Law and Order and the trial of Kerry Kennedy

Having watched the hit TV show, Law and Order for years, I have come to understand that certain crimes are not prosecutable, because they are not conventional crimes. There are L & O episodes where the D.A.'s and A.D.A.'s have exercised their righteousness upon being asked to bring to trial cases which really have no case material in them barring the moral content of the defendant's character.

Such was the recently concluded trial of Kerry Kennedy: The jury acquitted Ms. Kennedy from misdemeanor charges filed against her by the Westchester County D.A.'s office. 

A year and a half ago, Kerry Kennedy had driven her car in Westchester under the influence of Zolpidem, a generic version of the sleep-aid Ambien. She had driven erratically for a few minutes before stalling in a side road. She had been found slumped on her steering wheel.

This was a victimless event and the only death and/or injury that was luckily avoided was that of Kerry Kennedy herself. She was lucky to have come out of the accident bodily unharmed. 

Yet she was charged with two counts of misdemeanor. The trail which took place a few days ago after 20 months came to a speedy conclusion when the jury took less than an hour to find her not-guilty.

It's anybody's guess as to why Kennedy was prosecuted in the first place. If this were to be fictionalized into a future Law and Order Episode, it would fall under the L & O franchise, "Criminal Intent." The trial seems to have been about Kennedy's intent; did she intend to drive under the influence of a sleep-inducing drug and endanger the lives of fellow drivers on the road that day? Does the driving under the influence throw a shadow of doubt on Kennedy's character, her reliability?

Kerry Kennedy is New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo's ex-wife and a scion of the illustrious Kennedy family. I am positive the trial wasn't orchestrated by Cuomo's personal peeve against an ex-wife. They are on extremely amiable terms, as all divorced couples among the elite are. 

Kerry Kennedy said in her defense that she had mistaken the drug to be her routine prescription drug that she takes to manage her thyroids.

A 21st Century Modest Proposal

If SB 1254 passes in the state of Idaho, then students across college campuses in Idaho might look like this

They would have the right to carry guns (concealed weapons) on campus. 

Irresponsible politics can create problems where none exist, as has been noted by Boise State University President, Bob Kustra. 

But will the State Senate listen to sensible Idahoans, over right-wing, Constitutional Fundamentalist Senators like Curt McKenzie?

The bill would endanger not only the ecosystem of higher education but in the short term the lives of Professors as well.

What then is a way to counter a senseless move to ensure the safety of the professoriat  at Institutions of higher learning in Idaho?

Satire of course. 

Biology and Criminal Justice Professor at BSU, Greg Hampikian writes about the issue in a deeply satirical vein.

He argues that if students, who are already always ready to explode when they get less than expected grades, are armed, then ought not Professors to arm themselves? Imagine a situation if instead of a pen or a pencil, they were to be accosted by assault weapons inside their offices.

What if a disgruntled student decides to "shoot" a Professor a lesson in the form of bullets that emanate at a 100 sprays a second? How will the Professor, with reflexes slowed down by ageing (the ratio of age-advantage that students enjoy over the typical Professor is still 1:55) defend himself against the speed of the hypermodern gun?

Also, when we speak of the student body of age range 18-22 on campuses in the nation today, we think of a generation that's benumbed to the art of killings and massacres, having played them on video games from literally an infant stage. A student who whips out a gun and shoots a Professor would most likely be doing that by instinct without thinking through the moral consequences or the fact that it's sinful to kill.

Hampikian's piece, When May I Shoot A Student? echoes the satirical tone of Jonathan Swift, the 18th century Anglo-Irish satirist.

In 1729 Swift wrote A Modest Proposal, a Juvenalian satire, where he proposed that the impoverished Irish can ease their economic troubles by selling their children to rich English aristocrats for food.

Several centuries later, in Boise, a similar modest proposal to allow Professors to own guns has been penned.

When Davos wasn't magical

When we think of Davos, the city atop the regal Swiss Alps, we think of glamor, money, and of a center where the world's richest gather together to decide the economic fates of the multitude.

