I guess this posting on TMZ illustrates on many levels what's wrong with addiction treatment in this country in the 21st century. And our society in general, if you really want to be honest. Seems Lindsay Lohan got into an altercation with a staff member at Betty Ford Center, where she's in for her - uh, nth round of rehab, resulting in a police report, an alleged sprained wrist, the firing of the staff member for talking about it publicly (how do you make a public police report without talking about it?) and a juicy story for TMZ and others to run with.
First, my disclaimers. I don't really know anything about Lindsay Lohan, except what I read and see on TV. So this is just, like, my opinion. My knowledge of the Betty Ford Center is a bit fuller, since I actually looked at the Better Business Bureau's rating of them as a charity (they reportedly fail to meet the minimum standards for a reputable charity, including making data available on the effectiveness of their services). But I also know a lot about treatment programs (or "rehab" programs, as they are popularly called) from my ten years of case managing mental health and substance abuse treatment and my longer history of referring people to programs and rubbing elbows with their marketing people at conferences and meetings. So I know more about what I'm talking about on that score. Although I usually keep any criticisms to myself, out of professional courtesy.
And on the subject of mental health and substance abuse treatment, its relationship to the legal system, and patient compliance and noncompliance, I'm pretty much an expert, having done dozens of substance abuse assessments on people who violated drug and alcohol laws and policies and needed to fulfill the requirements imposed on them. So on to this story.
First, there's Lindsay Lohan. She certainly appears from what we read and see to be a train wreck of a human being. She was interesting (though a little hard to watch, which I assumed was part of her acting) in "A Prairie Home Companion;" but everything I've seen about her since that time has been painful. Take an apparently insecure human being with seemingly poor role models for parents, expose her to the celebrity machine and make her part of the national freak show for a few years, throw in some well-meaning attempts by the legal system to impose some constructive consequences on her, and wait for the mixture to ferment into a sour mash of what passes for "entertainment" these days. We probably expect her to self-destruct like Anna Nicole Smith, (whose tragic life has been replayed over and over by "Entertainment Tonight," in a particularly creepy carnival display). But at least she's still with us and in apparently decent health.
Then there's the judge and court system that tried to impose some sensible consequences for her drunk driving offense. They tried various forms of probation and education, and when those didn't work, finally sentenced her to "treatment." Which is dubious enough in the case of your average Joe who sits through a few classes and dozes through "Clean and Sober" a couple times. But for a celebrity, it's even worse. No hope of getting the offender to face the issues honestly and realistically, because of the constant pressures of public exposure, second-guessing, and celebrity narcissism that are sure to be involved.
Then there's the "treatment" itself. The pervasive approach that has come to be used in the treatment industry in this country is a bizarre amalgamation of support and shame. They've taken AA, which was the only game in town for many years, and twisted it to fit an industry that too often serves itself more than the client's needs There are good treatment programs out there (often based at hospitals or psychiatric facilties), but "rehab" tends to mean the free-standing residential programs that believe in 28 days (or more) of indoctrination rather than individualized therapy and an actual treatment plan.
This AA-based style of treatment (which many AA members consider a perversion of their program, by the way) seems to take some of the unhealthier 12-step lore and adds unhealthier treatment approaches to it. They focus on how they have to "break through denial" to get the substance-abusing person to realize that he or she is a lower form of life, which isn't exactly the AA approach (they always say that they are a program of attraction rather than compulsion).
There's already a pretty strong dose of Christian sin-and-salvation fundamentalism involved, with the AA program being a direct descendant of the Oxford and Moral Re-armament Movements of the early Twentieth Century, codified by a reportedly narcissistic insurance salesman and his male drinking buddies in the 1930's and followed like an actual religion ever since. That's okay when it takes place in church basements and draws a core fellowship of like-minded people, but then you have the forced treatment component, which frankly makes poor use of whatever benefit there is in AA. And then, you toss in the celebrity aspect that's morphed into a marketing machine over the years. When Tiger Woods checked into a "sex addiction" program, the treatment facilities went wild, throwing all their energies into promoting that dubious "disease" and their treatment programs as the only solution for it.
Finally, there's the Betty Ford Center. Our former First Lady is still revered as a brave pioneer who brought addiction treatment into the national conversation and helped create a prestigious and respected professional program that offers hope to the afflicted. But unfortunately, it's also become a stop on the celebrity rehab tour that offers a freak show of celebrity nuttiness for the paparazzi and the likes of TMZ to mine for our prurient interest. There's limited hope of privacy or confidentiality, and apparently very little in the way of medical care, but there's a whole lot of gratitude and wonderfulness among its supporters and alumni.
There's also a lot of cash flowing in ($25,223,002 in patient revenues, and $5,079,517 in donations, according to the figures they provided the BBB). As the BBB pointed out, there's little in the way of effectiveness data for BFC, but that's not unusual: no treatment program likes to reveal how many of the people it treats actually manage to stay drug- and alcohol-free for a year or more and achieve what the American Psychiatric Association calls "sustained complete remission."
The thing is, few of these "rehab" (residential) programs actively help patients to understand how addiction really works in the body and mind, how to manage cravings and urges, how to manage lifestyle changes, or what to do if they relapse. Instead, they get the standard-issue disease-and-denial talk, advice to "keep coming back," and gratefulness directed at the program (which can mean Betty Ford or AA in general), with the standard assertion that it has"saved so many lives." The participants get a lot of spiritual and serenity talk, disease education, one-day-at-a-time perspective, and profound helplessness and passivity - only one's "higher power" can restore them to sanity. However, "sanity" is a poorly defined concept, and is definitely not the same as clinical success, being instead a hazy amalgam of character flaw removal, surrender, groupthink, and, well, whatever the opposite of self-efficacy is.
