Wang Wen-hsing and the Unspeakable: Changes in the Family

Jia - "family"

When I lived in Taiwan studying Chinese language in 1979-80, perhaps the single biggest discovery was contemporary Chinese literature.

I've written about Taipei People -- the story collection by Pai Hsien-yung ... and my love of the stories of Huang Chun-ming. ... and my fascination with the stories and the choreography of Lin Hwai-min.  But the book I knew I loved before I even read it was called Family Change (also translated as "Family Catastrophe").

I loved it even before I read it because its title consisted of two characters I knew -- "family" and "change" -- and the meaning of the two characters combined was one I could immediately grasp.

I loved the fact that the little bit I knew about modern Chinese literature In particular, I thought about Family by Ba Jin -- one of the most important books of the 20th century. Family is about the contrast between traditional Chinese society's ideal of the family vs. the reality of contemporary Chinese family life. I loved the fact that before I even opened the book, I knew that it was part of a critique of the family that had begun decades earlier on the Chinese mainland -- a critique which itself built on landmarks of traditional Chinese literature centered on the family (most notably Dream of the Red Chamber) as well as on modern Western literature (most notably Ibsen).

Family Change by Wang Wen-hsing

I have a very clear memory of getting a copy of Family Change and reading it -- and by "reading" I mean plowing through, comprehending what I could comprehend and shamelessly blipping over whatever I couldn't. I remember lots of impressions that I could only piece together from context ("they're talking about some piece of furniture here, and it's made from bamboo because it has a bamboo radical, but ... ?"), and certainly lots of parts that I was mystified by and/or blatantly misunderstood -- but I also remember over and over again feeling that I completely understood the poignant, humorous, infuriating, embarrassing anecdotes that the book is made up of, anecdotes that trace a child's path from unwavering love for his parents to a state of infuriating frustration.

The frame of the book is the disappearance of a recently-retired father - he appears to have just wandered off one day.


Reality Check: the English-language edition

I went back recently and read Family Change in English translation (translated as Family Catastrophe by Susan Wan Dolling). I discovered three things.

My first discovery was that the poignant, humorous, infuriating, embarrassing anecdotes were just as I remembered them. Of course, there were details that I was only able to comprehend for the first time in the translation, but the gist was the same. And just as painful.

Nothing was as exquisitely painful, for me anyway, than the account of how the boy lost all confidence in his father when it was revealed that his father's readings of quotations from Confucius habitually misread a fundamental character used in classical Chinese. (The father read yue ("said") as ri ("sun").) As you can imagine, once the cracks in the facade are revealed, more and more faults start to appear in rapid succession.

Parental missteps have a way of undermining fundamental Chinese values, such as filial piety.

Family Catastrophe - translation by
Susan Wan Dolling.

The second thing I noticed was something about how I have changed in the course of 30 years.  When I read Family Change in 1979, the anecdotes spoke to me, but I couldn't say on a conscious level why they spoke to me.  In particular, I grew up in a family without a father, so on a conscious level I was sort of naively reading along and going, "Oh, so this is what it must be like to have to deal with a father in the family."

In the intervening years, I've done a little bit of work to think about the difficulties of growing up in a family you love but also that you are desperate to assert your independence from. And so I now found myself smiling in recognition at anecdote after anecdote. (e.g. the son speaking to his mother, who has just come in to inform him that his father has disappeared: "He tapped his temples to punctuate his words. 'Do-not while-I-am-reading come-in-here to-disturb-me.'" Gulp! Guilty as charged . . . .)

Turns out that while I was loving Family Change for the way it explained to me what was happening in families in Taiwan, I was also (or mainly) loving the way it explained to me what was happening inside myself.

And this, in turn, led me to a third discovery. As much as I want to relish the particularly Taiwanese aspects of Family Change, the more compelling truth is the fact that Wang is telling a story that is common to all of us. Two aspects of the book brought this home to me.

One is a single recounting of the admonition of the father to the young boy:

"Shush, shush. Don't say such things. You must never talk like that outside the family. Do this for me if nothing else. Remember what I said, eh, Sonny?" His papa would thus warn him, in great fear for no apparent reason." (p. 114 of the Dolling translation)

"Oh yeahhhh . . . " I said to myself in a state of slow dawning. (Who among us didn't get this instruction growing up?) Is this why there are things that I still won't even articulate to myself?

