Images Matter

I felt sick to my stomach.

Each time a republican senator asked Sonia Soto Mayor to recant her now (in)famous “Wise Latina” remark, and each time she obliged them by recanting, I felt a little bit of my soul turn black with rage, never to recover.

Each time a democratic senator wasted their precious time behind the mic to comment on Perry Mason, or deliver useless platitudes as a meager show of support, I spat bile in the troubled recesses of my psyche.

I desperately waited for Feinstein or Klobuchar to bring up the fact that although women represent more than 50% of the US population, they occupy only 11% of the supreme court (not to mention roughly 10% of the Senate Judiciary Committee itself), and while the current census list hispanics as representing about 14% of the US population, they’re maintaing a big fat goose egg as far as their representation on the highest court of the land (followed closely by a goose egg owned by another 14% of the population, Asian-Americans).

I thought, “though I disagree with his politics, Clarence Thomas laid it out with his High-Tech lynching comment…Sonia should go for it…do it…tell the truth”.

I closed my eyes and I pictured Judge Sonia Soto Mayor saying,

“This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a female Latin-American, it is a high-tech raping for uppity women who in any way deign to think for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be raped, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S Senate rather than strewn across the floor.”

I opened my eyes and Soto Mayor kowtowed. Yet she had to. The simple fact is that the United States, despite the rape and murder and humiliation it has heaped on African-Americans over the years, HATES WOMEN MUCH MORE. The constitution was amended to allow black males the vote in 1870, but another half-century would have to pass before women would be allowed the same.

So how screwed are you if you’re a person of color AND you are unfortunate enough to be born with ovaries? You’re forced to code-shift AND find some way around the fact that you’re biologically incapable of being “ballsy” and reduced to pathologically wielding your “temperament”.

The answer…Está chingada usted hermana.

If we truly are living in a society where we cannot openly say that Sonia Soto Mayor’s “Wise Latina” comment was a spot-on attempt to portray the state of the art of our high court (and government) as a location of socio-ethnic conflict, where women, homosexuals, and people of color are not yet represented nearly as well as heterosexual, Caucasian-American males…
…then we might as well let Pat Buchanan claim something foolish like the Supreme Court should only be populated by descendants of the original signatories of the Declaration of Independence.

Oh wait, he kinda-sorta did…
Ms. Sally Hemmings the Fifth? Shall we stroll our ass on up to Washington? I hear the circus is in town.

I feel sick to my stomach.

There’s something very disturbing about the public discourse of the USA. If one meanders through the comments sections of blogs, online videos, and other stories of interest, one will find that there appears to be a dead-on split between the participants. And both parties appear to occupy diametrically opposed positions.

If we use the concept of a grey scale to represent it, we find that the online participants seem to identify the world as either black or white, as opposed to something that would appear in between, or god forbid, towards the center of the grey-scale.

(On the floors of inpatient psychiatric treatment centers, professionals define “black and white thinking” as characteristic of two populations: adolescents, and individuals with certain personality disorders.)

Consider the aforementioned as applied to the recent comments of FOX AND FRIENDS co-host BRIAN KILMEADE during a broadcast in which he discussed a study that suggested that people who live with a long-term mate may experience a lesser prevalence of dementia type disorders. Kilmeade suggested that the study did not apply to Americans, who in his words,

“…marry other species and ethnics”

He went on to bolster his position with comments about the authors of the study,

“…swedes have pure genes because they marry other swedes, thats the rule.”

and then,

“…finns marry other finns so they have a pure society.”

Yahoo…where to begin…I can’t believe this even has to be stated…
Marry other species?
Species?
Really?
If we discount the apes, there’s not much left on the menu in the way of hominid species. Homo habilis? Homo erectus? Are these who Kilmeade is suggesting we necrophiliac Americans are marrying? I’d go back to Long Island University Mr. Kilmeade and demand a return of my tuition if you think that Americans are searching for a really saucy Homo neanderthalensis with whom to start a family.

Or did you mean that we marry raccoons, salamanders, and yet to be discovered extra-terrestrials and the like. I mean, we degenerate Americans are hardly likely to let something as arbitrary as TAXONOMIC RANK stop us from finding a nice, stay at home mate with a healthy sexual appetite.

For the sake of argument, we’ll completely bypass the fact that Kilmeade’s comments absolutely smack of Nazi ideology, and that his statements are so full of unfounded and ignorant conclusions, one may be tempted to deduce that Kilmeade just barely passed the IQ cut-off point for developmentally disabled.

We’ll also forego the basic facts that Sweden has no law forbidding it’s citizens from marrying outside it’s own citizenry (there is no “rule”), and that the term “Swedish” denotes a nationality, and not a classification of species. And we won’t even begin to examine the markedly MEANINGLESS question that, on a planet of six billion people, what in the F*#K would constitute a “pure” society.