In many of these programs, relapse is seen as less of an issue than accepting the program, which fits the AA tradition that ll that is necessary is a "sincere desire to stop" drinking or drugging. Unfortunately, when the public welfare requires an irresponsible substance abuser to CUT IT OUT, the goals of this kind of program don't serve the public interest. Useful advice on how to take responsibility for managing this chronic medical condition, including the most pressing task of how to manage urges, is almost completely lacking in too many of these "rehab" treatment programs. In fact, wanting to take responsibility fo managing one's addiction is often viewed as a heretical sign of "Egotism," (where "ego" is defined by the cute old chestnut "Edging God Out").
And, since addiction is a family disease, support and help automatically become "codependence" and "enabling." Unfortunately,when there is a true enabler, like Lindsay's mom, who make ridiculous excuses for the addicted person, these actions are actually trivialized and become simply run-of-the-mill evidence of the way the "disease"operates for everyone. It doesn't. That's wrong behavior when you're dealing with an addict in the family.
In my experience, stiff consequences for further use, combined with a seriously tight program of drug and alcohol testing, are a lot more effective in insuring the public safety than simply approving of the addicted person's participation in a program. Although it's often true that the willingness to demonstrate participation in the program can be a good sign, it's also often true that the attitudes conveyed in some of these programs (including the admonition to "fake it till you make it") can be associated with a lack of responsibility for future behavior..
So that leaves the staff member, I guess. She does have a right to make a police report if that's called for. And patients in an ordinary treatment facility are entitled to privacy. But BFC is clearly not an ordinary treatment facility. And it appears they follow the industry standard of hiring people "in recovery" themselves, who may, as a result, be less than professional. As this staff member appears from the news stories to have been. Which doesn't promise great results or professional treatment. But I still kind of feel sorry for the staff member, who probably got drawn into a scuffle with a particularly difficult client and now finds herself in the middle of that same freak show. I hope she can stay sober through it all, at least.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Julian Assange: Ka-Mai?
In all the talk about Wikileaks and whether Julian Assange is a hero or a traitor, doing the human race a service or out to destroy the world order, I find myself thinking of Roland and Eddie from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Or maybe Roland and Cuthbert. Both Eddie Dean and Cuthbert Allgood were characters who earned the epithet Ka-mai from Roland. The term meant “Fate’s fool,” at least roughly. In Roland’s view of reality (and King’s multiverse), Ka is a force that represents destiny, fate, karma, and blind chance all rolled into one. Ka makes seemingly random events serve a purpose, and seemingly coincidental events serve no purpose that humans can discern.
Most writing I’ve seen about Wikileaks seems to try to categorize Assange as an anarchist. To me, that’s not really accurate. Anarchists want all forms of government and authority to be destroyed. Assange seems to be targeting secrecy and deception, and to be operating only in the realm of information. His only weapon is information. His targets are misinformation and the withholding of information. He doesn’t use, nor encourage the use of, violence. Nevertheless many people seem to equate his actions with violence, alleging that the information he releases puts people in danger. That fascinates me. But it doesn’t answer the question of what Assange is.
That got me thinking. The world seems to me more and more to have its own self-preservation instinct, the longer I live in it. Call it the Gaia hypothesis if you will, but it tries to heal itself from all that we inflict on it – to the point that we become deceived into thinking we can continue to spill oil and belch carbon and get away with it.
The human world seems to have some of the same characteristics. Somehow, we avoided nuclear annihilation in the 1950’s and 1960’s, which only those of us of a certain age can really recall with clarity. Somehow, we were taken care of. If you are religious, you may well think that God saved the human race. If you believe in the innate goodness of people, you may think that we came to our senses and recoiled from that horrific possibility.
Now, we face newer threats. No one can kill the world in one giant fireball anymore – at least I don’t think so – but we risk death by a thousand cuts. We have little cells of terrorism and hate, which can spawn ugly and destructive consequences. And we have large-scale dysfunction and new sorts of plagues that we don’t realize are growing until they begin to show themselves. Instead of DDT and polio, we now have melamine in the milk, infecting the world’s food supply, and toxic assets infecting the world’s financial system. We have information plagues, as well: Unfounded allegations, rumor, libel, innuendo, lies, propaganda, and Internet hoaxes. These things threaten our sanity the way toxic assets threaten our economies, and melamine and lead threaten our food and household products.
So how does the Earth (or Fate, or Destiny, or God) attempt to remedy these plagues? In the case of the corrupted global information network (which includes everything from Fox News to Facebook) we get some medicine – remedies crafted by well-meaning and thoughtful people: FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, and some of the reputable news organizations doing real investigative work. But we also get the world’s equivalent of a high fever: Wikileaks. It’s a reflexive and unfocused attack on a plague by trying to make conditions inhospitable for the plague germs. Releasing all that information strikes me as the human race’s equivalent of the body releasing a host of white blood cells into the bloodstream. It may make the patient sicker, but it may cure the infection.
So maybe Ka is the organism behind all this. “Ka like a wind,” as King put it. Something is the universe abhors a vacuum – the absence of truth, honesty, openness and fairness among human beings. So Assange becomes Ka’s fool. He is the agent of the correction. And he’s not alone. He has plenty of people who believe in what he’s doing.
Adlerian psychology holds that neurotic symptoms often result from an individual’s lack of honesty with himself or herself – avoiding one’s social responsibilities by means of distracting symptoms and maneuvers, like the phobic person who avoids interacting with other people. The Adlerian therapist may employ a tactic that is colloquially referred to as “Spitting in the soup.” That means exposing the person’s hidden agendas and the real purposes of their behavior. It seems to me that Assange is doing that to the world of politics. And in one respect, I admire what he’s doing. The world of politics has too long been a parlor game played with people’s lives. Power, control, manipulation, deceit, and betrayal have been sad parts of human history for too long. It’s only after the fact that historians have been able to expose the deceits for what they were. We enjoy historical analyses because they peel back the façade of respectability and civilization, and expose the schoolyard behaviors and double-dealing that takes the honor and mystique out of epic battles.
