Rubbish. That's what Steven Pinker's lecture was on Saturday. Rubbish. Drivel. Pandering drivel. Motivated obviously by the desire to sell his new book (something I should have foreseen and been aware of), Pinker gave a lecture at about the intellectual level of a fourthgrader...funny thing was, I seemed to be the only one who noticed. Enraptured applause, supine in their questions, the audience which seemed to be populated with a fair number of older intellectuals were disgusting in their sycophancy.
Pinker, it seems, understands the limitations of even "intellectual" crowds. I don't blame him, he's just a guy trying to sell his book...I blame the audience for settling, more than settling, being satisfied by it. Popular intellectualism is about the most pathetic thing I have ever seen. Ruined my night...couldn't think about the greater implications at the Which One's Pink show, but was simply numb with the experience of such shallow stupidity.
Gone are the days when the public intellectual had a worthy audience to be held accountable to. All gone. We are left with a bunch of retards masquerading as semi-competent, critical human beings. Even intellectualism, it seems, has succumbed to the superficiality of the marketplace.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Saturday, September 29, 2007
"A system of extraordinary complexity" -- Steven Pinker
Pink Floyd or language acquisition? Pinker or Which One's Pink? Is it an either/or or is it both?
Both. Tonight I'll try to segue from listening to Steven Pinker discuss his latest book on the relationship between word choice and human nature, to listening to the great Pink Floyd cover-band Which One's Pink? rattle off some of the best chosen lyrics describing the nature of human existence ever put to song. I'll focus on trying to tease out the connections...
I am toying with this one as a kind of warm up: Pinker advocates what he calls "Learnability Theory" to explain the complex process of language acquisition. In his own words, it posits a theoretical scenario involving four parts:
1. A class of languages. One of them is the "target" language, to be - attained by the learner, but the learner does not, of course, know - which it is. In the case of children, the class of languages would - consist of the existing and possible human languages; the target - language is the one spoken in their community.
2. An environment. This is the information in the world that the learner has to go on in trying to acquire the language. In the case of children, it might include the sentences parents utter, the context in which they utter them, feedback to the child (verbal or nonverbal) in response to the child's own speech, and so on. Parental utterances can be a random sample of the language, or they might have some special properties: they might be ordered in certain ways, sentences might be repeated or only uttered once, and so on.
3. A learning strategy. The learner, using information in the environment, tries out "hypotheses" about the target language. The learning strategy is the algorithm that creates the hypotheses and determines whether they are consistent with the input information from the environment. For children, it is the "grammar-forming" mechanism in their brains; their "language acquisition device."
4. A success criterion. If we want to say that "learning" occurs, presumably it is because the learners' hypotheses are not random, - but that by some time the hypotheses are related in some systematic - way to the target language. Learners may arrive at a hypothesis - identical to the target language after some fixed period of time; - they may arrive at an approximation to it; they may waiver among a - set of hypotheses one of which is correct.
Now, if we were to suppose that the Pink Floyd oeuvre was a language (the target language) and a concert the "environment," then what we are left with is to explain a learning strategy and a success criterion. My theory is that there is such a wide gulf between enlightened and cretin Floyd fans because the Floyd linguistic universe is only suitable to a select number of individuals with the preexistent "hypotheses" necessary to penetrate Floyd's deep grammar, and hence meaning. Hearing a Floyd song, or recognizing a Floyd tune or string of lyrics is not the same thing as comprehending and learning Floyd--once learned, it becomes a language tool that can be used as a stand-alone communication system, albeit only with other enlightened Floyd-language users.
One of the crucial preexisting "hypotheses" necessary for learning the language of Floyd is the spectral-nihilism algorithm, which is essentially a predisposition of the individual brain to interpret existence and "input" as significant in its spectral relations--the way different levels and modes of perception and existence interact with one another--but which are insignificant and devoid of ultimate meaning when taken as a whole--that is, a thorough-going nihilism about the ultimate ground of being.
More on Floyd acquisition after I see the show...
Friday, September 21, 2007
Islamo-Marxism?
An interesting, though sadly derivative article from the neo-con publication City Journal (from the guys that brought you the Broken Windows theory of crime no less!).
If Islamic extremism is the new Marxism...then why does it look so damn different on the ground? Conflating a revolutionary ideology with an apocalyptic theology is daft at best. The fact is that Islamic extremism IS attracting the same youth that a few decades ago would have become part of the lumpen Marxist fellow-travellers and sometime errand boys. But simply because radical Islam appeals to the same group of disaffected, alienated youth, doesn't mean that it has the same characteristics (but perhaps the same future) as revolutionary Marxism.
Sociologist Olivier Roy has done a lot of wonderful work showing how radical Islam has borrowed and appropriated Marxist ideas as it has become more and more Westernized. But despite this fact, Islamic extremism remains a very different bird.
The value of this comparative approach is not in revealing the parallels in ideologies, but in revealing the condition of a large swath of disaffected, alienated youth not necessarily exclusive to urban underclass communities. The fact is that there exists in every generation a slice of youth that rebel against the contemporaneous order...the challenge for that order is to create avenues of incorporation wherein these youth can find their voice and identities while still engaging the social order surrounding them. Criminalizing their ideas or otherwise shunning them from the public space is a sure way to bolster the extremists of any age, whether they be Marxists, radical Islamists or common gang members.
City Journal Current Issue
Theodore Dalrymple
Islam, the Marxism of Our Time
Some troubling signs in Europe
17 September 2007
From an Islamist point of view, the news from Europe looks good. The Times of London, relying on a police report, recently observed that the Deobandis, a fundamentalist sect, now run nearly half of the 1,350 mosques in Britain and train the vast majority of the Muslim clerics who get their training in the country. The man who might become the sect’s spiritual leader in Britain, Riyadh ul Haq, believes that friendship with a Christian or a Jew makes “a mockery of Allah’s religion.” At least no one could accuse him of a shallow multiculturalism.
According to Le Figaro, 70 percent of Muslims in France intend to keep the fast during Ramadan, up from 60 percent in 1989. Better still, from the Islamist point of view, non-practicing Muslims feel increasing social pressure to comply with the fast, whether they want to or not. The tide is thus running in the Islamists’ favor.
Best news of all for the Islamists, however, comes from Germany. Two of the men that the German police arrested in early September for plotting a series of huge explosions in the country were young German converts to Islam. It is impossible to know how many such German converts there are, but it is thought to run into tens of thousands, principally men; in the nature of things, it is also uncertain how many of them are attracted to extremism, but few people are so attracted by moderation that they are converted by it.
The man believed to be the leader of the little group, Fritz G., the son of a doctor and an engineer, was himself a student of engineering, of mediocre attainment. He grew up in Ulm, where a quarter of the population is now Muslim, and at the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 15, he began to frequent the Islamic Information Center of Ulm, and also the comically named Multikultihaus in the neighboring town of Neu-Ulm, where young men of jihadist views, including Mohammed Atta, had long congregated. In 2004, he was spotted at the Ulm Islamic center, selling a journal called Think in the Islamic Way. In December of that year, the police found propaganda in favor of Osama bin Laden in his car. In 2006, he went to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
His fellow conspirator, Daniel S., came from a well-off family and converted early in life to radical Islam. He traveled to Egypt to learn Arabic, and then returned to Germany, where he sometimes irritated his neighbors by praying loudly in Arabic three times a day.
