Max on drugs

I have been away from my blog world for 2 1/2 days - not that long I realise, but it has seemed an eternity to me, especially since Monkey has finally got started, as has AG (links to right).

The reason I have been away and the reason that 2 1/2 days has seemed like 2 1/2 years is that I have been flat on my back in bed (occasionally managing a foetal position on my side) with a broken back. Okay, not literally broken, but close enough. Anyway, despite visits by AG and Monkey, and being looked after by Carol Brady, I have been bored to tears. The first day I was in too much pain to even read, yesterday I had July's Vanity Fair and the end of that book on synchronicity to keep me occupied, but I missed writing and cruising my blog world. It's not easy to sit here and type today (Day 3), but at least I can do it.

Monday night I had had a nice evening in the beer garden at Letna with Petr, Jeanie Weenie and their super-sized baby, Lukáš. We were back at their house and Lukáš did what babies do, which is anything stupid you can think of, in this case lunging for a lit candle. Not my baby: I should have let him burn himself and maybe he would have learned something, but no, I had to be SuperMax and save the bloody day. Lukáš lunged for the candle, I lunged for Lukáš (who, remember, is the size of a small running back) and my back broke. Carol and Mike came and fetched me; once home I hobbled my way into my bed, and on Tuesday morning I started calling people for drugs.

Jeanie Weenie had given me the only thing she had, which was super-strength ibuprofen. I took that, couldn't even feel a difference. AG came over with the contents of her medicine cabinet, which included muscle relaxants and codeine. Monkey went to see the Jester who gave him a prescription for me for muscle relaxants and pain killers. This is what I have taken:

Tuesday:
6.30 - Ibuprofen - 600 mg
11.00 - medical marijuana - 1/2 spliff
12.00 - Diazepam - 10 mg
12.30 - aspirin - 1000 mg
13.30 - Dorsiflex (mephenoxalonum) - 200 mg
14.00 - medical marijuana - 1/2 spliff
18.00 - Aulin (nimesulidum) - 100 mg
19.00 - Zyrtec (for hayfever)
21.00 - Kodynal (emetini hydrochloridum - .5 mg, ephedrini hydrochloridum - 10 mg, codeini hydrochloridum - 20 mg)

Wednesday:
8.30 - Dorsiflex + Aulin
14.00 - medical marijuana
15.00 - Aulin
16.00 - Zyrtec
18.30 - medical marijuana
19.45 - Diazepam
20.45 - Kodynal

Thursday so far:
7.30 - Dorsiflex + Aulin

Why do I know exactly what I have taken and at what times? It was Monkey's idea to keep a chart just in case I overdose.

Trial by Jury

In comments to yesterday’s post, Robert Downey Jr said “celebrity juries suck!”, citing OJ, Wacko Jacko and Robert Blake as examples. I doubt anyone would argue with that statement because trial by jury in those circumstances does not work in the interests of justice, but that has to be an unfortunate consequence of our system because trial by jury is necessary to guard against oppression and preserve liberty.

In the past, juries have been an important defence against tyranny largely due to the establishment of the principle that juries can refuse to convict on the basis of conscience - Bushell’s Case 1670. The Salem witch trials were finally ended in 1693 because juries refused to convict, and one of the reasons Prohibition was brought to an end in 1933 was that juries were refusing to convict people for alcohol-related offences.

The Declaration of Independence lists “depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury” as one of the proofs of the tyranny of George III and Great Britain. Our Bill of Rights guarantees us “the right of trial by jury” in both criminal and civil cases. Trial by jury is a fundamentally important institution in our society and we cannot do away with it. For that reason we cannot deprive celebrities of their right to trial by jury, even when we know there can never be justice in certain cases.

Land of the Free

I found this in the newspaper today:

“Countries that already outlaw burning the national flag include China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Cuba.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1667033,00.html

What the above partial list tells us is that any country that would pass such a law is currently, or is on its way to becoming, a police state, to whatever degree. We need to put aside imagining how we might actually feel were we to see someone burning our flag in order to evaluate what the proposed amendment to our Constitution says about the direction our country has taken.

