The Book That Got the Bro Tazed
The Book that Got the Bro Tazed
Armed Madhouse
Greg Palast
Dutton (2006)
I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1955)
Greg Palast is an angry man, a funny man, a brilliant man, and an unapologetic egoist. You might say he’s like Sy Hersh and Mike Moore and Ed Murrow and Milton Friedman rolled into one. His book, Armed Madhouse, has been released in several editions, with various Swiftian subtitles, since 2006. This reviewer used the English Dutton edition from the Ann Arbor Public Library, which, bless them, has four copies.
The book is like a volcanic eruption. Where to start? Most anywhere, since Palast has dispensed with conventional narrative, chronological progression, and logical argumentation in favor of a thematic and topical approach which is much like his blog at gregpalast.com. Palast says, “I like to read in the loo, so this book, like my last [The Best Democracy Money Can Buy] can be read in short spurts, in any order. To that end, I’ve eliminated the consistency and continuity I despise in other books.” A pity, that.
I first became interested in Armed Madhouse during the infamous “Don’t Taze Me, Bro” incident at the University of Florida on September 17, 2007. A young man spent 90 seconds attempting to ask former Presidential candidate John Kerry a series of questions based on Palast’s book. The unfortunate young man, Andrew Meyer, was dragged to the back of the auditorium by campus police. While Meyer was waving a yellow trade paper edition of Armed Madhouse, he was pinned to the ground and “drive stunned” with a Taser while pleading “What did I do?… Don’t Taze Me, Bro!”
Public interest in the Andrew Meyer case has subsided since Meyer, on the advice of counsel, wrote a letter of apology exonerating the police who had taken him down, drive stunned him and arrested him for taking 90 seconds to ask an argumentative question. Meyer reportedly is to complete a “voluntary” 18 month probation, which if successful, will result in him not facing charges over the incident. Video of the incident was a YouTube phenom, with more than 2 million viewings to date. Interest in Palast’s book, which had reached the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list in May 2007, has resurged since the Tazing of the Bro.
Palast is savage in his treatment of President Bush Jr’s defining “Mission Accomplished” moment:
On Thursday, May 1, 2003, President Bush landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Forgetting to undo the parachute clips around his gonads, our President walked bowlegged on the ship’s deck in a green jumpsuit looking astonishingly like Ham, first chimp in space.
It is really quite disgraceful of Palast to make such a comparison to Ham, a perfectly respectable hero-chimp-astronaut.
Beyond his bombast, Palast clearly has excellent investigative instincts and deep national security sources. His investigations of Exxon and Enron helped blow the whistle on major scandals of the 1990’s. His analysis of the Bin Laden’s and Bush’s as motivated by the same oil-baron class interests is similar to the thesis of fellow BBC contributor Adam Curtis’ documentary The Power of Nightmares which we reviewed in Current in January, 2006. Palast says:
Fear is the sales pitch for many products…Better than toothpaste that makes your teeth whiter than white, this stuff will make us safer than safe… Real security for life’s dangers–from a national health insurance program to ending oil sheiks’ funding of bomb-loving “charities”–would take a slice of the profits of the owning classes, the Lockheeds, the ChoicePoints and the tiny-town big shot who owns the ferry company. The War on Terror has become class war by other means.
Palast’s investigation of ChoicePoint alleges this organization grew out of the now-officially-defunct “Total Information Awareness Office” at DARPA. He associates ChoicePoint with the database techniques used to “suppress” votes by millions of legally registered Democratic voters in the 2004 election.
Palast ties the war in Iraq to oil–not to an attempt to sell the oil but rather, to prevent it from being sold in order to drive up prices. He points out that there is no oil shortage geologically–world proven reserves, he says, top 1.189 trillion barrels. That’s 49,938,000,000,000 gallons of oil remaining by my calculation. He quotes Mobil Oil heir Lewis Lapham of Harper’s as saying that “we have been ‘running out of oil’ since the days when we drained it from whales”. Palast later refutes, or refines, his own theory in an afterword called “Return to Hubbert’s Peak: Why Palast is Wrong”.
Greg Palast’s website may be found at http://www.gregpalast.com/
Armed Madhouse is a work to taste, chew, and enjoy. A troubling work by a troubled man, and wicked funny. But I repeat myself.
You be the judge!
see also: keyword “Andrew Meyer” on scanlyze
Copyright © 2007, 2008 Henry Edward Hardy
A version of this article has previously appeared in Current.
