The Spectrum of Acceptable Opinion

I’m not normally a devotee of Noam Chomsky, but his commentary on media control can be pretty sharp:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. [The Common Good, 1998]

Here’s a striking quote from a Russian cab driver interviewed in a 2007 dispatch aired by NPR’s On the Media:

ALEXEI: [Putin] is a good president. He has done a lot in Russia. Ever since the program when Putin answered the people’s questions on television, he immediately made a decision, and with a single call, he fixed everything.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And it’s not a problem that he doesn’t really want a free press?

ALEXEI: Why? We do have a free press. Everybody says whatever. Here there is no such thing as not being able to say something.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He doesn’t want the opposition on the radio or television. Do you think that that’s a good thing?

ALEXEI: What do you mean by saying not letting the opposition on? You have everything on TV, everything that’s possible. And what’s forbidden is forbidden.

Tort Reform: Save the Children

One thing I’ve noticed in Pakistan is how physically risk-tolerant people are, willing to stand on high platforms, walk around open sinkholes and wet floors without making a fuss, etc. Much of it seems sensible, although it has the obvious dark side when it comes to no seatbelts in taxis, nobody wearing bike helmets, and people riding motorcycles with three-year-old children on their laps. A lot of that probably has to do with poverty, but I also feel acutely the lack of a lawsuit culture here, even more so than in Europe.

The comparison underscores how forcefully questions of legal liability are imprinted in the mind of Americans from a very young age, and how these questions percolate into our subconscious processing of physical risk.  Our personal assessment of “is this dangerous?” has blurred subtly with the question “Could a plaintiff recover if this went wrong?”, even in situations where there would be no one to sue. I remember being told many times as a young child that I had to Get Down From There because somebody might get sued.  What a strange way to explain danger to a child!  What a dangerous way to conceptualize danger!

TEDx Margalla: Ideas Worth Spreading 20 Years Ago

Yesterday I attended TED^X Margalla, the Islamabad incarnation of the TED talks franchise.  It was fucking terrible.  A Cambridge University education researcher unveiled (with great fanfare) pedagogical insights that are at least 20 years old (leaning must be immersive?  HOLY SHIT!).  A parliamentarian, apparently unable to perform a Google Scholar search, asked the crowd why the intelligentsia has failed to  investigate corruption and terrorism in Pakistan.  A former architect outlined her plan for a transformative orphanage which, she claims, could be self-sustaining through the sale of vegetables from its garden.

Besides debasing the TED brand, these performances made me feel more acutely what some have described as “the postmodern condition”, the overload of information that reduces me to inaction and silence (but painfully, not apathy).  Gandhi said that we must be the change we wish to see in the world.  But today we need a new formulation, one that addresses the malady of the present age:  The ability of the thoughtless to see whatever they want in the world, and the inability of thoughtful people to see anything with confidence.

One of the speakers, by way of saying that we should be able to solve the problems that face us, said, “This is the age of reason, isn’t it?”

That was the most dated of all the dated ideas advanced at TED^X Margalla.  The Age of Reason is long over, riddled by  machine guns, irradiated by fallout, spun into quantum superposition, chopped up into tranches and bundled into derivatives for sale to the predictably irrational.  Reason still has power in the world, but it is the power of dinosaurs and trees long dead, plumbed and processed and pumped into the tanks that fuel our joyrides, and our wars.

Little Hans

Getting ready to teach Freud’s case study of “Little Hans”, which describes the psychoanalytic treatment of a 5-year-old boy.  Two gems worth sharing…

Little Hans on dicks:

The first trait in Little Hans which can be rearded as part of his sexual life was his quite peculiarly lively interest in his “widdler”… This interest aroused in him the spirit of enquiry, and he thus discovered that the presence or absence of a widdler made it possible to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects.

What a fucking awesome taxonomic process:

What kind of thing is this thing?
Hmm…

Step 1: Does it have a dick?

It was also kind of surreal to read Freud saying this:

It is a regrettable fact that no account of psychoanalysis can reproduce the impressions received by the analyst as he conducted it, and that a final sense of conviction can never be obtained from reading about it but only from directly experiencing it.

There it is, right there: the epitaph of psychodynamics as a mental science; the seeds of hegemony for cognitive-behavioral theorists; the tragedy of what must get ruled out when you’re Doing Science.

As fascinating as I find psychoanalysis, a science of case studies is no science at all.  The gradual recognition of this fact is threatening to render it academically inanimate.  For many years now, psychodynamic therapists have struggled with the very serious question: “Would Little Hans call our working theories dickless?”

Subcritical in Lahore

What’s more dangerous than cycling unhelmeted through anarchic Lahore traffic on a bike? Doing so while taking photographs? On a bike that handles like a shopping cart? Grinning madly?

We rode by slums, farms, military bases, more slums, buffalo soaking in the Canal (runs all the way to India – thanks Raj!), we rode past dusty amusement parks, highway cricket, gulley cricket, alley cricket, sandlot cricket, we rode past donkey carts, Mercedes, horses, other bicycles, a thousand festooned rickshaws, hordes of motorcycles, and one wheelchair.

Dodging through the traffic was shockingly comfortable. It required the same intense concentration and awareness as skiing, and produced a very similar pleasure.  (It’s probably a good thing I don’t live in Lahore; Islamabad is much, much more behaved.) I was very glad for my Islamabad cycling practice, and for being in good shape.

