¡Basta ya!

Let me tell anyone reading out there a little secret.

The world is a mess. Our country is a mess. Yes, the economy is slowly improving; some of us even have jobs! But there’s lots of stuff to do. We should be worrying—and maybe acting?—on global warming. We’ve got big issues like the widening disparity in wealth, the horrendous question of the national debt, terrible problems in our mental health system, to say nothing of a huge group of vets who are facing posttraumatic stress disorder.

Into this picture steps Dianne Feinstein, to whom I cheerfully gave four minutes of my time this morning (not, happily, having a job to have to get to…). 

Well, you can imagine that of course I like Dianne Feinstein—I was happy to be the choir at which she preached. Though I did find myself getting a bit annoyed with her. She was rational, she had done her homework, she was explaining one of the criticisms of the 1993 ban on automatic weapons and going into great detail about how gun manufacturers had gone around the law by removing one bolt or piece on the weapon, and boom! Legal!

So why was I annoyed? Don’t I want my senators to be intelligent, articulate, prepared? (Answer, for those who may need it—yes. Actually—with a nod southwards here—I’d really like my president to have the stated characteristics…)

Guys—how much time are we gonna spend on this issue? How many gazillion hours are we going to waste talking rationally to zealots who will never, never, never change their minds on the issue?

Oh, and by the way, didn’t we use to have a democracy, before the NRA roared into town, bought all the senators and representatives they could, and cowed all the rest? And weren’t there guys called journalists, who let us all know what was happening?

I spent four years of wincing as I watched Obama trying to reason with Tea Party republicans. And I felt the same way—almost—just now with Feinstein.

Well, well—I turned from that to the clip below. I knew that the fifteen-year old kid in New Mexico had taken his family out. And I know that apparently he had thought to go see my old pals at his local Wal-Mart—and no, not for those every-day low prices! He had the minivan all packed with his then-dead dad’s semiautomatic weapons.

So what happens? He decides to go to his church, instead. And spends the day there, hanging with his friends and girlfriend. A parishioner tells the pastor—something isn’t quite right with the boy’s family.

Well, by one of those things I call coincidence and more churchy people do not, there’s a guy on hand doing a drill on what happens if there’s a mass murderer in church. (Pretty obvious, I’d say—dive under the pews and pray!) So the guy giving the talk / drill speaks to the fifteen-year old kid, and they decide to go check it out. The kid has said, “yeah, I came home and discovered my whole family dead.” But he hadn’t called the cops, or told anybody but—presumably—his friends. Somewhere on the way to the murder scene, the former cop / now security consultant gets the whim-whams. He feels evil in the back seat, where the kid is riding. So he stops the car, pulls out his cellular, calls 911.

“Do you feel that you may have prevented the next Sandy Hook,” the reporter asks the pastor. The pastor thinks maybe.

Wrong question.

Well, we now live in the land of Google, where most questions now have answers. And so I looked into it—are guns an effective means of self-defense? Jack, my father who had a gun (kept in his underwear drawer—Sigmund? You in the house?) always said no. You hear a noise in the living room, it’s two in the morning, you get up, see the bastard, lift your gun, squeeze the trigger and BAM!

Killed the fucker!

Your fifteen-year old son, who had a little craving for cookies and milk.

And Google, predictably, has the answers. Guess what? According to something called guns4U.com (invented, but you get what I mean) the answer is….

OK, scroll down to a study by Harvard University. Of course the NRA won’t trust it, but the rest of us do. So what do they say? 

 Across states, more guns = more unintentional firearm deaths

We analyzed data for 50 states over 19 years to investigate the relationship between gun prevalence and accidental gun deaths across different age groups. For every age group, where there are more guns there are more accidental deaths.  The mortality rate was 7 times higher in the four states with the most guns compared to the four states with the fewest guns.

Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. Firearm availability and unintentional firearm deaths. Accident Analysis and Prevention. 2001; 33:477-84.

Now can we get down to work?

30,000 Tragedies

“The death of one man is a tragedy,” said Joe Stalin, “the death of millions is a statistic.”

Well, he was a guy who should know. And the twentieth century had more than a handful of men who committed their share of “statistics.”

Not surprisingly, there’s an organization that got into bed with a lot of the last century’s despots, all to gain influence and broker some juicy deals.

