One learns something new everyday. While researching Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I found myself reading about how it was used to in the search for computer scientist Jim Gray who was lost at sea (a fact I already knew). But what I did not know was that he was lost near the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco. While reading about the Farallon Islands on wikipedia I learned that near the islands was an oceanic radioactive waste dumping site in the mid 20th century.
Between 1946 and 1970, approximately 47,800 large barrels and other containers of radioactive waste were dumped in the ocean west of San Francisco. The containers were to be dumped at three designated sites, but they a litter sea floor area of at least 1,400 km2 known as the Farallon Island Radioactive Waste Dump.
When our children’s children finally start to learn of all the things that this generation and the generation before have provided them as an inheritance they sure are going to be pissed.
This clip of Sarah Palin doing a local TV interview with turkeys being slaughtered in the background has been making the rounds.
I am instantly reminded of the lines from the a Tom Waits song Murder in The Red Barn.
And no one’s asking Cal
About that scar upon his face
‘Cause there’s nothin’ strange
About an axe with bloodstains in the barn
There’s always some killin’
You got to do around the farm
A murder in the red barn
Murder in the red barn
Now the woods will never tell
What sleeps beneath the trees
Or what’s buried ‘neath a rock
Or hiding in the leaves
‘Cause road kill has it’s seasons
Just like anything
It’s possums in the atumn
And it’s farm cats in the spring
A murder in the red barn
A murder in the red barn
Say what you will about Palin and the PR disaster that this clip might present. But one thing is for certain she is true hick through and through. The casualness of the killing around the farm just reveals it more so than many had even imagined.
The interesting thing is perhaps ironically the visceral and graphic depiction of this clip and Palin’s apparent obliviousness in it will do more to promote PETA than all the naked athletes and movie stars could ever hope to accomplish.
As we go into thanksgiving turkey day I think it is a healthy reminder of all the killing we depend on but refuse to remain conscious of. Palin offers a rare unfiltered glimpse to an event that so called polite company would never acknowledge. If a PETA group tried to get footage of turkey slaughter on the major news outlets they would most likely be dismissed and railed against for disrupting social tradition and more often be ignored by mainstream media. Palin offers a rare moment to subvert that entrenched bias we seem to have against bringing up the brutal realities of our meat culture.
Now I am not particularly advocating vegetarianism. I am about 85% vegetarian in my routine diet, but I appreciate a good turkey dinner or hamburger as much as anybody. But as an ethical and moral matter I think it is appropriate that we are made viscerally aware of the killing that underlines our culture and society. This goes for animals as well as humans. Sarah Palin in the interview has done us all a great service, albeit perhaps unwittingly.
Here is some more of that viscerally provocative stuff:
One of my favorite bands Cake has decided to produce their next album entirely with solar energy. This is awesome on two fronts. One the environmental statement, but two CAKE HAS A NEW ALBUM IN THE WORKS! It has been too long. Hope there are not too many cloudy days in Sacramento, lest the album is delayed.
Yet nothing will free us from these disturbances of the mind so well as always fixing some limit to our advancement: men should be encouraged not to give to fortune the power of stopping their progress, but to halt far within their highest ambitions. In this way also some desires will sharpen the mind and these, being limited, will not lead into great and uncertain ventures.
In other words… tamp it down kid. You cannot control when and what fate will do to you, but you can insulate yourself from the damage by anticipating fate limiting yourself and acting before it acts. The the limited is achievable, the limitless is anguish and disaster, elation and success equally distributed but only on fate’s peculiar and uncertain schedule.
I have avoided being snarky about Palin as much as possible. I have tried to take her seriously, and give her credit even when it is not due. But this snark about fruit flies is over the top, beyond the pale. And really betrays ignorance that is no longer funny and rather quite frightening.
What is so unnerving about the statement is not so much the idea that she wants to repeal a specific earmark, but rather the dismissive nature of her tone and the self righteous indignation she conveys about a subject she knows so little about. It shows just how arbitrary and capricious she would be as a political leader.
I just wish she would actually learn about the things she belittles. She just might learn how important fruit flies are to helping us to understand the inner workings of “all of god’s children”.
