I am going to a fundraiser for the Marijuana Policy Project tomorrow night at the Playboy Mansion. It should be interesting. In thinking tonight about the more serious issues surrounding marijuana prohibition, it occurred to me that there’s one rather proactive medical recommendation that (I assume) anyone ought to qualify for. Here’s my attempt at a first draft:
“I, Doctor Whomever X. Wherever, have thoroughly evaluated and assessed Patient Doe. In light of this assessment, and my solemn duty to protect the privacy, dignity, and best interests of my patients, I hereby affirm that, in my best professional judgment, my patient’s physical and psychological health are best served by her never spending a single day in prison.”
Most of you have already heard about this so-called “Craigslist Killer.” This labeling is the worst type of media laziness and it perpetuates the fear of information technology that our society still can’t seem to shake. Fear of new things is, itself, nothing new. But our ability to rapidly disseminate and amplify that fear certainly is. A couple of years ago – when this same kind of panic had reached new heights with Chris Hansen’s MySpace hysteria – I told Tom Zeller at the New York Times basically the same thing I’m going to say now. At around the same time, Andrew Kantor at USA Today smartly called out our fear of everything tech – cameras, Lite-Brites, and things with “batteries and wires.”
So, I find myself (not) wondering:
If he drove a Toyota, would we be calling him “The Toyota Killer”?
If he wore Nike sneakers, would we be calling him “The Nike Killer?”
The shooting incident happened at the Marriott – why isn’t he “The Marriott Killer?”
And I’m sorry to belabor this, but I noticed the suspect appears to use a Blackberry cell phone – so why aren’t we calling him “The Blackberry Killer?”
Because we’re much more comfortable with cars, sneakers, hotels, and even cell phones (however fancy they may be.)
But online communities still scare us; we don’t get them. They’re still weird, new, foreign, or somehow sinister to most people. So we draw an association that does not exist. And in doing so, we irresponsibly do damage to a brand.
“I don’t think we should ever doubt our capacity to deny reality. Until you get to be my age, you really believe you’re not gonna die – that fundamental fact of human life. That’s part of our problem. I could make the same argument about the current economic collapse. Who didn’t know this was coming? Who didn’t know that a system that encouraged us to live beyond our means – and provided all kinds of devious and ethically doubtful ways for us to do so – was going to fall apart someday? Who didn’t know that housing was overvalued and stocks were overpriced? Who didn’t know a system that makes the rich richer while the poor get poorer would someday face a curtain call? We all knew it at some level, just like we all know we’re going to die. And yet our capacity to deny reality is huge and I think that we don’t want to know what we really know because if we did then we’d have to change our lives.” – Parker Palmer [on Bill Moyers' Journal]
“Love makes the world go ’round, it’s true, but lust stops the world in its tracks; love renders bearable the passage of time, lust causes time to stand still; lust kills time, which is not to say that it wastes it or whiles it aimlessly away but rather it annihilates it, cancels it, extirpates it from the continuum; preventing, while it lasts, any lapse into the tense and shabby woes of temporal society; lust is the thousand-pound odometer needle on the dashboard of the absolute.”
Before I get into this story I want to set the psychographic stage, because I’ve been through this enough now to know what kind of conversations these controversies stir up.
My 2007 incident in San Antonio [see An Accidental Interview With Lieutenant Phil Dreyer] – which was much scarier and more flagrant than the one I’m writing about today – made me realize how out-of-fashion standing up for your rights has become, and also how much it opens you up to criticism for being a troublemaker (and more).
People like Thomas Hawk and Carlos Miller have famously faced this as well. The assumption (often verbalized) is that we’re belligerent, in-your-face assholes who go to places sticking our cameras (and our laminated, marked-up copies of the First Amendment) in people’s faces, looking and hoping for a fight. Sorry, but that’s just not true. I absolutely hate these confrontations and just want to make my pictures and be left alone. For instance, I had a terribly embarrassing and awkward police / photography incident at LAX a few months back and decided not to write about it because of the rather sensational issues it would raise. So trust me, I am not in this for the fight.
