Rewatching The Wire:Season 1 Ep 1-2

I have started a Wire club at the new place for fellow Wire aficionados. We plan to meet on Sunday evenings, make some food, and plow through 2 episodes at a time starting at season 1. I have seen the series once and look forward to re-watching it to catch the subtleties I missed the first time. Eric, since you haven't seen the series this post and any subsequent should I feel so inspired to write will hopefully pique your interest.

Here are a few odds and ends I noticed in the first two episodes.

1. Mcnulty goes to see his FBI buddy who shows him a live video feed of drug dealers in an apartment somewhere. Mcnulty is impressed and surprised upon learning the video is live, he puts on the headset and leans into the monitor. This shot is set up so the viewer shares the perspective of the monitor. Mcnulty looks at and leans toward the viewer face-on with the traces of a smile playing across his face, which is creepily lit by the bluish glow of the screen. It's a subtle point about the creepiness of police surveillance and probably one of the only shots in the series where anyone looks directly into the camera.

1a. When Deangelo Barksdale happens upon the dead security guard, they show a flashback to the dead man on the stand at his trial. Knowing what I know now about the series, this must have killed David Simon and David Burns to put that flashback in there and almost certainly had to have been insisted upon by someone higher up at HBO over their objections. Part of The Wire's narrative power is driven by the respect Simon and Burns give the viewer and avoid obvious giveaways like this.

1b. Rawls and another commander enter an elevator. The camera angle switches to the overhead, black and white surveillance camera in the elevator. The two men say nothing, one adjusts his tie. They get off and resume their interaction and the camera switches back to the more conventional perspective with color. The overhead shot mirrors the surveillance camera in the projects from the opening credits, the one the kid hucks a rock at and breaks. I have no idea what this shot means. Are they drawing a parallel here? Something else?

2. Mcnulty and Bunk drink at the railroad tracks and Mcnulty steps up on the tracks and starts pissing while a train is bearing down on him. He stares it down, finishes, and steps off at the last second while Bunk looks on in disbelief. The incident tells us a lot about Mcnulty's character, forever fighting headlong against implacable forces beyond his control and survives by yielding at the last second.

I originally thought Mcnulty accidentally figured out how to pull the strings of the higher ups by going outside the chain of command, as he does with the judge to get the ball rolling in season 1. To recap: the judge calls him into his chamber after Mcnulty shows up to watch Deangelo Barksdale get off a murder charge after the Barksdale gang intimidates the jurors into recounting their testimony. Mcnulty is almost out of the building when a clerk grabs him and Mcnulty goes to the judge's chambers for a conversation. The judge asks him a question, Mcnulty answers frankly and goes on at length at the power of the Barksdale gang and the murder raps they have beaten. The judge makes some phone calls after Mcnulty leaves seemingly unaware of the heat he has just brought down on himself for going outside the chain of command, but the lessons he learns about getting what he wants from an otherwise indifferent and cynical system serve him well in the rest of the series. However, in a conversation with Bunk he warns Bunk to cover himself upon learning that the lone witness who did not recant ended up with a bullet to his head. Mcnulty's posture during this conversation with Bunk indicates that he knows exactly what is coming down the tracks but can dispense with his innocent "what the fuck did I do?" attitude to warn Bunk that he should cover himself. In other words, maybe his mistake was not that he couldn't see the wrath he was incurring with his loose talk, his mistake was thinking he could escape it by playing innocent, dumb and apologizing.

Mcnulty's inability to ever figure out how the politics of the institution he serves or the criminal enterprise he prosecutes contrasted with his genius at criminal investigation will be a source of conflict throughout the series, and you can already see this at work from the start. He is a genius at reconstructing past events, but can't seem to see into the future beyond the present moment, until the train is almost over the top of him. Most other characters are savvy in predicting how others will react to their actions with clarity, such as Daniels crystal clear understanding of the message his higher ups are sending him in with the mopes and losers they send to his unit, that he will only get more warm bodies by asking for more man power, why he can't sell out his own men without drawing heat for his own performance, and how rigged the game is against him. In another scene, Burrell predicts that if they do Mcnulty now, as Rawls wants, the judge will put that in the papers. He says that he can see that move coming "a mile away," and advises that they sit tight, wait for the investigation to run its course, and do Mcnulty then.