It seems to me that the people behind Wikileaks are forcing that perspective that we usually only get from historical research, and thrusting it into the current dialogues of humankind. Thrusting it in our faces, in fact. And in a sense, it doesn’t matter whether Julian Assange comes across as a hero or a traitor (Traitor to whom, though?). He is an agent of a corrective force in human history. We’ve gotten too tangled up in our own brilliant ideas, and we all need to face reality. Yes, it’s possible that the release of information we thought would help us “get” the bad guys may have consequences for our strategies. If we fail to make adjustments, some people may be hurt or killed as a consequence. That should not happen. But if nations and people treated each other honestly, it would not happen. We as a nation are guilty of thinking we can be more clever than our opponents, and we have hurt and killed people in the process. We should be above that. Like law enforcement officers, we must behave in a civil and respectful manner at all times if we wish to earn the respect of others in the world. We have not been good at doing that. We’ve been acting like vigilante cowboys too often. We are now being held to account.
The next set of releases threatens to expose corporate double-dealing. That should be our next target. If we don’t take strong steps to root it out – steps that can’t be weakened and disabled through hysteria and fear-mongering from the powerful people who stand to lose from transparency – we will deserve the disruption that more leaks will cause.
If Julian Assange didn’t exist, I’m afraid that fate - or ka - would have had to invent him, or someone very much like him. He may be a lowlife grandiose narcissist who thinks he can force himself on women, but by instigating Wikileaks, he’s done something that would have ended up happening somehow anyway. Let’s hope that this fever leads to a recovery for the human race’s integrity.
Most writing I’ve seen about Wikileaks seems to try to categorize Assange as an anarchist. To me, that’s not really accurate. Anarchists want all forms of government and authority to be destroyed. Assange seems to be targeting secrecy and deception, and to be operating only in the realm of information. His only weapon is information. His targets are misinformation and the withholding of information. He doesn’t use, nor encourage the use of, violence. Nevertheless many people seem to equate his actions with violence, alleging that the information he releases puts people in danger. That fascinates me. But it doesn’t answer the question of what Assange is.
That got me thinking. The world seems to me more and more to have its own self-preservation instinct, the longer I live in it. Call it the Gaia hypothesis if you will, but it tries to heal itself from all that we inflict on it – to the point that we become deceived into thinking we can continue to spill oil and belch carbon and get away with it.
The human world seems to have some of the same characteristics. Somehow, we avoided nuclear annihilation in the 1950’s and 1960’s, which only those of us of a certain age can really recall with clarity. Somehow, we were taken care of. If you are religious, you may well think that God saved the human race. If you believe in the innate goodness of people, you may think that we came to our senses and recoiled from that horrific possibility.
Now, we face newer threats. No one can kill the world in one giant fireball anymore – at least I don’t think so – but we risk death by a thousand cuts. We have little cells of terrorism and hate, which can spawn ugly and destructive consequences. And we have large-scale dysfunction and new sorts of plagues that we don’t realize are growing until they begin to show themselves. Instead of DDT and polio, we now have melamine in the milk, infecting the world’s food supply, and toxic assets infecting the world’s financial system. We have information plagues, as well: Unfounded allegations, rumor, libel, innuendo, lies, propaganda, and Internet hoaxes. These things threaten our sanity the way toxic assets threaten our economies, and melamine and lead threaten our food and household products.
So how does the Earth (or Fate, or Destiny, or God) attempt to remedy these plagues? In the case of the corrupted global information network (which includes everything from Fox News to Facebook) we get some medicine – remedies crafted by well-meaning and thoughtful people: FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, and some of the reputable news organizations doing real investigative work. But we also get the world’s equivalent of a high fever: Wikileaks. It’s a reflexive and unfocused attack on a plague by trying to make conditions inhospitable for the plague germs. Releasing all that information strikes me as the human race’s equivalent of the body releasing a host of white blood cells into the bloodstream. It may make the patient sicker, but it may cure the infection.
So maybe Ka is the organism behind all this. “Ka like a wind,” as King put it. Something is the universe abhors a vacuum – the absence of truth, honesty, openness and fairness among human beings. So Assange becomes Ka’s fool. He is the agent of the correction. And he’s not alone. He has plenty of people who believe in what he’s doing.
Adlerian psychology holds that neurotic symptoms often result from an individual’s lack of honesty with himself or herself – avoiding one’s social responsibilities by means of distracting symptoms and maneuvers, like the phobic person who avoids interacting with other people. The Adlerian therapist may employ a tactic that is colloquially referred to as “Spitting in the soup.” That means exposing the person’s hidden agendas and the real purposes of their behavior. It seems to me that Assange is doing that to the world of politics. And in one respect, I admire what he’s doing. The world of politics has too long been a parlor game played with people’s lives. Power, control, manipulation, deceit, and betrayal have been sad parts of human history for too long. It’s only after the fact that historians have been able to expose the deceits for what they were. We enjoy historical analyses because they peel back the façade of respectability and civilization, and expose the schoolyard behaviors and double-dealing that takes the honor and mystique out of epic battles.
It seems to me that the people behind Wikileaks are forcing that perspective that we usually only get from historical research, and thrusting it into the current dialogues of humankind. Thrusting it in our faces, in fact. And in a sense, it doesn’t matter whether Julian Assange comes across as a hero or a traitor (Traitor to whom, though?). He is an agent of a corrective force in human history. We’ve gotten too tangled up in our own brilliant ideas, and we all need to face reality. Yes, it’s possible that the release of information we thought would help us “get” the bad guys may have consequences for our strategies. If we fail to make adjustments, some people may be hurt or killed as a consequence. That should not happen. But if nations and people treated each other honestly, it would not happen. We as a nation are guilty of thinking we can be more clever than our opponents, and we have hurt and killed people in the process. We should be above that. Like law enforcement officers, we must behave in a civil and respectful manner at all times if we wish to earn the respect of others in the world. We have not been good at doing that. We’ve been acting like vigilante cowboys too often. We are now being held to account.
