The Security Apparatus Loves Brain Damage

Berkeleyside has an interesting article about an exhibit about the history of movies in Berkeley.  The security apparatus bizarrely loves promoting brain damage on high school and college campuses, but the best amenity on the Berkeley campus was the university art museum's Pacific Film Archive.  It alone had better film programming than anything available in the DC area, but that's not surprising given that this area is still kind of a cultural wasteland.  Their film programs were academic and exhaustive so they would show literally every movie ever made by a director (I don't know how people keep all of those Ozu "Late Spring," "Early Summer," "End of Summer" movies straight).  One time they had a Terrance Davies series (which at the time was only four or five feature films and a movie made up of short films).  Before a screening in front of about ten grungy grad students on a random Wednesday night in Berkeley, Davies popped out unannounced and proceeded to deliver a rambling anecdote about how his earliest memory was of his alcoholic, psychotic father throwing one of his older siblings out of a second story window.  He then said, "As for the movie you're about to see ("The Neon Bible" bizarrely starring Dennis Leary), to be honest I wasn't really able to carry it off, but I learned enough that I could do a much better job with "The House of Mirth."  Enjoy!"  And with that he left and probably proceeded to get drunk somewhere.  Then there was the screening in a Chaplin series that the extremely old son of Chaplin's longtime cameraman Rollie Totheroh attended along with a grandson and some great-grandchildren.  They raucously cheered every time Rollie's name appeared in the credits.

Oh, but UVa has football players like Adrian Burnim and Anthony Poindexter assaulting people on and off the field, so that makes the security apparatus happy.

The Security Apparatus Loves Anti-Intellectualism and White Supremacy

When we were in high school, I and my siblings had to go to our local LDS church for religious indoctrination at 6 am every single school day (in addition, of course, to the required 3 hours of church on Sundays plus various activities and "firesides" we had to go to throughout the week).  Not even fundamentalist Christians or even Mennonites did such a thing.  And what did we learn?  Well, it was ostensibly instruction on the LDS "standard works" - Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price - but according to the church the real purpose was to help impressionable young people "feel the spirit," i.e. have emotional experiences that would tie them to the church and cause them to go to church schools such as BYU, go on missions, get married in exclusionary LDS temples, and pay 10% of their income to the church in tithes for life.

The actual content was incredibly impoverished and often offensive.  In my freshman year, we were supposed to study the Old Testament in the poorly-translated King James Version as a means of supporting the validity of the LDS church's truth claims.  Even active LDS members acknowledge that this kind of proof-texting is incredibly anachronistic and misleading.  It didn't help that we also read Joseph Smith's risible and self-promoting "translation" and "correction" of ancient texts that he could not read.  Of course, such ignorance also did not stop him from hilariously mistranslating Egyptian hieroglyphics (on papyri that he bought from a traveling mummy salesman) that were ordinary funerary inscriptions and claiming that the writings came directly from the hand of the patriarch Abraham.

Of course, the security apparatus was always terrified of my desire to learn so they pulled some bizarre stunt where they claimed that our teacher died.  I thought the guy was fine, unlike my senior year Book of Mormon teacher who literally told us every single day that he was incredibly special because he had served a mission in Ecuador and LDS president Spencer Kimball had said that the indigenous people of the region were supposedly the purest descendants of the mythical savage and wicked dark-skinned Lamanites who had exterminated their white, righteous, and civilized kinsmen at the conclusion of the Book of Mormon.  Of course, Kimball also claimed that Native children who were sent to live with suburban Mormon families literally had their skin turned whiter as divine reward for their righteousness in becoming culturally assimilated into white Mormon society.

Oh, and this guy was getting some kind of degree in education and told me that people at UVa were antichrists.

UVa Is Such a Joke

I went to UVa because it was cheap and I could pay for it myself, but as they say you get what you pay for.  When I was a freshman, I was forced to take an idiotic First-Year Seminar on "Community in America."  The professor was a stolid, non-intellectual type who specialized in colonial US history but almost in an antiquarian sense.  He was actually really impressed by the stereotypical overachieving UVa undergrad types - you know, dumb stuff like U Guides and living on the Lawn.