Let’s just talk about the simple scientific fact that the term “race” has no actual genetic usefulness. It’s a simple fact that we learn in anthropology class. One cannot look at the DNA of an individual and determine if that individual is “Black” or “White” or any other “racial” description that we use so carelessly in our public discourse. Our genes can definitely tell us about what region of the planet our ancestors came from, and what the physical expression (phenotype) of our genes may look like (this person is likely to have darker skin tone, and an epicanthal fold, for example), but you can’t examine a gene sample and state, “This individual just missed the cut-off point for being (pure) caucasian.”

(And good god, I’m not even remotely close to having enough time to include the faulty assumptions surrounding the term “ethnicity”)

Kilmeade is either oblivious to the science that refutes his comments, couldn’t care less about thinking about his comments before broadcasting them to millions of people, or believes that science is just another liberal trick to brain-wash Whitey into self-hatred, and other unpatriotic ideas like “Slavery actually happened”.

Again, considering the aforementioned, as applied now to the comments sections of several YOUTUBE clips highlighting Kilmeade’s close-to-fascist treatise (oops, I said that we’d bypass that point), it’s amazing to find that so many comments attempt to forgive Kilmeade’s remarks as misunderstandings or even humor.

Are we so polarized politically, that we can’t even admit when someone from our own side of the political spectrum has their head so far up their ass they could scratch their forehead with their pyloric valve?

Is our political divide truly caused by an exponential amount of uneducated ignorance and vacuum of common sense, or are we just regurgitating what the MEDIA says is our official understanding? Do the radio and television pundits really have a bead on who we are, or have they devised a clever way to engage us as actors who readily bring our own supply of the basic element of drama…conflict? After all, if media isn’t entertaining, isn’t dramatic, why would any of us consume media in the volumes that we do?

As corporate culture continues to evolve and devour what scant understanding we have of ethnicity and our actual, historical cultures, and scientific fact becomes just another commodity that only the rich can afford, we truly will inhabit a color-blind society, because we will have ceased to have any connections to the scientifically studied, historical roots of our ethnicities, and we will be saturated with the pseudo-culture in which we are all MEGASTARS, acting out our corporate prescribed roles. And those roles may still have the “tags” of ethnicity hanging around them, but their cores will be more accurately described as an expression of false consciousness.

And it begins in the degraded, media-flooded synaptic gap between America’s public discourse, and the televised lunacy of brain-dead mannequins like Brian Kilmeade.

Peace

Of course, first across my lips must be my deepest and sincerest thanks to (the soon to be erstwhile Governor) Palin, as she has proven to be my own St. George, slaying the seemingly immortal news cycle dragon of Michael Jackson’s death. The man is an Icon, but he is not worthy of 24 hour news coverage day after day. Planes into buildings…yes. A dead entertaining legend…no. Just my own perspective. I had actually begun pondering about who would be the one to step up to the media plate when switch-hitting Palin hit a mutter-shtupping home run.

Her announcement today, that she is basically quitting her job, is physically painful to watch:

It rambles and tumbles.

The meter of breaking up what is in essence the fallacy of the False Dilemma…

(Because I don’t want to be a Lame Duck Governor who spends flipping great wads of public money, I will quit, rather than be a Lame Duck Governor who DOESN’T spend flipping great wads of public money, or a Lame Duck Governor who spends flipping great wads of some rich bastard’s private money, or perhaps just a Lame Duck Governor who grows a social conscience and then lays down and simply dies)

…with quotes by Gen. Patton and magnets on her parent’s refrigerator is so uneven, one needs off-road tires just to traverse it. Kind of like that last sentence.

She seemed unconvinced by her own words. Vacillating between political hot-topic phrases and “go get ‘em” platitudes, she never once sounded like she had a bead on where she was in her own discourse.

The ‘official aura’ that most political announcements carry was mercilessly ruptured when the cameraman gave an unmotivated whip-pan to reveal the reverse-shot of what appeared to be about 10-12 people in somebody’s backyard.

And the local waterfowl were ABSOLUTELY WAILING to the point that at times the audio was completely overridden.

I haven’t felt this confused, excited, fearful, and cogently fragmented since the time as a teenager when I OD’d on cocaine and psychotically ranted about my knowledge of a future plane crash (Come to think of it, there were more people listening to my delusions that night than there were attending Palin’s announcement today )

Does Palin have even ONE advisor who has managed to amass something beyond a GED? Even if she was taking the calculated risk to hit the presidential posturing stage without appearing like a self-serving quitter, could she have at least ATTEMPTED to write a lucid speech?

