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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 34 to 58 of 61. Go back in thread:
Posted by sigismund on March 5, 2019, at 15:37:13
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen » beckett2, posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 23:11:39
That article was impossible to satirise.
As you know the 3rd man in the Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell, is in jail in Australia on child abuse charges.
There were decades of events covered up or not dealt with. One, impossible to satirise, is when 2 priests enter a school yard, grab hold of an 11 year old boy and carry him off screaming to be raped elsewhere.
Yet we (still?) live with a sense of normalcy and progress.
Well, they have locked Pell up. I never thought I would live to see it.
Posted by sigismund on March 6, 2019, at 8:59:27
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen » beckett2, posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 21:12:33
She's from your neck of the woods.......
Posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:22:00
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen, posted by sigismund on March 6, 2019, at 8:59:27
Here's a review of a book on the border wall and American frontier. Because of your interests, I thought of you. I admit to tearing up because despite my spoken and desired beliefs, as an American, there has always been a feeling of expansion--in my case a sort of limitless internal space. But as he says, the American dream as powerfully symbolized and literal has closed and the violence this was predicated upon turns inward and begins to devour itself.
You'll need to click through the tiny url page to reach the New Yorker review.
Posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:30:34
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen, posted by sigismund on March 6, 2019, at 8:59:27
> She's from your neck of the woods.......
>
> https://www.joannamacy.net/mainThank you! This looks very interesting. And though out of fashion, I love love love Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orphius.
There are soooooo many books! So much to understand!
Almost 60, coming to terms with the end of understanding is difficult and presses on me. If I was a christian, I could anticipate a peace that surpasses understanding. Maybe that will come in some form or another. Who knows? I certainly don't.
My father-in-law, in late to final stage Parkinson said about his death, well, this is something interesting to look forward to.
Posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:32:48
In reply to Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 5, 2019, at 15:37:13
> That article was impossible to satirise.
>
> As you know the 3rd man in the Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell, is in jail in Australia on child abuse charges.
>
> There were decades of events covered up or not dealt with. One, impossible to satirise, is when 2 priests enter a school yard, grab hold of an 11 year old boy and carry him off screaming to be raped elsewhere.
>
> Yet we (still?) live with a sense of normalcy and progress.
>
> Well, they have locked Pell up. I never thought I would live to see it.It's like an evil, destructive sort of zen koan. To understand it snaps your mind.
My grandmother used to say sometimes of someone or other, 'hell isn't good enough'.
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:33:26
In reply to blood meridian, posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:22:00
I have heard of Blood Meridian and read and loved The Crossing. But now I have reached my limit with the New Yorker. The Crossing would make a great series.
>But as he says, the American dream as powerfully symbolized and literal has closed and the violence this was predicated upon turns inward and begins to devour itself.
This is the wars coming home? Armoured vehicles or maybe even tanks on the streets of Fergusen. And that feeling that there is no new primitive place to take or exploit, maybe? An opening for a war on the poor?
In the years of GWB Harpers (who was the editor?) was emphasising the diminishment of empathy as a political move. Somehow this brought to mind something Chris Hedges said, maybe from his ordination, a liturgy, a question and response.......'where were you when x was strung up?' 'I was not there'.
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:39:43
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:30:34
>My father-in-law, in late to final stage Parkinson said about his death, well, this is something interesting to look forward to.
Oh, I'm very impressed, that was good.
Much of the problem with pain relates to mood. If the pain gets into your centre, as might be the case with depression, you are in trouble. If it is somehow felt to be external, one is more detached.
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:51:37
In reply to Re: Impunity » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:32:48
Last night I read that Australia was a hotbed of paedophilia in schools and most closed institutions. The royal commission (Gillard, ALP) really opened it up.
I was 11 when I went to a boarding school. Nobody talked about all this, not even the kids, but within a year for sure I had the feel of it. My words, if I had had any, would have been different, but I knew who among the boarding school masters was gay (as we say now) and who was cruel and who was both.
For every case involving anything like sex there were ten of cruelty. The rate was much higher with choir boys, and maybe higher again with altar boys, who did look angelic in red cassocks and white surplices.
Posted by beckett2 on March 7, 2019, at 11:55:59
In reply to Re: blood meridian, posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:33:26
Blood Meridian is most excellent and very brutal. The alternate history of the west. I needed a serious dictionary.
Here's the article if you have time.
"On Election Day, 2018, residents of Nogales, Arizona, began to notice a single row of coiled razor wire growing across the top of the citys border wall. The barrier has been a stark feature of the towns urban landscape for more than twenty years, rolling up and over hilltops as it cleaves the American town from its larger, Mexican counterpart. But, in the weeks and months that followed, additional coils were gradually installed along the length of the fence by active-duty troops sent to the border by President Trump, giving residents the sense that they were living inside an occupied city. By February, concertina wire covered the wall from top to bottom, and the Nogales City Council passed a unanimous resolution calling for its removal. Such wire has only one purpose, the resolution declaredto harm or to kill. It is something only found in a war, prison, or battle setting.
