My mother, five months later

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of you may remember that my ninety-one-year-old mother had a stroke in late July.

How’s she doing now? Fair. It’s been a long, long five months.

In the beginning, she was able to move her left leg only a few inches—and very laboriously, at that. Her left arm could move better, but it was wildly uncoordinated. Asked to touch her nose with her index finger, she’d slowly and shakily approach the general region of her head; but her finger was far more likely to encounter an ear or her hair than the requested destination. When moving in any way—doing what are called “transfers,” from bed to wheelchair, for example–she had to be helped with what I believe is called a “two-person full assist.” That is, she was more or less limp, and two people had to support her weight.

It was dreadful for me to watch, still more dreadful for her to experience. And, although her speech was mercifully almost fully intact (only a slight increase in word-retrieval problems, but nothing out of the ordinary, really, for a person of her age), her memory wasn’t so hot. And she was scared.

It wasn’t always easy to tell if the memory problems were from the stroke itself, or from the overwhelming experience of having had it, and the resultant anxiety she felt about herself and her future. She was none too hopeful about that.

Never an optimist, she’d claim she couldn’t use her arm at all, when clearly she could. A constant litany was the fact that she’d always need 24-hour a day care, for the rest of her life. I couldn’t put a dent in this idea; if I even spoke of other possibilities, she’d become annoyed.

I know my mother better than to think pep talks would help—not that I didn’t try, but the look she gave me would shut me up pretty quickly. The forced heartiness of the physical therapists and their constant, “You’re doing so well!” would call forth eye-rolling and sarcasm worthy of a teenager from her.

Pretty early on I decided to give up on my mother’s having a positive attitude—the main thing was to just get her to do it—whatever the “it” might be at the moment. For example, when she was in the rehab facility, she developed the habit of telling the physical therapists she didn’t feel up to her exercises right now and to come back later. The therapists informed me that, if she declined too many days in a row, Medicare would stop paying for rehab and she’d be out on her ear and in a nursing home, utterly dependent. Knowing my mother, I decided to tell her. Her reaction? “Okay then, I’ll cooperate.”

And cooperate she did. Within weeks she was taking a few tentative steps with a walker. It was astoundingly gratifying to see her, almost as strange as if she’d mastered some rare and complex form of gymnastics. Her arm recovery was even more dramatic than her leg. I watched her persevere and put styrofoam pegs into a styrofoam board—it looked hard, requiring not only fine motor coordination, but force as well, and she seemed miserable. But she did it.

My mother’s recuperative powers were starting to take hold almost in spite of herself. Although her attitude problem remained, it turned out that some of the staff really enjoyed her sarcasm and her refusal to sugarcoat the situation. By the time she left the place, after two long months, she had many friends who were going to miss her.

And she could walk with a walker, although only for about ten feet before tiring. Her arm was almost normal (although she still said it “didn’t work”). As for transfers, she could do them herself, with someone standing near to cue her and remind her how it went, and to support her if she seemed wobbly.

The progress was immense, but there was a problem: she had a sort of amnesia for the events of the first few weeks after the stroke. And why would that be a problem? After all, who’d want to remember such helplessness and hopelessness? Well, it meant she couldn’t evaluate the astounding progress she’d made. All she knew was that she still couldn’t walk right; she didn’t remember that at the beginning she couldn’t even consider the concept of walking, much less do it.

Now she’s been home—“home” being a lovely apartment in an independent living facility—for almost three months. She’s progressed from 24-hour attendants (the situation she insisted she’d need for the rest of her life) to 8-10 hours a day, lessened at her own request. At a certain point, she’d confided in me that they were getting on her nerves, and she could do without them at night and a few hours during the day. Now she’s almost careless about her transfers, even letting go of the walker on occasion as she performs them, balancing for a few seconds in the way she used to so long long ago, before the stroke: on her own two legs.

Every single thing is getting better, including her memory. She still can’t get all the way to the elevator under her own power, and so she’s wheeled down to activities and meals. But I have every hope that some day, probably within the next six months or so, she may indeed graduate to doing so on her own, and to only having help for perhaps an hour in the morning and then again in the evening.

