The Binary Circumstance

Martha Stewart has filmed a five minute video for PETA that condemns wearing fur.

She hosts and narrates the video which is full of graphic images of how animals are treated and killed by the fur industry. The spot was filmed on the set of her new daytime TV show.

In the video Martha admits that she used to wear real fur but had a change of heart after learning how the animals were treated. She also states that she is an advocate of free choice, but adds that she also believes in making informed choices.

My only gripe with her video is when she notes that fur farms are not regulated by the government. She did not suggest that they should be, but I think that many will interpret her comment that way since that narrative accompanies video of animals being abused on fur farms.

As I have stated before, giving animals the same rights as humans gives humans the same rights as animals. Where that equation could ultimately lead is not a pretty picture.

I totally support her efforts to educate the public about the fur industry as it puts the choice to wear fur in a broader dialectical context.

After seeing so many floating corpses in New Orleans on the TV news coverage of Katrina, the question that everyone has on their minds is “Why are dead bodies in the water always facedown?”

Slate provided an in-depth explanation and Busker kindly provided the link.

Ever since seeing the pictures of bodies floating in the water on TV and hearing rescue workers talk about finding dead children, I’ve been haunted by the image of dead children floating facedown in the water and holding hands. It’s like some eerie painting that I keep seeing in my mind.

I imagine that they were friends or brother and sister. They had been playing or sleeping. Every day was something new. They were full of questions about the world around them as all children are.

Each of those floating corpses represents the end of a lifetime of experiences no matter how long or short the life was. And the person who could tell us the most about those experiences is gone for good.

For many, all of their possessions were wiped out also. For some there are no artifacts from which to recreate the story of their life. It’s as if they never existed.

Death doesn’t give a damn what happened to you during your life, nor does it give a damn how old you are or anything else.

The Slate article makes the observation that dead bodies do not always float facedown though they usually do. The news media does have a bias in the pictures they show us, however.

Editorial control over photographs also contributes to a facedown bias. Most photo editors won’t publish pictures of a body that could be identified by a friend or family member. Since facedown corpses are likely to be anonymous, they’re more suitable for newspapers and television.

Facedown pictures also distance us from the fact that the floating, decaying corpse was a person with an identity and a life, perhaps a life similar to our own. The corpse seems much less of a person without its face showing. If we could see the face it would be frozen, no longer expressing happiness, sorrow or anger, just frozen in death.

If we could identify them, the details of their lives would unfold. Who knew them? How were they connected to other people? Where they connected to others at all? Did they have a job? Children? Lovers? Enemies?

We would be living in a very different world if the news media showed us any bodies floating face up. Ironically, if they did that they would be showing us life, as it is.

They would be showing us the truth.

By censoring how they show death, the media is distorting the reality of life.

Bodies are shown floating facedown in the water for the same reason that Jesus is portrayed rising from the dead. Mendacity.

Yesterday I went with my hiking group to the top of Mt. Pilchuck which is about an hour and a half drive north of Seattle.

More than one person in the group said it was an easy hike. So when the weather looked like it was going to be great I decided to go along thinking this was going to be a piece of cake.

They lied.

It’s popular, but not easy.

I should have done some research before I went.

The climb gets progressively steeper as you go up. The trailhead begins at 3100 feet above sea level and the top of the peak is 5324 feet above sea level. That’s a 2224 foot gain in 3 miles. The trail, though well-maintained, is very rocky and gets rockier as you go higher.

Many of us could really feel the thin air as we got higher. It got harder and harder to get enough oxygen.

As you can see from the Mt. Pilchuck State Park web site, there is a fire lookout at the top of the mountain.

I do not like heights and didn’t like the idea of climbing all the way up into that lookout.

The woman who organized the trip had brought her adorable little dog along on the trip and I was amazed at how well that little dog could climb. But you have to climb up and over a number of boulders and crevices to get to the lookout and then go up a ladder. So the dog could not go to the top and I volunteered to watch the dog while the others when all the way up into the lookout.

I had some lunch while I babysat the dog who reminded me of Toto from the Wizard of Oz. As I ate I watched men, women and children of all sizes and shapes climb up and then come back down from the lookout.

So after the others came back down I started feeling like it would kind of dumb to not climb up to the lookout after having suffered through the hike up the mountain.

So I did it.

The climb up was not a pleasant experience but the view was worth it. Fortunately, a portion of the lookout is enclosed so there’s a wall of glass and wood that separates you from the possibility of falling off the mountain, unless there was suddenly a big earthquake that would sent that little shack cascading down the side of the mountain.

I even stood out on the deck where there is just a little 2×4 wooden railing. I mostly staying in contact with the wall behind me but I did force myself to step out to the railing but it wasn’t fun so I didn’t do that for more than a few seconds.

The really strange thing about having a fear of heights is that you can be very rational about standing in a place like that, reminding yourself of all the countless others who have gone there before you, look at the many people casually leaning on that fragile wooden railing thinking nothing about the possibility that it could have some dryrot in it or could for some reason have lost its strength since the last time it was inspected.

You can watch the ease with which others maneuver on that decades-old structure and also think about what a stunning view it is, but always in the back of your mind and traveling through every nerve in your body is this sense of horror that shaves more than a little enjoyment off the experience.

In all, it was a wonderful day but far more exhausting than I had expected. So today my legs are very sore and I’m too tired to do much of anything.

I remember years ago when I thought nothing of taking off to backpack in the wilderness near Yosemite by myself.

People decay so much faster than mountains do.

Andrew Sullivan used to be one of George W. Bush’s greatest defenders. So I must admit that I always get a good laugh out of articles like this op-ed piece he wrote for The Sunday Times. He is now describing Bush as our country’s greatest socialist.

Finally, finally, finally. A few years back, your correspondent noticed something a little odd about George W Bush’s conservatism. If you take Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that a socialist is someone who is very good at spending other people’s money, then President Bush is, er, a socialist.

[...]

Remember when conservatism meant fiscal responsibility? In a few years, few people will be able to. I used to write sentences that began with the phrase: “Not since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society spending binge. . .” I can’t write that any more. Johnson — the guns and butter president of liberalism’s high-water mark — was actually more fiscally conservative than the current inhabitant of the White House. LBJ boosted domestic discretionary spending in inflationadjusted dollars by a mere 33.4%.

In five years, Bush has increased it 35.1%. And that’s before the costs for Katrina and Rita and the Medicare benefit kick in. Worse, this comes at a time when everyone concedes that we were facing a fiscal crunch before Bush started handing out dollar bills like a drunk at a strip club.

[...]

Here’s the chairman of the American Conservative Union: “Excluding military and homeland security, American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression.” That would be correct. When you have doubled spending on education in four years, launched two wars and a new mega-entitlement, that tends to happen.

Here’s Peggy Noonan, about as loyal a Republican as you’ll find, in a Wall Street Journal column last week: “George W Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?”

Some of us have been pointing out for quite some time that Bush reality is the anti-reality.

Everything is exactly the opposite of what he says it is: small government is big government, science is religion, the truth is faith (whatever you believe it is), any lie is as good as the truth, saving for the future equals spending more than you have today, free-markets are markets where the government is free to take whatever it wants from working class people to finance corporate welfare, the real world is the fantasy world you make up in your head, homeland security is a catastrophic lack of preparedness in the face of disaster, non-existence is the real existence, we all are on earth to serve God yet God serves as a justification for whatever we desire at the moment no matter the cost.

If he spends like a drunken sailor or as Sullivan puts it, “like a drunk handing out dollar bills at a strip club” there might be, The National Enquirer suggests, a logical explanation for it. He is one.