A Blog Named Sue

The Mel Cooley Index For Friday, November 30, 2007

Today, Mel Cooley is thinking, 'But isn't greed what fucked up Africa in the first place?"

Just when I say "Boy We Can't Miss, You Are Golden" Then You Do This

By now, it's no secret that Rudy Giuliani was using the NYPD to shuttle then mistress now wife Judith Nathan about and sticking " wheelchair kids, legless vets, and the blind pencil salesmen outside Bloomindale's" with the bill. Less common knowledge (at least, outside of New York City) is that Nathan wasn't his only mistress - he's also been linked to his one time communications director Chrystine (gotta love the "y") Lategano. It's remarkable, really - you'd think that concealing two extra-marital affairs wouldn't leave a guy much time to  threaten to evict the United Nations over unpaid parking tickets, wage futile battles in the culture war, and release the sealed criminal records of juvenile offenders.

But that's not the real mystery, as far as I'm concerned. No, to me, the real mystery is how on EARTH someone who looks like GIULIANI gets that much SEX.

Yeah, yeah, I know - money, status, all that. But my God, there must be a limit. I mean, power is an aphrodisiac, not a date rape drug.

Look, I live in New York, OK? Trust me, there's no shortage of rich assholes here to set out the honey trap for. Some of them aren't even bad looking! I'm no expert on women (just ask my wife) but, damn, what could possibly be worth having to see Giuliani naked?

Still don't believe me? OK, then, I'll leave you with this - Rudy's "O" face probably looks something like this:

You Learn Something New Every Day

Huh. It seems that only white people have abortions.

See, I never knew that. Thanks, Pat!

(via The Crack Den)

The Mel Cooley Index for Tuesday, November 27, 2007.

Today, Mel Cooley is thinking, well, at least he's somewhat less disgraced than Donald Rumsfield.

See No Evil

I've been wondering when this was going to start. YouTube has pulled the plug on an Egyptian activist who was using his channel to post evidence of torture and police brutality in his home country, apparently because of his graphic and shocking content. The activist, blogger Wael Abbas, was previously instrumental in distributing a clip that led to the arrest and conviction of two Egyptian police officers for sodomizing a prisoner. YouTube has brought his work - and the work of other Egyptian activists like him - to an even wider audience.

It seems viewers were complaining about the disturbing nature of his videos, although one wonders why someone who would be disturbed by video of police brutality and torture clicked on a video clearly labeled as depicting police brutality and torture. (It should be noted that YouTube policy strictly forbids posting videos depicting graphic violence and YouTube is completely within their rights to suspend Abbas' account. It should also be noted that YouTube rarely acts to remove content or shut down accounts unless someone complains. With the incredibly vast amount of material posted to YouTube on a daily basis, it's virtually impossible to police the site any other way.) Calls for censorship in the name of decency have always been one of the most effective tools for restricting access to information, whether that information concerns sex education or evidence of governmental wrongdoing. Who wants to be the one to stand up in the public square and declare that its OK for video of police officers sodomizing prisoners to be posted where children might stumble across it?  It should be - the responsibility for monitoring what kids watch on YouTube falls squarely with their parents in my book.

But still, "decency" trumps all. How many disturbing images of what really happened at Abu Ghraib did we not see because CNN considered them too graphic, too disturbing? That's what makes the "decency" argument so infuriating to me - it gives the people who control our access to information the perfect dodge for not pursiung an important story. (Of course, the decency argument did not apply when media pundits saw fit to describe the really juicy bits of the Starr Report in explicit detail.)  What other stories are we missing out on because they don't want to "disturb" us? It's worth noting that other Eygptian bloggers aren't certain YouTube's actions are due to pressure from the Egyptian government:

Elijah Zarwan, a prominent blogger in Egypt, said he thought it unlikely that YouTube had come under official Egyptian pressure to suspend Abbas's page.

He claimed it was more plausible that the site was reacting to the graphic nature of the videos. "I suspect they are doing it not under pressure from the Egyptian government, but rather because it made American viewers squeamish," he said.

(Hat tip to Moonbootica via the Crack Den.)