All this suggests that Islam is fast becoming the Marxism of our times. Had Fritz G. and Daniel S. grown up a generation earlier, they would have become members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang rather than Islamic extremists. The dictatorship of the proletariat, it seems, has given way before the establishment of the Caliphate as the transcendent answer to some German youths’ personal angst.
This is good news indeed for Islamists, but not so good for the rest of us.
If Islamic extremism is the new Marxism...then why does it look so damn different on the ground? Conflating a revolutionary ideology with an apocalyptic theology is daft at best. The fact is that Islamic extremism IS attracting the same youth that a few decades ago would have become part of the lumpen Marxist fellow-travellers and sometime errand boys. But simply because radical Islam appeals to the same group of disaffected, alienated youth, doesn't mean that it has the same characteristics (but perhaps the same future) as revolutionary Marxism.
Sociologist Olivier Roy has done a lot of wonderful work showing how radical Islam has borrowed and appropriated Marxist ideas as it has become more and more Westernized. But despite this fact, Islamic extremism remains a very different bird.
The value of this comparative approach is not in revealing the parallels in ideologies, but in revealing the condition of a large swath of disaffected, alienated youth not necessarily exclusive to urban underclass communities. The fact is that there exists in every generation a slice of youth that rebel against the contemporaneous order...the challenge for that order is to create avenues of incorporation wherein these youth can find their voice and identities while still engaging the social order surrounding them. Criminalizing their ideas or otherwise shunning them from the public space is a sure way to bolster the extremists of any age, whether they be Marxists, radical Islamists or common gang members.
City Journal Current Issue
Theodore Dalrymple
Islam, the Marxism of Our Time
Some troubling signs in Europe
17 September 2007
From an Islamist point of view, the news from Europe looks good. The Times of London, relying on a police report, recently observed that the Deobandis, a fundamentalist sect, now run nearly half of the 1,350 mosques in Britain and train the vast majority of the Muslim clerics who get their training in the country. The man who might become the sect’s spiritual leader in Britain, Riyadh ul Haq, believes that friendship with a Christian or a Jew makes “a mockery of Allah’s religion.” At least no one could accuse him of a shallow multiculturalism.
According to Le Figaro, 70 percent of Muslims in France intend to keep the fast during Ramadan, up from 60 percent in 1989. Better still, from the Islamist point of view, non-practicing Muslims feel increasing social pressure to comply with the fast, whether they want to or not. The tide is thus running in the Islamists’ favor.
Best news of all for the Islamists, however, comes from Germany. Two of the men that the German police arrested in early September for plotting a series of huge explosions in the country were young German converts to Islam. It is impossible to know how many such German converts there are, but it is thought to run into tens of thousands, principally men; in the nature of things, it is also uncertain how many of them are attracted to extremism, but few people are so attracted by moderation that they are converted by it.
The man believed to be the leader of the little group, Fritz G., the son of a doctor and an engineer, was himself a student of engineering, of mediocre attainment. He grew up in Ulm, where a quarter of the population is now Muslim, and at the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 15, he began to frequent the Islamic Information Center of Ulm, and also the comically named Multikultihaus in the neighboring town of Neu-Ulm, where young men of jihadist views, including Mohammed Atta, had long congregated. In 2004, he was spotted at the Ulm Islamic center, selling a journal called Think in the Islamic Way. In December of that year, the police found propaganda in favor of Osama bin Laden in his car. In 2006, he went to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
His fellow conspirator, Daniel S., came from a well-off family and converted early in life to radical Islam. He traveled to Egypt to learn Arabic, and then returned to Germany, where he sometimes irritated his neighbors by praying loudly in Arabic three times a day.
All this suggests that Islam is fast becoming the Marxism of our times. Had Fritz G. and Daniel S. grown up a generation earlier, they would have become members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang rather than Islamic extremists. The dictatorship of the proletariat, it seems, has given way before the establishment of the Caliphate as the transcendent answer to some German youths’ personal angst.
This is good news indeed for Islamists, but not so good for the rest of us.
Knowledge is Power
An interesting article from the NY Times today. The fact is, there exists an entire cottage industry within prisons to procure and distribute literature promoting violence and racial hatred. However, there also exists a parallel industry, desperately combing the sparse shelves of prison libraries for the classics, philosophy, social criticism, history, anything to broaden the mind and raise it over the concertina-lined enclosure that keeps the understanding and the will bound in ignorance and fear.
Taking the illegal books out of prisons will help, rather than hinder, the sinister industry's prospects and clientèle. It will teach the inmates, many of which are incredibly smart and attuned to the machinations of power, that they are being denied knowledge as a form of control, as part of a technology of control, further reinforcing their opposition to the state, to the guards, and to anyone different from their own small, safe world that they have built within the prison.
A laissez faire policy is what has the potential to do the most good, and not just laissez faire, but an active policy that would focus on bringing in as many diverse and intelligent voices as possible, in the form of words on the page, into the prison culture. Because when we speak of books, we speak of culture, of the primary cultural influence upon the hermetic universes that are prison houses. In fact, prisons, by their very structure, should be the easiest cultures to influence...one just has to understand just what kind of environment one is dealing with, an understanding obviously not a part of the mental universe of our prison authorities, both State and Federal.
Interestingly, there does not exist even an approved "secular" reading list for prisons. This situation, I have found, is responsible both for the religious extremism that is frequently a part of prison culture, as well as for the woefully archaic and disconnected moral and civic values that are created in a context where engaging with non-religious ideas about the world and society and ones place in it are expressly forbidden. I have seen with my own eyes the Federalist Papers and Common Sense purged from an inmate's room...and I had to keep my own copies of Paine's The Rights of Man and Mill's On Liberty close to my chest in order to keep them from being confiscated...an outrage? No, a travesty borne of complete incompetence.
Critics Right and Left Protest Book Removals
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: September 21, 2007
The federal Bureau of Prisons is under pressure from members of Congress and religious groups to reverse its decision to purge the shelves of prison chapel libraries of all religious books and materials that are not on the bureau’s lists of approved resources.
'Standardized Chapel Library Project' Lists
These lists were provided by a source who works in the federal prison system. The exact date of the lists is unknown, and they may have been revised.
Bahai
Buddhist
Catholic
General Spirituality
Hindu
Islam
Jehovah's Witnesses
Judaism
Messianic
Mormon
Nation of Islam
Native American
Orthodox
Other Religions
Pagan
Protestant
Rastafarian
Sikh
Yoruba
Related
Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries (September 10, 2007)
Outrage over the bureau’s decision has come from both conservatives and liberals, who say it is inappropriate to limit inmates to a religious reading list determined by the government.
The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of some of the most conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, sent a letter on Wednesday to the bureau’s director, Harley G. Lappin, saying, “We must ensure that in America the federal government is not the undue arbiter of what may or may not be read by our citizens.”
Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said in an interview, “Anything that impinges upon the religious liberties of American citizens, be they incarcerated or not, is something that’s going to cause House conservatives great concern.”
The bureau, the target of a class-action lawsuit by prisoners because of the book purge, is hearing criticism from a broad array of religious groups and leaders. Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group based in Washington, sent an alert to its members, who within 48 hours sent the bureau more than 15,000 e-mail messages urging it to scrap the policy. The issue is also a hot topic on conservative Christian talk radio shows.
Spokesmen for the Bureau of Prisons said it was not reconsidering its policy. The bureau said it was prompted to act by a report in 2004 from the inspector general of the Department of Justice, which mentioned that since most prisons did not catalog their library materials, radical books that incite violence and hatred could infiltrate the shelves.
Initially, the bureau set out to take an inventory of every book and item in its chapel libraries. When the list grew to the tens of thousands, the bureau decided instead to generate lists of acceptable books and materials — about 150 items for each of 20 religions or religious categories. It calls that plan the Standardized Chapel Library Project.
Prison chaplains were instructed in the spring to remove everything not on the lists, and put it in storage. The bureau said it planned to issue additions to the lists once a year.
Douglas Kelly, a Muslim inmate at the minimum security Federal Prison Camp in Otisville, N.Y., said his chaplain showed up in the chapel library with garbage bags one day last spring and removed “hundreds and hundreds” of volumes. The only thing left on the sole shelf devoted to Islam was a Koran and a few volumes of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.
“It’s very important to have as much material as possible,” said Mr. Kelly, a recent convert who said he learned about Islam from a book another prisoner gave him. “What I know of Islam, and what I’ve been able to practice so far, has been as a result of the literature and the books I’ve been able to get ahold of. Unfortunately this purge has curtailed our short supply.
“I’ve seen the list of approved books, and 99 percent of them, we never had to begin with,” said Mr. Kelly, 40, who pleaded guilty to using a false identity. He said that prisoners were permitted to keep only five books of their own.
Mr. Kelly is an original plaintiff in the lawsuit against the bureau, and expects to sign on as a plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, which was refiled in late August. The other named plaintiffs are a Christian and a Jew.
Mr. Kelly and the Christian plaintiff, John Okon, agreed to a telephone interview, but Mr. Okon decided not to participate when officials at the Otisville prison insisted on sitting in the room during the interview. (The Jewish plaintiff has already been released to a halfway house and declined an interview).
Some organizations that advocate for inmates’ religious rights say they have privately been trying to persuade federal authorities to rethink the policy.
Leaders of the Aleph Institute, a Jewish group, and Prison Fellowship, a Christian group, say they met last week with the director of the Bureau of Prisons and Acting Deputy Attorney General Craig S. Morford.
Rabbi Aaron Lipskar, executive director of the Aleph Institute, a group founded by the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher movement, said that the government officials tried to reassure them that a book could be restored to the library if a prisoner requested it, the chaplain vetted it from start to finish, the chaplain sent a certification form to the bureau in Washington and the book made the updated approval list.
“I find it almost impossible that they can expect a prison chaplaincy department, which is already so strained, to take the time to review all these materials,” Rabbi Lipskar said. “No matter to what extent they try to fix this policy, it will never come out right.”
Taking the illegal books out of prisons will help, rather than hinder, the sinister industry's prospects and clientèle. It will teach the inmates, many of which are incredibly smart and attuned to the machinations of power, that they are being denied knowledge as a form of control, as part of a technology of control, further reinforcing their opposition to the state, to the guards, and to anyone different from their own small, safe world that they have built within the prison.
A laissez faire policy is what has the potential to do the most good, and not just laissez faire, but an active policy that would focus on bringing in as many diverse and intelligent voices as possible, in the form of words on the page, into the prison culture. Because when we speak of books, we speak of culture, of the primary cultural influence upon the hermetic universes that are prison houses. In fact, prisons, by their very structure, should be the easiest cultures to influence...one just has to understand just what kind of environment one is dealing with, an understanding obviously not a part of the mental universe of our prison authorities, both State and Federal.
Interestingly, there does not exist even an approved "secular" reading list for prisons. This situation, I have found, is responsible both for the religious extremism that is frequently a part of prison culture, as well as for the woefully archaic and disconnected moral and civic values that are created in a context where engaging with non-religious ideas about the world and society and ones place in it are expressly forbidden. I have seen with my own eyes the Federalist Papers and Common Sense purged from an inmate's room...and I had to keep my own copies of Paine's The Rights of Man and Mill's On Liberty close to my chest in order to keep them from being confiscated...an outrage? No, a travesty borne of complete incompetence.
Critics Right and Left Protest Book Removals
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: September 21, 2007
The federal Bureau of Prisons is under pressure from members of Congress and religious groups to reverse its decision to purge the shelves of prison chapel libraries of all religious books and materials that are not on the bureau’s lists of approved resources.
'Standardized Chapel Library Project' Lists
These lists were provided by a source who works in the federal prison system. The exact date of the lists is unknown, and they may have been revised.
Bahai
Buddhist
Catholic
General Spirituality
Hindu
Islam
Jehovah's Witnesses
Judaism
Messianic
Mormon
Nation of Islam
Native American
Orthodox
Other Religions
Pagan
Protestant
Rastafarian
Sikh
Yoruba
Related
Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries (September 10, 2007)
Outrage over the bureau’s decision has come from both conservatives and liberals, who say it is inappropriate to limit inmates to a religious reading list determined by the government.
The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of some of the most conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, sent a letter on Wednesday to the bureau’s director, Harley G. Lappin, saying, “We must ensure that in America the federal government is not the undue arbiter of what may or may not be read by our citizens.”
Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said in an interview, “Anything that impinges upon the religious liberties of American citizens, be they incarcerated or not, is something that’s going to cause House conservatives great concern.”
The bureau, the target of a class-action lawsuit by prisoners because of the book purge, is hearing criticism from a broad array of religious groups and leaders. Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group based in Washington, sent an alert to its members, who within 48 hours sent the bureau more than 15,000 e-mail messages urging it to scrap the policy. The issue is also a hot topic on conservative Christian talk radio shows.
Spokesmen for the Bureau of Prisons said it was not reconsidering its policy. The bureau said it was prompted to act by a report in 2004 from the inspector general of the Department of Justice, which mentioned that since most prisons did not catalog their library materials, radical books that incite violence and hatred could infiltrate the shelves.
Initially, the bureau set out to take an inventory of every book and item in its chapel libraries. When the list grew to the tens of thousands, the bureau decided instead to generate lists of acceptable books and materials — about 150 items for each of 20 religions or religious categories. It calls that plan the Standardized Chapel Library Project.
Prison chaplains were instructed in the spring to remove everything not on the lists, and put it in storage. The bureau said it planned to issue additions to the lists once a year.
Douglas Kelly, a Muslim inmate at the minimum security Federal Prison Camp in Otisville, N.Y., said his chaplain showed up in the chapel library with garbage bags one day last spring and removed “hundreds and hundreds” of volumes. The only thing left on the sole shelf devoted to Islam was a Koran and a few volumes of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.
“It’s very important to have as much material as possible,” said Mr. Kelly, a recent convert who said he learned about Islam from a book another prisoner gave him. “What I know of Islam, and what I’ve been able to practice so far, has been as a result of the literature and the books I’ve been able to get ahold of. Unfortunately this purge has curtailed our short supply.
“I’ve seen the list of approved books, and 99 percent of them, we never had to begin with,” said Mr. Kelly, 40, who pleaded guilty to using a false identity. He said that prisoners were permitted to keep only five books of their own.
Mr. Kelly is an original plaintiff in the lawsuit against the bureau, and expects to sign on as a plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, which was refiled in late August. The other named plaintiffs are a Christian and a Jew.
Mr. Kelly and the Christian plaintiff, John Okon, agreed to a telephone interview, but Mr. Okon decided not to participate when officials at the Otisville prison insisted on sitting in the room during the interview. (The Jewish plaintiff has already been released to a halfway house and declined an interview).
Some organizations that advocate for inmates’ religious rights say they have privately been trying to persuade federal authorities to rethink the policy.
Leaders of the Aleph Institute, a Jewish group, and Prison Fellowship, a Christian group, say they met last week with the director of the Bureau of Prisons and Acting Deputy Attorney General Craig S. Morford.
Rabbi Aaron Lipskar, executive director of the Aleph Institute, a group founded by the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher movement, said that the government officials tried to reassure them that a book could be restored to the library if a prisoner requested it, the chaplain vetted it from start to finish, the chaplain sent a certification form to the bureau in Washington and the book made the updated approval list.
“I find it almost impossible that they can expect a prison chaplaincy department, which is already so strained, to take the time to review all these materials,” Rabbi Lipskar said. “No matter to what extent they try to fix this policy, it will never come out right.”
Thursday, September 20, 2007
God in the Dock
Does faith to some extent require one to put God in the dock? On the contrary, it is frightful to think of a God that is beyond his own justice...especially when His nature seems, in mnay respects, to be contrary to it. An interesting story in this connection...
News : State News
Nebraska State Senator Sues God
Case attempts to bring attention to unnecessary lawsuits
State Senator Ernie Chambers has filed a lawsuit against God.
State Senator Ernie Chambers is noted most for shedding light on issues by publicly confronting those in prominent positions. Chamber's newest target holds the highest position of them all: He’s suing God.
The purpose of the lawsuit is to show that anyone can sue anyone else, according to The Associate Press.
“It’s Ernie Chambers,” Matt Baker, first year University of Nebraska-Lincoln law student, said. “He just does thing like that.”
Baker said that, of course, Chambers could attempt this, but the turnout probably won’t be good for him if it does go to court.
Chambers’ reasoning behind the lawsuit is to show that this lawsuit, along with many others, is frivolous.
“People might call it frivolous but if they read it they'll see there are very serious issues I have raised,” Chambers said in an interview with the AP.
Chambers filed the lawsuit in response to a current lawsuit against District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront. Cheuvront, the judge in a Lancaster County sexual assault trial, prohibited the use of words such as “rape” and “victim” so as to not sway the court one way or the other.
The accuser, Torey Bowen, is suing the judge because she said he violated her free speech rights, according to the AP.
Chambers said his case against God comes from threats from The Almighty. He claims the threats come from widespread terrorization that God has caused with floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters, according to the AP.
Assistant Professor of Law Eric Berger thinks Chambers' lawsuit is frivolous. photo: courtesy of UNL College of Law
Eric Berger, UNL assistant professor of law said he was entertained by the story but doesn’t know what the outcome of the lawsuit could be.
“People are paying attention because it’s an unusual suit, but at the end of the day there’s probably a better way of denouncing frivolous lawsuits,” he said.
News : State News
Nebraska State Senator Sues God
Case attempts to bring attention to unnecessary lawsuits
State Senator Ernie Chambers has filed a lawsuit against God.
State Senator Ernie Chambers is noted most for shedding light on issues by publicly confronting those in prominent positions. Chamber's newest target holds the highest position of them all: He’s suing God.
The purpose of the lawsuit is to show that anyone can sue anyone else, according to The Associate Press.
“It’s Ernie Chambers,” Matt Baker, first year University of Nebraska-Lincoln law student, said. “He just does thing like that.”
Baker said that, of course, Chambers could attempt this, but the turnout probably won’t be good for him if it does go to court.
Chambers’ reasoning behind the lawsuit is to show that this lawsuit, along with many others, is frivolous.
“People might call it frivolous but if they read it they'll see there are very serious issues I have raised,” Chambers said in an interview with the AP.
Chambers filed the lawsuit in response to a current lawsuit against District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront. Cheuvront, the judge in a Lancaster County sexual assault trial, prohibited the use of words such as “rape” and “victim” so as to not sway the court one way or the other.
The accuser, Torey Bowen, is suing the judge because she said he violated her free speech rights, according to the AP.
Chambers said his case against God comes from threats from The Almighty. He claims the threats come from widespread terrorization that God has caused with floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters, according to the AP.
Assistant Professor of Law Eric Berger thinks Chambers' lawsuit is frivolous. photo: courtesy of UNL College of Law
Eric Berger, UNL assistant professor of law said he was entertained by the story but doesn’t know what the outcome of the lawsuit could be.
“People are paying attention because it’s an unusual suit, but at the end of the day there’s probably a better way of denouncing frivolous lawsuits,” he said.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Socialism for the Rich?
Here's a great article from the New York Times on the latest lending crisis...who said there isn't a welfare for the rich?
The Fed’s Subprime Solution
By JAMES GRANT
Published: August 26, 2007
THE subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 is, in fact, a credit crisis — a worldwide disruption in lending and borrowing. It is only the latest in a long succession of such disturbances. Who’s to blame? The human race, first and foremost. Well-intended public policy, second. And Wall Street, third — if only for taking what generations of policy makers have so unwisely handed it.
Possibly, one lender and one borrower could do business together without harm to themselves or to the economy around them. But masses of lenders and borrowers invariably seem to come to grief, as they have today — not only in mortgages but also in a variety of other debt instruments. First, they overdo it until the signs of excess become too obvious to ignore. Then, with contrite and fearful hearts, they proceed to underdo it. Such is the “credit cycle,” the eternal migration of lenders and borrowers between the extreme points of accommodation and stringency.
Significantly, such cycles have occurred in every institutional, monetary and regulatory setting. No need for a central bank, or for newfangled mortgage securities, or for the proliferation of hedge funds to foment a panic — there have been plenty of dislocations without any of the modern-day improvements.
Late in the 1880s, long before the institution of the Federal Reserve, Eastern savers and Western borrowers teamed up to inflate the value of cropland in the Great Plains. Gimmicky mortgages — pay interest and only interest for the first two years! — and loose talk of a new era in rainfall beguiled the borrowers. High yields on Western mortgages enticed the lenders. But the climate of Kansas and Nebraska reverted to parched, and the drought-stricken debtors trudged back East or to the West Coast in wagons emblazoned, “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.” To the creditors went the farms.
