What I Heard From Sanity and/or Fear Rally

An echo.

“When we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” Llike an echo of my own refrain as a new blogger at Culture Kitchen five years ago, urging (in a quite civil indoor voice!) some well-modulated post-partisan Sam Waterston Unity ’08 thinking and talking: Amplifying Our Differences

Amplified sound, in effect, may diminish rather than amplify our individualism, our audience, even our own ability to pay attention or care about all we’ve lost. . .

Should we care, if the heavy bass and deafening levels of powerful modern difference-amplifiers blow out everybody’s eardrums along with our will to live, and thus our chances for ever building any majority audience able to appreciate artistic, nuanced and truly innovative political theatre?

. . .Does it matter if we the people learn to prefer politics to problem-solving, screaming to singing, mass media to personal passion?

I wish the ralliers more luck with being heard now than I had then. America’s appetite and audience seem bigger now for subtle, intelligently designed sounds of sanity, so that’s something.

Maybe as usual I just peaked too soon? I’ve been straining to hear and understand for many years while guns were blazing and sirens shrieking, tuning in earnestly to years of FOX and right-rant radio, trying to figure it out.

It’s insidious. Amplification deafens you to the wrong thing! — by trying so hard to be intellectually curious, fair-minded, engaged and reasoning, I’ve been systematically deafened BY the loudest and craziest, FOR the loudest and craziest, TO all but the loudest and craziest! It feels like a lifetime ago that I could comfortably hear (or speak) real hope about America’s chances of restoring sanity.

So could my personal power of story be that I’ve paid a hubris price for going it alone without publisher or party, hoping I could individually trade off small damage to myself in return for contributing to the common good but failing miserably, like Dr. Jekyll experimenting on himself for good cause but becoming Mr. Hyde?

Halloween two days before a momentous election, is a better time than most, I guess, for ghostly fears to echo. I won’t scream it, but please. Vote.

How Stupid IS She, or Is She Smart Like a Pit-Grizzly-FOX?

This is a scary fairy tale not for the children, made up by Sarah Palin to tell America about Marco Rubio.

Marco Rubio is no maverick and that’s simple fact. He’s the carefully groomed, obedient, adoring Jeb Bush pet pit-bully-pulpit carnival barker, raised from an attack puppy in the GOP dynasty to fleece the public and bring home their dead and broken dreams to lay at the feet of his shadowy bosses behind their cheesy tabloid facade, wagging and waiting for his pat on the head and a treat.

Sarah Palin either knew or should have known this, not even as highly paid “news” commentator much less former (beauty) half-queen or populist kingmaker remaking America forever, no, even just as a fully functioning human bei–oh wait. Okay, so that’s THREE possible explanations. . . .

Helping Real Kids in Their Real Lives, Right Now

This teen reporter underlines a key point as we try to help all kids, not just those bullied at school — that their real lives are right now. Today matters utterly.

Dear Husband and I both were the oldest children in our families, and both my parents were firstborn as well. Talk about delayed gratification! — we were masters.

Fortunately for my own children, I was able to change or grow out of this mindset or learn its limitations at least, after the painful epiphany of losing both my parents much too young. I saw the gratification they’d so conscientiously delayed and delayed, denied to them forever . . .if you’re a Thinking Parent, that really makes you appreciate the people you love and the life you can live fully with them NOW.

Sayre Quevedo, 17, is a reporter with Youth Radio, a youth-driven production company based in Oakland:

I love the “It Gets Better” videos as much as the next gay kid. But I worry that the campaign makes it seem as if gay teenagers need to stow away in a time capsule until adulthood, when we can feel fulfilled and safe.

. . .I don’t think we should have to wait to live happily. . . Kids don’t change because we realize we’re gay. Our opportunities to be happy shouldn’t either.

Just to be clear, this isn’t a gay issue or a girl issue or about sex at all. Upper-crust universities have bullies. They just tend to make it about money as power instead of sex as power (well, except for the Duke Lacrosse guys who one might reasonably observe, combine both and don’t ever defer or deny gratification!)

By the end of the month, only a handful of students hadn’t given.

. . .”There was a huge push,” she says, which included knocking on the doors of those who had not yet donated. The student interns who ran the drive encouraged volunteers to ask about a student’s personal reasons for not giving but to accept no as a final answer.

