Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Ouch

I apologize for disappearing. Here's the deal- I have acute tendonitis in my shoulder. A few days ago I couldn't even raise my arm above waist level. Needless to say, this has not been conducive to blogging. In fact, my computer habits (work and blog) may have caused the problem. I've been sore for a month, and one short day of skiing laid me low.

So I took some time away. But I was watching, and here are some random observations....

Did you know that some people are giving their loved ones plastic surgery as a Christmas present?Yeah, and it has something to do with President Bush, apparently.

Amazing, the things you learn when you read the paper.

I did go out to see Gangs of New York. This is a flamboyantly bloody film, as described in the New Yorker -

obvious, and grisly, with an emphasis on knives and blood that borders on the fetishistic. Scorsese shot "Gangs" in Rome's Cinecittà, and the picture has some of the depressive feverishness of "Fellini Satyricon," which was also shot there—the jeering spectators mounted in multitiered sets, the furtive life of the crime-ridden metropolis, with its hapless poverty, its barbaric entertainments, its obscure and unredeemed suffering.

In the moments when I was able to block out Lenny DiCaprio's hideous performance I thought of the precious illusions about man's past or "natural" state that cultural conservatives and certain leftists seem to maintain, i.e., the rural life is better, rapid development reduces our naturally prosperous standard of living, etc.. So, I wondered, was the violent, hateful moral wasteland depicted in this film an accurate depiction of life for the poor in the 19th century?

No, says Kevin Baker in the New York Times, it was worse:

Certainly "Gangs of New York" should not be mistaken for the historical record; it is based on Herbert Asbury's book of the same name, a scarcely accurate collection of gangland anecdotes gathered in the 1920's. But if anything, Mr. Scorsese has for the most part spared us the more sordid details of the reality. In my own research of New York history, through first-person accounts and newspaper reports, I have found that our past was often at least as violent and squalid, if not more so, than the movie depicts.

Many people seem to be surprised and unsettled by this aspect of the American past. But the truth is that antebellum New York, particularly in its poorer wards, often was literally swimming in filth and blood. The city's sewers were so stuffed with butchers' offal that they overflowed with it even in the lightest rains; it wasn't uncommon to see little boys sailing paper boats on pools of blood in the gutters. Pigs ran loose on the streets, as Mr. Scorsese faithfully shows, and rat-baiting was indeed a popular spectator sport, an entertainment in which betting gentlemen wagered on how long it would take a trained terrier to kill 100 rats.

Between 1788 and 1870 there were numerous riots, many of them with a morbidly comic tinge to them, as their names imply — the Doctors Riot, the Flour Riot, the Actors Riot, the Orange Riots. These disturbances broke out at the drop of a hat, often sparked by something as minor as a misunderstanding. (The Doctors Riot started because of a rumor that medical students were secretly dissecting the corpses of the poor and ended with a mob ransacking the house of someone named Sir John, whose name was mistaken for Surgeon.) These outbreaks were usually put down only after extensive bloodshed.

After all the grief Anna Quindlen took about claiming to "understand" a woman (Andrea Yates) who drowned her kids, I'm surprised she even went near Madelyne Toogood -

Yet there’s a weird sort of cognitive dissonance between that attenuated consciousness of childhood safety and the Zeitgeist of our dangerous age. Perhaps it was reflected in the behavior of Madelyne Toogood, the mother caught on tape walloping her 4-year-old daughter as though child abuse were an aerobic exercise. The video eye watched as the woman hit the child, and hit her, and hit her again. Then she put her in the child safety seat in the car, and hit her some more.

A twisted metaphor for a time in which we keep our children away from gory movies and then have to keep them inside so they will not be picked off with a semi-automatic weapon.

I thought also of my oldest child when he was about six. Sometimes, as we arrived at the playground, he would point way across the park to a group of older kids playing and laughing and oblivious to our presence. "Dad," he'd say, lip quivering, "those kids are being mean to me." Silent, long distance taunting, apparently.

North Korea's recent statements about imminent U.S. attack plans reminded me of that.
Also, being accused of "internationalizing" our conflict with North Korea. That is rich.

Today I heard Clinton National security Council Staffer Charles Kupchan declare that the Bush Administration is focused "like a laser" on Al Qaeda and Iraq. Funny, I thought Iraq was distracting us from Al Qaeda.

I am almost done with Smart Mobs. I'm not sure Howard Rheingold and I define "Commons" similarly. Also, he spends a lot of time describing the incredible means for communication people will have in the future without offering much of a suggestion of what we will do with it. Teenagers checking each other's location every ten seconds is not an earth shattering social trend. Will ubiquitous access to information and communication change our actual beliefs and behavior?

Finally, for all you SUV-snobs out there (no I don't have one, and my wife is a card-carrying SUV-hater) - do you know why people buy Suburbans, Yukons and Navigators? Very simple - child seats, bucket seats and airbags. You can't wedge one of your kids between Mom and Dad in the front seat of the Country Squire anymore, and minivans have no room inside for luggage when the seats are full. Take my word on that last one. You try strapping duffle bags to a roof rack with only your left arm.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at January 1, 2003 9:36 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links