The other is the accumulated descriptions throughout the book of the rituals of childhood. Bathing ... getting ready for bed ... having fingernails trimmed ... curing the hiccups ... taking family photos ... blowing bubbles ... favorite foods ... staying home alone ... family outing to a restaurant ... wrestling ... ... a new pen ... mending ... the first diary ... worship ... an outing with an older sibling ... bicycling ... shopping (and candy!) .... What one starts to understand is that they are not just instruments of control -- not just parts of the indoctrination to good behavior, compliance, filiality. They are also the building blocks of a happy childhood.

Somehow two things are true at the same time.


So now I have an assignment for myself . . . . There are story collections as well as a second novel by Wang Wen-hsing that are available at the Chicago Public Library (Chinatown Branch). It's time to dust off my Chinese and start reading again.

What I am wondering -- now that I've discovered the way Wang Wen-hsing holds up a mirror to me as much or more than he documents life in Taiwan -- is whether I am ready to bring more of these things about myself up to the surface.

Am I finally ready to speak of "the unspeakable"?



More about Taipei c. 1979 . . . .


Related posts

"Days for Looking at the Sea" is set in a fishing town on the east coast of Taiwan. It's about a prostitute who determines to have a baby, and so selects as the father a likely candidate from among her customers (most of whom are workers in the local fishing fleet), gets pregnant, and heads back to the tiny town in which she was born, in order to have the baby.

(See Days for Looking at the Sea )

I love to walk around North Pond here in Chicago and notice the asters as September stretches into October. They make me think of my mom . . . .

(See Asters for Eva )









Each story in Taipei People is about a person who ended up in Taiwan after the war. More than anything, the story "Glory's by Blossom Bridge" is about the destiny of so many men who came from the mainland to Taiwan: ending up old and alone.

(See Taipei People: Thinking of Home ) 

Approaching Hiroshima: A Challenge for Children's Literature and Peace Education

My Hiroshima by Junko Morimoto

As best I can remember, it was 1971 when I became my mother's typist.

She was 50 years old and was making the heroic trek several days a week from our home in New Jersey into Manhattan to attend classes at Columbia University. She was working toward her Master of Library Science (M.L.S.) degree, so that she could begin a new career as a librarian.

I was 11, and had barely learned asdfjkl; but when it came time for Mom to do her masters thesis, I set up on a card table in the "sun room" and started to type.

Mom's thesis was on children's literature, and she had researched dozens of versions of a single story: Little Red Riding Hood. The thesis contained a synopsis of every single book, and a long bibliography.

And so I learned at a very early age that every story gets told in many different ways. And to love lists of books.


My Hiroshima

When I had children of my own, books became one of the major ways we spent time with each other.

I have a very clear memory of being in the children's section of a Border's store in Philadelphia (where we lived at the time) and laying my hands on My Hiroshima by Junko Morimoto. Its bright colors and social purpose appealed to me. My two sons were about 8 and 5 at the time.

Junko Morimoto, author of My Hiroshima
(Read more at "80 year old artist paints the horror
of atomic bombing live" on Japan in Melbourne)

I'm not sure My Hiroshima made an impression on either of them. It is a beautiful book, and I love it. I think its value for us was really the impression it made on me. It started me thinking about the difference between what appeals to an adult and what appeals to a child.

I went down to the children's section of the main branch of the Chicago Public Library a few weeks ago and refreshed my memory about My Hiroshima. I had forgotten how interesting it was in the way it mixed many styles and genres: the depiction of everyday life scenes during the prelude to the bombing reminded me of anime; a section of pictures of the aftermath closely resembling drawings by survivors; and a very activism-oriented section at the end, providing facts and figures about the consequences of the bomb and explaining about the growth of the modern peace movement centered on Hiroshima.

For me, My Hiroshima stands for the proposition that educating young people about the threat of nuclear weapons is a multimedia endeavor, and is an ongoing proposition.


Hiroshima No Piko

I first came across Hiroshima No Piko by Toshi Maruki because of a book for adults by the important historian of the U.S.'s 20th century conflict with Japan, John Dower: Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki. That led me to a video -- Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima -- and then when I got to the children's section of the library, I found Hiroshima No Piko.

There is a wonderful reading of Hiroshima No Piko -- showing all the illustrations -- on Youtube.

