After the first week I could hear these complaints and realize that I did not have to have an opinion of the patient – I did not have to think they were whiny, or weak, as so many physicians not in psychiatry seem to do (or psychiatrists think and do not verbalize). I also did not have to judge that they were actually strong people who had had horrible things done to them in childhood and throughout life. I could just listen and evaluate dispassionately because, in the end, I was not responsible for figuring out the cause of their problems, nor, really, with their success in treatment. I could accept that this was the way this particular patient experienced the world. They saw stress everywhere, the world was overwhelming, and they believed that upon seeing the psychiatrist they would be presented with a pill, much like Morpheus (such a carefully chosen name) presented a choice of pill to his patient in The Matrix. In psychiatry, however, the patient cares not whether the pill is Red or Blue.

Note that, up until this point, I have not said anything judgmental of any patient I have seen, and that if you are feeling a rise of resentment in your chest at this uppity jerk who is posting some inconsequential reflection on his time in psychiatry…well, what does that say about you? I am going for introspection, not for judgment or valuation.

I have had multiple psychiatrists talk with me philosophically about the role of drugs in their field. One felt like prescribing medications just reinforced the belief of the patient that a drug would solve their problems. The medicines, in a sense, were preventing the patient from developing the coping skills they had never been raised to have by their parents, who usually were not around. He was an addiction specialist, and his argument frequently pertained to prescribing benzodiazepines. More interesting, however, is the discussion I had with another physician about anti-depressants.

There are times, I think, when physicians take a step back and realize how little they know. We prescribe these drugs that have been “evaluated” in randomized controlled clinical trials, which tell the public that a drug is legitimate, but just raise more questions to more than a few people. Not everything can be evaluated in numerical form. The fact that you answered the right questions on a depression screening does not necessarily mean that you have depression. The same goes for ADHD – “yeah, I suppose I do have times of distractibility,” the patient said yesterday, while playing angry birds on her iPhone.

Anti-depressants, as we know from the almighty trials, help in depression, and help to a degree that is directly proportional to how severe the depression presents. But what, really, are the long term effects? I am not talking about symptoms – sure you can have headache, or sexual dysfunction, or you pick your side effect as you read the package insert, but what about qualitative life outcomes?

You see, in our discussion we talked about how the Prozac you take may make you able to handle the stress in your life a little better. Your job is more manageable, your relationship more tolerable, your kids less ADHD-ish, but what if this outcome is not good? What if you just stay in a dead end job or an abusive relationship because you are better able to tolerate it? Is that successful treatment? I don’t think so. Or what if the reason why you have all your stress is not because of external circumstances but because of You? You, as a person, unconsciously desire a certain amount of stress and find ways to seek it out. Prozac lessens your stress, so you seek out circumstances that send it back to where your actual “set point” is. Scary. You take a bad situation and make it objectively worse, even if your subjective experience is the same.

The psychiatrist said that he didn’t believe that the case was as I described above, but he did say that some psychiatrists feel like it is, that medication may not actually help. What if the problem is not the red or blue pill, but the choice itself? Maybe the right choice is the hand you do not see and holds in its palm a mirror.

