From in the fairy tale asylum:
Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.
(Heinrich Heine)
It’s Banned Books Week. Have you clung to a banned book recently? Have you reviewed one?
Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so
by John 11 Comments
From in the fairy tale asylum:
Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.
(Heinrich Heine)
It’s Banned Books Week. Have you clung to a banned book recently? Have you reviewed one?
by John 8 Comments
Habitués of Running After My Hat know, I think, that I resist the intrusion of politics into my posts here. And although I’ve never been tested on this, I’m pretty sure that’s one area in which I would likely resort to editing (or outright banning) comments of certain kinds. If you’re after debate, even of the reasoned sort, there are plenty of other sites around the Internet whose proprietors are more than happy (and better equipped than I) to offer it.
As my newest review at The Book Book begins:
Like (probably) most Americans, I have never fought in a war, and am unlikely ever to do so. Like (probably) most Americans, I nonetheless hold plenty of opinions about war in general as well as about specific conflicts. Those opinions are important to us, and we regard holding onto them in the face of opposing views as a matter of psychological — almost theological — life and death.
But civilian opinions one way or the other about war, any war, shred like tissue paper when you try to wrap them around the hard, spiky reality of soldiers’ experiences. It simply doesn’t matter what John Q. Public (let alone his favorite talk-show host) thinks.
War, by Sebastian Junger, is all about the daily lives of soldiers on the front line in the war in Afghanistan. (He spent a year embedded with a company there, in 2007-2008.) I won’t kid you: although it is a quick read, it’s not easy reading. What these young men have to deal with, and how they deal with it, is so far from the experience of civilian life that wanting it not to exist, or pretending it doesn’t, is completely understandable. Even if you’re open to knowing about it, I likewise understand the difference between that agreeability and a willingness to spend a few days reading about it.
But I think one thing Junger says, almost in passing, strikes me as one of the main reasons to read the book:
Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they’re looking for. Not killing, necessarily — that couldn’t have been clearer in my mind — but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing you’d rather do.
What soldiers are looking for: If you think it’s a desire to win their particular war, or to “get” the “enemy,” or, simply, a desire to get home ASAP (where the “S” represents Safely as well as Soon), you might want to at least sample some of Junger’s book.
Again, though, despite the title and the above quoted passage: this isn’t a book about war, but about battle — combat — and how men adapt to it. If you undertake reading War, prepare yourself for some moments of high intensity (also some low comedy, and emotionally moving passages).
by John 2 Comments
This week, a little something different: Usually, I start my Friday post by pulling something at random from the last seven days’ selections at whiskey river. Then I go on to include a handful of poems, quotations, film clips, and/or songs to which the whiskey river snippet led me (by whatever inscrutable chain of thoughts).
Today, I’ve already got some poetry which I encountered elsewhere (scroll down to see #4) in the last week, poetry which I really liked.
With that already rustling in my head, then, I stopped by at whiskey river‘s archives, called whiskey river’s commonplace book, and just started to browse.
From whiskey river’s commonplace book (no specific link; it’s about halfway down the page):
Prayer
Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of
themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change —
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
(Jorie Graham [source])
Not from whiskey river:
by John 4 Comments
In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously.
It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether he”ll be a good President, let alone a great one.)
And yet, and yet…
I’ve been with my current employer since 1993; until today, they’ve never offered the use of conference rooms and video facilities to watch an Inauguration — except possibly for the simple but godawful swearing-in in November 1963.
And truthfully, I have not been able to stop smiling.
by John 2 Comments
Wow — four hundred years, and (many) people still don’t even furrow their brows when you say the name “John Milton.” Most of us aspire to be remembered for one-fourth of that span, if that much.
Today, Milton’s memory is honored (if not read, exactly) principally for his epic works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained — and, to a lesser extent, for his other poetry.
But in his time he was also something of a political gadfly. Wikipedia speaks of his “radical, republican politics and heretical religious views,” which — coming, as they did, before, during, and after the English Civil War — ensured either his popularity (during Cromwell’s Commonwealth) or his ostracism (during the monarchy).
Among the forward-thinking issues which Milton made a point of espousing was freedom of written expression (what we’d call freedom of the press, today).
by John 6 Comments
My head keeps saying This isn’t a political blog… this isn’t a political blog…
My heart, though, can’t deny the huge chunk of me myself which is political…
Short version: I have voted in ten Presidential elections. That’s 36 years. For nine of those elections, I have watched the returns on TV and read about them the next day and thought to myself, alternatively:
We were at a “watch party” last night. When the clock rolled over at 11:00 — when the West Coast polls closed — and the networks started making their calls, I completely lost it: sobbing, laughing, fighting the sobs and giving into the laughter. (The Missus finally suggested that I go into the bathroom and splash some cold water on my face. It helped.) But the tremors continued, off and on, until I fell asleep at around 1:30am. (They resumed this morning, every time the reality struck me anew.)
