Month / November 2006

by Edward Champion

The Dark Side of Python

Telegraph: “Avarice’s ink is darker, so John Cleese and Eric Idle – both of whom come across in the Diaries as keen on cash – are drawn rather more colourfully than our host. But for a genuinely interesting Python you need the show’s specialist in dictatorial military types, Graham Chapman. Tardy, depressive, unreliable, epicurean, homosexual and permanently stewing in gin and tonic, Chapman was, in Palin’s words, ‘the high priest of hedonism.’ In other words, he rarely pulled his weight.”

by Edward Champion

Full Statement from Judith Sturgeon

I was sitting in my sparsely furnished apartment, trying to contemplate how I could make more money. I had just let a 21 year-old intern out the door, releasing this little boy only after he sobbed something to me about how his mother would be disappointed in him if she were still alive. I suppose you’re never too young to learn.

The kid had thought himself a social climber and, seeing as how he had nice abs and seeing as how he’d intimated to me that his thrusting was competent (funny how these boys always overstate these things), I figured a passable lay wasn’t a bad way to pass the hours. There’d always be tomorrow’s steady revenue steam at Sturgeon Books, of meetings where I’d cause my underpaid minions to cry and where all of us would plot how we could best appeal to the lowest common denominator. The book business was all about the dinero. And we were prepared to dupe the public by any means necessary.

Conviction was on my mind. Conviction and cash. Cash was the great human equalizer. I had Matt Drudge on speed-dial.

I had watched Tom Cruise jump on Oprah’s couch and I was convinced he was a killer. I was convinced that he would do something dangerous. But we couldn’t get him to write a book speculating upon how he would chop Katie Holmes with an axe. Further, he had not been tried for murder.

We needed a crook. We needed a sale. We needed another bloodbath.

So we called Robert Blake. And we knew that if we gave him a pistol and a pen, he might be counted upon to write a bestsetlling book on how he might have killed his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakely.

And I knew right there and then that I could kill two birds with one stone. I raced to the street and saw my faithful intern. He was fishing in his pockets for his Metrocard, staring gloomily into the Manhattan rain for the next bus back to Queens. I told him to come back to my apartment for a proposition. There was initially some confusion. He had mentioned something about tendering his resignation that morning. But when I whispered him in peremptory terms, “This will really help your career,” his ears pricked up. And I observed that he had an erection. Okay, maybe I could kill three birds with one stone.

I told the intern to wait in the living room and called my attorney. Before ten o’clock, he had drafted an airtight release and faxed it over to me. The intern asked to read it and I told him not to worry.

“Do you know who William Tell is?” I asked.

The intern said no.

“Do you know who William Burroughs is?” I asked.

The intern shook his head.

“What’s your name anyway?”

“William,” he said.

“Well, William, how would you like to join a long list of cultural luminaries.”

I gave him an apple from my fruit bowl.

“Is this for me to eat?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “You’re going to meet with a Mr. Robert Blake in Los Angeles. And you’re going to do everything he says. It’s going to involve a pistol, but we’re going to make publishing history.”

I asked William if he had any family or friends. He told me that he didn’t, outside of a brother in Wichita who he was no longer on speaking terms with. He had only starting working at Sturgeon Books two weeks ago and he knew nobody, save the guy at the deli who made him affordable sandwiches.

William was the perfect man for this great moment in Sturgeon Books history. A man wholly without connections, a man who Robert could tinker with.

We got him on the first flight out of LaGuardia to LAX.

Six weeks later, Robert banged out If I Killed Bonnie, I Killed William Too, one of the most eloquent pieces of writing I believe we’ve ever printed at Sturgeon Books. We had even included color photographs of William’s bloody head, complete with little flecks of bone embedded in Robert’s kitchen wall. Really sensational stuff! I’m pleased to report that William was smiling all the way to the end.

There won’t be any wrongful death actions. My lawyer saw to that.

And while Robert has settled into a deeper depression over this experiment of ours, the good news is that Sturgeon Books stands to make a mint.

Conviction. It’s a great way to do business.

by Edward Champion

MANDATORY VIEWING

This is the United States of America.