2a. Mcnulty gives away more information than he should to Landsman when he asks him where he doesn't want to be reassigned when the consequences of his fallout with Rawls are fully felt. Mcnulty answers the boat. Later Mcnulty will know to duck questions he doesn't want to or shouldn't answer with a smirk or a non-sequitor, but young Mcnulty hasn't learned this yet and his loose lips seal his inevitable fate. At another point, Landsman informs Mcnulty that Rawls has summoned him after Mcnulty has gone outside the chain of command and burned Rawls by doing so. Mcnulty doesn't seem to understand this yet, or maybe this is an act, asks Landsman what Rawls wants, and Landsman pointedly replies, "how the fuck should I know? I'm only a seargant." The message here is that Landsman knows only what he knows and knows enough to keep it that way as a matter of self-preservation.

3. The development of Carver's character is impressive, given that he starts out as a head knocking sidekick to the walking brutality case, Herc. I hadn't realized how dynamic Carver is the first time through the series, but seeing where he began is jarring. There is the hint of a difference between the two when Kima leaves them on the rooftop with instructions, Herc starts bitching that she is bossing them around, Carver tells him to shut up so he can take pictures as she asked. Its a subtle show of respect for her police work after she reveals the Bubbles hat trick. Later, he participates in the Herc led disaster at the Terrace at 2AM after drinking Budweiser and listening to "American Woman", where Prezbo takes a kids eye with a pistol-butt stroke and the officers eventually take cover under their squad car while unseen assailants rain down glass, televisions, and a hail of gunfire upon them.

The narrative conceits of The Wire are parallel story lines and mirroring. This is evident from the very first two shows. For example, we learn from Mcnulty's conversation with the judge that the Barksdale gang has hijacked 3 murder trials, Deangelo Barksdale is the latest to beat the rap. Deangelo goes to see his cousin, the drug lord Avon Barksdale, after his release. Avon chides Deangelo for losing his cool and getting himself into this situation, as well as costing the organization time and money to get him off. Later Mcnulty and Bunk go put some pressure on Deangelo in the low rises courtyard. Mcnulty brings up the trial and Deangelo coolly answers that the jury had its say and found him not guilty. Following the debacle at the towers with Herc, Carver and Presbolewski, Lt. Daniels rips into his men for their reckless behavior and lists the lost car, radios and shotgun they had been responsible that had been burned in the melee. He also mentions the brutality cases Herc had taken in the past two years. How many cases? 3, of course, same number as the Barksdale crew. To which Herc responds that he had been acquitted in all three, echoing Deangelo's words earlier about the jury.

4. Bodie's character's growth mirrors Carver's. Here Bodie is a low level, hot head drug dealer. He has a few subtle interactions with Deangelo that show him probing D for signs of weakness. After D chides Wallace for getting taken with fake money but doesn't administer a beating, Bodie asks, "That it?", turns his head and spits. Later when they catch Johnnie with the fake bills, Bodie gives D another incredulous look after D walks away from the scene without giving the order to beat the scammer.

Authority

Ms. Fredrickson said people who were vomiting, unresponsive and unconscious were not a red flag with her because Mr. Ray had explained that those responses were possibilities. She told the authorities that her experience with sweat lodges was limited to the ones led by Mr. Ray, and that she never took it upon herself to research them or find out why people would pass out.

“James is my boss, so I listened to what he says and I listened to what he told participants,” she said in the documents.

2 Workers Tell of Deadly Sweat Lodge Event
Associated Press, 2/7/2010

The capacity for humans to follow orders over their own moral conscience and common sense never ceases to amaze me. This story reminds me of the infamous Milgram experiments.

Heavy Metal: Red

Heavy Metal: Red
mixed media, oil on board with copper wire4"x8"

This is inspired by some recent sculpture I saw and is a study for a larger painting. When I track down the sculptor's name I will add credit to her in the post.

Heavy Metal: Orange

Heavy Metal: Orange
mixed media, oil on board with copper wire
4"x8"

This is inspired by some recent sculpture I saw and is a study for a larger painting. When I track down the sculptor's name I will add credit to her in the post.

Not It

GAZA (Reuters) - The Islamist groupHamas on Wednesday formally rejected allegations it had committed war crimes during last year's fighting in Gaza, charges made in aUnited Nations report.

Hamas officials said the group set out in a 52-page response handed to a U.N. official in Gaza that the killing of three Israeli civilians in rocket attacks during Israel's December 27, 2008-January 18, 2009 offensive was an accident and military installations had been targeted.

Up to 1,387 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and 13 Israelis, including three civilians, were killed in the war Israel launched with the declared aim of curbing rocket attacks on its territory.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch organization, commenting last week after Hamas released a summary of the report, said the group's "claim that its rocket attacks against Israel are not war crimes is factually and legally wrong."

Human Rights Watch, which also has criticized Israeli conduct in the Gaza war, said "hundreds of rockets rained down on civilian areas in Israel where no military installations were located."

