Eloquent Review of the Obama Speech

This says it all.



This, too, says it all:

The Crack in the Cosmic Cage

A few months ago, an excellent article in the New York Times discussed fear in children. Called Joy of Fright: Old Chillers That Should Scare (but Not Terrorize) the Kids, Wendell Jamieson observed the effect of 1940' fright films on his son Dean.

So for the last several weeks he and I have watched a series of clever horror movies from the 1940s, including a few exciting recent releases. I’m happy to report success. Dean has learned to allow his imagination to frighten him, and he doesn’t seem any the worse for wear.

As a bonus he has also learned some lessons about cinema. He can now tell, almost instantly, when a character appears who was created solely for the purpose of being killed. And he has even learned some lessons about life, like this one: When you are alone with the bad guy, and he is pouring you a drink, and he asks if anyone knows that you came to meet him, you always answer: “Yes, yes. Everyone knows! I told everyone I know that I was coming! Totally.”

Unfortunately the monsters that exist in today's world are far more frightful than those of a healthy active imagination.

Dozens of articles warn or complain of helicopter parents who oversee every movement a child or teen might make. And parents do so not because they are intolerant of their children but because society has become so. Parents come in a multiplicity of archetypes these days but one category distinguishes those who hover.

The Wobegon sect insist on creating and maintaining social class differences. They advocate entitlement and hover to insulate and ensure every social advantage. They are often by-products or principals in the education system. One can sit in just about any academic awards ceremony at any school in the country and note, scorecard fashion that those who are considered worthy of awards are related to those who work within the school system. Education in America has manufactured an education entitlement caste, self-insulated, and self-insulating.

The Jedi sect hover for other reasons. The vampires, witches, and monsters of this world have become institutionalized, unmerciful, ruthless, and far more depraved than any child or young adult can cope with.

The collapsing U.S. economy demonstrates how coarse and vulgar the unwitting are treated in today's society. People are duped into becoming credit slaves, enjoying short-term gain for a lifetime of obligatory servitude.

Young adults are seen as armies of victims waiting to be exploited by creditors, politicians, and educational paper mills. The insatiable desire evoked by these monsters is no longer the sexual fantasy of being swept away by a stranger. Today, the cultivated desire is consumption, immediate gratification, and extreme, accelerated thrill.

I am strong and unflinching advocate that television and media need to offer adult themes for adults and that open forums offer free speech even when the speech offends. Unfortunately, open forums are intolerant of ideas that challenge the status quo. Censorship killed the Charlie Rose forums. Talking Points Memo for all its sanctimonious "truth"-telling is intolerant of unflinching liberal viewpoints. The New York Times closed their forums when its vocal readership pointed out their hypocrisies.

By diminishing of free speech through the privatization of the most democratic communication channels, children and teens cannot learn how the system truly works, how it takes advantage of people, and how it neutralizes citizenship. By controlling free speech, critical thought is eliminated except to argue manufactured talking points.

Frank Rich at the New York Times laments our descent as he provides a film review of Wall-E.

Humanity is not dead in “Wall-E,” but it is in peril. The world’s population cruises the heavens ceaselessly on a mammoth luxury spaceship that it boarded in the early 22nd century after the planet became uninhabitable. For government, there is a global corporation called Buy N Large, which keeps the public wired to umpteenth-generation iPods and addicted to a diet of supersized liquefied fast food and instantly obsolete products. The people are too bloated to walk — they float around on motorized Barcaloungers — but they are happy shoppers. A billboard on the moon heralds a Buy N Large outlet mall “coming soon,” not far from that spot where back in the day of “Hello, Dolly!” idealistic Americans once placed a flag.

And yet these rabid consumers, like us, are haunted by what paradise might have been lost. How can they reclaim what matters? How can Earth be recolonized? These questions are rarely spoken in “Wall-E,” but are omnipresent, like half-forgotten dreams. In this movie, a fleeting green memory of the extinct miracle of photosynthesis is as dazzling and elusive as the emerald city of Oz.

One of the great things about art, including popular art, is that it can hit audiences at a profound level beyond words. That includes children. The kids at “Wall-E” were never restless, despite the movie’s often melancholy mood and few belly laughs. They seemed to instinctually understand what “Wall-E” was saying; they didn’t pepper their chaperones with questions along the way. At the end they clapped their small hands. What they applauded was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out.

