Category Archives: Current Affairs

Fast-Roping 101

Current Affairs, Politics, War

We got back from the Smoke Creek late Tuesday only to see “Israel attacks flotilla”. Having had no news for three days, I don’t have a good picture of what happened except even India is pissed.1 It is as if Israel has been taken over by the Tea Bag Party. Andrew Sullivan, in a blog post entitled The Capitan Speaks,  quotes and comments on an article in Haaretz.Com.

An interesting account:

“I was the second to be lowered in by rope,” said Captain R. “My comrade who had already been dropped in was surrounded by a bunch of people. It started off as a one-on-one fight, but then more and more people started jumping us. I had to fight against quite a few terrorists who
were armed with knives and batons.”

I note two things. It began with a one-on-one fight. This was not a lynch mob primed to kill. It was a reaction that spread as more soldiers arrived. The second thing I note is that the captain describes the passengers as “terrorists.”

This picture, from the Center for a New American Security from where I blatantly ripped it off, is labeled Too Soon? and filed under Israel. 

 

Helos

1. We were in India at the camel festival at Pushkar when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995. The Indian government shut everything down and declared a national couple of days of morning. They were that pro-Israel. 

Adrian Newey and the theory of “everything is progressive”

Cars, Current Affairs, Sports

General Grant once said War is progressive, when he was accused of not following the old rules faithfully enough. I will go a step further and say Everything is progressive. Everything is built on the past which was, of course, built on its past. Especially in sports which are – when you think about it – war with a better set of rules.

Part of  Everything is progressive. is that nobody stays on top for long. Think football. Every decade, there is a Team of the Decade, but then new coaches come along and build on what was the newest latest thing but no longer is. For example, the San Francisco 49ers' Bill Walsh. He was a genius and he changed professional football, but, after a while, his opponents began to understand what he was doing, then how to stop him and then incorporate what he was doing and then build on it.

Like football, Formula One Racing is a team sport, and like football, a team is strong for a while, then another team comes along and replaces it. Except for teams that have Adrian Newey. Newey is an racecar engineer specializing in aerodynamics.
When he worked on CART cars in the United States he took Al Unser and then, Bobby Rahal to championships in the 1980s. In the 90s, he worked for Williams in Formula One and took them to several championships. Then he moved to McLaren F1 and they won. Now he is at Red Bull as the technical director and they are the fastest car, by far, this year.

Seeing “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and thinking about New Stories

Current Affairs, Film, Television

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A couple of nights ago, we saw "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" with Laura Atkins and Neil. It is a Swedish movie with lots of subtitles. It is a hack story with lots of gore, a horrific rape scene – two rape scenes, I guess, depending on how you count them – and shot in Rembrandt lighting minus two f stops. I heartily recommend it.

It got me thinking. Why is this a hack story? because I have seen it before? Several times?  This is a story of Buffy Summers  and River Tam, it is the story of any woman in any Luc Besson film. Or, as far as that goes, like the Marine Lioness Program . Then I started thinking What if it isn't a hack story, but a new female archetype?

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It is an archetype of a young woman as the most powerful person in the
Universe of the story.

Buffy Summers is all that is between Sunnydale and the hoard of
Vampires that will destroy the world. There are men who, maybe, can help her – often
not very well, atleast, compared to her – but she is the only one that can save the world. The men are there to hold the structure, but Buffy holds the power.

Part of the Buffy story is that she is both damaged and vulnerable and River Tam even more so. Mathilda, in Luc Besson's The Professional is incredibly vulnerable and damaged but, in the end, she is more powerful than Leon, her protector.

I think that this is a new myth. A New Story. Granted, my education in myths is preeeety shaky, but I can't think of a Grimm's Tale or a Greek Myth where the female is young, vulnerable, and straight up, kickass, powerful.

And, like any archetype, it is coming out in stories because it exists in the real world. One place, for sure, the archetype is starting to manifest itself is the Marines Lioness Program. The Marines are now training women to go on patrols because they can interact with the local women in Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, they can go where the men can't. They have power the men don't.



God, Sex, and Race: how swearing has changed

Americana, Current Affairs, Evolution, Politics, Religion

From everything that I have read on the life and times around 1600 – which is not very much, excluding the 1632verse – using God’s name in vain was a big deal. I mean, a really big deal. People didn’t do it. When I read that, it seems so strange that I adjust the words to mean that it was probably like saying fuck today.

But, now that I have really thought about it, I am convinced that people didn’t do it. It was taboo.

By the middle of the 19th, century, people did take the Lord’s name in vain, people might say damn you, but sex was taboo. Even indirect words like bastard or son of a bitch were considered heavy duty. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was considered a great book for it’s accurate depiction of Civil War combat and it does not have any sexual swearing in it – I have not read it in more than 50 years so it is possible I might have forgot them, but I don’t think so. I don’t think fuck – or, to push the limit, cunt –  is to be found in Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not because they were effete – they were anything but – but because those words really were taboo.

Now, we use sex words. Michele and I are watching HBO’s Pacific and they use fuck all the time. But we don’t use disparaging words about race. As close as a white person gets to using the N word is to say the N word. It has become taboo.

The vice-president says This is a big fucking deal!  and nobody really notices. Senator George Allen, during his 2006 re-election campaign, calls somebody a Macaca, and he is political history. No reprieve.

Here is a test:

Imagine you have an eleven year old daughter; she comes home from school and says Jane, that fucker, lied about me to the teacher…. Depending on alot of things: you might tell her that If you say that again you will go to your room for a timeout; admonish her saying Nice people don’t talk that way; just laugh, knowing she wouldn’t say that in front of your mother and she was doing it for shock value for you only.

Now imagine she comes home and says Jane, that nigger, lied about me to the teacher… Among other things, you would probably consider pulling her out of school and putting her in a different school. I know I would and – I have to admit – I am sort of shocked about that.