Reuters

There are symmetries in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One symmetry is the seemingly limitless capacity of the combatants to make excuses for violence that are beyond incredible and refuted by mountains of evidence that they are in fact guilty of doing what it looks like they are accused of doing. I wouldn’t be surprised if leaders up and down the ranks have internalized these extreme rationalizations for their behavior and actions. The nature of these symmetries (and asymmetries) is the ability of one side to see with clarity what the other is doing and not recognize the nature of their own actions.

There are also symmetrical asymmetries as well, namely the vast asymmetry of how much damage each side inflicts upon the other during fighting. The Arab fighters can hardly damage the Israelis, whereas the Israelis can and have pulverized the populations in Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank. The asymmetrical symmetry to the asymmetry of actual violence is how much attention the west pays to the Israeli government and various Arab/Palestinian organizations doing the fighting.

This caught my eye because of how similar in tone and spirit Hamas’ claim that their rockets are aimed at Israeli military sites are to the Israeli dismissal of the well documented incidents described in the Goldstone Report.

Choices

Tim Tebow is participating in a somewhat controversial and unintentionally hilarious Superbowl ad. I’ll get to that in a second, but first…

The episodic spectacle of the Superbowl and specifically its marketing bonanza grows more offensive with each passing year. The buzz over Superbowl ads is a celebration, ultimately, of the art of lying, deceiving and manipulating people into buying shit they don’t need, on the basis of messaging that is usually, at best, a complete non sequitur. My favorite ad to date was the so quiet inside the car that a badger could rip the driver to shreds and no one would hear his screams from outside ad a few years ago. I didn’t see The Big Game at all last year and only tuned in for the last 10 minutes of the Giants v Patriots game the year before, I saw most of the ones in the years prior and as a kid loved most sports, football included. Football games typically last 3+ hours and during the typical telecast there are approximately 11 minutes of action (via Eric). The rest of the time you are watching people stand around or advertisements. I think I’ll just keep saying no to that.

Back to Tebow’s advertisement. I’ll try to say only as much as necessary to explain who this guy is and the context of this ad he is participating in. Tebow is one of the most successful college football players in history. When his mother was pregnant with him, doctors advised her that there was a complication that could threaten her life, his life, and her ability to have children again. She decided to carry the pregnancy to term. Tebow grew up to be a devoutly religious man as well as start college athlete. Now he is participating in a Superbowl ad spot paid for by the ostensibly pro-life religious group, Focus on the Family. The message of the ad is that doctors informed Ma Tebow of the health risks associated with bringing her pregnancy to term, offered her options, and she chose to go through with and allow what would happen to happen. I can absolutely respect that choice, just as I would respect a choice to terminate the pregnancy. The implication of the Focus on the Family’s political advocacy to outlaw abortion is to take away that choice from other pregnant women whatever their circumstances. The advertisement for that position should explain Ma Tebow’s complications, express regret that she had to endure the anguish and emotionally fraught decision about what to do, and advocate the government to pass a law so that other pregnant women do not have to suffer the emotional distress with making the decision about whether to keep a baby or not, whatever their circumstances or reasons for considering aborting. Instead, we get the comically befuddled ‘pro-life’, but really pro-choice, advertisement that will air on Superbowl Sunday. That is the sort of bumbling public advocacy boondoggle (the 30 seconds will cost almost $3 million) that I can get behind and this is the almost beyond parody message to expect from the pro-life crowd who caricatured the pro-choice crowd as pro death, abortion loving animals that they seem wholly unaware that telling this story in terms of a mother making a difficult choice actually weakens their argument and makes the alternative reality they want to live in where mothers have no option but to risk their lives, babies' lives and long term health of all parties seem all the more oppressive.

Celebrating a woman's agency and personal decision to have a baby is just as much a pro-choice message as offering understanding and support to a woman who chooses not to. The pro-life position that seeks to amend the law that no woman be allowed to make this decision without the threat of legal sanction is entirely different. Could it be true that a staunchly religious and pro-life athlete with household recognition and a pro-life political-religious organization that likens abortion to murder come together and spend millions of dollars unwittingly promoting a pro-choice message during one of the most widely watched television spectacles in American culture? Verily, reader, it can be! It is!

Left Overs

I. More on The Trap
I want to follow-up to my post about The Trap. At the end of the review I began to get into what the documentary isn’t, or rather where I’d like to see the discussion proceed with the ideas/themes/history presented in The Trap as a point of departure. I did not want to go too far along these lines in a post that was supposed to be a review of the documentary and how well it covers topics that fall within the scope of its presentation. The story of how the war games devised by a paranoid schizophrenic in the bowels of the U.S. military industrial complex serving an elite group of decision makers that were self selected for cynicism, violence and fanatic devotion to ideology at a time when two nuclear superpowers threatened to annihilate each other and the rest of the world in the process could come to be the dominant model of human behavior at large is ambitious enough, and they accomplished their goal in presenting all the moving pieces in a coherent narrative.

