The Best Books I Read This Year

Top 10 for both fiction and non-fiction, with a brief description of each

Fiction

1) The Red & The Black by Stendhal - A young literary scholar falls in love with his employer's wife, and then falls in love with another employer's daughter. I love the book because of the drive toward authenticity amidst petty capitalist attitudes. As a political novel, although written in 1830, nearly all of it can be applied to today, and, specifically, to me.

2) Room by Emma Donague - This was a surprise Xmas gift, and I fell in love with it immediately; in fact, I read it in a span of two days. I cannot really give away anything of the plot, for fear of ruining the experience. It was a hauntingly beautiful novel that I will never forget.

3) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - This was a hilarious, cynical book about an old, neurotic matriarch desperately trying to coerce her dysfunctional family to get together for Christmas. I loved it.

4) A Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A very short account of a murder told in reverse. When it is finally laid bare, it is a sheer spectacle to behold. I was not expecting such a violent conclusion.

5) In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike - I remember the book more for Updike's enjoyably indulgent prose (remember, I was an English major) than its substance, but I did find the theological debates between characters and points of view quite interesting.

6) One Hundred Years of Solitude by GGM - This was a fast and engrossing read, but keeping track of the characters was somewhat difficult (coming from someone who read Russian novels for fun), probably because names of matriarchs and patriarchs are repeated in subsequent generations. Much like Island by Aldous Huxley without the LSD, it is about a small town slowly getting taken over by surrounding territories, populated with lively characters who have a lot of sex.

7) The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingslover - A Ragnarok between an ossified religious worldview, and the harsh realities of the third world in the sixties. It was a sheer pleasure to anticipate the deranged preacher's demise.

8) The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson - I finished this book a few weeks ago, and have just started The Girl Who Played With Fire. It isn't much of an intellectual read by any stretch, but it does contain some history and economics to justify itself. It's a fairly decent story that reminded me of Clue, and it has a very good cast of characters. Too bad Lisbeth Salander, the real star of the series, doesn't show up until halfway through the book.

9) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling - This is my favorite book in the series. One of my friends persuaded (forced) me to finish it (Goblet of Fire is the last one I read, and that was years ago). This is the book with Professor Umbridge, the juvenile version of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, and she turns Hogwarts into a totalitarian dystopia.

10) Out by Natsuo Kirino - I embarked on a quest for Japanese crime stories for a friend, but ended up finding something for myself instead. A group of women who work the night shift at a package lunch factory conspire to murder one of their abusive husbands. If you are looking for a glimpse into the lives of ordinary Japanese women, or are looking for a seriously violent novel, this is it.

Nonfiction

1) Being & Nothingness by JP Sartre - I identify as an Existentialist; I got a TON out of this book.

2) Capital vol 1 by Karl Marx - I was compelled to read Capital because of my chronic unemployment, my swiftly waning confidence in capitalism, and my support of Occupy Wall Street. Reading Capital was difficult, but, like Being & Nothingness, I was greatly rewarded for my persistence.

3) The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir - The back of the book claims that she pissed a lot of men off, but I'm not one of them. I really enjoyed it.

4) Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter - Thank you Richard Hofstadter for explaining how America got to be so devoid of intellectual culture, and for so beautifully illuminating the internal conflict of the intellectual between conformity and alienation.

5) Discipline & Punish by Michel Foucault - This book is more than just about the rise of the prison; it is about power, its structures, and how it operates, not only upon prisoners, but also greater society.

6) The Economics of Good & Evil by Tomas Sedlacek - I have been increasingly pressured to begin reading about economics, and so I chose this little book. Sedlacek presents economics and its history in a context to which my political/philosophical/literary brain can easily relate. I may read Adam Smith (whom Marx quoted extensively in Capital) and Keynes next year.

7) God: A Biography by Jack Miles - After reading Walter Brueggemmann last year, I found this little book that approached the Old Testament precisely from a perspective that closely matched mine. God: A Biography approached the Old Testament from a literary perspective and attempted to construct God as a full character, as a subject. Because of this book, I have a much greater respect for the Old Testament than I had previously.

8) The Savage City by TJ English - I saw the author appear on The Daily Show, and decided that I should read this book. It turned out that I made a good decision: English deconstructs the power structure of the police department and--to borrow from Foucault--its illegalities between the 60s and 70s. The book converged three vantage points to tell a complete story: That of George Whitmore, an unfortunate bystander devoured by the machine; a corrupt cop; and a Black Panther member.

9) Phenomenology of Mind by Georg W.F. Hegel - *DISCLAIMER*: I only understood about half of this book, but what I did understand, I really liked. What I did understand was about the synthesis of knowledge in the mind, but the rest of it was about the existence of Absolute Knowledge, and I had absolutely no idea what he was trying to say on that point (pun sort of intended).

10) Making Our Democracy Work by Justice Steven Breyer - I really like Steven Breyer as a SC Justice. In MODW, Breyer compares and contrasts what he considers--for lack of a better term--consequentialism/pragmatism with Originalism (Antonin Scalia's constitutional hermeneutic framework), while attempting to explain on a basic level what the SCOTUS actually does. While I was already familiar with much of what Justice Breyer had to say, it still proved to be worth my time.

In Defense of Apathy, OWS

I just finished an amazing book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964. The book discusses the fate and impact of intellectuals in and on American society. The picture he paints is not a pretty one.

What was most interesting about the book was the conflict between intellectuals and society from the intellectuals' point of view: The idea of "selling out" is not simply a petty one, but rather the notion that through getting a comfortable position, the intellectual will eventually become docile, and no longer be in a position to function as a social critic. Alienation is a perspective from which one sees society in its stark nakedness, and yields a certain freedom to say what one truly believes, and to no longer be alienated means to be exposed to the temptation to moderate or radically shift one's views in order to maintain a position. Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, refused the Nobel Prize in Literature, protesting that he "did not want to become an institution." The entire dynamic hinges on the temptation of power: The intellectual values the truth as s/he sees it, and in no longer being alienated, runs the risk of falling victim to some other idol (power, fame, fortune, etc).

There were fleeting moments in which the intellectual community in America (we actually had one!) possessed some power, during Teddy Roosevelt's presidency to World War 1, and later during the Great Depression, and one might suggest also the first two years of Obama's presidency. But each of those moments was but fleeting, and followed by enormous backlash: World War 1 was by all accounts a wanton holocaust, the New Deal was followed by McCarthy era, and Healthcare Reform was followed by the Tea Party with continuous effort to kill it. I might say that Occupy Wall Street, while right, is a failed movement, born too late and will probably die too soon. The Tea Party and TARP have only further ensconced the derivative traders and the corporate bogeymen in the seat of power when they should have been duly and severely punished for their excess.

The pattern of progressive policy in the United States leaves me to wonder about how someone described Michel Foucault's action/inaction dynamic, which at first I didn't like because apathy only enables further action by oppressors, but now I am starting to realize just what kind of position educated people find themselves in, and whether or not Foucault is indeed right.

Foucault, according to this person I was talking to, suggests that any kind of protest--such as Occupy Wall Street--legitimizes the current power structure. Protest, in this view, falls far short of what could be argued necessary revolution, and in this way, does not seek to make substantial changes to the prevailing order. As an example, look at women's rights, which are never so secure. Despite sexual liberation, widespread birth control, and new economic opportunity, women are still paid substantially less than their male counterparts. Examine the wanton manner in which cases of rape and sexual harassment are handled, Herman Cain being the latest example: Here is a man who is blatantly misogynist, indicating that he is most likely to have been guilty of sexual harassment by way of his low opinion of women, and we as a society seek not to punish him for this behavior, but rather to undermine the claims of his accusers. So often, despite the enormous advances in women's rights generally (not just abortion, that is an entirely more rabid and dangerous animal), they never feel quite so secure. African-Americans, however, appear to be so secure in their status that they are more than happy to align themselves with their previous oppressors and disparage homosexuals in their struggle for equal marriage rights, when the actual reality is that they suffer economically more than other groups in the current crisis. "You can still hold the keys to the kingdom, but I want X, Y, and Z" just doesn't work; when the truth is that it may be a choice of all or nothing.

Is there a way that intellectuals could have a lasting impact on society given the pattern of brief success followed by overwhelming backlash? Is it possible for those who know anything at all about how our society operates to be heard and listened to by anyone who has real power? What happens when intellectuals do get power? The Russian Revolution was born through the intelligentsia, and only unimaginable horror followed. The American Socialist Party, for their turn, owed much to intellectuals, but were just as confused by their presence as the capitalists, despite the fact that Marxism gained ground first in academia. The gulf between theory and praxis has never been bridged; the men who act are always at odds with the men who think.

So what do the intellectuals do, putting aside the anxieties of acceptance, if they cannot have a lasting impact on the course of society because of quintessential popular American mistrust? Do they wring their hands and allow those who show themselves to be malevolent, both to society and to intellectualism, to simply take over?