Lately, I took over her checkwriting and financial record-keeping. It’s not that she can’t do both things–it’s just that they caused her so much anxiety and worry that it was making us both crazy. And why all the anxiety about that? She is fortunate to have home health care insurance, but the balky insurance company has caused a cash flow problem that has increased her stress so much that it was affecting her health itself—not to mention my own psyche. The insurance company—ah, the insurance company! Two and a half months, and they have yet to make a payment.

But lately there’s been a remarkable change in my mother. Both my brother and I have noticed it. There’s a certain lightness in her voice, a lilt that means she’s happier. When I call her now and ask how she is, she ordinarily says “Pretty good.” She’s reading, or going downstairs to an activity like a concert or a lecture, playing cards again. The caretakers have finally shaken down from a bewildering host of strangers who came and went with no pattern, hardly even staying long enough to allow her to learn their names, to just a few whom she likes and who like her.

And they really do like her. My mother is an intelligent and outspoken woman who, even now, exudes a sort of life force, an energy that comes across as much younger than her years. Her main caretaker seems to know exactly what to do, devising strategies to entice my mother to walk longer distances in the halls, getting her soup when she doesn’t feel too well but making sure it’s low-sodium soup, staying late one time when the next caregiver didn’t show up to relieve her. Even my mother, who earlier on didn’t have much praise for anyone she encountered (the best was usually, “She’s OK, I guess”), phoned the agency to let them know how wonderful this particular caretaker is.

I can’t praise these women (they are all women) highly enough. It often seems to me to be a thankless job. And it’s true that it’s a frustrating, low-paying, high-stress, sometimes infuriating (and even revolting) position. But the rewards must come from seeing the gratefulness of someone like my mother, someone who clearly doesn’t give out those sorts of kudos lightly. In seeing the slow but palpable progress that is possible even in a woman of ninety-one (a few weeks short of ninety-two, in fact).

Just five months ago my mother left the land of lifelong robust health and entered the terra incognita of illness and disability—and it was a terra that held, for her, a great deal of terror. I’m not saying that at this point she’s happy to be there; not by a long shot. But the terror has diminished. And now, when I remind her of all the progress she’s made, she doesn’t wave her hand and dismiss me anymore, or roll her eyes–she agrees.

Let’s hear it for the purple fingers of Iraq

The New Neo Posted on by

Others are covering the news in great depth (I recommend, in particular, the entire front page of Mudville Gazette for a good roundup and links; as well as the horse’s mouth, the one and only Iraq the Model).

But I have to add a word to express my own pleasure at watching the proceedings. I saw a bit on TV, and once again, the happy faces were a great joy. My hope is that stability and a democracy that preserves human rights will come as soon as possible to that long-suffering country.

Some time after the first post-invasion Iraqi election, I wrote a piece in which I reflected as follows:

When the authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” it was more an article of faith than anything else, because the right of liberty (and the desire for it) was not all that self-evident to most of the world. But the framers turned out to be prescient, because here is evidence that is so strong that I think it amounts to proof: human beings want and value liberty and self-determination. Even though these things are abstractions compared to basic needs such as food and water, they seem to represent another basic need, one of the human spirit.

It seems just as true today.

Jane Fonda and those “killing machines”

The New Neo Posted on by

Michelle Malkin has a post entitled, “Baghdad Jane’s Bloviations,” excoriating our old friend Jane Fonda for these remarks (offered here in their entirety):

“Hanoi Jane” Fonda is claiming that ever since Vietnam, U.S. troops have been trained to commit atrocities against innocent civilians as a matter of military policy.

“Starting with the Vietnam War we began training soldiers differently,” the anti-American actress says in an email to the Washington Post.

Fonda claims she learned of the policy switch in “secret meetings” she had with military psychologists “who were really worried about what was happening to our combat personnel.”

One doctor, she insists, told her U.S. troops had been deliberately trained to be “killing machines.”