I was struck in particular by the image of the aftermath of the atomic bombing shown here:

Hiroshima No Piko: aftermath of the bombing

In the lower right quadrant of the picture, a woman hunches over the child she cradles in her arms, protecting it. This posture was strikingly reminiscent of a sketch that my daughter did when she was about 8 years old:

Parents escaping Pompeii, cradling baby (after Benzoni)
(Sketch by Alanna Huck-Scarry)

The story of my daughter's sketch is in the blog post "The Children Are Waiting." The experience of seeing my daughter develop that sketch led me to realize how perceptive children can be about the most terrible disasters, particularly when they view it through the lens of the children involved, and that of the relationship of those children to their parents.


The rest of the shelf . . . 

My trip to the library reminded me that there are lots of books for children about Hiroshima and the issue of nuclear weapons.  (Two additional examples are Shin's Tricycle and Sadako and the Thousand Cranes.) There is so much to sort out . . .

The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki by J. Pools
in the "Great Historic Disasters" series

* There are many books proffered to children that provide justifications for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The discourse on the use of atomic weapons is certainly a worthy topic of study for young people of a certain age. However, there is a distinction between critical reading of atom bombing history and passive receiving of atom bombing dogma. I am wondering about how this can be effectively broken down.

* There are more and more materials about the atomic bombing being offered online. (See, for instance, Hiroshima: A Survivor's Story, offered by Scholastic.) Quite apart from the dogma embedded in online materials, it seems important to question the pros and cons of the online medium itself for this kind of teaching. On the plus side, there are huge advantages to the kind of interlinking that can be done online, giving access to enormous quantities of resources to everyone. On the other hand, there are benefits associated with physical books, including the way in which families and other groups experience them together.

* There are many books and other resources -- lists and lists, and lists of those lists -- about the atomic bombing. (Perhaps compiled by people with MLA degrees?) Just two examples are "Nuclear Holocaust in Contemporary Children's Fiction: A Surprising Amount of Agreement" and "New Miseries in Old Attire: Nuclear Adolescent Novels Published in the United States in the 1980s", and I'm sure there are many more.

There are abundant resources for teaching children about the problem of nuclear war.

I think that what we need now is curation. In particular, we need people who will carefully sort out what kinds of materials can best be used with children of various ages. (Perhaps all of this curation can be coordinated through a website or blog?)


In Chicago on November 22, 2014, there will be a social justice curriculum fair. My next step is to go to this fair and investigate what materials are being provided for teaching children about the problem of nuclear war. (Is anyone holding a "social justice curriculum fair" anywhere near you?)


Related posts

I don't think Alanna and I ever talked about what it must be like to be trying to escape a shower of sparks and hot ash. But she seemed to know that the sparks and hot ash are too important a part of the picture to be left out.


(See The Children Are Waiting )









It is the combination of the fire and the fact that it is a couple of children that are up against it that makes the reality of Grave of the Fireflies so undeniable.

(See Can We Confront the Fire and Blast of Nuclear War and Still Remain Human? (Watching "Grave of the Fireflies") )

I'm marveling at the adjacency of a piece of public art -- one with a very clear message about the risk of human ambition and self-absorption and heedlessness -- to the center of political power in the city of Chicago.

(See NUCLEAR WEAPONS: Who will bring us down to earth? )

Military at Ames? No Sirree Bub!

Maria must've been shaking here head. "What, is this guy afraid of a little snow?"

I had texted the door-knocking coordinator: "Are people really going out today? There's 3 inches and it's still coming down!" Hey, it was a Saturday morning.  Was anybody really going to make the effort?

When I got to Ames, I got educated.

The community affairs room -- a large, well-equipped, full-time feature right on the first floor of this beautiful, 13-year-old school -- was full of people, working on collating the piles of petitions that had already been collected and notarized. Two teams were already out on the street. Two more teams were being formed -- one of which I was assigned to -- and after a pass by the donut and coffee table we headed out with our clipboards.

And the best part?  "A little child shall lead them."

A Civics Lesson

We were going out to canvas a territory of about 5 blocks to gather signature on a ballot initiative. Many of the people in our area would prefer to speak Spanish, and only one of the adults in our team spoke Spanish.  Luckily, we had Edwin.

