Phunny Fotos

All Work and No Play Makes Hiroko a Dull Boy

Apparently it is an accepted occurrance in Japan for employees to actually work themselves to death. In fact, there is a word in Japanese—karoshi, whose meaning is “death from overwork”—that entered the lexicon after the first cases in the 1970s. The government blamed 672 suicides in the past year on karoshi, with unpaid overtime at factories and offices being a fact of life.  One engineer, for instance, collapsed after working more than 100 hours of overtime in a month on a hybrid car project.  (Remember folks, to hell with social integration—any obligation you feel towards an organization is the product of a weak mind; always look out for Numero Uno.)  Luckily, victims’ families are entitled to compensation (the deceased is viewed as dying for the honor of his company) and there is a national karoshi hotline.  While some companies have vowed to monitor the health of their workers and pay for overtime, other employers remain inexplicably callous:

Passion of the Congress

            As the saying goes, “there are no atheists in the foxhole or in the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.”  Given that approximately one out of every ten Americans is not religious and one out of every five-hundred-thirty-five federal representatives is not either, those of no faith may be the most consequential demographic (consequential in that religious conviction is an important characteristic of American society; I recognize that the midget and albino constituencies are underrepresented as well) without influence at the national level. Congress is often disdained for not being representative of the general population, with 84 percent of our representatives being male and 86 percent white.  The presidency is even less diverse with 100 percent of officeholders being male and 100 percent also white.  However, only six members of the national legislature say that they have no religious affiliation—other than the one atheist, Pete Stark (D-Calif.), this could include New Age religion followers or scientologists or agnostics—with nearly all others being Catholic or Protestant with a large number of Jews, also.  Needless to say, we have never had an openly atheistic president.

            Has atheism become the new black, the new woman, or the new gay?  Perhaps, in that there is an irrational stigma of non-believers in a country in which 90 percent of people believe in some higher authority, 60 percent are certain that God exists, and 80 percent believe in miracles; furthermore, 50 percent would automatically not vote for a candidate for president just because he/she is an atheist.  Radio host and author Michael Medved, without contesting the merits of non-belief, has given three reasons why an atheist could not become president: state occasions that require a certain degree of religiosity would be meaningless when invoked by an atheist; such a person could not connect to the American people; and it would inhibit our fight against what he terms “Islamo-Nazism.”

            On the charge that the President, who oversees stately affairs—such as attending funerals, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, or singing America the Beautiful (or other rituals which mention God)—would not be able, if an atheist, to perform these actions without being called a hypocrite or abstain from them without being called un-American, I do not see why such a black-white distinction is necessary.  Going back to the days of James Madison, a fervent believer in the separation of church and state who condemned the practice of paying congressional chaplains from the national treasury and, as president, vetoed the incorporation of a church in D.C. by Congress (and denied Congress’s ability to provide for what President Bush now calls “faith-based initiatives”), it was possible to have it both ways.  He issued a proclamation in light of the onset of the War of 1812 calling for a day of fasting and prayer, which was a lengthy statement with heavily religious rhetoric but with no specific mention of Christianity.  Madison later justified the proclamation by saying that it was merely a recommendation, not mandatory, and that his predecessors had made similar issuances.  The Founding Father, though, was clearly troubled by the implications of this kind of action in regards to the First Amendment.

            Madison, not quite an atheist but certainly not in favor of the control that established religious authority had over society, hit on the reason why Americans should not necessarily worry if their president does not believe in the God that is supposed to be blessing his country.  To wit, that which transcends theological boundaries is the love of and dedication to country.  Just because someone does not believe in God does not mean that the person is amoral or can lead our country in any worse direction than, say, our current president, who is one of the most openly Christian chief executives in our history.  The phrases “under God” and “in God we trust” are symbolic of the larger pride that Americans have in their country and in their belief that the United States is the most powerful nation on the planet.  Any feeling of spirituality that comes from incantations of patriotism comes not with the knowledge that God bestowed land and prosperity on our people—land that was stolen from the Mexicans and the Indians, and prosperity that benefitted from two hundred years of slave labor—but at the respect for the history and heritage of the country.  Just as a holy man cannot hold his job without believing in the word of the scripture and working towards perfection of humanity, politicians must believe in our Constitution and work towards a more perfect union.