“This began,” Fonda maintained, “because the military discovered that in World War II and Korea, [U.S.] soldiers weren’t killing enough.”

“So they changed training procedures” to teach troops how to commit atrocities.

Still, the anti-war gadfly cautions, it’s important not to blame the soldiers themselves for carrying out war crimes.

Recalling the “Winter Soldier” hearings that she and John Kerry staged in 1971, Fonda lamented: “When you put young people into an atrocity-producing situation where enemy and civilian are commingled, where the ‘other side’ is dehumanized, we cannot be surprised.”

Anti-war vets now returning from Iraq, Fonda cautioned, should be listened to instead of being dismissed as “unpatriotic.”

“We have not learned the lessons of Vietnam,” she declared.

If you look at the trackbacks to Malkin’s post about Fonda, a lot of bloggers are pretty enraged at her Winter-Soldier-redux remarks. And rightly so; I count myself among them. But it’s no surprise that Fonda is singing the same old song, and trying to tie Iraq into Vietnam. I’ve already given my opinion on Fonda, here; so she’s not really the subject of this post. The subject of this post is the substance of her remarks.

Because, strange as it may seem, Fonda is actually correct–at least, about part of what she’s claiming. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially in the hands of Jane Fonda, and she draws the entirely wrong conclusions from that element of truth in her remarks.

What is she correct about? Well, she’s got this portion right: U.S. troops have been deliberately trained to be more automatic and focused about killing.

And, just as Fonda claims, “this began, because the military discovered that in World War II and Korea, [U.S.] soldiers weren’t killing enough.”

And indeed, they “changed training procedures” to correct that flaw.

But that’s where Jane parts company with the truth. She believes that this change is what led to atrocities in Vietnam. In fact, she’s got the thing quite backwards.

It’s certainly true that the phrase “killing machines” is a chilling one. But training members of the military to be more efficient and automatic at what they do is actually designed to make them more effective in a combat situation, to reduce psychological stress, and therefore to make atrocities less frequent, rather than more.

To understand this one must study the psychology of killing in war, a subject that until recently has been somewhat taboo (it’s certainly not anything I, as a psych major back in the 60s, heard anything about).

But, just as Fonda states, it was discovered during WWII that:

…according to the military historian S.L.A. Marshall, as many as 80 percent of the American infantrymen he interviewed failed to fire their weapons in combat. Marshall attributed the low ”fire ratio” to a mixture of poor training and a natural reluctance to kill. Even though his methodology has come under attack — critics say his numbers are exaggerated — his premise is generally accepted, and his book, ”Men Against Fire,” is read throughout the military establishment. After it was published in 1947, the military revamped its training to make G.I.’s more comfortable firing at humans; soldiers shot at targets shaped like people rather than at bull’s-eyes, for example. Today, Special Forces units make their training as realistic as possible, using pop-up targets with human faces, and setting off smoke bombs and small explosions to simulate the battlefield experience.

Dave Grossman, who spoke to me about ”the bulletproof mind,” has written about the hidden logic behind military training. In his controversial book ”On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” he writes: ”It is entirely possible that no one intentionally sat down to use operant conditioning or behavior modification techniques to train soldiers in this area. But from the standpoint of a psychologist who is also a historian and a career soldier, it has become increasingly obvious to me that this is exactly what has been achieved.” …

Indeed, Special Forces officers openly discuss the use of ”stress inoculation” — in which they are exposed to heartbeat-racing drills that raise their threshold for staying calm. It doesn’t mean Special Forces soldiers are immune to stress or the mistakes that stress causes, but it takes a lot more to rattle one of them than an old-time draftee….

Special Forces soldiers may develop cold-blooded reflexes, but they are also trained to know when not to kill. Targets that pop up during shooting drills include women and children who are not supposed to be shot. Being able to remain steady in combat doesn’t just mean you will be a quick draw; it also means that you will do a better job of deciding when to hold your fire. As Grossman writes of the calibration of aggression: ”This is a delicate and dangerous process. Too much, and you end up with a My Lai. . . . Too little, and your soldiers will be defeated and killed by someone who is more aggressively disposed.” Colonel King put it like this: ”Our guys have got to be confident in their ability to use lethal force. But they’ve got to be principled enough to know when not to use it. We’re not training pirates.”