After Bush left office, I was fairly optimistic that Obama could have a real positive impact on society because of his intellect; I voted for him because of it. And what happened to him has happened to every other public figure with any significant degree of intellect: He was immediately lampooned by the most ignorant, backward, and even malicious among us, and arguably his most brilliant success is still being campaigned against, and is being tried at the Supreme Court. Halfway through his presidency--a span of merely two years--he was declared a lame duck by a pseudo-movement that could be described as nothing short of rabid. His reelection chances, depending on the commitments of our electorate, are slim. Because of the backlash against his intellect by a vagrant and uncommitted voting population, our election cycles have seemed to be rapidly accelerated, leaving far less time for any responsible public official to be productive, leaving those with questionable aims and the means to sell their poison pills to the public as though they were selling candy ample opportunity to wreak havoc.

The difference is stark: The Tea Party came out with a loud, clear, anti-intellectualist and xenophobic message that, to its own demographic, would prove suicidal were it pursued. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, is a genuinely populist movement, taking into account a very diverse membership, had difficulty deciding on more than a few decent slogans, but anyone with half a brain could figure out exactly what OWS was trying to say, and the conversation that Occupy movements across the country have been having with greater society have been rather...insightful.

Through Occupy Wall Street, we have learned some interesting things about how much we learn from the past, the range of acceptable political debate, and where our professional press stands: With the people it was supposed to serve, or the current power structure? UC Davis students were wantonly pepper-sprayed by a thug in a uniform. Lt Anthony Bologna in New York City pepper-sprayed a young girl behind a barricade, despite the fact that she was doing nothing. Oakland Police used military action against nonviolent protestors in order to evict them, and war veteran Scott Olsen was hit in the head with a tear gas canister, and a flashbang grenade was thrown into the group of people who rushed to help him. Where police officers get flashbang grenades, I would very much like to know. The militarization of police is an issue that will surely crop up again. Police officers, I should remind everyone, are unionized, and they are fighting for a power structure that will only exploit them and diminish their rights as public employees. The only explanation for rampant and unwarranted police violence is that they don't know or don't care about this technicality, and only get off on having a gun and holding power over others (top two responses of a survey my Sociology professor conducted on a class of police recruits). This is an interesting fact because there was almost no violence when the Tea Party held their rallies, despite their strong use of revolutionary and brazenly violent rhetoric, anti-union views, and their fetish for second amendment rights.

All of these things happened in previous eras: African-Americans were attacked by police dogs, beaten, and sprayed with fire hoses. Students were shot on a campus during the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. And we know how those turned out. But with Occupy Wall Street, they are using a wholly different tactic. Those in power are indirectly undermining the movement by intentionally diluting its message, claiming that they don't know what it is. So they would have us believe that a few hundred thousand people are gathering in public space and enduring extreme police violence for no reason? Either they are have lost all capacity for critical thinking, or this apparent confusion is deliberate. Our press is failing us absolutely, regardless of which of those two options you choose.

The allegiance of the press in times of crisis is always helpful to figure out, in order to gauge the degree to which the people should trust it. There are always those who will trust the media no matter what, even if violence rages in the streets outside their windows, and only one side has the weapons and armor.

Occupy Wall Street is also about how much we can actually say in our democracy. In the wake of massive financial meltdown--as I have oft repeated--we still have prominent people who will go to their graves reciting the mantras of the virtue of free-market capitalism, while millions are starving. Many adults who have lost their jobs, whose lives fell into ruin, still love the capitalism that killed them. The True Believers will never be swayed, even as they find themselves homeless. Can Occupy Wall Street fulfill its promise? Can it consolidate its myriad voices, and scream what needs to be said? Can it rise above the crowded voices of the corporate bogeymen, speculative sycophants, and alter forever the discourse of this country?

I personally believe that as a consequence of TARP, the management teams of any and all firms that participated in the program should have been immediately fired without severance, retirement, or a "parachute". I also believe that the banks, as a consequence of their irresponsibility, should have been placed under the control of the federal government, even though this does not by itself guarantee that the firms would behave more responsibly. I also believe that the IRS should thoroughly investigate all banks that participated in the program as a necessary condition of their receiving taxpayer funds, and lastly, that all derivative trading being pursued by these banks should be stopped immediately. Lastly, I urge everyone to move their money into a smaller institution on the condition that the bank they choose has not received TARP funds.

I realize that the question of apathy has not been solved, that I have spent more time on Occupy Wall Street than I intended. I have not worked out whether or not apathy is warranted, because we still live here and are still affected by the decisions of our politicians, even if we do not hold any real influence, but this could be said to be true for all Americans, intellectual or not.

No, I Will Not Worship Steve Jobs

In the process of death, it is often that those surrounding the dying or recently deceased will romanticize or flat-out whitewash that person--especially if it is a person that they already admire for things that have nothing to do with their personality--such as in the case of Steve Jobs.

During an argument with my parents, I discounted Steve Jobs as an inspiration because while he was good at making shiny gadgets that don't do very much (I am talking about the fairly totalitarian third-party app policies, such as the removal of Google's VoIP service a few years ago, and, more relevant, the lack of a donation system in apps for charities), his record for using his money for public good is rather "thin"1.

His defenders claim that he may have donated to social causes privately, but I don't find this convincing because he was a man beloved by millions, and really the first person (this is why I should like him) to make those damned hipsters look like the hypocrites they are. Think about it: Steve Jobs, beloved by the public, could have used his fame and fortune to do enormous good. Pick a cause--any cause--and his fans and followers would have solved it instantly. But curiously, he didn't do that, despite having ample opportunity2.

Bono claimed that he donated anonymously to Project RED, and in the 80s, Jobs set up a philanthropic organization, but that quickly shut down because "[he] didn't have time"3.
But look at what I said before, about how charities don't have donation systems in their apps. If Steve Jobs really cared about philanthropy, about social responsibility, wouldn't he at least have opened the doors to non-profit organizations on the most popular platform in the industrialized world? From this view, despite claims to the contrary--that in his death his estate may donate his fortune--there is no indication that he cared about anything but shiny objects and money.

The amount of attention and praise Steve Jobs is receiving is inversely proportionate to the amount of good he did as a person. Sure, he founded Apple, but Apple isn't dead; Steve Jobs, the person, is.

What matters to me when considering what he has to say is how much he did. During the last years of his tenure at Apple and his life, he traveled a dangerous road by cordoning off his technology, strictly regulating what could and could not interact with his devices.

In studying for the CompTIA A+ Certification exams, I learned that the computing industry took off and became what it is today precisely because those myriad technology companies had the foresight to share their technology for the betterment of everyone involved, which led to industry-wide standards and more freedom for consumers to mix and match computer peripherals and components. This is why I can build computers from scratch.

But none of this is true for Steve Jobs or Apple today, and it is ironic to me that a man so responsible for restricting technology is idolized--dare I say, worshiped--by people who claim to value freedom.

No, I don't feel compelled to join in worshiping Steve Jobs for two reasons: 1) The long-term impact of his isolated technology will have a detrimental effect on the greater industry precisely because of its restrictions, which may or may not result in the rest of the computing industry following suit, which means an Internet that is less free, less versatile, and more expensive. Imagine using a Windows OS and only being able to install pre-approved software! How many games and Open-Source applications like Firefox would be lost!? 2) Steve Jobs' lack of a record of social responsibility and philanthropy immediately discredits him as an inspirational figure.

1) http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/record-thin-on-steve-jobss-philanthropy/2011/10/06/gIQA3YKKRL_story.html

2) http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-jobss-public-giving/

3) http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/08/yes-you-can-think-less-steve-jobs-not-being-philanthropist/41885/

Why Are They So Desperate For Christie?

Just yesterday, NJ governor Chris Christie clarified what New Jerseyans have known all along: He isn't running for President1. But I can't seem to figure out why it is, exactly, that they think he could run in the first place. The conditions governing Christie's potential as a candidate in the current Republican field perfectly illustrates exactly what the Republican party is, and those who wish he would run are trying as best they can to ignore the fact that their party is inherently broken.

In my last article, I described how audience members cried "Let him die!", cheered Perry's record number of executions, and finally booed a gay service member, all without comment from the candidates themselves (Santorum claims that he couldn't hear the boos, but I think he's lying). Some doubt that the audiences at these debates constitutes the "base", that they are not representative of the larger GOP electorate, but I disagree. What one has to understand about the Republican party is that it consistently chases after the lowest common denominator: The least educated and the most vulnerable, the most terrified and the most xenophobic; the Republican party appeals to the very worst in all of us.

If you disagree with that, I present to you the current presidential lineup: Michele Bachmann, who, nearly everyone agrees, is categorically insane. Rick Perry, a demagogue who hates cancer, and, as Brit Hume remarked, "threw up all over himself." Perry's administration in Texas is so incompetent that it had to pray to solve problems because his state is on fire (the prayer session, as it turned out, did nothing). Rick Santorum is vociferously homophobic and has a "Google problem" because of it. Herman Cain, who absolutely hates Muslims, doesn't like to read. Newt Gingrich cheated on his wife multiple times while claiming to be a "Christian", and trips over himself in debates. Mitt Romney is a Mormon (the evangelicals HATE Mormons), and appears inauthentic generally; nobody trusts anything he says. Romney is currently believed to be the frontrunner. Jon Huntsman had to put "Call me crazy, but..." before announcing that he listens to scientists on global warming, and believes evolution to be true. That alone is enough to cut him out of the race. Ron Paul is the only candidate who has a shot at being the President in an effective capacity, but hardly anyone pays attention to anything he says but pot-smoking anarchists. The greater media establishment is so terrified of dealing with difficult questions that it is easier for them (as well as the greater American public) to simply pretend that Ron Paul does not exist.

