Petesophizing...

Wasn't John Kerry a "C" student like Bush?

I dreamed I owned a horse farm and the John Kerry Campaign asked me to use it for their debate preparation weekend.

When I acquiesced, they kicked me off my own property for security reasons.

When I returned after the weekend they were gone and my cat was dead.

That's my analysis.

Lacking TIVO, I'm going to miss the ability to rewatch some television moments when they disappear in the YouTube litigation.

Here's the old Letterman v. O'Reilly, the 60% of what you say is crap clip.

It doesn't hold up well to repeated viewing, if you want to continue to claim victory for Letterman.

I'm biased -- I don't like to see the Democrats using Cindy Sheehan and Michael J. Fox as point people.

But I don't want to side with O'Reilly, either.

Still, Letterman was nonresponsive, thinking in soundbites:

A Clemson University economist, Todd D. Kendall, has delivered a paper at Stanford entitled Pornography, Rape, and the Internet.

Borrowing Andrew Sullivan's syntax, the "money quote":

I find that internet access appears to be a substitute for rape.

(Italics is Kendall's, in the paper's introduction.)

If you don't have multiple regression in your math background (I do, but it's been fading for 20 years now), I can summarize this procedure as follows, and I'm borrowing now from Steven Pinker, I believe: Correlational statistics doesn't tell us about causes but instead tells us what likes to happen with what.

In other words, the paper concludes that a reduction in rape statistics "likes to occur" when internet access increases, particularly for 15-19 year-old boys. Pornography seems to decrease rape, leaving other crime rates unchanged.

Keep in mind this conclusion doesn't immediately invalidate all suspicions and worries about porn. Porn could still dehumanize women, desensitize men, etc. But the paper makes a strong argument that porn works as a substitutive satisfaction. And this effect is powerful enough to overcome other factors, at least as far as decreasing rape statistics.

Well worth reading. And sure to cause controversy because Kendall -- like Steven Levitt before him applying mathematics to questions that really matter -- has the unmitigated gall to write clearly and thoroughly, with a broad audience in mind.

I'm midway through Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Fascinating. Refreshing after six years of homeschooling by the Bush's and the Cheney's -- even if you're not converted to atheism.

I confess I've watched Dawkins' appearance on The Colbert Report about ten times. Two geniuses at this table? At the very least, seven minutes of the best television I've seen in some time:



Here's a blogger who's collated Dawkins' British broadcast called The Root Of All Evil. I don't think this documentary is going to make it onto American TV. (It's not on the Netflix horizon either.) His encounters with evangelicals in the South are frightening -- filled with violent expectancy.

Here's an internet find. Google videos is carrying his 1987 BBC broadcast The Blind Watchmaker. Wonderful for illustrating why Natural Selection should not be considered a random process:

Once again there's cleverness in the Republican attack -- this time from Rush Limbaugh suggesting Michael J. Fox was simulating his symptoms during this political ad airing in Missouri:

Beaudrillard offered medical symptoms as an example when he said: Simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Introducing even the smallest doubt about what you're seeing is decidedly clever.

But forget about the hifallut'n Frenchified that I probably don't understand anyway. The ad itself is hopelessly unsophisticated -- even to the point of being counterproductive. Like a public embrace of Cindy Sheehan it's full of the suggestion that our case is emotional.

The case for scientific research is decidedly unemotional; the Republican position, (usually a prone position while getting angioplasty or secret antibiotics for std's), hypocritical.

Our case isn't emotional in the least. Scientific research? An end to an incompetently prosecuted war? What's more rational than these?

An ad like this let's the idealogues occupy the high ground of rationality (leadership!) even as they're demonstrably thoughtless.

Some statistics about Martin Scorcese's The Departed:

Number of clients the police psychiatrist character has a personal relationship with: 2

Rank of Mark Wahlberg -- sharing time with DiCaprio, Nicholson, Baldwin, Damon, and Sheen -- in terms of screen presence: 1

Rank of DiCaprio's performance as an actor: 1

Number of dialogue surprises and innovative characterizations in the first half of the movie: lost count

In the second half: 0

Number of characters shot in the head in the second half: lost count

Scenes supporting the presence of androgens, including testosterone, in the male characters: all

Scenes suggesting those hormones are implicated not just in violence but in the natural, pleasurable, female-directed act of procreation: maybe one? maybe?

This might be wishful thinking but I'm wondering if others aren't experiencing violent resolutions to interesting conflicts as superficial. Witness the popularity of Law & Order, where the violence usually takes place first and the resolution usually involves thought, cleverness, character.