I have to say that at times, I feel that Palin is discriminated against because of her class background. Her immediate family comes across in a sort of rural, middle class caste, and I’m sure that the intelligentsia loves to poke fun at her for that fact alone, despite how well they or the media shields it. Jimmy Carter got the same “bumpkin” treatment from the media. It’s discrimination based on class and it’s wrong. But something extremely important separates Carter and Palin. Carter graduated in the top 10 percent of his class from the United States Naval Academy, and Palin attended five different colleges (dropping out at one point to compete in beauty pageants) to finally receive her Bachelors. Good looks appeared to be more important than an education. I think if Palin was not a physically attractive woman to many heterosexual males, she may have formed a different appreciation of the looks over intelligence quotient. She may have been able to at least learn how to appear bright, or wield a bit of judgment. You would think that a former newscaster would have at least learned to perfect the ’shell’ of a sentient being.

But the fact is that, at her core, Palin is simply a pretty face, trying to brand herself as a politician. They say she’s maverick for calling her own shots, but how maverick is it to quit your job in public service one day before Independence Day, use a basketball metaphor in which you awkwardly refer to yourself in the third person, and panic when you realize that you just said the word “consideration” without having said the word “prayer”, and then rather than just adding the word “prayer”, you back-up real quick and squeeze in the whole phrase “prayer and consideration” so your audience remembers what a pious and righteous maverick you are. I prefer the term dip-shit.

I confess again, the only person more grateful to Palin than myself today is Governor Mark Sanford. When you are addicted to news while despising the media you take your moments of succor and lunacy with extreme gratitude. The talking heads pretend to support the lunacy or despise the hypocrisy, but they’re just selling advertising space. Politicians and the Media are part of an obscene and disingenuous puppet show that belies the superficiality of our avaricious culture and the lack of lucidity in our public discourse.

You are my dearest train-wreck Palin, but if your lunacy and news anchor strategy pays off with the presidency…I promise you that I will immolate myself in the National Mall.

PS Remind the sound guy to turn the freakin birds off.

Peace,

The thing is… it’s so hard to NOT caricature the many faceted, and heavily emotional field of psychiatry. The truth is, our country is still terrified of psychiatry. With the advent of demographically specific pharmaceutical advertising, we have convinced an entire generation of people that they SHOULD be medicated (even if they don’t necessarily need it)… meanwhile, the people who truly suffer from “Persistent Mental Illness” have neither the desire nor inclination to access the treatment that they desperately need.

It should be diagnostic (sarcastically) that if you WANT to be treated, we should seriously LOOK at whether it is necessary.

The program “Mental” hits some of the points accurately: the new director strips his clothing to gain the trust of a naked and psychotic patient. Truthfully, this strategy could work, but one would never want to leave one’s self in the highly vulnerable state of nudity to de-escalate a patient.

What is “de-escalated” is the focus on how quickly the director takes control of the writing implement that the psychotic patient is using to scratch in the walls.

Working with acutely decompensated psychiatric patients is some of the most rewarding and risky work you could ever do. One doesn’t need to emphasize the danger. Nor does one need to emphasize that there might be a “zipper” in their head.

The truth is that unless you’ve been there, you don’t know the reality of the relationship.

However, the world can be shown, with concern for the patient, as long as you continue the integrity that is so important to care-providers.

Is that possible???

We’ll continue to watch “Mental” and comment.

Peace

So I must admit that I do have some of the burden to bear (at least in my own narcissistic mind). I had approached a few instructors when I first arrived at film school about the possibility of producing a series about the inpatient psychiatric field. I was continually told that “Now was probably the time” as it had not yet been seen. Although many, many hospital “procedurals” had been shown, the authentic psychiatric series had yet to come to fruition.

Well, I didn’t want to make my grad school experience about making that happen… to my shame. I see know that had I come to grad school with the psychiatric television series as my driving force… things may have been different… or would they.

First, I see the procedural TV series in the psychiatric vein needing to happen. As I mentioned, you can’t swing a dead ferret without bumping up against a procedural medical series where at last…Nurses are having their glories sung. Just this season, there are at least two series (Hancock …er… Hawthorne, and Nurse Jackie).

But where are the 5150’s ???

“Wonderland” (Direct TV’s 101) certainly made an honest attempt, and succeeded in many many ways. They seemed to make an honest attempt to portray the “front-lines” of an inpatient psychiatric unit: the variety of patients in the throes of their acute illnesses, the vulnerability of staff to unpredictable, acting out behaviors, and by far… the irony of care-givers being frequently as “not-normal” as their patients.

But ultimately it was a series about doctors, MD’s, the people who occupy the supreme position of power in the patient / care-giver quotient.

We’ve seen that already. When will we get a subjective look into what it is like to be subjected to an arguably imperfect, and sometimes abusive psychiatric system?

This season’s “Mental” (Fox TV, with a seriously ill-advised “zipper” in it’s advertised “Logo” head) has a shot at taking the topic into the serious grounds with which it needs, but there’s no reason to be optimistic if it’s trailer has any indication of it’s final worth.