Finally, I present the long period between 2008-2010 in which the Republican establishment was infatuated with Sarah Palin, whom everyone has since admitted is basically an idiot. She still possesses a small base of fans, and the media is still watching her like they watch the groundhog to know how long winter will last.

Given this environment, how could someone who is articulate, intelligent, bombastic, and tolerant (Christie nominated a Muslim to the State Supreme Court2!) have a chance? He doesn't, and he probably knew it. The fact that they came to him so desperately--that they hounded him--speaks either to their delusion regarding their own party, or to their desire to fix it, which a political candidate cannot do alone.

Moderate Republicans can only marvel at their party's descent into lunacy, but as Paul Krugman once pointed out, this was an evolution that occurred only because nobody realized it was happening. Glenn Beck was a clown, yes, but with no one on the right devoted to calling him a clown, to refuting the bizarre conspiracy theories fed continually to people who largely didn't know any better in a way that they could understand, he was allowed to thrive.

Doing nothing does not make extremism go away. I am often told that the Christian Right is "just a fringe", that it isn't representative of what "most people" believe, but with polls stating that belief in Creationism to hover around 50% for a decade, for gay marriage to be such a divisive issue, for Birtherism to become dogma for a major political party even for a time, can we really call it a fringe?

What is the reason for this insanity, anyway? Why stoke up baseless fears about a rival candidate? Well, who has the money? Look to Wisconsin, in which Scott Walker fabricated an economic crisis in his state to disenfranchise public unions. Look to Michigan, in which boundless power was given to Emergency Financial Managers. Look at the Occupy Wall Street protests that are happening right now. Look at Congress, which hasn't done a single thing since 2010. Who has the money?

The entire Republican party is focused on preserving the status quo in the face of the hardships of those who were wronged by the actions of the few in 2008. This is the reason for the distractions and the apparent stupidity: They got their money (our money via TARP, which, to be fair, is largely paid back), and all they need to do to keep the cash rolling in (our cash, because there is a finite amount of money in the economy, and our jobs--our futures--were all collateral) is to prevent us from holding them accountable at all costs. The damage to the political landscape doesn't matter, even the global economy doesn't matter; the only thing that matters is that they stay on top.

Why hasn't the CFPB been in the news lately? In Elizabeth Warren's interview on The Daily Show, she said that if it isn't talked about in the open, it will die. I still don't know, after about a year, if that essential agency has any teeth. Why is that?

1) http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/10/chris-christie-not-running-for-president/

2) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/nyregion/14christie.html

What I'm Really Afraid Of

There are two major phenomena that I am really worried about in this election cycle: The first is the readily apparent bloodthirst or barbarism of the Republican base, evident in the previous two debates, when the audience applauded Rick Perry's record number of executions (234), despite the fact that a few of them--one definite--may have been innocent, a fact that they--and Perry himself--are perfectly willing to ignore. In the second debate, the audience cheered, "Let him die!!" when Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul what should be done with a young man who falls into a coma without health insurance. Regardless of what one believes about the size or role of government, throwing a man's life away is not something about which we should be so nonchalant. Suffice to say, on this point, I am more terrified of our electorate than the people we may be electing.

It is true that Obama has not been a very effective President; there are two main things that he is not doing: 1) He is not fighting hard enough for what he wants, and 2) He attempts to accommodate a political party that is not interested in anything less than his own ruin and their ascension to absolute power. But these two points presuppose that we cannot afford to replace him with anything other than a possible Third-Party progressive or another Democrat; these points presuppose that the incapacity and potential tyranny of a Republican candidate is a given. It isn't "Anyone but Obama!"; rather it is "Please someone who can fight harder against the Tea Party than Obama is!"

Today, my parents were watching Fox News (just to see what they were saying), and they were misinterpreting liberals' dissatisfaction with Obama in order to support the notion that the Republicans should win, that Obama wasn't doing the country any good, etc. But this is not at all the case, as I have demonstrated concretely above; no Obama supporter in his or her right mind could possibly want any of the Republican candidates to replace him.

A few weeks ago, I came across an article about a recently-retired Republican staffer who brought up an incredibly terrifying potential reality, that extends in part from everything I said during the 2010 campaigns about Fox News and media saturation: "If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power"1. Imagine the kind of apparatuses that would be required to convince voters that the disappearance of their Social Security checks and health insurance is beneficial. Logic would tell us that the 2010 election strategy should have been a one-shot deal: Get them just crazy enough to put the Tea Party into office, but those freshmen could expect to be voted out again when the voters see the reality of their agenda. But what if it were possible to fool them not once, but repeatedly, even as the more catastrophic, possibly permanent damage starts to manifest itself?

And if it doesn't succeed immediately, it does not take long for the Republican party to recover its abused legion of voters: The many scandals of the 80s and 90s should have been the death knell for the Christian conservative bloc, but during the 2000s, in which many more scandals occurred (such as that of Ted Haggard, Scott Roeder, and George Rekers), that bloc only reemerged in an even more radicalized form called the Tea Party2. The truth is that what that article claimed has already come to pass: The GOP is so successful that it can absorb a near-constant stream of scandals directly caused by its ideology, unleash the most irresponsible policies, and still manage to get elected, merely by changing its facade. It is the Hydra.

1) http://truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

2) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/opinion/crashing-the-tea-party.html

Rudy Giuliani's Favorite Day of the Year

Between this year and last year, the way I see 9/11 has changed forever with the failure of our legislature to pass the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, the act of Congress that would provide healthcare to 9/11 first responders, who have been exposed to immeasurable toxins in the wasteland of the WTC in the course of duty.

The Zadroga Act and its failure exemplifies what America generally and especially the Republican party really thinks about 9/11. It is ironic to me that for a decade the GOP has used 9/11 to justify nearly everything it has done, and then when the time came to pay for its use, they turned around and filibustered what would be a demonstration of sincerity toward 9/11.

I find this particularly abhorrent because of the wanton frequency with which they used 9/11 as a cattle prod to goad the American people into accepting unpopular and dangerous legislation (Shock Doctrine): Rudy Giuliani himself used 9/11 as the entire substance of his presidential campaign in 2008, and the GOP has used it to justify everything from the two military quagmires in which we are currently ensnared to this day to the PATRIOT Act. Mind you, the seats in the legislature have not changed much between 2001 and 2011, so those same people who goaded us into Iraq and Afghanistan and who heaped upon us the PATRIOT Act in the name of September 11th are the very same people who blocked the Zadroga Act.

Look at the failure of the Zadroga Act: This is what we really think of 9/11. In fact, 9/11 is as existentially important to us as Jesus: We talk a lot about them, we make big shows and speeches about them, and then we pursue our everyday lives come Monday morning. But when it comes time to pay up, to demonstrate truly what we believe, we shrink away and ultimately fail to do the right thing.

The Zadroga Act did eventually pass, but only after Jon Stewart made a huge deal about it. It should have passed without question or debate.

There is one other nagging question I have about 9/11: Why do they care so much? Why do the GOP and the Tea Party care so much about 9/11? On the morning after 9/11, Jerry Falwell remarked to Pat Robertson that America itself is responsible for the WTC attacks. This is the same attitude that these kinds of people (like Michele Bachmann) always take when something bad happens. But what changed? The people working in the WTC on that day were probably more liberal, college educated, less religious, and more affluent than they are (not to mention, some were possibly homosexual!); shouldn't they have maintained Jerry Falwell's initial attitude given these possibilities? What changed and why?

Before I unleash my boundless cynicism, it could be that the United States was attacked not only by foreigners, but by a religion viewed by the GOP as alien and satanic. This may have something to do with their bizarre solidarity with a city almost as liberal as New Orleans. But the other reason (cynicism in five...four...three...two...one...) is that it had provided a miraculous justification for everything at that time the GOP wanted to accomplish, which would otherwise be incredibly unpopular. This is easy! All we have to say when people disagree with us is that they are Unamerican and that they support terrorism! Of course, this happened before (McCarthy and the HUAC in the 50s), so it wasn't a game that anyone had forgotten how to play.

The tragedy is that that is all 9/11 ever really is: We really don't honor it, not in any way that really matters, we just like using it to expediently justify reckless actions. Most Americans, it seems, are simply satisfied with this insincerity. We get an idea, whether it is a religion, or a political ideology, or some maxim, and while we like it, we don't do anything with it. Ideas require work and dedication. If you really believe something, you had better do the work. I wonder whether anyone in this country believes anything at all...

The Tragedy in Norway

Last week, Anders Breivik murdered 91 people in Norway while disguised as a police officer. In the days that followed, the Norwegian Prime Minister gave an amazing speech with a few nice swipes at George W Bush, and made me wish we had him instead of Bush as our President on 9/11(1).