I have been reading a short philosophical tract by William Hazlitt, On the Pleasure of Hating. A relevant passage for our times:
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over actions and motives of others. What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at? Does any one suppose that the love of country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition to serve another, bearing the same name? No, it means only hatred to the French, or the inhabitants of any other country that we happen to be at war with for the time. Does the love of virtue denote any wish to discover or amend our own faults? No, but it atones for an obstinate adherence to our own vices by the most virulent intolerance to human frailties. This principle is of a most universal application. It extends to good as well as evil: if it makes us hate folly, it makes us no less dissatisfied with distinguished merit. If it inclines us to resent the wrongs of other, it impels us to be as impatient of their prosperity. We revenge injuries: we repay benefits with ingratitude. Even our strongest partialities and likings soon take this turn. ‘That which was lush as locusts, anon becomes bitter as coloquintida’; and love and friendship melt in their own fires. We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.
This statement should go into any public record as a comment on the legacy of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol, and all the other neocon liars that we have suffered in this nation over the last several years.
Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophesy; whither all Delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion has now arrived.
For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever.
The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, in Heaven’s Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour.
~Thomas Carlyle
I have a confession. I have been cynical. Deeply cynical. As a strong holdout for Hillary I have had my doubts about Obama. Even been reserved in my support. But in the back of my heart I get it, I get the optimism, the guarded hope for the future. This nation has been disrupted and beaten down for so many years. Long before Bush, the spirit of this country was hushed and beaten into a submissive, bitter cynical mode. I stand here now ready to believe in the future. Ready to believe in Obama, ready to believe in the greatness of a nation renewed again.
What has brought me to this? Well it has something to do with these two videos.
I would much rather embrace the spirit of the latter and keep at arms length the spirit of the former.
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
We shall overcome because Carlyle is right—”No lie can live forever.”
We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right—”Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.”
We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right—
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future.
And behind the dim unknown stands God,
Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.
What immediately caught my eye was a photo of Mickey Rourke, brought in on driving under the influence charges. While I have no sympathy for anyone driving while intoxicated, I do find myself compelled by his enigmatic smile.
It betrays an inner peace. Or perhaps he is just “really, really high”. Who knows. But I do think it is a face of a person in control, master of their immediate domain. As a visual contrast take this photo of Kumari Fulbright, a former beauty queen, brought in on kidnaping charges and assaulting her boyfriend with a handgun.
Now obviously I do not know the precise and specific details of either situation, so I am left to read the photos for any additional meaning. And apart from the apparent nihilism of life what I do read is a deep chasm of difference. In the former we have an image of a man who conveys confidence, in the latter we have the visual of an apparently deeply disturbed individual. As a psychological portrait I don’t know which image of Fulbright I find more disturbing. The deeply troubled and traumatized girl on the left who obviously is under duress, or the gun toting soon to be trainwreck on the right. And I find myself moved to an emotion of pity and simultaneous urge to keep that kind of force away at arms length. As for Mickey Rourke I have always held a certain inexplicable contempt but nonetheless grudging respect for. This is in no small part due to his over the top portrayal in the film Barfly, based on Charles Bukowski’s work. Despite Mickey Rourke’s performance, it was one of the most memorable movies I have ever seen.
So what kind of conclusion does any of this lead to? None really, only a logical nihilism that looking at any photo must provide. Only affect. I am not there, I am not that which I see. A photograph is a hollow kind of being, into which we pour our own meaning. But I am lead to conclusions nonetheless. I am lead to a thought about the fragility of life, and the tenuous psychological fabric that either holds us together or tears us apart. In the two photos I find a most remarkable contrast, I don’t think there could be more opposite responses to having one’s mug shot taken. In one we find life in the other death. One conveys a spirit of affirmation, the other a spirit of total destruction and sense of panic as one confronts the void. Both serve as a model of how one can conduct one’s life and the emotions we may lay bare when we face consequences of our conduct. But the story is universal. Our life is our life and we may some day be held to account for our action. And in that moment we will have a choice. A fleeting moment before the camera or the gaze of others in which we can try to explain who and what we are and what belies our inner nature. And in this moment we can either affirm or negate. Will you greet it with an enigmatic smile or a spectacle of trauma? Strength or weakness? Hope or doubt? For how we make that choice is the key to our redemption. Our life is our life, and what we make of it is ours. We can confront it with an inner laughter or despair. The rest is truly meaningless. Because it is only in our choice that redemption comes forth.
Of course Charles Bukowski put it a little more poetically:
I always liked the phrase “conventional wisdom zombie” that Arianna Huffington and other bloggers have used to attack the mindlessness of the MSM. I recently stumbled across a related quote from the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith:
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
Of course there are others in the past who looked with great skepticism on the idea of “public opinion” which is a relatively modern invention. The philosopher Kierkegaard for example had a very negative view of the press and its role in shaping this notion of public opinion. He viewed it as a leveling force in society.
In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to produce a phantom, its spirit a monstrous abstraction…and that phantom is the Public.
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