The seminar was an obvious setup designed to promote small-minded anti-intellectual boosterism and Babbitry in retaliation for my reasonable disdain for my parents' thoroughgoing bigotry and racism.  I had already read Faulkner, not to mention Sinclair Lewis, so I was reasonably unimpressed.  The only thing we read that was useful was Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," which had a similar pessimistic view of such environs.  We actually had to read and write an essay on Garrison Keillor's middlebrow fave Lake Wobegon Days.  My essay was characterized by Innes as an "evisceration," but he had to give me an A because it was completely accurate.  

The main thing I learned from the experience was to never get advice on course selection from a UVa professor.

Oh, and Innes's annoying daughter apparently has a high-level administrative position at UVa AND rides the horse at UVa football games.  What an incredibly stupid school!

The Security Apparatus Is Unbelievably Bigoted and Stupid

Because of anti-intellectual bigots like my mother, so much of this country doesn't have access to decent public education or public transportation or public health.

But we have the most overfunded military-intelligence complex in the world!  That's so much better than having the life expectancy or infant mortality or maternal mortality of a developed country.

The Security Apparatus Is Unbelievably Stupid and Bigoted

The state of Utah is notorious for shirking its ethical responsibility to provide a social safety net, instead directing people who should be eligible for assistance to the bigoted LDS church.  As ProPublica's Eli Hagar explained to NPR, people are forced to affirm that a thoroughly racist text that defames indigenous Americans as wicked and cursed is divine truth or face being homeless or going hungry.  He even explains the role of "bishop roulette" in this unprofessional and thoroughly patriarchal system.

HAGER: So in my ProPublica story, I highlighted the story of Danielle Bellamy. She's somebody who is not Mormon herself. And she's going through some serious health problems that have left her in the hospital for weeks at a time, and she's worried about being able to still afford her rent where she and her two daughters live. She tried applying for cash assistance from the state, but they denied her. And she was explicitly instructed by state caseworkers, she says, to go to the church instead. And she went to her local bishop for help. And that's when she was asked to read out loud from the Book of Mormon, watch Mormon videos and set a date to get baptized all in order to get help that she desperately needed to avoid becoming homeless.

KELLY: And, again, she's being asked to do all this. She's not Mormon, you said. Did she get any help?

HAGER: She did get some help from the church, but in her most recent attempt to get help, she was denied because she refused to get baptized as part of a faith that she is not part of.

KELLY: One big issue this raises is that, unlike the government, churches are often allowed to discriminate based on religion. Did your reporting indicate that that is happening in Utah?

HAGER: Correct. They are allowed to constitutionally. To be clear, the LDS church provides a tremendous amount of help to poor people and homeless people across Utah, across the country and really across the world. But there's a term in Utah called bishop roulette, which essentially means depending on the bishop where you happen to live, he might - it's always a man. He might be very generous with aid. Many are. But others might discriminate against, say, single mothers, you know, for having had sex out of wedlock or against LGBTQ people or simply against non-members of the church.

Theories that Probably Aren't True But Should Be

1.  "The Wizard of Oz" is an allegory for bimetallism and the gold standard.

2.  The movie version of "The Shining" is an allegory for the genocide of indigenous peoples of the Americas.

At least the theories seemed compelling when I first read them as a kid.

The Security Apparatus Loves Genocide

It's so inspiring to see that the parking lot of the former Spenger's Fish Grotto in my West Berkeley neighborhood will finally be returned to the indigenous Ohlone community.  As a child, I had to suffer in a thoroughly bigoted environment in which the material benefits of genocide were celebrated.  For example, my mother endlessly complained that she had been forced to contribute to society by supposedly "homesteading."  In reality, my grandfather, unlike my mother, worked hard, contributed to society, and was astute at business and knew that rich farmland in the Columbia Basin with access to water for irrigation was a good investment that bore little resemblance to sod farmers trying to homestead on the barren plains.  Of course, if my mother had even the most rudimentary knowledge of US history she would have realized how profoundly offensive her statements really were, given that the actual Homestead Act represented the massive redistribution of millions of acres of land that had been systematically dispossessed from indigenous peoples in campaigns of state-sponsored removal, extermination, and genocide.  

And my mother had the gall to complain that the real tragedy was that she wasn't given enough time to spend with her white supremacist youth group that systematically denigrated people of African and American ancestry as cursed!