Mr Breivik's 1500-page manifesto was released upon the internet, in which he derided "Marxists" and Muslim immigrants, as well as feminism, and lamented that conservative members of Parliament were invertebrate pragmatists.

And I sit here, for the past week, bewildered. I wondered why such a thing has not happened here. Yes, George Tiller has been murdered; earlier this week a Molotov cocktail was thrown into a Texas Planned Parenthood, but no conservative has thus far had the balls to bring the Tea Party to its logical conclusion (Gabrielle Giffords does not fall into this category because Laughner was ruled apolitical in motivation)2. Most of the conservative party in the United States can directly sympathize with Mr Breivik: They hate Islam and Marxism, and they fervently believe in a "Christian America," some of them as fervently as Mr Breivik himself believed in Christian Europe, it would seem. They even denounced Obama as a terrorist himself, and continue to question his legitimacy as President; their hatred seemingly knew no bounds.

There is a direct correlation between belief and action, and judging by the beliefs of those who listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, it would seem to me that anything at all is possible.

What is also interesting to me is that Fox News is kind of playing a double game: They have been quick to emphasize the connection every other terrorist has with his respective religion (i.e. Islam), such as Faisal Shazad and the Fort Hood shooter, but here--because of the proximity of what their anchors and hosts declare to their viewers every single day to Mr Breivik's stated ideology, they are quick to de-emphasize, or even flat-out deny the connection--and they would be right. But it would only be fair to do the same for terrorists on the other side. This is duplicitous because they are denying Breivik's Christianism (more on that in a minute) while at the same time telling their viewers to think in a manner similar to him. The prospect of violence naturally makes everyone uncomfortable, so it is in their interest to deny that they could have anything in common with him in order to continue to do what they are doing and not have to take responsibility for it.

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic defined Christianism in an editorial for Time back in 2006 in order to differentiate Christian Conservatism from Christianity as a religion.

Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike3.

Sullivan, in writing about Breivik, described him as being an example of what he means by "Christianism":

But Christianist? Breivik's picture should accompany the term in any dictionary. Christianism is all about power over others, and it has been fueled in the last decade by its mirror image, Islamism, and motivated to fury by hatred of what it sees as is true enemy, liberalism. Both Islamism and Christianism, to my mind, do not spring from real religious faith; they spring from neurosis caused by lack of faith. They are the choices of those who are panicked by the complexity and choices of modernity into a fanatical embrace of a simplistic parody of religion in order to attack what they see as their cultural and social enemies. They are not about genuine faith; they are about the instrumentality of faith as a political bludgeon4.

This "religious nihilism"--to use Karen Armstrong's term--is a last-ditch to save one's faith, to make it manifest in order to prove it to one's self after it is lost5. Religion as a political ideology is not, according to Sullivan, a manifestation of one's authentic conviction, but the inner panic of a person who lost it and has nothing else. The less one believes in a religion, the more fervent this need is for their beliefs to be made actual.

But I find this incredibly tragic, as those like myself, and others, are fully able to be genuinely good without being religious. We can only assume that he loved his religion, and it died in his heart despite how much he fought to keep it. Instead of blaming himself, or augmenting his faith with reality--as many do with great success--he blamed greater society and other people for the death of religion in his mind, ultimately killing 76 innocent people.

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mGBGspE8FM

2) http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/07/dallas-area-planned-parenthood-clinic-attacked-with-molotov-cocktail/

3) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191826,00.html

4) http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/07/revisiting-christianism.html

5) Armstrong, Karen. The Battle For God: A History of Fundamentalism. Ballantine Books. (C) 2001 New York, NY.

The Debt Ceiling: Two Options

We have 11 days remaining before the debt ceiling deadline, and as we inch closer and closer to the end, I am ever more convinced that the United States is going to default.

This stems from the simple fact that the House leadership does not at all care about good governance; they care more about "drowning [government] in a bathtub" (Starve the Beast) than they do about federal debt. It would be in their interest, from this point of view, for the government to default insofar as it would greatly restrict its borrowing power. Their adamant resistance to tax increases in this case would only serve to finally kill the government they so hate (which, ironically, governs the country they say they love). I would further say that they would gladly have private businesses--and ordinary Americans--take the credit hit if it would serve the greater cause of bringing down the federal government.

As the clock ticks, the GOP only grows in power, as their negotiating in bad faith and interest in seeing the government collapse would force the President to take their unilateral proposition just to prevent a default, as it is unlikely that the GOP would accept anything that isn't on their terms. Now we see how dangerous it is to see our government negotiate in bad faith, and why we can't afford to elect people into government who believe that government 1) cannot work, and 2) is itself the problem.

The Male in Pornography

Forewarning

This essay will probably be more controversial than many of my other ones, even those on religion. Many of my Facebook friends will probably untag themselves as soon as I create a link.

I am going to start with a confession: I watch a lot of porn. At 24 years old, never having been successful at finding love, this may come as no surprise. But there are a few things about porn that strike me as particularly interesting--even unsettling. Many feminists argue that the woman in porn is objectified and oppressed, and while this may be true in many cases, it is evident to me that onscreen, it is the male that is much less of a person. I don't want to say that there are not any instances where the male and the female are equal, but this scenario is, tragically, the most difficult to find.

Heterosexual Porn

The attention in a pornographic video is placed upon the female(s) and what they are doing, and the (often fake) pleasure they are experiencing, as this encourages both the male participants and the audience. The function of the man lies solely in his penis, as the woman often cries "give me that cock!" and other such exclamations; never is he treated with even the same kind of consideration the males may even pay her: Caresses and massages from the male to the female are never returned; all of their attention, if any at all, is upon his penis because that is all he is.

In porn where there are two women, it is between them that they find any kind of human affection: They kiss, they caress between themselves, and again, the male is simply his penis; a passive object subjugated to the whims of the woman: he receives nothing as a totality in himself.

The Male Orgasm in Porn

At the end of a given scene, after a display of nearly superhuman endurance, the male is finally permitted to release sexual frustration in his one and only orgasm. Here, he is often responsible for his own pleasure; despite the fact that he is allowed to ejaculate on her body, she does not reciprocate for the pleasure he has given her precisely because he is made to masturbate to orgasm after 20-30 minutes of sex. Even though having the male ejaculate on the woman is an aesthetic interest on the part of the pornographer with the intent to further encourage the audience, the fact that the woman does not help him still reinforces the fate of the male in pornography.

Oral Sex in Porn

Oral sex is the only area where men possess the upper hand in porn. A woman may spend anywhere from thirty seconds to a full minute--or, depending on what you're watching, five to ten minutes--on the man, but scenes where men perform oral sex on the woman are difficult to find, and I have only ever found a single scene where the male spends more than 5 minutes. Contrary to what one might conclude from this fact, this reinforces the notion that the man is just his penis, as any other kind of intimacy--such as that which is not focused on his genitals--received from the female is simply nonexistent.

Lesbian Porn

What I said about porn in which there are two women with men present is true without men present, but here there is something else going on: The equality between two or more partners in a lesbian porn video is apparent: There is an equal exchange of pleasure between them, whereas if a male were present, this condition would not exist.

Even in videos in which a strap-on is used; in which a female "becomes" the male, this equality is never broken, because either female maintains consideration for her partner's pleasure, and gives up the "male" in order to receive it from her partner after she (her partner) achieves orgasm. While it can be said that the "male" (the one wearing the strap-on) becomes a mere object by virtue of the fact that a toy cannot feel pleasure, and the woman wearing it is acting for the pleasure of her partner, she again becomes a subject when she relinquishes the strap-on.

This says volumes about men in porn--in fact, it says everything about men in porn. The man (or men) is necessary insofar as he is able to provide the woman with pleasure. The woman is encouraged to reach orgasm whenever she pleases, but the male only achieves orgasm at the end of the scene. She could have as many as four or five orgasms, but the male can only have one, after the woman appears satisfied. The presence of a condom does nothing to change this fact. A man cannot relinquish his penis as easily as a woman can remove a strap-on, and therefore he is damned to be a slave for the star of the show, forever objectified and passive.

Hentai (Japanese Animated Porn)

Japanese anime porn is quite different, but the treatment of men is worse in this genre than in any other. Most people agree that because women in hentai are often tortured and abused onscreen that it is they who are most oppressed, but where women are oppressed, it is the men who are often portrayed as sex-crazed demons (literally) and predators. In many hentai series, the man often has power over the women already: often, he is the headmaster of an all-girls' school. The role of the male in hentai is to attack and violate the woman in an incredibly exaggerated fashion. Neither the female nor the male is anything in themselves, but the fact of the male always being the perpetrator of violent crime does damage to a man watching it, and to women who see it and expect not only for men to be that, but also to accept it as normal. It is important to note that the woman in violent hentai often accepts her situation despite her initial shame and fear, which is intended to portray the situation as OK for both parties in order to give a kind of approval to the audience's sexual arousal, but it still leaves a lingering, profound sense of guilt after the scene is over.

Unknown to many is the fact that the Japanese produce interactive novels that are pornographic in nature. One of the most infamous--as it was rejected by Amazon.com--is the game RapeLay, which is exactly what it sounds like: The player takes the role of a sexual predator, and the goal is to violate a mother and her daughter. I know someone who has played this game, and when asked about it, I said to this person, "Watching such anime porn is bad enough, I don't want to be party to it."

