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To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

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Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

     ~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

Washington Post: The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, has undergone a major renovation. "The change to the building is pervasive, both subtle and transformational."

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Wednesday
May112011

The Banality of MoDo

Maureen Dowd writes about how much Osama bin Laden reminds her of Norma Desmond, one of the major characters in "A Star Is Born." Or something.

Following is an e-mail a friend sent to Kate Madison, Karen Garcia & me this morning re: his thoughts on some of the comments to MoDo's column. I have the writer's permission to share the letter with you. I've redacted a few personal notes, including the opening paragraph in which the writer briefly mentions the banality of Dowd's column.


Kate did a nice job of calling out MoDo on her use of the "Bin Laden Slipped Away" meme, trotted out by the MSM, the Neo-cons and just about, well, everyone. He didn't, as Kate declares, "slip away". The Bushies took their eyes off the ball because they were too busy plotting world domination. Bush wasn't kidding when he said he really didn't think much about Bin Laden after the initial furor. He was thinking of blood and glory and killing brown people and re-making the Middle East in his own stunted, half-thought out image. Maybe that's why it's so fucked up now.

I did notice an interesting strain running through several comments, specifically, Marie's and Gemli's. They both refer to the banality of evil. It's funny, I was reading an essay in Hannah Arendt's Life of the Mind the other day. Arendt sat in on the Eichmann trial. She coined that phrase “banality of evil” to describe what Marie notes as Eichmann's seemingly innocuous and pleasant nature. How could such a nice little man be responsible for so much horror? You can say almost the same thing about Bush, except I don't think anyone would describe him as all that pleasant and polite (he's an arrogant, snotty little shit) but his public demeanor is one of good ol’ boy, back slapping, joke telling, occasionally pain in the ass frat boy. But here he goes, in full sociopath mode, initiating not one, but TWO, count 'em, TWO wars. You have to go back to FDR for that kind of two-fer (at least he didn't start the actions in the European and Pacific theaters).

But even closer to home, Gemli's comment called to mind that we are very close to that sort of thing (total evil in a “guy next door” package) right here in the US of A. Karen mentioned the Frontline piece “Capture/Kill” and right at the end there's an interview with an up and coming killer. This guy is the real deal. A hater, a murderer, a guy who made his bones by blowing up scores of civilians with a pipe bomb; someone to whom reason, hope, love, political expediency, national pride, money, power -- nothing -- matters. Only killing. He says that there can be no discussion, no negotiation. He says, revealingly, that this war that Bush started (and Obama continues) is like a sweet dessert for him and his kind. If a day or two go by and they haven't killed someone, they're antsy and restless. Ready for more blood.

It's not a stretch to take that checkered scarf off his head and put on a greasy trucker's cap with NRA or NASCAR stitched on the front, and put him in the mountains of Colorado ready to start a-shootin' guvmint men comin' to steal his freedoms!

I remember that I was reading Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1975 when I heard that Arendt had died. I was just getting into hard core philosophy and I distinctly recall a passage talking about Eichmann discussing his love of Kant and relating that he tried to live his life according to Kant's moral philosophy. Arendt of course rips him a new one for only reading one sentence and ignoring the rest of the 467 pages in the book, but I was struck at how dangerous philosophy could be to lamebrains, or smart, canny, unscrupulous people like David Brooks or Glenn Beck who can use it to provide support for the insupportable, cover for what should never be covered up. Eichmann focused on Kant's rejoinder to the rest of us to obey the law (he was specifically referring to the moral law). But think for a minute. Why did Bush and his legal assassins like Yoo and Gonzalez and Cheney's bully boy Addington, work so fucking hard for so long to provide legal cover that would allow them to attach electrodes to a man's testicles, pour water on him and turn on the juice. They were OBEYING THE LAW.

This is part of Brooks' obsession with those in the Baby Boom generation who (like all of us) questioned authority. A while back Brooks quoted from the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, specifically a book called Metaphors We Live By. Brooks, of course, didn't read it all the way through, probably only scanned for quotes so he could look smart. Unfortunately, I don't have that gene. I actually read the fucking thing. If Brooksie HAD read it, he would have come across the primary, seminal metaphors that describe the way the right and the left work politically, in this country. I believe it has gotten much worse since L and J wrote their book, but the gist of it is that the right wants a patriarchal society in which the Daddy calls the shots and we all dance. He dishes out assignments as quickly as punishment and we all have to take it. This goes along with the idea of why so many on the right (a total puzzlement to most lefties) so frequently vote against their own best interests. They are happy suffering as long as their enemies (mostly, us) suffer too. As long as Daddy spanks us hard, they'll take the lash too. The defining metaphor for the left tends to be much more matriarchal, nurturing and supportive. This, of course, drives the right to distraction.

Anyway, the point here is that there is so much going on under the hood that remains barely noticeable and certainly not thought out. Our news cycle (Marie and Karen, you both must feel the stress of getting things out there in a timely fashion in order to remain relevant -- the other day Marie sent a link to a piece about the disclosure of the Bin Laden killing. Ten minutes made the difference between a scoop and a left-in-the-dirt, also-ran condition) does not allow for thoughtful analysis of what's happening to make us this way. Granted, plenty of people who are making things happen don't have anything close to the type of analytical skills necessary to do more than celebrate surface victories.

But we are getting further and further away from any kind of thoughtful consideration of where we're headed and why or, more to the point, WHO, is pointing us there.

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