Exactly how does one train soldiers to be effective and yet principled killers? Operant conditioning is part of it. The goal of this process of accustoming military members to killing in wartime is to reduce their psychological and physical stress/fear, in order to avoid panic. And why is this so important? Because it’s this stress/panic reaction (as well as a number of other factors, to be discussed in a moment) that can lead to the commission of atrocities in war.

The training, as described by the aforementioned Colonel Dave Grossman (an expert in the field), is as follows:

Many people think killing is a natural act, but Col. Grossman argues that it isn’t. He discusses how new and innovative pop up targets, video-based firearms training simulators, and Simunition®-based training are used to facilitate overcoming this innate resistance. These devices are then combined with high repetition to condition a correct response even in the face of fear….

Sometimes, a deadly force encounter explodes without warning, or a fight can be so fast and furious that there is no time to think about which technique to use and how best to employ it. To survive, you must do what needs to be done ”“ now. In order to react reflexively, yet responsibly, and continue to fight no matter how impaired, you must have a set of conditioned responses ingrained into your mind.

Range training must be repetitive. When a pop up target of a bad guy appears (stimulus), you shoot (response). Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, and then a pop up target of a man holding a cell phone appears, you don’t shoot. The more realistic the target is, the better….

Realistic settings and situations, combined with live fire training using Simunition rounds will dramatically elevate your adrenaline to replicate how a real situation feels. The more you engage in this kind of training, the lower your heart rate gets as you become “inoculated” against combat, just as a vaccination will inoculate against a disease.

Stress is part of battle, and can never be eliminated. But too much stress leads to combat fatigue and ineffectiveness, and can also lead to atrocities. Therefore anything that reduces it is likely to reduce atrocities, not encourage them.

In this article there is a very lengthy discussion of the ways in which stress can lead to both casualties and to violations of the rules of war–that is, atrocities and war crimes. Here’s a very brief summary:

Examples of misconduct stress behaviors range from minor breaches of unit orders or regulations to serious violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and perhaps the Law of Land Warfare. As misconduct stress behaviors, they are most likely to occur in poorly trained, undisciplined soldiers. However, they can also be committed by good, even heroic, soldiers under extreme combat stress.

The most famous example of combat stress being a contributing factor in the commission of atrocities was, of course, My Lai in Vietnam. My Lai was an occurrence with many elements that came together on one terrible day to cause a true war crime (in the following, I’ve taken the information mostly from this article, which is part of a military training course. Also, by the way, nothing in the rest of this post should be construed as an excuse for atrocities in general nor of Mai Lai in particular; it’s offered as an explanation only).

Some of the non-stress factors leading to My Lai were part of the Vietnam War itself: the emphasis on body counts, for example; confusing, complex, and poorly understood rules of engagement; the one-year rotation making for lack of cohesive and experienced units.

Enemy tactics were another factor implicated in the mindset that led to My Lai (some of this may sound familiar to those who’ve followed the current “war on terror”):

The Viet Cong conducted a guerrilla war that can best be described as “clutching the people to their breast.” They disguised themselves as civilians, hid amongst civilians, often fortified villages (with noncombatants being the vast majority of the population), and even used civilians of all ages and both sexes (little children, women, and old men, included) for logistical support, intelligence, and to plant mines and booby traps. There was widespread belief among American soldiers that the Viet Cong would use the type of civilians mentioned above to throw grenades. An expert on the Vietnamese army remarked that “the Vietnamese communists erased entirely the line between military and civilian by ruling out the notion of noncombatant.”

