danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

From today’s New York Times article about Joseph Lieberman:

Eight years ago he exhorted sweaty ironworkers in Boynton Beach, Fla., to join the Democratic cause. Four years ago he told voters in New Hampshire that President Bush was “a divisive leader.”

But four weeks ago, he returned to Boynton Beach to address 250 Republicans at a country club. This time, he deplored the Democrats’ “visceral” anger at Mr. Bush. He is skipping the Democratic National Convention in Denver, but may turn up at the rostrum of the Republicans’ conclave in Minneapolis.

Turning on factory workers in favor of the country club set is a telling move for Lieberman. I have known for a long time he cares more about the very rich than the very average. I regret that Al Gore chose him as a running mate in 2000; I firmly believe that had Gore chosen someone with more credibility, things would not have been so close in that election. Let the Republicans have him.

Filed under: Politics on February 18th, 2008 | No Comments »

Susan Jacoby nails it in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post: Americans are getting dumber, and seem to be proud of it. One horrifying statistic she cites to prove it says that twenty percent of Americans think the sun revolves around Earth. Idiocracy is not so far fetched.

Our shrinking national attention span is evident from the fact that during the last thirty years, the average length of a presidential sound-clip played on the evening news shrunk from over 42 seconds to under eight. That’s bad news for liberals, whose ideas and opinions require more substantive explanation than the corporate media will allow. For every problem, after all, there is a simple–and incorrect–solution. But conservatives have mastered the art of the sound bite politics. It doesn’t take more than five seconds to say “we’re going to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”. Even if that statement is meaningless, it sure sounds good.

Jacoby has some bad things to say about digital media, though I certainly do not find the internet without merit. I have previously posited that it has become vastly more useful within the last five years alone, and promises to be even indispensable as technology improves. By simple virtue of the ubiquity of computers and their proximity, information which would have been unavailable to me when I was in high school–even at a library–is now immediately accessed. Satellite maps and high resolution photographs of far away lands are the stuff of which I dreamed when I was a boy. I never could have conceived of something as spectacular as GoogleMaps’ street-level view, which lets you see a 360° perspective of any spot on any given road in America. I recently wanted to see what it would look like to drive across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and in seconds, while wearing sweatpants, I was able to see it in color on a screen in my own home. Meanwhile, if I am so inclined, I can listen to T.S. Eliot himself reading from “The Waste Land”. Yes, the internet is pretty great if you use it right.

But it is simple to see that most Americans are downright stupid now, and I don’t have much hope for the future.

Filed under: Politics, Rantings, Technology on February 17th, 2008 | No Comments »

I thought it essential to at least make note of the end to the long strike by the Writers Guild of America. It couldn’t have come too soon, either, because TV was getting bad. Let it be remembered that for several months we had to do without new episodes of many of our favorite television shows. Talk shows were off the air for two months before returning sans writers for lackluster episodes. Repeats were the norm, and eventually much of prime time was taken over by “reality” programming. Lost premiered as scheduled, but will now have a truncated season of far fewer episodes than originally scheduled. The Office, 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother and other comedies will be back in March and April, but will also air less than their full run of episodes.

I’m crossing my fingers that the Screen Actors Guild doesn’t strike this summer.

Filed under: Current Events, Television on February 16th, 2008 | No Comments »

I don’t read fiction often. In fact, the last novel I read was Picture of Dorian Gray…in 1997. This embargo hasn’t been by design, rather, it’s just how it happened. But for my History of Consumption course I was required to read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, so the streak was broken. It is a wonderful book!

The gist: a terrifically average, middle-class man marries a lovely, but also terrifically middle-class girl. She is happy at first, but during an evening at the ball she sees how the other half lives–namely, in lavish opulence–and becomes disenchanted with her boring life of homemaking, and begins to associate her husband–a genuinely decent man–with all her dissatisfaction. She begins imagining a different life with different men, where she has all she desires, and her disdain for her husband grows.

Flaubert so perfectly captures love’s myriad torments, and imagination’s deceit:

And all this time she was torn by wild desires, by rage, by hatred. The trim folds of her dress hid a heart in turmoil, and her reticent lips told nothing of the storm. She was in love with Léon [a character that is not her husband], and she sought the solitude that allowed her to revel undisturbed in his image. The sight of his person spoiled the voluptuousness of her musings. She trembled at the sound of his footsteps; then, with him before her, the agitation subsided, and she was left with nothing but a vast bewilderment that turned gradually into sadness.

That is a brilliant description! And throughout the book there are countless depictions of the subtle particularities of 19th Century rural France, from every imaginable household item, to cuisine, to fashion and on and on. It is all vividly brought to life. This contemporary detailing of commodities is the reason we are reading the book. But the narrative is also rich. Spoilers follow…

Read more »

Filed under: Literature and Books, School on February 14th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

I am not a painter, nor do I possess any skill at drawing or sculpting. But I appreciate good art as much as anyone. So it never ceases to disgust me when masterpieces are stolen, and whisked away by masked brigands.

With 2004’s daylight robbery of the Munch Museum in Oslo fresh in my memory, this week’s theft of four Impressionist works from the Bührle Museum in Zürich has me enraged. A Cézanne, Van Gogh, Monet and Degas were snatched from the walls and tossed in a waiting van while the robbers held staff at gunpoint. Meanwhile, two Picassos were swiped last week.

Thank god the Munch masterpieces turned up relatively safe in the end, but you can never be sure what will happen to stolen art; these paintings are in danger.

What I don’t understand is how this can happen. Certainly, I do not wish that any bystander should risk their life fighting off an armed robber, but don’t these museums have any sort of security? The average Wal-Mart deposits less than a hundred thousand dollars per week, but they still send two armed guards in a bulletproof truck to pick it up. These paintings are worth over a hundred million dollars. Do you think that if a museum had a hundred million dollars in cash sitting on a table they wouldn’t have armed guards standing right there?  It’s not a difficult risk-management assessment to make.

Filed under: Art, Current Events on February 13th, 2008 | No Comments »