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The Dialectic Of Drug Use In American Culture
Hundreds of little pills, each uniform and purple, rattle down the assembly line. The conveyor belt is like a street, and the workers dressed in white caps and aprons watch the parade until it reaches their arms’ grasp. White face masks cover their breath. With darting hands and beaming eyes they sort these pills into machines that take each pill, position it just so, and slam it into a small plastic packaging at the speed of sound. Phu-chk, phu-chk, phu-chk, the machine goes until the day is done, casting the purple pill in translucent plastic. The caskets are carefully placed in flimsy cardboard boxes with Brooditor, Pfizer’s latest and greatest “self-stabilizing” laboratory concoction, in large purple letters on the front. They are shipped to the multitudes of 24-hour-a-day pharmacies across the country. The year is 2036. It is the age of cosmetic pharmacology.
Electronic billboards light up the night above the freeway. The screen is white with black lettering. “Brooditor – be yourself.” Brooditor was released as an alternative to Happilex, Pfizer’s other bestselling “self-stabilizer.” As opposed to Happilex, which, as the advertisements claimed, “brought the real you, the happy you, out to play,” Brooditor is a drug – no, not that, public censors won’t allow that word – Brooditor is a “self-stabilizer” that attempts to alter personality bring out your inner brooding poet. In other words, it was for individuals who were eclectic and energetic to a fault –too outgoing, too extroverted, or maybe just too much Happilex. Because in the age of cosmetic pharmacology, people can “be” whoever they want. Need to be more outgoing to get that upper-management position? No problem – Take some Powertex, and watch your inner ambition sprout. Want to give off that brooding, deep aura, like you really have something on your mind? Get some Brooditor. Your friends will be amazed at the deep thoughts you will impress them with at parties. Want to be smarter, more friendly, more aggressive, more suave, more happy? There’s a drug for that.
The future I have depicted above sounds dystopian. It is scary to think that prescription drug companies would mass-produce personality-altering chemicals, each and every American on some form of drug, in some sort of illusory state. A critique of this world from the standpoint of American culture might ask, “where is the individuality? Where is the real self, under all those drugs?”
Dystopian novels, from George Orwell’s 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, have long played on the concept of constant, society-wide drug use. The drugs in these futures are used to control and manipulate the populace by the corrupt state, and this possible future plays well on American fears. The two aforementioned novels frequently make top-100 novel lists and are read in high schools across the United States because American culture is deeply haunted with visions of what drug use could destroy. Americans have a collective phobia of altered states, especially ones that are endorsed by governments or corporations, which is why it is odd that the United States is leading the world in antidepressant research, proliferation, and use.
The anti-depressant market has forged new ground, unlocking the secrets of personality, and is allowing us to change our personality through drug use. Neuroscience has fostered drugs that can make people go from sad to happy, introverted to outgoing, or anxious to calm. Antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft, and Cymbalta are being ingested in the United States at record-breaking numbers. An article from the USA today states that, “about 10% of Americans — or 27 million people — were taking antidepressants in 2005, about twice the number in 1995.” With numbers like that, it is not hard to imagine a future where drugs exist for every personality archetype imaginable. It would be a future where human interaction is reduced to drugged-up “fakes” plotting along their daily lives, robbed of their inner self, their soul, their humanity – or so American culture says.
We Americans have a strange relationship with drug use. We at once fear drug use, with our war on drugs, the Just Say No campaign, and DARE. But we are also one of the largest consumers of drugs, legal and illegal. Why are we at once frightened and accepting of drug use? We are a culture that wages a war on drugs while “50.9 percent of adults 18 years of age or older are current, regular drinkers (at least 12 drinks in the past year).” We are disgusted by addicts yet create mental institutions where the patients are fed six different drugs on a daily basis. We fear dystopian mind-control while one in ten of us are on antidepressants. Drug use takes place in a strange dialectic, to say the least. But why? How?
It is our cultural view of selfhood that creates these glaring contradictions with drug use, and it is only through piles and piles of mental dirt that we can bury these contradictions. But to understand this seemingly contradictory attitude, we must first understand the American view of selfhood: the dualistic self.
Dualistic selfhood is defined as “the assumption that mind and body are separate.” Descartes thought that what one experiences as the I, the self, the thing that experiences things, the thing that we feel is “us” is a non-material phenomena, something special and outside the normal functioning of matter. Rene Descartes is the “father of modern philosophy.” His ideas make up the foundations of western existence, and dualism, the basic lens through which American culture views the world, is his ever-lasting mark on history. This thought can be traced back to its religious roots of the Christian soul.
