Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Murder As Amusement For Children
My holy of holies is the human body, health. . . and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence. . . .
— Anton Chekhov, Letter to Alexei Pleshcheev
Since not all my readers get to movies on a regular basis and many of them will have avoided this one thinking it’s for children, herewith a brief description of the movie that will inform the reader and spare the curious of the need to pay money to see it.
The movie is a story of girl meets boy through a lottery and after a lot of folderol, girl gets boy. It is a wonderful story and that is why it made more than $155 million the weekend it opened. The movie is called “The Hunger Games.” The country in which all the action takes place is the capital city called Panem. Its wealthy inhabitants rule the impoverished people living in 12 Districts that once revolted against the capital and were defeated. To remind inhabitants of their subjugation, the capital conducts a yearly lottery in which a boy and a girl from each district are selected to participate in something called a “Hunger Game” put on by Panem’s rulers. The game takes place in forests in Panem and the goal of the game is for the children to find and kill each other. The last child to remain alive is the winner.
The 24 lottery winners are brought to the capital in preparation for the game. Each pair is placed in a beautiful suite and served great food and taught to ingratiate themselves with the sponsors of the game although why any of them would care what the sponsors think of them since all but one of them will soon be dead, is a mystery. In addition each of the children is introduced to a bloodthirsty audience in a television game show setting and questioned by a man who is modeled after actual games show hosts who are obnoxious in both appearance and demeanor. He asks the children the sort of vacuous questions asked on such shows and the audience hoots and hollers at the responses making some children really uncomfortable although not as uncomfortable as they will be when they are being killed (or as some viewers will be when watching the action.)
When at last the moment comes for the game to begin, the children are lined up and as the game begins, most of them rush forward towards some sort of goal and right then and there several children are killed by their fellow participants. That is quite exciting. Each time a child is killed a canon goes off thus enabling the not yet dead to figure out how many participants remain to be murdered.
As readers can figure out from the foregoing description, this has all the makings of a love story and the children responsible for that are the boy and girl from District 12. Her name is Katniss and his name is Peeta. It becomes clear before the game begins that he is sweet on her and during the game it becomes clear that she is sweet on him. Since Katniss and Peeta are in love the saddest thing that one thinks could happen to them is that one of them gets murdered which is, of course, what is certainly going to happen because those are the rules. Katniss spends her time in the woods hoping not to be killed and, when Peeta is injured but not killed, tenderly tending to him rather than killing him. The viewer cannot help but like the two children and applaud their efforts to survive so that one of them can return to District 12 as a hero but the viewer doesn’t know how the love part can have a happy ending since happy endings in love stories involve two people.
After 21 children have been murdered Peeta and Katniss end up trying to kill the only other child still living. To accomplish that, Katniss pulls out her bow and shoots the child who falls down torn limb from limb by ferocious beasts. That leaves Katniss and Peeta who are in love but know that the rules require one of them to kill the other. Just as they are gazing at each other sadly, a voice announces that the rules of the game have been changed and two survivors will be permitted. Peeta and Katniss embrace. Then the voice is heard again and says only one survivor will be permitted after all. At that point Peeta and Katniss start to eat poisonous berries so there will be no survivors thus turning the tables on the game’s organizers. The games’ organizers realize they have been outsmarted and say there will be two survivors after all and so Peeta and Katniss go back to District 12 and everyone is proud of them and they presumably live happily ever after.
There you have it and there’s no reason for you or your children to go see the movie. Just read them this column. It’s far less offensive than the movie.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Stripping and Searching
Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child
Proverb
Except for Clarence Thomas, things are not nearly as bleak as commentators would have had us believe after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in the recent case of Florence v. County of Burlington. Strip searches, some feared, would run wild.
Albert Florence had received and paid a fine for a traffic offense some years prior to the incident that gave rise to the case that went before the Court. When his wife was stopped for speeding and he was in the car, his identification was checked and through a computer error the officer was led to believe Albert had an unpaid fine that had, in fact, been paid years earlier. Since it appeared to be unpaid, he was taken to the Burlington County Detention Center where he was forced to shower with a delousing agent and carefully examined as he disrobed prior to showering and again while nude. Subsequently he was transferred to the Essex County Correctional Facility and, since the Essex County folk lacked confidence in the Burlington folks’ strip search and showering admission procedures, he was strip-searched a second time. Following his release, Albert sued, among others, the government entities that ran the jails.
The Federal District Court that first heard the case entered a summary judgment in Albert’s favor, holding that strip-searching a “nonindictable offender” without reasonable suspicion deprived him of his Fourth Amendment right to be protected from an unreasonable search. The Obama administration was distressed at this holding and joined the defendants in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the actions of the jailers in subjecting Albert to two strip searches. The Supreme Court sided with the administration and held that the strip searches were just fine. Since the Court has now opened the door wide to strip searches of everyone admitted to a jail for whatever reason there are some who wonder if there are any arenas in which strip searches would be frowned upon by the conservative majority on the court that dislikes government intrusion in private lives except when it doesn’t. The historical answer is there is one sacred area-the school. We learn that from a case that involved then-13-year old Savana Redding, Safford Unified School Dist. #1 v. Redding.