It was a little hard for me at first to take a back seat when it was time to give our pitch -- after all, who better than me to explain the civics context to the people we were meeting on the sidewalks and stoops of the west-side neighborhood that surrounds Ames? Someone had to determine if the person was a registered voter . . .  quickly explain the concept of an alderman pushing the school board to fall in with the Mayor's scheme to militarize the neighborhood school . . . emphasize the lack of consultation with the community . . . and then suggest the desirability of putting the question on the ballot so that everyone could vote on it.

Well, the answer to the question "who better?" turned out to be: Edwin.

Edwin is a smart, confident, likeable 7th-grader from Ames. Edwin did a beautiful job of explaining to people what was going on, and he had a winning way that made them not only want to provide their own signature, but also go rouse the other voters in the family so they could come give their signatures, too! Oh, and he switched effortlessly between English and Spanish, as the situation required.

As I stood to one side, ready to peel off one of our flyers if necessary, but mostly just offering moral support and enjoying the beautiful snowy day and listening to Edwin's conversations with the residents, I thought, "Our future is in good hands."

Sir Yes Sir!

The hardest thing for me to understand about the whole effort to militarize Ames is, why would anyone want to go into a place that is dedicated to community involvement, creativity, and leadership development, and change the focus to "following orders"?

It seems that Ames has become caught up in a complicated cultural discussion about schools, adolescence, parenting, multiculturalism, and community safety. To some people, teenagers running around and being obstreperous is the problem, and "Discipline, discipline, discipline!" is the answer.

Let's just pause here for a moment and each ask ourselves: What was I like when I was a teenager?

*   *   *

Leadership

Okay, back to the present. Consider the Peace and Leadership Council at Ames. "80 students at Ames Middle School in Logan Square participated in a student-led peace assembly [in March] in order to promote ways to diffuse violence and empathize with others who may have stressors in their lives that affect how they behave." (See Ames Middle School Students Hold Peace Assembly )

The Peace and Leadership Council brought forward a set of six recommendations to Alderman Moldanado, based on their survey and analysis of conflict in the surrounding community.  (Militarization of Ames wasn't one of them.)

The thing that scares me most of all is the idea that kids at Ames will be "taught" to become at very good at "do what you're told" instead of what I currently see happening: being in an environment that brings out creativity and learning to think for themselves; an environment that places a high value on community involvement and cooperation, and eschews violence.

The fact that Ames is so successful is not an accident. Ames is one of 5 schools in Chicago with ELEV8 programs -- a highly prestigious program being operated in four areas around the country.

ELEV8 schools feature:

* Adolescent-centered health services and education in school-based health centers that encompass physical, mental, sexual and dental health, with an emphasis on prevention.

* Capacity-building for students, parents and community members to increase their leadership skills and build sustainable, healthy neighborhoods.

* Community organizing on the local, state and federal levels in partnership with the Federation for Community Schools.

* Extension of the school day, with afternoon, weekend and summer programs, including the International Baccalaureate curriculum.

* Family supports, including public-benefits screening, tax-prep assistance, fitness and healthy-living classes, effective parenting strategies, book clubs, and more through a "Center for Working Families" in each school neighborhood.

* High-quality mentoring and leadership programs for youth through Big Brothers/Big Sisters and other organizations.

ELEV8 schools have been recognized by the federal government as one of ten top models of what schools should be. (Scroll down on this page to read about Ames: "An Elev8 Chicago Success Story")

When I think about kids at Ames being forced to say, "Sir Yes Sir!" all I can think of is something my mother, Eva Scarry used to say: "No sirree bub!"

As the Urban Dictionary explains: "No siree bub - With out any possible doubt, NO. Nope, Never, Never in a million years. Absolutely not. Used in conjunction with; Do I look I look that stupid to you?"

Mom always was a font of wisdom! ;-)

Related posts

The community group in the Ames neighborhood has presented data to the Chicago Public Schools Board, showing that the community overwhelmingly demands that Ames continue to be a regular academic school, and that they reject the proposal that it be militarized. It seems to me that the only remaining question is: who controls the city, the citizens or the politicians?

(See Ummm . . . do the people in the community get a say? (Update on the Military Coup at Ames))




Ames serves a largely Spanish-speaking community. Is the militarization of Ames anything other than a signal of what the Democratic party means by equitable treatment for immigrants?