Christianity holds the belief that the self, calling it the soul, is transported into another world upon death. Christians believe that awareness is something special given to us by God and that our physical bodies are merely vessels in which our souls are temporarily carried. This belief plays a large role in American culture. Although the United States is a secular nation in its government, it is still religious. A Gallop Poll from May, 2011 found that, “more than 9 in 10 Americans still say “yes” when asked the basic question “Do you believe in God?” Belief in God necessitates belief in a soul, and this concept plays heavily on American culture.
Whether or not they believe it to be a Christian soul, most Americans believe that what is between our ears is something more than a soup of neurons and grey matter, a meaningless algorithm or animal-like instinct organizer. Something “more” exists there, we think. The self, our fundamental building-block for our experience of the world, is “special.”
It seems obvious to us that the “self” exists. After all, we experience it every day. We think to ourselves, asking ourselves questions like “is that right? Do I like that? Is this good?” We feel the self inside. We feel it because we feel experiences from the outside world, and something, we feel, exists as an observer, a judge of this phenomenon. This judge, we feel, is us, the thing that controls our bodies and moves our arms, the thing that decides whether or not the pizza was good, the thing that decides whether or not we are tired, hungry, or angry. But what American culture’s dualistic attitude attempts to do is divorce our experience of reality from reality. It attempts to say that our emotions, memories, and cognitions exist on a different plane than the rest of matter. It attempts to say that awareness is special. But this belief is under attack from all sides at all hours of the day, from the research lab to the junkie’s heroin den.
American culture, and western culture at large, is inexorably intertwined with a dualistic view of selfhood. Dualistic selfhood, however, is failing the test of progress – science is ripping its foundations out day by day, study by study. Neuroscience is painting a new picture of the brain, and we don’t like it. It’s allowing us to destroy our “self,” and the century-long war with drugs, from prohibition to the war on drugs, is bearing down on our culture like cement shoes on a drowning man. The foundations of our civilization are crumbling before our eyes, but damned if we aren’t furiously painting over the cracks, carefully placing that Terry Redlin over the gaping hole in our culture’s psyche.
A specter is haunting the United States: the specter of non-dualistic selfhood. All our politicians, pundits, and priests have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter. This ghoul lurks in our shadows, hides under our beds, and haunts our dreams – It is our greatest fear, and we’ll go to any length to quickly pull the blanket over our heads, to keep the nightlight on in the dark basement of our inner conscious.
Cognitive dissonance is defined as “a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions simultaneously.” For example: “The following sentence is true. The previous sentence is false.” When we view this statement, we don’t attempt to believe both facts, and we instead recognize that it is a paradox, a breach of logic. But if we were to believe both statements at the same time, we would experience cognitive dissonance. This is what should be happening in American culture. Dualistic selfhood states that “something more” exists between our ears and that the self is an extra-material phenomena, but American culture is wrought with evidence to the contrary: recreational drug use, antidepressants, psychiatric wards, neuroscience. All those things point to the fact that our experience of the world is little more than a series of brain algorithms, like a computer or a complex snail. Yet they exist side by side our dualistic attitude. How?
Dirt. Lots and lots of dirt.
In my dystopian story, I called the drugs “self-stabilizers” for a reason. I say “self-stabilizer” because that, I imagine, is how those drugs would be have to be marketed for an American audience. Americans would not swallow pills that drugged them up, changing their “inner self,” but they just might take a drug to bring out their inner self, however nonsensical such an idea may actually be. Americans love drugs, but they love their idea of dualistic selfhood even more, which is what creates this strange love-hate relationship with drug use.
What does it mean to take an antidepressant? In truth, in the neuroscientific actuality, you are altering neural pathways with psychotropic chemicals. This fact destroys dualistic selfhood. It points out that the brain is a series of codes that act on environmental stimuli, not a special “carrier for the self.” It points out that invisible hexagons called serotonin are the fundamental determinants of brain function, not God or the soul. It points out that we are not special. It points out that we are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. But that doesn’t jive with American culture. With the emergence of antidepressants came the emergence of a cognitive dissonance which we quickly buried six feet deep in careful wording.