From the Davos economic forums emerge new labor laws and new ways to make productivity the center of our lives. 

But if we think of Davos in the context of the setting of Thomas Mann's 1924 epic novel, The Magic Mountain Der Zauberberg), we would get a different picture of Davos.

In Mann's novel, Davos is home to The Schatzalp, a "luxurious" sanatorium to which Hans Castorp, the hero, travels to visit his sick cousin. Instead of three weeks, Castorp ends up spending seven years in The Schatzalp.

No sooner than Castorp arrives, he falls ill and can't leave. The doctors collude with the hospital administration to prolong Castorp's stay. In fact whoever comes to the sanitorium, sickened by the pressures and drudgeries of modern, workaday, bourgeoisie life, doesn't want to leave, because the ethos of The Schatzalp is anti-bourgeois.

The doctors of The Schatzalp believe that the interest of culture and life at large will not be served if modern man devoted all his time and energy to mindless office work. Castorp is plunged into a culture of botany, extravagant meals, love affairs, walks in the woods, philosophical discussions, the arts, opera, and the goal is to render him unfit for the world of office work. 

I wonder if the pilgrims of today's Davos, who epitomize both 21st century ethos of capitalism and bourgeois values, are aware of this piece of Davos' literary history. 

A bit of the fictional Davos can be found here.

Neighbors from hell

Humans are neighbors from hell. Not only are humans unable to share the planet responsibly with their fellow species, but they are also agents of the planet's imminent destruction.

Such is the claim made by Elizabeth Kolbert in her new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. 

An asteroid collided with the earth and dinosaurs perished 61 million geological years ago. That was the fifth extinction the planet had suffered.

The agent of the planet's sixth extinction is man himself. 

The sixth extinction isn't one large mass extinction of a species in a single fell swoop. It's an ongoing series of extinctions of several crucial species, crucial for the maintenance of the earth's ecological integrity, that would add up to reach a tipping point of a grand scale of irrevocable demise of the planet's environment.

Hurricane Sandy is said to have had a more damaging impact on New York City because of the erosion of oyster beds from the shore lines of Greater New York. In an epiphanic piece, Paul Greenberg attributes the erosion to "400 years of poor behavior on the part of humans." 

Humans have chipped away steadily at the planet's ecological integrity over time. 

Kolbert scalds our "hegemonic ideology" of that "exalts short-term thinking and ignores the true long-term cost and consequences of the choices we’re making in industry, energy policy, agriculture, forestry and politics."

Two excellent reviews of the book can be found here and here.

India the ban-capital of the democratic world

My desire to read University of Chicago scholar Wendy Doniger's book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, has been aroused.

Why? Because it's now banned in India.

Penguin India recently caved in to the demands of a Hindu Right Wing activist, Dinanath Batra that all copies of the book be destroyed because it allegedly misrepresents Hinduism from a deeply salacious point of view.

To allay fears that India is going the way of Hindu fascism, Batra said that he is not against alternative perspectives, it's just that there should be "guidelines" for expressing dissent. The octogenarian RSS is not aware, as so many of the old, semi-literate fogies of Indian politics and the Indian religious establishment are, that alternative and dissent mean flagration of "guidelines". 

Whether or not Hinduism has the DNA of real "dirty" sex embedded in it or not is moot; what's lamentable, as activist Arundhati Roy observes, is the fact that free speech has been censored in a country that prides itself on being the world's most populous democracy.

The censorship of the book comes in the heels of earlier censorships of books with religious and cultural content, like Joseph Lelyveld's The Great Soul, a biography of Gandhi. Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, who is poised to be India's next Premier, personally campaigned for a banning of the book because it had allegedly portrayed Gandhi as a "homosexual". Modi had also asked for a national ban of the book.

Two other books that have been banned in India are: Jitendra Bhargava's The Descent of Air India, and Tamal Bandophadyay's Sahara, The Untold Story.