My loaner bike was a total, 7th hellcircle piece of shit, and too small besides, but I didn’t care. The sun shone, my black shirt baked me. I took pictures of a Ranger base in flagrant violation of what I later discovered was the Law. At one point we rode through a clothesline-strewn slum to a market stacked with chicken cages, and finally on to a bristling army checkpoint. Waved through (a Gora on a bike is pretty much the opposite of the profile they’re worried about), I was suddenly released into the elegant precincts of the Cantonment residences, the neighborhood of military families.  It strongly reminded me of Bozeman, Montana (my Western Jerusalem, soils steeped in happy memories). I would’ve taken pictures of it but I was by that point aware of the risk such snapping would pose to my existing photos. If caught in the Cantonment, I’d be forced to delete the lot, and I was not going to risk losing this picture:

There are many phallic monuments in Lahore, but only one with balls to tickle.

Or my photoshoot with a festively-painted sheep…

I met a new favorite Person, a lawyer named Rafay (5ft 10 inches, around 35 years old, JD from London, formerly a popular radio host).   He suited up for the day’s ride in Hawaiian shirt, nylong hiking pants, and — gasp! — Vibram Fivefingers.  I AM NOT THE ONLY PERSON IN THIS COUNTRY WITH FIVEFINGERS!  Here is Rafay, cigar in hand, barefoot/shod, with his hog:

We stopped for lunch next to a minor canal, at an open-air eatery that was entirely off-limits to my gut.  I went for the only edible item– juice.  It tasted strange, so I inspected the package, and discovered that this particular brand of “apple beverage” has fucking milk in it

 

Really, random Pakistani Beverage Corp? Really?

Lahories seems to be less accustomed to foreigners than Islamabytes.  At every stop, children would gather and stare at me, and more than one local introduced himself and asked here I was from.  Nowadays, less paranoid than when I first arrived, I answer without hesitation that I’m American.  It’s truer now than it’s ever been.

Double Up

While on trial for having/filming sex with a 15-year-old girl, R. Kelly ran this ad promoting his new album:

Pouty-faced R. Kelly had an important announcement.  If you don’t have the sound on, here’s the voice-over that goes with the video:

Sixteen years.  Nothing but hits.  And they still don’t believe.  There’s only one thing to do and that is: Double Up.

Now if you actually go and  listen to the album’s title song, “double up” refers to having an MFF threesome.  So in this this ad (again, it ran during the trial) R. Kelly is actually saying:

I’ve had a successful musical career.  Now I’m being prosecuted because I can’t control myself sexually.  There’s only one thing to do and that is: have sex with two women at once.

I know it’s a miscarriage of justice, but I’m glad he’s a free man.  I want him to keep on being insane in full public view.

Purity, Rape, and Bottled Water

About nine months ago I watched the movie Taken with my then-girlfriend and her father. It was a little awkward. If you haven’t seen it, the whole movie is an elaborate father fantasy about an aging, retired CIA dad (played by Liam Neeson) whose hot teenaged daughter is kidnapped by Eastern European thugs in Paris. The second half of the movie basically consists of him killing people in a race to save his daughter’s virginity. Again: I was watching this next to my girlfriend’s dad.

One of the gangsters Neeson tortures to death explains that his daughter has not been violated, yet, because virgins fetch much, much more money for the kidnappers. In fact the delay that makes rescue possible occurs because she is being auctioned off.

The movie was a blunt instrument, to be sure, but I appreciated how firmly it connected the fetishization of virginity with rape. I’ve long thought there was something pretty creepy about non-virgins who are overly interested in dating/sleeping with virgins. From a strictly pleasure-seeking point of view, it doesn’t seem rational. Unless you’re similarly green and feel intimidated by a knowing partner, why would you prefer sex with someone completely inexperienced at sex? There’s an irrational erotic principle at work here, and to my mind, it’s a pretty dark one. To fetishize purity is to create structural violence in your fantasy life, because the act of attaining your desired object is the same act as destroying it.

– — –

I was looking at a shelf full of different bottled water brands the other day and became increasingly disturbed at the subtext in their marketing copy. Take a leading product:

Apparently the market research shows that nothing sells spring water wrapped in hormone-disrupting plastic like the subtle touch of rape fantasy. Purer water is healthier, I guess, but “untouched by man”? Am I really not supposed to read into that? Voss, how about you?

VOSS Artesian Water is amongst the purest waters in the world. Taken from a virgin aquifer shielded for centuries under ice and rock in the untouched wilderness of central Norway.

The feeling of trampling across a delicate, flower-filled mountain meadow can be yours for $4.29 a pop. But can I indulge my urge to despoil mother nature at a lower price? Don’t worry, there’s always Evian:

Yeah, live young. Reach “deep inside the earth”, for water “perfectly protected beneath dense layers of glacial sands” and taste something “untouched by man”.

But cost aside, there are so many choices, so many maidenly potables to choose from, that I really need a standard metric to help me determine how much dark pleasure to take in breaking each distinct tamper-proof safety seal. That’s why the people over at finewaters.com, who don’t allow Freudians into their meetings, have invented the highly scientific and totally-not-rape-fetishistic term “Virginality” as a standard of comparison.

They’re also helpfully provided an objective scale they use to rate virginality among different brands. VEEN Water, for instance, is very proud that:

VEEN Spring Waters’ virginality has been rated nothing less than superior.

And you’re never gonna get your hands around a tall cold glass of Superior Virginality with a Brita filter, my friends.

(The next time you taste some high-end bottled water, perhaps at a fine restaurant, moan loudly and exclaim: “Such delicious VIRGINALITY!”  You will look sophisticated; tuxedoed waiters will nod knowingly.)

All of this brought me to the stark realization that I’m in the wrong business. These people are selling water, a substance that is fucking given away in most settings, and their profit margins are huge.

That’s why I’ve started my own spring water company, and we’re gonna cut the bullshit, distill this reptilian psychological sales pitch into it’s purest form, and rake in the cash.

I give you nymf: