"I can only imagine [the trauma felt by] someone who had lived at a level of near adoration by those around him, and seen the grandeur with which his father was treated,” said Ms. Afkhami, who now also lives in exile in the US.
“And then to suddenly, really quite suddenly, be dislocated, separated from his parents and also when he was with them to witness his father, whom all heads of state almost universally had courted and admired and flattered, was suddenly a pariah, there was no place for him."
“You keep asking these presentist questions,” said the Kenyan-born, British-accented historian.
Kenyan-born...
“As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in 'My Cousin Vinny,' ‘That’s a f----- up question!'” Morris said, relishing over the word as network censors bleeped him out.
“You cannot pluck people out of the past and expect them to comment on what’s happening today,” he continued.
Yeah, it's a fucked up question, but I bet Doris Kearns Goodwin would answer it. I mean, she'd whip out a juicy anecdote that would seem to answer it. Come on, Edmund, cast off your Kenyan-born, British-accented attitude and play the media game.
“I can only say that what he represented in his time is what we hope for in our presidents now, what we look for in our presidents now and what we’re increasingly disappointed by. He understood foreign culture, recognized the dignity of the United States. He was forceful yet dignified. And what I really feel these days is, we’ve become such an insular people.”
Good evening... this is my last broadcast. Yesterday, I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well, I'll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God Bullshit. We don't know why we're going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decay, so there better be someone somewhere who does know. That's the God Bullshit. And then, there's the noble man bullshit — that man is a noble creature that can order his own world. Who needs God? Well, if there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me, that man is full of bullshit. I don't have anything going for me. I haven't got any kids. And I was married for 33 years of shrill, shrieking fraud. So I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see.
More from Morris the Cat Kenyan:
Morris went on to criticize the American people, who he said “are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.”
So... like... the terrorists? They do maintain more slim and toned bodies. Man, he just came out and called us fat! He ran out of bullshit!
UPDATE: My original link goes to Politico, which records Morris as saying "That’s a f----- up question!" But here's the video and, although the bleep is there, it seems that Morris said "That’s a bullshit question!" That would correspond to what Marisa Tomei said:
Strangely, I was motivated to call bullshit on Morris and go on to discuss "bullshit" in that other movie ("Network").
John McCain is leading the filibuster against the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" "repeal" legislation in the Senate (it's not an actual repeal, but we'll leave that for another time). Today, Cindy McCain joined a number of celebrities in a video about gay youth suicide and bullying. Mrs. McCain's part of the video condemned DADT and then accused our government of sending bullies a message that what they do is okay.
The woman basically accused her husband of sharing the blame for gay kids killing themselves.
I'm astonished. And impressed as hell.
Husband-wife teams work like that sometimes. It's not really evidence of a marital breakdown or even necessarily a real conflict at all. Try this exercise: Begin with the assumption that they are a partnership. Now, explain their behavior. Do you see how it makes sense? I sure do.
Marie Osmond goes on "Oprah" to talk about her son's suicide and the "calculated decision" she made to go back to work 2 weeks later. It's not that the death didn't have a big impact on her. Please understand. She's "unique," she tells us, and that suicide was "probably the hardest thing I've been through."
USA Today, reporting these quotes, uses that last quote in its headline and sensitively omits the word "probably."
I can only imagine the impression this makes on a young, gay person who actually is suicidal. I'm old, heterosexual, and an immense fan of staying alive. But I can't see why would it would help to hear this dreary, robotic intonation of conventional advice from a representative of an administration that is fighting, in courts, against the rights of gay people to serve in the military and to marry.
ADDED: "Tomorrow will be better"... that's the message. I note the red dress. Why not:
AND: I think that song really makes you want to stay alive. Look:
There's so much room for personal taste. To each his own. For love partners and for things that stimulate the will to live.
Okay. Here. I don't want there to be an increase in suicides because you people have nowhere else to go. Satisfied? Now, please clean up after yourselves.
[Rigoberto Ruelas] tutored his students after class, visited their homes and met their families, steered them away from gangs and toward college. He arrived early for work every morning at Miramonte Elementary, and had near perfect attendance for 14 years, right up until last week, when he disappeared.
Ruelas' body was discovered on Sunday in a ravine beneath a Big Tujunga Canyon bridge. He left no note, but the Los Angeles County coroner has ruled his death a suicide. Family members have said he had been upset over his score in a teacher-rating database our newspaper created and posted online, which ranked him slightly below average.
If most teachers are excellent, it's not bad to be below average, but it will feel terrible nonetheless. That's the trouble with grading on a curve. Your performance is judged relative to others.
ADDED: Of course, if everyone's pretty bad, you can get a false idea of how good you are when there is grading on a curve. I've been grading law school exams on a curve — it's required — for a quarter century, and I know it is much easier to make relative judgments.
"What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money and often been successful in other fields want to pump his hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost purely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (rent, electricity, gas, water, linen, maintenance, insurance, license fees, trash removal, etc.), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongiform bacterium so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run them over? After all these years in the business, I still don't know."
Wrote Anthony Bourdain years ago, offered up now for insight into the 2 suicides by a chefs who appeared on the TV show "Hell's Kitchen." Bourdain wasn't writing about chefs who try to make it via TV show, and back when he wrote that, Bourdain himself hadn't leveraged his cooking into TV celebrity. So what is it — cooking or reality TV — that's more dangerous to the will to live? I'd guess reality TV. I think there is more delusion there and less likelihood of getting what you want.
A New Jersey woman is devastated that her precious sports car -- just repaired and fully gassed up -- was wrecked by a suicidal man's 40-story attempted death leap on the Upper West Side.
"I miss it. It's my baby," moaned Maria McCormack, who regrets lending her husband the 2008 Dodge Charger Tuesday for work. "I want to meet [Tom Magill] and say, 'Why? Why my car out of all the cars in the city?' "
It's not that she thinks he has an answer, like he picked her car, she just wants to say "Why? Why?" at him.
"I wonder how he feels now that he made it. Does he feel like an idiot?" said Maria. "I hope he's OK. But I just want to know why."
Well, Magill is in the hospital after having rods inserted in his legs and some operation to "relieve the clotting" in his groin, so maybe you could go over there and interrogate him about whether he feels like an idiot.
If you think this sounds like an episode of "Seinfeld," it's "The Bris":
"Well, I just got the estimate. It's going to cost more to fix that roof than the car's worth... Someone's paying for that damage and it's not gonna be me.... swan dives from twenty floors, lands right on to it. What do I have a bulls eye on there? He couldn't move over two feet? Land on the sidewalk. That's city property. What are the chances, what are the odds? He couldn't do it again if his life depended on it..."
1. The headline says the man — Thomas Magill — "lives to tell tale," but the "tale" he's told so far is "My leg! My leg!"
2. A construction worker who witnessed the fall has opined that the man survived not because he landed on a red 2008 Dodge Charger, but because the car contained a set of rosary beads.
3. He landed feet first, "twisted like a pretzel," in the backseat of the car. The car seat! That, not God, accounts for the soft landing, as shown in this reenactment:
4. The man's Facebook page shows that he regarded his interests as "being mean" and "making fun of people." Does that make you less likely to scold me for being mean and making fun of him? I am making fun of him, but I deny that I'm being mean. This post is part of my ongoing effort to deter people from committing suicide. I believe stories about suicide are full of the kind of sympathy that creates a romantic aura around suicide. I want to give suicide the kind of awful image that will make less easy to embrace than facing up to your problems in the material world.
Bob Wright, inviting Robert P. George to address the topic of euthanasia, lays out the scenario with respect to seriously persons who "feel that they are so unpleasant... uh... unhappy..."
It's also, I think, a slip to say "euthanasia" instead of "assisted suicide," isn't it? Wright must mean only to refer to people who are choosing to die. Euthanasia goes beyond that, and covers killing individuals whom others find — shall we say? — unpleasant.
Rwanda, a close American ally that has received hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid, is tightening restrictions on political opponents and critics of the government in the months leading up to elections in August, several human rights groups have said. No subject seems to be touchier than the genocide in 1994, in which hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred by government-backed death squads. In recent years, thousands of Rwandans have been charged with genocide ideology, an Orwellian-sounding and vaguely defined crime often leveled against anyone who challenges the government’s version of events in 1994.
But Mr. Erlinder’s case is the first time Rwanda has leveled such charges against a Westerner. And the charges against [American law professor Peter Erlinder], 62, seem to have nothing to do with what he may have said or done in Rwanda, but more with his earlier work as a defense lawyer at a United Nations-backed tribunal in Tanzania.
At that tribunal, Mr. Erlinder, who represented a top genocide suspect, disputed the standard characterization of the bloodshed in Rwanda as Hutu victimizers slaughtering innocent Tutsis. Instead, he said that the violence was more spontaneous and possibly the result of Tutsi rebels killing Hutu civilians. He even went as far as to say that the Tutsi rebels, who now rule Rwanda, assassinated Rwanda’s president in 1994, the event that set off the widespread murder.
That sounds like something a blogger might say, but it was Art Linkletter, speaking in 1965, back when he was one of the most familiar faces on television. He died yesterday at the age of 97.
I remember watching him when I was a kid. He had kids on his show.
Being a kid, I was very interested in... how do I get on that show?
Later, young people my age turned against him. It had to do with this:
In 1969 Mr. Linkletter’s daughter Diane leapt to her death from her sixth-story apartment. Her father said that LSD had contributed to her death, and although an autopsy showed no signs of the drug in her body, the personal tragedy became a national event, suggesting to many Americans that drugs and the counterculture were making inroads even into seemingly model families like the Linkletters.
Mr. Linkletter, rather than retreating from the attention, became a crusader against drug use and an adviser to President Richard M. Nixon on drug policy...
Oh, how we callow youths mocked the poor man who, having lost his daughter, wanted to spoil our good times. LSD became associated with the urge to leap from windows and rooftops — an idea that many took seriously but many others — e.g., everyone I knew — thought was hilarious. Some of us seem to remember a National Lampoon illustration picturing the daughter at her window gazing at a hallucination of Art Linkletter floating in the air and beckoning to her. I hope we won't go to hell for laughing at things like that.
Meanwhile, in heaven, there's "gold and diamonds." That's from the first kid interview in the YouTube clip above. Art asks little Roger Wong — a kid who wants to be a doctor — what heaven is like, and the kid says "gold and diamonds." Art suggests that, as a doctor, the boy will "keep people from going to heaven," which the boy takes the wrong way and denies. Art has to rephrase it: "I mean, you're just going to delay them a little, aren't you?"
Strangely, the same joke — that saving lives is only delaying death — appears in the current issue of The Onion. Humor is a funny thing. Sometimes cornball and hip merge, like that, and sometimes they are so thoroughly different — as with that beckoning hallucination — that it drives a sharp wedge between us.