Bhargava's book doesn't have any religious content, but it takes to task the dealings and the abuse of power of former aviation minister Praful Patel. Patel is accused of ruining the once-significant national carrier Air India.

Neither of these books have been banned, but both Patel and Subrata Roy, founder of Sahara Pariwar, the unscrupulous Indian conglomerate with holdings in every business imaginable, have slapped defamation suits worth crores of rupees in Indian courts. The defendants don't want to fight their battles in Indian courts when the plaintiffs are powerful and can bribe their way around the judiciary.

A timely reminder that freedom of speech is restricted in India and that citizens are not free to speak inconvenient truths or express opinions that unsettle the powers.

Cold residues in a hot. flat world

Remember what Thomas Friedman, one of globalization's ardent evangelists, said of war in a flattening world?

In The World is Flat, Friedman had blithely observed that nations will not go to war if what's at stake is the disruption of the global supply chain within which nations were (profitably) ensconced.

While Russia and America didn't quite go to war over the disruption of a supply of the Greek Yogurt Chobani to American athletes in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, they went into a bit of a cold war.

Russia wouldn't allow Chobani to enter Russia because of a controversy over proper custom certifications of dairy products. America has relented and Chobani has decided to donate the yogurt intended for Olympics.

Two cardinal tenets of the flat world have been challenged in the Chobani-war: Nations do have power over corporations and old Cold War enemies fight on quietly against the backdrop of a hot, flat world and corporations are a site for the proxy war.

Blaming Mexicans mex (me) sic

Something in this particular narrative of heroin overdose-related deaths in American small towns (and I believe there is a narrative pattern), disturbed me.

The story presents a black and white picture of an innocent (the catch word is "unsuspecting") small, "tightly-knit" community in, all white and all cute, invaded by the dark forces of evil, embodied by Mexican drug dealers, who easily cross borders and through an informal global supply chain, and sell poison to little children at prices below the market rate (cheap).

The borderlessness, the easy access to outsiders, the contact between evil marauders and innocent white cherubs, puts a dampener on globalization. A fundamental tenet of globalization is the opening up of borders, literally and metaphorically and even metaphysically. But, as stories like these, evidence, with goods and capital, bad things too will flow as a result of the world gradually but surely integrates. 

When globalization benefits a community, then the credit goes to it and by default almost to the American faith in the beauty of the free-market economy. However, when globalization hurts a community, especially an American community, then the blame falls, not on the impersonal forces of globalization, but on the Mexico's, the China's and the Africa's. Many of the disease-producing agents are said to arrive because of more facile contact with Africa. The fish we consume, injects mercury into our blood stream because they come from China's highly polluted rivers. 

When American lives are destabilized by globalization, then globalization remains not so impersonal, but acquires specific names, faces and identities, calculated to produce, it seems the kind of xenophobia that we saw in the reaction to the Superbowl Coca Cola ad.

The reaction to the Coca Cola ad did not take place in a vacuum, but in the context of a shrill, jingoism-laden discourse that is churning at this moment in this nation, the most ardent of the champions of globalization when it happens elsewhere.

Regarding the death due to heroine overdose in the small towns of America: Shouldn't we first check out the correlation between the cultures and opportunities in these locales and the deaths? A vast majority of the victims of heroin overdose are young and white. Instead of correlating the heroin with the lives of those who are compelled to consume them, a neat correlation is made between heroin and its Mexican suppliers.

Why?

In connection with the death of 21 year old Alysa Ivy in Hudson, Wisconsin, it's said:

In the wake of the prescription painkiller epidemic, heroin, much of it Mexican, has wormed its way into unsuspecting communities far from the Southwestern border as a cheaper and often more easily obtained alternative.

"Unsuspecting communities"? Were the unsuspecting and innocent of the world folks of these communities deceived into taking heroin when they thought they were consuming kale?

The new imperialist in town

China!