Every crackup is the same, yet every one is different. Today’s troubles are unusual not because the losses have been felt so far from the corner of Broad and Wall, or because our lenders are unprecedentedly reckless. The panics of the second half of the 19th century were trans-Atlantic affairs, while the debt abuses of the 1920s anticipated the most dubious lending practices of 2006. Our crisis will go down in history for different reasons.
One is the sheer size of the debt in which people have belatedly lost faith. The issuance of one kind of mortgage-backed structure — collateralized debt obligations — alone runs to $1 trillion. The shocking fragility of recently issued debt is another singular feature of the 2007 downturn — alarming numbers of defaults despite high employment and reasonably strong economic growth. Hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities would, by now, have had to be recalled if Wall Street did business as Detroit does.
Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd, in the 1940 edition of their seminal volume “Security Analysis,” held that the acid test of a bond or a mortgage issuer is its ability to discharge its financial obligations “under conditions of depression rather than prosperity.” Today’s mortgage market can’t seem to weather prosperity.
A third remarkable aspect of the summer’s troubles is the speed with which the world’s central banks have felt it necessary to intervene. Bear in mind that when the Federal Reserve cut its discount rate on Aug. 17 — a move intended to restore confidence and restart the machinery of lending and borrowing — the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen just 8.25 percent from its record high. The Fed has so far refused to reduce the federal funds rate, the main interest rate it fixes, but it has all but begged the banks to avail themselves of the dollars they need through the slightly unconventional means of borrowing at the discount window — that is, from the Fed itself.
What could account for the weakness of our credit markets? Why does the Fed feel the need to intervene at the drop of a market? The reasons have to do with an idea set firmly in place in the 1930s and expanded at every crisis up to the present. This is the notion that, while the risks inherent in the business of lending and borrowing should be finally borne by the public, the profits of that line of work should mainly accrue to the lenders and borrowers.
It has not been lost on our Wall Street titans that the government is the reliable first responder to scenes of financial distress, or that there will always be enough paper dollars to go around to assist the very largest financial institutions. In the aftermath of the failure of Long-Term Capital Management, the genius-directed hedge fund that came a cropper in 1998, the Fed — under Alan Greenspan — delivered three quick reductions in the federal funds rate. Thus fortified, lenders and borrowers, speculators and investors, resumed their manic buying of technology stocks. That bubble burst in March 2000.
Understandably, it’s only the selling kind of panic to which the government dispatches its rescue apparatus. Few object to riots on the upside. But bull markets, too, go to extremes. People get carried away, prices go too high and economic resources go where they shouldn’t. Bear markets are nature’s way of returning to the rule of reason.
But the regulatory history of the past decade is the story of governmental encroachment on the bears’ habitat. Under Mr. Greenspan, the Fed set its face against falling prices everywhere. As it intervened to save the financial markets in 1998, so it printed money in 2002 and 2003 to rescue the economy. From what? From the peril of everyday lower prices — “deflation,” the economists styled it. In this mission, at least, the Fed succeeded. Prices, especially housing prices, soared. Knowing that the Fed would do its best to engineer rising prices, people responded rationally. They borrowed lots of money at the Fed’s ultralow interest rates.
Now comes the bill for that binge and, with it, cries for even greater federal oversight and protection. Ben S. Bernanke, Mr. Greenspan’s successor at the Fed (and his loyal supporter during the antideflation hysteria), is said to be resisting the demand for broadly lower interest rates. Maybe he is seeing the light that capitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich.
In any case, to all of us, rich and poor alike, the Fed owes a pledge that it will do what it can and not do what it can’t. High on the list of things that no human agency can, or should, attempt is manipulating prices to achieve a more stable and prosperous economy. Jiggling its interest rate, the Fed can impose the appearance of stability today, but only at the cost of instability tomorrow. By the looks of things, tomorrow is upon us already.
A century ago, on the eve of the Panic of 1907, the president of the National City Bank of New York, James Stillman, prepared for the troubles he saw coming. “If by able and judicious management,” he briefed his staff, “we have money to help our dealers when trust companies have [failed], we will have all the business we want for many years.” The panic came and his bank, today called Citigroup, emerged more profitable than ever.
Last month, Stillman’s corporate descendant, Chuck Prince, chief executive of Citigroup, dismissed fears about an early end to the postmillennial debt frolics. “When the music stops,” he told The Financial Times, “in terms of liquidity, things will get complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”
What a difference a century makes.
The Fed’s Subprime Solution
By JAMES GRANT
Published: August 26, 2007
THE subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 is, in fact, a credit crisis — a worldwide disruption in lending and borrowing. It is only the latest in a long succession of such disturbances. Who’s to blame? The human race, first and foremost. Well-intended public policy, second. And Wall Street, third — if only for taking what generations of policy makers have so unwisely handed it.
Possibly, one lender and one borrower could do business together without harm to themselves or to the economy around them. But masses of lenders and borrowers invariably seem to come to grief, as they have today — not only in mortgages but also in a variety of other debt instruments. First, they overdo it until the signs of excess become too obvious to ignore. Then, with contrite and fearful hearts, they proceed to underdo it. Such is the “credit cycle,” the eternal migration of lenders and borrowers between the extreme points of accommodation and stringency.
Significantly, such cycles have occurred in every institutional, monetary and regulatory setting. No need for a central bank, or for newfangled mortgage securities, or for the proliferation of hedge funds to foment a panic — there have been plenty of dislocations without any of the modern-day improvements.
Late in the 1880s, long before the institution of the Federal Reserve, Eastern savers and Western borrowers teamed up to inflate the value of cropland in the Great Plains. Gimmicky mortgages — pay interest and only interest for the first two years! — and loose talk of a new era in rainfall beguiled the borrowers. High yields on Western mortgages enticed the lenders. But the climate of Kansas and Nebraska reverted to parched, and the drought-stricken debtors trudged back East or to the West Coast in wagons emblazoned, “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.” To the creditors went the farms.
Every crackup is the same, yet every one is different. Today’s troubles are unusual not because the losses have been felt so far from the corner of Broad and Wall, or because our lenders are unprecedentedly reckless. The panics of the second half of the 19th century were trans-Atlantic affairs, while the debt abuses of the 1920s anticipated the most dubious lending practices of 2006. Our crisis will go down in history for different reasons.
One is the sheer size of the debt in which people have belatedly lost faith. The issuance of one kind of mortgage-backed structure — collateralized debt obligations — alone runs to $1 trillion. The shocking fragility of recently issued debt is another singular feature of the 2007 downturn — alarming numbers of defaults despite high employment and reasonably strong economic growth. Hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities would, by now, have had to be recalled if Wall Street did business as Detroit does.
Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd, in the 1940 edition of their seminal volume “Security Analysis,” held that the acid test of a bond or a mortgage issuer is its ability to discharge its financial obligations “under conditions of depression rather than prosperity.” Today’s mortgage market can’t seem to weather prosperity.