With 24 hours left, there were, serendipitously, just 24 students who had not donated. One volunteer, an honors student in sociology, sent out a list of those students’ names via BlitzMail that was passed along to many people.

Candais Crivello was on that list. A former fund raiser for Dartmouth’s annual fund, she was surprised that some of the tactics her peers were using . . . In the end, the lone holdout was

JJ’s Quote of the Day

And I may post this every day between now and the election, because it captures so much of what’s really happening:

“Rove is the past master of directing populist resentment against government and away from corporate business.”
–Howard Fineman

Celebrating Power of Story in Books & Movies

I was just poking around the PBS site because of the new Sherlock Holmes series that started airing last night.

Young Son is a huge fan of everything Holmesian and he’s put together a Sherlock Holmes costume for this Halloween (last year he was Inspector Javert from Les Miserables but that was more about the singing than the detecting, I think) — point being, they are both book characters. As I always say, our unschooling is mostly “power of story” and seeing the same characters and story in different interpretations is an important part of the learning and fun.

The website has a short video of the new young Holmes, who said it was on record that Holmes is the single most often re-interpreted literary character.

The exhibition items have not changed since they were first installed, and are now complemented by an interesting and nostalgic collection of television and film stills, featuring the famous actors who have played the Great Detective and his trusty sidekick, Watson, down the years.

I can’t vouch for Holmes holding the record, but it was interesting and while I was waiting for Young Son to wake up so I could show him, I was thinking we sort of have our own book club mentality around here, not formalized of course, but that’s what we talk about and how we have fun.

Anyway, all that led me to this and I thought I’d share —

Getting Out the Youth Vote

UPDATE: Awesome video (from the future!) here

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Tell Them What Republican Plans to End Net Neutrality Will Feel Like:

If Republicans win Congress, then all messaging will no longer be treated equal. Ever again.

. . .First on the agenda: kill and bury net neutrality, the principle that all messages are treated equal, that there are no “fast speed” and “slow speed” lanes based upon one’s ability to pay.

Once destroyed, net neutrality can never return. Messaging to return to net neutrality will be routed to the bridge to nowhere. With the news media under corporate control already, you do not even see this issue covered, even by good people like Ed Schultz.

Otherwise, voters, especially those 30 and under who were raised on and expect a neutral internet, would be flocking to the polls.

This is no joke.

Young Son’s Unschooling This Week: Dracula Offspring

Young Son got so absorbed reading Les Miserables, then Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes, that he teed up Bram Stoker’s Dracula next. He’s nearly finished the book but because it’s October and Halloween is nigh (one supposes) some cable movie channels are showing different versions of the story and Young Son is recording them at all hours and then watching them critically, comparing and contrasting them.

The other day it was a science fiction spoof:

We got a bite to eat at Chili’s yesterday before show rehearsal, just the two of us. He regaled me with all sorts of Dracula story aspects I had never considered. It was like listening to him talk about real history of, say, the Red Baron or Napoleon — power of story! (Which reminds me, let’s talk about Virginia’s fourth grade history textbooks later, huh?)

Then this morning I awoke to see he had updated his Facebook status in the wee hours:

. . . just finished, in addition to the Keanu Reeves Dracula, Van Helsing, which somehow manages to take characters from Stoker’s novel, completely change the backstory of one to the point where he can no longer be used in the novel and kill the other one, all of this 10 years before the novel takes place.

Also, Dracula offspring is not a concept that ever needed to be explored…

I can’t wait for him to wake up so I can get him going on that last point!

Supremes Not Emulating Jesus and the Moneychangers

Scalia and Thomas and Kochs, oh my

What’s in the Word Promise?

UPDATE with video JJ just located:

Remember lawyer-former state governor Bill Clinton parsing the meaning of the word “is” under sworn testimony?

“Rick Scott’s straight talk gets fuzzy under oath”:

[Florida candidate for governor Rick] Scott, a former mergers-and-acquisitions attorney, stalled.

“I don’t know what the def — your definition or anybody’s definition of an `agreement’ is, or an `offer’ is, or `promise’ is,” he said in the Jan. 16, 1997, deposition.

These days, on the campaign trail, Scott showcases the word “`promise.’ He pledges to help turn the economy around and create jobs . . .

What was that Einstein quote again, that Roger Ebert used, oh yeah:
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters.”