            Medved’s second assertion, that an atheist politician could not connect with the American people because he/she would look down with contempt upon the less enlightened God-fearing people in the constituency, can be construed offensively.  This implies that everyday citizens cannot trust atheist politicians because they lack the moral compass that supposedly comes with belief in God—any god.  Of course, that is untrue, especially since there are many policymakers who do not let their faith get in the way of good judgment and many nonbelievers who know that killing, for example, is wrong.  The implication of elitism also factors into this assessment, even though the ranks of Congress are already filled with lawyers and businessmen with intimate connections to special interests and lobbyists; I’m not sure how such individuals can become humbled in the minds of ordinary Americans just by going to church once a week and then lying and obfuscating during the other six.  But if atheist politicians had any desire for self-preservation they would not disdain those of faith or dismiss religion as the “opium of the masses.”  They simply need to realize that religion is a major part of many Americans’ lives and that, misguided as those people may be, churches are able to address many problems of the community that the government cannot.  Similarly, those with religious convictions must learn to overcome that irrational distrust of the “other” that stems from a closed mind and a closed heart—the leap still needs to be made from accepting those of different faiths to accepting those of no faith.

            Speaking of close-mindedness, the last of Medved’s arguments proposes that an atheist president would only antagonize the “Islamo-Nazis” that the U.S. is fighting, since the reason we were attacked on 9/11 is due to our presumed godlessness.  Furthermore, an attack on our enemies of faith would be an attack on all faiths because would be waged by someone who is not fighting in the name of God.  First, this inaccurately categorizes the fight against terrorism as a fight against the religion of Islam; we really are only fighting against extremists, since not every Muslim in the Middle East and certainly not those living in the U.S. consider this jihad (struggle) of ours a holy war.  Secondly, to characterize an atheist commander-in-chief as leading a “war against belief itself” is redefining the conflict into a binary opposition that pits obvious good against obvious evil.  If anything, an atheist president would be disinterested enough in matters of religion to ensure the preservation of Islam since he/she would have no impulse to see an “inferior” culture Christianized and civilized—a practice which the Judeo-Christians of the 19th century employed, acting to “liberate” Native Americans from their misguided ways.  A nonreligious perspective would also seemingly be fairer deciding whether to wage war based on appropriate intelligence, ability to serve justice, and moral permissiveness rather than simply whether God would will it, since, as is presumably the case, God cannot be on both sides of the same conflict.

            This country may eventually elect more atheists in positions of power in Congress and maybe even the presidency, as their number is slowly growing.  Atheists are no more prepared to overstep the bounds of the Constitution than are those of faith who must tend the laws, nor are they immoral (although Rep. Stark, atheist from California, does not have a long record of corruption, he does have a reputation for dickishness, an affliction not restricted to nonbelievers by any means).  Eventually, we will look at the merits of atheism on its own, independent of its place in politics.

 

6/16

Bubble Bubble, Oil in Trouble

            Americans are predictable creatures: they like their cars big, their Internet fast, their water clean, their popcorn buttered, their news sensational, their celebrities screwed up, and their fuel cheap.  Yep, when God put fossil fuels on this earth (as with ketchup, democracy, football, and everything else we worship), He did so with the presumption that we would grow our cities, lay down paved roads through the open hinterlands of the west, and maybe even make sport out of burning copious amounts of gasoline by driving in circles for hours on end in front of a mesmerized crowd.