I suggested that the documentary’s decision to take what people said at their word and compare that to the results of their actions was defensible, though it left some questions unanswered. Those questions are of secondary importance, it is not that important to figure out what people really think compared to what they say and do. There is no way to know with any certainty and in any event, the internal motivations and thoughts of the powerful as compared to the tangible effects of their actions are negligible except insofar as it is important for people to understand that when leaders, politicians and guys with metal pinned to their shirts talk about freedom and liberty, it usually spells trouble.

A more substantive problem with some of the narrative of the documentary is its acceptance of the characterization of free market ideology as defined by free market ideologues. Recall that Isaiah Berlin’s 'negative freedom' is the type of freedom enjoyed by the western democracies, where people are free to do whatever, there is no government enforced program that forces people into behaving according to what a vanguard of revolutionaries has determined would lead to utopia, and the government exists to prevent people from infringing on another’s rights. The negative freedom model of economics posits that governments should let the markets be free and conflates consumerism with political democracy. This has been a fashionable and particularly devious line of propaganda and ardent capitalists are usually quite enthusiastic about the idea that by shopping people are acting in complete free will and expressing desires for what they want. For example, they may say that the reason we have fast food restaurants and SUVS is because those are the products the people want and to oppose those products on moralistic grounds is elitist and anti-democratic.

There are a several objections to the economic consumerist democracy point of view.
One is that a product’s, like fast food hamburgers, dominance or apparent popularity does not strictly reflect consumer choice. Slogans like “vote with your feet” or “the consumer is king” give a false sense of power and political action to a person for the activity of consuming. There are incentives and real political activities to make some choices more attractive than others to people. The vast subsidies of public money that allow hamburgers and French fries or other corn based products to be sold below their cost of production compared to healthier, unprocessed foods is as relevant factor as ‘personal’ taste to why the poor are the biggest consumers of junk foods. Many poor families simply cannot afford to eat healthy foods regularly. Or consider the role that zoning laws and building codes have had on the suburban lifestyle ‘choices’ that have given us the present physical makeup of America. It’s commonly posited that we have the suburbia that we do because of consumer choice; but the more substantive answer is that the nature of zoning laws have given incentive to the style and model of development, individual tastes are of secondary importance. One is reminded of Harold Ford’s line about the color of his model T, you can have any color you want as long as it is black.

The fault with ‘market democracy’ as a meaningful concept is that we are not making choices with our wallets that affect our reality, or ‘voting with our feet’, in a vacuum; we are reacting to the actions of others and modify our behaviors according to what will be to our best advantage or limited to options selected for us by others’ choices. This begins to get back to game theory, which does contain valuable insights into how people modify their behavior based on how they believe those around them are behaving, but fails to accurately predict exactly what choices people make given those options based on a psychopathic model of humanity. There is work on this front, Eliner Ostrom’s recent Nobel Prize in economics is evidence of this chipping away. For more examples and a better explanation of the false concept of ‘market democracy’ see Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart.

Another popular fallacy the documentary uncritically accepts is the trade-off of free markets vs. government regulation. Free market ideologues champion business interests and want to keep government out of markets, keeping them free and inefficient. Government intervention has unintended, and mostly b ad, consequences for the public good. There are no free markets though, or rather, free markets do not exist independently of government. The government creates the space that make it possible for markets to exist, or markets to exist in any meaningful sense. They create and enforce trade laws, protect emerging industries from countries with more developed economies, protect intellectual property, give a framework for resolving disputes peacefully. Free markets without the infrastructure and support of government are black markets, which are quite obviously corrosive to the communities they exist in as they have to use violence and force to protect market share and resolve disputes. It is not really meaningful to say that governments shouldn’t intervene in business; the real tension is on whose behalf the government intervenes.