(See The Militarization of Ames: The Real Meaning of the DREAM Act )


For those not already familiar with the situation in Chicago: at a time when the City cannot be bothered to figure out how to run its own schools, but is instead closing dozens at a time, our leaders somehow think it's appropriate to let branches of the U.S. military have the run of the school and recruit kids -- and in some cases outright convert the school into a military academy. Parents in the Logan Square neighborhood are fighting a valiant effort to stop that from happening to the Ames School.

(See Stop Playing "Ender's Game" With Chicago's Young People)

Asters for Eva

Asters

My mom passed away three years ago at this time.

I think of her when the asters start to come out.

I love to walk around North Pond here in Chicago and notice the asters as September stretches into October.

Asters are exuberantly showy - with lots of different types competing to outdo each other: "Look at me! Look how purple I am!" "No, me, look at me! I'm even more purple!"

I never thought of Mom as being "showy," and yet there's something about those shades of purple that remind me of how she used to dress for church on Sundays, and it makes me smile to associate her with asters.

Eva Scarry

And she could hold her own with any showy flowers!

Here's are some albums we put together with more of pictures of Mom and of her garden.

More wildflowers . . . . 

(Also ... check out Seamus Heaney reading this poem in memory of his mother ("When all the others were away at Mass.)


Related posts

Any day that starts with morning glories on Point Alanna is a good day!

(See Morning Glories on Point Alanna )










Each story in Taipei People is about a person who ended up in Taiwan after the war. More than anything, the story "Glory's by Blossom Bridge" is about the destiny of so many men who came from the mainland to Taiwan: ending up old and alone.

(See Taipei People: Thinking of Home )





Chicago has a tremendous head start in being a place that is inspired by the beauty all around us to do the difficult things that are needed. And Chicago is so beautiful all summer long, there's no reason to leave the city. Think of all the carbon emissions save on car and jet travel!

(See "One Word: Wildflowers" on Zero Carbon Chicago)




What I am wondering -- now that I've discovered the way Wang Wen-hsing holds up a mirror to me as much or more than he documents life in Taiwan -- is whether I am ready to bring more of these things about myself up to the surface.

(See Wang Wen-hsing and the Unspeakable: Changes in the Family )

The Obamoid and the Eva Test

The path-breaking computer scientist Alan Turing defined a fundamental divide in thinking about artificial intelligence. He asked us to think about a device which, when a human interacts with it, cannot be distinguished from a human. This gave rise to the notion of the "Turing test" - in which a person interacts with a counterpart and tries to tell whether it is a computer or a person.

My mother had her own version of the "Turing test" -- let's call it the "Eva test" -- in which someone would try to lie to her face, and she would look down, and then say hesitantly, "That doesn't sound true to me." You see, her problem was that she just couldn't understand the idea of a "little" lie.

The Obamoid
(graphic: "Obama Robot to be Set Loose in Central Florida")

I thought of Mom the other day when I read some quotes from an interview with Barack Obama that appeared on Youtube. For instance, the New York Times quotes the President as saying, "I want to make sure that people understand: actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.... For the most part they have been very precise precision strikes against Al Qaeda and their affiliates.... a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists.” Yet the same article cites a report "by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, [which] found that at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile. The bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals." Further, the bureau "counted 260 strikes by Predator and Reaper drones since President Obama took office, and it said that 282 to 535 civilians had been 'credibly reported' killed in those attacks, including more than 60 children."

"[A]ctually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties" ???

Actually? Actually, I shudder to imagine Mom's discomfort in the face of such mangling of the truth.

In another report, the the New York Times quotes the President as saying, "I’ve been very clear that we’re going to do everything we can to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and creating an arms race, a nuclear arms race, in a volatile region."

"[C]reating an arms race" ? Iran is creating an arms race?? Really? You can say that with a straight face? (I refer -- once again -- to the real numbers behind the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world today ... which I believe must form the basis of any meaningful discussion of how we are to avoid the next war.)

We can see how Barack Obama is doing on the "Eva test." It makes you wonder how he would do on the Turing test. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that in an age in which we have been lulled to sleep by the assurances that drones and robots can do all the fighting, and shield us from the consequences of or responsibility for violence and injury, we are becoming more and more insensitive to the inhuman proportion of the lying going on all around us.

Maybe it's time for more of us to start administering "Eva tests" of our own -- and start demanding truth from our leaders.