Living in Tucson, barely an hour north of the border, I have become familiar with both sides of Nogales, crossing over the border to shop, attend meetings, take gifts or supplies to deported friends, or volunteer at a soup kitchen for migrants. In December, as I walked through the pedestrian crossing, I passed by uniformed soldiers transporting long ladders to one side of the port of entry, but I barely registered their significance. The militarization of the borderlands has become so commonplace that one often grows numb to its manifestations. It can seem distant until it reaches out to touch you. Only months later, as I watched images of the concertina wire proliferating on my social-media feeds, did I finally understand what those ladders had been for.
In The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (Metropolitan), the historian Greg Grandin argues that Americas urge to wall off its borders marks the death of our most potent myththe galvanizing vision of men and women seeking freedom along a vast frontier, a space for reinvention, unburdened by society, history, and ones own past. Since the very inception of our country, he writes, the presence of a frontier has allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence. The ever-shifting and expanding frontier also acted as a physical barrier against invasion; as a national-security buffer against foreign enemies, Native Americans, and Mexicans; and as a tenuous escape valve for freed slaves, European migrants, and discontented laborers from crowded Eastern cities.
The frontier did not always have mythic connotations. In early America, the words frontier, border, and boundary held little emotional significance and were used interchangeably to describe the physical limits of the nation. Americas first dictionaries didnt even include the word frontier. But as the U.S. government began to coördinate campaigns for the removal and the extermination of Native Americans, clearing the way for westward settlers, the meaning of frontier came to be pegged to the notion of civilizational struggle. By the dawn of the twentieth century, with Native Americans dwindling in number and largely relegated to reservations, the frontier had been fully transformed into something romantic and beckoningan entire way of life. It became, Grandin writes, a state of mind, a cultural zone, a sociological term of comparison, a type of society, an adjective, a noun, a national myth, a disciplining mechanism, an abstraction, and an aspiration. For the dominant white culture, the word meant freedom.
The frontier also provided a new way of understanding American identity, history, and politics. At the end of the nineteenth century, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced his frontier thesisthe idea that, in his words, the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development. American identity hinged upon its perpetual expansion. Our democracy, Turner wrote, came out of the American forest and it gained strength each time it touched a new frontier. Expansion was thus a fundamental good and an integral part of what set us apart from Europeit was the very thing that made America great. But on the frontier, Grandin reminds us, settlers won greater freedom for themselves only by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down.
The End of the Myth aims, in part, to reposition race-based violence to the center of the frontier narrative, exposing it as foundational to todays border brutalism.
In passages like this, The End of the Myth is effectively in conversation with Cormac McCarthys seminal novel Blood Meridian, which follows a band of scalp hunters as they wreak carnage across the borderlands. Indeed, Grandin quotes from the novel, borrows its title for one of his chapters, and even draws on the cover art of the original, 1985 edition for his own book jacketa closeup of one of Salvador Dalis phantom carts, in which a horse-drawn wagon and its occupants become, upon further examination, indistinguishable from the expansive landscape and architecture that surround them. Blood Meridian is propelled by grisly, deeply researched depictions of the violence perpetrated by remorseless white American men, unconcerned with the traumas they were unleashing into history. Long celebrated as a disabused, revisionist anti-Western, McCarthys novel can also be understood as fuelling the illusion of frontier masculinity. Grandin, to his credit, rejects the temptation to dismiss the violence as being somehow typical of a particular time or place. The atrocities accompanying expansion are shocking now, and were shocking then: even war-hardened men like General Winfield Scott, the commander of U.S. forces during the Mexican-American War, found them heinous enough to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals blush for his country.
As settlement supplanted Americas physical frontier, a new project arose to extend Manifest Destiny beyond its former geographic limits. American imperialism provided the opportunity for a new revolution, Woodrow Wilson declared in 1901, a little more than a decade before ascending to the Presidency. During the Spanish-American War of 1898 and ensuing military campaigns in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, Americans had, in Wilsons view, made new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas. This form of expansion allowed a nation still recovering from the Civil War and Reconstruction to channel its aggression outward once more. Former Confederate soldiers were able to don the uniform of a newly unified country and earn patriotic recognition while still fighting to exert racial superiority over people of color. Letters sent home by soldiers enlisted in these campaigns, Grandin tells us, are notably similar, lightheartedly narrating to family and friends how they would shoot n*gg*rs, lynch n*gg*rs, release n*gg*rs into the swamp to die. . . . Like those who had collected Native American scalps first as mercenaries and then as soldiers, these men learned that Americas new frontier was a place that could legitimatize a racist thirst for violence.