It’s called “the family,” and it was started, I’m sorry to say, by a Norwegian immigrant in Seattle in 1935. The group has one public activity: the National Prayer Breakfast. The rest of the time they’re underground, or forming a spiritual cell around the next congressman or senator.

And they do keep busy. I know all this because I forced myself, this last weekend, to forego the jacuzzi and read Jeff Sharlet’s book, appropriately called The Family. And here’s Wikipedia on the subject.

The author Jeff Sharlet has criticized the fellowship's influence on US foreign policy. He argues that Doug Coe and the "networking" (or formation of prayer cells) between foreign dictators and US politicians, defense contractors, and industry leaders has facilitated military aid for repressive foreign regimes. Sharlet did intensive research at the Billy Graham Center, before the Fellowship Foundation archives were closed to those other than divinity scholars. Sharlet published a book about the history of the groups and their influence on US domestic and foreign policy from the 1920s to the present.[28] Sharlet in particular details the relationship with General Suharto of Indonesia in the 1970s, and with Siad Barre of Somalia in the 1980s. Also, in the archives, there are at least two nearly full boxes of documents describing the relationship with Brazil's long dictatorship of the Generals.[61]

Regarding his relationships with foreign dictators, Coe said in 2007, “I never invite them. They come to me. And I do what Jesus did: I don’t turn my back to any one. You know, the Bible is full of mass murderers.”[62]

Don’t believe me, or Sharlet? How about this guy?

“The Fellowship’s reach into governments around the world is almost impossible to overstate or even grasp,” says David Kuo, a former special assistant in George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Well, great to know! Although it does appear that Coe isn’t quite as embracing to absolutely everyone. I copy and paste again from Wikipedia.

The Fellowship, through Representative Joe Pitts (R.-Pa.), redirected millions in US aid to Uganda from sex education programs to abstinence programs, thereby causing an evangelical revival, which included condom burnings.

In a November 2009 NPR interview, Sharlet alleged that Ugandan Fellowship associates David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo were behind the recent proposed bill in Uganda that called for the death penalty for gays.[75] Bahati cited a conversation with Fellowship members in 2008 as having inspired the legislation.[76]

Wonderful! And it appears that it’s not just in Somalia, Indonesia or Uganda that Coe exercises his power. Sharlet indicates that there’s virtually no office in Washington where Coe can’t drift in, pound on a few backs, gather the boys together in prayer, change public policy and broker another deal.

“In Washington, you must have a religion to get anything done,” writes Sharlet, or words to that affect. Even Hillary Clinton gets into the picture. Here she is on Coe.

Doug Coe, the longtime National Prayer Breakfast organizer, is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship to God.

Ummm, yes and no. The Family is devoted to those who have power. It’s a ministry that makes no bones about it—no money, no influence? Screw you!

The story of the family makes a good read—a shadowy man, a secret organization, evil and misdeeds, a perverted religion. I thought of it all this morning, on the trot. The death of millions is a statistic.

Is that the trouble with the gun control issue? 30,000 is just a number. But behind that number are 30,000 names, faces, lives. If we published the names, would it make it more real?

‘Let’s try,’ I decided. And went to a site that randomly generates names. So here are forty-five names—as much as will fill one page of a document with the font size set at 12.

OK—so how many pages would I need to list all 30,000 victims of gun violence annually?

Hold onto your seat.

666.

A revelation, hunh?

1.   Dona Schrom


2.   Darryl Ferriera

3.   Loraine Pietz

4.   Earnestine Kardos

5.   Mallory Mani

6.   Rae Nassar

7.   Fernando Lamborn

8.   Alana Ghoston

9.   Allan Kittinger


10.   Mathew Hoppes


11.   Jamie Vitiello


12.   Kelly Basler


13.   Jock


14.   Avis Heuser

15.   Malinda Brindle

16.   Javier Mckinsey


17.   Jessie Gowers

18.   Max Miraglia

19.   Saundra Vanderhoof

20.   Jamie Junker


21.   Cody Cassara

22.   Edwina Kilman


23.   Cody Calabria


24.   Marcie Ritts

25.   Tyrone Guard

26.   Kurt Spradling

27.   Lakisha Fasciano


28.   Kelly Mossey

29.   Avis Deasy


30.   Carlene Verge


31.   Allyson Yanes


32.   Guy Loew


33.   Ted Mariner


34.   Lonnie Bart


35.   Clinton Matthias


36.   Tanisha Bou


37.   Lorrie Kowalewski


38.   Elinor Doten


39.   Melisa Roose


40.   Jamie Jarrard


41.   Ted Mahnke


42.   Melisa Cerutti


43.   Roxie Marcial


44.   Zelma Rozar


45.   Sofia Detty


Will We?