Kennedy Center Honors

The latest group of Kennedy Center honorees has been announced, and the organizers somehow resisted the temptation to recognize yet another British rock star.  They finally got around to selecting Francis Ford Coppola, which seems overdue given that his more prolific peers Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg and even his less prolific protege George Lucas were honored a long time ago.  I read a very tedious online article about how it's somehow bad that dead rock stars like Jerry Garcia aren't honored as part of groups like the Grateful Dead, this despite the fact that the honors are never given posthumously.  The same article didn't have a problem with a building, in the case the Apollo Theater, being honored.  

It's a good thing that true architect of rock and roll Little Richard didn't live to see a building selected instead of him.   

The Security Apparatus Loves Abusing Students

It's tremendously appropriate that Anthony "Sexy Dex" Poindexter is co-defensive coordinator at Penn State.  After all, Dex is truly a worthy successor to Jerry Sandusky given his bizarre participation in a scheme concocted by UVa in which I was beaten and robbed for absolutely no reason.  At the time, I thought Poindexter and Adrian Burnim were taking "Nazi Germany" in summer school as a gut class - little did I know that they were using it as career guidance! 

Former Albermarle County Commonwealth Attorney's Jim Camblos last got attention for defending horrific murderer and sexual predator Jesse Matthew, so he continued to consort with horrible people.

The Security Apparatus Hates Public Health

One of the absolute dumbest things the security apparatus has done to me (and there are countless) is steal my air conditioner because, wait for it, I actually prefer to not destroy the environment and public health.

Leaving aside the bizarre notion of stealing my air conditioner on the hottest day of the summer if they claim it's so vital, it makes absolute no sense to use air conditioning.  People have been living in this area for thousands of years without it (of course, most of them were dispossessed of that land and exterminated by the state).  As the fine people of "The Atlantic" wrote when they were taking a break from properly decrying the horrific environmental evil of lawn mowing, fewer than 1% of US homes had ac in the 1940s, and my 1947 home does just fine without it.

Of course, they've now invented some nonsense about how humidity is bad for paint or some other stupidity to try to justify their addiction and decades of environmental destruction.  Why, my middle school never had air conditioning and I never saw any peeling paint even in the boys locker room! 

Trailblazers

It's so inspiring that Charlottesville is renaming elementary schools that had honored proponents of white supremacy and perpetrators of genocide.  Given my mother's adamant support of genocide, perhaps she'll get the hint and move to a more bigoted enclave such as Provo, Shenandoah County, or Couer d'Alene.

"Eight Is Enough" S4:E18 The Commitment

High school senior Tommy is obviously profoundly insane and believes that Mary's gorgeous med school classmate (played by Markie Post with late 70s Farrah-esque hair) has the hots for him.

The Security Apparatus Loves Schlock Rock

The security apparatus has always HATED that I like and sometimes appropriately reference critically acclaimed and socially relevant music from the likes of Public Enemy.  When I was in high school, they tried to express disdain for my superior sophistication by saying that someone had gone to a concert with them and embarrassed them by dancing in the parking lot afterward.  Of course, they completely failed to realize that the truly embarrassing part is that they had willingly gone to a concert by Billy Joel.  That's right, they honestly really liked the middlebrow "Piano Man" universally reviled by hipster critics as the worst musician ever: 

He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. Joel’s famous song “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”? Please. It never was rock ’n’ roll. Billy Joel’s music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: “Mock-Rock.”

Al Whited

My biggest accomplishment in college quiz bowl was helping to establish the Gordon Carper Lifetime Achievement Award when I was helping edit 1999 ACF Nationals.  I first suggested the idea of an award for contributions to academic competition to Andrew Yaphe, who of course was unimpressed.  I then mentioned it to Al Whited, and he got REALLY excited.  Apparently, he had been thinking of something similar and had it all mapped out - it should be named for Gordon Carper who would be the first recipient a la the Fermi Award.  I actually bothered to check with Dr. Carper to see if it was ok to name it for him, and he said, "Well, if you and your little friends want to name an award for me after all of these years then who am I to object?"  

Al Whited of course was a great guy and master storyteller who apparently singlehandedly wired pretty much the entire 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta for telecommunications.  They now appear to have a veterans committee selection each year, and Al would certainly be a worthy companion to his former Yellow Jacket teammate Jim Dendy.