Reading Lolita in Tehran

(x-posted at Pax Americana)

As the drum beats for war with Iran grow louder, I find myself thinking more and more about Azar Nafisi's remarkable memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. I highly recommend it to anyone concerned about the  current situation with Iran, including Bush administration supporters with some shred of humanity left. (I've written off everyone actually in the administration.) The book brilliantly depicts everyday life in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the deliberate, delicate manner by which even its most devout citizens must conduct themselves in order to avoid running afoul of the religous authorities. Michael Moore was pilloried for his depiction of Iraqi children at play in Farenheit 9/11; war supporters claimed he didn't show the ugliness and brutality of Hussein's Iraq. Moore countered by claiming the horror of Hussein's Iraq was no secret but the everyday life of Iraqi citizens might as well have been. Both ugliness and rare moments of exhiliration are vividly portrayed in Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nafisi, a professor of literature, advises her students that a novel, "...is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved with their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing." Though Reading Lolita in Tehran is not a novel, I recommend reading it the same way before deciding whether or not attacking Iran is a good idea.

Nafisi's memoir focuses on her time spent with a hand-picked group of dedicated students she selects for clandestine study of Western classics after ideological restrictions at her university sap her will to continue teaching there. Although there are male students she respects and admires, the students in her group are, by necessity, all female. A mixed gender class would be too risky and
the presence of male students might inhibit her female students from freely expressing their opinions. Through their study of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen, the women find refuge from and in some cases meaning in the strictures and privations forced upon them by Iranian society. One frequently hears about young Iranian men gathering in basements for underground screenings of pirated episodes of Baywatch, as if this was somehow evidence of the West's cultural superiority. It's worth remembering that our culture, our heritage, has something more to offer than tittilation and cruise missiles.

And Nafisi and her students have certainly had their share of experience with missiles: they endure Iran's prolonged and ultimately pointless conflict with Iraq, surviving, at Nafisi's count, 168 cruise missile attacks in the year 1988 alone. The war doesn't make them hate Iran's regime any more than they already did and at no point is a scheme hatched to overthrow the government, despite what many of those urging war with Iran presume will happen in the event of an American air assault. Even if they had the desire to incite a counter-revolution, they didn't have the means, a situation that hasn't changed to this day. This is an important point to remember, since it's very easy to get angry while reading this book and decide that, SOMETHING MUST BE DONE! But what? Indiscriminate bombing isn't likely to liberate these people but it is very likely to kill them.

The women endure the conflict with Iraq the same way they endure living in theocratic Iran: they use their study of literature to enrich that portion themselves they stubbornly refuse to yield to the religous authorities. It is an act of profound rebellion to differentiate your self, your "soul," in a country that demands conformity, that has drained all value from piety. One of the students in the book, Mahshid, wore the head scarf before the revolution as an act of personal faith; Nafisi notes that, 'When the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless." It's a brilliant insight into how faith should operate in society, and the perfect illustration of why it is the faithful who should most insist on the separation of church and state.

Whether Nafisi's students still take refuge in literature or if they're even still alive is uncertain, but we can be sure they are not the only examples of their ilk and maybe, just maybe, they have passed their love of literature on to friends and children. It's impossible to say. Their situation reminds me of the literary refugees in Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, hiding in the forests with the world's great books comitted to memory so they can return the books' collected wisdom to society when it is once again ready to listen. Nafisi and her students are not nearly so altruistic in their rebellion - they are seeking the means of their personal survival, not their society's. Even still, their presence makes their society a little saner, a little more bearable, if only to them.

Bradbury's literary refugees survive the bombing of their city. Will Iran's?

The Mel Cooley Index for Wednesday, November 21, 2007

But what Mel really wants to know is: Could it rock you like a hurricane?

Rubber Ducky, You're the One

Courtesy of My Lovely and Talented Wife Who is Smarter Than Me™, I have discovered the greatest Nativity set EVER:

Yep, that's right - they're all rubber ducks.
Jesus being the duckling, of course.

I haven't put out a Nativity set since I was twelve years old (I think), but I may very well be doing so this year.

Ways in Which Sci-Fi Turned Out to Be Cooler than the Actual Future

Marvin the Martian vs. the new high-tech helmet the RAF has developed for its fighter pilots. Discuss.

You can tell that the kids who grew up watching anime are old enough to be designing real weapons systems now.

(Pic via BBC, h/t Watertiger)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

OK, not my deepest analysis of current affairs, but, still,

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!