A third remarkable aspect of the summer’s troubles is the speed with which the world’s central banks have felt it necessary to intervene. Bear in mind that when the Federal Reserve cut its discount rate on Aug. 17 — a move intended to restore confidence and restart the machinery of lending and borrowing — the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen just 8.25 percent from its record high. The Fed has so far refused to reduce the federal funds rate, the main interest rate it fixes, but it has all but begged the banks to avail themselves of the dollars they need through the slightly unconventional means of borrowing at the discount window — that is, from the Fed itself.
What could account for the weakness of our credit markets? Why does the Fed feel the need to intervene at the drop of a market? The reasons have to do with an idea set firmly in place in the 1930s and expanded at every crisis up to the present. This is the notion that, while the risks inherent in the business of lending and borrowing should be finally borne by the public, the profits of that line of work should mainly accrue to the lenders and borrowers.
It has not been lost on our Wall Street titans that the government is the reliable first responder to scenes of financial distress, or that there will always be enough paper dollars to go around to assist the very largest financial institutions. In the aftermath of the failure of Long-Term Capital Management, the genius-directed hedge fund that came a cropper in 1998, the Fed — under Alan Greenspan — delivered three quick reductions in the federal funds rate. Thus fortified, lenders and borrowers, speculators and investors, resumed their manic buying of technology stocks. That bubble burst in March 2000.
Understandably, it’s only the selling kind of panic to which the government dispatches its rescue apparatus. Few object to riots on the upside. But bull markets, too, go to extremes. People get carried away, prices go too high and economic resources go where they shouldn’t. Bear markets are nature’s way of returning to the rule of reason.
But the regulatory history of the past decade is the story of governmental encroachment on the bears’ habitat. Under Mr. Greenspan, the Fed set its face against falling prices everywhere. As it intervened to save the financial markets in 1998, so it printed money in 2002 and 2003 to rescue the economy. From what? From the peril of everyday lower prices — “deflation,” the economists styled it. In this mission, at least, the Fed succeeded. Prices, especially housing prices, soared. Knowing that the Fed would do its best to engineer rising prices, people responded rationally. They borrowed lots of money at the Fed’s ultralow interest rates.
Now comes the bill for that binge and, with it, cries for even greater federal oversight and protection. Ben S. Bernanke, Mr. Greenspan’s successor at the Fed (and his loyal supporter during the antideflation hysteria), is said to be resisting the demand for broadly lower interest rates. Maybe he is seeing the light that capitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich.
In any case, to all of us, rich and poor alike, the Fed owes a pledge that it will do what it can and not do what it can’t. High on the list of things that no human agency can, or should, attempt is manipulating prices to achieve a more stable and prosperous economy. Jiggling its interest rate, the Fed can impose the appearance of stability today, but only at the cost of instability tomorrow. By the looks of things, tomorrow is upon us already.
A century ago, on the eve of the Panic of 1907, the president of the National City Bank of New York, James Stillman, prepared for the troubles he saw coming. “If by able and judicious management,” he briefed his staff, “we have money to help our dealers when trust companies have [failed], we will have all the business we want for many years.” The panic came and his bank, today called Citigroup, emerged more profitable than ever.
Last month, Stillman’s corporate descendant, Chuck Prince, chief executive of Citigroup, dismissed fears about an early end to the postmillennial debt frolics. “When the music stops,” he told The Financial Times, “in terms of liquidity, things will get complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”
What a difference a century makes.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Thus spake Stephen Wright
Long ago, in the 80's, a prophet foretold the coming of One whose beauty he himself could not have held a candle to...like the prophets of old, his words were ascribed to a King, but the secret meaning was clear: a child was born, and they called him Handsome. The year of my birth Stephen Wright spake thus of Steven Morrissey:
"I repeat. The only thing to be in 1983 is handsome."
Christianity
Everyone knows Jeff Buckley's rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." But have you ever considered it as a symbol of a Christianity that has the potential of actually working, of achieving a deep authenticity in this age of shallow, feckless religion.
What's great about Buckley's Christianity, if you will, is that it isn't. It is religionless. Heterodox. Honest. Passionate. Searching. Doubtful. Full of transcendent pathos.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
What is a Child?
Is a child a child only when he behaves? If a child makes a big mistake, does he lose the right to continue as a child? What happens when he grows up and realizes, in the light that maturation provides, the errors of his puerile ways? If he never has the chance to benefit from that growing up because he has already been stripped of his childhood, then what hope does that man have left?
I re-entered a courtroom for the first time in five years this last week...I was attending the trial of a 14 year old boy being prosecuted as an adult, direct filed into the adult system, facing life in prison.I was that child not so many years ago...sitting in that chair, the chair of the accused, legs and arms shackled to my waist. Deja vu. Now I was watching it repeat all over again.
And yet...the other child. The child for whom society, in its infinite wisdom, considers it justice to sacrifice this child's life in propitiation for the loss of his own. Lex Talionis (the law of the talon) is still alive and well in our hearts, it seems.
The challenge is not to let oneself be ruled by fear. Not to let oneself be ruled by distorted fearmongering. And to let oneself see the child in the child. To see that child in this child. This child in that child. Until we can achieve that level of imagination, of trans-empathy, of grace, we are lost, and because we are lost our children are lost, especially when they make devastating mistakes.
If anyone cares, here is a link to the most recent coverage of the trial:
http://independent.com/news/2007/aug/09/pathologist-describes-stabbing-juarez-prelim/
Friday, June 22, 2007
My Candidate for President
So, I have been researching Presidential candidates lately. It was a tough choice--I mean, come on, what with Clinton and Obama, McCain and Giuliani, sheesh, who can choose just one!
So I have chosen a compromise candidate. Perhaps you don't recognize him. That's OK, its not your fault, he's French. Nevertheless, apart from that one little problem, he seems to be the perfect admixture between what I'd want as a President--and what everyone else seems to want in one, namely:
What People Want
1--to be rich.
2--good looking (nice hair)
3--self-possessed ("confident")
4--seemingly competent (Levy is perhaps a bit too competent. I can just see his speech writers now, wearily chiseling down his famously voluminous, long-winded, magniloquent lectures/speeches to their bare bones--so as to become intelligible to an ever linguistically degenerating American public)
5--Presumptuous
6--Seemingly visionary
What I Want
1--to be so rich she/he has ceased to be at all motivated by profit.
2--actually competent and literate, so as to be a challenging mind to follow.
3--honest to the point of offense.
4--an idiosyncratic visionary that dreams her/his own dreams.
5--rational...that is, has the capacity to understand the impact of his decisions on the least of the humans under her/his leadership.
So I choose Bernard Henri-Levy because he fits both bills fully and precisely. We'll see--my hope is that Schwarzenegger will make a push to change the Constitutional prohibition on foreign born candidates for President, and that Levy will then jump on the band wagon, fight a blitzkrieg campaign, and take the field--with consultation help from Ralph Nader--as an independent. Yeah.
bhl for President! Vive la America! (my French is horrible!)
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Good Marketing
If there were more advertisements like this in America, then I'd think about sticking around...
Monday, June 18, 2007
Heartburn
It's just after four in the morning and I am up with heartburn. When it gets this bad, sleep is simply not an option. Having heartburn in a locked jail cell in the middle of the night, with no prospect of getting relief until the morning, was perhaps the worst experience of my entire incarceration. It was complete torture. Gagging myself was the only option--but that was only a temporary cure that made the acid come back with a vengeance in the long run.