There is simply no need for such a constitutional amendment or, I will go even further to say, regular criminal legislation. As DD has pointed out, the crime of damaging property belonging to another already exists.

The United States was founded on principles of liberty, as we have all agreed. The word “liberty” is in our Declaration of Independence as one of our “unalienable rights” and in the preamble to our Constitution as a “blessing” to be secured for “our posterity”. Any amendment to the Constitution, therefore, should increase our liberties, not take away from them.

Monkey's Max is proud to present a guest blog by AG

I would like to expand a little on a subject that SS brought up concerning abortion. I know that all you young’uns don’t have a personal memory of what it was like pre Roe vs Wade. So, if you’ll bear with me a moment, I’ll give you a little history lesson.

Back in my mother’s day abortion was illegal in all States of the Union. Rich women could afford to go to places like Switzerland, or even to Mexico, to have a safe abortion. And, believe me, they did.

Poor women, on the other hand, were forced onto kitchen tables. The work was done by either a midwife (with everyone in the neighborhood knowing why the woman was visiting that particular midwife) or by a quack doctor who had lost his license to practice medicine at all. If something went wrong during the procedure and a real doctor was called in to save the woman’s life, he (the doctor) could be sent to jail if he treated the woman and didn’t report the fact that she’d had an abortion. The State thereby guaranteed that the doctor would become part of the police force by informing on his patient. Many doctors complied, for religious reasons, did not treat the patient and the woman died. Or, if he treated the woman and saved her life, he could end up in jail or have his license to practice medicine revoked. Even though it was against the law, women still had abortions.

I’d like to remind you that this was at a time when having a baby out of wedlock meant that you were branded for life as a whore. In the big cities you could just move to another neighborhood and your parents, if they still spoke to you, could visit you. In the smaller townships around America, you were the town tramp – never to be allowed to marry and have a family in the normal, conventional American way. Young girls who got into “trouble” were usually forced to give their babies up for adoption and thereby never see or hear from them again. This attitude was a holdover from a time in the European past, when a woman was expected to suffer for her “sins”.

The controversy over Roe vs Wade spun around my young head and was finally decided in January 1973. Having been raised in the Catholic Church, I was very against the idea. However, my mother and I had a conversation that changed my mind. Her personal memory of the time before, watching friends getting into “trouble” and ending up with never having a child at all because of a botched abortion. A mother who was rational and pragmatic raised me, and I learned to think for myself.

At the age of 35 I finally, for the first time (thanks to birth control pills), found I was pregnant. My choices - yes I had choices - were as follows: give the baby up for adoption, have an abortion, keep the baby and raise her myself, or marry the father and raise the baby together. I was one of the lucky ones. He was a wonderful man and we loved each other very much. My husband and I were together for 22 years before he died of cancer and we have two beautiful daughters, and one granddaughter.

To conclude, I like having choices. I like the idea that I was raised at a time when I didn’t have to feel guilty about my life or my lifestyle. I don’t believe in abortion for myself, my choice, but I will defend a woman’s right to make her own choices when confronted with any conflict in her own life. Now, if that makes me a feminist – yes, I accept that, but it does not make me a man-hater.

- AG

Do we not have more pressing issues?!!

In the news this morning:
The US House of Representatives will be voting today on a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban burning, or other “desecration”, of the American flag.

desecrate to violate the sanctity of (something sacred); to profane (it).

sacred 1 dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a god or gods. 2 worthy of religious veneration; holy.

flag a usu rectangular piece of fabric of distinctive design that is used as an identifying symbol, e.g. of a nation…

I will not bore you with a semantic explanation of why a flag cannot be “desecrated”; I think it is obvious from the definitions above. A flag is, after all, a piece of fabric, and I have got as much trouble with someone burning it as I do with someone burning an old t-shirt. I myself have no interest in burning a flag, a bra or any textiles, but we all have our own behaviours.

My problem is that our government is wasting time and money on a frivolous issue when we are at war and we have scores of other real problems.

Georgia Congressman Phil Gingrey said, “to burn a flag is to disrespect America.”

To that, I say, “So what?”