There is anime porn that does not victimize women, but I do not know the exact proportion in which it exists relative to the kinds of hentai in which women are victimized.

Conclusion

It is interesting to me that an industry so condemned as oppressive to women has so succeeded in an almost total reversal of sexual roles: The males exist for the sake of the woman's pleasure.

The question remains: How does this impact real life? What does it tell us about ourselves? Insofar as a single party can be disenfranchised, the system remains dysfunctional. If pornography is going to mimic real relationships--even a heavily exaggerated view of real relationships (and the physical possibilities of human sexuality--"How many can she fit in there!?")--it is going to have to rectify itself. I am glad to see more actresses saying that they enjoy what they do (and I hope their testimony is authentic), now if only men could say the same thing.

Male self-image is damaged by pornography. Juxtaposed with the dream of the "insatiable whore" is Herculean endurance: "Whoa! How the hell am I expected to last that long!? 30 minutes of thrusting!? That's IMPOSSIBLE!"1. The very point is that both of these extremes are not what constitutes good sex (or even what is expected of us, male or female). The absence of intimacy on behalf of the male can only be described as disheartening, as it can dampen the range of sexual pleasures he can expect to receive in his own life, even if he would ideally enjoy receiving all things which he expects to confer upon his partner--he wants to be treated as a woman is treated, as more than simply his penis.

All media conveys a message, and whether or not this message is true is important for us to examine and decide. If it is false--which, in this case, it is--it should be rectified if it cannot be ignored. We are told things about ourselves and our world that may or may not be true, and it is important for the betterment of our own self-perception and our perception of others that we scrutinize the merit of what we are told, as how we see ourselves and others is integral to how well we function in the world.

1) http://feministphilosophers.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/qzg4v.jpg

Short Story I Just Wrote

The following text is a work of FICTION. It DID NOT happen. It also needs a title.

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It was 2:00 in the morning on a Thursday night. I was in the city, walking back from the midnight opening of The Ledge, and as I was walking back to my car, I was assaulted by a gunman. I had turned my back to open my car door, and a pistol was pressed against my back.

I dropped my keys on the seat as I put my hands in the air. “Give me your wallet,” the man’s voice was shaky; he was pleading, as though he had never done this before. I took a few seconds to consider my options, and swiftly turned around, grabbed the barrel of the pistol, and twisted it out of his hand, while at the same time hitting the side of his jaw with a palm-heel strike. I then bent him over with a wristlock, and forced him to the ground. I pointed the pistol at him on the ground with two hands—one on the grip, and one on the butt—and stepped back.

The man was rubbing his cheek, where I had struck him. “Please don’t shoot me!” The man was clearly bewildered: he had never considered the possibility that his first time would end so badly for himself.

“Why not? You have threatened my life; what obligation could I possibly have to you?” Adrenaline was still pumping through my veins; it would be easy to kill him.
“I have a family!”
“So do I. Why did you assault me?”
“I…I needed drug money,” this man clearly had nothing to lose, and little to live for. “Please have mercy on me! Aren’t you a Christian?”
“No, no I’m not, actually. Are you?” I said, rather dismissively. The man’s eyes widened: I had appeared to him as Satan incarnate, and he psychologically prepared for his death. He started to cry. Ignoring the real-life consequences of killing the man for a moment, I found him too pathetic to pull the trigger.

“Yes, I am!” he said with a slightly proud tone, as though declaring his love for his Lord and Savior would magically transport him out of the dire situation he immediately finds himself in. It didn’t.

“How can you consider yourself a Christian if you would murder a man in cold blood for drug money?” This response only made the attacker cry harder. Once again, he begged for forgiveness and to be let go.

“Redemption from me will not come easy. At this moment, you may believe that you understand the gravity of what you did, but as you walk home tonight, you may well forget. What guarantee do I have that you won’t try this again? What if I let you go, and I read in the papers next week that you killed someone else? I could only hold myself responsible for that.” The man prostrated himself before me, and was wailing. He clutched at the bottoms of my jeans, promising that he would not repeat his mistake.

Watching him carefully, I slowly lowered my left hand into my pocket and reached for my cell phone. Steadying the pistol to deter him from running away, I called the police and told them what happened. I turned to the pathetic assailant: “The police are on their way. I am going to unload the pistol. If you run, I will catch you.” I removed the magazine, and pulled the slider back as I turned the pistol upside-down. The round in the chamber made a soft high-pitched ring on the sidewalk.

The police arrived shortly after. In that time, I said to him, “You might want to read Crime & Punishment.” The police officers walked up to the scene and told me to drop the weapon. I told them it was unloaded as I slowly placed it on the ground. They collected the weapon and the magazine, and arrested my attacker. They asked me to accompany them to give them a more detailed account of the incident. I obliged.

Epilogue

The man was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and possession of drug paraphernalia. He was addicted to heroin, and was connected to a series of robberies that occurred over the past few months. I later testified in court against him, and he was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

What do you think?

Casey Anthony and Public Ignorance

I must admit that I did not pay much attention to the trial until the day the verdict was read. That day, I read a synopsis of the arguments of the defense and prosecution, and I have come to believe that the jurors made the correct decision.

The circumstances surrounding Caylee Anthony's death are mysterious, but all of the evidence that points to Casey's guilt is purely circumstantial: Not calling 911 when Caylee was found, and providing law enforcement with false information. The jury could not be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of her guilt, and therefore they did not convict her. This is the correct thing to do.

What I'm most upset about is the public's reaction to the verdict. Nancy Grace fanned the flames of this trial, and whipped up a national frenzy, convincing spectators that Casey Anthony should be nailed harder than Jesus himself. It is not often that a trial with such a high profile as this one is divorced from greater society, and I am glad that the outcome of case has restored some of my confidence in the American judicial system.

But many other people do not feel that way. A chili restaurant in Florida has expressly banned the jurors involved in the trial, and a large portion of my active Facebook friends are equally angry. I think this betrays a profound misunderstanding of how our criminal justice system is supposed to work: Innocent before proven guilty. Is the State's case strong enough to warrant the effective end of a person's life?

But I would be naive to ignore the fact that many people who should go to jail--such as the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Erik Prince, President of Blackwater (now Xe Services), or the high school football stars from Glen Ridge, NJ in 1989--do not; and there are others who do go to jail, but are not there for long, like Bernard Madoff.

Our justice system is not perfect, but the Casey Anthony trial is one important instance in which we get to see how it is supposed to work.

1) http://eater.com/archives/2011/07/07/florida-chili-restaurant-bans-casey-anthony-jurors.php

Further reading: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/07/05/why-casey-anthonys-verdict-makes-sense/ (Yes, I know it's a Fox News article, but it is a legitimately good read)

The Mentoring Program

Last month, I applied for a mentoring program in my county, and got in immediately. I was given the information by my career counselor, and I acted upon it not expecting anything to happen. The next morning, I got a call from one of the program directors informing me that training would start the next day.

Over the course of the training, I found myself doing things I never would have thought I would do: Skipping karate the month before my brown belt test, and driving to a nearby town to get fingerprinted. At the end of the program, however, I had to do a collage. I am not an artistic person. Yes, I can write, but I failed arts and crafts in kindergarten; I couldn't cut a straight line if someone handed me $10 million. Luckily, I had my mom and sister to help. Despite my panicked disposition, the collage turned out extremely well. I hope I get to see it again, and I wish I could show it to my friends.

Unfortunately, I also had to present said collage in front of the rest of the group. I didn't prepare--I don't prepare for anything like that--but I managed to do two things: 1) not screw up, and 2) not scare everyone away.

This week, I am meeting with one of the program directors to finally be matched, and I am very excited.

After my correspondence with one of my classmates from training, I am thinking about why I am doing this, why I am so adamant about participating in this program. I know why--I said it to them: Because I was bullied, and I wanted to help another kid who was going through that avoid a path to self-destruction.

In my last email to my training classmate, I explained that children become bullies because they have no capacity for empathy, which is a result of no one ever conferring value upon them. But if that were true, then why is it that I have so much of what they lack? Why should I be so compelled to benefit the society under which at this time I feel so oppressed?

The answer lies in my own experience. In a way, my life has become a circle, and it is the enormous drive to stop it from happening to someone else. No one should ever have to go through what I did. It is a way to close this chapter of my life, to become a whole being.

Seven years of severe bullying, and another five and a half years of major depression has had a profoundly negative effect on how I relate (or, rather, not) to other people even long after the original oppression has ended. I have an overwhelmingly negative perception of myself in the eyes of others; I don't expect people to care about me, and therefore I do not do anything to compel them; I am very unsure of others' trustworthiness, and it is remarkably rare for me to ask anyone to do anything for me. This, in part, is what has made the job search so difficult, because I don't expect people I don't know to treat me like another human being, and it is far too easy for me to become cynical when others don't do what they say they will (such as call me back when they say they will). Overall, I often feel alienated, and my relation even to others I do know is often in question, sometimes without cause.