I am also up thinking about the woman who died yesterday in a car accident right outside my Church. I had just finished speaking before the entire congregation, when the all-too-familiar screeching of tires and crunching of metal came crashing through our ears. I rushed outside along with a cadre of other church-goers to see what had happened. She was hunched over the steering wheel with blood coming out of her mouth and ears.
Would we all be paralyzed by life if all of the suffering in the world happened right outside our Church windows? Is proximity the only thing that keeps us from feeling the true depth of human sorrow? Seeing is feeling. Not seeing, well...And we are excused if we do not see...and yet, what if we have missed the main part of the suffering in the world because we have in reality averted our eyes from it and erected walls against it?
And if we gag ourselves to find a moments respite from the pain...rather than find a real solution, then will it in the end come back to us with a vengeance?
I am also up thinking about the woman who died yesterday in a car accident right outside my Church. I had just finished speaking before the entire congregation, when the all-too-familiar screeching of tires and crunching of metal came crashing through our ears. I rushed outside along with a cadre of other church-goers to see what had happened. She was hunched over the steering wheel with blood coming out of her mouth and ears.
Would we all be paralyzed by life if all of the suffering in the world happened right outside our Church windows? Is proximity the only thing that keeps us from feeling the true depth of human sorrow? Seeing is feeling. Not seeing, well...And we are excused if we do not see...and yet, what if we have missed the main part of the suffering in the world because we have in reality averted our eyes from it and erected walls against it?
And if we gag ourselves to find a moments respite from the pain...rather than find a real solution, then will it in the end come back to us with a vengeance?
Friday, June 15, 2007
Happy Animality
I have been in the thick of writing my senior thesis--The End of Liberty--well, actually, in the thick of trying to find the time to write it...anyway, in the course of my research I came across this picture of a sculpture ("The Young Family") by Australian sculpter Patricia Piccinini, which, although meant to depict a transgenic creature representing the biological "animalness" in humans, is in my mind a representation as well of the "animalness" (or potential animalness) of our non-physical identities. Could it be that our thoughts, our thought-worlds, our social organizations, are in fact shot through with animality on some very basic biological level? The point is mundane if taken in its simplest sense that we are, afterall mere mammals. And if we are in a very basic psycho-social sense animal, then what can this potentially say, for example, about some of our most cherished and enlightened ideas? Such as liberty. Such as equality. Such as democracy. Such as tolerance. The point I am trying to make in my thesis is not actually this point--but the more I study the more I realize that, even if we are much more than highly developed mammals (which I believe), I think that the state of the world makes a strong argument for the fact that human beings, under the guise of enlightened development and 'progress', are in fact becoming more animal-like everyday. Most importantly, we are becoming animal in the sense that we are losing our seemingly instinctive and distinctively human drive to self-reflect and critically engage the world as it is. In the course of this regress, I fear, we are losing the very freedom, the freedom to self-determine by critically engaging the world as a uniquely valuable and autonomous individual, that makes us most special as human beings--whatever, in the final analysis we happent to actually be.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
More musings on freedom
Freedom. It can either be negative or positive. There is, at least with respect to the idea if not the reality, this choice.
So I am reading Isaiah Berlin, but I am also at the same time reading Hannah Arendt. They are fighting an epic battle in my head. The irony is that both Arendt and Berlin think that freedom is sacred for radically different reasons--rather, Arendt's passion is for a critical freedom, a freedom that is truly opposed to external positivity. Berlin, however, seems in the end to be a lover of the freedom that is.
Berlin and Arendt hated eachother--or in any case Berlin hated Arendt. This makes sense, considering their different approaches and final evaluations, really, of the march of freedom in the world.
In the end, I think their difference is in fact the most important difference within the liberal tradition--where to hang ones hat in terms of moral judgment. Berlin saw Arendt's judgment as fundamentally flawed because it lacked pity. Arendt certainly would have seen Berlin's appeal to pity as compromising a truly honest evaluation of the world. Berlin's judgment was a judgment informed by liberal principles of thought, like Arendt's, but with this fundamental difference--he accepted liberal democracy into his soul. I don't think that Arendt ever went as far. She certainly considered liberal democracy as the best system of government available, and as such morally legitimate, especially since it protected fundamental human rights. Nevertheless, it never became for her the internal structure of her soul as it did for Berlin. Michael Ignatieff notes that Berlin saw himself as "a cosy Russian tea-drinking Jew" and Arendt as "the qunitessential Yekke, the punctilious, exacting and charmless German Jew." Better: Berlin was content with the world he had escaped to and loved it as an end-in-itself; while Arendt appreciated the world she escaped to, but loved it enough to keep it brutally, painfully honest and growing.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Berlin and Me
I am reading the works of Isaiah Berlin at the moment. I began rereading his famed essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" last night in the bath. I really understand him. It is one thing to follow a phiosopher's arguments--to grasp what he is saying, to place his thought within the history of ideas, etc. But it its quite another thing to truly understand one. To understand a philosopher is to find that there is a part of one's own perspective that squares with his own. It is to recognize affinity, a kind of unity of vision. Nevertheless, this is a troubling thing for me because I am reasonably sure that Berlin has been rather misused in the history of ideas. Because he argued for a prevailing philosophical understanding of the world in a time when this understanding was acheiving fame and success in the social and political world wherein he lived and thought (in contrast, for example, to the New Left, whose philosophy, while popular and deriving force from the socialist/communist world, was nevertheless a critical, oppositional philosophy), his insights have been cheapened and streamlined in order to reflect the state of the world as is. My commitment, aboveall, is to change the present state of the world--and yet here I am looking into the soul of Isaiah Berlin and fnding a part of my own there.
Obviously, I can simply claim that Berlin is misunderstood. But that would be dishonest. In a real sense Berlin was a proponent of the liberal-democractic world of which I remain at best a skeptical critic. However, in a real way I need Berlin to remain a good skeptic, a critic committed to building up rather than simply tearing down. I really think that intellectual maturity consists in the simple ability to read and to understand disparate intellectual traditions, and to begin to think their concepts at the same time.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
A Note to Self
A week ago I was sitting in a cell. Two days ago I was riding on this bicycle with Mer. Today...
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Back in the USSR
In June of 1976 the Beatles released "Back in the USSR," a parody of Chuck Berry's tune, as well as of the Beach Boys, but actually referring to a particularly bad flight the band took from Russia back to Britain. When I was working at a sheet metal shop in prison I used to hear it a lot on the radio for some reason. Ironically, I have frequently described to people asking me what prison is like by drawing an analogy between the Soviet system and the prison facility.
Prison has it all--the Gulag, Big Brother, a tight, centralized, top-down, authoritarian government, a strictly regulated economy and repressive social and cultural system, as well as a thriving black market. It is also bleak and metallic ("Stalin" means "Steel"), homogenous and sparse--the product of an idolizaiton of sheer, raw power at it's most explicit.