Notice the careful wording in the advertisement I found on www.prozac.com According to the ad, Prozac has not fundamentally altered the concept of selfhood – it has “been a catalyst in bringing attention to mental health.” It has not drugged people out of their original self – it has “helped people in their battle with depression.” It is not a psychotropic chemical that alters your neural pathways and fundamentally changes your perception of the world around you – it is a treatment for a disease, Major Depressive Disorder.
The fact that Prozac, or any other anti-depressant, is a drug is carefully avoided in the advertisement. It is a “treatment.” It is a “medicine.” It is for a “disorder,” usually depression. It is not marketed as something that changes you – the disorder did that. It is marketed as something that brings the “real you” out from the grips of an ailment. Any cognitive dissonance was carefully buried under wording and pathos.
The advertisement’s treatment of the concept of depression brings another cultural burial to light: our dialectic of disorder.
In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, the reader is taken inside a mental ward through the eyes of Chief, a patient. Through Chief’s eyes we see the metaphorical tyranny of nurse Ratchet, who is the epitome of dictatorship. She keeps an iron grip on the mental ward and carefully manipulates the patients into her control. Taken allegorically, Kesey is attempting to relate our cultural concepts of mental disorders to tyranny. He has got a point.
Due to American culture’s entanglement with dualistic selfhood, we must be very careful about how we go about labeling the condition of sanity. We cannot merely denote those individuals who act differently or strangely as just different or strange. We must denote them as wrong, sick, and unhealthy in the brain. We must denote them as broken selves.
What does it mean to be “mentally disordered?” A “mental disorder” is merely a product of genetic recombination that resulted in neurological coding that caused a human to differ, or appear to differ, from the normal range of human actions. And as for what is considered normal? As George Orwell put it, “sanity is statistical.” What the existence of what we consider “mental disorders” points out is that people are different. They are born that way. Their actions are merely the result of deviation in genetic encoding, and if that’s the case, then “sane’ people’s actions are merely genetic encoding too. It points out that just because a majority of people’s brains function a certain way, it does not mean that that way is “special” or contains any kind of soul or innate self. If normalcy were special, then the mentally disordered would have to be soulless and wrong, which is exactly how we treat them.
The concept of “mental disorder” is itself an extension of our dualistic culture. Due to the fact that we believe our neuron soup to contain a special soul, we grew diagnostic labels like depression, multiple personality disorder, and neurosis to account for the fact that not everybody acts the same. The multiple personality disorder patient does not have, or even have the capability of having, the same concepts of selfhood as most Americans do. Instead of recognizing this as an inherent difference in individuality, we label the patients as “wrong,” disordered, and insane. And then we attempt to fix them.
Ken Kesey’s nurse Ratchet metaphor is about how American culture attempts to fix anybody who is different. Are you depressed? Something’s wrong. Take a pill. Do you view the world through a different lens? Something’s wrong. You’re disordered. Let us fix you. By attempting to fix people, with so much emphasis on treatment, we avoid dealing with the reality – people are different, and that’s just the way it is. It is not the fact that we recognize mental disorder that is the outgrowth of this dualistic viewpoint. Rather, it is the way in which we treat the disorder. Everywhere we throw these labels, wrong, insane, depressed, but the true function of these labels is to pile more dirt on our cognitive dissonance, to avoid the truth that dualistic selfhood is not congruent with the concept of mental disorders.
It is ironic that we pile dirt on the cognitive dissonance caused by pharmacotherapy when pharmacotherapy is itself a result of attempting to cover up the cognitive dissonance mental disorders themselves cause. Just as there was an old lady who swallowed a fly, there is a culture that shovels dirt on top of dirt, only to cover it up with… more dirt. But on the flip side lies the most hysterical, the most sickening and destructive attempt to pile dirt on our cognitive dissonance. It comes in the form of an all-out war, being waged right now, to save us from ourselves.
Right now there is a whole army of heavily armed, highly trained troops, armed to the teeth with fully automatics, armored personnel carriers, combat helicopters. This army is fully-funded by a two-billion-dollar-a-year salary. It is dedicated to destroying certain plants. This army even has an official cabinet position within the United States government, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Dirt-piling is now official business. We are in a perpetual war, the War on Drugs: a war for our sanity; a war for our culture; a war in which our soldiers do vicious combat against plants and pills. The plants are dangerous, after all, but not nearly as dangerous to the user as to American culture.
What is a drug? It is a bullet that creates a gaping hole in dualistic theory. Drugs are the death of the self because they point out that hexagons and sticks are the cause of our actions, not an innate specialness between our ears. To the right is a picture of tetrahydrocannabinol. It is the active component in the cannabis plant. The dried buds of the cannabis plant can be smoked to achieve psychoactive effect, meaning that that thing over there gets put in your brain and causes your emotions, your ideas, and your perceptions to change. If you live in the United States and you possess any material that contains that certain combination of hexagons and sticks, you will be hunted. The army of dirt-loaders will suffocate you under piles and piles. You can be sent to a cage. You can be sent to a cage forever, if you possess enough of it, even though it is a victimless crime. The crime may be victimless, but the sin is cardinal: thou shall not violate dualistic selfhood.
The nature of drug use challenges the nature of dualistic selfhood. Cognitive dissonance arose. We piled it under dirt, from DARE to Just Say No, from the DEA to MADD. All psychoactive substances are illegal or stigmatized in the United States unless they exist to correct a mental or physical disorder. Tobacco and alcohol remain semi-legal for today, but the fight is never ending. Tobacco is being banned from establishments left and right, its users stigmatized and demonized through massive propaganda campaigns. Alcohol was illegal during prohibition. But now that prohibition is over, alcohol use still faces great stigmatization. More and more restrictions are placed on its consumption every day, and the fact that it is a beverage, not a pill or injection, gives it partial legitimization.
Ultimately, drugs are illegal or stigmatized because they point out that hexagons and sticks are the cause of our actions, not an innate specialness between our ears. The DEA is dirt. Lots and lots of dirt.
How contradictory is it that we at once label individuals as disordered and mandate they take drugs to fix themselves while condemning others for taking drugs in a recreational context? It is only after an exhaustive day of shoveling dirt that logic like that could pass as legitimate.
The fact of the matter is that dualistic selfhood cannot exist side by side drug use. One cannot take antidepressants and believe that their brain has “something more” to it. One cannot smoke a joint without realizing dualism is dead. One cannot live with the mentally disordered while maintaining a belief in the soul. But we do it. We have cognitive barriers, dirt mounds set up to block our dissonance. American culture needs to have a war on drugs. It needs careful marketing and diagnostic labels followed by treatment. Our culture needs these elaborate contradictions. Otherwise we would experience cognitive dissonance, and our fear would creep through our clever disguise, our mountain of dirt washing away in the rain.
The reason why we love Huxley and fear drug-induced dystopia, the reason why marketers for antidepressants perform an intricate ballet of words in their ads, the reason why we treat disorders and lock drug-users in cages is fear. We fear the idea that our lives, our existence on this earth and in this reality, are not special. We fear that our neuron soup floating in our skull is not forever, momentous, or perfect. We fear that we are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We fear non-dualistic selfhood. We fear that, in the end, we are hairless apes madly shoveling dirt over an idea we know is truth, on one pale dot out of nine, in the sea of infinity.