Bad science makes bad science fiction: Richard Morgan’s Thirteen fails to impress
Bad science makes bad science fiction
Richard Morgan’s Thirteen fails to impress
Thirteen
Richard K Morgan
Random House, New York, 2007
Carl Marsalis is a genetically engineered assassin, variant 13. He has been sent to earth from Mars to track a renegade 13 who is loose somewhere on Earth. Marsalis is a gun for hire, forcing resettlement on or killing renegade 13’s on Earth. The action of UK cyberpunk writer Richard Morgan’s novel Thirteen jerks back and forth from the Pacific to the high Andes to Turkey and New York.
One detects in Thirteen shades of Phillip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep, better known as the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner. Like Dick’s anti-hero Rick Deckard, Carl Marsalis is a genetically engineered assassin sent to kill others of his kind. Like Blade Runner, Thirteen is full of philosophical speculation interspersed with spectacular violence. But there the comparison ends.
In early works of cyberpunk, such as Neuromancer by William Gibson, or John Shirley’s Song Called Youth trilogy, or the work of Rudy Rucker, there is an exuberance and sense of rebellion against injustice and order for the sake of order. Whether it is a last rock and roll concert on the Eiffel Tower in Eclipse, or the streets of Chiba City in Neuromancer, there was a fierce anarchic joy in those 1980’s cyberpunk classics.
In Thirteen, I’m not feeling the joy. Morgan explains, rather ponderously, that the 13’s are free of social constraints:
“Calculated murder is an anti-social act, and it takes special circumstances at either a personal or a social level to enable to capacity. But that’s you people… it’s not any variant thirteen… We’re the violent exiles, the lone-wolf nomads that you bred out of the race back when growing crops and living in one place got so popular. We don’t have, we don’t need a social context.”
Morgan’s theory is that modern man is an effeminized, wimpy and cowardly, degenerate race because all the true alpha males were exterminated and bred out. Thus, confusingly, his thirteens, though sociopathic loners, deficient in empathy, are somehow also charismatic leaders and irresistible to women. Women, we are made to understand by Morgan, really want to subordinate themselves to the strongest male.
Morgan is drawing on the work of Richard Wrangham as popularized by Matt Ridley in his book Nature Via Nurture. Wrangham was a student of primatologist Jane Goodall. Wrangham focused on interpersonal (inter-ape?) violence in his 1996 book, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham’s book, and Morgan’s fictionalization of Wrangham’s ideas as construed by Ridley have several problems. Chimpanzees are not ancestral humans any more than humans are ancestral chimps. They are, if you would, cousins. Among the chimps that Goodall studied at Gombe there were many examples of apparent altruism, trust, and loyalty; these virtues get short shrift among the adherents of primal human nature as essentially nasty and brutish.
Cyberpunk is often a delight to read because of its reimagining of a familiar world, the world of today. Lights are brighter, mirror-shades shinier and even commonplace objects are re-imagined and re-contextualized in works such as Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
In Thirteen, the places we visit are not well-imagined or well-described. For instance, Morgan’s scenes in the alteplano, or high plains of Peru and surrounding countries, are almost generic. We don’t smell the smells of the dusty street. We don’t see the remaining Incan roads, terraces and canals, ancient walls joined without a trace of mortar. We don’t hear the llama’s and old cars in the narrow streets. We don’t see the women in their colorful vests, long braids, long skirts, and funky hats. We don’t learn what people eat (aside from whisky). We don’t see the festivals like Oruro’s la Diablada (Dance of the Devils) even though such a scene might have dovetailed well with Morgan’s preoccupation with humans who are or become monsters. We know we are in New York or Turkey later on in the story only because we are told that we are there.
In short, Morgan’s prose is not merely plodding, predictable, and average. It is downright boring. His best ideas seem to have been lifted from the works of better writers such as John Brunner’s 1975 The Shockwave Rider and Dick’s 1968 Electric Sheep. For instance, Thirteen’s United States is fragmented into three states, a Pacific Rim, old Northeast and “Jesusland”. This internet meme is attributed to G Webb of yakyak.org by Morgan; but it is quite similar to ideas about the fragmentation and tribalization of the future US in Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider.
The UK title of Thirteen is Black Man. And Carl Marsalis, despite being a genetically engineered super/sub-human, apparently looks like a modern black man. There is a good bit of seemingly overt racism in the book as when Carl is beaten unconscious, apprehended and thrown into a Jesusland jail. Morgan tries to soften the Nazi-ish tinge of his twin themes of racial destiny and will with a dedication that says that he hates “bigotry, cruelty, and injustice with an unrelenting rage”. One wonders then why he has found it necessary to construct a novel in which such traits are seen as genetically endowed survival mechanisms. That Marsalis is a symbol of the fears of white society that the black man is a subhuman violent brute who is after “their women” is one thing; but the black man, Marsalis in Morgan’s book really is a sociopathic, back-bred pre-human. Who just happens to look like a black man. Would Morgan have called his novel “White Man” and made his anti-hero an exaggeratedly virile, violent, sociopathic white man?