[getting a grip on self]
I just want to share a little bit of classical history with you right now. It goes back to at least the third century BC, in the ancient city of Rome.
by John 5 Comments
Cartoonist Keith Knight is a regular contributor to my favorite monthly magazine, The Funny Times. To break the routine from his main comic strip, called The K Chronicles, he occasionally does a strip called “Life’s Little Victories.” He builds these strips from ideas submitted by readers — little one- or two-panel ideas describing the little things that make life worth living.
From the weekly Funny Times “Take a Break” cartoon email newsletter, here’s a recent and highly relevant collection of such victories (numbers 265 through 270), applicable across the political spectrum:
by John 2 Comments
by John 6 Comments
Kidding. Sort of.
I mean, look, the guy’s made almost 60 movies, in a career spanning more than 25 years (per his Wikipedia filmography, at least). It’s pretty much impossible to make that many films and have nary a stinker in the bunch.
Granted, I haven’t seen all or even most of those five dozen films. (Which surprised me, actually; I’d been prepared to open this post by flashing my Cusack credentials, daring anyone to challenge me.)
But I’ve seen a lot of them. And I honestly cannot think of a single film, even the ones he hasn’t “starred” in, which he has not boosted by a sly, assured performance.
Lord knows, there’s nothing conventionally movie-star about his looks — his soulful-hangdog looks (like in the above photo) or (as at left) his crazy looks or (as below right) affable, laughing, and apparently relaxed. (I’ve never seen Rachael Ray’s talk show, but I’ve seen her manic 30-Minute Meals routine. It’s hard to imagine anyone could ever really be relaxed around that person, but I remain open to the possibilities of an infinite universe.)
And Lord knows, in one of his profession’s true injustices, he doesn’t have shelves full of acting awards.
But damn, the guy is a pleasure to see on the screen.
by John 2 Comments
In a college linguistics course, I first encountered the work of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), a pre-World War II organization — we’d probably call it a think tank, nowadays — which (per Wikipedia):
…formed with the general concern that increased amounts of propaganda were decreasing the public’s ability to develop their own critical thoughts. The purpose of the IPA was to spark rational thinking and provide a guide to help the public have well-informed discussions on current issues. “To teach people how to think rather than what to think.” The IPA focused on domestic propaganda issues that might become possible threats to the democratic ways of life.
I’m not going to use RAMH for political commentary, in one direction or the other. But in light of the political atmosphere in the US this year, I thought it might be useful to reiterate, briefly, the seven categories of propaganda techniques which the IPA identified:
Each category is covered separately in links from the Wikipedia article. Another couple of excellent resources for further reading on this subject are:
For now, though, I wanted to highlight one specific tactic which politicians of all persuasions are especially fond of. It’s a sub-category of category 2, “glittering generalities,” and it’s summed up in a phrase which I still remember from that linguistics course: mere assertion.
Mere assertion is exactly what it says: the propagandist says that something is the case — is true — (that’s the “assertion” part) but does not offer any sort of substantive support for the claim (hence the “mere”). This tactic most often becomes useful when the politician is speaking under time constraints; the implication is, I could cite numerous pieces of evidence for that claim, but unfortunately I don’t have time.
I’m not going to quote mere-assertion examples from last night’s Vice-Presidential debate, although it wouldn’t be difficult. Instead, I’ll direct your attention to the transcript, available from numerous sources:
And, of course, don’t forget to visit the FactCheck.org site to help sort out the wheat of fact from the chaff of fiction and propaganda.
Edit to add: Bear in mind that FactCheck, and sites like it, seldom point out the true statements; they focus on the false, questionable, and/or fuzzy ones. So knowing that two debaters have a roughly equal number of bogus claims doesn’t mean much unless you account for the overall number of factual claims made by each of the two. (That is, for example, if both “teams” made 10 erroneous statements but one of them made a total of 50 factual claims while the other made only 10 — well, you see where this is going.) Also note that these sites don’t weight the importance of a false claim: someone who’s wrong on the average household income in Country X, but otherwise right, isn’t at nearly as much fault as someone who’s wrong on Country X’s ties to terrorism (and hence on its invasion-worthiness), but otherwise right.