I had planned to post most of this yesterday, but, well, I didn't. So today it's two for the price of one, and a more random assortment of half-chewed thoughts you'll never find.
And so it begins. After four years of coursework, two years of studying for and taking comprehensive exams, and one year of planning and proposing, I just wrote the first 150 words of my dissertation, with the goal of completing this section — my discussion of Tony Kushner — by June 20. Today I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by the immensity of the project, which, over the next two years, will likely swell from 150 words to well over 100,000. But I've started. I'm now officially "writing" my dissertation. Lord help me.
The Prison Industry. I begin most mornings by skimming through some favorite news sites, most of which are linked over there to the right. While clicking headlines at Common Dreams, I stumbled into this article, which is just head-shaking. Latest statistics reveal that 2,019,234 Americans now live behind bars. I've come to expect figures like this — America has, after all, been battling for some time now with Russia for the honor of locking up the largest percentage of its population — but this article digs a bit deeper. Some random samples:
On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany. Maryland has more citizens in prison and jail (an estimated 35,200) than all of Canada (31,600), though Canada's population is six times greater.
The Justice Department reports that one in eight black men in their 20s and early 30s were behind bars last year, compared with one in 63 white men. A black man has a one-in-three chance of going to prison, the department says. For black male high school dropouts, Western says, the numbers are higher: 41 percent of black dropouts between ages 22 and 30 were locked up in 1999.
In 1980, says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project in Washington, about 40,000 Americans were locked up solely for drug offenses. Now the number is 450,000, three-fourths of them black or Hispanic, although drug use is no higher in those groups than among whites.
Honesty Matters. This blog at The Whiskey Bar compiles an interesting collection of quotations (all carefully cited) that illustrate nicely the administration's changing attitudes toward Iraq's WMD.
Honesty Matters, Part 2.
And Violence Matters, Too. "The Messenger Kills" from Mike Ward of PopMatters is the best piece I've read in weeks. Unfortunately, it's nearly 3,000 words, which means that it likely won't be read in full by even the most dedicated and responsible of Web and blog browsers. Which is a shame because it pulls together so many of the seemingly random thoughts that have been bouncing around in my brain for the last few months. Drawing on the writings of Gore Vidal and the examples of 9/11, Oklahoma City, and Iraq, Ward argues (and quite convincingly for only 3,000 words) that violence has become a de facto method of global communication for "good" Americans and "evil" terrorists alike and that it not only leads inevitably to senseless death and more violence, but it also fails to achieve its stated goal: communication. Most damning of all, Ward writes, is that we've come to accept this as our only option — as if violence were the "inevitable" product of modern politics or human nature or "Man's fallen condition" or predestination or (choose your own word for "fate").
Absent any sense of clarity regarding who constitutes "good" and who constitutes "evil" in the Great Game of war and terrorism, violence now registers as an act of nature — state-sponsored violence much more apocalyptically so. It swoops over, down, and upon the unsuspecting, it wipes out the lives and livelihoods of those who wish nothing more than a sustainable existence for themselves and their families. Because it is prohibited to ask why this must be so, state-sponsored violence comes to seem as arbitrary as the downhill flow of magma from an exploding volcano, and leaves similarly blighted wastelands in its wake.
Read the whole article. It's worth your time.
On the Lighter Side. And because I'm not nearly so cynical or dour as this blog might lead you to believe:
Answer: "I jacked some guy for his bling."
Question: What did my wife say when I asked her where she got that 75 cents?
(And I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. Right there in the entrance to Wal-Mart, smack dab in front of the Dr. Thunder machine.)
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