Some of these issues are what I will be dealing with in others--in my mentee--but how can I ever overcome them myself? Am I impenetrable? Has anyone ever tried? How much do those I know really know about me? Will I ever know?

There is so much worldly experience I have never had--things that normal people have what seems like easy access to, and I wonder just what I did to be so excluded.

I have just finished The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and I have to wonder if I am doing what I do--reading, philosophizing--because I have limited access to the real world? Do I sit there reading Being & Nothingness simply because I am looking for a way to fill empty time? What am I hoping to do with all of this knowledge--knowledge that others seem to do perfectly well without?

Or, has it prepared me for this? Do I feel ready to enter into this uncharted territory because of what I learned about myself and others?

Joining the mentoring program is the one thing I have done that I do not doubt; I know it must be done, for myself and for my relation with the world. It is the only way this is ever going to end.

Excerpt From My Project

"Let us assume that this program was adopted, and produced a single, brilliant generation of over 5 million children, who went on to college, and majored in science, math, gender studies, English, art, and music. After college, when they finally look for work, they will come across people who are still tied to their own petty interests. This generation will lose all sense of right and wrong as their own ideals are dissolved into an endless bureaucracy that only cares about its own existence, and the nebulous entity will punish any of these gifted people for acting in an unorthodox manner, even if their ideas would improve it.

The nature of institutions is such that it cannot afford to care about anything except for itself, and the immense weight of this overprotection and paranoia bears down upon those who operate beneath it to the degree that the only manner by which one is to survive is to embrace Sartre’s Bad Faith: In our context, it is to pretend to oneself that s/he is having a real impact upon the world in his or her everyday life, even—especially--if the opposite is objectively true. It is here, then, that our goal in this project is totally and irredeemably lost, and it is against this crushing reality that I pound away at my keyboard."

An Ambitious Project

You may have noticed that in my essays, I have frequently come up against a virtually intractable problem. I have noted on numerous occasions that the generation that suffered through Vietnam was the same generation that eventually sent us to Iraq and Afghanistan (I'm looking at you, John Kerry); humanity continually makes the same mistakes over and over again.

I am currently working on an incredible project: I want to stop this vicious cycle, at least in the United States. I am devising an educational program to do just that, and it will be my longest essay to date (currently it is six pages long, single-spaced; I estimate it will be 15-20 pages long). Children are the future. I know that is a cliche, but it is true by the sad fact that adults are mountains of prejudices, and are unable to reconsider the world around them, having had their youthful idealism sucked right out of them as soon as they left college for the "Real World." It is this impotent complacency that makes the world what it is and perpetuates its harsh condition.

I may or may not be updating this blog as I work on this project. It was to actually be a blog post until I discovered just what I was doing. I currently do not know whether or not I will post the project here when it is finished.

This project is ambitious, and it may turn out to be impossible: No one has ever undertaken this before and had it actually work. The society devised in Plato's The Laws was never implemented, but I do not have the burden of creating a society from scratch. In fact, I want to perpetuate this society, but fix the most egregious problems. Can I do it? Do I know enough about how things work? We will soon find out.

Some Decaying Old Man Claims That the World Will End on May 21st. He Should Know--Just Look at Him!

For about 2 months now, a certain percentage of the population of the United States has been following a shambling corpse of a televangelist who claims that the world will end next Saturday, May 21st, 2011. It is worth noting that this particular decaying corpse has previously claimed that the world would end in 1994, but has admitted he was wrong simply because he "hadn't read Jeremiah."

Basically, the premise is that next Saturday is the 7,000th anniversary of the Flood in Genesis (not the one from Halo, but that would be much more awesome/terrifying, as it involves mutated space zombies instead of just a ton of water).

There are five basic theological problems with the idea of the world ending on Saturday: 1) God never indicated that he eventually wanted to annihilate us all a second time (in fact, he tells Noah that he won't ever do that again), and, by extension, God learns from his mistakes; 2) We really don't know how many generations have passed in the Biblical timeline even if some of us believe it to be literally true, and this is important because the Old Testament measures time by generations, not years; 3) The number 7 has significance for Numerologists, but few others; 4) (also the most important) The Biblical Old Testament is completely rearranged, it differs significantly from the order of the Jewish Tanakh, therefore, such predictions are impossible; and 5) Jesus' apostles believed that he would return within their lifetimes but he never showed up.

The rationalist arguments as to why Harold Camping should be placed in an insulated nursing facility are that 1) He was wrong in 1994, 2) He frequently says bizarre and irresponsible things (by my standard, anyway), and 3) people have been predicting the end of the world since it began, and all of them have been flatly wrong.

The only argument one could make in favor of Harold Camping's prediction is because of his physical disposition: He appears emaciated and more or less dead already, so his proximity to his death may give him privileged information. But old and sickly people are often delusional, and he may be clasping to what little he has left of his mind, and he has no proof that what he believes is actually correct beyond his own bizarre interpretation of the Bible.

This leads to an interesting point: Just why are people so eager to see their world end? This is the only home we have, why would we want Jesus to burn it? Jack Miles writes on page 268 of God: A Biography,

"An Apocalypse is a cryptic revelation of imminent destruction to be followed by a definitive divine intervention at the end of time. Historically, apocalypticism is a kind of weed sprung up in Judea from the charred earth of failed prophecy. Its predictions are coded and otherwise elaborately mysterious in part to mislead the Judeans' and later the Jews' foreign oppressors, in part to renew the nation's own belief in God's power and its national uniqueness when all evidence seems to point the other way"1.

So why now? Over the past decade we have seen a nearly unceasing series of destruction, from 9/11, the tsunami in Indonesia. the Haiti earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, the earthquake off the coast of Japan and the imminent collapse of the Fukushima reactors, and I am sure that there are more than a few other events that I have omitted here. Also, do not forget that the May 21st prediction is not the only apocalyptic conspiracy theory in circulation: December 21st, 2012 is also apparently a date for annihilation.

It has always been fun to speculate that civilization as we know it would collapse. I know that I enjoy zombie movies, dystopian novels, and exploring an annihilated United States in the Fallout series of computer games. But it is an entirely different matter when people begin to believe that these ideas are factually true.

Why should we have to suffer through the Christian fundamentalist nonsense again? In response to the dumbassery of the Bush administration, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, assault on women's rights, Terri Schaivo, and the enormous campaign in favor of gay rights, because the liberals began fighting back, because they dialed it up to 7, the Christians have to dial themselves up to 12, when they started at 9. When Americans start supporting gay rights and fighting back against Creationism in public schools, they want to feel vindicated in their own way: "How could we lose America? Surely God will annihilate it now that they're all hedonists!" Even though most of the country is still religious. As Michael Shermer wrote in The Science of Good & Evil in 2004, "If America is going to Hell in an immoral handbasket, it is happening at a time when church membership is at an all-time high and a greater percentage of people than ever before proclaim belief in God"2

The irony is that it is these people who took us in the wrong direction in the first place, and continue to try to steer us further to the right, and only seem to get angrier when the voices of reason fight back.

This entire escapade is motivated by bitter and resentment over staggering political losses, evident of a slash and burn attitude toward America: It isn't going their way anymore, so they want to see it destroyed. So what looks to us as some fun little game--riding Winnebagoes across the country telling people the Rapture is going to be a lot of fun is really a subtle code for "We're losing elections and if you keep supporting gays, we'll tell God on you!" But God hasn't been seen for more than 2000 years.

1) Miles, Jack. God: A Biography Vintage Press. (C) 1995. NY, NY

2) Shermer, Michael. The Science of Good & Evil. Henry Holt. (C) 2004. NY, NY

Osama bin Laden: The Reigning Hide & Seek Champion

On Monday night at around 10:30-11:00 EST, I learned that we have killed Osama bin Laden. Unlike everyone else, though, I was a bit ambivalent about his death.

There is no question in my mind that the SEAL team that stormed his compound did the right thing by ending it there and then, but to me this victory rings hollow in that Osama bin Laden accomplished more than simply the deaths of 3,000 innocent people.

Politicians profited immensely from the attack, and were able to pass legislation that would have normally been unpopular. President George W Bush passed the PATRIOT Act soon after the World Trade Center attack, which made us subject to sweeping and nearly Orwellian security measures. In 2001, we invaded Afghanistan, and in 2003, George W Bush and his administration, with the GOP institution following, made the erroneous case that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Queda. We, despite objections from the United Nations, preemptively invaded Iraq.

During the previous decade, despite cheerleading for the troops overseas, Americans consumed even more gas with bigger cars, and our domestic car manufacturers failed to create more efficient vehicles. With the focus on global climate change and the fabricated 'controversy' associated with it, few people saw petroleum consumption as a national security issue.

Socially, Americans became increasingly paranoid and suspicious of others (especially Muslims). Ten years later, a proposed Islamic Cultural Center in NYC has come under enormous fire, despite the fact that there are already a significant number of mosques in the area, as well as a large Muslim population. This backlash was motivated primarily by paranoia and suspicion. Many Americans claim that Osama bin Laden had taught them everything they need to know about Islam, and I already stated how unfair this is previously, when I asked whether or not it was fair to say that Jerry Falwell and the larger GOP taught me everything that I need to know about Christianity.

In response to Osama bin Laden America under George W Bush had a knee-jerk reaction that went far beyond trying to find him and began to erode its very democracy. In Guantanamo Bay, the United States held--and continues to hold--terror suspects outside the bounds of the Constitution. There, detainees are tortured psychologically and held indefinitely without charge. Unfortunately, Obama has thus far failed to close Guantanamo, but that is mostly in part because Americans are uneasy about holding terrorist suspects on American soil. Are we afraid that our Constitution is insufficient to protect us? Would it not be good for our image to hold Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a Dostoevskyan trial in a demonstration of the superiority of our values in the face of religious nihilism?

That we will not, that we are afraid of a fair trial for the most evil people currently walking on this Earth, points to the stark possibility that Osama bin Laden has already won. We have tried one of the most evil ideologies human civilization had ever seen in the Nuremberg trials, and won. Why can we not do that again? Furthermore, that we are celebrating his death is evidence of the possibility that we have become the very monsters we are fighting. I completely understand that it was necessary and convenient to kill him at his compound, but that is nothing more than a necessary evil. It is not *good* that we killed this man--it is never *good* to kill any man, even if it may be necessary. But our celebration of his death--our jubilation--is unequivocally vile. This is America, home of the free, land of the brave. We are supposed to be decent, if docile, people. But our behavior is not indicative of our values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But then again, maybe it never was.

Truly, is our reaction to Osama's death any different from our previous behavior? Was there ever a time when we treated the enemy--the Other--with at least some decency as a society? No, there was not. We came to the New World and profited from the subjugation of the native population. When that population was almost completely destroyed, we joined the Dutch in the Slave Trade, and in spite of our stated values and intentions, there was left a gaping chasm between what we said and what we did. When the Puritans came over from England because of oppression, they immediately began imposing their views upon everyone else, repeating the exact same tactics they suffered under in their homeland. Even among white people, each new demographic that arrived in this country was reviled: The Irish Catholics, the Germans, the Jews, etc. But each in turn eventually joined with the majority, if only to turn around and join in the oppression of the new Other. In fact, what do we see today? African-Americans, who have had fought the greatest uphill battle for civil rights in the history of the country, have turned around and joined their white counterparts in the oppression of homosexuals. In fact, these were the same kinds of people who sixty years prior wanted to deny them basic civil rights. Globally, no other kind of oppression brings more different people together than the oppression of homosexuals. All three monotheistic religions condemn homosexuality, so it is the only issue upon which nearly every group--no matter their religious or political differences--can come to a tragic consensus.

It is actually quite logical then that after World War II, we have had medium- to full-scale conflicts in 4 countries, financed rebel fighters that would eventually turn around and attack us, and all the while used buzzwords like "Freedom" and "Democracy" when the truth is that the only freedom we want to preserve is our own freedom to continue to enjoy lower gas prices.

Should we give up, though? Should we simply accept it, muttering to ourselves "c'est la vie", doing nothing to change who we are? No. The truth is that we have made some progress: We recognize that what we've done in the past was wrong and we have become much more tolerant than we were previously. The problem is that we currently do not possess the mechanism by which we can understand what we will do in the future we may be wrong. For all of our tolerance, however, it appears that someone has to be oppressed, much like capitalism generally, where the low prices we enjoy at Wal*Mart must come from someone's $0.50/day wage. It is very unfortunate, however, because tolerance doesn't have to work like that. In fact, then it really isn't tolerance at all when it is banking on intolerance toward someone else. There is no 'currency' of tolerance, it doesn't have to be compensated for.

How do we solve this problem; a problem as large and complex as human nature? How can we ensure that we do not simply repeat the behaviors and attitudes of our predecessors? What, exactly, is the root of understanding? Would it be possible to instill an unwavering respect towards others regardless of who or what they are in our children? And most important, how do we ensure that they do not fall into the traps their parents and grandparents fell into before them? For it is a great tragedy that the generation that suffered in Vietnam would send their children into Iraq and Afghanistan. Are we damned to repeat their mistakes, too?

Business Ethics: Further Problems Between Society and Business

Abstract: I write about hubris and ethical problems in business, and I attempt to figure out why CEOs escaped unharmed as the companies they led sunk into ruin. I map roughly what causes most institutional problems, and I attempt to dissect the ethics of major corporations and lower management. I also attempt to explain how my generation may avoid making such mistakes.

Wal*Mart is being sued by 1.6 million current and former employees for sex discrimination; Apple is storing unencrypted long-term exact location data on iOS 4; BP is applying for a license to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico; Food giant Monsanto is going to be allowed to police itself1; the Consumer Financial Protection Agency is about to lose a massive fight because the debate over consumer financial regulation has left the mainstream2; and Sony has failed to inform that their customers' financial data is in the hands of cyber thieves3 & 4.

Combined with what I have said previously about corporate America--especially with the financial collapse and tobacco companies--it would appear that the jobs we all have are, while providing us with a decent living--are contributing to harsher costs elsewhere.

I've begun reading one of my father's old university economics textbooks (from 1979), and the author (APA citation at the end of the essay5), George C Sawyer wrote the textbook as a project in part because there is--as he said--very little literature providing a framework in which businesses can act ethically. Thirty-two years later, it seems, this same thing could be written again.

After 9/11, George W Bush diverted FBI personnel from white-collar crime investigations to counter-terrorism, at a time when white-collar crime was rampant6.

As the recession devoured people's lives and livelihoods, the entire business structure underwent immense changes: take-overs, shut-downs, and massive layoffs. While this is normal in business and is not generally frowned-upon, the constant adrenaline rush at the workplace and the subsequent focus on simply the bottom line eradicated any kind of ethical framework in the workplace. If you were a part of an organization that valued a relationship with its clients or the society in which it operated, and were taken over by someone else and everyone who enforced and adhered to that ethical standard were upended, ethics are not going to appear to be immediately important.

What I am trying to get across is that in business, long-term ethical ideals are not immediately valued unless they are proven to be profitable. However, there is a problem with this idea, because as history as far back as we can tell, has proven to us consistently that to cover up a destructive act and to ignore it creates a much bigger problem than to admit it and do something about it when it happens. The lie is usually worse than the crime. People will find out, and will no longer trust you. This is the ultimate answer Socrates gave to Thrasymachus in The Republic when he supposed that to be unjust is more profitable than to be just.

What is amazing about businesspeople then, is that for the sheer number of occurrences of this same thing happening over and over again, they keep making the same mistakes. But I also don't want to categorically say that there aren't businesspeople who do see the errors of their neighbors, but these are usually smaller business people, if only because they think that they cannot afford it.

On Easter, I was talking with my aunt's boyfriend and his brother about business ethics, and we were trying to figure out why these CEOs are making an exorbitant amount of money when their companies were in ruins. "Aren't they beholden to an executive board of directors who ultimately have to decide how much the CEOs are paid, and whose primary interest is the existence of the company?" There is a very interesting dynamic between them, and while we do not immediately know why this would happen, my own hypotheses would be this: (1) The Board of Directors could be operating under groupthink, in that the CEO wants to tell them that the company is doing just fine and therefore he should get a raise. The reality may be that corporate offices or outlets may be closing across the country, but the CEO and the Board of Directors are willfully complicit in supplanting factual reality with delusions of prosperity; any admission of possible failure is deemed heresy. This is what happened to the Bush Administration. (2) The CEO takes full command of the company and buys off the Board of Directors (this is an example my dad suggested). Any kind of collective entity could break down because of threats or coercion. Bush's cabinet denied problems in Iraq or Afghanistan out of nothing more than blind faith and ambition. The Catholic Church vociferously denied allegations of sexual misconduct with children, even after the presentation of overwhelming evidence. This same instance can appear anywhere and has nothing to do with economics; it has to do with psychology and the dynamics of hierarchical power and the blind belief in the invulnerability of the existence of the institution. Remember "Too Big to Fail"?

Most institutions--especially corporate institutions--are not democratic. Whatever equality we enjoy as citizens is lost for the bulk of our lives. This means that we are beholden to people who may not understand ethics generally, or not really have an interest in the success of an organization or its employees beyond his or her own petty satisfaction. S/He may even decide he hates you. You certainly say "Cest la vie", but I think that would be a mistake. There are hundreds of books on how to deal with a [an ethically] corrupt manager or supervisor, but I see very few books about how to be an effective and ethical manager. This, too, is not economics, but psychology and philosophy. Because of the power dynamic reminiscent of the Master/Slave dichotomy humanity has always been cursed with by its own avarice, most business leaders with whom one deals with in everyday life--the supervisor at a grocery store, the owner of a restaurant--do not have the kind of ethical or educational upbringing that would lift them out of it. Even a little power corrupts absolutely. Good managers are very difficult to come by, but most of them are so hard-hearted because the system itself demands a certain output. This output, however, under a corrupt manager, is often thrust upon a few individuals, a fraction of the total workforce. This is called favoritism, or bullying.