Well, there’s great news this morning, something to lift the spirits of even the churliest (knew that wasn’t gonna fly) of spirits.

Coca-Cola has joined the fight against obesity!

Yup, they’re getting right into the fight, the brawl, the tumult. Here they are, their gloves taken off and their fists swinging!

"…beating obesity will take action by all of us, based on one simple, common-sense fact: all calories count, no matter where they come from. And if you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you'll gain weight."

Well, that’s reasonable, isn’t it? And they point out that of their 650 beverages, 180 have no calories. You can always drink that water.

"We've never been more committed to doing our part to help address the issue of obesity," Coca-Cola spokesman Ben Scheidler said in an e-mail, adding that "2013 is going to be a landmark year in terms of expanding partnerships and efforts to educate consumers about energy balance."

Whew. Well, it’s good to know that we’re all on the same page, all moving unitedly (stop it, computer) together, all taking this battle on. Now that Coke is on the team, we can really stamp out that little problem afflicting two out of three Americans…their bellies / thighs / behinds.

Nor is it just Coca-Cola that is exercising corporate responsibility and benevolence—look at the latest effort of our friends in the NRA! Here’s Leslie Horn's lead:

Here is some free PR advice for the National Rifle Association: Now is not the time to release a target practice iOS app—especially one intended for kids. According to the NRA, the app is intended for children as young as age four.

Yup, target practice, and not with just any gun. For an additional buck, you can be practicing with an AK47 or an MK11.

Readers of this blog may not be familiar with these guns. OK—fess up. I didn’t have a glimmer of an idea what these things are. So I looked up what the navy seals had to say.

The US Navy MK11 Mod 0 Sniper Weapon System (SWS) is based on the highly-accurate SR-25 automatic rifle. It was originally conceived and constructed to meet a requirement placed by the Navy SEALs. The MK11 is a highly accurate and durable, precision semiautomatic sniper rifle that operates like an M16 or M4A1, and can deliver a 7.62mm round out to 1,500 yards. Due to its high degree of accuracy, (.5 inch MOA), it is has won acceptance by U.S. Special Operations Forces as one of the finest semiautomatic sniper rifles in the world.

Guys? You’ve designed an app for people who have a very poor sense of what reality and non-reality is. Or maybe I can put it simpler. A kid sees a toy gun. He picks it up. He says, “Bam, you’re dead” to his friend Billy, who promptly falls over dead. Hey, fun!

Second scenario. A kid sees his father’s gun. He picks it up. He says, “Bam, you’re dead” to his friend Billy….

You know the rest of the story. Or maybe you don’t. I’m not a parent, but I do.

So what’s with the NRA? How the hell can they be such morons?

I have a little secret for all you guys out there. Despite all the touting about how business is efficient, how—unlike government—it operates like a well-oiled machine, it doesn’t. Trust me, I know. I worked in the biggest company in the world, and saw insanity on a daily, hourly, almost-minutely basis. So I’m not surprised when Coca-Cola makes its grand gesture—coming out slugging against obesity.

Which yes, can kill. And as senselessly as a gun. So isn’t it inconsistent that I laugh at Coca-Cola yet go crazy on the NRA? Aren’t they both killers?

Is it visual? It’s hard to see a death by diabetes, as opposed to the blood and viscera on the schoolroom wall. And a gunshot wound is more immediate than an elevated blood sugar.

Whatever it is, we’ve got a problem. Every time there’s been a tragedy, we go crazy. We clamor for gun control, we march, we write letters and put flowers on the school door and light candles. Then we go back to our lives.

The NRA knows that. And unlike the sane “us,” the crazy “they” are steadfastly passionate. Their guns are their lives, or a big part of them. All they have to do is wait. We’ll go away, until the next atrocity.

Or will we?

My Crazy Country

It’s one of those weird things about living in a place that is and isn’t my country.

