not the Mormon girls' fault

I could hardly look at the Mormon girls, when they came to my door on their Mission. I know they will vote for John McCain because, even if he ditched his wife for a younger model, had an affair with a beer heiress, and another affair with a lobbyist, he is the Christian vote, the moral, family values vote, and that’s what they want, these earnest girls at my door with the Book of Mormon in their hands. I know it’s not right to blame them for 100,000 Iraqis dead, for water boarding, for the end of our democracy, the destruction of our natural world, the extinction of polar bears, wolves being shot from helicopters, people abandoned and dead in New Orleans, thousands of dead American soldiers, the wedding party massacres in Afghanistan and all the rest of it. My daughter says it’s not their fault.

apologists for torture

While I wait for the last season of The Wire to make it to dvd, I've been watching The Shield. Yesterday I told Chuck that I can't figure out if it's a reactionary program, designed to illustrate the efficacy of torture--- show after show, the cops get to the big bad guys by torturing the little bad guys until they tell what they know (and we are glad they're doing it)--- or if the theme is anti-torture, because, when you think about it, the cops who torture (Vic, mostly) lose everything. They lose their families, their jobs are in danger, they lose their friendships and their self respect. So which is it? A rationalization for forture or anti-torture?
Chuck said that the guys who design programs understand how to appeal to both sides of the spectrum. We watch the show and read into it whatever we already believe. And he said anyway any program that works from the perspective of authority, particularly police authority, especially when applied to oppressed people, cities or landscapes is reactionary. So there you go.

Coetzee and being American

"A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotion that the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered, to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one? The answer: one would have felt proud, proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff. Contrast with that one´s feelings of shame that we, our people, have made Guantanamo. Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other: the best and the worst that human beings are capable of."
J.M. Coetzee: Diary of a Bad Year (2007).