Let's say you have 100 people working for you, and you need something done over the weekend every weekend. Out of your 100 employees, there are 10 people who are capable of doing this project. The ideal would be to fairly rotate the weekly workload. So far so good. But what would you do? Let's say that there is one person out of that 10 you really hate, and one you simply don't know that well--maybe because you never see them at your religious service--and 2 people you really like. So what do you do? You organize the workload so that the people on the bottom do a disproportionately higher percentage of the work than the people at the top. In fact, you game the system so that the top two people--maybe they're really sexy brunettes who wear low-cut jackets, push-up bras, and high skirts--never do any extra work (you'd also be committing sex discrimination, but you wouldn't care about that, and quite frankly neither would they).

Let's say you REALLY hate one person. He just annoys the crap out of you; he's constantly contradicting every idea you have, and his arguments are generally very compelling, but you can't get rid of him because your supervisors value his input. So to show your dissatisfaction, you make him come in over the weekend every two weeks, and you insult him at every turn.

The work still gets done, but at what cost? You have paid a price you didn't really need to pay: The work was done, but you've alienated many of your employees. You have also made yourself vulnerable if they know that the two sexy ladies who should be in the pool are not, and decide to report the problem to your boss. If these 10 people communicate, and one of them records the frequency and distribution of the work in a given time frame, it would be incontestable evidence that you are corrupt. I think most people are in this category of managers who succumb to these base notions and take unnecessary personal and social risk.

It is this same risk that is committed on a much grander scale. Sony perhaps believed that it could get away with not sharing critical information with its customers; maybe Apple never thought two tech geeks would find their long-term location data on an iPhone and be able to map it; Nobody thought the housing market bubble would burst; and few people understand that gold is historically a volatile commodity. Tobacco companies probably never figured people would be able to trace their products to a smorgasbord of medical complications. Wal*Mart never figured that 1.6 million employees would be suing them for sex discrimination; BP never thought that the consequences of being cheap on critical parts for their Deepwater Horizon rig would manifest themselves in a massive fireball killing 11 workers and dumping millions of barrels of oil into the ocean. And yet we see this all the time.

This is a complicated problem, and it has to do with more than simply ethics. It is easy to charge that these executives were complacent and morally dubious, but the truth might be something less overtly malevolent. It might be that instead of (or, in Wal*Mart's case, aside from) being callous bastards, they might not have correctly calculated the probabilities of failure. The person or team in charge of calculating disaster risk at BP may have--either of his own volition or coercion by management--artificially reduced the calculated risk they were taking by using faulty equipment in order to save money in the short term. But I see now that this is a solipsism in that in the example I entertained the possibility that upper management may have pressured our person in charge of risk management at BP into presenting fabricated data in order to at least present the illusion of security. But it would be equally wrong to pin everything upon an ethical bankruptcy. It may also be a hubris in that an institution may falsely believe that it is above the law, its customers, its clients, or its employees.

Most corporations, when faced with an accusation of wrongdoing, or evidence of negative social impact, immediately deny or cover up said allegations. This is the start of collapse, and embodies Jean-Paul Sartre's Bad Faith: What happened to the Catholic Church in the child molestation crisis is that they categorically denied everything beyond the point at which the evidence against them was irrefutable: A letter signed by Cardinal Ratzinger--now Pope Benedict XVI--urged the institution to protect those priests who have been accused from the law. It became a game: The only people they were even trying to convince were themselves. They blamed everyone else for their problems, but no one believed them.

How do we fix these problems? They seem insurmountable because changing the nature of institutions and how they work as a class from the outside is impossible. If we truly want our institutions to change, we must educate people in such a way that they both understand and internalize the values they would need to succeed: Social good and responsibility, respect for those around them, etc, and give them the freedom within the institutions they join to do what is right. This last condition may be the most difficult to meet because of the attitudes ingrained within CEOs and Boards of Directors may be contrary to factual reality, especially if they operate like the Bush Administration. But an even greater problem exists: How do we guarantee that those who manage to do all of this do not fall into the same traps as their predecessors? This is the most incredible and seeming insurmountable problem in human history generally. The generation that protested Vietnam brought us into Iraq and Afghanistan. It is up to my generation to solve it.

1) http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_23097.cfm

2) http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-april-26-2011/elizabeth-warren

3) http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/85812/sony-your-psn-personal-info-was-stolen-nine-days-ago/

4) http://www.techi.com/2011/04/playstation-hacked-credit-card-data/

5) Sawyer, George C. Business and Society Houghton Miffin Company. (C) 1979. New York, NY

6) Moore, Michael, Capitalism: A Love Story Documentary. 2009. Overture Films. United States.

The Point of Jesus From a Philosophical Perspective

I don't write a lot about Jesus. He has never really fascinated me as a philosopher or as a person. But his death--and Socrates' death--says volumes not necessarily about him, but our collective reaction to him.

The deaths of Socrates and Jesus are tragic in such a profound way that few would ever dare consider, because the manner in which they were killed speaks to the very worst in all of us.

I don't consider Jesus to be even a very important philosopher on paper (fitting, because he didn't write anything down; for that matter, neither did Socrates), but I still consider him a nice guy who really should not have been murdered. The reason I don't view Jesus as incredibly important philosophically is because he offered a utopian system of ethics that is truly impossible, and banked everything on divine judgment, despite the fact that there are very good immediate "worldly" reasons to be a good person. Many of these were laid out in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. I don't think waiting a lifetime for the consequences of your actions is an effective motivation for doing anything. People are generally bad at considering anything more than the immediate consequences of any decision, and in my view, therefore, need very good "worldly" justifications for being good, such as having people like you and listening to what you have to say; having true friends as opposed as those you need to pay in order to keep their company, or the fact that helping others triggers a positive emotional response in all parties. Doing good feels good. This says nothing more or less about the integrity of their character than trying to score Brownie Points with God.

But all of this is really beside the point. Remember who Jesus was interacting with, because this will be extremely important later: Jesus was helping the disenfranchised, and eviscerating the wealthy, probably because he saw that the existing system as oppressive. Do not forget that a recurring theme in the Old Testament was also the care for the poor and disenfranchised, and in this way Jesus is still not a complete reversal.

And then there was the Pharisees, who were principally the ones who whipped up the crowd to call for his death because he had gained the support of the lower classes and were thus a danger to their power. Pontius Pilate didn't really want to kill him, but the people, who were manipulated against Jesus by the Pharisees, demanded he be crucified. And so he was.

Socrates was forced to drink Hemlock because of trumped up charges resulting from his cross-examinations of government leaders, often resulting in the exposure of their ignorance. He, too, was a threat to the powers that be.

Jesus was killed because he was a threat to the ruling class; his system of ethics and lifestyle resembled what we would think of as a commune. The problem with Jesus' death, ultimately, is that it was supported by the very people who stood to benefit from and originally supported what he had to say. The ultimate tragedy is that the people themselves wanted him to die.

Let us imagine that Jesus did come back. To be kind, let us even give him the scars he presented to his followers that, according to the story, proved that he was who he said he was when he returned. Let us also allow that he said pretty much the exact same things he said when he was originally alive.

How would people react to him? The reality of this question in its possibility--not of Jesus' factual return, but the reaction he would receive from his audience--should frighten you. In other words, if Jesus ever returned, we as a society would kill him again. It is Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor"; the irony is that Jesus would probably be murdered for his own sake--in the name of the very institutions that are supposedly attached to his legacy. One could very well argue that these institutions are not really doing what Jesus intended--which would be a fair point--but this line of reasoning would eventually call into question the very nature and authenticity of Christianity itself when matched against the figure it revolves around.

The crux of Christianity, of what follows from the tragedy of his death, the possibility of resurrection and further prophecy, stems from the profound guilt at having killed him. The people who originally believed in him probably saw the profound, cosmic injustice of his death, and devised a story with a "happy ending," in which his spirit endures and his martyrdom guarantees salvation for them. This guilt is further assuaged by a kind of determinism of the whole thing: "It was supposed to happen." But did Jesus himself see it that way? Did he want to become a martyr? Did he think he was intended to construct Heaven and Hell, or participate in a cosmic chess game against Satan? When Jesus says that he was betrayed at the Last Supper, it might not have been any kind of divine knowledge; he might have had someone tell him about the plot to have him arrested. Also, much like Socrates in "The Crito," he might have simply accepted his fate, and dined knowing that he was going to be captured, much like Socrates telling Crito that while the punishment is unjust, because I live here, I must obey them (and form the basis of Social Contract Theory). To shed light on this problem, Jesus remarked, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they are doing" [Luke 23:34 NSRV]. This single quote clarifies for us that Jesus did not see himself as a martyr, or, even if he did, he did not want to be one. He did not say, "Hey guys, I'll be right back. Everything will be fine." The supernatural elements surrounding his death were artificially imposed precisely because the people who loved him needed something more to hold on to; they could not live with an injustice as the end result. Even in the failure of the Garden of Eden, God did not abandon his creations, and here, too, the people who believed in Jesus would not allow their relationship with God to end in such tragedy.

But I don't see it that way. I don't think that Jesus' death could ever be whitewashed or compensated for. I may be deemed a pessimist, but I cannot deal with the fact that were we to have another chance--or even multiple chances--we would blow it. But the primary reason why I am so upset is that the people who would kill Jesus are the very same people who say they love him. I also don't condone murdering philosophers, but that's a given.