“Various administrations have closed in gloom and weakness … but no other has closed in such paralysis and discredit (in all domestic fields) as did [President Ulysses] Grant’s. The President was without policies or popular support… half its members were utterly inexperienced, several others discredited, one was even disgraced. The personnel of the departments was largely demoralized. The party that autumn appealed for votes on the implicit ground that the next Administration would be totally unlike the one in office. In its centennial year, a year of deepest economic depression, the nation drifted almost rudderless…”
“A bailout creates perverse incentives. Rather than punishing their behavior, it encourages fiscal irresponsibility among bankers, mortgage brokers, speculators, and refinancers. These folks made money hand over fist in the past nine years (remember, homeborrowers who tapped their home equity received cash money to pay for Escalades, vacations, and stainless steel appliances; now they want you to pay for it!). Why change your behavior when you benefit from it?”
“[T]he inequities [of a bailout] smell to high heaven, and that is one of the huge problems in dealing with it. It runs against the streak of basic fairness in a lot of Americans. You’re going to provide a handout to the fool. The fool is going to be rewarded and I, the taxpayer, will be put at risk at the margin for that handout to the fool. When all I did was exactly what I was supposed to do. Where is the fairness here?”
Let’s transcend politics and look at the arc of history today. The hard work will come – but for now, I wish to revel in some starry-eyed honeymooning. No matter who you voted for, here are some reasons to be proud of your country today:
Senator John McCain’s Call For Unity
Senator McCain’s concession speech was the most gracious and patriotic I have ever heard. While his crowd seemed to want almost none of it, he – and most of his supporters – are better than that. This is the man I was excited about in 2000. Had he run like this – had he been this guy all year – and avoided the neocons who sunk their claws into him, we’d very possibly be looking at a different outcome today. I continue to believe – as I always have and as I have said publicly loud and often – that John McCain is a good man who wants the best for his nation. It wasn’t particularly obvious these last few months, and that was tragic. This speech – and the action that will undoubtedly follow it – serves as a powerful exclamation point on a distinguished career.
I’m really thrilled – more excited about this Election Day outcome than any since ‘94, when my friend Angus King won the Maine Governorship.
Our nation is confronting once-in-a-lifetime challenges, so the road ahead is rough. But this outcome makes us far better equipped to face them. I’m proud of us, and not just for the choice we made, but for the impressive numbers of people who engaged, spoke up, and turned out.
Shortly, the real work begins – but for now, maybe let’s celebrate a little. Fireworks have actually erupted here in Venice.
Leading into the MSNBC announcement, Chris Matthews said: “The world will look at us – thank God – with wonder again.” NBC called it at exactly 20:00 PST, with a clearly emotional Keith Olbermann delivering the news:
Everyone – please, for the love of all that is holy, get out and vote tomorrow. If you can vote early (at this point I guess that’s just today), do. Those of you who can’t vote early, please be sure you know where your polling place is, and that you bring anything you may need to bring (some states require ID for first-time voters.)
RockTheVote has a great resource center that helps you figure out where to go and what you need to bring. Use it. Now. And DO IT.
Here’s an intriguing Halloween week mystery from my home state of Maine. While the coast of New England is well known for its haunted houses, this one is a bit more obscure; apparently the tides went bezerk earlier this week, with several dramatic back-and-forth shifts of more than eight feet. The National Weather Service could only describe it as “a mystery.” Weird enough for me. [h/t Jim].
“… it will be very alarming if this weekend rolls by without a credible announcement of a new financial rescue plan, involving not just the United States but all the major players.…the only things anyone wants to buy right now are Treasury bills and bottled water… You may think that things can’t get any worse — but they can, and if nothing is done in the next few days, they will.“
NYU Economics Prof Nouriel Roubini presents a grim assessment on his blog tonight:
“The US and advanced economies’ financial system is now headed towards a near-term systemic financial meltdown .. [this] crisis was caused by the largest leveraged asset bubble and credit bubble in the history of humanity..”
