End the use of long-term solitary confinement in Illinois!

Hey all. I haven't been posting since last summer, mostly because I've been drowning in graduate school duties. One of these duties has been interning at Chicago's Cook County Jail. There, I sit in on group therapy sessions for inmates with drug-related offenses. I've been consistently touched by the philosophical and psychological depth of these men, their gentleness and the span of their regrets. These are men who will sit down and opine for hours on topics you wouldn't expect low-SES drug dealers and addicts to have much knowledge of: gender identity is a big topic, for example (these guys live firsthand the consequences of masculinity). And when it comes to living with shame or regret, these guys are almost the best resource you can find. The only place where you can find more affecting people, I think, is at prisons. I've been volunteering for a Chicago-based group called Tamms Year Ten, which advocates for prisoners housed in long-term solitary confinement. I write and read inmates' letters, respond to their requests for photos and magazines, and read their countless reports of abuse-- from medical staff, from Corrections Officers, from mail room staff, and from the state itself. Let's be clear on what "long-term" solitary confinement means. These men at Tamms are housed alone for 23-hours a day, with zero human contact, for decades. Some have been locked up alone for 23-28 years. [More . . . ]

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Stepping Up Finally

I’ve been hesitant to write anything about the Susan G. Komen fiasco. Not for fear of invoking controversy, but because things started unraveling so fast it was difficult to know when it would play out. Here is a handy overview of the series of events. The position taken by the Komen charity group shifted, mutated, and reeled in the sudden upwelling of negative response, that on any given day whatever I might have said would be irrelevant the next morning. One aspect, however, strikes me as significant. That response. It came swiftly and it came from all quarters and it came with cash. I cannot recall a similar response happening so swiftly and so decisively in this ongoing struggle over abortion rights. One of the most annoying things about being progressive and/or liberal is the tepidity with which we meet challenges. It would appear that all of us who espouse a progressive view, when it gets down to the nitty gritty of political position-taking and infighting, have feet not even of clay but of silly putty. It is actually heartening to see an abrupt and united response that is categorically decisive for once. [More . . . ]

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A Last Picture Show

The last motion picture theater of my youth is gone. For several years, The Avalon, sitting on Kingshighway in St. Louis, across the street from a mortuary that has now become a church, has been shuttered and slowly decaying and finally has met its inevitable fate. In a way, good. It has been an eyesore for some time, a constant reminder of neglect and a ruin of a bygone era. Hyperbole? Indeed, yes, but true nonetheless. As you can tell by what remained, it was an elegant, simple building, with a lovely facade. A symbol of an age thoroughly gone—the single-screen, stand-alone movie theater. The last film I saw there was back in 1986 or ’87—The Last Temptation of Christ. The theater had passed into the hands of a single owner who was a bit of an eccentric, and he tried everything to keep it going. He had a bit of a windfall with that film because of the timidity of every other movie theater in the city and county. They all refused to show Scorcese’s flawed depiction of Jesus’ final days. The Avalon announced it would screen it and it was no doubt the last time it had sell-out audiences for several days. [More . . . ]

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Conservative Fantasy Role Playing

I wonder sometimes how a modern conservative maintains. Romney has won the New Hampshire primary.  All the buzz now is how he’s going to have a much tougher fight in South Carolina, primarily because of the religious and social conservatives who will see him as “not conservative enough.”  There is a consortium of social conservatives meeting this week in Texas to discuss ways to stop him, to elevate someone more to their liking to the nomination.  And right there I have to wonder at what it means anymore to be a conservative. I grew up, probably as many people my age did, thinking of conservatism as essentially penurious and a bit militaristic.  Stodgy, stuffy, proper.  But mainly pennypinching.  A tendency to not do something rather than go forward with something that might not be a sure thing. I suppose some of the social aspect was there, too, but in politics that didn’t seem important.  I came of age with an idea of fiscal conservatism as the primary trait. That doesn’t square with the recent past.  The current GOP—say since Ronny Reagan came to power—has been anything but fiscally conservative, although what they have spent money on has lent them an aura of responsible, hardnosed governance.   Mainly the military, but also subsidies for businesses.  But something has distorted them since 1981 and has turned them into bigger government spenders than the Democrats ever were.  (This is not open to dispute, at least not when broken down by administrations.  Republican presidents have overseen massive increases in the deficit as opposed to Democratic administrations that have as often overseen sizable decreases in the deficit, even to the point of balancing the federal budget.  You may interpret or spin this any way you like, but voting trends seem to support that the choices Republican presidents have made in this regard have been supported by Republican congressmen even after said presidents have left office.) [More . . . ]

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Name the largest city in North America prior to 1790.

Name the largest city in North America prior to 1790. I'm betting that you named one of the biggest cities list on this result from the 1790 U.S. census, which indicates that New York only had 33,000 people and Boston only had 18,000 people. You probably didn't mention the settlement of Cahokia, Illinois, located just east of St. Louis, Missouri.   An article titled "America's Lost City" in the December 25, 2011 issue of Science indicates that Cahokia was a "large urban complex," perhaps home to as many as 50,000 people.  Cahokia was "in its heyday" in the 12th century, and it was "by far the largest concentration of people north of Mexico until the late 18th century."  Although this excellent article in Science is available online only to subscribers, you can access this recent article on Cahokia by National Geographic.

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