Here’s his full two-hour deposition. Even in the first minutes, you can see he can’t or won’t answer the most straightforward factual questions about the very business he started and headed as CEO:

Update on Alaska as Reality Show Culture

I’ve been known to wonder what the heck goes on in Minnesota as a political metaphor, and our own state of Florida is a literal carnival of crazy when it comes to public affairs.

[I]n Minnesota, home of Pharyngula-famed PZ Myers. . . PZ himself was blacklisted, police on high alert to enforce his, ahem, “expulsion” from this supposedly scientific, open-inquiry teaching of the controversy. Which they literally did, on threat of his arrest — wonder if such ideological use of police power will be decried or defended, by those who characterize as “free speech” what the anti-abortion party-crashers did at the Dr. Seuss movie premiere?

See also

Mark Drake, of the Republican party in Minnesota, said: “To compare the democratically elected leader of the United States of America to Hitler is an absolute moral outrage which trivialises the horrors of Nazi Germany.”

But today, on the heels of my mentioning Sarah Palin’s personal reality of Alaska as reality show, Alaska repeats as the state throwing me into a state of shocked disbelief:

When Hopfinger continued to try to ask questions, one of the guards put the reporter in an arm-bar and then handcuffed him [and isolated him out of all public view for nearly half an hour.]

Hopfinger was released after police arrived. [But were the guards then handcuffed, perhaps charged with false arrest/unlawful detention/kidnapping? ]

The reporter was on public property where a public event was being held at the time of the incident.

See the latest here if you’re interested in civil rights and constitutional principles as real rather than as scripted skits for world wide wrestling as reality-show entertainment.

The US Senate candidate’s private guards argue the reporter they handcuffed to stop him asking questions of their boss, was just a blogger (not a real reporter IOW) and that at the time, even that wasn’t known to them.

But here’s a contravening fact (you decide if it’s relevant):

What’s in the Word Miracle?

As the Chilean mine rescue unfolded in real time, coverage in every language suggested we were witnessing a miracle.

So what’s in that word, miracle? Not intelligence and good will. Not good journalism either, not even good theology. So says a man often called a miracle himself:

Roman Catholic theology from the days of Aquinas has tried admirably to build on logical reasoning. . .Such theology is a help is clarifying what we’re really talking about. . .

That is why precision in language is useful. Einstein observed, “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters.”

Good slogan for a real news organization or top-flight journalism college, if there remain any of either.

Immediately post-Watergate when I was an honors journalism undergrad and newspaper intern, the least consequential “fact error” led to the student’s sudden death: an automatic, unappealable zero on the assignment, no matter how well-executed otherwise. Einstein’s trust-the-truth principle was the reason hammered home to us.

(Is unappealable a real word? Hope you get my true meaning from it.)

Real news journalism for that brief and shining moment — a few decades at most? — meant lively, liberally educated minds pursuing and expressing truths with precise yet poetic language meant to convey knowledge in both small and important matters. . .you know, more what America’s Founding Fathers really said and did and meant, less what their words have decayed into.

How much better to describe the rescue as the result of the fortitude of the miners and the skill of the good-willed people on the surface who reached them in what was, after all, a very short time. How much better to say the outcome in Chile was the result of intelligence and good will.

But there seems to be a narrative in these matters that requires the citing of divinity. Newscasters, victims and their families alike praise the powers above. This reassures us — of what?

That everybody knows the script.

That’s below the radar of wrong-doing even. It seems just lazy, intellectually and morally, to settle for safe, well-worn ruts of yesterday’s meaning that can’t go where tomorrow’s thinking needs to be, today.

(What’s the commercial shipping slogan, when it absolutely, positively has to get there overnight? Better not just bank on a miracle!)

We can do better.

NPR is no miracle yet in my view it defines intelligent narrative, good will and trustworthy use of language. Today I saw a good f’rinstance: seeking new words to make room for naturally growing thought, instead of allowing the old tightly bound narratives to deform new understanding as Chinese foot-binding once deformed naturally growing girls. So let’s sing its praises!

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet. My question is, does it work the other way around? Does a fuzzy name make fish smell less fishy?

JJ’s Vote: Musical Theatre as Very Model of Modern Meaning (in) General

Toe-tapping cock of the snook to fellow “musical theatre as unschooling” mom Pam Sorooshian, for this: