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Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children’s Healthcare

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It’s time to add “amnesty” to the list of the 100 most often misspelled words.

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Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually.

We love our animals, but we also love to eat them:

This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric.

Isn’t this a contradiction that we love our pets but that we don’t care that we treat farm animals so incredibly badly?

Kohler quotes Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals: “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.”

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If they don’t like it, then they should do something about it. That’s how I see it. The solution is not to hide the facts that people in your district are dying from a problem that might have a solution but that you are not seeking any solution.

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In recognition of mankind’s inherent propensity for tragically foolish decisions, Congress allocated nearly $500 billion Monday for the construction of a new national monument honoring human folly.

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Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation.  he may be being a fan, but he hasn’t lost his mind.  The female is being…a groupie, I guess.  Though the groupies I’ve met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it.  In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things.  The fan reaction—mindless adulation bordering on deification—looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion.  Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant.  You can see the same thing in politics.  To a lesser degree with less public personalities—writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there’s a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies…) and other creative types—but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives.

I’ve never had this happen to me.  I’m not sure if I’m grateful or resentful—having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don’t know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing.  But it’s appealing the same way porn is—something most people, if they’re at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over.  I know I would not find it very attractive now.  When I was twenty-five?  You betcha.  Bring ‘em on.

But if I’d had that then I think I’m fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly.  I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person—emphasis on Person—and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after.  (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can’t provide.)

But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art.  The two are inextricably linked.  Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating.  The notion that the talent “arrives” and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it’s not one I’m particularly in sympathy with—it all happens in my brain, it’s definitely mine—but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true.  Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work.  There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it’s done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being.  To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising.  For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that.

But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner.  A prisoner of other people’s expectations.  Those expectations always play a part in anyone’s life, but certain aspects—the most artificial ones—get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration.

Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female.  No, he doesn’t stop being Bono, but it’s almost as if he says “Oh, it’s time to do this sort of thing now” as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk.  Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she’s feeling right then is her’s and to claim it is artificial is wrong.  Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she’s In The Moment, the emotions are real.  If he’d ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan’s part.

Bono (creative commons)

Some—perhaps most—of us grow up to a point where, although our respect and admiration for certain artists is immense to the point of feeling like we have nothing meaningful to say to these people (and after all beyond “I really enjoyed your work” what do we have to say to someone we just don’t know?) we realize that they are human beings doing a job of work.  To idolize them is really a selfish act and blinds us to the possibilities in people who do not happen to occupy that slot in our pantheon of significance.

I was fortunate.  Way back when I was possibly susceptible to becoming a kind of mindless acolyte, I had an opportunity to meet a couple of musical superstars under circumstances that allowed for the human element to dominate.

The first was a chance encounter with Martin Barre, guitarist of Jethro Tull.  I worked at a camera shop and he came in when the band was in town.  He’d heard that the owner of the shop had a big camera collection, museum quality, and he was interested in buying all or part of it.  I had some of my own photographs hanging in the shop at the time and we ended up talking about photography.  Barre was a collector.  We had a ground upon which we could meet as rough equals and had a good conversation about it.  It lanced the boil of idolization for me (and resulted a couple years later in my being able to go backstage and talk to Ian Anderson and a couple of others, and because of the basis of my albeit small relationship with Barre, the interaction was satisfyingly ordinary in many ways).  Here was just a bloke who liked cameras and was a hobbyist and his talent, while I respected it enormously, didn’t get in the way of actually talking to him.

The other was with Rick Wakeman and was amusing in the extreme and I’ll save that story for later.  But in both instances, I was able to just talk to these men in a way that standing in an autograph line would never have permitted, and consequently gave me—I suppose I could say “inoculated” me against the mindlessness of fan adulation.

Make no mistake, I treasure both those encounters as peak experiences.  But I’ve never forgot that such people are gifted but ordinary.

Ordinary in the way that we all are and few of us are without special qualities and talents.  The circumstances that lead to “stardom” are just that—circumstances.  (Stephen King, for all his gifts as a narrative writer, benefited immensely from a publishing environment that simply does not exist anymore.  Not that he wouldn’t have been significant anyway, but his stature would have taken much longer to achieve and might not have become what it is today without that initial synchrony.)

(In an argument several years ago involving the president, my opponent kept pushing the position that criticizing the president was the same as insulting the country, to which I finally said “Damnit, the president is not the country—he’s an employee!  Well-paid, highly-placed, enormously powerful, but the son-of-a-bitch works for me!”  It was not a view my opponent had ever seemed to consider before.  It was for him a humanizing moment.)

I’m not sure what, if anything, to do about fan adulation.  As I said, you can see in this exactly what happens in religious conversion.  The mindlessness, the abandonment of intellect, the handing-over, as it were, of the Self to the momentary care of someone who is seen as Other Than Ordinary.  I think anything that robs people of their self-possession is a bad thing, which is why I generally dislike being in large crowds—there is something about that many people being synced emotionally by a single event that disturbs me deeply.  But it seems to be a human characteristic.

Which may be why I’m so very bad at determining the demographics of my own potential audience.  I can’t say who will want to read my books, not as a definable group to which marketing might be targeted.  I don’t buy books as part of a group, and if I did and I found out, I’d seriously re-examine my habits.  I’m not a commodity.  Either as an artist or as a fan.  And yet, to make a living at art, there’s a degree of having to cater to that kind of thinking.

But here’s the thing that baffles—if you’re message is freedom, the best way to deliver that message is to become famous enough that the maximum number of people listen to your message.  But if in the course of becoming that famous you find that those listening are just shifting their loyalty from one warden to another—you—and still don’t “get it” that freedom means not having wardens at all…what do you do?

Another paradox, I suppose.

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Last week I spent an entire day taking depositions. After the depositions were finished, I asked the court reporter what she was daydreaming about. She smiled, because she knows that experienced court reporters are perfectly capable of daydreaming about such things as grocery shopping or going to the beach at the same time that they are taking down every syllable of every word spoken in the room.

I asked this particular court reporter how often she has to go back and look at her transcript to see what was being said, because she was thinking about something else at the time she was taking down the testimony. She told me that she was once working for a judge who was going to sentence a man convicted of murder. The big question that day was whether the man would be put to death or whether he would get a life sentence. This court reporter was assigned to preserve all of the court proceedings regarding this momentous sentencing. After she was done taking down the testimony, and after she left the courtroom, someone asked her whether the judge sentenced the accused to death. This woman hesitated before replying that she did not know, even though she was a court reporter. To find out, she went back to her tape (the strip of paper on which the court reporter’s keyboard prints out the testimony), and looked for the critical part. She found out that the judge had actually sentenced the man to death, but she had no memory of this.

I asked her whether she is ever asked to read back testimony during a court proceeding or deposition at a time where she became nervous that she might not have been accurately taking down the testimony. She stated that this never happens, and that she is always confident that she’s taking down the testimony accurately. If something starts going wrong, her full consciousness kicks in and she deals with the unusual situation fully aware. She has never been caught not taking down the testimony accurately.

I find it pretty amazing that someone could have their working memory so thoroughly occupied in the linguistic sense, and yet be able to think about other things. It’s even more amazing that when the court reporters daydream or think, they are often doubly-employing their linguistic abilities. It just seems like this would be impossible, but it’s commonplace.

Most of the court reporters today use a special stenographic keyboard, but there are a few who speak into something that looks like a muzzle. They hear the testimony in the courtroom with their own ears and simultaneously speak those words into this muzzle-device which is recorded by a tape recorder. In short, they “shadow” the testimony with their own voice. Later, someone types out that the court reporter’s words into a transcript. I’ve spoken to some of these muzzle-device court reporters over the years, and they to tell me that they are able to think about other things were daydream while they are taking down the testimony.

If you are wondering why we even have court reporters, that would be a good question. The main advantage is that when you have a court reporter, you have a person who is in a position to swear to the accuracy of the transcript, indicating who said exactly what. A tape recorder would simply record the sounds, and might not accurately pick up the exact words that were being spoken (for instance, because someone is mumbling or gesturing). When these sorts of things happen at a deposition, human court reporters ask the witness to speak up or to state their testimony in words rather than gesturing. This makes for a more accurate and more readable transcript. That said, some courtrooms are now employing tape recorders in lieu of court reporters.

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Lobbyists for powerful corporations are crawling over every piece of pending legislation- from health care, to banking regulation, to climate change — keeping a chokehold on deep reforms. Jankowsky says that lobbying is transparent. . . . Special interests have already spent $2.5 billion dollars this year on 13,000 lobbyists like Mr. Jankowsky and his colleagues at the firm Akin Gump, with many contributing their expertise to gutting financial oversight of Wall Street, delaying control of greenhouse gas emissions, and preventing real controls on health insurance costs.

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