish

I am still getting used to working at a Large Company: at my Small Company, it was a GOOD sign that content was just starting to come together more than a week in advance. At the Big Company, that counts as running perilously close to late.

Items

Great interview with Mary Roach, author of the book Stiff, which is giggle-inducing and enlightening at once. I love the part in the chapter on decomposition where she decides that “maggot” is an ugly word and that for the remainder of the section we will use “hacienda,” which sounds much nicer, to describe larval flies in dead people.

McSweeney’s reconsiders famous films. I like the one on Babe.

Singers

Every game, between the top and bottom of the seventh inning, is the stretch, and these days it usually involves someone singing “God Bless America.”

Last night it was Amy Grant, and tonight it was that guy from Creed, who just strikes me as an Eddie Vedder imitation. I can’t decide which is more annoying.

As a wise woman said recently, “Today I saw a flyer for an anger management seminar. It was printed in Comic Sans. That made me angry.”

The Man that I’ve Become

Untended and unturned, a houseplant leans
to an unhealthy light
grows fragile, rootbound,
dies.

I stand outside the window and watch
the man that I’ve become
unfurl new leaves
against the glass.

Darko, Again

Well, there goes that idea for a Halloween costume. Three hundred bucks for the mask alone?

I guess it would have been hard to eat and drink in that outfit anyway. Nonetheless, a Halloween mask seems like the most obvious merchandising for Donnie Darko. Oh Mammon, why have you not created supply for my demand, price-inelastic as it may be?

Liberal is a Dirty Word

My grandfather, Adm. Parks, thought the NYT was too liberal and too influential. The only person brave or foolish enough to disagree with him was my father, who said, “The New York Times is the most influential paper in the country because it’s the best paper in the country, and you should read it.” I think about that whenever I read a well-reasoned editorial on religion and politics and wish it were published somewhere it’d do some good, like maybe the Washington Times. On the radio in Orlando I heard a talk show go on at length about the credentials of a guest author, which included his long-running gig at the Washington Times– not exactly a respected paper, given that it’s run by the Moonies, loses millions every year, and exists solely to push a dramatically slanted view of the world.

But really it’s all about the hypocrisy of moralists like Bill O’Reilly and its absurd mandates for a world which no longer comes close to fitting its rules. I’ve hoped for some time that the Republican party would have some sort of nervous breakdown, and Frank Rich seems to predict a similar outcome:

Mrs. Cheney and her surrogates are in effect doing exactly what Elizabeth Edwards had the guts to say they were doing: they are sending the message to Mr. Rove’s four million that they are ashamed of Mary Cheney. They are disowning her under the guise of “defending” her. They are exploiting her for the sake of political expediency even as they level that charge at Democrats.
…
Sooner or later this untenable level of hypocrisy is going to lead to a civil war within the Republican party. But this hypocrisy is not just about homosexuality – it’s about all sexuality, as befits a party that calls for the elimination of Roe v. Wade and the suppression of candid sex education that might prevent teenage pregnancy and AIDS alike.

Doublethink

Apparently, people’s heads don’t explode when they believe two contradictory things.

Actually I’ve often regarded it as an important ability– if you can’t believe things you know to be false, or believe two mutually exclusive things, you can’t really function properly in society. I mean– you’d never sleep at night. Lies are bad, but I am a liar. Gasoline is wasteful, but I own a gas-powered vehicle. Investors should be socially responsible, but I hold shares in Child Labor International. Now, I try to keep my contradictions to a minimum, but I know they exist. I believe in moral consistency, yet I am morally inconsistent.

I try especially to avoid counter-factual beliefs. Merely failing to meet my own ideals is forgivable, easy to rationalize. Rejecting the “reality-based community” in favor of ideology, or worse, insisting that black is in fact white (or that grey is in fact dark white, or maybe light black)… do I hold similarly untenable beliefs in my political fantasyland?

Yes, I know it’s a fantasyland. I drink at the People’s Republik. I don’t know anyone who actually favors the president. I am surprised when I see pro-Bush ads, when I hear the word “liberal” used as an insult (we say “progressive” nowadays, which reminds me of the disappearance of the words “negro” and “Afro-American,”) And yet I consider myself more reality-based than the crowds out in Ohio baying for the drawing and quartering of their gay neighbors because don’t you know what they’re doing to the soil?.

Sibling

My brother has a new camera phone. Apparently it can be programmed to take pictures of him whenever he sticks out his tongue.