II. More on the passing of Howard ZInn…
I couldn’t help myself and read obits of Howard Zinn on the internet over the weekend on blogs, newspapers and their comment threads. Numerous liberal/progressive types gave Zinn some backhanded compliments that went something roughly like, “I did not personally like, respect, or appreciate his history, but am glad he was here.” Or, “I respect his work, but in the end he offered no practical solutions for real world problems.” I’ll leave the first category of comment alone for the most part, except to note that it is common for people seeking respect from the establishment and dominant power structures of business, media and politics will never miss an opportunity to piss on dissidents who imagine a better world. That brings me to the second, more generally applicable critique that he offered no practical solutions. This is a hollow, narcissistic critique that is usually applied generally and meant to discredit anyone who does not keep their dissent confined to what is considered an acceptable range options as defined by the powerful. In Zinn’s case, the solutions he proposed with his historical revision were obviously practical. At the time he wrote his seminal work, he was frustrated with conventional history and its hidden biases. He meant to attack that structure and succeeded. He believed that reinterpreting history would make us better prepared to think critically about the present. To say that he did not propose practical solutions is only to signal to others that you wish to have a seat at the table of power, or in some cases a spot under to collect the scraps that fall down to the floor.

Documentary Review: The Trap

I have come to believe the neurotic reliance on statistics, pie graphs and charts as of primary importance in interpreting individual and organizational performance reflects a crisis in leadership and an implicit degradation of human intelligence and the capacity to interpret their reality. The employment of complex mathematical, statistical and computer models to meaningfully interpret our world and allow an informed narrative to form inverts at a certain point; instead we are inundated with data but no information, or at least no meaningful interpretation that bears any relationship with the reality it is supposed to represent.

These models are useful in making informed decisions, offering new insights or helping to interpret reality, this is precisely what makes them so dangerous in the hands of the unimaginative and unthinking boobs who bloat the fat middle management hierarchy of any medium to large public or private organization. These models also allow us to defer decision making responsibility, and subsequent fallout from bad decisions, to their explicative and interpretative powers. Those under them have a set of hard metrics to perform to, if they can’t figure out how to get there then it is not necessarily the managers responsibility. In turn, they only have to meet their numbers anyway they can to please those above them. And so on up the chain.

Complex models are most useful are in studying systems or phenomena that remain mostly unchanged or unaware that they are being studied and measured. Using statistical models to study the weather, or population trends in nature, or genetic mutations is perfectly valid and provides important insights into the world. The trouble is that the same is not true when working studying human systems because people are notoriously adept at performing to whatever is measured. The important thing for one studying natural phenomena is not to alter the behavior of the system they are studying for the data to have any meaning. If a scientist studies the mating patterns of an exotic bird, and the birds know this and alter their behavior to meet his expectations, then the study is worthless. The over-reliance on metrics and statistics to measure organizational performance has created games within games and hoops within hoops for people to play at and jump through, often at the expense of rational behavior.

The BBC’s documentary, The Trap, traces the rise of the complex and simplified systems that have overtaken our cognitive and decision making processes over the last century. The documentary tells you from the beginning that you ought never to trust humans, who will ultimately betray you, but trust the numbers because they never lie. The documentary links the seemingly disparate fields of inquiry of political science, economics, mathematics, revolutionary activism, anthropology, domestic and foreign policy, and psychiatry to one another in a compelling manner. The case that it makes is the stultified, simplistic models of human behavior originating in the heart of the cold war to help U.S. and British state planners how to predict how the Russians would respond to Western actions has flowed outward, infecting other sciences and come to dominate how many fields model humans behavior and relations.

The kick in the ass of all this is that much of the limited and flawed understanding of human beings originated in the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic, one John Nash, working for the RAND corporation in the 1950s. He was a leader in developing game theory, the absolutist rational models of human behavior that have underpinned many of the economic models of the past half century and, in turn, underpinned public policy initiatives of western governments by politicians and think thanks. Nash has since recovered from schizophrenia and acknowledges the limited nature of his models and their over reliance on false assumptions of human behavior. When the economists at RAND tested their theoretical models, they proved poor predictors of human behavior with the exception of clinical psychopaths and economists immersed in this line of inquiry that had internalized their own assumptions. Nonetheless, the games largely devised by a paranoid schizophrenic proved influential enough that they helped shape public policy for the next half century. And so it goes.