Related posts

In my opinion, the reason to focus on drones is this: when we focus on drones, the general public is able to "get," to an unusual extent, the degree to which popular consent has been banished from the process of carrying out state violence. (Sure, it was banished long ago, but the absence of a human in the cockpit of a drone suddenly makes a light bulb go off in people's heads.) It takes some prodding, but people can sense that drone use somehow crosses a line. And that opens up the discussion about how our consent has been eliminated from the vast range of US militarism.

(See "Why focus on drone attacks?")


Recently, some of us have been wandering the Twittersphere, searching for a congressman or congresswoman who will speak openly about their opposition to drone killing and drone surveillance.

(See The Diogenes Project: Can Anyone Find an Anti-Drone Congressman? )

A big Hollywood production of Ender's Game is scheduled for release on November 1. It's a perfect opportunity for us to ask: Are we happy seeing our schools turned into "Battle Schools"?

(See "Ender's Game" and the Militarization of Youth: Can We Talk About This? )

Why Weren't People Talking About It?

More on "What's right before our eyes TODAY . . . ?": Make Drone Killing 100% VISIBLE!
Drones: Am I Responsible?

Last year I spent a lot of time watching movies with my mom. We watched a lot of comedies, and quite a few romances, and usually we didn't pause too long to talk about any one movie before we were off and running, watching the next one. But one movie started us doing a lot of talking.

It seems that everybody has some awareness that Charlie Chaplin did a satirical depiction of Hitler; but unless you've actually seen "The Great Dictator", it's hard to imagine just how bitingly accurate it was. Take a look, for example, at the way Chaplin, in the role of "Adenoid Hynkel" perfectly parodies Adolf Hitler's body language and verbalizations in this clip. (Does that speech actually mean anything in German? Does it matter?)



But what was more remarkable to me was the way the film shows the treatment of Jews by Hitler/Hynkel and his countrymen. For instance, this scene shows Chaplin's Rip Van Winkle-like character returning to his barbershop in the Jewish ghetto after experiencing amnesia, unaware of the persecution that has become commonplace there.



The conceit of the film is that this innocuous Jewish barber (played by Chaplin) is a lookalike for Hitler/Hynkel (also played by Chaplin), and at a crucial moment the two switch places.

It is often said that the West was shocked when the first reports came out of the Nazi concentration camps after the war. I found this hard to believe after realizing how thoroughly, explicitly, and pointedly this 1940 film -- a major studio film, by a Hollywood legend, which was nominated for 5 Oscars -- portrayed German persecution of Jews, including beatings, lynchings, and concentration camps.

After we watched "The Great Dictator" together, I asked Mom if people were talking about German persecution of Jews in 1940. "No," she said, "For instance, at that time I was spending time with your father's family, and because they were in the newspaper business, they were up on all the latest news and events, and talking about everything. But they never talked about this."

"I don't understand why people weren't talking about it," she said.

That conversation got us talking about a lot of things that Mom saw and experienced, especially during the early '40s when she was living in "the big city" of Philadelphia as the country was being drawn into WWII. I was glad that it finally occurred to me to ask, and also that she remembered so much, and so well.

I wonder if, years from now, we will be thinking back to today and feeling surprise at how little we thought about some of the developments in our world, and in our country, and how we talked about them even less. Someday will I have to explain to my kids, or to my kids' kids, why it was that "people just weren't talking about it" . . . ?


MORE: "What did Americans know as the Holocaust unfolded? Quite a lot, it turns out."


[This turned out to be one of my favorite blog posts of 2011. Check out my other 2011 favorite "Scarry Thoughts" blog posts here!]


Related posts


Posterboard and markers: $21.79
Leaflets: $7:50
Bullhorn: $99.99
Standing up for peace and justice when everyone around you is saying "Get a job!" and "GO F**K YOURSELF!": PRICELESS!

(See Dissent: PRICELESS!)






Thinking about the Holocaust Museum's depiction of the reliance on brutality and intimidation during the Holocaust, all I could think of was the repeated use of similar tactics by the U.S. military against prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo.

(See Holocaust Museum: "Those Nazi Bastards!" )






In the "Turing test," a person interacts with a counterpart and tries to tell whether it is a computer or a person. Hmmm . . . and in the case of Barack Obama, the answer would be . . . ?

(See The Obamoid and the Eva Test )