Tag: politics

Modest Proposal: Talk Radio Project

It’s an angry white guy talk radio show with a twist. We’ll have the angry white guy as usual, with his hard-hitting, straight-shooting, “politically incorrect” take on things which is the same as every other angry white guy talk show. We’ll have the callers who take it a step further and yell a lot about how the brown people and the “international bankers” and Bill Clinton and women are responsible for all our troubles, and advocating the usual genocidal and/or unworkable solutions to complex problems.

The twist is that all the callers are actors. Any real callers are immediately referred to a psychiatric intervention which is mandatory and may be carried out by force. We’ll have them agree to this by pressing “1” on their touch tone phones while waiting to go on the air, and none of them will listen to the disclaimer anyway.

This is going to require some resources, including air time, an 800 number, and quite a few “mobile intervention centers” (windowless panel vans with hospital beds, 4 point restraints, and gallon bottles of Risperdal).

Who’s in?

The Raft of the Medusa

( Larger version here )

It’s a famous painting, often parodied or quoted. Months ago I was talking to eyeteeth about it and we started looking up its history. The shipwreck and the painting have a story to tell that’s pertinent today.

After Napoleon was deposed, the French got a new royal government, the Bourbons. Shortly after they took over they sent some ships to West Africa on a colonial adventure. The Medusa carried 400 passengers and 160 crew.

The captain was an inexperienced political employee who should not have been given charge of a ship. He was chosen for his loyalty to the new regime, and was disliked by his crew.

The Medusa ran aground, and Captain De Chaumereys proceeded to fuck everything up. Instead of trying to float the ship free, he abandoned her. Special important privileged people were put in lifeboats, and everyone else was dumped on a raft. The lifeboats were to tow the raft.

Pretty soon the aristocrats in the lifeboats found it tiresome to pull the lesser beings in the raft and cut it loose. Their shipmates were now floating helplessly.

When the raft was found two weeks later, there were 15 survivors out of the 149 who had been abandoned and set adrift. Suicide, murder, and starvation took them. Five more died after their rescue. The French government declined to help the survivors to return home, so the British navy repatriated them.

The attempt at a coverup of this failed; survivors made sure that newspapers heard about it and at least one survivor published a popular book. GĂ©ricault was inspired to create the classic you see above, which was praised or condemned according to the politics of the viewer. The government nearly fell, and the captain was found guilty at court martial.

It was clear that some people on the raft had behaved badly (murder, cannibalism, madness). The blame for their degradation was, however, also clear. An arrogant government had given charge of people’s lives to an ignorant toady who had then shown incompetence and disregard for human life. The privileged had been saved and the others left to die.

In sum, the disaster and its aftermath showed the French people the true colors of their government.

Looting: My story.

The word “looting” is a hot button. Push it and people reliably react with their prejudices about poverty, property, race, violence, and law. Use it on me, and I get a tape replay from the Los Angeles riots of ’92. Here’s what I saw then, and what I learned.

In 1992 I was living in West Los Angeles and working at home and downtown. I had a small failing DIY medical records business and my best friend Greg had a small failing DIY courier business. I used his courier business to deliver my work to California Hospital, which is in the industrial part of Downtown Los Angeles. I was also working part-time at Good Samaritan Hospital, which is just west of Downtown in the Westlake/Pico-Union district.

On the day of the Rodney King police beating verdict I was at a computer store run by some Iranian friends. When the news came out they shook their heads and said “There will be a riot”. I didn’t believe them and thought they were exaggerating or misinterpreting an adopted country. I went home that night feeling awful about the miscarriage of justice.

Good morning. Your city is on fire.

Don’t believe the hype

Watch out for hysterical urban legends, unconfirmed reports, and exaggerated nightmare scenarios about looting in New Orleans. There’s looting and violence all right, and when all is told there are going to be some sad and frightening stories about it.

But who benefits from a lot of scare talk about masses of armed looters, snipers, and great crowds of the unwashed attacking rescue personnel? The people who want to blame the victims, that’s who.

All those officials who failed us are going to talk long and loud about the breakdown in civil order and the need for zero tolerance and lots of soldiers with guns. Don’t forget the real villains here: the people who didn’t give the evacuation order in time, the local agencies that left people on their own without transportion to leave, the federal agencies that pulled the funding for the levees, the President who couldn’t be bothered leaving his vacation until the corpses were floating already. They’d just love for you to concentrate on all those grimy underclass losers stealing beer and taking potshots at helicopters.

Keep your focus. The “grownups” in suits who were supposed to spend our tax money to save lives stood around while Americans died. If they try to look good later by shooting some pathetic losers for boosting a beer, it’s doubling their own crime.

Female Trouble

There is a disease that middle-class American women get. Its symptoms are exhaustion, headache, lassitude, unexplained fevers and aches, and a depressive inability to progress. This disease has been renamed several times. At one point it was assumed to be the result of hormone problems. Other culprits have been anemia, depression, thyroid imbalance, and allergies. Some insist that American middle-class women have dietary problems. Ten or 15 years ago, a new diagnosis for these women arrived: chronic fatigue syndrome. This mysterious ailment, possibly caused by an infectious agent, fit all the symptoms, and everyone fell on it with glad cries.

Anemia, thyroid dysfunction and the rest are all real diseases, and so was CFS. But the medical and scientific world found CFS a hard sell. The earliest cases were from wealthy suburban women who get written off by doctors, because they had that disease that all of them seemed to get.

Middle-class American women had always felt tired and crappy and got mysterious diseases. When you’re making 64 cents on the dollar, expected to care for children and be an economic provider simultaneously, constantly at risk from sexual assault and domestic violence, and generally treated as a second class citizen, it’s hard to be consistently energetic. And since trying to change any of these things makes you even more of a social outcast, there aren’t a lot of solutions to your problem. Intelligent, well-educated women have good reasons to feel defeated. Any disease that gets renamed several times may well be a hidden social problem.

So, aside from the galaxy of diseases these people may have, they have excellent reasons for feeling like shit all the time and preferring to collapse and stare unhappily at the ceiling. But because of the nature of the social problem they’re facing, they get blamed for that too. Doctors prescribe tranquilizers, or iron pills, or vitamins, or just tell them they’re having female trouble.

So far, this is all a clichĂ©. An unsolved social problem manifests as a disease and is patched over with nebulous illnesses and hypocrisy. The difference is that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome described a real disease, or perhaps several diseases. Hillary Johnson’s excellent book Osler’s Web tells the story of how difficult it was for the physicians who reported the problem to convince anyone that this wasn’t “just” the social problem or the hallucination of well-heeled ladies with issues. People with CFS couldn’t get out of bed for months at a time, found moderate exercise debilitating, felt terrible pain, and had their lives ruined for years.

So CFS was a hard sell because physicians were used to ignoring a social problem that showed up as a disease, and because the social problem itself made them more likely to write off their patients. But it gets worse.

When chronic fatigue syndrome became publicly known, everyone got it. The often renamed disease of American women had a new name, and newspaper editors ran the story like that; if you’re always tired and can’t get your shit together, here’s your diagnosis. Talk shows and popular magazines used the “epidemic” word a lot. Huge numbers of people self-diagnosed, and in fact were pretty annoying about it.

So to this day if someone says “I have CFS” people are suspicious. It’s too easy as a universal excuse for unhappy American ladies. Are you for real? Are you a malingerer, disease collector? The social problem wins over the medical one. And meanwhile, people who are actually fighting this mysterious ailment get a social stigma on top of a debilitating life-stealing ailment. Until we make some progress on the actual problems of women in our society, this pattern will repeat.

Why do I re-tell this story? Because of Asperger’s syndrome. A hilarious entry in the Encyclopedia Dramatica reminded me that it’s not just middle-class American women who need to turn their social problems into diseases; middle-class American geek guys do it too. If you don’t get along too well with people, have obsessive hobbies, do well in academics but not in life, you can now assign yourself a diagnosis rather than an epithet. There are no doubt many people with serious problems that this diagnosis fits, but there are uncountably many more people with neurotic personality issues who cling to a diagnosis.

Why do I find the E.D. entry on Asperger’s funny? Because almost none of the people who claim this disease are that badly off. They’re just geeks. The social problem they’re masking with a diagnosis is thoroughly personal.

It’s a lot worse that we’re stuck using diagnoses to solve a problem that we could have solved 25 years ago when we tragically and unaccountably failed as a national to give women equal rights under the law.

On our next episode of “Let’s Make it a Diagnosis”: the changing face of Bad Kids, or how ADHD didn’t get properly investigated for 30 years.

smog monsters

An interesting story in the New York Times (linked from automotivedigest.com) discusses the problems we’re having in Southern California improving air quality. Despite tremendous efforts, greater Los Angeles is in the bottom 3 metropolitan areas for air quality.

As the article points out, we’ve come a long way. When I was a child in the 1970s, a visit to the city meant a headache, burning sensations in the eyes, and a sulfurous taint to the air. On bad days we’d have smog alerts inland and in the city, occasionally bad enough that the authorities would tell you not to exercise or breathe very much at all, thanks.

Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs led to legislation, and since California is a huge market for automobiles the automakers and oil companies had to cave. Over the last 30 years emissions from vehicles have dramatically reduced. You don’t get a sick headache from a summer day in Los Angeles any more, and smog alerts are rare. The ruthless Air Quality people crack down on generators, drive through restaurants, even barbecues to keep particulate matter and ozone out of the air.

It turns out that further improvement may be a lot harder. We’re still stuck with the inversion layer that keeps everything squeezed down on top of Los Angeles. There was smog before cars because of this; the Spanish called the Santa Monica Bay the “Bay of Smokes” because it was so hazy from forest fire smog.

And the last big set of air polluters are beyond our reach. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are gigantic and essential to the nation, and they spew the worst possible diesel fumes. Locomotives, idling trucks, and ships are all egregious polluters and for various reasons are beyond the regulatory authority of the State. Locomotives are regulated by the federal EPA, for example, and ships by an International Maritime Organization. The U.S. hasn’t ratified the maritime treaty that would somewhat improve our ability to regulate marine pollution. The EPA says that locomotive fuel will become cleaner over five years starting in 2007. And diesel standards for trucks are progressively improving, but only for new engines, leaving an installed base of dirty engines that will be used until they finally die.

Unsurprisingly, shipowners and trucking company bosses are not enthusiastic about upgrading their fuel and engines. So it looks like we’re stuck paying a huge price for the nation’s import-export economy for at least another 20-30 years.

Once again I’m glad I live by the ocean, where the smog never comes.

Linkastrophe

  1. Judith Miller is having a well-deserved bad year. Turns out you don’t get the Heroic Journalist Award after all when the source you’re protecting is a government stooge trying to get revenge on a whistleblower. Oh, and thanks for the faked WMD reporting, Judy!
  2. AUUUGH! One of the towelhead terrorist guys can take on the appearance of a Westerner at will! Are we fighting fucking LEX LUTHOR here? Does anyone know BUFFY’s phone number? Thank you ASSOCIATED PRESS for this IMPORTANT UPDATE!! YOW!!
  3. The Global Guerillas blog covers terrorism and guerilla warfare and looks very interesting at first read.
  4. Ell jay user tinymammoth has some cool science news updates today!
  5. Starbucks is in fact everywhere. (Flickr)
  6. The Mozilla people are starting a for-profit company. Somewhere jwz is laughing until he pukes.