The next set of releases threatens to expose corporate double-dealing. That should be our next target. If we don’t take strong steps to root it out – steps that can’t be weakened and disabled through hysteria and fear-mongering from the powerful people who stand to lose from transparency – we will deserve the disruption that more leaks will cause.
If Julian Assange didn’t exist, I’m afraid that fate - or ka - would have had to invent him, or someone very much like him. He may be a lowlife grandiose narcissist who thinks he can force himself on women, but by instigating Wikileaks, he’s done something that would have ended up happening somehow anyway. Let’s hope that this fever leads to a recovery for the human race’s integrity.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Wikileaks and my skepticism
My take-aways from the latest Wikileaks leaks:
1. The Wikileaks guy is neither the menace to civilization and international peace that he's made out to be, nor the people's hero he fancies himself to be. He strikes me as nothing so much as a kid who never outgrew his high school newspaper rants against the principal.
2. The world of diplomacy will survive all these leaks with nothing worse than a bunch of embarrassed people who counted on their snide and cynical handling of important world events being their own little secret.
3. All in all, it's probably a good thing that everyone has had their noses rubbed in the fact that nothing can be kept from the masses anymore. Remember that, you who financed the Republican "tsumnami' that was supposedly such a "mandate" in last month's elections. See who benefits, as Walter Szobczak said. "Follow the money." ("I am the walrus," said Donny). People will wise up once they stop crowing about how we're gonna shrink government and cut taxes. When that doesn't happen, they'll first of all blame Obama and Pelosi, then once they've been drubbed and Palin is pesident and they're still in foreclosure on their homes with flat screen TV's... Then they'll take the trouble to find out who was behind it all.
4. Anyone who thinks the guy is really a rapist because the Swedish prosecutors coincidentally found two women to come forward with accusations right after the last leaks: I have a great scheme to make money working from home that I want to tell you about. C'mon, the same powers that be that are being made to look foolish in all these documents now want us to believe that this guy is a crazed psychopath who threatens world order. Yeah.
1. The Wikileaks guy is neither the menace to civilization and international peace that he's made out to be, nor the people's hero he fancies himself to be. He strikes me as nothing so much as a kid who never outgrew his high school newspaper rants against the principal.
2. The world of diplomacy will survive all these leaks with nothing worse than a bunch of embarrassed people who counted on their snide and cynical handling of important world events being their own little secret.
3. All in all, it's probably a good thing that everyone has had their noses rubbed in the fact that nothing can be kept from the masses anymore. Remember that, you who financed the Republican "tsumnami' that was supposedly such a "mandate" in last month's elections. See who benefits, as Walter Szobczak said. "Follow the money." ("I am the walrus," said Donny). People will wise up once they stop crowing about how we're gonna shrink government and cut taxes. When that doesn't happen, they'll first of all blame Obama and Pelosi, then once they've been drubbed and Palin is pesident and they're still in foreclosure on their homes with flat screen TV's... Then they'll take the trouble to find out who was behind it all.
4. Anyone who thinks the guy is really a rapist because the Swedish prosecutors coincidentally found two women to come forward with accusations right after the last leaks: I have a great scheme to make money working from home that I want to tell you about. C'mon, the same powers that be that are being made to look foolish in all these documents now want us to believe that this guy is a crazed psychopath who threatens world order. Yeah.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Shock Machine Memories
Ah, now that Christmas is coming, the Hallmark Channel is running shows about good old fashioned Christmas complete with good old fashioned toys and good old fashioned moral dilemmas like whether to make money or make kids happy... Which made me think of shocking people.
When I was a kid, we had a Gilbert Erector Set. Actually, we had two or three of them, with all the parts kind of mixed together. The oldest one had belonged to my older brothers. My younger brother and I inherited it all, along with a bunch of instruction booklets in that inimitable 1940's - 1950's style. We made lots of stuff with the Erector sets, but my favorites were the tram cars (like aerial tramways) that ran on string between two rooms, and the shock machine.
For a long time, I wondered if we had the only erector set that had instructions on how to build a shock machine, but Googling it now reassures me that it was indeed a feature of one of the sets (the "8-1/2" set).You took a few of the rectangular plates and assembled them into a holder for two "D" batteries, with room for an axle with a crank and gear on one end of it, and a piece of metal that slapped against the teeth of the gear when you turned the crank. Next, you assembled two "handles" that each used four of the 6 inch or so "girders" bolted into a square shape. Then you took some wire and hooked the battery/crank assembly to the handles, and to the two blades of the wall plug of the 120V electric motor. Then you had your little friends hold the handles while you turned the crank, and they got a shock that was guaranteed to delight them (Especially any budding personal injury lawyers, I'm sure).
The instructions helpfully explained the principle, which (as best as I can recall) involved sending the 3 volts of DC current from the batteries through the coils of the motor, where they induced a field that then "broke down" when the strip broke contact with the gear teeth, and sent a higher voltage current back in the opposite direction and through the handles and your little friend. It was supposed to be a high voltage but a "harmless" low level of current. It made a tingling, throbbing sensation that was actually much harder to endure when the crank was turned slowly than when it was turned quickly. It made the muscles in your arms tense and cramp up.
For even more fun, you could attach one wire to the handle of one of those cheap aluminum pots that most people had in the kitchen cabinet, and fill it with water. Then you were supposed to put a quarter in the water, and dare your friends to pick the quarter up out of the water while holding the other handle, while you turned the crank. I clearly remember that they said to use a quarter, because it impressed the hell out of me that you could safely offer to let them keep such a big piece of change (heck, it could buy 25 pieces of Bazooka bubble gum). Because NO ONE could grab the quarter, they claimed. (and inflation had already claimed some of the drama between the 1950's when my brothers got this set, and the early 60's, when I got my hands on it).
We showed this to other kids in the neighborhood, and one of them (a kid of about six who nowadays would be on Adderall) tried to imitate us and build his own shock machine.He took a more straightforward approach, using scissors to cut and strip the wire of an outdoor extension cord. That was my first lesson in the awful power of imitation. My brother and I (and our friend Mac MacArthur) hopefully convinced him that his version wouldn't be nearly as much fun.
And that toy was used when we got it! So much for the Christmas spirit of being good consumers.
When I was a kid, we had a Gilbert Erector Set. Actually, we had two or three of them, with all the parts kind of mixed together. The oldest one had belonged to my older brothers. My younger brother and I inherited it all, along with a bunch of instruction booklets in that inimitable 1940's - 1950's style. We made lots of stuff with the Erector sets, but my favorites were the tram cars (like aerial tramways) that ran on string between two rooms, and the shock machine.
For a long time, I wondered if we had the only erector set that had instructions on how to build a shock machine, but Googling it now reassures me that it was indeed a feature of one of the sets (the "8-1/2" set).You took a few of the rectangular plates and assembled them into a holder for two "D" batteries, with room for an axle with a crank and gear on one end of it, and a piece of metal that slapped against the teeth of the gear when you turned the crank. Next, you assembled two "handles" that each used four of the 6 inch or so "girders" bolted into a square shape. Then you took some wire and hooked the battery/crank assembly to the handles, and to the two blades of the wall plug of the 120V electric motor. Then you had your little friends hold the handles while you turned the crank, and they got a shock that was guaranteed to delight them (Especially any budding personal injury lawyers, I'm sure).
The instructions helpfully explained the principle, which (as best as I can recall) involved sending the 3 volts of DC current from the batteries through the coils of the motor, where they induced a field that then "broke down" when the strip broke contact with the gear teeth, and sent a higher voltage current back in the opposite direction and through the handles and your little friend. It was supposed to be a high voltage but a "harmless" low level of current. It made a tingling, throbbing sensation that was actually much harder to endure when the crank was turned slowly than when it was turned quickly. It made the muscles in your arms tense and cramp up.
For even more fun, you could attach one wire to the handle of one of those cheap aluminum pots that most people had in the kitchen cabinet, and fill it with water. Then you were supposed to put a quarter in the water, and dare your friends to pick the quarter up out of the water while holding the other handle, while you turned the crank. I clearly remember that they said to use a quarter, because it impressed the hell out of me that you could safely offer to let them keep such a big piece of change (heck, it could buy 25 pieces of Bazooka bubble gum). Because NO ONE could grab the quarter, they claimed. (and inflation had already claimed some of the drama between the 1950's when my brothers got this set, and the early 60's, when I got my hands on it).
We showed this to other kids in the neighborhood, and one of them (a kid of about six who nowadays would be on Adderall) tried to imitate us and build his own shock machine.He took a more straightforward approach, using scissors to cut and strip the wire of an outdoor extension cord. That was my first lesson in the awful power of imitation. My brother and I (and our friend Mac MacArthur) hopefully convinced him that his version wouldn't be nearly as much fun.
And that toy was used when we got it! So much for the Christmas spirit of being good consumers.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
"...Except at Ground Zero." Republican Slurpee Cups.
Scott Stantis, a cartoonist I usually have a problem with because he's consistently snotty about anything that smacks of liberalism, actually hit the nail on the head with today's cartoon. It shows the text of the First Amendment, as if carved on a stone monument, with a spray-painted asterisk after the sentence, "Congress shall make no law respecting the extablishment of religion." The spray-painted footnote says, "except at Ground Zero."
Much of the debate over the proposed mosque and community center near Ground Zero invokes emotion: The opponents ask, “How must the families of the victims feel?” The supporters counter with, “How would you feel if a Catholic parish was treated this way ..?” And on and on. Many of the arguments resonate with most of us, and (according to the surveys I’ve seen) most of us feel mixed emotions and dissonance about this. Despite all the rhetoric, people don’t seem to be able to avoid talking about how they feel. Even very intelligent and reasonable essays (like this one in the New York Times) seem caught up in trying to come up with a way of looking at it that you can feel okay about.
But we have a Constitution for a very good reason: so that the way people feel at any given moment does not lead to decisions that have no consistency nor rationale.
However you feel about the mosque, Ground Zero, your views of Islamic beliefs, your impressions of someone’s perceived (or presumed) sympathies toward terrorists, or any other value judgment, none of it matters. That’s because we have a First Amendment that has stood the test of 200 years. And it has endured precisely because it is unequivocal and clear. We as a nation do not permit ourselves to attempt to dictate or restrict the practice of religion. Period.
If you don’t like that, then your only recourse is to try to assemble the majority needed to repeal it. But if that were to happen, we would lose a huge part of what makes this country what it is, and makes it worth fighting for. A visit to Iran might give you an education about what to expect were that to happen.
On another (and much lighter) note, it has been pointed out (also in the New York Times) that Obama and the Democrats have adopted the "car in the ditch" metaphor with special enthusiasm. In case you haven't heard this line of rhetoric, he likens the economy to a car that the previous administration drove off the road and into a ditch... "And now they want the keys back."
He has embellished this image with references to the mud that the car is stuck in, how muddy the current administration is getting trying to free it, and how even his daughter will need to show how she can drive before she'll be trusted with the keys. The one that gave me a laugh was when he mentioned that the Republicans were "...standing around with their Slurpees" while the Democrats toil to pull this vehicle out.
Shortly after that, I passed a Seven-Eleven with a window display of various Slurpee cups with WWE wrestlers on them, with the line, "Collect them all." I thought, what a great idea!
So here's a free idea for the Democrats. With the permission of the Slurpee folks, of course: "Right Wing Windbag Slurpee Cups." I can picture them now... Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, "Dr" Laura Schlessinger, Ann Coulter, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and what the heck, Russell Pearce, because even though he's only a state windbag, he unleashes a lot of stink into the national discourse.
The smaller size Slurpees could feature each of the Republicans who's delivered the Saturday rebuttals to Obama's radio addresses. That could be the "small Republican windbag" collection.
If we give credit to Ed Kilgore of Progressive Fix, we could expand this (throw in Ben Stein and Steve Forbes, for instance) and call the whole thing the "Teabags, Windbags, and Moneybags" Slurpee Collection. Collect them all!
Remember, I thought of it first.
Much of the debate over the proposed mosque and community center near Ground Zero invokes emotion: The opponents ask, “How must the families of the victims feel?” The supporters counter with, “How would you feel if a Catholic parish was treated this way ..?” And on and on. Many of the arguments resonate with most of us, and (according to the surveys I’ve seen) most of us feel mixed emotions and dissonance about this. Despite all the rhetoric, people don’t seem to be able to avoid talking about how they feel. Even very intelligent and reasonable essays (like this one in the New York Times) seem caught up in trying to come up with a way of looking at it that you can feel okay about.
But we have a Constitution for a very good reason: so that the way people feel at any given moment does not lead to decisions that have no consistency nor rationale.
However you feel about the mosque, Ground Zero, your views of Islamic beliefs, your impressions of someone’s perceived (or presumed) sympathies toward terrorists, or any other value judgment, none of it matters. That’s because we have a First Amendment that has stood the test of 200 years. And it has endured precisely because it is unequivocal and clear. We as a nation do not permit ourselves to attempt to dictate or restrict the practice of religion. Period.
If you don’t like that, then your only recourse is to try to assemble the majority needed to repeal it. But if that were to happen, we would lose a huge part of what makes this country what it is, and makes it worth fighting for. A visit to Iran might give you an education about what to expect were that to happen.
On another (and much lighter) note, it has been pointed out (also in the New York Times) that Obama and the Democrats have adopted the "car in the ditch" metaphor with special enthusiasm. In case you haven't heard this line of rhetoric, he likens the economy to a car that the previous administration drove off the road and into a ditch... "And now they want the keys back."
He has embellished this image with references to the mud that the car is stuck in, how muddy the current administration is getting trying to free it, and how even his daughter will need to show how she can drive before she'll be trusted with the keys. The one that gave me a laugh was when he mentioned that the Republicans were "...standing around with their Slurpees" while the Democrats toil to pull this vehicle out.
Shortly after that, I passed a Seven-Eleven with a window display of various Slurpee cups with WWE wrestlers on them, with the line, "Collect them all." I thought, what a great idea!
So here's a free idea for the Democrats. With the permission of the Slurpee folks, of course: "Right Wing Windbag Slurpee Cups." I can picture them now... Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, "Dr" Laura Schlessinger, Ann Coulter, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and what the heck, Russell Pearce, because even though he's only a state windbag, he unleashes a lot of stink into the national discourse.
The smaller size Slurpees could feature each of the Republicans who's delivered the Saturday rebuttals to Obama's radio addresses. That could be the "small Republican windbag" collection.
If we give credit to Ed Kilgore of Progressive Fix, we could expand this (throw in Ben Stein and Steve Forbes, for instance) and call the whole thing the "Teabags, Windbags, and Moneybags" Slurpee Collection. Collect them all!
Remember, I thought of it first.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
An Odd and Solitary Grief
I found out last week that an old girlfriend of mine had died. She had died a month earlier, but I hadn’t heard about it till a friend let me know. I hadn’t spoken to her in at least 36 years, and we broke up almost 37 years ago after a relationship that lasted less than six months when we were 20 years old. The start and end of the relationship were equally awkward for me to handle, and I didn’t do well at either task. I made a mopey ass of myself after she made it clear there was no point in pursuing the issue. I hated the feeling of rejection, and it made me a less admirable person for a few months. So I gave her good reasons not to regret her decision, I guess. She did do one nice thing for me after the breakup which I’ll always appreciate her for: She took a record to a Leo Kottke show I wasn’t able to attend and got him to autograph it for me. That made it hard for me to remember her with much bitterness, just a sort of general sadness.
My next relationship after that (not counting some trial and error dating) was with my future wife, and we’ve been together for 35 years. My wife always referred to my ex-girlfriend by some not very complimentary labels, and I was a good sport about that, since I understood the nature of dealing with the exes of your life partner. But aside from a time when we spotted my ex at a Star Trek convention the year we got engaged (which was a very weird coincidence, given that it was an extremely unnatural environment for all three of us), I never saw her again.
I knew that she was working as a public defender, and was a steward in their union, from the alumni directory that our college put out about fifteen years ago. Other than that, I didn’t think much about her. She still listed her maiden name, and I assumed she hadn’t gotten married. Not that a name is a reliable indicator, but I had a hunch she wasn’t the marrying kind. At least that explanation was easier on my male ego than some of the alternative explanations for her unceremoniously dumping me in 1973.