You have to wonder what these same kids make of the political show their parents watch on TV at home. The fierce urgency of now that drives “Wall-E” and its yearning for change is absent in both the Barack Obama and McCain campaigns these days.

Jedi parents who hover, hover because of the comprehensive dangers our society has amassed against individuals, the free-thinkers, and the sacred.

The life-blood of freedom is free-speech yet the message of Wall-E could be construed as disruptive of school activity and censored and punished. In Sunday's Courant, Frank D. Lomonte enumerates the assault on free speech of students in Reaching To Stifle Students.

In one recent case, lawyers for Connecticut's Region 10 school district, serving Burlington and Harwinton, actually convinced the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that Avery Doninger, then a Lewis S. Mills High School junior, could be punished for using a blog — created on a home computer on personal time — to encourage the public to lobby school administrators to overturn a decision that threatened a student-organized concert. Although the student regrettably used a coarse word to refer to the administrators, it was not the mild expletive that decided her fate; it was the fact that, in the court's view, Doninger "disrupted" school by escalating the concert dispute to involve the public.

What a miserable civics lesson for a 17-year-old who, as even the school conceded, was an otherwise exemplary student. Asking public officials to take precious time out of their day to actually answer calls and e-mails from parents who question their management of the school is such a "disruption" that it justifies suspending the First Amendment. In what country?

Thankfully, this bizarre and frightening view of our Constitution remains an aberration.

A U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania recently rejected the same argument that prevailed in Connecticut, wisely observing that — if students misbehave online in ways that violate the rights of others — that's a private matter with private remedies.

Why should we be concerned for the "rights" of a student to call the principal a bad name? Because court decisions can live on forever, and they can be misapplied in mischievous ways.

What about the student who learns that the coach has been molesting female students — a scandal that undoubtedly would provoke a "disruptive" level of discussion at school? Many principals refuse to let students publish such "adult" matter in the school newspaper — and now, if the radical expansionists get their way, the principal can constitutionally add: "If I catch you talking to anyone about this — anywhere, any time — you're expelled."



In a landmark 1963 case, the Supreme Court said elegantly that "First Amendment freedoms need breathing space to survive." Today, thanks to decisions like Morse, too many courts are affording the breathing space to the censor — especially when that censor is a school. They're willing to let schools punish innocent conduct for fear of second-guessing the principal's authority.

Well, principals who abuse their disciplinary authority need second-guessing. And if schools want to put court-approved muzzles on our kids, then we'd better speak for them — loud and clear.

To be muzzled is to be a slave to the political hucksters who run the schools, the government bureaucracies, and the above-the-law corporations who shamelessly will take advantage of every individual weakness a child, young-adult, or unwitting adult may have.

Dissent across the globe is being reduced to a silent scream whose avenues of expression are being systematically eliminated. Jedi parents know this all too well. If they hover, it is to protect their children from an all-too blood-thirsty world.

The crack in the Cosmic Cage is not an accident.

Will Someone Please Tell This Kid the Bill of Rights is Dead?

Its Avery Doninger all over again...

Avery Doninger Update

Today's Courant article, Court Looks at Internet Limits by Arielle Levin Becker is a great overview and update on a case about freedom of speech and limits of school authority.

In simplest terms, the hearing Tuesday addressed whether Doninger should be allowed to serve as senior class secretary at Lewis S. Mills High School and, as a class officer, speak at her graduation.


The principal had barred Doninger from serving on the student council because of derogatory comments she made about school officials in an Internet blog. A lower court judge denied an injunction that would have allowed her back on the council.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Kravitz ruled in August that Doninger had not shown a "substantial likelihood" that she would succeed in challenging the constitutional validity of her principal's decision.

The appeals court did not rule Tuesday, but the judges raised questions ranging from the specifics of the high school's student council election procedures to how the Internet changes students' rights to free speech.

The attorneys staked out opposite positions on the free-speech question.

The Courant offers an online poll as well.

The three-judge panel issued no ruling.

Avery Doninger and Free Speech

U.S. District Judge Mark Kravitz ruled that Regional School District #10 could punish Avery Doninger for what the judge agreed was "vulgar and[or] lewd" speech (the use of the term douch-bag). It won't last long.