(Photo: Marlene Dietrich autographs the cast on the leg of Tec 4 Earl E. McFarland at a United States hospital in Belgium, November 24, 1944. )

My play makes some mention of Oskar Schindler so I've been rereading David M. Crowe's Oskar Schindler: The Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List, published in October 2004.

With this book in hand you can't help but ask about Steven Spielberg's movie Schindler's List: How much license is too much license? And when are narrative demands too demanding? According to Crowe, a Columbia University history professor affiliated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

• Oskar Schindler never compiled the list (more accurately: lists).
• There's no evidence he ever went to Auschwitz to save the women who were routed there.
• He fled for Switzerland five weeks before his factory in Czechoslovakia was liberated by the Russians, leaving others the burden of acquiring food for the more than 1000 "Schindler Jews".
• He was not just a German spy, a member of the Abwehr, but a German spy implicated in covert operations that helped to incite the invasion of Poland. (He helped start World War Two!!)
  
• He's so controversial, Vad Yashem, the Jewish memorial organization in Israel, did not name him among The Righteous Of All Nations -- until Steven Spielberg was about to arrive to shoot the film's epilogue.
  

"Schindler's List" is fiction based on fiction, derived from Thomas Keneally's 1982 book entitled Schindler's Ark, a book ultimately classified as a novel. Yet of the three principal English-language treatments of the Schindler story, Keneally's novel, the Spielberg film, and Crowe's 700+ page biography, we all know which one occupies the mental space known as "history", and probably always will.

I don't care if the film adds snow to events that actually occured in warm weather. I care about whether Steven Spielberg should have waited for the seven years of scholarly research Crowe undertook. (Would the movie have been made at all if Crowe's biography had preceded it?) And I've been thinking about the risks involved in presenting a composite hero.

Schindler was socially clever, and at times, brave. More than individual acts of bravery, every day tempted him with a loss of nerve that could have doomed those people. But so many more heros were necessary for the miraculous outcome. And often it was questionable whether one could really consider Schindler to be in the leadership role.

The months after the factory was moved to Brunnlitz in Czechoslovakia really offer the most heroic portrait of Schindler. (Keneally's original novel title was "Ark" not "List".) Yet here, his wife, Emilie, humiliated for years by her husband's infidelities, emerges as certainly a necessary condition for survival. For the dual tasks of throwing sand in the eyes of their Nazi overseers and procuring food for more than 1000 people in the Spring of 1945, Emilie Schindler has also been honored by Vad Yashem.

The Nazis perfected the cult of personality delivered via film. Has Steven Spielberg answered them powerfully, countering larger-than-life evil with larger than life goodness? Or is larger than life evil countered only by a consortium, with each member doing what small things they can, not waiting for a hero, not using the heroic paradigm which inevitably mirrors back that me, I, am not made of heroic stuff.

(Photo: Amon Goeth with rifle. NARA.)

The story in Crowe's Schindler biography that caught my eye a couple of years ago was the rescue of the 300 women from Auschwitz. I don't care if it was routine to be sent there temporarily. They were in Auschwitz! And temporary was beginning to look like permanent. Yet someone did something to get them out -- a singular event in the history of the facility that has come to represent the greatest crime in modern history. Who?

From Crowe, according to Emilie Schindler:

So a few days later, Oskar went to Zwittau, and asked an old friend, Hilde, to go to Auschwitz "and personally take care of the release of the women." Hilde, at least according to Emilie, "was strikingly beautiful, slender, and graceful."

In an interview with West German police in 1963, Schindler testified directly:

It is true that I sent my secretary Hilde Albrecht (fate unknown) to Auschwitz with gifts (jewelry and alcohol) in order to obtain the release of my female workers from the responsible labor supervisor Schwarz [SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Heinrich].

In a letter Oskar Schindler wrote in 1956:

Who can feel my inner conflict, which I encountered when I sacrificed a dozen women to the orgies of the SS-Uebermenschen (superior human beings), where alcohol and gifts had already lost attraction.

In the same letter:

I was throwing pearls before swine.

Crowe does not take a decisive stand on how the women were released. But there's no case for Oskar Schindler personally going to Auschwitz.

Can you imagine at such a decisive point in "Schindler's List" the tall, dapper Oskar Schindler as portrayed by Liam Neeson turning to his former secretary and asking her to go to Auschwitz to save 300 women?

What's lost with a composite hero? Maybe nothing. Maybe the heroic meditation serves humanity.

But maybe everything. Maybe all the Hilde Albrechts of the story -- when the sadistic Nazi Amon Goeth is played by the handsome, ethereal Ralph Fiennes -- so attractive to women -- but the real Amon Goeth -- who needed so often to be placated and controlled -- was decidedly not attractive to women.