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The media circus surrounding Trayvon Martin’s death has seemingly come to a close. The tents taken down, the elephants caged, the props placed back on the wagon to head off to a new old town aptly denoted “The Past.” For weeks, America stood up in arms over the legitimacy of statutory law, over the prudence of government bureaucracy, the racism of the right, the racism of the wrong. A grand brawl ensued inducing marches, petitions, admonitions, solidarity, divisiveness, hooting, and doubtless too some hollering. But now that George Zimmerman has been charged with a crime, America is back to work and back to the grind – back to the sounds of background noise sputtering “news” about Newts getting stepped on and Mitts changing masks.

What will be the next grand media extravaganza? One can only sit back and wonder, sit back and hope that it comes soon, because if we don’t get warm weather first, things could get very ugly, very fast.

Because that’s America. That’s Americans. We sit here and toil and stew over whatever the T.V. says we ought to. And then its off to work the next day – or the welfare office – or the classroom – or the bar – or wherever else American’s spend a typical day.

This week, during your runnings around and goings on, ask your fellow citizens of this great United States a question – (ask yourself the question first) – ask them: “Have you ever heard of the Citizens United Supreme Court case of 2010?” Doubtless, you will get looks of puzzlement – bemusement, and, bashfully, a coworker might change topics, start talking about “Brown v. Board” or “Roe v. Wade,” to assert some presence of knowledge over those two words hanging low in the dead air of your breathless conversation: “Supreme Court.”

In 2010 the Supreme Court of the United States gave political campaign speech the equivalent status of individual speech by offering to its purveyor’s constitutional protection over their contents thus being now declared “Free Speech.” In English, this means that Political Action Committees (created to promote politicians running for office) have free speech rights equal to those you and I possess, individually. In reality, this means P.A.C.’s and the donors thereto can spend limitless amounts of money promoting their respective candidates. In America, this means that the institutions with all the money will drive the political Buick from now until the end of the Republic. In prophecy, it saddens me to think this end to be in sight.

Because of Citizens United, our sound democratic principles of democracy (tautology!), principles dictating that the PEOPLE elect the politicians instead of some gargantuan conglomerate moneyed interest, will be drowned out by the noise of P.A.C. “donations.” No, from now on, the T.V. tells us who to vote for… and the T.V. gets to decide who we get to choose from. It is no mistake that the old republicans, those grand old individual Americans who support the Grand Old Party, far disgruntled and greatly disturbed by their lack of a worthy candidate — it is no mistake that they have no other choice in the coming election than to vote for ROMBOT or to stay at home. : (

The money has spoken. After this incumbent leaves office any politician with ideas, with independency, with polarization, with principles – such will become a thing of the past. In a post Citizens United world, our great democracy shall be ran by none other than the most powerfully wealthy, many of whom buried us into a four year recession because of their evisceration of efficient government oversight. Because that’s the problem with a nation controlled by only the wealthy – that nation falls out of democracy and into Oligarchy. The wealthy fight to eviscerate government oversight over their generation of wealth – that evisceration generates for them even greater wealth – (for a limited time only). But in a country where the wealthy can then play casino games with taxpayer dollars – where the taxpayer has to bailout “the wealthy” for their having placed ill advised bets with their oh so respectable and honorably earned “wealth,” shouldn’t it be the taxpayer who gets to decide who our political candidates should be?

Oh, but they already do, just turn on MSNBC and ask Chris Matthews or Fox News and ask Bill O’ Reilly: “They HAVE chosen, they chose to choose between Mitt Romney and the incumbent.”

No, in a post Citizens United world – they have not chosen. The T.V. chose for them, and ya know who chose for the T.V.? P.A.C.’s. And ya know who chose to fund the P.A.C.’s?

The high rollers – the private equity funds – the casino owners – Wallstreet.

Wallstreet doesn’t care if Mitt Romney is a pandering robot that speaks with two mouths and eats with two tongues. That’s because, if elected, he’ll need them in four years, and so they pull out the hot iron plate reading “PROPERTY,” they brand him, and send him to the podium.

“Hey, send the voters to Burger King and make sure they hit the polls up on the way back will ya?”

So there’s democracy for ya – we got George Zimmerman charged. Justice for Trayvon Martin. Yay. Meanwhile, the rest of America with a hoodie on and less than a couple thou in their checking accounts continue stumbling into one and other. Aloof. Alone. Alloted. Getting paid off to sit in the ghetto and kill each other over who gets control over the lifeblood of ghettos, the cheap drugs and pussy — or going to work and having their checks garnished through taxes that get recycled to fund the submission of the impoverished by pumping out the lifeblood of ghettos, the money that pays for the cheap drugs and pussy.

It is a sad, shameful reality that we can get an entire country to stir and protest over the death of one young man and yet be so willing to sit idly and ignorantly by while we watch before our very eyes unfold the death of our democracy.

Occupy Wallstreet, Tea Party Protestors, where is your bully pulpit now? Why do your phantasms continue slowly to tread the country’s grounds, shamefully, lonely, shallowed, and shackled? Why is it that Jacob Marley is ALIVE, alive and well, laughing, laughing hysterically with a cigar in his mouth at the top of a bank in New York?

How is it that we have become the ghosts of the Republic?

It is so because the money controlled sociopolitical media machine has long ago drained, embalmed, and buried the body of true democracy in a damp and dumpy bone-yard off some interstate somewhere in a state no one has ever bothered to have ever even driven through.

The reason you have never heard of the Citizens United case is because it is not a big deal to the average citizen given the average citizen has never heard of the Citizens United case. The reason the average citizen has never heard of Citizens United is because they have never been told that it exists let alone that it might be something worth hearing about.

They have never been told it is exists because, well…. Because, because they have FAR more important and pressing concerns at the moment… Because they don’t need to worry. Because they can still wake up and go to work tomorrow and nothing will be any different than it was today. Because everything is fine as long as no one makes a fuss. Because some kid got shot in Florida and now, well now we need to focus in on injustice.
Because the Citizens… have never been so United.

CNN SCROLLER:
“George Orwell Continues Spinning Wildly In His Grave…. George Zimmerman Today Was Charged With….”

SHHHHHHHHH (TV SNOW) SHHHHHHHHHH

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I found this video hilarious, but I know a lot of people will disagree.

If you unclench your jaw for a second, you could ask, “so what?” He’s still in prison. We tell ourselves and each other that we object to the hoarding of food, certainly the weed, and the cell phone, but the part that enrages is simply that he’s happy. Too happy. If he was in solitary confinement with a toilet and zen tranquility we’d object that he had oxygen. He’s supposed to be miserable, that’s the point of the punishment.

But what do you want instead? Harsher punishment? He’s in for aggravated robbery, but it’s the same jail for burglars and murderers– should the only difference in punishment be the duration, not the severity? And do you really think that how harsh prison is or is not is really going to change the calculus of this guy’s next smash and grab?

But his happiness just enrages us, even though we don’t know what he did and who he did it to. This desire to see our “enemies” suffer is natural to the human race, and is reason 1, 2, and 3 why power should never be centralized.

I suppose that the reason I find this so funny is that I know this guy’s hoarding of popcorn isn’t a flaw in the system, I know that this is the system: the corrections officers are in on it. Perhaps they’re bribed, in most cases that isn’t necessary. Everyone’s there for months or years; they get friendly with each other, with their visitors; they know their cousin who was in last year or their buddy in the other wing; and it’s a hell of a lot easier to just let them have their Twinkies and weed then it is to not allow this.

I will point out that if that prisoner was white, this story would definitely have been about the COs’ complicity and not just lack of vigilance; but the racial angle was just too juicy to contaminate with investigative reporting. The news may get a second chance if it turns out that the COs were also black (corruption!); or, even better, that the COs were female (and please please please let them be blonde.)

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How Katniss Wins The Hunger Games

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1. Rue – from The Hunger Games

2. Emmett – from Twilight

3. Ivy – from Beyonce & Jay-Z’s recent offspring

4. Weston – from the son of a character on The Office (US version, I guess)

5. Adele – The Monster with Many Grammys

6. Grayson – Last name of a family on some show called Revenge

7. Aria – Opera (not the browser) is finally coming back?!

8. Cyrus – From a Kennedy-Bushesque dynasty of pop music

9. Estelle – Name of the recently born Swedish princess

10. Cato – Apparently another character from The Hunger Games, unless the Classics are coming back?!

11. Blythe – Parental subconscious really means ‘blight’?

So 8 (and a half, if you count royals) of 11 are drawn straight from pop culture. Of course, those generating these page views are consulting the internet for ideas, which might also mean that they’re already very plugged into pop culture, but then who isn’t?

Cynical SOBs like Yours Truly will probably jump quickly to the idea that these names are chosen as extensions of the parents’ desired brands. It’s a message to the world, but since the parents can’t know what to tell the world about someone as yet unborn, it’s a message about the parents themselves. The message might be about the parents directly (e.g. “We’re the kind of people who have kids as sweet and innocent as this figure that our peers will know from pop culture, like Rue.”), or it might serve the parents’ more profane interests. (Example 1: When I first heard that B & J-Z were naming their daughter ‘Blue Ivy’, my first, immediate thought was ‘That sounds like a perfume.’ and the bottle design and ad campaign formed involuntarily in my head in about 15 seconds. Example 2: I know a couple whose eldest daughter is named ‘O’hara’. I asked the mother about the name’s origins recently. When she was pregnant with O’hara, she ran a hair salon. Assuming her daughter would one day take over the family salon, the name ‘O’hara’ was going to work perfectly with the business, as in ‘O’haira’s’ or ‘O’hara’s Hair’.) And this doesn’t seem to be all that new. I seem to remember lots of Britneys, Brittanys and the like about a decade ago, there were a lot of Alexes and Samanthas back in the Family Ties days, and The Partridge Family was reproduced in many households in the 70s, I’m sure.

Okay, so parents are really thinking of themselves when naming their kids, but is there anything new going on here besides the fact that the parents are looking to pop culture for inspiration? Fathers have been naming sons after themselves and their fathers for millennia. It’s almost a rule among royalty, and it used to be a much stricter almost-rule. It would be a fair guess that Jewish boys would be more likely to be named ‘Joshua’, and for sons of Muslim parents to be named ‘Mohammed’, than you’d expect in the population as a whole. Names in cases such as these clearly are not chosen from out of a hat. Is referencing pop culture really new, is it just the case that other traditions have different sources of ‘pop culture’ to reference (i.e. holy texts & great ancestors), or is there a meaningful difference in the two practices?

For contrast, bear in mind that some parents in other cultures go about it very differently. For example, in a few west African countries, it’s conventional to name kids after the day of the week on which they were born, which is why it seems that every 7th Ghanaian is named Kofi or Kwame. Closer to home (for many of you) a couple of economists found that 30% of black girls in California had names that were unique to themselves, at least in the state. If you want to give your kid a unique name, you’re not going to check the internet, unless you wanna try to spin the wheel.

So what does this practice mean?

No related posts.

An exercise in application of a line of thought.

From a recount of a study in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (click through for full citation. Since I have no access to the actual journal I’m taking for granted the recount is accurately representing the study’s results).

258 US school girls and 171 female undergrads were studied to determine how they feel when they see sexualised images of female athletes. The three conditions: female athletes in a sporting context in sporting attire, female athletes in a sexualised context in lack of attire, and magazine models in bikinis.

The results:

The key finding is that the girls and undergrads who viewed the sexualised athlete images tended to say they admired or were jealous of the athletes’ bodies, they commented on the athletes’ sexiness, and they evaluated their own bodies negatively. Some also said they found the images inappropriate. The participants who viewed the bikini-clad glamour models responded similarly, except they rarely commented on the inappropriateness of the images, as if they’d come to accept the portrayal of women in that way. Daniels said that sexy images of female athletes “are no more likely to prompt viewers to reflect on their own physical activity involvement or appreciation of sport than sexualised model images.”

By contrast, participants who viewed the female athletes in a sporting context tended to comment on the athletes’ determination, passion and commitment; they wrote about feeling motivated to perform sport; and they reflected on their own sporting participation or sports they followed. “Infusing more performance images of female athletes into the media may be helpful in promoting physical activity among girls and young women,” Daniels said. “Currently, female athletes are largely absent from magazines targeted at teen girls.”

The above stops short of linking sexualized imagery with negative self-evaluation, although most media would consider it sufficient enough to misrepresent that it does. The results are interpreted to support increased usage of female athletes portrayed in a sporting capacity in media, which is what the study’s author wants to be true.

However the problem is not the nature of the image, but the propensity of the girls and undergrads to consistently measure themselves against the images. Whether that image is sexualized or athletic is irrelevant, it’s the pursuit of the ideal the image represents that is problematic. While the images are of real people and thus are not an abstract ideal, the variance of our individual capacities might as well make it so. What’s attainable for a professional athlete may not be so for a student, be it due to genetic or physical or economic or just plain time limitations.

You’re not supposed to think that way though. You can do anything, right? If Mia Hamm is doing it, why aren’t you? Get out there on the field, girl. Just don’t think about why you’re really there.

It’s tempting to throw your hands up and say, “Well, so what? It’s getting kids outside and exercising.” But at what point does using a brain hack to self-motivate cease to be productive and start to be undermining? If you’re using externally generated images to motivate, then it’s a short step to using externally defined standards to validate. Or maybe you’re already there, which is why the images work.

Or, to put it more succinctly and in a way Google will no doubt tell me was said elsewhere before, if you think either the abundance of sexualized images or lack of athletic images of women is the problem, you’re in The Matrix.

Refutations welcome.

