Jealous of the “runner’s high” serious athletes feel after an intense, vigorous workout? Well, newly published research reveals three alternative ways you can release those mood-enhancing endorphins:According to news reports ("Trucker Who Made Wrong Turn Freed From Mexican Prison," on Yahoo! News), a truck driver made a wrong turn and after following a police officer's directions, wound up in Mexico with 268,000 rounds of ammunition he was supposed to deliver to a Phoenix gun shop. After three to four miles he was able to make a U-turn and drive back to the border, but he was arrested when he tried to re-enter the U.S. near El Paso, TX. He spent seven months in a Mexican prison for what is by all accounts an honest mistake and was finally released after his mother paid a fine.
Singing, dancing, and drumming.
How is this even possible in 21st century North America? Isn't this something that is supposed to happen only in some corrupt former Iron Curtain country or in the Third World, where bribes and shakedowns are too much of a very real part of everyday life? What does this say about the political relationship between the U.S. and Mexico? What does it say about how easy it is to traffic weapons and ammo from the U.S. to drug cartel killers in Mexico, and what does that say about all our tax dollars that have apparently been wasted trying to "secure" the border? [personal communication]
A nice bit of Chris Hedges on hope and community. [personal communication; Chris Hedges is an American journalist specializing in politics and society]
Very interesting, very beautiful: "Dance of 1000 Hands." Considering the tight coordination required, the 21 dancers' accomplishment is nothing short of amazing. Completely deaf and mute and relying only on signals from trainers at the four corners of the stage, these extraordinary dancers deliver a visual spectacle that is at once intricate and stirring. Its first major international debut was in Athens at the closing ceremonies for the 2004 Paralympics.
But it had long been in the repertoire of the Chinese Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe and had traveled to more than 40 countries. Its lead dancer is 29-year-old Tai Lihua, who has a BA degree from the Hubei Fine Arts Institute. The video was recorded in Beijing during the Spring Festival this year. [personal communication; watch performance on YouTube:]
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| Daniel Day-Lewis is Lincoln |
Lincoln himself stands several cuts above the vast majority of U.S. presidents. After some equivocating, he freed the slaves, a monumental undertaking that was a service to the country and to humanity in general. He was also friendlier to workers than most presidents, an affinity noted by Karl Marx, who exchanged letters with Lincoln leading up to and during the Civil War. (You won’t see the GOP acknowledging that!)
But there’s a side of Lincoln that no Hollywood film shows clearly: He was extremely close to the railway barons, the most powerful corporate titans of the era....
Here’s the inconvenient truth: Some of the most powerful corporations of his time were wildly enriched by having a friend in one Abraham Lincoln....
I was not quite nine years old when JFK was killed, and heard about it from a radio report while riding home on a school bus, I obviously have no inside connection. At the time however, I was great friends with my next door neighbor and regularly went fishing with him. By age 12, I also began hunting with him and learned to shoot pool from him since he had a pro quality table in his basement. (I was the stand in until his own sons were old enough to go such things with him.)
His father retired from a career as a U.S. Navy intelligence officer, was involved in Bay of Pigs, and used to visit on a regular basis. To this day I can remember him visiting my next door neighbor the day after JFK's killing and and them calling me to come up to say hello. They were both in a jubilant mood and his dad said something like "they got the SOB, they got him. I can't believe it." When I realized they were glad the president had been shot, I didn't know what to think. It seemed nuts to me at that age. His dad lived only a few more years but he never quit talking about how JFK got what he deserved and that RFK would get his someday too for what they did at Bay of Pigs.
When you consider the enemies the Fitzgerald family made running booze from Canada during Prohibition, the enemies the Kennedy clan made across the board, the enemies JFK and RFK made on their own through allegedly trysting with mobsters' girlfriends and such, you have quite a list of suspects for conspiracy theories.
Now add in the animosity from JFK's excruciatingly narrow victory over Nixon—both on the part of Nixon and those in the military-industrial establishment who backed and favored him—plus the religious nuts who vowed a Catholic would never lead America, and the Cuba missile standoff that humiliated Kruschev and the USSR, and those whom JFK and RFK subsequently betrayed at Bay of Pigs, and you have more leads than you could follow.
And let's not forget the threat that any idealist poses to small-minded people who always want to do things the way they were always done. The only greater idealist in modern American political history than JFK was RFK, so a lot of people would want to get rid of them just because of their ideology.