I ran into the story on El Nuevo Dia’s online edition. So I read in Spanish the story of an eleven-year-old kid who took a gun to school in Utah. He was brandishing it in the playground at recess, and threatening to kill a group of kids. They took the advisable step of alerting the teacher, who, along with several others, approached the kid and asked for the gun. The child gave it up, after saying that his parents had suggested the idea—never too early to keep a kid safe!

Right—so now we have parents giving guns to their eleven-year-old kids?

My original reaction was ‘nah, can’t be.’

Now, I think it’s probable.

Until you meet one, it’s impossible to imagine the depth of craziness of a gun fanatic. Or the level of fear and suspicion that they exude. And for anyone wondering whether the fabled frontier mentality—trust no one; shoot first, ask questions later; hate those bastards in Washington; you get the picture—is dead, I can tell you, it’s not.

And it leads to the question—will we ever change? How long has it been since the Pilgrims, whom even the Dutch couldn’t put up with, came over to a virgin land, and here we still are, centuries later: just as extreme, as antisocial, as suspicious and untrusting as they.

Look, there’s a lot to like in my country. Living in another land, another place, gives you that perspective. And—a nod to Mr. Fernández here—the fifty states manage to weld some very diverse cultures. Rural Iowa versus Las Angeles Watts, for example.

But there’s a group of us that are very, very fearful. They really think they’re under attack, that their existence is threatened. They’re convinced that Obama was born in Kenya, is a Muslim, and that their kids are gonna be forced to watch Satanic sex films in kindergarten, the way things are going. And suggesting that anybody put any limits on arms is psychic castration.

Right—so we have the crazies. The rest of us? We’re tiptoeing around them.

Maybe it’s sensible—these guys do have guns, after all.

But when an eleven-year-old takes a gun to school because his parents—gee, was it his mother or father?—suggested it, and I read about in Puerto Rico but not on CNN, and nobody apparently is talking about it or discussing it, well, maybe we have gone too far.

It’s a serious question in my mind. Should we stop being reasonable? Or rather, should we start?

I had thought, earlier in the week, that we could at least have a dialogue on assault weapons, background checks at gun fairs, psychiatric evaluations, etc.

But now I think having a rational discussion with a true gun-lover is impossible. And maybe it’s time just to say fuck it, this is crazy. In other words….

You don’t have a right to own a gun. Period. And the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to individuals but to the right of the people collectively—you hear that?—to form militias to protect themselves. And guess what? That applies to hunting, because listen—man is not the only living creature on this earth, and no, you don’t have a right to kill them either. So right now we have a choice between protecting children and mollifying a bunch of crazies who are seriously armed and whom we’ve put up with all these years.

And guess what?

I’m going with the children.   

Kindertotenlieder

Or songs on the death of children. There are five of them, which Mahler culled from a group of over four-hundred poems by Rückert.

Anybody who has been to more than five concerts of lieder will have run into Rückert. He pops up again and again as the poet on whom Schubert, Brahms, both Schumanns, Strauss, and even Hindemith borrow for the texts to their songs. Wikipedia reports that there are about 121 settings of his work to music; only Goethe, Rilke, and Heine have more.

Now, of course, absolutely no one reads him—except in concert halls. But he was wildly popular in his day, especially as an Orientalist. Wikipedia maintains that he continues to exert a powerful influence on German Orientalism today—and who am I to dispute that?

He had a typical 19^th century industriousness. He knew over 30 languages. He published widely. He held professorships in Erlangen and Berlin, and was also appointed a member of the Privy Council.

Tragedy struck when, in 1833-34 his children fell ill with scarlet fever, and then died. He reacted characteristically—spewing out 428 poems. Here’s what Karen Painter, via Wikipedia, has to say:

Rückert's 428 poems on the death of children became singular, almost manic documents of the psychological endeavor to cope with such loss. In ever-new variations Rückert's poems attempt a poetic resuscitation of the children that is punctuated by anguished outbursts. But above all the poems show a quiet acquiescence to fate and to a peaceful world of solace.

The irony is that Mahler wrote the pieces from 1901 to 1905. He had been near death, and was found comatose in a pool of blood. He recovered, wrote the Kindertotenlieder and…

…had his daughter die of scarlet fever four years after their premiere.

One commentator has said that Mahler’s skill with words was nearly equal to his skill in music. And he chose, among the 428 poems at his disposal, the five poems that deal with light, and with regeneration.

“You must not hold the darkness of the night in you, You must flood it in eternal light…”

I’ve no idea how hard these words are to sing. I think they are very easy to say. They may be true, or become true for some people.