I notice Vad Yashem has titled the small biography supporting the Oskar Schindler tree on the Avenue of the Righteous "Oskar and Emilie Schindler". (Italics mine.) In the short biosketch they include the statement:

He then proceeded to send his personal German secretary to Auschwitz to negotiate the release of the women.

I don't know what their website read like before Crowe's book was published.

Recently I read in Norman Cantor a terrific summary of the French deconstructionist thinker Michel Foucault:

Foucault is, entirely, thoroughly, a moral relativist. He writes that all the institutions of a society, as well as all its ethical principles and cultural forms, are instruments of power.

He famously indicted not only the obvious -- the criminal justice system -- but also the sexual revolution, feminism, and – ouch – what I’ll call liberalism of the type spirited along in the Huffpost, Daily Kos, and Air America. (Al Franken on a power grab? But he’s so cute!) Late in life Foucault -- less-famously -- recanted.

A new schtick of mine is to say I’m dating one clinical psychologist casually, and another, hourly. I turned to JR (casual) the other day and asked her if she thought it was possible the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles Of Psychologists And Code Of Conduct is primarily an instrument of power.

What do I mean? I mean: Could its most significant role be not protecting patients but protecting therapists and their ability to make money? Could the code even have a role in positing a class of people called “patients” or “clients” who are unable to act in their own interests?

“This is personal”, JR said. “You want to sleep with LV” (hourly).

Just what you’d expect from a psychologist.

I cried, “But does that mean I’m wrong?”

What followed surprised me for the ease with which my devil’s advocate position held its own. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I was just fooling around.

JR: The APA protects patients by illuminating for therapists what ethical conduct is.

Petey: That should be accomplished by a school and a curriculum before licensing, not by ethics review boards applying a code.

JR: The ethics boards stop therapists who act detrimentally toward their patients.

Petey: As usual the protection comes too late for the victims.

JR: Protecting future patients.

Petey: You’re referring to unethical behavior that’s not addressed by the criminal justice system – otherwise the ethics boards are redundant. Clients are protected by laws. Why an additional code?

JR: The therapist-client relationship is a special one. The client needs to feel safe.

Petey: But is it so special that the client is unable to act in their own interest?

JR: No, the client still acts in their own interest.

Petey: And defines what’s a positive therapy outcome for themselves.

JR: Yes. Although now you can appeal to brainscans to see changes.

Petey: But if a client says “I feel terrible” and later commits suicide -- that might trump a therapist saying, based on a brainscan, “He’s doing better”.

JR: (laughs)

Petey: If I don’t see myself as vulnerable having a physical relationship with my therapist (cough), or if I want to give her an expensive gift -- why should an ethics board tell me that’s wrong?

JR: Those things change the therapeutic relationship.

Petey: And if I find something abusive or exploitative in my therapy, I’ll only get satisfaction from the ethics board if they – a body of professionals working with the same paradigm as my therapist – agree.

JR: They examine things on a case by case basis.

Petey: No doubt careful about setting precedents – especially where refunds are concerned.

JR: They try to determine if a client has been damaged. It’s a thorough process. But if a client says their therapist is stalking them using a spaceship, isn’t it “right” for the board to side with the therapist?

Petey: And once again protect the therapist, not the client. The client would be better off going to some other type of arbitration – where maybe the adjudicator isn’t so swift at identifying delusions. Or maybe has a strong anti-therapist bias. Or -- believes in spaceships.

JR: You see, you’re just good at arguing. There are others who can make this case better than I do.

Petey: But what if I’m not? You’re just as articulate as I am. What if I’m just on the right side of the issue?

I annoyed her there. I’m sure there’s something wrong with my position. Between the two of us, though, we couldn’t come up with an example of how the APA Code of Conduct protects clients.

I put on the (French) devil’s mask and it’s become my real face. And JR (who’s not in private practice) unraveled enough to say:

JR: If George Clooney is my client, the ethics code is going out the window.

Presumably right before her underwear.

Thanks to the thoughtfulness of an old friend, last night I was able to attend Absolutely The Best Party 11, the annual AIDS research benefit sponsored by the Wisconsin AIDS Fund, with a VIP ticket. All VIP's received a stainless steel flask with a few ounces of vodka in it as a party favor. Still, the lines for the bar were long all night. Everyone drinking.

What happened to "gay energy"? Few people, gay or straight, dressed for the Las Vegas theme. The Party's new location, the Pfister Hotel, induced cognitive dissonance: there are no musty curtains in Las Vegas reminding you your wealth was inherited. I didn't know a soul, other than my companions.