Ironically, when my college friends and I reconnected online a few months ago, one of the things we did was post and comment on some of the old movies and videos we’d taken of those years. On one group outing to my parents’ summer home, there was a brief silent movie scene with my old girlfriend. She was ignoring me as I tried to get her attention, and I made a dismissive wave in the general direction of her back and stomped off as she walked away from me. I was hamming it up for the camera’s benefit, but the scene was oddly premonitory of the breakup that happened a couple months later. Seeing that got me wondering about her, but beyond Googling her name, I didn’t pursue the matter. The Googling turned up almost nothing, except the year she passed the bar and the fact that she had been disqualified from the ballot in an attempt to run for judge three or four years ago. The ballot filing listed her address as the same town she grew up in, only a few miles from where I live now and where we went to high school. I wasn’t surprised to find out that the local old boys hadn’t let her run for judge. She wasn’t the type to kiss ass to get ahead, and I’m sure she had made some enemies. I sort of suspected that, given the line of work she was in, she had to be careful not to have any personal information floating around out there on the Internet for bad guys to find out about. So I left it at that and went back to my daily routine.
I had no way of knowing that, as I was indulging this idle curiosity, she was lying in bed dying of lung cancer. She passed away about two weeks after I thought of her, as I later found out. Had I Googled her name just two weeks after I did, I would have seen the obituary and the tribute from her union local, of which she had been the president, and where she was held in high regard and was compared to “Mother” Jones. The blog from her union included admiring anecdotes from attorneys and judges she had worked with, which portrayed her as a hard-nosed fighter with a heart. I found out she had been active in an organization working to abolish the death penalty in our state – ironically again, an organization that some of my fellow faculty members were also involved with. Apparently she had been thrown in jail on more than one occasion by judges who didn’t like her style. I also found out that, even though she spent most of her time at the criminal courts building, her actual office was a half block away from the office where I’ve worked for the last seven years. Who knew?
So now I have this weird feeling. On the most basic level, I felt like this was one more step closer to my own mortality and that of my friends. As my Irish co-worker puts it, “You realize that your rung is next on the ladder.” It’s not like losing your parents, or even like it was when I lost my older brother, who, at twelve years my senior, was of a different age cohort altogether. This was the Angel of Death swooping right into those college pictures and snatching one of us out of the picture. Never mind that she smoked when I knew her. A lot of us did a lot of unhealthy things - then and since - so you can’t just blame her “lifestyle choices,” as the current phrase puts it.
But this is a more complicated feeling than just hearing that a classmate has died. I first had that happen in high school. This was someone who was important to me. She meant something to me. But I can’t really have her mean anything to me now. Not without seeming disloyal to my wife and unappreciative of our time together. A time together which has endured, I might point out, sixty-eight times longer than my relationship with the deceased did.
And I looked at the online tribute messages and the comments on the union blog, some of which came from her family members whom I had met, and I had the same urge that we all have to leave some message of sympathy and tribute to a person who obviously made a difference to a lot of people. Not the least of which is the son that I never knew she had. I wasn’t surprised to hear about him either, and my wife and I both wondered if she had adopted him - it would have been consistent with the approach to life that we figured she had. But I tried to joke with my wife by saying that all I knew was that he wasn’t mine. She bristled a little more than I would have expected and said, “THAT would be a way to ruin 34 years of marriage!”
But what am I supposed to say in the way of tribute? “I dated her for six months in 1973 and hoped to marry her until she broke up with me and never spoke to me again. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
So I’m left feeling a bit relieved, and yet a bit disappointed, that (like an extra in someone else's movie) my part in her life will be forever unknown and unmarked now by all who shared her last years and months. And that I don’t have any real loss to mourn, except the same loss I mourned for those months in 1973 and 1974. It’s the loss of a life I had once hoped for which would have included her, and that loss is long put to rest. But the ghosts of that loss are stirred up again now, and there’s nothing I can do about them except wait for them to go back where they came from, into my memories – and my dreams, where she has shown up intermittently over the years, and where she can now join my parents among the restless dreamed dead. I can’t even raise a glass in her honor, because I don’t drink these days. But in my mind I can tip my cap to her like an old Irish gentleman, and use Richard Brautigan’s phrase to mark the passing of “…a good ass gone under.” She’d probably ask for nothing more than that.
My next relationship after that (not counting some trial and error dating) was with my future wife, and we’ve been together for 35 years. My wife always referred to my ex-girlfriend by some not very complimentary labels, and I was a good sport about that, since I understood the nature of dealing with the exes of your life partner. But aside from a time when we spotted my ex at a Star Trek convention the year we got engaged (which was a very weird coincidence, given that it was an extremely unnatural environment for all three of us), I never saw her again.
I knew that she was working as a public defender, and was a steward in their union, from the alumni directory that our college put out about fifteen years ago. Other than that, I didn’t think much about her. She still listed her maiden name, and I assumed she hadn’t gotten married. Not that a name is a reliable indicator, but I had a hunch she wasn’t the marrying kind. At least that explanation was easier on my male ego than some of the alternative explanations for her unceremoniously dumping me in 1973.
Ironically, when my college friends and I reconnected online a few months ago, one of the things we did was post and comment on some of the old movies and videos we’d taken of those years. On one group outing to my parents’ summer home, there was a brief silent movie scene with my old girlfriend. She was ignoring me as I tried to get her attention, and I made a dismissive wave in the general direction of her back and stomped off as she walked away from me. I was hamming it up for the camera’s benefit, but the scene was oddly premonitory of the breakup that happened a couple months later. Seeing that got me wondering about her, but beyond Googling her name, I didn’t pursue the matter. The Googling turned up almost nothing, except the year she passed the bar and the fact that she had been disqualified from the ballot in an attempt to run for judge three or four years ago. The ballot filing listed her address as the same town she grew up in, only a few miles from where I live now and where we went to high school. I wasn’t surprised to find out that the local old boys hadn’t let her run for judge. She wasn’t the type to kiss ass to get ahead, and I’m sure she had made some enemies. I sort of suspected that, given the line of work she was in, she had to be careful not to have any personal information floating around out there on the Internet for bad guys to find out about. So I left it at that and went back to my daily routine.