But it won’t be months, but years in the future. During which many of the families of the victims will disintegrate, parents will turn to alcohol or drugs, manageable situations will become unmanageable, and unendurable.

A student of mine at Wal-Mart had the grueling experience of having to file both a birth certificate and a death certificate on the same day. His child had died minutes after birth. Five-hundred people—the population of the home office at the time—were at his side.

People who had the energy, the stamina to give him strength. People who were not bowled over by their own tragedy, or the tragedy of someone closer.

Half a continent away, my cousin’s wife is worried—in a lockdown, will she freak and forget the procedure? Could she have acted as the teachers did in Connecticut?

And I wonder, today, what she will say in her classroom tomorrow. Will she address the issue? Reassure the children that they are safe? Wait until a child ventures a fear or worry?

Whatever it is, we have all paid a big price for someone else’s madness, this weekend.

And for the “right” of the NRA to buy Congress.

With a Nod to Shirley Jackson

It’s curious to think about—I’ve probably spent more time listening to this song than Schubert spent writing it. The manuscript is, if the website I stumbled upon can be trusted, a single sheet of paper. It was published some two decades after it was written. Liszt transcribed it—as he did so much else—and Primrose as well. Not surprising, if you’re a violist, you gotta do a little borrowing to fill in the repertoire.

That was a cool, cool paragraph written on the day after a bloodbath. And by cool I mean not hip but emotionally chilly, neutral, stepped-back and slightly ironic.

Which is not how the rest of the nation is feeling. People are in shock. The New Day has discovered that a little girl with connections to a town on the east side of the island was killed. Boricua Blood in the Tragedy screams the front page today.

And people are saying the usual. Evil, we are told by CNN, visited the town of Newton, Connecticut, yesterday.

Yeah?

Or was it a paranoid schizophrenic who had access to semi-automatic rifles?

I’m skipping this one. I’m assuming that if we had wanted to do something about it, we would have. I’m forced to conclude that there is something in my countrymen that wants slaughter, that relishes in the bloodshed, that thirsts to see anguished families and a weeping president and destroyed lives.

Why don’t we celebrate it?

The Spanish—a more honest people—go happily to their bullfights, and delight in seeing the bull downed in a pool of blood.

Well, we could do the same thing. Every Saturday, at random, a school somewhere in the nation is picked—will it be yours? Your children’s? Your grandchildren’s?

No matter, Friday night you will not sleep. Little children will beg to sleep with their mommies. “I’m scared, Mommie,” they’ll whisper.

Go back to bed, it will all be all right.

But you’re not sleeping either.

Because after all, it could be your child, your daughter, your sister.

Right, school chosen. Now we have to know the grade, the classroom.

Hey, do it in real time.

Add some excitement to the game.

How long does it take for the killer to walk from his home to his car? How long is the drive? How long to search for parking, to unload the guns, to pull the mask over his face?

Half an hour?

Forty-five minutes?

Right, so now we have the kids in the school. Everybody is there—teachers, principal, kids. Everybody is in their places.

Waiting for the slaughter to begin.

The media is filming. Relieved parents in other towns all across the country are cracking the first beer.

Better than Monday Night Football!

It’s old, our bloodlust. The Romans, seeing the Christians fed to the lions.

The gentry, viewing the mad raving at Bedlam.

Maybe it’s time to say it. We love to see the young butchered, the blood splattered on the chalkboard, the entails underneath the little desks / seats.

Love it.

Death and destruction and blood and tears.

Makes us feel good.

Or some of us. Because who’s going into that school?

The killer.

Also chosen by lottery.

A card-carrying member of the NRA.

Litany for the Feast of All Saints

Rest in peace, all souls,

Those that have done with care and suffering,

Those that have fulfilled a happy dream,

Those sated with life, those scarcely born...

All who have passed from this world to the Beyond,

All souls, rest in peace.

Souls of loving-hearted maidens,

Those who shed uncounted tears,

Whom false lovers deserted,

And the blind world cast out...

All who have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.

And those that have never smiled on the sunshine,

But beneath the moon waited, on thorns,

To see God one day, face to face

In the pure light of Heaven...

All souls that have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.

An ode to joy (reposted)

(Note from the webmaster: Mr. Newhouse is on holiday, so here's an older post of his, originally published on July 22, 2012….)

Readers, forgive me. I had a tantrum in yesterday's post. Hope this makes up for it! (Crank up the volume!)

Well, we know there are evil winds—Joan Didion wrote her famous essay about the Santa Ana winds almost half a century ago. The Santa Ana starts on the leeward side of a mountain, she writes, and warms up and becomes drier as it moves down the mountain. By the time it hits Los Angeles, it is intensely hot, intensely dry and…

…intensely strong. Hurricane force, at times.

California burning? It’s almost always because of the Santa Ana winds.

But other things happen as well. Crime spikes, tempers fray, kids become unmanageable in the classroom.

Oh, and blood doesn’t clot as easily.

That’s when Didion inserts her famous phrase: “to surrender to the Santa Ana winds is to accept a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.”

(Or words to that effect—the damn Internet connection is still goofing off….)

Well, maybe that’s what’s needed—to accept a mechanistic view of human behavior.

It wasn’t, somehow, an easy weekend. I didn’t watch TV footage of the Aurora shooting—I’m smarter than that. But I read the accounts nearly compulsively (sometimes the same article, ostensibly to see if it had been updated). I thought about it. I wrote a post that was almost as incendiary as the Santa Ana winds.

Then I remembered—we’re being zapped by increased solar activity. Duluth reported blazing northern lights last week.

And I also remembered—the Santa Ana winds increase the ratio of positive to negative ions in the air.

Meaning a change in the electromagnetic field that constantly surrounds us.

It’s a subject that draws a lot of bunkum, and I almost hate to go there. Ghost hunters wander through houses at midnight, looking for dips in the electromagnetic fields. The UFO believers do similar things. 

But there is some scientific evidence. Solar flares occur normally three times a year. Investigators in Russia determined that suicides rise predictably in one extreme Northern Russian city with each period of flaring.

Aurora—which is seventeen miles from Columbine High School—is also a mile above sea level. Would they be more prone to the effect of changes in the electromagnetic system?

The advantage of thinking mechanistically is that it takes you away from things like “willpower” and “self-discipline.” Your drinking is out of control because of a change in genetic structure, for example, or proteins in the brain.

Might be true.

The disadvantage?

It leads straight to the Twinkie Defense. 'All that sugar made me kill Harvey Milk.'  

And my good friend Susan, I suspect, wouldn’t have it. “No woman suffering from the ravages of PMS has ever committed the massacres that men have.” 

Good point.

Whatever it was, it was intense. My mood was labile. Little things irritated me. And then, Pat sent me a link to the Beethoven clip above.

And I found myself flooded with tears in a coffee house in San Juan.

It’s something so moronic that I rarely admit to it, but here goes. I love orchestral performances because it’s one of the few occasions I can think of where one hundred people gather to do something beautiful.

And I loved this clip for the humor, the playfulness of it all. The musicians coming out of the bank (the Ode to Joy was a gift organized by a Catalonian bank to celebrate their 130^th anniversary). The people looking on, gathering, singing, filming, tapping their feet. The kids imitating the conductor.

The assassin in Aurora did more damage than the 12 / 71 he killed or maimed. But it’s also true that one person playing a musical instrument can…

…change the world?

No.

Yes.    

Well, now we know

Breaking news—the Norwegian court has declared Anders Behring Breivik sane.

Great! My question over the last year has been answered! The guy’s not nuts!

That means, apparently, that he will have to be rehabilitated. That’s the focus of theNorwegian prison system. They take rehabilitation very seriously, unlike the US.

So they’re gonna spend pots of money on this guy. 

Well, Norway is hardly a poor country, but is it, well…SANE?

Look, I believe in rehabilitation too. 

To a point.

But I also think that we have to be realistic. Can everyone be rehabilitated? Does it make sense for even a rich nation to spend millions of dollars over possibly half a century trying to reason with a fanatic?

And what Breivik did is still almost unfathomable, even today. How many lives did he shred, that Friday afternoon in June 2011?

How would I feel, if I were the father of one of the victims, paying my taxes year after year, and knowing some part of it was going not just to sustain but pamper the killer?

Exercise room, computer, and special visits by the pastor!

Wow! 

I wonder as well about vengeance. Not a pretty word, maybe not a pretty concept. We talk about justice and feel good about it. But the shadow is vengeance.

You have torn my life apart. Now you will suffer.