What is the possible connection between psychiatry and the Rand Corporations war games? As the documentary tells it, the Rosenhan experiment rocked the field and the fall out resulted in a complete reordering of the profession’s objectives from interpretive art, to psychotropic drug industry whose products simplified and numbed human beings, drawing them closer in behavior to the simplified caricatures beginning to dominate all social sciences, that were in turn influenced by the models of game theory. Rosenhan sent people to different hospitals with instructions to lie about having a single auditory hallucination, hearing the word “thud”, and to otherwise behave normally and lie about nothing else. All were admitted. Once inside they reported to the doctors that they no longer heard any hallucinations and continued behaving normally. The psychiatrists treating them refused to release them and claimed they were still clinically insane. The only way out was to admit they were insane, take psychotropic drugs, and fake getting better. This reminded me of the Kafkaesque Soviet prison system for dissidents and attempted defectors. Soviet doctors diagnosed defectors as insane, because only the insane would want to flee the workers’ paradise, and if they denied they were insane this was only proof that they were insane. Their other option was to admit insanity. Either decision yielded the same result; the patient was insane and in need of treatment. Once Rosenham revealed his findings, one hospital challenged him to send more fakes and they would detect them. He agreed. After a period of time the hospital claimed to have identified over 40 fake patients. Rosenham then revealed he had sent no one. The field of psychiatry was rocked to its foundations; instead they decided they would observe behaviors only and describe what they saw. They devised a mathematical evaluation; people filled out questionnaires with simple yes or no answers and these answers were tabulated by a machine that spit out a diagnosis. Almost instantly, it was found that half the population of the United States suffered from mental disorders. The pharmaceutical industry came up with drugs to treat these disorders and this has given rise to the over medicated and over diagnosed population of today and the battery of psychological drugs we take. In other words, society had internalized the horribly simplified human models in economics to the point that it seemed normal to take drugs to bring real life people closer to the 'norm' of a completely rational, calculating automaton.

A few more threads taken up by the documentary is in political science, including Isaiah Berlin’s influential political science talk about the two concepts of liberty that he called positive and negative liberty. Berlin had escaped the Soviet Union and wondered how a revolution intended to free the masses of working people could result in the Soviet government, so fiercely repressive and tyrannical. He defined positive freedom as the freedom instituted from a vanguard of revolutionaries who believed they had the right answer as to how to create utopian society and were willing to destroy individuals who they perceived as impediments to the realization of their lofty visions. Their ends justified the means behavior inevitably led to atrocity and even fiercer repression than the elites they had overthrown. Negative freedom meant only that individuals were left free to do what they wanted; government authority existed to ensure that individuals did not infringe upon one another’s freedom. The documentary argues that after the cold war, in so far as negative freedom still influences American and British foreign policy actions, the result has been wanton destruction and freedom without meaning; such as in Iraq or Afghanistan. This has created a brutal, nihilistic reality for the people we are supposedly trying to liberate. Domestically, the British ruling class has begun to resemble the positive freedom tyrannies of the past as they systematically abrogate individual freedom for the purpose of increasing security. Berlin’s conception of negative freedom animated movements such as the neo-cons and people like Tony Blair, who although they espoused negative freedom behaved like positive freedom crusaders; believing, of course, just like the positive freedom revolutionaries, that their means could justify the end result of liberty and freedom. Berlin’s doppelganger is Jean Paul Sartre, whose political writings inspired a generation of positive freedom fighters, whose violent actions wrought their own utopian spasms of bloody destruction; none as infamous or as deadly in the late 20th century as Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia.

The Trap is a compelling portrait of the 20th-21st centuries and if I have a criticism of the piece, it is its decision to take what various movements and leaders say about their actions at face value. I think it is a defensible position and avoids the troubling and noisy task of determining how much any movement’s ideological commitments are cynical or fanatical. To describe the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq as motivated by liberty and freedom, primarily, is not only simplistic but also counter factual. The initial pretext for invasion was to disarm the regime of weapons of mass destruction, itself a cynical public relations gambit, and when that pretext collapsed the west quickly attempted to seize the moral high ground and reframe their invasion in terms of freedom. To reiterate, the documentary offers a compelling framework for interpreting recent history, but it is nonetheless lacking (as are all frameworks), but perhaps it is important to note where it falls short, highlight its strengths, and appreciate it for the sum of its parts. It certainly goes much farther in its interdisciplinary approach than almost any other effort I have seen and contains several moments of clarity where two things, seemingly disconnected, now appear linked in some way. It might reach in some places to fit reality within its narrative concepts, but for the most part makes a good deal of sense.

As a follow up, I’d like to see the filmmaker take up the meaning of freedom in the context of today’s modern, industrialized, surveillance heavy world. Words like liberty and freedom are cheap today, and politicians above all others love to throw them around when shilling for whatever cause they have taken up, often they use these words most when the actual consequences of their policies work against liberty and freedom as traditionally understood. These words are beginning to mean everything, and therefore nothing. But if we are to take negative-freedom revolutionaries at their word, then it is important to understand what they mean exactly when they say freedom, not what we think they mean using our own commonly understood definitions. When the Michael Ledeens, Paul Wolfowitz’s, and Bill Kristol’s of the world talk about war, overthrowing governments, and remaking parts of the world in our image and call this freedom, what does that ever mean? I suppose we are beginning to circle back to the cynic vs. zealot point I touched above, so it may be time to let go.
Special thanks to Thomas Daulton for bringing this film to my attention.

Wherever there’s a cop rolling a 12 sided die, I’ll be there

Someone famous once said that the best measure of a civilization is to see who it imprisons; unjust civilizations put the righteous and the poor in chains while the criminals hold the keys. Actually, I am not sure if that is a real historical quote or if it is, who said it. It was probably me, I remember scrawling something like that on a homemade placard about 15 years ago outside of the Penn Yan courthouse in protest of JPK's criminal sentencing as a result of something that is sealed to the public so I can't get into specifics. At the time, I attributed the quote to Thomas Paine to lend it some moral authority, but that was probably bullshit. I knew none of the slack jawed, lax playing yokels in that Buckwheat town would bother to fact check me unless I attributed it to someone important like Joe Camel, the Marlboro Man or Stevie Ray Vaughn so I might have gambled. Not going to bother looking it up now, just going to keep letting it ride. So let's just say for the sake of argument that Thomas Paine or maybe Henry David Thoreau said it.

Let's think about this mathematically. That simple equation says the measure of civilization = (the criminality of the jailors less the righteousness of the jailed) multiplied by the number -1. A score of less than 0 is an unjust civilization, greater than 0 means there is still hope. The U.S. must be fucked because we have a lot of criminal jailers. Just last year, for example, a scandal rocked the Philadelphia juvenile court system when it came to light that two judges sentenced youths to serve time in prison for very minor offenses; they received financial kickbacks from the for profit private company running the prisons who make marginal income on their pinstriped head count.

We are world leaders in incarceration, besting the Chinese, the Cubans, the Iranians, even the Russians, a country whose citizens have spent generations under the thumbscrews of an oligarchic criminal class. That Philly story isn't even the half of it here in the states, much worse are the judges who aren't getting kickbacks and no one bats an eye at them for locking away pot and crack-heads. Or the wink, wink, nudge nudge levels of violence and sodomy that we joke about in our prisons and accept as unsanctioned extrajudicial punishments. Hey, no doubt some of these creeps deserve to be in jail, the point is that there are a lot of dastardly, scandalous people running free with blood on their hands. I am looking at Perez Hilton, Marlo Stanfield, Dick Cheney, and Peyton Manning (I'd take Eli as consolation and call it even with the Mannings, for now).

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are some bright spots. The Obama Administration has quietly ended the War on Drugs - drugs are still illegal, but we are no longer rhetorically at war with users. Small consolation to people like the guy the cops shot dead in the back while he lay prostrate on the ground, not struggling, at a Bart station in Oakland the New Years before last, or this kid from Pittsburgh who ran from unidentified, plainclothes police officers that he thought were muggers. (via IOZ) They chased him down and beat the ever living shit out of him - of course they were narcos! But we aren't calling it a war on drugs anymore and that counts for something! We used a similar rhetorical trick to weasel out of counting Vietnam as a loss so we can still proudly claim to be undefeated in war.

More good news - Marijuana is slowly becoming legalized, that is good news and not because I like smoking pot, I don't, but I can't think of a single good reason why it should be illegal to do so. Another sign of hope is this decision in Wisconsin as reported by the Associated Press wire service,

"A man serving life in prison for first-degree intentional homicide lost his legal battle today to play Dungeons & Dragons behind bars.

Kevin T. Singer filed a federal lawsuit against officials at Wisconsin's Waupun prison, arguing that a policy banning all Dungeons & Dragons material violated his free speech and due process rights.

Prison officials instigated the Dungeons & Dragons ban among concerns that playing the game promoted gang-related activity and was a threat to security. Singer challenged the ban but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld it as a reasonable policy."

First of all, this article is preposterous on its face and is either intentionally misleading or badly mistaken on the facts. There are two schools of thought on what the real story is here.

Theory 1: The Mad Warden
The prison warden, frustrated by middle age spread, erectile dysfunction, and embittered at his former role-playing friends who are all now too busy manning World of Warcraft avatars full time to come over and roll dice while he plays God these days, took to forcing inmates to play D&D with him. He was the omnipotent dungeon master, of course. Things escalated, and these once relatively harmless games turned into mega-wrong live action role-playing (LARP) sessions. A few 'orc' guards rolled natural 20s, boom, crash, bang, and a few hapless prisoners went to the infirmary with bashed skulls. By and by word of this cruel and unusual punishment got out, nobody believed it at first, but the bodies kept piling up and soon they ran out of rug space to sweep under. The courts did what was right in classifying this as a violation of civil rights.