Savana attended a school that has a zero tolerance for drugs. In 2003 a classmate told school officials that Savana had proscribed drugs in her possession. Without calling her parents, the school officials did what any reasonable school official would do under those circumstances. They ordered Savana to remove her outer garments and pull out her underwear to see if she was concealing drugs in her private parts, thus “exposing her breasts and pelvic area to some degree” as Justice Souter who wrote the majority opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court explained. In discussing whether the search was reasonable Justice Souter said: “Here, the content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion. Wilson [the school official] knew beforehand that the pills were prescription-strength ibuprofen and over-the-counter naproxen, common pain relievers equivalent to two Advil, or one Aleve. He must have been aware of the nature and limited threat of the specific drugs he was searching for, and while just about anything can be taken in quantities that will do real harm, Wilson had no reason to suspect that large amounts of the drugs were being passed around, or that individual students were receiving great numbers of pills. . . . “In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.” The opinion in that case was, insofar as strip searches were concerned, eight opposed and one in favor.
Clarence Thomas, whose function on the Court is to arrive at such bizarre conclusions that they make his conservative colleagues seem to speak with the voice of reason, applauded strip searches. He lamented the fact that his colleagues did not apply the common-law view that “parents delegate to teachers their authority to discipline and maintain order,” a principal known as “in loco parentis.” When that rule was applied, he happily observed, parents transferred to teachers the authority to “command obedience, to control stubbornness, to quicken diligence, and to reform bad habits” a quotation from the 1837 North Carolina Supreme Court decision of State v. Pendergrass. In addition to looking to that case for support, he also cited, a 1765 treatise by W. Blackstone and an 1873 treatise by J. Kent. He observed that if the reasoning of these old authorities had been accepted by his colleagues, strip searches of school children would be fine. Since parents are not restricted by the Fourth Amendment, teachers and other school officials would not be restricted by that Amendment and would have “almost complete discretion to establish and enforce the rules they [believe] necessary to maintain control over their classrooms.” To that one can only say Wow!! and perhaps express gratitude that he’s a Justice and not a school administrator. On the other hand. . . .
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Heart Transplants
“How about my heart?” asked the Tin Woodman.
“Why as for that,” answered Oz, “I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.”
— L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
New hearts are not always what they are cracked up to be. Compare the Tin Woodman from the Land of Oz with Dick Cheney from Wyoming.
Followers of such things know that through a series of mishaps the Tin Woodman had gone from being a human being to being a tin woodman. He wanted nothing more than a new heart and when the Tin Woodman, Dorothy and his other companions met the Wizard of Oz who was known as “Oz” he was given a new heart by Oz. As the story goes, “Oz cut a small hole in the Tin Woodman’s breast and then, “going to a chest of drawers, he took out a pretty heart, made entirely of silk and stuffed with sawdust. ‘Isn’t it a beauty’ he asked. ‘It is, indeed,’ replied the Woodman, who was greatly pleased. ‘But is it a kind heart?’ ‘Oh very!’ answered Oz. He put the heart in the Woodman’s breast and then replaced the square of tin, soldering it neatly together where it had been cut. ‘There,’ said he, ‘now you have a heart that any man might be proud of.’” As it turns out, the world was less fortunate when Dick Cheney got a new heart.
The heart Mr. Cheney got was clearly not a kind heart and as we soon learned, there was no difference between Dick Cheney with the old heart and Dick Cheney with the new heart. (Although the recipient of a new heart, like the Tin Woodman, Mr. Cheney was more like the Wizard of Oz who the residents of Oz believed could accomplish great feats while working behind a screen without those who came in contact with him knowing that he was only a common man. When finally exposed as a fraud to Dorothy and her companions, Oz asked them not to let anyone know he was a fake. Dorothy asked him “Doesn’t anyone else know you’re a humbug?” He replied: “No one knows it but you four-and myself. I have fooled everyone so long that I thought I should never be found out. . . . Usually I will not see even my subjects, and so they believe I am something terrible.” Of course Mr. Cheney was, as we all know, a humbug and something terrible. But back to his heart.)
On March 24th we learned that Mr. Cheney had gotten a new heart. We learned that he had been waiting for 20 months to get his new heart but had not been convinced he wanted it until one became available. He did not go to the Wizard of Oz for his new heart but to Jonathan S. Reiner, a heart transplant surgeon. The operation lasted from 10 AM on a Saturday until 5 PM. It took a great deal longer than the Tin Woodman’s surgery since the heart that was selected was somewhat more complex than the silk heart stuffed with sawdust that the Tin Woodman received. Many of those who learned of Mr. Cheney’s new heart entertained hope that Mr. Cheney would be transformed from the mean, constitutionally infirm vice president he had been while serving as a malevolent vice president and a man behind the screen under George W. Bush. Those who held out such hopes were in for a bitter disappointment. His new heart gives him no greater understanding of what made this country great than he had with his old heart. He demonstrated that on April 14th.
On that day, Mr. Cheney spoke for more than an hour to the Wyoming Republican Party state convention. In the course of his remarks he said that Barak Obama had been “an unmitigated disaster to the country” forgetting apparently that it was he and his boss who had lied in order to justify invading Iraq, a decision that ended up in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, thousands of U.S. troops and devastating injuries suffered by many thousands of American troops and Iraqi citizens. When the Bush administration left office the economy was an unmitigated disaster being in free fall and losing 750,000 jobs a month. Mr. Cheney showed a country how unimportant the protection of human rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution were if they seemed irrelevant to those running the country. He again defended water boarding that was extensively employed while he was in office. As he proudly said: “It produced a wealth of information. Don’t let anybody tell you the enhanced interrogation program didn’t work. It did.” According to reports that comment got him the biggest round of applause from those in attendance none of whom, it is safe to say, had ever enjoyed the experience. All that just goes to show that a new heart is no guarantee that its recipient will become a better person, even if the new heart is of a higher quality than that received by the Tin Woodman. A pity that.