You and I probably won't live long enough to learn the truth about JFK's death, and no one may ever know the truth. [personal communication]
A very interesting comparison: "On Pilgrims and Zionists: Why I’m thankful America didn’t turn out like Israel," by Rosa Brooks, in Foreign Policy National Security, November 21. [personal communication; excerpts:]
The early American setters saw parallels between themselves and the ancient Israelites....
...America and Israel share similar origin tales: the Pilgrims who set sail from Plymouth, England in 1620 did so against a backdrop of European religious wars, massacres, and persecution; while the Jews who founded the modern state of Israel fled centuries of European anti-Semitism and the unprecedented horrors of the Holocaust....
However, Israel's path diverged from that of early America. The Native Americans were already badly weakened by epidemic disease and internecine conflict by the time European settlers arrived in force...By the mid-1700s the native population had ceased to pose an existential threat to the European colonists....
In Palestine, things were different: the Arab inhabitants declined to die out of their own accord, leaving the Jewish settlers surrounded by displaced, aggrieved locals. Escalating attacks and counter-attacks embroiled the Israelis in a cycle of violence and retaliation...In the nearly seven decades since 1948, Israel has remained in a state of intermittent war....
But Israel's immense military superiority has produced only illusory gains....
...Suicide bombs and makeshift rockets are weapons of the weak, but they have left a trail of mangled, broken bodies all the same, and the Holocaust still casts a long shadow. By now, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are fighting the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Arabs displaced or killed by the Jewish settlers who created the state of Israel. Everyone's a victim, and everyone has become a perpetrator....
Another Bush presidency? Are you freaking kidding??!! We barely got over the first one and we won't live long enough to get over the second one. If we start pooling our funds now surely there is a small inhabitable island we can buy and live out what few years we can still afford. [personal communication]
Did you see this coming? Another excellent candidate for Juvenal's "the times have become too absurd for satire, so I'm retiring to cultivate my vineyards" file: "Federal Judge Announces Wageless Job Opening, Calls Working for Free a 'Moral Commitment'," by Paul Campos, on Alternet, November 21 [personal communication; excerpts]
Traditionally, the most prestigious job a law school graduate can get straight out of school is a federal judicial clerkship...Competition among law students for federal clerkships is ferocious.Limerick of the Week:
...Any federal judge will be deluged with hundreds of highly qualified candidates for an open position.
...William Martinez, a federal judge in Denver, is currently using [a new federal online] site to solicit applications for a standard year-long clerkship in his chambers.
While the requirements for the job look quite ordinary...the position’s salary is not...“This position is a gratuitous service appointment,” the posting announces, while going on to make clear that the successful candidate will waive any claim to salary, benefits or any other compensation....
...Although Judge Martinez isn’t going to pay the successful applicant, and reserves the right to fire this person arbitrarily at any time, the judge is asking whoever takes the job “to morally commit to the position for one year”....
Patience would lower her book,
And give men a come-hither look;
When a fellow drew near,
She'd exclaim with a sneer,
"Amazing how little it took!"
I've also seen Spielberg's Lincoln, and I found it a very impressive portrayal of the man, his family, the political tensions of the time, and the intense bigotry of many Northern congressmen. The accusation that with Lincoln's help "powerful corporations... were wildly enriched" has no merit when no corporations are named and no details of the ethical lapses are offered.
ReplyDeleteTed, did you read the article from which the skimpy excerpt was taken?
DeleteI confess that I didn't but looked for the crux of the allegations in the excerpt. Now I have read the article, and I see a disparity between it and the excerpt. The article never holds Lincoln's character in question. It portrays him as a brilliant lawyer who wins his cases and enjoys the rewards of those victories. The excerpt gave me quite a different impression, that he may have compromised the integrity of his office by doing favors for the railway tycoons.
DeleteHmmm...may I politely throw a spanner in the works? Without bothering to list individual railway or corporate barons, one could make a case that Lincoln enriched ALL northern corporations and financial leaders by pursuing a war that gave them cheap labor and resources because it prevented the South from seceding and trading independently with foreign entities willing to pay much higher and fairer prices for goods than the North.
DeleteYes, "after some equivocating, he freed the slaves," as noted above, but was freeing them a priority or a political ploy? Is it not reasonable to question if the real goal of the war was to secure cheap cotton, grain and other resources for the North from the plantations those unfortunate slaves had to work on?
It's not reasonable, supportable, plausible, or objective.
DeleteConsidering that Lincoln won the 1860 election without even being on the ballot in 10 of the Southern states, and that the burgeoning population of the Northern states enabled them to dominate the Electoral College, it is at least plausible that Lincoln, an astute politician, knew who he had to cater to if he wished to govern effectively and win re-election.