And the new imperialist has no civilizing mission at stake unlike previous colonizers from Europe, and their American progenies. China only lends capital, invests and buys up, without imposing values of democracy or freedom or human rights.

While the emperor wears new clothes, the victims of imperialism pretty much remains the same--Africa.

Better to be a riotous pussy than a monologuing vagina

The absolutely witty and intelligent and very brave, Russian renegade rock band, Pussy Riots on The Stephen Colbert show:

The Colbert Report and Pussy Riots Part 1

The Colbert Report Part 2

The sad state of Detroit

Where was I when the Twin Towers fell in New York City?

Detroit; not in the city of Detroit, but in Metro Detroit. I had a brief stint as the Director of the Writing Center at the University of Detroit Mercy, in inner city Detroit.

When I took up a teaching job in an University in the plush demesnes of the cities of Rochester Hills and Auburn Hills, I spent a summer teaching a class to first-generation college goers from Detroit's inner cities.

University of Detroit Mercy was less like a college campus and more like a gated community with a degree of security at the gates that would put the security measures of an Institution in post-9/11 New York City, to shame. We were advised never to step out of campus, even if for lunch. There was nothing to step out to, as I found out. The streets were empty (which is a byword for "danger"), unkempt (sporadic garbage collection), stores and ramshackle houses lay abandoned, in ruins or were boarded up.

Along both sides of Jefferson Avenue, known as a scenic drive, would be more of the same: stores that were boarded up and side walks sprouting weeds. The one structure that stood beautifully was Fox Theatre, but the area surrounding Fox Theatre was in disrepair. 8 Miles road, made (in)famous by Detroit's native son, Eminem, was a replica of what the eponymously titled movie said it was--pretty run down.

My experience of Detroit was limited, but then again, the city was discussed only as a negative space, to be rescued, despaired about or avoided. Overt and covert expressions of anti-Detroit sentiments hovered in the periphery of my consciousness.

Detroit was a city that was dangerous, Detroit was a city that was dangerous because it was Black, and Detroit was a city that has fallen into hard times and would gradually become untouchable if it wasn't emptied of Blacks. 

Having experienced Metro-Denver and Greater-New York--as urban geographies that centered around the commercial and cultural hub of cities, "Metro-Detroit" sounded like a misnomer to me. Detroit could have very well been named "Metro-Troy" or Metro-Madison Heights" (I lived in Madison Heights, which bordered the city of Troy, cities dominated by the auto companies).

Today, Detroit has become the center of a whole discourse on economic mudslide, depopulation, and a site for ruin-porn. Perhaps Detroit's all abysmality has reached a tipping point, else the Michigan Governor would not have come up with this plan for Detroit's economic revival.

Michigan's Governor is a Republican and a businessman; he wants to populate Detroit with 50,000 highly educated immigrants from China and India over the next 5 years. His conviction is that the flow of knowledge, cultural and real capital that will ensue as a result of immigration will stabilize Detroit into an economically viable city once again.

At first I thought this was a fictional plan, part of a story based in Detroit. Having bumped into the plot of Chang Rae Lee's On Such A Full Sea recently--a plot that plays with the consequences of populating a city with outsiders--I thought perhaps Detroit, would make for a good place in a story that's about socially engineered de- and re-populations.

Can a city, in which I have lived, albeit briefly and a bit cursorily, become so hopeless as to descend into the state of a metaphor?

Businessmen like Snyder (the case of Michael Bloomberg, the visionary Mayor of New York City for 12 years, is different as he's a rarity), tend to see complex organisms like cities like corporations; while an infusion of high calibre knowledge-workers can resurrect a struggling corporation with new life, the same can't be foretold of a city or a nation, at least not in a mere five years.

A New York Times Editorial reasonably scolds the plan as disrespectful and accuses the Governor of treating the city as a blank slate upon which a rebuilding experiment can be launched. 

Where do the native Detroiters fit in this picture of rebuilding? The Blacks don't figure at all. It seems like yet another plot (not a fictional one) is being hatched to dislocate the Blacks from a city which they have taken to be their own since the time of its glory days as a "motor city."