No. I think about a person I once hated, and the rot and rage it did…

…to me.

But I don’t think, as well, that this is justice—spending millions on the very dim chance that a fanatic can be rehabilitated.

I think that the guy should be put to work.

Look, presumably all the victims’ families are working, right? They’re all getting up every Monday morning, putting on the work clothes, putting on the smile they don’t feel.

Why should Breivik be different?

He’s clearly a guy with energy. Writing a 200 page memoir exhausted me—his screed was 1500 pages. Oh, and by the way, he apparently is going to use his free time to add MORE!

OK—remember that dictum: don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions!

(Ahh, how I miss the corporate world!)

Here’s what I’d do. First, isolate him. He’s toxic and cannot be exposed to others. Second, find the thing that he can do that will be most valuable economically to society. If it’s folding laundry, let him fold laundry. If it’s designing computer software, let him do that. Monday through Friday, nine to five.

Oh, and after dinner? He goes for two hours into a small room, is put in a chair in front of a screen, and watches—night after night, decade after decade—the videotaped stories of the victims’ families, talking about their lost children, their ruined marriages, their nightmares, their alcoholism, their loss.

Night after night, decade after decade.

That, I think, is justice.

Ooooops

OK—first a word of reassurance to the international audience of this blog, who must be anxiously waiting at their computer screens for word from the battered blogger.

Survived the storm!

What I didn’t do was, well…

…detect the storm.

It did rain hard for five minutes at about 4:30 PM yesterday. So I closed the window. And then? 

Well, Raf came home, we ate, it was warmish, we went to bed. Expecting to get up when the bashing began.

Slept through the night!

Storm apparently weakened and dropped south. Instead of 58 miles south of Ponce, it’s a couple hundred miles.

“Totally exaggerated,” claims a critic of the governor, speaking of the 96 million dollars per day lost in productivity by closing down the island these last two days.

Gentle Readers, welcome to the Caribbean, where even a storm can be politicized!

Let’s be fair. No one can predict these things. The waters of the Caribbean are hot—a perfect source of fuel for a hurricane. The National Hurricane Center was predicting intensification. It’s not the wind, it’s the water that kills. Forty-five percent of Puerto Ricans live in flood zones.

And it’s not over yet. The tail of a storm can do bad damage, and this is a wet storm.

But it’s cool and overcast today. The banana kwit is chirping across the street. Elvin, the guy from La Perla, is continuing his work next door. And I?

Comparing and contrasting—as they made me do those many years ago in high school.

The sober Norse have constructed a special psychiatric cell for the mas murderer, just in the event he gets declared insane tomorrow. Yup, cost a cool million bucks, but that’s not unusual. The cost of keeping highly weird guys away from society in Norway is routinely over a million dollars a year.

Has to be done, because they have rights!

Yeah?

It’s a little hard for me to get my head around this. I don’t think he should be put on the wrack and tortured—though I’m also not the father of any one of the victims. Might think differently if I were.

But a million bucks? When my cousin’s husband had to wait over a month in agonizing pain for a very much-needed surgery? 

Still, you have to respect the Norwegians, that good sober earnestness. Doing the right thing. Playing fair, even with a guy who very much did not. Refusing to give in to any base instinct.

Well, well, it’s all rather different in Spain! There, the nation is going crazy making jokes on a poor 80 year old lady who gave her time and talent to the church!

How can they!

Shame on them! It may be true that the results were less felicitous than hoped. Celia Giménez has asked pardon, but also points out that she wasn’t able to finish the work. And no, it’s not a masterpiece. The artist dashed it off in two hours a century ago. Here’s how it looked….

Well, and here’s the restoration!

And now, of course, the entire world is laughing at this poor dear! This lovely lady who went into the church and got right down to work! The press is dubbing the work—originally called Ecce Homo, behold the man—as Ecce Mono, behold the monkey.

That’s just not right!

All right, drop the ironic tone. Admit it, come clean. 

I couldn’t stop laughing. The storm brings many things—salchichas, beer, anxiety. No, I didn’t go as crazy as before. But the general hysteria works its way into you. And when it’s released?

I get punchy.  

Well, Jack wouldn’t think Ecce mono was funny at all. He’d have some sympathy for that good Spanish lady that all the world is laughing at. He’d run to her defense!

He was a better man than I.

I can’t stop laughing….