Most of the time, responding to my friend's questions, I felt sort of like George Kennan, writing my long telegrams from this totally alien place, grasping for analogies that a member of the "free world" would understand.
Because it is not until one has lived in a totalitarian-authoritarian system that one fully understands it. Not until it begins to work on your identity, eroding away one's intrinsic sense of individual significance, that one begins to grasp the gravity of what it means to be controlled by a system.
When I got out I felt agoraphobic for a week. Men in black suits, or Crown Victorias were under-cover police folloowing me, waiting for me to slip up. Although these feelings were brief, and I immediately recognized them as silly and irrational--the fact remains that I actually experienced them. What were perfectly normal reactions in prison were silly and irrational in the "free world." This has been both profound and disturbing at the same time.
Coming back into the world of "freedom" has been an immense shock. More shocking however, for me, has been the realization of how consensual I had been to the state of the world before I was so abruptly rended from it.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
An Occasional Glimmer of Light
On 28 December 1944, Dietrich Bonhoffer was permitted to write his mother a letter from his prison cell at the Gestapo prison on Prince-Albrecht-Strasse. He told her he had to write quickly, as the post was about to go out.
"Dear Mother, I want you to know that I am constantly thinking of you and Father every day, and that I thank God for all that you are to me and the whole family. I know you have always lived for us and have not lived a life of your own. That is why you are the only one with whom I can share all that I am going through...Thank you for all the love that has come to me in my cell from you during the past year, and has made every day easier for me...My wish for you and Father...and for us all is that the New Year may bring us at least an occasional glimmer of light, and that we may once more have the joy of being together."
There are some, in the inscrutible will of God, who are vouchsafed those occasional glimmerings of light, and those who are not. I remember first reading these beautiful and simple words of Bonhoffer to his dear Mother in juvenile hall, then again in County Jail, and again in prison. They have always meant much more to me than a simple expression of a son's maternal devotion. They resonate in my soul in a special way that I have never really been able to come to terms with.
I wrote a letter the day before my release, a release which was by no means certain, wherein I tried to express what those glimmerings have taught me over my long captivity:
"My hand trembles as I write. The anticipation, the longing, the fear. I pour my soul out to God this night--in gratitude as much as in supplication. I had this realization today--it fell out of the sky. Blessing amidst the pain. Joy in the midst of sorrow. Today, tonight, this last night, the words are all gone. I am rendered speechless by His Face. He has been teaching me this moment, what it means to love as He loves. The love of God--as simple as that. To live amongst, share the plight of, the very life of, the unlovable, in order to see wahat love means and how it feels in His eyes, in His heart...in the Dark Face of God there is joy, limitless joy..."
The ecstasy of light. Light swallowed up by the Dark Face of God. Why me? Why have I been spared? Why am I spared while others are sacrificed to Evil?
The depth of this question...so deep it threatens to swallow the light from those glimmerings that have ignited my soul and have kept it burning through a very dark night indeed.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Disorder
Prison authorities call it maintaining accountability consistent with a structured environment. This defines prison—the perpetual prevention and suppression of disorder.
“The leper and his separation; the plague and its separations. The first is marked; the second analyzed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies—this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.”
It is fashionable to call prisons, ghettos, and anything blighted or depressed areas of social exclusion. But exclusion implies a throwing away, a pushing aside, but also a turning aside. It implies a kind of disregard, a removal from the map of modern knowledge and study. This is ironic, since prisons, ghettos and places of blight and depression are some of the most studied, monitored, and observed areas of society. Foucault, then, is right to call them places of social discipline. But he doesn’t make an absolute distinction. He synthesizes the two:
“to the space of exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) [was applied] the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning. Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague victims’, project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused space of internment, combine it with the methods of analytical distribution proper to power, individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion—this is what was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school, and, to some extent, the hospital.”
Isn’t Foucault intense? The active and passive aspects of power, of the power-ful, driven by the social fear of all forms of disorder, including, of course, criminality.
Apollonius locking down the Dionysian districts of society.
Total disorder is never good; but neither is total discipline.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
The Jungle
Quid Pro Quo
Prison culture would be fascinating if it weren’t so deeply disturbing. The shallow stereotypes don’t even begin to explain the complexity. This is not surprising, considering the long list of disincentives for social scientists or cultural anthropologists to engage in the kind of participatory studies necessary to illuminate the minute complexity at work within prison subcultures.
Prison culture is unique because it is completely synthetic. It’s a pre-fab culture, a function of the criminal justice process, its landscape and macrodynamics wholly determined by a centralized authority external to the cultural participants. The culture precedes the people. It is a little bit monastery, a little bit colony, a little bit Soviet central planning, but unique in that its unifying characteristic is what criminologists call antisociality—the cognitive-behavioral departure of the individual from the norms dictated by a given social system, enshrined in it’s code of law.
What this means, among other things, is that prison culture bears on its surface that which most other cultures keep hidden deep beneath the surface. Prison culture is the inside-out boy of cultures. The honesty begins with their formal titles: “Correctional Institutions.” The candor has never ceased to amaze me. It’s everywhere. I remember recently seeing a staff member proudly displaying his favorite California Correctional Peace Officers Association T-shirt to some of the wards under his charge. It boasted a large print on its back depicting a Panther or Cougar with large, blood red eyes, growling behind the bars of a cage. Under the picture a commentary was offered: “It’s a jungle in here.”
We, of course, are the fearsome beasts behind the cages with the blood red eyes living in the “jungle.”
Tocqueville, it will be recalled, came to
“Hey, shoot this next door dawg. Good lookin’ out.”
I take the small scrap of paper from the narrow crack in the electric door and pass it through an identical crack in an identical electrical door immediately to my left. I have just engaged in a vital cultural practice of prison life—which might be called, if anyone cared to study it, the quid pro quo system. This is a curious practice that cannot be accurately defined according to the usual scholastic stereotypes utilized to elucidate prison culture.
Let me summarize the complex dynamics underlying the practice. First of all, the note was passed from a Hispanic to a Black by way of a White ad hoc courier (these color distinctions are absolutely basic in prison). The Hispanic ward initiated the quid pro quo fully aware that his request would commit the White ward to breaking a prison law infraction, although only sporadically enforced and carrying minor repercussions. The White ward was also fully aware of the minor illegality of the favor being requested of him. But, after observing that the object to be passed was innocuous and neutral (a small drawing, probably a tattoo pattern), he calculated that, in this instance, the benefits clearly outweighed the risks. Ordinarily he would not have thought much at all about this simple task, especially had it been a neutral transfer, that is, if he had been asked to pass the object from one Hispanic to another, intra-racially.
What is interesting about the quid pro quo phenomenon is how it resembles, in an inside-out kind of way, the complex race relations that govern society in general. Whereas in prison segregation is an open secret, all but enshrined in the structure itself; in society it is no less a reality, but it is a concealed reality, an unspoken status quo.
We are deeply disturbed when we SEE the overt segregation and accompanying cultural practices in prison culture. But we slumber on in blissful disregard about the covert segregation that defines our own communities, precisely because it remains unseen.
Why? Why are we so chronically unconcerned about the “jungle” that is our own society?
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