Richard’s Morgan’s Thirteen is poorly written fiction based on dubious science. The interested reader is advised to find instead a nice copy of The Shockwave Rider or Neuromancer or A Song Called Youth or any of Phillip Dick’s novels.
Copyright © 2007, 2008 Henry Edward Hardy
A version of this article previously appeared in Current.
A response to Ron Suarez’ A New Ann Arbor City Council Resolution to End the War in Iraq?
A response to Ron Suarez’ A New Ann Arbor City Council Resolution to End the War in Iraq?
Note: the antiwar resolution mentioned on Ron’s site was passed by the Ann Arbor City Council in March, 2007.
Ron said:
I received this request from Michigan Peaceworks to support a new Ann Arbor City Council resolution that would hopefully push Congress to bring an end to the war in Iraq…
Here is their [Michigan Peaceworks] Proposed wording for a City Council Resolution:
We urge Congress to move in a bi-partisan way to address war policies in the Middle East. The United States now spends more on military defense than all other nations combined, but the world is less safe than when we embarked on our present policies. It is time for Congress to provide leadership by:
* re-establishing its on-going, joint authority with the President over war powers and war expenditures
* using Congressional appropriations authority to protect our troops by establishing conditions for their mobilization and deployment, conditions and time-lines for their return home, and needed assistance to veterans of our recent wars
* providing international humanitarian leadership
* developing a humanitarian budget to meet non-military needs of the worlds’ people, including our own
* using Congressional oversight to help strengthen international cooperation in peace-building…But, I could use help identifying other government officials who could use a nudge in the correct direction.
John Dingell. He often wears red.
His recent antiwar resolution, HR 3938 sounds good at first in that it reportedly withdraws the use of force authorization. The full text was not yet on Thomas when I wrote this. But the 2009 timeframe is too long. And this is a political cover for Dingell in that it distracts from what matters, which is his votes for the appropriations for the wars. Dingell’s resolution won’t pass both houses, and if it did it would be vetoed. He knows that.
If a majority of the House would refuse any more defense authorizations the war would end. Soon. Maybe some mainline Democrats want the war to continue. It is good for the business of the people who give them money. One hopes Dingell would not be in this category.
We need to focus in the short term on amending or defeating war appropriations. Resolutions like the proposed council resolution and HR 3938 give political cover to mainline Democrats who feel pressure from an increasingly frustrated public. But they don’t end the war. They give it political cover to continue.
What does Peaceworks mean that Congress should “move in a bi-partisan way?” Isn’t that kind of like a three-legged sack race? Seriously are the Democrats supposed to wait to defund the war until the Republicans turn into a pro-peace, anti-war party? This is a poor idea at best.
The Peaceworks resolution’s reference to “joint authority” between the president and Congress over “war spending and war powers” is inaccurate. The Constitution reserves these powers to Congress alone.
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; ….
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; …
US Constitution, Article I, Section 8
The president is an executive of the People, who acting through their Legislature, make the laws and raise taxes. We rely on the President to obey and fairly enforce the laws, not to ignore, make, or break them. The president is not a sovereign. Bush is not “King (or warlord) of America”.
We oppose:
HR 2638: Making appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008, and for other purposes, in committee.
HR 2642: Making appropriations for military construction, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008, and for other purposes, in committee.
HR 3222: Making appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008, and for other purposes, resolving differences.
And we need to oppose any more continuing resolutions like Democratic sponsored H.J.RES.52: Making continuing appropriations for the fiscal year 2008, and for other purposes, which Bush signed September 29, 2007.
Bush and the House and Senate Democrats like Dingell and Stabenow are pretending to disagree over the war to appeal to their base constituencies, while they are collaborating in continuing to fund it. I don’t have the same issue with Carl Levin, he and John Rockefeller have been fighting very hard behind closed doors on the war, concentration camps, and surveillance issues for a long time now.
What’s the cost to the citizen? Tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead; Thousands of American casualties; Military suicides and fragging incidents on the rise; America’s democracy and reputation in ruins; and $8,000 per person in the US through the next ten years. Or, if you want to look at it another way, $80,000 per person in Iraq. We could have bought all of Iraq intact for less than what it is costing to destroy it.