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Recently, a rising Hollywood superstar saved a young woman’s life from an oncoming cab in New York City. Most women would swoon over a guy like this coming into contact with her let alone him being a hero (a real human being) to her. Instead, she revealed a very telling thing about her nature; as opposed to thanking him and writing a short description of what happened she used her 15 minutes to prove how much she “cares” about the Middle East. In addition, she talks about how Americans are “very strange” although we know that only Americans can be inconsiderate when visiting other countries.

“But as a feminist, a writer, and a gentlewoman of fortune, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role, even though I have occasional trouble crossing the road, and even though I did swoon the teeniest tiniest bit when I realized it was him. I think that’s lazy storytelling, and I’m sure Ryan Gosling would agree with me.”

OOOOoooohh… well now it makes sense.

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As news leaked today of a gaffe on the part of Mr. Obama, news outlets responded in varying and telling ways. Perhaps this observation is simply a reinforcement of the adage “If you’re watching it, it’s for you,” that we seem to read in just about post and/or comment associated with Alone’s writing but I felt it might be interesting to point out.

Mr. Obama leans in to let Medvedev know the scoop on his missile defence policy, that being a hands off policy until the election. I first read of this on BBC’s website; the title was: Obama and Medvedev caught in unguarded missile remarks. The article can be found here and it goes on to quote the President and provide readers with some context for the statement. There seemed to be no politicizing of the matter, although, the issue is certainly politically charged. No real side was taken.

Jump to CNN. The title of its article concerning the statement is as follows: First on CNN: Obama’s open mic a Republican open season. If you’re reading it, it’s for you. The article went on to feature Romney tweets about the President’s remarks and other gems.

I looked to find a Fox News article outlining how Mr. Obama and Rootin Tootin Putin are planning a lavish party in honor of Lenin but I couldn’t come up with anything. For the sake of full disclosure, the title of this article is: During missile defense talk, Obama tells Medvedev he’ll have ‘more flexibility’ after election. There is no mention of the Romney tweets. I suppose the Fox conservatives feel that the statement, itself, is damning enough for them.

I have no agenda one way or another on this issue – I think the President did what any President during an election year would do. The media, however (CNN in particular), has set up this kind of event to spur the brand of contentious, partisan politics Americans crave. Who do you think used the shotgun mic to get the quotes? This kind of reporting is necessary for ratings – it brings in the wankers that follow cable news and political pundits without realizing that masturbation is more fun when watching porn with hot lesbians than with Rachel Maddow.

CNN Article: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/26/first-on-cnn-obamas-open-mic-a-republican-open-season/

BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17516108

Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/26/obama-tells-medvedev-hell-have-more-flexibility-after-election-during-missile/

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On the surface of course this is a feel-good story with the trite and true moral of “don’t judge a book by its cover,” as homely shy teen wins over a skeptical audience with the power of his booming voice. But of course we’ve seen this before, Susan Boyle became a worldwide phenom. So why is it working again?
Because the producers know you, and they know exactly how to make you think what they want you to think.

They know your prejudices, they know what you want to believe about yourself, and most of all they know you’ve seen this before. That’s why they know it will work again.

When you watched the video, did you immediately think something along the lines of, “Christ, what a fatass” followed almost immediately by a self-satisfied, media aware recognition that “I’ll bet he’s going to blow them away?” They knew you would. They knew that you are savvy enough NOT to judge a book by its cover because they know you’ve seen this before. And they know just how damn satisfied you’ll feel when you’re right.

Think for a second: do you suppose that Simon Cowell, mastermind of multiple singing and variety competition shows, doesn’t understand that the next person on stage could blow the audience away? Do you really think the studio audience doesn’t understand this?

Simon Cowell is the executive producer of BGT. He calls the shots. Which means he knows in advance exactly who is walking out on to that stage. He knows exactly what he’s going to see and he knows exactly the part to play—as the “audience” who is incredulous that some fat boy has managed to drag himself on to the stage. “As if it couldn’t get any worse.”

They want you to believe that both Simon and the studio audience have pre-judged the performers when in fact they know it is anything but. Do you think the audience doesn’t know there are cameras on them? Take a look at the piece again, and ask yourself if the reaction shots you’re seeing really came from that moment. I’ll pull rank for a moment and tell you that as a professional television editor, I can guarantee you they did not. There was a team of producers and editors scouring footage to make the audience seem unimpressed.

They want you to know in advance that this guy is going to blow the audience away, and they want you to feel smart when you’re right. And furthermore, they want you to feel like you’re the person that you say you are–a person too kind to judge a fat book by its fat cover. Even though secretly all you saw was fat and instantly felt all the judgments that come with it.

They’ve made it easy to play the part of the person you pretend to be. All that’s left for you to do is share it on facebook.

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