For Americas leaders, the new age of imperialism also reaffirmed old lessons: expanding the countrys borders beyond the domestic sphere could provide a space to divert anger, resentment, and extremism. Frederick Jackson Turner had recognized that the frontier was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated. He also recognized that, at the end of the nineteenth century, America was closing in upon itself. But he hoped that the experience of having constructed civilization on a vast frontier would lead to the building of a stable inward society, one rooted in lessons of coöperation, progress, and equality. He failed to imagine that the seductiveness and the convenience of the frontier would, instead, propel America through a new century of global expansion.
As America thrust itself into the wider world, it simultaneously began a process of shoring up its domestic borders. With its entrance into the First World War, the country started to implement race-based quota systems and other immigration controls, culminating in the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, which excluded all Asian immigrants and sought to insure that ninety-six per cent of Americas immigration slots were reserved for Europeans. Business interests shielded Mexican migrants from such immigration quotas. But the 1924 act provided for the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol: the previously irregular and ad-hoc policing of the boundary was replaced by a new paramilitary police force that would come to wield extraordinary power along the Mexican border. White supremacists and members of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan saw the nascent Border Patrol as a venue for unchecked brutality, Grandin writes, and they quickly joined its ranks, turning it into a vanguard of race vigilantism. The new agency became the bastion of a Wild West mentality in which patrollers easily imagined themselves as guardians of frontier forts in hostile territory, holding off barbarians."
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
March 11, 2019
I
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:57:46
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:51:37
The government is mostly avoiding parliament until the election by May lest it lose a vote on the floor. Therefore.........
'The resources minister, Matt Canavan, has declared now is the time to build new coal-fired power, as the prime minister insisted his pre-election priorities were securing passage of budget bills and helping north Queensland recover from the recent floods.
The comments from Canavan and Scott Morrison follow a new push from Queensland Nationals for immediate government action to underwrite new power station construction in regional Queensland, and a separate demand the government pass the big stick energy package in the final sitting week of the 45th parliament.'
This will provide support for Adani in the Galilee Basin......will it be the biggest coal mine in the world? Just the time to do it.
Posted by beckett2 on March 7, 2019, at 12:00:40
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:51:37
> Last night I read that Australia was a hotbed of paedophilia in schools and most closed institutions. The royal commission (Gillard, ALP) really opened it up.
>
> I was 11 when I went to a boarding school. Nobody talked about all this, not even the kids, but within a year for sure I had the feel of it. My words, if I had had any, would have been different, but I knew who among the boarding school masters was gay (as we say now) and who was cruel and who was both.
>
> For every case involving anything like sex there were ten of cruelty. The rate was much higher with choir boys, and maybe higher again with altar boys, who did look angelic in red cassocks and white surplices.Was this a catholic school? Sounds awful. Very awful. Sending my kid to boarding school seemed anathema to being a parent-- but I wasn't raised that way, based on our social class, I suppose.
Do you think many boys boarding schools have similar cruelty and abuse?
Posted by beckett2 on March 7, 2019, at 12:24:07
In reply to Re: Impunity » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 7, 2019, at 12:00:40
That sounded a little preachy. I'm sorry. I meant more that I always wanted to hold my kid close and couldn't imagine not seeing him every day. Older, clingy parent.
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 20:48:53
In reply to Re: Impunity » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 7, 2019, at 12:00:40
No, it was Church of England (as we thought of it). It surprised me later to find how similar the liturgy or something like it was to the Catholic.
We lived in the country, so all boys of a certain class were sent there. I remember the first night thinking, 'Can I kneel down by the bed and say my prayers here? Maybe not?' This is in a dormitory.
You know how people talk about an atmosphere in which there is trust and growth? It wasn't like that, not at all. The experience certainly affected everything for me.
>Do you think many boys boarding schools have similar cruelty and abuse?
Then they did. It is probably better now, idk. Some people coped better than others.
The orphanages would have been bad. A bit like in the Manifesto where he says, 'In proportion therefore as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the remuneration decreases'.
I've never known what to make of 'To him who has shall more be given, but to him who has not, even that which he has shall be taken away'.
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 21:05:14
In reply to Re: blood meridian » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 7, 2019, at 11:55:59
>By the dawn of the twentieth century, with Native Americans dwindling in number and largely relegated to reservations, the frontier had been fully transformed into something romantic and beckoning an entire way of life.
Ah yes. It wasn't happening, then it did, then we had to move on, and we only remember when the possibility of reparation is remote. That's progress.
I've been coming across Greg Grandin, probably in lectures on youtube.
A dangerous Mexican bandit in The Crossing says something funny and terrible while perhaps wielding a knife: 'Your leprous paradise.....'
Well, that is a tremendous piece. Oh dear, what does it say about us? The difference here is that the (we did not even have a name for it) was so much more quickly done. Pretty much over in 100 years. Once property relations were stable the protective racism could be gradually laid aside. But they weren't as grateful for that as we had wished, and they didn't forget (we were better at that) and move on as we thought they should.
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 21:07:09
In reply to Re: Impunity » beckett2, posted by beckett2 on March 7, 2019, at 12:24:07
You should enjoy your children while they are little and want you.
Why else have them?
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 21:34:34
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 21:07:09
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AryaeW54g8
The sight of those brown kids looking over the edge of the coffin of the Guatemalan kids who died recently.......
And our PM said of the US 'We are joined at the hip' and naturally one thought of Trump playing golf and how racism makes no aesthetic sense.
Posted by beckett2 on March 11, 2019, at 2:05:00
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 21:34:34
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AryaeW54g8
>
> The sight of those brown kids looking over the edge of the coffin of the Guatemalan kids who died recently.......
>
> And our PM said of the US 'We are joined at the hip' and naturally one thought of Trump playing golf and how racism makes no aesthetic sense.The woman at 11:05 holding a teen (?) boy is heartbreaking.
I like Gradin even more after hearing him. Such a plain speaker.
Posted by sigismund on March 11, 2019, at 15:05:22
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by beckett2 on March 11, 2019, at 2:05:00
Just before that, only just before, these boys are looking down into the coffin. Their expression is very touching. They seem so, I don't know, decent and hurt (rather than entitled and ugly), that the world could be like this perhaps. I guess it made me angry with the spectacle of the political class who display none on these virtues.
Posted by sigismund on March 11, 2019, at 15:39:14
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 11, 2019, at 15:05:22
They look vulnerable. Some people feel outraged by the vulnerable because it shows them in a bad light.
Like boys who throw rocks because they have nothing else. Even the thought of this, which existed in no other place than Trump's head, was enough to make him think of murder.
Posted by beckett2 on March 11, 2019, at 17:19:24
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 11, 2019, at 15:39:14
> They look vulnerable. Some people feel outraged by the vulnerable because it shows them in a bad light.
>
> Like boys who throw rocks because they have nothing else. Even the thought of this, which existed in no other place than Trump's head, was enough to make him think of murder.You're absolutely right you know. There is something from... it escapes me. Maybe it is biblical exegesis. Not being able to look at god or another purity because the light casts a shadow into which one's self inevitably falls.
See, the woman I mention, she has lost that particular vulnerability. She's experienced injustice but left to comfort the innocent.
Now I feel sad. What do you do with sadness? Maybe, you mentioned, when you realize the pain (sadness in this case) is coming from outside you and not inside. This likely makes no sense.
Posted by sigismund on March 11, 2019, at 23:18:00
In reply to Re: Impunity » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 11, 2019, at 17:19:24
In one of his many books Primo Levi asks why it was necessary to be so cruel and dehumanise so much when more simple means would have sufficed.
The answer, which as he says cries to heaven, was 'to make it easier for them to do the job'.
I think of this often.
Yes, you are right about the woman; she knows. There is something so touching about the expression on those boys' faces. They say we have paedophiles on various island prisons waiting to enter and take our hospital spaces and cause traffic jams. The politicians treat us with such contempt, but it is noticed. This time last year it was Sudanese gangs in Melbourne. Any 2 or 3 Sudanese young men wanting to spend time together in a new country.
One time in Sydney a friend and I were sitting out the back talking and drinking, and some people from Africa were playing music in the apartment opposite. I think they became aware we were listening and put on a show for us. When it was over we clapped and called out. They smiled and bowed. Ordinary people are like that.
2 elections coming up, state and federal, that last by May.
Posted by sigismund on March 11, 2019, at 23:25:47
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 11, 2019, at 23:18:00
It's not as f there is no resistance to it. I bought his book; it's here somewhere.........
Posted by beckett2 on March 12, 2019, at 16:55:36
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 11, 2019, at 23:25:47
Look how happy Amy and David Cay Johnston look.
Posted by beckett2 on March 12, 2019, at 16:57:16
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 11, 2019, at 23:25:47
> It's not as f there is no resistance to it. I bought his book; it's here somewhere.........
>
> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-31/behrouz-boochani-wins-australias-richest-literary-prize/10768688I'm very curious. When you get to it, let me know.
Posted by sigismund on March 12, 2019, at 17:12:23
In reply to Re: Impunity » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 12, 2019, at 16:57:16
>I'm very curious. When you get to it, let me know.
Oh no, I've got it. But the house is full of books and I have kind of lost it, there being so much to read as you know. I hate Dutton so much I had to buy it. I've seen him before, and Amy of course.
I got a cab to the airport one day. There was a black driver so I asked him how many languages he spoke. Something like 4, but then he said 2 dialects. By which he meant unconnected African languages, so he agreed, under some pressure, that he knew 6. Shithole countries. No wonder we avoid the mirror.
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