            Except the great Bubba in the sky gave us a small caveat: we could not use fossil fuels forever (which is just absurd: it’s almost impossible to imagine our oil supply coming to an end any more than if Saturday Night Live were to end—it is an institution that transcends time).  Now that gas prices are skyrocketing, we begin to see how that could be problematic.  But really, who could have predicted that a finite resource which took millions of years to form and only a century-and-a-half to extract would become harder to access with diminishing supply and increasing demand?  Well, this guy for starters: M. King Hubbert.  In 1956, Hubbert, a geologist working for Shell Oil, theorized that our oil would be supplied according to a bell curve; upon reaching its peak, the easily-accessible oil would run out resulting in the diminished capability for recovery and lowering the supply.  He thought that the peak for the United States would occur in 1970 and the peak for the world would occur right about now.  He was laughed at in the industry.  But 1970 rolled around and we ended up hitting our peak, then the laughter stopped.  We are now extracting in this country about as much onshore oil as we were in 1940—the U.S. requires about 21 million barrels of oil per day, of which we only supply 8.5. 

            What should we do about this unfortunate inconvenience?  We could open up the Arctic for drilling or explore the oceans, as noted analyst Dr. Charles Norris has suggested.  But at the risk of receiving a roundhouse kick to the noggin, I would venture that this is too expensive a solution that would only last a couple of decades at most.  If it must be done, it should only be done out of necessity to keep our economy from collapsing while we rapidly invest in new sources of energy—and I’m not referring to coal.  Those who advocate for more drilling and more coal mining are thinking regressively and behaving stubbornly.  It is true that we have a coal supply that will last at least 250 years, however coal mining disfigures the countryside and accounts for 40 percent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  If we let the free market decide, we will be an oil-based economy until our doomsday, so it’s time that Mean Ol’ Big Government gives a push to finding a solution that will carry us into the next few decades without having to move from fuel crisis to fuel crisis.

            Development of renewable energy sources should be given an immediate boost in funding for research and implementation by the government, and if that means taxing oil and coal companies then so be it.  Remember: General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tire were the guys who, beginning in the 1920s, conspired to buy up rail transit systems in 45 cities and tear out the rails, replacing the trains with their own buses and electricity for oil.  That was the wave of the future half a century ago, now we need to look at not only repairing our mass transit infrastructure, but restructuring our energy supply.  Currently only one percent of our country’s energy is being supplied by solar, wind, geothermal, etc. sources (excluding hydroelectric). 

People become skeptical that clean energy can be applied on a large scale; they visualize Rube Goldberg-type fantasy machines that power entire cars, homes, and businesses.  That isn’t necessarily what is needed.  Take, for example, a building in Bahrain that has three windmills incorporated into the structure to provide fifteen percent of its energy.  Conservation can be classy as well as practical.  In fact, windmills alone currently provide enough energy to power 4.5 million homes.  Remember: any uptick in renewable energy usage means less dependence on coal and oil, and if the demand decreases so will the price.  As if high gas prices weren’t enough to increase demand for more fuel efficient cars and expansion of mass transportation, the government should look into providing more resources to expand mass transit (especially intercity rail travel—trains emit half the amount of carbon per passenger mile as an airplane and certainly less than a car) and perhaps providing tax incentives to foster the production and purchase of electric cars.

            Rebuilding an economy based on renewable energy is not just left-wing hippyism—coal and oil have, since the Industrial Revolution, been used to collapse distances and connect the world technologically and physically and to that we owe a round of applause.  But now the globe is getting warmer and the oil supply is running thinner.  It will hurt a little to usher in new forms of energy, but think of all the benefits.  It will encourage colleges in the U.S. to graduate more engineers (China graduates four times as many as we do, and two-thirds of our degrees go to foreign-born students) to design the technologies needed for clean energy, it will provide jobs to those who build, install, and maintain such devices as solar panels and windmills, and will free us from dependence on the turbulent Middle East for oil.  But we need to start planning now; we’re running out of dead dinosaurs to burn.

 

6/12

Lights, Camera, Reaction

What makes the news?  Is it what gives you the blues?  Does someone choose what is news?  Whose views does news use?  Some say that it skews or that it’s all just a ruse.  News can amuse by talking about taboos; it can excuse or accuse and even confuse.  You can peruse the news for facts you can use.  But muse this if you choose: who gives the cues?  