A similar, highly prominent case (or non-case) involved an attempted suit by an author who didn't like a blog book review criticizing his book, Lifecode. The book review called the author "a classic crackpot" and the book review was written by a university professor Myers.

Thanks in part to an open letters to the author by retired law professor Peter Irons, the suit was quietly dropped in deafening silence. Mr. Irons is a retired law professor whose specialty is First Amendment Law.

In part he wrote this in defense of the book review;

On a substantive level, the complaint will never survive a motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, for “failure to state a claim upon which relief can be based.” You allege defamation by Professor Myers on the sole basis of his characterization of the revised edition of your Lifecode book as the work of “a classic crackpot.” This was in the context of a fairly lengthy review of your book (following an earlier review of your book’s first version) that was not included or even referenced in Mr. Little’s complaint.

As Mr. Little should have known, by due diligence, Professor Myers’ characterization was protected opinion, not a false statement of fact. As such, it is immune from defamation actions. Mr. Little cited, in paragraph 21 of the complaint, a single case to support your action: McFadden v. U.S. Fidelity & Guarantee Co. (766 So.2d 20). I have carefully read this opinion, which has no precedential value in any state or federal court. The claim in Mr. Little’s complaint that in this case “[t]term ‘crackpot’ was considered as actionable as slander per se” in simply not true. This case was remanded by the Mississippi Court of Appeals to the trial court; no trial was held on this question and no subsequent opinion was issued.

More to the point, and a case Mr. Little should have discovered by due diligence, is an opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Dilworth v. Dudley et al., 75 F.3d 307 (7th Cir. 1996). For your edification, and that of Mr. Little as well, let me summarize and quote from this opinion, written by Chief Judge Richard Posner, one of the most highly respected federal appellate judges. The case involved a book by a mathematics professor at DePauw University, in which he characterized an article by an engineer and amateur mathematicians as the work of a “crank,” a term that is synonymous with “crackpot.” In upholding the district judge’s dismissal of this defamation case under Rule 12(b)(6), Judge Posner wrote that the term “crank” is an opinion and “is mere ‘rhetorical hyperbole.’ … To call a person a crank is basically just a colorful and insulting way of expressing disagreement with [the author’s] master idea, and it therefore belongs to the language of controversy rather than to the language of defamation.” In my opinion, Judge Scheindlin would be more impressed with Judge Posner’s opinion than in dictum from a Mississippi judge. Judge Posner, by the way, also wrote that terms like “scab,” “traitor,” “fake” and “phony” (far more pejorative than “crackpot”) “are incapable of defaming because they are mere hyperbole….” Judge Posner added, “By publishing your views you invite public criticism and rebuttal; you enter voluntarily in one of the submarkets of ideas and opinions and consent therefore to the rough competition of the marketplace.”

I am going to guess that the term douch-bag is also little more than hyperbole - protected speech.

And if the Doninger incident was not an opportunity to teach instead of an opportunity for reprisal then none exists. The idea that school administrators earning significant 6-digit incomes can't resolve a dispute about a concert is a clue to the region to take a harder look at what's going on in that school district.

As a citizen, former educator, and critical thinker, it appears that Avery Doninger was first abused by the school in significant, unconstitutional ways.

Connecticut's judicial branch of government needs a scrubbing. An independent citizen review needs to take a hard look at what is going on. Connecticut once one of this nation's finest courts and today the quality of rulings gives every impression that the courts have become a political whorehouse from the Supreme Court of the United States right down to the local levels.

The agenda of these new politically greased courts seems to be to deny students any right to speak out. This has little to do with freedom of speech or cyber-bullying or any such nonsense. This is about growing a docile citizenry that will not protest its own growing subjugation to forces that no American should ever genuflect to.

The same breath of God that informs our ears is the breath of God that children speak. The God that informed our Constitution called our rights inalienable.

What is the story of the money-changers in the Temple of the New Testament if not a child's eternal contribution to his culture. Who has the right to negate that today?

In James Hillman (THE DEPTH OF THE SOUL: JAMES HILLMAN’S VISION OF PSYCHOLOGY by Sanford L. Drob) we find out about growing souls and why a child's expression of oneself is sacred ground;

Soul, according to Hillman is most apt to emerge in those chaotic, "pathological", moments when we experience the disintegration of our beliefs, values, and security. For it is in such moments that that our imagery, emotions, desires and values are heightened and we have the fullest awareness of the psyche in its essential form. Here, Hillman provides us with a psychological application of the Kabbalistic act of Birur, the extrication of the inner divine self, the spark of divine light that lays hidden within the human personality. For Hillman, the very point of deconstructing our fixed ideas in psychology and elsewhere is to provide us with the conditions for the revelation of psyche itself.