The best appetizer, a one-shrimp cocktail in a shot glass full of sauce, produced piles of half-eaten shrimp and bloody shot glasses. I'm sure I'm the only attendee who ate the crunchy shrimp fins at the end of the tail and drank the remaining cocktail sauce like a horseradish shooter. Three times. The third one I had out in the hallway.

Tommy Femia took the stage doing his Judy Garland Live show. "Pfister? I hardly even know her." The sense of Weimar-coated gloom was complete.

I was in performance mode, too, believing I was not sharing in the despair -- over the cause, (AIDS treatment now heavy with unmentionable income and class considerations), over the same old 11,000 Dow, and over how the buffet of mini-food uncannily whispered that none of us would ever experience true cleverness or charm again. I thought I'd risen above it all. So what if beef tenderloin is now the size of Scrabble tiles on tiny toast. You just eat more of them!

This morning I think I might have been pretty depressed myself. I recall now that I quipped to my companions, including my generous sponsor, that I have an idea for a restaurant to feature 72 nubile waitresses and a river of yogurt. I didn't even realize I'd put a stinger on the end of the scorpion's tail. I designed a place where the carriage trade -- and how do you get to the Pfister if not in a carriage -- can sit back, relax, and receive their just reward at the end of a long day.

I have to say – Mike Fischer’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel review of Naughty Angel makes me cringe. Look at his lede from September 30 -- ‘Angel’ falls flat despite naughtiness:

Nice guys don’t just finish last in baseball. They also tend to make boring protagonists. “Naughty Angel,” local dramatist Thomas Rosenthal’s latest play, unwittingly confirms this simple maxim. The Windfall Theatre Ensemble staged the world premiere on Friday night.

I’m betting Mike Fischer got “Nice guys … tend to make boring protagonists” from a how-to website. I guess HowToWritePlays.com didn’t mention Hamlet. (Also, consider: “unwittingly confirms this simple maxim.” Sheesh.)

All right. Naughty Angel is not "Angels In America" or "Look Homeward, Angel". It’s “premise heavy” and the premise plays out in the first act. There. I read a website, too.

But what Naughty Angel is – is funny. In all three acts – it’s FUNNY. It’s not “flat” in the least.

Writing is a lonely business made lonelier by the foreknowledge that nearly everyone -- family, friends, and oh yeah, reviewers – will work out their judgmental reflex on what THEY see as flaws. Their impulse usually requires ignoring the hundreds of decisions and inspirations the writer wagered successfully. I take issue with such a hatchet job, especially when it’s directed at a new play by a local playwright.

Fischer says Rosenthal’s dialogue is ‘dull’. I’m old school when it comes to accusations of “dull” and “boring”. The really clever people of this world never experience boredom. I found plenty of sequences where Rosenthal gave the actors just enough of a comically endowed situation for THEM to shine. And this ensemble cast, under the direction of Shawn Gulyas, got laughs. Each and every actor.

Angela Beyer's talent is clear to me, and I’ve noted it elsewhere. Though her role as temptress Lilly is small, Rosenthal gave her an opportunity for a large “contrast”, from sorority girl to she-devil.

Amy Kull always has some Kramer-like “kovorka” on stage. The audience Saturday night physically reacted to each entrance by Ryan Spiering as lovable mechanic (and “swordsman”), Zack. They expected to laugh, and did. So too, for Chad Tessmer playing Rick, a beer guzzling “reality instructor” who’s stuck in the same gear he was when he was your Freshman roommate in college. Funny.

Jason Powell as the leading “nice guy”, Jerry, could have used more ammunition from the playwright. But the audience was still with him at the play’s sentimental ending, after a solid two hours. An accomplishment for director, actor, and writer.

If overall Naughty Angel kicks more like a string of comic set-pieces than a theatrical “whole”, remember: in these melancholy, anxious times Will Ferrell gets millions of dollars for doing just that.

And before you thank reviewers like Mike Fischer for saving your precious time and your entertainment dollar, try a little experiment. Put down your Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and pick up a blank piece of paper. Now – using only twenty-six phonetic symbols and a few punctuation marks, set in motion a chain reaction that results in two hours of badly-needed laughs for a Milwaukee audience.

A daunting, mysterious, vulnerable endeavor, right?

Consider supporting this local playwright and these fine, local actors.

Naughty Angel plays again this weekend and next. Details here.

Had dinner with AB last night. We're trying to invent a game of "Fantasy Casting" like "Fantasy Football". We agree the following cast for Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie would score maximum allowable points:

Jim O'Connor: Sylvester Stallone
Tom Wingfield: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson
Laura Wingfield: Sandra Bernhard
Amanda Wingfield: Harvey Fierstein