 

            In the media there is a loose formula for determining which news is reported by considering factors such as the timeliness, the consequence, and the proximity of the story.  For example, in the wake of unprecedented gas prices, a report on a local government’s plan to implement a light rail system to alleviate road congestion and provide alternate means of transportation would be timely, consequential, and proximate.  The other important element to weigh is the entertainment value of news.  Now more than ever, with corporations vying to catch our eyes and ears in an increasingly congested and busy world, media need to make every story seem sensational or imperative so that we will watch.  They know that a House Subcommittee Hearing on Infrastructure is more important than a recap of American Idol, but darned if more people didn’t tune into FOX than C-SPAN.

            But do the media solely present what is inherently ”news”?  For such a function to occur, the media would need to gauge what the people want to know and what they ought to know.  Treatment of Guantánamo prisoners, the Chinese earthquake, effects of Mexican immigration, climate change, etc. are newsworthy because they appeal to the country’s traditional values: civil rights, empathy, accommodation, and activism.  Obviously not all news coverage is treated equally, so the process might seem pretty arbitrary and opaque, but also understandable, given Americans’ preferences for “infotainment.”  However, what happens if you get an instance of two talking heads screaming at each other over whether Hillary Clinton should drop out of the presidential race?  Which value does that appeal to?  Is it even news?  Outside of the media, would anyone else be talking about it if it didn’t matter so much to journalists?  Of the last question in particular viewers must be mindful—we need to wonder about whether, when we read or watch the media, we are learning about current events more so than learning about the views of journalists on current events.

            Take the recent incident of columnist and commentator Michelle Malkin creating controversy over a Dunkin Donuts commercial featuring their spokesperson, Rachael Ray, wearing a Middle Eastern-looking scarf.  To make matters worse, the company actually pulled the commercial because of all the Internet attention.  The media created their own news!  If they had just written off Malkin as using the kind of conspiracy-mongering, racist, and inconsequential rhetoric indicative of the style of the crazy homeless guy in the park, we would not be left over with such useless messages as “Dunkin Donuts supports terrorism” or “Michelle Malkin is an ultra-conservative hack” (not that we didn’t already know at least one of those to be truths).  In 1898 yellow journalists blamed the sinking of the Maine on the Spanish; in 2008 they blame terrorism on a doughnut company.

            Another example of a manufactured controversy comes from the ample coverage of the 2008 election.  Anchors and correspondents have salivated over trying to predict which states Hillary will win, which states Obama will when, when Hillary will bow out, if Obama will ask her to be his vice president, etc., etc.  I heard an NPR correspondent today give a synopsis of what Barack Obama will announce after the last two primaries end, and punctuated his remarks by saying, “But I don’t want to give too much away.”  What are you giving away?  The man hasn’t said anything yet!  It seems that the media’s penchant for being in a perpetual state of preview (“coming up at eleven o’clock…stay tuned for a special consumer report…the full story is straight ahead”) is being applied not only to what they do, but now what others say and do.  If we want predictions of the future, there is an adequate number of fortune tellers, tarot card readers, soothsayers, etc. throughout the country.  If the media spend their time telling the public that blue collar workers are voting for Clinton, those people will perceive her to be representative of them and will indeed vote for her; voila, the media have created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

            So, let’s say the media were to stop predicting the news and simply be reactionary in their coverage and analysis.  How could they mess that simple job up?  Well, in 1996 President Clinton gave a State of the Union Address that lasted nearly an hour-and-a-half in which he laid out his policy goals.  The media attacked Clinton for not sticking to his message and as being lengthy and boring.  Yet, the media soon found out that 80 percent of Americans approved of the speech, 74 percent had a “clear idea” of the president’s agenda, and that more people tuned in to watch as the speech progressed.  In other words, the media’s news was news to us.  The public supported the substance while the media were critical of the style.  Apparently since the media have gotten us addicted to sound bites, it makes their job too difficult when legitimate discourse comes into play.