One could say that these strategies on the part of the Viet Cong seemed almost designed to call forth atrocities on the part of the Americans, if possible–and if one said that, one would probably be correct:

A member of the Viet Cong would later confirm that: “Children were trained to throw grenades, not only for the terror factor, but so the government or American soldiers would have to shoot them. Then the Americans feel very ashamed. And they blame themselves and call their soldiers war criminals.” It was not rare for small children to wave an American patrol into a booby trap or minefield. Additionally, the Viet Cong would use women and children as lethal ploys or ruses to lead Americans into deadly ambushes. Female Viet Congs were just as effective as their male counterparts, especially in sniper fire. In other words, the civilians were not exactly sitting out the war. American servicemen soon grew wary and suspicious of all Vietnamese.

Yet another huge factor was the terrible stress that C Company in particular, the unit involved in My Lai, had been under:

C Co. was fully deployed in Vietnam by the second week of December 1967. Task Force Barker was activated on 1 January 1968 to take over military operations in the Quang Ngai Province (a province that is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Viet Cong). C Co.’s first casualty comes from a booby trap on 28 January 1968. The following month, on 25 February 1968, C Co. walked into a minefield. CPT Medina kept his head and, after three died and twelve suffered serious injuries, managed to lead his soldiers out. The soldiers of C Co. blamed the Vietnamese villagers nearby who failed to warn them of the minefield and booby traps.

1LT Calley, who had just returned from leave, saw the helicopters transporting the dead and wounded. 1LT Calley also noticed that, from that point on, the attitude of his soldiers toward Vietnamese children had changed — they no longer gave them candy, and kicked them away. According to one account, 1LT Calley could hardly restrain his satisfaction when he said “Well, I told you so.” Prior to the minefield incident, Task Force Barker had failed on two separate attempts to trap the 48th LF Bn in the Quang Ngai Province. During the second attempt, A Co. came under heavy automatic and mortar fire coming from My Lai 4., the second time in a month that Task Force Barker had encountered resistance from around the hamlet of My Lai. Its company commander is among the fifteen wounded, five other soldiers died.

After the minefield incident, C Co.’s esprit de cops and morale sagged and eventually vanished. They went down to 105 soldiers. To make matters even worse, on 14 March 1968, SGT George Cox, an NCO well liked and respected by the soldiers of C Co., an NCO with a reputation for looking after his soldiers, was killed by a booby trap while on patrol. Since arriving in Vietnam three months earlier, C Co. had suffered twenty-eight casualties, including five killed. All the casualties were caused by mines, booby traps, and snipers.

It takes little imagination to see that C Co. had been undergoing terrible psychological and physical stress–being blown up by mines and booby traps without ever getting a chance to fight back and engage the unseen and mysterious enemy, or to defend themselves. And, since in their minds they had reason to suspect the villagers were cooperative–or even instrumental–in the setting of those booby traps and mines, the stage was set for the massacre, which represented not a disciplined and cohesive force of trained fighting men, but an explosion of frustration and rage by a group that was highly stressed and poorly prepared for what they faced, as well as subject to weak and inadequate leadership.

The idea that training the military to be more automatic in its responses and less stressed in combat is hard to accept; it seems so cold and brutal. But, once understood, I think it’s clear that courses working towards that end, such as Grossman’s, actually lead away from more My Lais, not towards them.

The never agains of Vietnam: the last battle?

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought this comment from Nicholas on a previous thread was worth highlighting:

I think the home battle is between the two types of children of Vietnam…

Type “A” is “Never Again!” in the sense of never getting into [a] fight worth winning.

Type “B” (you and me) is also “Never Again!” — but in the sense of never getting into a fight we’re not willing to actually fight for the win.

It’s odd how we keep coming back–not to Bataan, but to Vietnam (and also, in a sense, to Watergate).

I wonder sometimes whether this need to go back, and back, and back, will die out only when the generation that came of age at that time (mine) finally dies out, or whether the scars in the national psyche will last well beyond the lifetime of myself and all the other tiresome, addled boomers.

I sometimes fear it will be the latter, if only because so many of the effects of Vietnam have become institutionally embedded: the leftward tilt of academia; the tendency to consider the military as marauding abusers and/or exploited victims; the kneejerk and automatic distrust of the actions, and even the basic motives, of the government and the Presidency.