A Visit to Oświęcim

I was resident director of a study abroad programme for American students in Prague in 2001. As the programme was in Jewish Studies, one of its main elements was a 10-day study trip through Poland. We started in Kraków, which is an incredibly beautiful city with an extensive historic Jewish section, Kazimierz, as well as remnants of the wartime ghetto on the other side of the river. Our second stop was the town of Oświęcim, better known by its German name, Auschwitz.

I will not write about the visits to the camps of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau; instead I want to write about a very positive experience in the town of Oświęcim. My friend Tomek runs the Auschwitz Jewish Center, a cultural institute built in and around a reconstructed synagogue, which celebrates pre-war Jewish life in and around Oświęcim. On my second student trip there, Tomek and I had planned a meeting for my group of nine students (eight of them Jewish) with local Polish students and German and Austrian students who were volunteers at the International Youth Meeting Centre in Oświęcim.

It was the first time either of us had tried anything like it. My students had just had a harrowing day in the camps, and they were not feeling very friendly, to say the least, towards their European counterparts. The twenty or so of us sat down around the tables that Tomek had arranged in a big square. Tomek and I started the discussion off by asking a couple of questions, and then the students took over and Tomek and I remained quiet for the next 90 minutes.

A couple of the Polish kids had never met any Jews before. The Jewish kids for the first time heard something about what it was like to grow up in a culture of guilt. The European kids heard personal stories of survival that some of the Jewish kids told about their grandparents. A couple of the Polish kids had similar stories. They all talked about what they had learned or had not learned about World War II and the Holocaust in school and elsewhere. They talked about their own experiences visiting the camps. They talked about their pre-conceived notions about Jews, Germans and Poles. The students really communicated, asking each other questions and listening to the answers. The discussion was amazing and eye-opening for everyone, including me and Tomek.

We broke the discussion off after 90 minutes and invited everyone to go back to the Youth Centre where the Austrian and German students lived and my students were staying the night. They all went into the club where they could drink beer and they continued to talk to each other until the wee hours of the morning. Many of them exchanged e-mail addresses and I know that some of them kept in touch at least for a while.

I have chosen to write about this intensely moving experience because recently I have read a lot of anti-Jewish rhetoric online, all clearly written by people who do not communicate with anyone who is not exactly like them, and it troubles me.

Synchronicity Revisited

This is a follow-up to my post of 21st May in which I started exploring the Jungian concept of synchronicity.

On the 27th of May, Monkey received an sms from our superhero BG which said, “…I’ve crossed the proverbial Rubicon and am not sure how all will turn out.” The Rubicon, if you will remember, is where Julius Caesar said “Alea iacta est.”

Then on the 31st of May, kd made a remark about “gnashing of teeth”.

On the same day, Monkey brought me a book called There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives. The book had been sitting on Monkey’s bookshelf. He did not know why he had the book; it is not at all the sort of thing he reads. He remembered picking it up somewhere but he had never so much as leafed through it. When he grabbed it off his bookshelf that day to bring it to me, a postcard that I had sent him fell out of the book.

I did not look at the book until this weekend just gone because I had been reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being for a book club meeting (sophisticated piss-up) I am going to with Jono next time I am in London. I finished the Kundera book on Friday and opened the Synchronicity book on Saturday. The introduction, titled “The Stories We Live, The Connections We Make”, began with a quote:

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences…but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

The quote was taken from Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

As I read the Synchronicity book and prepare my Kundera for the book club meeting, I expect I will have more to say about it all.

Dumbed Down History

Like I have said in this space, I have been learning a lot from blog discussions and following up with research of my own. It is a beautiful Saturday afternoon, the sun is shining and there is a nice breeze, so of course I am sitting inside at home reading and writing.

I have just read an article called “Getting Lincoln Half Right and Half Wrong” by Thomas J. DiLorenzo at http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo94.html. Following is a comparison between what I learned in school and what the article claims.

School	DiLorenzo
Lincoln was a good man.	Lincoln was a cold-hearted egoist.
Lincoln was a lawyer.	Lincoln was a wealthy railroad lawyer whose clients were mostly giant corporations.
Lincoln freed the slaves.	Lincoln was a white supremacist.
Lincoln preserved democracy.	Lincoln arrested political opponents and shut down opposition newspapers.
Lincoln preserved the nation.	Lincoln destroyed the Jeffersonian system.