It's Not Surprising He Ended Up at Bigot U

Another objectionable thing about Brent LaMar Top is that he used to harass me for not having interest in Boy Scouts because of my visual condition, unrevealed to me until I was in grad school at Berkeley, that made things such as tying knots essentially impossible.  Of course, Boy Scouts is so incredibly important to the LDS church and its young men that the church has completely severed all ties with Scouting and replaced it by all accounts with pretty much nothing (oh, and of course the church never supported Girl Scouts because the church has always been openly proud of treating women and girls as inferior and less important).  Top LDS church leaders didn't even bother to try to hide the fact that they ended their long relationship when Boy Scouts of America stopped actively discriminating against gay people.  Former car salesman turned prophet, seer, and revelator Russ Ballard tried to justify this obvious homophobia by saying, "The reality there is that we didn't really leave [Boy Scouts]; they kind of left us.  The direction they were going was not consistent to what we feel our youth need to have."

Of course, I'm sure ableist bigot Brent LaMar Top completely agrees.  After all, he chose to spend the last several decades at an institution notorious for literally torturing gay people.

It Didn't Happen Here

The security apparatus will always relentlessly defend that they helped my parents promote racism, white supremacy, genocide, sexism, and homophobia and punished me for not embracing their horrific views and practices.  One of their idiotic attempts at justification is that supposedly only bigots help others.  It's not remotely true and doesn't make a bit of sense, but they always assert that my parents paying 10% of their incomes and following an obvious con man and sexual predator in order to be assigned supposed friends with whom to do a lot of makework nonsense was and is a great thing.  The reality is that my parents always chose to live in the middle of nowhere and barely had neighbors let alone any semblance of a neighborhood so they were really just electing to associate with people with similar exclusionary beliefs that were appropriately rejected by at least 99.7% of the their community.  I guess I can kind of understand why they engaged in such nonsense when they were fresh off the boat from Provo, but it takes a special kind of bigotry and stupidity to persist in such antisocial behavior for decades.

Even worse is that conservative religious types such as my parents don't have any sense of actual community and the common good.  My parents chose to commute hours and hours to work each day so that they could live in a bigger house in a county with approximately 200,000 residents and absolutely no public transportation.  Thanks for the global warming!  And tens of millions of women in places like Utah and Idaho can't access basic health care because of the actions of people like my parents.  Talk about horrific mistreatment of young women!  The LDS church at one time even tried to maintain their own separate "church welfare" system because the geriatric archconservative patriarchy running the church thought that the New Deal was creeping socialism.  As a result, the actual state welfare system in Utah is so anemic that nonmembers with legitimate need are sometimes advised by state employees to get baptized in the LDS church to try to get assistance that way.  Of course, the church's welfare system, like its supposed "educational system" or pastoral counseling, is at best profoundly amateurish, relying on well-intentioned but untrained and unqualified volunteers with little oversight or transparency.

Instead of trying to convert infinitely more sophisticated and better educated Scandinavians by peddling a thoroughly racist hate text that justifies genocide of indigenous peoples, dopes like Brent LaMar Top (geez, he even has a stereotypical Utah/Idaho name) should have actually tried to learn that people who truly care about others pay taxes to provide a comprehensive social safety net available to everyone that includes quality public education, national health care, readily available public transportation, and appropriate assistance to those with needs both at home and abroad.  Perhaps people in the US would then enjoy the same quality of life as those in Denmark and Sweden.      

"Eight Is Enough" S3:E27 Marriage and Other Flights of Fancy Part 2

The single strangest "Eight Is Enough" episode, it includes only one Bradford (David), lots and lots of hang gliding, and a rivalry between a young hotshot glider and an older retired Air Force pilot who are never mentioned again in the series.  At least most of the first part episode not only had the Bradfords but the well-worn plot elements of David and Janet fighting about her career as a lawyer and Tom Bradford unknowingly promoting pornography (he finally gets a short story published, but it's in the Playboy stand-in "Man's Man Monthly").  I can't tell if the episode is supposed to be a backdoor pilot or if one of the producers really, really wanted to promote hang gliding as a sport.

"Eight Is Enough" S3 E19 Horror Story

The B plot of this episode where Nancy's blind date looks like a young Anthony Perkins and the power goes out during a storm has Tom Bradford set to debate some British expert on population control and family planning.  They get stuck in an elevator and Bradford wins their impromptu debate with his impassioned argument that Nicholas, his eighth child, could somehow "solve" the whole population problem.

In real life, Adam Rich, who played Nicholas, was an addict for most of his adolescence and adulthood and died at 54 from an accidental fentanyl overdose.

The British dude should demand a recount!