Feel-good resolutions without the force of law are a distraction and an impediment to holding our legislators accountable for real effective actions to end this garrison state of permanent war and neoconservative-neofascist oppression.
A New Ann Arbor City Council Resolution to End the War in Iraq?
Dingell bill sets date for Iraq pullout
War costs may total $2.4 trillion
See also, Bush on Iraq: ‘We’re Kicking Ass’
Letter to the youth of America
Scanlyze tag: Stabenow
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
Comcast versus the Net
The following is written in response to: Comcast: We’re Delaying, Not Blocking, BitTorrent Traffic on the Bits blog at nytimes.com.
The allegation made against Comcast by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and reported by the Associated Press is that Comcast have allegedly been inserting forged reset (RST) packets into the datastream. This is not analogous to delaying a call. It is more analogous to the company disconnecting a call in mid-sentence because they have been listening in and classifying the type of conversation and don’t like what is being discussed or think it is likely a waste of time.
This is unethical if it is being done and also goes against the Internet technical documents, the RFC’s. Further there are several potential legal issues including potential violations of the:
* Electronic Communications Privacy Act 18 USC § 2510.
* General Prohibition Against Traces and Traps 18 USC § 3121.
* The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030.
* The Cable TV Privacy Act of 1984, 47 U.S.C. § 551.
* State statutes such as Michigan statue Fraudulent Access to Computers, Computer Systems, and Computer Networks, MCL 795.791.
Whatever Comcast routing and Quality of Service provisions are in effect should be fully spelled out and transparent to regulators, internet technical experts and the general public so that citizens can make an informed choice about whether they want their internet unsurveilled, uncensored and uninterrupted… or whether they want Internet which is “Comcastic”.
See Comcastic?!? Not So Much…
Comcast and BitTorrent; a Complicated Relationship
Technorati posts tagged comcast bittorrent
See also An Open Letter to Rich Sheridan regarding the proposed insertion of spam by the Wireless Washtenaw Project
Seven Questions on ‘Net Neutrality’ for Ann Arbor City Councilman Ron Suarez
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
Does politics belong in the classroom?
Prof. Stanley Fish has been discussing on his nytimes blog whether or how freely political opinions should be expressed by a teacher in the college or university classroom.
His initial blog entry is, Yet Once More: Political Correctness on Campus and the followup to which I have responded is, George W. Bush and Melville’s Ahab: Discuss!
Fish’s first post was a long response to Evan Coyne Maloney’s Indoctrinate U.
The basic thrust of Fish’s post seems to be that,
Academics often bridle at the picture of their activities presented by Maloney and other conservative critics, and accuse them of grossly caricaturing and exaggerating what goes on in the classroom. Maybe so, but so long as there are those who confuse advocacy with teaching, and so long as faculty colleagues and university administrators look the other way, the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary. In 1915, the American Association of University Professors warned that if we didn’t clean up our own shop, external constituencies, with motives more political than educational, would step in and do it for us. Now they’re doing it in the movies and it’s our own fault.
My response follows:
I would not entirely agree with the thesis that politics has no place in the Academy.
As teachers, can we not state that, for instance, “Torture is antithetical to every basic principle of the American democratic system”? Or contrariwise, “Corporal punishment has been a feature of the American system of justice since its inception, and even killing a prisoner who has been condemned to death after due process is held to be judicially and legally acceptable under federal and most state jurisdictions today”?
Can we not say, “The evidence for global warming is regarded as conclusive by an overwhelming international consensus of scientists” as well as, “Solar incident radiation is the principle contributing factor to global warming in accordance with Boltzmann’s Law and the primary factor mediating this is the albedo of the earth, and any radiative forcing from CO2 in the atmosphere is negligible by comparison”?
Is it not precisely so that such opinions can be voiced without fear of retribution that we have tenured positions in the academic structure? If one prevailing political, scientific, or social view is defined culturally as “objective” and no other views are permitted to be advanced or advocated by a teacher in a classroom setting, then where is the great “marketplace of ideas” of which the classroom is a preeminent exemplar? As the Supreme Court held in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, (385 U.S. 589, 605-606 [1967], supreme.justia.com/us/385/589/case.html ):
‘Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom. “The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.” Shelton v. Tucker, supra, at 487. The classroom is peculiarly the “marketplace of ideas.” The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth “out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.”‘
Thank you for your interesting post and enjoyable and weighty blog, Prof. Fish.
See also: The Universities Under Attack …
I would further note that after 1915 the political “cleaning up” of leftist radicals such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman took the unpleasant form of the Palmer Raids in 1919, indeed an interesting and fraught comparison to draw with our present political situation.
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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