I am not a Lincoln scholar so I am not in a position to say which side of the table is right, if either. I would, however, tend towards believing DiLorenzo.

What I will question today is what I was taught in history classes. Living for many years in a post-communist country, I know that my Czech friends and acquaintances were exposed daily to communist dogma in school. Now it seems to me that my experience in the US was not very different. We were obviously taught history from a slanted angle aimed at convincing us that America was the greatest country in the world and our way was the best way. For example: we were taught not that we pointlessly massacred the indigenous populations of North America, but that we were guided westward by “manifest destiny” – clearly nothing more than political propaganda.

Why were we taught that way? Education should not be dumbed down for children. History classes would have been much more interesting if we had been given the opportunity to discuss and debate, if we had been able to decide for ourselves whether our country’s leaders had made the right decisions. Developing an ability to think critically is so much more important than memorising names and dates. It seems that our education system was designed to produce factory workers rather than thinkers. When we grow up we watch dumbed down news so that we continue to not think for ourselves. It now seems to me that it is all a plot to keep power in the hands of those who have always held it, to preserve the status quo.

The Fashion of Politics

It is all too common for people who do not have sufficient knowledge of a given situation to nevertheless take a stand and have an opinion about it. International politics is the obvious example because while most people do not understand what is really happening anywhere, we have all got something to say.

I noticed this first as a student and as a staunch defender of Israel on campus in the 1980s. By that time it had become very fashionable to be pro-Palestinian, and therefore anti-Israel, but it seemed that aside from a small core group of Jews and Arabs that liked to yell at each other on the plaza at lunchtime, no one knew anything factual about the situation. That Jews and Arabs each had their own version of the facts is another matter entirely. Most students were just following political trends in an effort to be cool Berkeley activists as if it were still the 1960s or 1970s. Oddly, everyone seemed to be an extremist and no one ever represented a middle ground; there were never any solutions to discuss, only issues to be argued.

I went to Israel when I graduated from university and I was there for the beginning of the first intifada, which started in December 1987. Going to live somewhere will normally change your understanding of that place. I was living in an international student commune (for lack of a better word), and the intifada divided us politically. But as we were living on the fringes of it (I won’t say ‘in the middle of it’ because we were not in the West Bank or Gaza), we all had a fair idea of what was going on and we could all form our own opinions and take appropriate actions. I went on a peace march while a couple of my friends volunteered for the army.

Amongst Americans in Europe now, it is of course the height of fashion to be anti-war and anti-Bush. Many people stop there, but I am happy to be able to report that a lot of people are going beyond that. The political discussions I have on the blogs are mirrored in political discussions I have with people in Prague and elsewhere. It seems to me that more than ever before people are digging to get at the truth, and more people are contemplating ways in which we can bring about change. It is heartening to see people bucking the trends of fashion and I look forward to the day when our words become actions.

On libraries

In the news this morning:

Supporters of the Patriot Act countered that the rules are potentially useful and argued that the House was voting to make libraries safe havens for terrorists.

“If there are terrorists in libraries studying how to fly planes, how to put together biological weapons, how to put together chemical weapons, nuclear weapons,…we have to have an avenue through the federal court system so that we can stop the attack before it occurs,” said Rep. Tom "Wanker" Feeney, R-Fla.

The dangers of reading have long been underestimated. Books blatantly threaten the peaceful existence of our country. Libraries are clearly rampant breeding grounds for terrorism and therefore should be shut down. Book shops must be closed and their contents confiscated. Anyone with a library card or book club membership will be arrested. No one must read lest he or she learn how to build a bomb.

In fact, we must burn the books – we must burn all books. Start with Harry Potter so that children will not be tempted by witchcraft. Burn histories so that we can forget shameful episodes of our past. Burn textbooks because learning is the work of Satan.

We can, we will, we must eliminate our collective knowledge because it is obviously that knowledge which undermines freedom and democracy.