We’ll catch you on the flip side of its Pilot.

Peace,

Cyber culture continues to perplex the s#*t out of me.

I remember as an undergraduate getting into my first “Flame Wars” with online participants from Usenet as part of a New Media class (obviously I wasn’t assigned to flame with others, but it just… you know… turned out that way). I kept struggling to figure out whether the uninhibited behavior online was a result of the anonymity that the internet affords, and whether the behavior was a reflection of our “truer” selves, or an exaggeration. The people with whom I flamed continually stood upon insults that adhered to what I call the “Unholy Trinity”. That is, forging every insult in terms that could be reduced to the following three words: bitch, fag, and nigger. When they called you out, you were either a racial, sexist, or homophobic slur.

Was this behavior a reflection of the ability to express their true sentiments without any serious consequences, or were they just throwing the extremes because the internet is basically a Holodeck where people (almost) never get hurt?

Or does it matter which is the case? Perhaps the real issue is that the behavior is here, it is continual, and we still don’t know what this type of behavior has in store for us.

Which brings us to the Scary Maze Game.

There is apparently an online prank-game (one of many) in which a participant tries to negotiate their way through a maze, only to be startled by a frightening, Exorcist-like face on screen, accompanied by sudden loud screams. I fell for a comparable like prank online, and it left me a few pounds lighter in the colon I can tell you.

But what’s even more horrifying, is the phenomenon of people actually RECORDING video of their small children falling for the prank and freaking POSTING the video to YouTube. One of the more saddening videos can be viewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_-U9PBiA8c

My heart breaks when I watch the look on this little girls face. So much so, that I posted a comment on the page, stating that I hoped her startle reflex becomes exaggerated and she kicks the parents in the genitals the next time they try to surprise her with a hug. I know…I don’t really hope her startle reflex becomes exaggerated.

But get this, I actually got a response comment asking me to basically lighten up. If you read the comments on the same page provided in the link, you’ll find it’s pretty evenly split between those that have similar feelings to mine, but with just as many people claiming how uptight the others are and that it’s just plain funny.

I really really hope that somehow digital culture enables us to “play hard”, rather than show our true selves. That the coldness and cruelty that I observe online is only a cyber-phenomenon. But somehow, I find it hard to believe that continually playing hard doesn’t translate into actually being hard, that continually expressing ourselves without consideration for either consequences or other’s feelings doesn’t terminate in an actual set of de facto values. Actions do speak louder than words… even when they’re just words.

Peace

Like it or not, we have markedly entered the age of the image. In this age, the image will be lingua franca, coin of the realm, pick your metaphor. Why this is of supreme importance to anyone online is that the image is the de facto “truth” regardless of what any futuristic time machine DVR with automatic focus will provide. You can scream bloody murder and hold your seventh press conference if you and your publicist can afford it, but it may better serve you to “grok” the above mentioned fact… the image, and concomitantly, its coverage, will be held as the bottom-line.

Why is this “grokking” so important?

Well, for one, you don’t have to let Keith Olberman break your heart.

I had really fell in love with Keith Olberman during the Bush II Dynastic realm, if only to be able to witness someone put that spawn of Asmodeus, Bill O’ Reilly, in his place. But beyond that, his writers and researchers appear to be top-shelf, his delivery is very clever, and he was a welcome respite from what had become an Orwellian nightmare for me.

But that ended today.

MSNBC has shown that they are just as biased as those fascist-tinged mannequins at the FOX propaganda channel.

To my broken-hearted shame.

I watched Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi jerk, stutter, and obfuscate her way through the question of “If you were lied to then…” (as late as Feb 03) “… why did you tell us as recent as last month…” (Apr of 09) “…that you had not been lied to?” (this question coming from CNN’s Dana Bash)

I don’t care what anyone says… my gut tells me Pelosi was lying to Bash.

Now I understand that this doesn’t take away from the Bush administration’s culpability in the entire “torture” story.

BUTTTTTT…

It does show IMHO that EVERYONE was complicit in those early days after 9/11 when we were apparently willing to excuse anything to get that JACK BAUER edge on our perceived opponents. It seems that the DEMS are scurrying to the (Non-Complicit) torture holes, while the REPS are forgetting that they implicitly ENCOURAGED torture while stating that those of us who disagreed were TRAITORS.

Back to “grokking”

Keith Olberman, my now, somewhat less than perfect hero, is willing to forego the footage of Pelosi stuttering and side-stepping her way through questions, for an edit that shows a very brisk DENIAL from Pelosi.

And we come back to the “image”…

You can force, manipulate, comment, and “Head-Talk” an issue to death if you like…

But for those of us who are addicted to the latest and “freshest” “image”…

John Ford can blow us… you’re all had.

Peace be to all of you,
atheisticmystic