DeleteIt is reasonable and objective to look at the advantages Northern industry gained from the war, and at Lincoln's "equivocating," and question if their concern was equal human rights for all, or just smart business. If the concern was really only for the slaves, why the equivocating?
Considering the future use of U.S. military-industrial might in obliterating the rights of Native Americans (in large part for the benefit of land developers and railroads) and on behalf of "banana barons" in Latin America, it is supportable that the U.S. Civil War was in part a testing and proving ground for the techniques the Northern-based powers that be would employ for decades to come.
Right, and it's also plausible, reasonable, objective, and supportable that Abe was a vampire slayer. Did you write the screenplay by any chance?
DeleteAbe as a vampire slayer? You had me on that one, had to Google it to figure out what you were referencing. If the trailer shows the the best parts the rest must be ghastly. If I had written that I surely wouldn't admit it.
DeleteJust curious, are you as blindly supportive of Ulysses S. Grant as you are of Lincoln?
That has to be a trick question. I suppose Grant was an agreeable man and a capable general, and there ends his accomplishments.
DeleteNo trick at all. It is just that I have never been able to fathom why the same educated and informed people who heap praise on Lincoln for making the decision to win the Civil War for the North, no matter the cost in civilian death and destruction across the South, are usually the same folks who express disgust at the "meat grinder" tactics Grant used to carry out Lincoln's wishes.
DeleteInformed people, the media, and history have harshly judged Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger for using a modern-day equivalent of Grant's tactics by "carpet bombing" massive areas of Vietnam and Cambodia. When George W. Bush sent the U.S. military into Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, it was Bush and his political underlings who were blamed for the needless civilian slaughter that ensued, not the military. In Lincoln's case it is the opposite - he gets a pass for decisions that needlessly killed thousands upon thousands, and Grant gets the blame.
Is that because modern-day Americans place the same minimal value on the civilian lives lost in the South as they do on those killed in Southeast Asia and Iraq? Or is it simply that students are taught to worship the ideal of Lincoln, and as adults they never bother to look beyond the myth?
Are we to assume endorphins are released and the pain thresholds are raised for those doing the singing, dancing and drumming, or for those who have to listen to them?
ReplyDeletemotomynd, your question reminds me of mixed martial arts fighter Allen Crowder's practice of listing to "intense rock music like Korn or Disturbed" to rev him up to enter the ring (revealed in our interview of him on October 31). That seems to indicate that, for Mr. Crowder at least, simply listening raises his endorphin level and pain threshold.
DeleteListening to what I am guessing would be the over-exuberant singing and drumming it would take to mimic the exertion levels that contribute to the "runner's high" certainly should raise one's pain threshold. If Mr. Crowder listened to such cacophony from less talented musical groups than Korn and Disturbed, would it possibly raise his threshold even higher, and save him from future disaster in the ring? Perhaps Moristotle's editorial staff, contributors and guests could combine talents to create a punk/alternative/thrash/heavy metal music CD and market it to those wanting a quick endorphin high? If you could do dramatic readings from Shakespeare and others could find some old galvanized trash cans and lids on which to accompany you, that might be quite the sensation. It would definitely create pain tolerance.
DeleteFascinating blog post, Morris; really very interesting. My wife wants to see the Lincoln movie, and I guess we will, but I usually don't like historical movies because they don't let facts interfere with a good script. I only give Shakespeare that license. I'm going to read the JFK piece to my wife right now.
ReplyDeleteJim, the person who sent me the Lincoln item was mainly objecting (he said) to Spielberg's ponderous "mystical" cinematic style, as though Spielberg expects his films to be "ones for the ages." My wife and I had a similar reaction to War Horse and took the DVD out after five or ten minutes.
DeleteHowever, in Lincoln, my source thinks there are three Oscar-worthy performances in the film, nevertheless. Daniel Day-Lewis's one of them, of course.
His "source" has just read this, which covers many of my issues with the film: http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2012/11/30/a-filmmakers-imagination-and-a-historians/.
DeleteMy three Oscar worthy performances are Tommy Lee Jones and Sally Fields, in addition to Daniel Day-Lewis. I wish however I could add Morgan Freeman as Fredrick Douglass, but that's a Close Encounter that Spielberg failed to make.
Tom, thanks much for joining the interchange and, especially, for the link to Kate Masur's piece in the Chronicle. I haven't seen Lincoln yet, but it is easy for me to understand and appreciate that Masur's several "dreams and fantasies" of scenes showing black involvement in the abolition movement could have been written into the script. It appears just to debit Spielberg for not including such scenes.
Delete