Even with aggressive coordination we could see near-term bank or market closures and otherwise fitful times. I reiterate my advice that you each seriously consider a personal or family contingency plan for a potential four-alarm banking emergency. This may seem unlikely – but it’s no longer out of bounds in pleasant conversation. We discussed this very delicate issue in a bit more length here, and I’m hoping to write a little more about it in the next couple of days.
Sorry it’s been a little bleak around here lately.
“The market in my opinion is on the verge of ceasing to function… it is nearing the time when my next post will be an obituary for the fixed income market.”
I am generally not one to delight in the misfortunes of others. But schadenfreude has never been more at home in my heart than in the story of Denver’s own Gabriel Schwartz. The obnoxious, self-impressed, clueless lawyer did an interview on the floor of the Republican National Convention… I don’t want to just dislike him for his worldview (although I do) – which mostly revolves around bombing and plundering Iran. I also dislike him because he’s such an assface. Think I’m being harsh? Watch the interview and tell me you don’t want to beat him with a stick:
I’m not the only one who has issues with this guy. The day after he gave that interview, he met a woman in the bar of his Minneapolis hotel and invited her to his room. Once they got upstairs, the woman asked him to get undressed while she prepared him a drink. That drink made Gabriel a very sleepy boy. (Is there a bomb joke here?)
“as a single man, I was flattered by the attention of a beautiful woman who introduced herself to me. I used poor judgment.”
Poor judgment? By the same Gabriel Schwartz I see in that interview? No!
I can only assume she saw the interview, or had an equally maddening conversation with him in the bar that night. Here’s what I wanna know: did she “plant a flag”?
Valleywag picked up a FriendFeed discussion between a few of us yesterday regarding the bailout bill within which Scoble blames “people like [me]” for the coming “breadlines”. It rings a little hollow considering where I’ve been on all this and where he’s been (i.e. nowhere), but it brings a much more important issue to the fore.
To the thread in particular, I realize how acerbic my tone can be when discussing such things and try to be cognizant of that every time I write. Sometimes my frustration – the result of a bit too much anguish about our national slumber – gets the best of me. But Americans sat mostly silent as international and domestic crimes were perpetrated in their names and their economy was wrecked – choosing to glide along as if they had far more important things to think about.
Robert is right to describe the financial mess as the result of our collective idiocy. The bill for one or two generations of stupidity has now come due and our remaining credit cards have been declined. And for the moment, the social media characters participating in the specific tendril of web masturbation that is Robert’s “what to do” post have come up substantially empty. So, I’ll see what I can come up with.
Never been a huge fan of the man from Alabama. But he had some great words of wisdom at today’s Bailout of the Century hearing:
“I understand the situation is dire. But so is the condition of the taxpayer… yes, the market is overwhelmed by greed, a lack of oversight… and the bottom line, as I see it, is that you’re [sticking] the taxpayer with it. I think that’s shameful myself. I know there are better ways – would it be without pain? Oh no… but the best – and Chairman Bernanke, I’ve heard you say this – the best disciplinary mechanism we have is the marketplace. The marketplace will discipline all of us with pain. But we learn. I’m not sure people will learn if this goes through.”
Then allow Princeton economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman [on Bill Maher's show last night] to bring home the gravity of our current predicament. “We hit the wall but good this time … there are no atheists in foxholes.”
I just found out that genius writer and thinker David Foster Wallace hanged himself earlier this week. He was a real inspiration to me and I am very sad to see him go, especially at such a young age. He is survived by his wife. In memoriam, here is a wonderful commencement speech he gave a couple years ago. David, your influence and your way of seeing the world will be missed.
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