            The effect of the media can be powerful—they brought us pictures of the carnage in Vietnam, showed the unfair treatment of 1960s protestors in Birmingham, and lost communist-hunter Joseph McCarthy much of his support—but it also needs to be responsible.  There are still problems that need fixing which could easily fill up twenty-four hours if the television networks preferred to cover it.  But when they stop telling the stories of others and become the newsmakers themselves, those in the media augment their influence and are able to make their own stories—however unneeded—part of our discourse.

 

6/3

Nearly Beloved?

In the interest of full disclosure, I really do not mind what kinds of sexual activities people like to engage in privately.  As far as I am concerned, you can use however many whips, chains, cucumbers, pitchforks, and falafels (even Bill O’Reilly’s) with however many people as you choose.  What I do have a problem with is those who use someone’s sexual orientation to discriminate against them in civil practices.  Obviously the California Supreme Court was right on the mark to legalize same-sex marriage (which mostly involved the agreement to call it “marriage” in the first place) but there are a number of people who want to restrict the term and the practice of the institution to only men-women.  While such feelings are not inexplicable for us, they are not necessarily reasonable.

First of all, to define marriage as an institution we have to define the word “institution”—primarily it is any system that sets norms and rules for interaction and behavior.  Slavery, the Internet, schools, etc. all inculcate certain values that must be adopted in order to participate successfully.  For marriage, the normative aspects are typically 1.) that it occurs between a man and a woman; 2.) that the man and woman are of the same race; 3.) that there is a bond of affection; and 4.) that it occurs for the benefit of procreation.  There is nothing legal or moral to debate in that description, it is merely the pattern that most marriages follow.  The only universal constant (as opposed to norm) is the last one—creating babies.  Let us look at how the other aspects have changed over time in the United States.

Just like all social proceedings, marriage practices have undergone various tweakings.  I used the term “affection” instead of love to denote a want of companionship more than an emotional need because prior to the Industrial Revolution, households operated as independent economic units in tight-knit communities.  If his wife died, a husband would remarry quickly due to pragmatic concerns of getting work done and raising many children.  After industrialization, having the father going off to work in the factory or in the city fostered a greater specialization of labor and families became more independent of the community.  Thus it was not imperative that marriage be based on finding a mate to help with social and familial duties; instead, marriage would be consummated on love (although there are still some who marry out of economic interest—take Anna Nicole Smith, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and every hot lady who’s ever married a filthy old rich guy).

The other element that has changed is the influx of marriage between persons of different races.  Today’s gay marriage is the interracial marriage of forty years ago.  California allowed it in 1948 and the Supreme Court approved of it in 1967.  Would it have been appropriate two hundred years ago?  Certainly not, as many of our Founders, including the oft-referenced Thomas Jefferson, could not even envision an America where blacks and whites could coexist peacefully, let alone allow miscegenation.  Maybe in a generation or so same-sex marriage will not be seen as a big deal.  After all, only 7 percent of marriages are interracial; I do not think gay marriage will result in a threat to heterosexual autonomy any more than interracial marriage is a threat to white autonomy.

So, can we say that same-sex couples rightfully belong in the institution of marriage?  How about this for an answer: can we say that the institution of marriage should rightfully belong in our institution of democracy?  We cannot pretend to ignore the fact that homosexuals exist and they have the right to love each other like any two people do.  Though our country’s record might not reflect positively on how those in power—typically white male Protestants—have treated those not of their own culture or race, when we look back in history we cannot imagine in today’s world tolerating slavery, allowing Japanese internment camps, or refusing women the right to vote.  Though some may claim that America is being destroyed by letting gay people marry (as opposed to climate change and energy needs, wars, affordable medication and housing), we will just have to accept it as another part of our culture; not as something that goes against morality or the Bible but as proof of the justice and equal opportunity that America offers.  In bed.

 

5/30