The thoughts of a plot to dispossess natives brings me back to my tangential experience of Detroit's inner city through the kids I taught. Lovely kids, as I remember them taking my class seriously and laughing and sharing ideas and a hope that they would in the near future be going to college.

I feel sad.

P.S. just read that the idea to revive Detroit through repopulating it with immigrants, belongs to Michael Bloomberg. Last year Mayor Bloomberg had suggested the following on Meet the Press: That all immigrants be allowed to come into the U.S. under the condition that they reside in Detroit for a minimum of 10 years. He was criticized as a fascist, because repopulation has a fascistic stink.

The fill-cities-with-immigrants ploy is taken up seriously, especially by Rust-Belt cities like St Louis and Dayton, which are losing populations because of the recession.

The Ascent of the tolerant man

Philosopher Simon Critchley's piece on the philosopher/scientist/literateur Jacob Bronowski's 1973 BBC classic, Ascent of Man, is not only timely, but also makes me take a trip down memory lane.

I remember being riveted to the television on Wednesday evenings every week, waiting for the Polish Jewish British Professor (based in San Diego, California) to appear on the screen and for an hour dive into a narrative of the evolution of human civilization.

Television-watching in India in those days was a dour black and white experience, both in terms of color and content, so any program bearing a non-Indian stamp on it would be welcome for us children.

These days I'm interested in narratives of globalization and have been cruising through Thomas Friedman's paean to the all round "flattening" of the world in The World is Flat. I'm particularly interested in figuring out who do we need to be or become, and what values should we endow ourselves with, in order to qualify as the citizens of a "flat world."

Though Dr. Bronowski gave his views on science, religion and civilization in an era when the word "global" wasn't a known term, yet Critchley's reintroduction of the man and my memory of what he said of the trajectory of global civilization, tells me that the Doctor would have made an excellent citizen of today's globalizing world. In fact he would have made a better candidate for citizenship of a globalizing world than many of our eminent contemporaries, who believe they know precisely what it means to be a global citizen (become "creative" by harnessing the constellation of all of the latest technologies).

As Critchley reminds us, Bronowski had espoused the value of uncertainty, humility and tolerance in our quest for knowing:

For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call “a play of tolerance,” whether in science, literature, politics or religion. As he eloquently put it, “Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.” [...] The relationship between humans and nature and humans and other humans can take place only within a certain play of tolerance. Insisting on certainty, by contrast, leads ineluctably to arrogance and dogma based on ignorance.

Embrace your inner bot

The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT, predicts that the future of knowledge work would be largely owned by computers. 

According to the authors, computers would be able to perform increasingly complex parts of cognitive jobs like diagnosing diseasing, picking stocks and granting parole.

Is this something we should worry about?

NYTimes columnist, David Brooks says, we should worry about the future computer displacing the "average" skill-holder, whom he describe in terms of the "middle distance runner." A "middle distance runner" is the worker who regurgitates yesterday's news in language that's comprehensive and length that's graspable, but does nothing more.

However, it's the "creative" sort whom the smart computer will not be able to displace unless the smart computer develops emotive traits and a "heart". Brooks describes the new age creativity brilliantly:

Creativity can be described as the ability to grasp the essence of one thing, and then the essence of some very different thing, and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.

Thomas Friedman has some acute observations on the book here, and the authors' interview is here.

No(r)way

Since I'm in a Scandinavian mode these days (having raised a toast to Sweden in my last post), I thought of mentioning Norwegian novelist, Karl Ove Knausgaard's three-part memoir, My Struggle.

The memoir challenges a myth that there is no suffering in Norway. 

Knausgaard, according Gary Shteyngart, humor writer and self-professed lover of all stories that originate from or resolve in suffering (because he grew up in Bolshevik Russia), is a living proof that Norwegians suffer too, and quite acutely to boot.

Here is a review of Knausgaard's memoir.