UCLA. A kid goes into a library. He doesn’t have ID. They ask him to leave. And he starts to. But he’s not fast enough. And the campus police Taser him not once, but multiple times. All the while, the kid screams, “Don’t touch me!” The kid shrieks that he has a medical condition. But these cops don’t care. And when he’s frightened and screaming in pain, trying to explain that he was minding his own business, the police still demand that he stand up. And they Taser him again. Torturing him with total equanimity. Telling him to stand up.

The horror finally kicks in around the students and a few of them are brave enough to ask for badge numbers. The officers refuse.

The kid’s dragged out into the vestibule. He begs with the officers, “Please! Please!” But they insist that he stand up. One cop has the temerity to declare the kid “mentally ill,” perhaps communicating to the considerable crowd of onlookers that the police is in the right. Mind your own business. Go study some more and be good consumers.

Finally, the kid is dragged out of the library. The students look around, slackjawed, shocked that this can happen in a library. They only came here to study.

The UCPD owes us an explanation. UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams owes us an explanation. UC President Robert Dynes owes us an explanation. The police who were involved in this torture of a harmless student need to be shitcanned on the spot.

If you found this video as disgusting as I did, then you need to let the UCPD know how you feel.

Here’s the contact info:

University of California, Los Angeles
Police Department
601 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1364
Telephone: (310) 825-1491

A man named Karl T. Ross is the UCLA Chief of Police. Direct your mail and your phone calls to him.

Here is some more contact info:

Karl T. Ross, Chief of Police
kross@ucpd.ucla.edu
310-825-1633

John Adams, Captain
adamsj@ucpd.ucla.edu
310-825-4406

Interim Chancellor Norman Abrams
Telephone: 310-825-2151
Fax: 310-206-6030
chancellor@conet.ucla.edu

I will be calling them tomorrow myself, demanding answers.

[UPDATE: The police statement: “The officers deemed it necessary to use the Taser in a ‘drive stun’ capacity.” And here’s the LA Times’ report.]

by Edward Champion

The Virtues of Selfishness?

Scientific American: “When money is on the brain, people become disinclined to ask for help when faced with a difficult or even an impossible puzzle….People who think, even subconsciously, about money are also less helpful than others, the researchers say. After witnessing a pre-arranged accident in which someone walking through the testing area dropped a box of pencils, money-primed participants picked up fewer of the fallen pencils than the other subjects did.”

by Edward Champion

On Milton Friedman’s Passing

It’s rather fitting that economist Milton Friedman died today of heart failure. The man didn’t have much of a heart to begin with, unless you count an almost total concern with keeping money in the hands of the rich as a bona-fide conviction.

Friedman was quite adamant on this point, so staunch that he insisted that the government should keep its hands out of private industry. Wage control? Price control? Not for Friedman. The economy was a buckling bronco that could stay in its own turf without so much as a guardrail, thank you very much. It wasn’t a surprise when he fawned over the Gipper (one of his many employers) when the Grand Old Man kicked the bucket, writing:

To Reagan, of course, holding down government spending was a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end was freedom, human freedom, the right of every individual to pursue his own objectives and values so long as he does not interfere with the corresponding right of others.

For a guy who railed against the evils of socialism (even referring to Nixon’s 1971 90 day wage and price freeze as “socialist“), this libertarian notion seems just as naive in its inability to account for the devilish impulses of human nature. What was human freedom for Friedman? In a lecture Friedman delivered in 1991, he compared human freedom’s essence to that of a free private market, calling it “the freedom of people to make their own decisions so long as they do not prevent anybody else from doing the same thing.” This would all be very nice if we assume that human freedom is always benevolent. But who sets the standard for these freedoms? What one person may consider non-preventive freedom is likely to be very harmful to another. Particularly when we consider export processing zones, sweatshops, Wal-Mart overtime, and our current unchecked spending spree in Iraq. Of course, if you subscribe to the Friedman philosophy, I suppose you can look the other way. I suppose you can look to the Jack Welches of the world as great captains of industry who fulfill their own objectives and values. Perhaps 100,000 layoffs in four years, the economic equivalent of the Great Purges, doesn’t interfere with another businessman’s “objectives and values.” But it certainly harms a lot of individuals and families in the name of profit. The Friedmanite will argue that the worker deliberately entered into an arrangement with his employer and should have seen what was coming. But what of the worker’s right to pursue her objectives and values?