I had no way of knowing that, as I was indulging this idle curiosity, she was lying in bed dying of lung cancer. She passed away about two weeks after I thought of her, as I later found out. Had I Googled her name just two weeks after I did, I would have seen the obituary and the tribute from her union local, of which she had been the president, and where she was held in high regard and was compared to “Mother” Jones. The blog from her union included admiring anecdotes from attorneys and judges she had worked with, which portrayed her as a hard-nosed fighter with a heart. I found out she had been active in an organization working to abolish the death penalty in our state – ironically again, an organization that some of my fellow faculty members were also involved with. Apparently she had been thrown in jail on more than one occasion by judges who didn’t like her style. I also found out that, even though she spent most of her time at the criminal courts building, her actual office was a half block away from the office where I’ve worked for the last seven years. Who knew?
So now I have this weird feeling. On the most basic level, I felt like this was one more step closer to my own mortality and that of my friends. As my Irish co-worker puts it, “You realize that your rung is next on the ladder.” It’s not like losing your parents, or even like it was when I lost my older brother, who, at twelve years my senior, was of a different age cohort altogether. This was the Angel of Death swooping right into those college pictures and snatching one of us out of the picture. Never mind that she smoked when I knew her. A lot of us did a lot of unhealthy things - then and since - so you can’t just blame her “lifestyle choices,” as the current phrase puts it.
But this is a more complicated feeling than just hearing that a classmate has died. I first had that happen in high school. This was someone who was important to me. She meant something to me. But I can’t really have her mean anything to me now. Not without seeming disloyal to my wife and unappreciative of our time together. A time together which has endured, I might point out, sixty-eight times longer than my relationship with the deceased did.
And I looked at the online tribute messages and the comments on the union blog, some of which came from her family members whom I had met, and I had the same urge that we all have to leave some message of sympathy and tribute to a person who obviously made a difference to a lot of people. Not the least of which is the son that I never knew she had. I wasn’t surprised to hear about him either, and my wife and I both wondered if she had adopted him - it would have been consistent with the approach to life that we figured she had. But I tried to joke with my wife by saying that all I knew was that he wasn’t mine. She bristled a little more than I would have expected and said, “THAT would be a way to ruin 34 years of marriage!”
But what am I supposed to say in the way of tribute? “I dated her for six months in 1973 and hoped to marry her until she broke up with me and never spoke to me again. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
So I’m left feeling a bit relieved, and yet a bit disappointed, that (like an extra in someone else's movie) my part in her life will be forever unknown and unmarked now by all who shared her last years and months. And that I don’t have any real loss to mourn, except the same loss I mourned for those months in 1973 and 1974. It’s the loss of a life I had once hoped for which would have included her, and that loss is long put to rest. But the ghosts of that loss are stirred up again now, and there’s nothing I can do about them except wait for them to go back where they came from, into my memories – and my dreams, where she has shown up intermittently over the years, and where she can now join my parents among the restless dreamed dead. I can’t even raise a glass in her honor, because I don’t drink these days. But in my mind I can tip my cap to her like an old Irish gentleman, and use Richard Brautigan’s phrase to mark the passing of “…a good ass gone under.” She’d probably ask for nothing more than that.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Haiti and the Roots of America's Crazy Fake Populism: Astroturf is Nothing New
This is a line of argument that Joe Bageant has made convincingly in "Deer Hunting with Jesus." It's in the interests of those with economic power to keep the working-class white populace (especially in southern states) supporting politics that work against those whites' best interests. And one big way they do that is by stoking racial fears. As many have pointed out, they just do it less directly these days, using code words. They also do it by creating "debates" where there are none. The immigration "debate," the healthcare "debate," and on and on. Those are code words to defend and fan fears based on ignorance, and keep people from thinking about what they really want to stand for as a nation. This is a very good essay because it digs deeper into American history than Joe Bageant went. Greed seems to have trumped idealism since the Constitution was written.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Monday, January 11, 2010
Christian Armchair Jihadists
I'm kind of amused by the conservative blowhard blowback over Brit Hume's advice to Tiger Woods (to abandon Buddhism and become a Christian so he can be redeemed). Columnists like Ann Coulter and somebody named Brent Bozell III (Whoever he is) spent a total of about 50 ranting paragraphs talking about how "apoplectic" all the liberals are getitng over Hume's comment, and why they're so laughable for doing so.
Their smug (as always) and vaguely threatening (as the ones with all the right answers) tone reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw one time, that had a picture of a Christian "fish" symbol (with big frickin' TEETH) about to devour one of those "fish with legs/Darwin" symbols. The line was, "Survival of the Saved." Now I don't know what kind of Christianity these people were raised with, but it's not the one I grew up with (where the sisters politely referred to "our non-Catholic friends"). Heck, these people are probably among the ones I used to hear on the low power radio station down the hall in Portage, Indiana, talking about how Catholics are devil-worshipping anti-Christs.
Actually, the finest comment I saw on the subject came from Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune, who thoughtfully commented, "Try this: 'Brit, turn to secular humanism and you can offer troubled people advice grounded in useful reality.'”
Their smug (as always) and vaguely threatening (as the ones with all the right answers) tone reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw one time, that had a picture of a Christian "fish" symbol (with big frickin' TEETH) about to devour one of those "fish with legs/Darwin" symbols. The line was, "Survival of the Saved." Now I don't know what kind of Christianity these people were raised with, but it's not the one I grew up with (where the sisters politely referred to "our non-Catholic friends"). Heck, these people are probably among the ones I used to hear on the low power radio station down the hall in Portage, Indiana, talking about how Catholics are devil-worshipping anti-Christs.
Actually, the finest comment I saw on the subject came from Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune, who thoughtfully commented, "Try this: 'Brit, turn to secular humanism and you can offer troubled people advice grounded in useful reality.'”
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