Hillman says five more things about the nature of the soul: the soul (1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (Hillman, 1977, p. xvi, Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47). For Hillman, as a result of these five characteristics, the soul is the "imaginative possibility of our nature", a possibility that is realized in reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy. Death is significant for soul because possibility (and hence imagination) derives from an existential recognition of one's finitude: what is finite can imagine possibilities, some of which will be realized, others of which (owing to death) will not (Hillman 1992, p. xvi, 1989, p. 21).

For Hillman, the ultimate psychological value, indeed the ultimate value in general, is a realization and deepening of the soul in its widest possible sense. Hillman's goal, which can be described as "mystical" amounts to a radical departure from not only the medical model of psychoanalysis but also from those humanistic models which, having rejected the metaphor of "cure," continue to entertain notions of self-improvement, self-actualization, well-being, understanding or enlightenment as goals for treatment or therapy (Moore, 1991). For Hillman the goal of psychology is the deepening of meaning and experience per se; any other goal, whether it be medical cure, humanistic self-actualization, or spiritual enlightenment, is bound to distract us from our primary human task as the bearers of meaning and significance. Hillman's views are almost quietistic, and they approach those strands within Jewish mysticism, particularly in Hasidism, where devekut, or cleaving to the God within, is the ultimate value. However, more generally, his view is one in which every arena of human endeavor is to be imbued with meaning and significance, and here is close to the Kabbalist's affirmation that all human acts provide an opportunity for the respiritualization and repair of the world.

If voices can be silenced then some will never speak before they die. Who has the right to deny that soul and who is to say who this world's chosen messengers can be? If the soul is a narrative then these are stories that must be realized in open speech.

First Amendment Shredded by the -cough- "Supreme" Court

Jesus, what a disaster this country is becoming. Today, the president was asked to ban the use of torture by high school scholars visiting the White House [Scholars urge Bush to ban use of torture]. So Bush did what comes naturally, he lied to them.

"The president enjoyed a visit with the students, accepted the letter and upon reading it let the student know that the United States does not torture and that we value human rights," deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.

The other possibility that exists is that Bush pretended to read the letter, didn't understand a word of it, and just let somebody else lie for him.

The man is an embarrassment to the human race but I'm tired of even dealing with another Bush rant.

More significantly, these scholars were unaware that the Supreme Court decided that students have no first amendment guarantees. In the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case, the Court in all its witless wisdom decided that school officials can make up any damned excuse they want to shut up students under the pretense that the speech is interfering with the school's "mission".

So the message that protests torture delivered by high school students may never be allowed again. And its too bad because nobody else in this country has the guts to tell our leaders what is morally reprehensible about their policies.

But this is also one of our first whiffs of this new Supreme Court. Man are we in trouble. At a time when this country desperately needs vision and clarity, a hand-picked bunch of judicial jokers is playing havoc with the Constitution.

Soon these students may be serving in Afghanistan protecting the poppy farmers there to process and deliver the world's finest heroin to Western markets. Some will die. But thank Bush for protecting us from their right to satirize a society that punishes thought and rewards criminal politicians. After all, its not real drugs, gangsters, or criminal government enterprises that threaten us, it is high school newspaper editorials.

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Imus,Skakel, Baez, Existential Christianity

If there are no liberals in a foxhole then there are no conservatives in the unemployment line. Imus is readying to defend his -cough- first amendment rights. After bashing liberals for a career for exercising these same rights, Imus has discovered his own appetite for certain inalienable rights. Hallelujah!

I have grown to despise everything this guy stands for including any and every so-called charity he sugar-coats his liberal-bashing hate speech with but he needs to be heard and understood for what he is. We must defend the right to be offended as Salman Rushdie advised us earlier in this blog.

Likewise, Joan Baez should have been heard at Walter Reed Hospital. Service to one's country means defending everyone's rights - even those you may hate. Again, we must defend our right to be offended.