However, it does seem that one trend that began in that era has effectively ended for the majority of the American public (at least, if polls are any indication). That’s the sense that the press is composed of heroic and crusading truthtellers.

But Type A and Type B of the “never agains” are duking it out mightily right now, over Iraq. I hope it’s the last battle between these two particular factions–the last battle of Vietnam.

Tom Lehrer: no more Mr. Nice Guy

The New Neo Posted on by

Roger Simon has a wish:

I wish Tom Lehrer were around to write new lyrics to his amusing song about our most distinguished university [Harvard], whose Islamic Studies department is now the recipient of a multimillion dollar donation from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Roger is referring to Lehrer’s “Fight Fiercely Harvard,” a song he wrote in an effort to create a football fight song that would be appropriate to the Harvard ambiance he knew (it’s funnier when you actually hear him sing it than it is in print).

Well, Roger, I am pleased to inform you that Tom Lehrer is still very much around. That’s the good news. The bad news (and I say this more in sorrow than anger) is that Tom Lehrer has gone off the deep end.

Many of you may not know who Lehrer is. That’s not a surprise, since he pretty much retired from public life after the 60s. Here and here are some introductions, for those of you who don’t know Lehrer’s work.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I was raised on Lehrer, from such a young age that his oeuvre probably wasn’t very appropriate for a growing child. My family had a good friend who’d been his good friend at college (Harvard, of course!) and so we all had a very early introduction to his work, before he became famous.

To a kid, Lehrer was not only funny, but dangerously “out there.” His early records, featuring songs that ripped such targets as the Boy Scouts and small town life and the celebration of an all-too-commercially- oriented Christmas, were outrageous for a child–or for almost anyone back in the 50s and early 60s, when it was easier to be shocking. Later on, of course, he became much better known for political satire, such as this one about Werner Von Braun (“a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience”).

I could go on for some time on this subject of Lehrer’s songs, since as a child I effortlessly committed his entire body of work to memory (in fact, his song “The Elements, which listed the names of the chemical elements and put them to a catchy Gilbert and Sullivan tune, got me through a rather odd pop chemistry exam once.)

But, Roger and others, please take a look. Back in 2003, Lehrer gave an interview to a Sydney newspaper that showed that time has only not mellowed him, it’s transformed his rapier wit into a far more vicious blade.

Here are some selected quotes:

“I’m not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them…”

When Lehrer talks in his still-boyish voice about vaporising Bush, he quickly adds: “And that’s not funny.” It’s hard not to laugh, nonetheless, if only because of the sudden change of tone accompanying the word vaporise…

He says he couldn’t do anything with the Israelis and the Palestinians “because I’m against everybody and I can’t take a side”. Nor can the man who found so many snappy couplets and delightful tunes in impending nuclear doom see any toe-tapping inspiration in September 11, the invasion of Iraq, or the thing he seems most keen to talk about the Columbia space shuttle explosion.

“They are calling it a disaster instead of a screw-up, which is all it was. They’re calling these people heroes. The Columbia isn’t a disaster. The disaster is that they’re continuing this stupid program.

One of the things I’m proudest of is, on my record That Was the Year that Was in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon.

I was against the manned space program then and I’m even more against it now, that whole waste of money. And so, when seven people blow up or become confetti, then they’ve asked for it. They’re volunteers, for one thing.”

Not the sort of sentiments that will get you air time in the US at the moment, he agrees. And clearly signs of a man who is getting highly passionate, yet who acknowledges such a condition is bad for humour. “That’s what happened to [satirist] Lenny Bruce. He got angry, and then he wasn’t funny any more. You have your choice there.”

Lehrer makes some interesting points about his brand of political satire:

The audience usually has to be with you, I’m afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.

The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.

The interviewer writes:

His favourite quote on the subject is from British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”.

Lehrer says you can’t satirise real evil. “You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes … but you can’t make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.”

I’d really like to ask Lehrer why Saddam Hussein doesn’t come under the category of “real evil.” But perhaps it’s because Saddam is an enemy of the real real enemy, he-who-should-be-vaporized: George Bush.

