Posts Tagged ‘tragedy’
A Few Links for a Travelin’ Sunday
* After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered. A teacher resigns.
* Academics have finally “started” to talk about capitalism? Inconceivable!
* Take the example of online education, for which excitement is rapidly building in California. Morozov notes in the book that it might very well produce more graduates per dollar spent, but it also might miss the very point of education.
* An outrage of the week right in my own backyard: Botched ATF sting in Milwaukee ensnares brain-damaged man.
“I have never heard of anything so ludicrous in my life,” said Greg Thiele, who spent 30 years working for the Milwaukee Police Department including on undercover stings with federal agents, including those with the ATF. “Something is very wrong here.”
* The latest from the law school scam.
* How people die in Shakespearean tragedy.
* And when continuity collides: The new Doctor Who companion’s ten-second appearance in Captain America.
Newtown – 2
* The victims of the Dunblane massacre would have turned 21 this year. The United Kingdom responded to this tragedy by banning private ownership of handguns; they had 39 gun homicides this year. We are radically free; we can choose to live in any type of world we like. Tax bullets. Ban bullets. Mandate insurance for gun ownership. Institute onerous licensing requirements and registration fees. Figure out some way to stop people from being murdered in movie theaters and schools. There’s no reason this should go on.
* In 2008, the U.S. had over 12 thousand firearm-related homicides. All of Japan experienced only 11, fewer than were killed at the Aurora shooting alone. And that was a big year: 2006 saw an astounding two, and when that number jumped to 22 in 2007, it became a national scandal. By comparison, also in 2008, 587 Americans were killed just by guns that had discharged accidentally.
* Nine kids dead from guns in 24 hours. From 2007.
* Fuck Everything, Nation Reports.
* How to talk to your kids about tragedy, from St. Rogers.
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.
Newtown
Multiple Fatalities Reported in Shooting at Connecticut Elementary School. 29 dead, including 18 children. Questions I ask myself about Connecticut School Shooting. Eleven facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States. Reminder: German police fired just 85 bullets in 2011. 39 deaths from guns in the UK in all of 2011. Three Common-Sense Gun Bills That Can’t Pass Congress. The gun the shooter used. More Guns, More Mass Shootings. A Guide to Mass Shootings in America. Deadliest U.S. shootings. 31 school shootings since Columbine. Barring some seismic realignment in this country, the gun control debate is all but settled — and your side won. The occasional horrific civilian massacre is just the price the rest of us have to pay. No words.
What Can Be Worse Than to Sell Your Soul and Find It Not Valuable Enough to Get Anything For It?
Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to contemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it?
Local Tragedies
This week’s mass shooting happened just a few miles from our new house. What a tragedy for the Sikh community here, and for the city as a whole.
#unPCthoughts
* It’s telling that the people who get paid to analyze politics recoil at the notion that its practitioners should connect it to real-life pain. They think they’re covering a sport, an entertainment. But politics matters, because policies matter.
* National tragedies are political. They’re too important not to be.
Two Tragic Tastes That Taste Tragic Together
Two recent headlines tugged at my heartstrings: Could ocean acidification deafen dolphins? and Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies. Naturally the universe has found a way to combine these into a single, terrible Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of Tragedy.
For the last 12 years, a single solitary whale whose vocalizations match no known living species has been tracked across the Northeast Pacific. Its wanderings match no known migratory patterns of any living whale species. Its vocalizations have also subtly deepened over the years, indicating that the whale is maturing and ageing. And, during the entire 12 year span that it has been tracked, it has been calling out for contact from others of its own kind.
It has received no answer. Nor will it ever.
Genius in the Works of Wes Anderson
The Suicide of Genius: Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson in Life and Art. At 24LiesaSecond, via The House Next Door.
The subtext of The Royal Tenenbaums is one of collisions. The sanctified world of genius, creativity and art collide with the world of contemporary psychology. Diagnosis, psychosis, breakdown, and divorce emerge like a hydra in the wings of Anderson’s work. And the point of collision is Eli Cash, played by Owen Wilson. Through Cash, Anderson’s tragic-comedic vision reaches its apex and foreshadows its decline into sentimentality and self-apologetic quirk.
Of course, as an unrepentant Wes Anderson fanboy, I don’t agree that his later works are failures in this or any other way—but the thesis is interesting. And I think there’s something to Lasky’s idea that Anderson shifts in Tenenbaums from a model of autonomous, tragedy-laced genius towards a comparatively more hopeless one of psychological and psychochemical dysfunction:
Genius, in their early work, is ineffable, resplendent with the trappings of depressive, rumple-haired Nietzschean eccentricity and Faustian striving and discontent. Anderson as writer/director and Wilson as writer/actor depict the creative spirit that defies diagnosis as it is ratified by its own insatiable drive, as it rebels against social pressures and cultural environments. Conversely, the therapeutic imperative of our contemporary society is to contextualize and diagnose, to encourage radical self-assessment in hopes of propagating permanent stability and happiness. As of late, Anderson’s original vision has been compromised by this imperative: his idea of the troubled genius has lost its romantic cache. Its integrity as a thing of heroism and beauty has been ostensibly diagnosed.
This may go a long way towards explaining why Rushmore is so much better-loved than Zissou.
Literally and figuratively
Police are investigating one of the largest* art heists in Vermont history: the $1 million theft of 30 bronze statues from the home of artist Joel Fisher, some weighting as much as 1,000 pounds.
The sculptor’s life work is likely to be smelted for the material—unless, of course, he’s lying, which is what the police rep more or less accuses him of doing at the end of the article:
The burglary was reported last week, said Senior Trooper Callie Field of the Vermont State Police in Derby. Law enforcement has “no idea what the heck is going on,” she said. She has received no evidence to establish clearly what was stolen, or even whether the works were on the property, Field said.
“A lot of stuff’s not adding up,” she said. “Who knows what was taken?”
—
* not a pun
The Sad Story of the Zápara
Via the first page of The World Without Us, the sad story of the Zápara. More at NativeWeb and UNESCO’s list of oral tradition.
The smallest Indigenous group in the Ecuadorian Amazon is the Zápara. Often they are called “Zaparos,” which refers to a type of basket, while “Zápara” in their own language means “person of the forest.” Their history demonstrates the devastating impact of Western civilization as their numbers collapsed from about 200,000 people in 39 different groups at the arrival of the Europeans to approximately 200 people today living in five Zápara communities in Ecuador in addition to two other related groups in Peru.