Michael Skakel is no Kennedy. When Robert Kennedy appeared in Skakel's behalf a week or so ago, it was the first time in decades. Kennedy is the antithesis of Skakel. Skakel the villified American conservative is nothing like Kennedy, liberal environmentalist.

Yet, Skakel was convicted because a drug-addict cutting a deal claims Skakel said, "I can get away with murder because I'm a Kennedy." I don't buy it. The last claim Skakel would make is to be a Kennedy. And can any statement made under therapy carry the veracity of fact? This conviction doesn't pass the sniff test.

Baez and Imus are political hot potatoes. Skakel represents the avarice of wealth.

This weekend my younger son, Adam, received his Confirmation into the Roman Catholic faith. The priest spoke of service, service in the here and now - existential Christianity if you will.

These people all share the breath of God with us and all provide a service by example.

Holy Moley! Bong Hits 4 Jesus!

Today, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments on a Freedom of Speech issue driven by our old friends Kenneth Starr and George "The Decider" Bush.

A high school student seeking nothing more than his fifteen seconds of local TV exposure created the nonsensical banner entitled, Bong Hits 4 Jesus. The principal of the school destroyed the sign. The issue is whether or not students have the right to free expression when the ideas expressed distress the school administrators. This is not about pornographic, salacious, or profane messages, this is about words.

In this case the prosecutors think that if the substance implied in the message is illegal then the words used as labels for the stuff that's illegal is illegal as well. Welcome to Bush World.

From Free-Speech Case Divides Bush and Religious Right by Linda Greenhouse, New York Times:

On the surface, Joseph Frederick’s dispute with his principal, Deborah Morse, at the Juneau-Douglas High School in Alaska five years ago appeared to have little if anything to do with religion — or perhaps with much of anything beyond a bored senior’s attitude and a harried administrator’s impatience.

As the Olympic torch was carried through the streets of Juneau on its way to the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City, students were allowed to leave the school grounds to watch. The school band and cheerleaders performed. With television cameras focused on the scene, Mr. Frederick and some friends unfurled a 14-foot-long banner with the inscription: “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”

Mr. Frederick later testified that he designed the banner, using a slogan he had seen on a snowboard, “to be meaningless and funny, in order to get on television.” Ms. Morse found no humor but plenty of meaning in the sign, recognizing “bong hits” as a slang reference to using marijuana. She demanded that he take the banner down. When he refused, she tore it down, ordered him to her office, and gave him a 10-day suspension.

Mr. Fredericks’s ensuing lawsuit and the free-speech court battle that resulted, in which he has prevailed so far, is one that, classically, pits official authority against student dissent. It is the first Supreme Court case to do so directly since the court upheld the right of students to wear black arm bands to school to protest the war in Vietnam, declaring in Tinker v. Des Moines School District that “it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Furthermore;

What galvanized most of the groups on Mr. Frederick’s side was the breadth of the arguments made on the other side. The solicitor general’s brief asserts that under the Supreme Court’s precedents, student speech “may be banned if it is inconsistent with a school’s basic educational mission.”

The Juneau School Board’s mission includes opposing illegal drug use, the administration’s brief continues, citing as evidence a 1994 federal law, the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, which requires that schools, as a condition of receiving federal money, must “convey a clear and consistent message” that using illegal drugs is “wrong and harmful.”

Mr. Starr’s main brief asserts that the court’s trilogy of cases “stands for the proposition that students have limited free speech rights balanced against the school district’s right to carry out its educational mission and to maintain discipline.” The brief argues that even if Ms. Morse applied that precept incorrectly to the facts of this case, she is entitled to immunity from suit because she could have reasonably believed that the law was on her side.

The religious groups were particularly alarmed by what they saw as the implication that school boards could define their “educational mission” as they wished and could suppress countervailing speech accordingly.

“Holy moly, look at this! To get drugs we can eliminate free speech in schools?” is how Robert A. Destro, a law professor at Catholic University, described his reaction to the briefs for the school board when the Liberty Legal Institute asked him to consider participating on the Mr. Frederick’s behalf. He quickly signed on.

Having worked closely with Republican administrations for years, Mr. Destro said he was hard pressed to understand the administration’s position. “My guess is they just hadn’t thought it through,” he said in an interview. “To the people who put them in office, they are making an incoherent statement.”

Incoherent? And that's a surprise?

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