It’s sad to see another mind deranged by BDS, especially when it’s the mind of Tom Lehrer.

[ADDENDUM: I hereby nominate the worthy Dr. Sanity as Tom Lehrer’s successor.]

Happy birthday, Kesher talk

The New Neo Posted on by

You might want to go over and wish Kesher Talk a happy fourth birthday.

Four years! I’m impressed. In blog-years (the opposite of dog-years), that’s practically ancient. And to think they still have the energy to blog after all that time–well, those folks at Kesher Talk are positively spry.

Neo and Neo: separated at birth?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, perhaps not quite.

But, in honor of my recent renaming by Gerard van der Leun of American Digest, I thought I’d try my best to live up to my elegant new alias, moniker, appellation: Neo.

What’s with the black apple? Well, see, the apple is a face shield, a substitute for Keanu’s sunglasses, which admittedly are much sharper-looking. As is Keanu.

[ADDENDUM: For those of you who are aware of my technological shortcomings, I must confess that I did not photoshop this on my own. Credits go to my non-resident computer expert, my son.]

Bianca and Ramsey

The New Neo Posted on by

They seem like strange bedfellows: Bianca Jagger and Ramsey Clark. But I think something the former said can shed a bit of light on the dark and murky thought processes of the latter.

Writing in Friday’s NY Post, Amir Taheri reports on a speech given by Bianca at a Foreign Press Association meeting in London. Taheri writes that a prize was given to there to “Akbar Ganji, an Iranian investigative reporter who is on a hunger strike in Tehran’s Evin Prison.”

Taheri has learned from experience that ordinarily there are certain unwritten rules about awarding such prizes:

Together with several colleagues, I had been trying for months to persuade the Western media to take an interest in Ganji, a former Khomeinist revolutionary who is now campaigning for human rights and democracy [by the way, that sounds like another fairly dramatic “change” story, doesn’t it?]. But we never got anywhere because of one small hitch: President Bush had spoken publicly in support of Ganji and called for his immediate release.

And that, as far as a good part of the Western media is concerned, amounts to a kiss of death. How could newspapers that portray Bush as the world’s biggest “violator of human rights” endorse his call in favor of Ganji?

To overcome that difficulty, some of Ganji’s friends had tried to persuade him to make a few anti-American, more specifically anti-Bush, pronouncements so that the Western media could adopt him as a “hero-martyr.”… Would Ganji adopt [this] tactic in order to get media attention in the West? The answer came last January and it was a firm no.

The result was that Ganji, probably the most outspoken and courageous prisoner of conscience in the Islamic Republic today, became a non-person for the Western media. Even efforts by the group Reporters Without Frontiers, and the International Press Institute, among other organizations of journalists, failed to change attitudes towards Ganji.

Taheri was heartened when the Foreign Press Association decided to defy convention and to honor Ganji despite his refusal to denounce the evil Bush. But then, at the awards ceremony, Bianca Jagger turned out to be the speaker of the evening. And it was quite a speech she made:

She started by telling us about her recent trips to Tehran and Damascus, presumably the two capitals of human rights that she likes best, and how she had been told “by officials and others” that she and other Westerners had “no moral authority” to talk about human rights and freedom.

She then proceeded by saying it is all very well to remember Ganji but that should not prevent us from remembering “those held in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and all other secret prisons” that the United States is supposed to be running all over the world.

The rest of the little speech had nothing to do with Ganji and everything to do with the claim that the United States is drawing an almost sadistic pleasure by practicing torture. I couldn’t believe my ears.

There was this caricature of a “UNICEF ambassador” equating Ganji ”” a man who has fought only with his pen ”” with men captured armed in hand on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

So what does this have to do with Ramsey Clark? Well, Taheri had the following post-speech exchange with Jagger:

Having swallowed my anger, I gave the “UNICEF Ambassador” a piece of my mind. She seemed surprised. No one had ever told her such things, especially not in a polite society of dinner jackets and long robes. “Is Ganji the same as the alleged terrorists in Guantanamo Bay?” I asked.