For Friedman, inflation was the great Beelzebub. When things started to go batty during the 1970s stagflation, Friedman challenged the Phillips curve, that delicate elliptical sliver which correlated the unemployment rate with inflation. He argued that there is only a short-term relationship between employment and inflation and that unemployment shoots up the minute that workers become cognizant of their true wages, the amount of money they can actually spend, in relation to the economy. But this position assumes that all workers have bargaining power and that all workers are in the position of being selective about their vocations. The real world, not so easily plotted on an Excel spreadsheet or tracked with the slide of abacus beads, doesn’t always work this way.

Nevertheless, in all fairness, while Friedman was firmly against wage and price control, he did support the New Deal relief and recovery programs, in large part because the Great Depression was, in his words, “a very exceptional circumstance.” Perhaps this was because, in part, Roosevelt’s policies allowed him to get a job when he was unable to find an academic position. Or perhaps even Friedman had to confess that the free market economy wasn’t always perfect.

Friedman authored the 1970 essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits,” in which he wrote:

The shortsightedness is also exemplified in speeches by businessmen on social responsibility. This may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked and immoral and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats. Here, as with price and wage controls, businessmen seem to me to reveal a suicidal impulse.

When considering Friedman, one does not often consider such “suicidal” values as empathy, a concern for humanity, or even a sense of wonder (save perhaps that all-seeing eye on the dollar bill). One does not consider duty, except as it pertains to earning the maximum profits possible for the employer. One does not consider an economic system that provides safeguards against greed, corruption, and providing welfare for the vanquished. One considers the free market and only the free market.

Only a nation so inexorably concerned with the accumulation of capital could have produced a figure like Friedman. Certainly, there will be many obituaries who will laud his genius. But I’m wondering if any of them will remark upon Friedman’s lack of empathy for those who weren’t free market acolytes. I’m not entirely against capitalism, but it feels unjust to praise a man who believed so whole-heartedly in an unfettered free market, but who couldn’t even come close to a plausible correlation between the economy and humanism.

by Edward Champion

UCLA Cops = The New LAPD?

Sister Rye points to this remarkable overstepping of authority. At UCLA, a student who was using a computer in the library was asked to leave. While he was in the act of leaving the library, the police then grabbed his arm and the student asked the police to let him go. He then began to scream, “Get off me!” This (and perhaps the student’s profanity) resulted in the student being Tasered several times by the campus police.

What’s more, these UCPD officers threatened to Taser another student when she asked the officer for his name and badge number.

It’s terrible that thuggish behavior like this would happen in a library, a sanctuary intended for anyone to pursue the humanities without violence. And based on my own experience with violent police officers, it’s even more terrible that these cops will likely get off without so much as a slap on the wrist.

Perhaps the only solution is to lobby the newly Democratic Senate and House of Representatives to consider legislation that would permit nationwide accountability for this type of excessive force. If the police know they can get away with this, they will continue to engage in this kind of behavior.

[UPDATE: Video. This is utterly disgusting.]

by Edward Champion

Roundup

by Edward Champion

Richard Powers

First Vollmann, now Powers. It seems the folks at the National Book Foundation and I are in sync these days. At last report, shortly after the ceremony closed up, the poor man was mobbed.

For those who are absolutely new to Richard Powers (and what a treat you’re in for, if you are), here are some good places to start (I’ll add more to this list later):

REVIEWS/DISCUSSION OF THE ECHO MAKER

INTERVIEWS

by Edward Champion

One More Reason to Punch Chuck Klosterman

AV Club: “Well, I haven’t really done much of anything today. I got up at 10:30, tried to do a little writing, but really didn’t do anything. I went running, then I had to buy a Syd Barrett Pink Floyd record for something I’m working on, so I walked to the store and bought that. Then I came back here and I’ve been watching an NFL Films documentary on Lawrence Taylor. That’s basically been my day. Not too strenuous.”

by Edward Champion

Marisha Pessl: Not the Brightest Cultural Bulb?

From The Onion A.V. Club:

MP: I never knew who Nick Drake was until the Garden State soundtrack, and then I got his greatest hits, and I really like it. It’s really restful and thoughtful, something so pure about his sound. It’s good for when you’re walking around New York listening to your iPod—nice to listen to instead of all the craziness happening around you. I don’t know anything about him, though.

The A.V. Club: He was a reclusive, depressive guy who died very young from a drug overdose.

MP: Really? You’re kidding. He sounds so put-together.