Daily Archives: February 8, 2010

The Golden Rule is in danger. No, not the famed ethical code — though proponents of selfishness certainly have ignored it — but a thirty-foot sailboat of the same name that rose to prominence about half a century ago.

The remarkable story of the Golden Rule began in the late 1950s, as the world public grew increasingly concerned about preparations for nuclear war. In the United States, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) was launched in November 1957, and polls showed rising uneasiness about the nuclear arms race — especially giant atmospheric nuclear weapons tests that spewed radioactive fallout around the globe.

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Since misery loves company — at least during the time when misery doesn’t want to be left entirely alone — I grabbed on to Brian Dillon’s new book, The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (Faber & Faber, $25), as fast as I could. One thing I hadn’t heard said before, although it now strikes me as absolutely and undeniably true, is that misery loves good company. And Dillon’s brimming volume (278 fact-filled, not to say fun-filled, pages) certainly provides good company for the ceaselessly suffering imaginary-malady-struck.

For once the author — who never identifies himself as hypochondriacal, but why else indulge in such unnecessary woe? — gets an introduction out of the way, he tells the medical histories and mysteries of those “tormented lives.” The nine memorialized are, in more or less chronological order: James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust (probably the least surprising inclusion), Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol.

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Sarah Palin is missing the nucleus of what the Tea Party activists are all about. They are not looking for another John McCain or George Bush. While I sympathize with much of Palin’s platform, she misses the entire isolationist sentiment of the movement.

Tea party activists want a return to the constitution. While they require that our leaders fiercely defend our country, they also do not want to conduct any more pro-active wars that bankrupt the nation. They also value the life of our young men and women more than the profits of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. There are many right leaning independents that will no longer support the use of military force to spread democracy and build nations across the globe.

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In the United States, our democracy works through a representative process. That is, we elect individuals to represent us in the legislature and we hold them accountable by making them run for re-election. Of course, the cynics need no further introduction to begin asserting “All politicians care about is getting re-elected!” I’m not sure that that statement is wholly accurate, but I’m also quite certain that it contains a great deal of truth. Still, that’s not the point. The point is that our elected representatives are to be held accountable for representing us.

To be held accountable, however, requires two conditions to be met: the representative must have the responsibility to act in our best interests–or as we wish them to–and perhaps more importantly, they must have the authority to act. In the title of this post, I assert that the republicans hate democracy, which is perhaps hyperbolic, but the basis for the accusation is that absent a 60-seat super-majority in the Senate, the minority party can be as obstructionist as it wants to be, and this republican minority has been just that.

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Who are the great baseball writers? Roger Angell, Bill James, George Will, whose politics we will ignore because being a lifetime Chicago Cubs fan has to count for something. Oh yeah – and Philip Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint.

I hear snickering, and I don’t blame you for what you’re thinking: I just finished the book, and I am frankly exhausted by everything Alex and the Monkey managed to do — and Alex and the two Israelis didn’t manage to do, despite his ludicrous and admittedly pathetic efforts.

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–I heard the news today, oh boy, About a lucky man who made the grade…He blew his mind out in a car, He didn’t notice that the lights had changed..– (Sgt Pepper, The Beatles, 1967)

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 triggered a wave of media ownership consolidation.

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Simply put, I’m sick of hearing about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Perhaps I should say that I’ve grown bored with the majority of the dialogue surrounding it, and at this point I’m not sure how the conversation is different now than it was 17 years ago when this issue was first raised in the public consciousness. Unfortunately, we’re being presented with the same talking heads and the same high-level military leaders who both seem to think that they know the right answer to this issue, but we seem to be ignoring the men and women who actually live this, or have lived it before. I’m starting to realize that what is missing from the DADT debate is the stories of soldiers who survived it, who know what it is like waiting for the other shoe to drop if someone suspects too much and decides to play detective, or if you forget to replace “guy” with “girl” when you’re pushed about what exactly it was that you did last Friday night while the rest of the guys and their girlfriends went bowling.

This was my life for nearly 5 years as an Infantryman in the U.S. Army, where DADT forced me to be someone I wasn’t while I tried to figure out who I was. I survived under this rule and left the Army with an honorable discharge due in no small part to my ability to keep my head down and my mouth shut for my term of service. Having been unfairly forced to do so, I now realize that I have no desire to listen to newly enlightened politicians like Colin Powell tell me why it should be repealed 17 years and thousands of discharges later, and even less of a desire to listen to pro DADT ideas about “the desires of sexual minorities” from people like Senator John McCain, who continues to cling to ideas about gays in the military that would be more at home in a combat platoon in 1970 than in 2010. I will neither discount nor defend the homophobia that I experienced and witnessed in the U.S. Army, but I still truly believe that its soldiers are no more or less homophobic than anyone else in our society, and certainly not so socially underdeveloped that they are somehow less prepared for the kind of cohesion with people of differing sexual orientations that has become more or less commonplace in every other facet of working-class American society.

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The Red Riding trilogy is exactly the kind of project that video-on-demand was made for.

Make no mistake: These are high-quality mystery-thrillers, made for British television but better than most American cop films, with more going on than the case that seems to be at the center of each film. Layered and well-acted, they are psychologically riveting and complexly plotted.

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Like many people, I assumed that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s loss to Barack Obama in the 2008 primary meant the end of her presidential ambitions. But today, a faltering Obama presidency creates the possibility of a truly dramatic development for 2012 — Clinton v. Obama. Drama aside, it might be the Democratic Party’s best chance to hold on to the White House in the next election.

I say this as someone who supported Barack Obama and opposed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election. I still have mixed feelings about the Clintons but like many progressives, I also have mixed feelings about President Obama. Personal feelings aside, I think there is a very realistic scenario for a Hillary Clinton candidacy in ’12.

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