“Well, yes, I mean no, I mean yes,” she mumbled. “But they are all prisoners, aren’t they?”

They are all prisoners, aren’t they? That’s it; that’s the key. In Jagger’s eyes, all prisoners are the same: victims.

And I think that is also the key to Ramsey Clark: in his eyes, the role of prisoner trumps all others, and immediately makes a person a victim, and therefore a figure of pity. If you’ve read my piece on Clark, you know the rest.

[NOTE: And, in a possibly doomed effort to head some of you off at the pass, this does not mean that (a) I approve of torture; (b) I approve of the Abu Ghraib goings-on that fell short of torture; or (c) that I don’t think Saddam should have a defense lawyer. It’s just about two things: (1) the PC need to denounce Bush in order to get any human rights kudos; and (2) the mentality that automatically assumes all prisoners are victims.]

Richard Pryor: vulnerability and bravado

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading the news of Richard Pryor’s death yesterday, I have to say that it surprised me—not that he died, but that he’d still been alive. He had been so sadly debilitated in recent years that it seemed remarkable that he’d lived so long.

And it was remarkable, considering the ways in which he’d abused his body and mind when younger, and the bad luck he had in also coming down with a vicious case of MS.

So, RIP Richard Pryor.

You may or may not have noticed (probably not) that in my old normblog profile, I answered one of Norm’s questions this way:

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > I liked Richard Pryor when he was in his prime, and also the classic early Saturday Night Live crew.

I thought this might be a good time to explain why I went out of my way to mention Pryor.

He was shocking, he was crazy, yes, but that wasn’t it for me. He was funny, really really funny. I haven’t watched any of his stuff in decades, so I don’t know how I’d react to it today, but at the time it came out, I thought his “Live in Concert” act was a work of genius.

What was it about Pryor, way back then? Well, first of all, he truly was groundbreaking. Even though he talked about race, and talked more raunchily and freely than I’d heard previous comics speak on the subject, it seemed that he was talking person to person, from the heart.

As Roger Simon (who knew him) wrote today:

…it was Richard’s remarkable humanity [the audience was] reacting to, his ability to express a people’s pain without rancor or anger, with a forgiving grace that finally defused all rage in laughter and put everything on a different, even strangely color-blind, level.

My sentiments exactly. Pryor sometimes (although not always, by any means) focused on race, but his routines transcended race at the same time. How did he do this?

If you watch those old Pryor routines, look at his eyes. I was always transfixed by them. They are the eyes of a brave but very very frightened child. An intense and very feeling one, as well, who seems almost too vulnerable to bear the world and its hardships, but is going forward nevertheless into every experience it has to offer.

I’m not saying Pryor was a child. But he kept within him, quite close to the surface (and somehow managed to express, despite his all-too-adult persona and his wild comic flair) the intensity of vulnerability and pain most people feel when very young. For the majority of us this pain and vulnerability lessens, or goes underground, with adulthood. But for Pryor, both always appeared all-too-easily accessible—much too easily for his own good.

And it was his own good that he seemed famously and carelessly unconcerned with, developing a legendary cocaine habit that probably was responsible for an early heart attack, as well as being the mechanism for his near-death (and probable suicide attempt) back in 1980.

In “Live in Concert,” Pryor isn’t just a comedian, he’s an actor. He becomes each character he talks about, using his body effectively to create the illusions of change. But what I considered the most memorable part of the evening was the portion of his routine (although it was anything but “routine”) about his heart attack. He was somehow screamingly funny (how could that be?) while at the same time deadly serious as he described what it had felt like. This had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with humanity.

As for his actual death from a heart attack at age 65–well, according to Wikipedia (so I suppose we need to take it with a grain of salt), Pryor:

…was brought to the hospital after his wife’s attempts to resuscitate him failed. His wife was quoted as saying that “at the end there was a smile on his face.”

It’s possible. If anyone could die with a smile on his face, it might just be Richard Pryor.