Theory 2: Inmates Running the Asylum
The only other plausible theory is that the guy who runs things inside, you know how there is always the prison gang leader in the movies that other prisoners fear/follow blindly? Well, it could be possible that that guy, the guy in the article, Singer, is coercing other inmates to play dungeons and dragons with him with horrifying offers they can't refuse. They can pick up the 4 sided dice or they can sit in the hole for 30 days while Latino gangs kidnap their family members and dissolve them in vats of acid.

Now, I don't have any experience in prison. I'd never make it and know this. I am too weak; emotionally, spiritually and mentally. But I have some experience playing Dungeons & Dragons (first edition rules, I refused to play the compromised 2nd or 3rd edition rules.) There are points of intersection here. An afternoon playing D&D is probably about as boring as an afternoon in prison. The range and depth emotions that you feel having the character that you spent an hour and a half rolling, creating, writing stats for, notating all his equipment, coming up with a backstory and entrusting with your frustrated adolescent hopes and dreams only to lose him 20 minutes into the game because of a stupid roll of the dice to a hobgoblin has to be roughly analogous to having the warden rip apart your cell, find and confiscate your prized cache of nudie magazines sewn into the inside of your mattress. Still, it was not all bad. Just like every prisoner longs for the day when a prison guard gets busted for drug smuggling and faces sentencing, there were small moments of triumph in my playing career that still stand out in a lifetime of achievement as sweeter than most. One example is the time when my abusive, power mad childhood Dungeon Master, and he shall remain nameless, OK, his name was Jerad Flood, created an elaborate labyrinth-dungeon on graph paper with hundreds of rooms, doors, monsters and treasures for me to crawl through. I just went left at every turn and plowed through the dungeon in 30 minutes, avoiding about 90% of the dumb messes he created for my avatar. The look on his face when I came to the exit so quickly, a mixture of shock and disgust, the clear disappointment that he spent so very much more time creating this ridiculous map than it took me to go through, that look was as sweet to me as honey-pie. Later, after getting through that maze, my character fought an Ancient Red Dragon. I played some ridiculous hybrid, it was a half-elven martial artist, I think, and rolled a natural 20, which meant that I/he punched through the dragon's skull and pulled out his brain. I hated that character, this was all just so preposterous. Floody wouldn't let me play a ranger, which is what I would have played if I'd had my druthers. He always pulled bullshit like that and if I insisted on the character I wanted he'd just put me in an impossible encounter in the first 10 minutes where death was certain. I can still hear his dickish voice, "Five red dragons fly out of the sky and surround you..." Solidarity, my incarcerated brothers and sisters.

The dying of the light

Howard Zinn has passed. I always enjoyed the moral tone to his writing and how he rejected the supposedly objective tone of historians. One of my favorite Zinn books was Voices of a People's History of the United States, a collection of writings and speeches from dissidents and working class people that he edited a few years ago.

I wrote Zinn a few times and he responded promptly. He wrote with humor and force. The other interaction I had was seeing him speak at the University of Georgia in 2004 a month or two before the election. He spoke for a bit, recounted his transformative experience as bomber in WWII bombing the shit out of the French town Royan, something he didn't think twice about at the time. The town was out of the way, of no strategic value and a small garrison of German soldiers still there, but the military nonetheless sent hundreds of bombers to test out a new weapon it had just developed, napalm. When the war ended he collected his clippings and photos from his service years, put them in a folder and subconciously wrote the words "never again" on it. He used the GI bill to get an education. Years later he went to that town of Royan and met with some of the people there who were survivors of the bombing run he participated in.

Anyway, after his talk there was the typical question and answer session. One young man (about my age) began his question with a nod to nominee Kerry's anti-war platform. I immediately interjected by blurting out, "he's not anti-war, he's pro-war." I didn't mean or think about that, it just came out. The person at the microphone heard me, stuttered a second, and I finished my thought by explaining that Kerry is strongly in favor of the Iraq war, he just wanted to prosecute it differently. Someone in the back yelled something at me, I didn't hear. I was near the front so Zinn heard me clearly. He quieted the heckler and said that this was an important discussion, that what I had said was basically true, and then he went on to expand on those thoughts. A relatively apolitical friend of mine had gone along, he had just gotten out of the navy, and he expressed surprise at learning that Howard Zinn served in the military during WWII and was so outspoken against the USG and military action. I got the impression that for a moment his stereotypes had broken down a bit, creating some space in his head for some introspection. Then we drove back to Atlanta and got drunk.

I always loved his koan-like line about how "you can't be neutral on a moving train." There is a reference to that line in this song about keeping hope alive,

RIP, Howard Zinn.