imagined-community

Is there anything Jack Bauer can’t survive? Is there any person that Jack Bauer can’t convince with his earnest eyes and sincere words …or his deadly accuracy with a weapon? I used to love 24, but lately Jack has become so invincible that 24 has become more humorous than suspenseful (although the take over of CTU almost reminded me of the urgency I felt during season one). And then there is the torture earlier in the season. I had some serious issues with how heavily 24 leaned on the long torture scenes to keep the audience – what – afraid, disgusted, and anxious? For me, my TV watching line is drawn at gratuitous torture. (I actually stopped watching 24 for a while — ditto for Lost — because I find graphic torture scenes repugnant, especially when torture is used as a vehicle for entertainment.) And I do believe that people become habituated — their fear of a thing is reduced — the more they are exposed to it. Quite frankly I don’t think we should desensitize ourselves to the act, or even the idea, of torture. We should be afraid of torture, of what it is and of what it means to be a torturer.

Along these lines, I found the GOP candidates response to the torture question at the University of South Carolina illuminating. Not surprisingly, McCain was the only one who was anti-torture. Sometimes it nice to know that experience — not just some lame ass ideology spun out in a life buffered from contact with poverty, violence, and war — really does help shape ideas – and sometimes for the good. Mitt Romney did his usual slight of the hand words trick, “not torture but enhanced interrogation techniques.” WTF?! Oh, you mean like torture, but not quite as gruesome as the stuff our Fox super hero Jack Bauer does on 24?

So is Jack Bauer really a hero after all? Ready yourself for a snippet of a serious over the top rant. This from Station Charon :

Here is an ugly little secret for the deep-seated television addicts in our attention deficit democracy - Jack Bauer is also an ultra violent latter day Nazi with a savage psychopathic mean streak and a king-sized hard-on for torture. Torture has become one of a growing number of previously unthinkable and utterly abominable acts that can now be wrapped in an American flag as some type of a sick endorsement of what constitutes super patriotism under the pathologically amoral regime that is the Bushreich…

When we peer into that flickering glass Jack Bauer is us and our voyeuristic Pavlov’s Dogs type of involuntary salivating at depictions of wanton cruelty that appropriately belong in a Schutzstaffel training manual is a damning condemnation of a rotting society that has through our decadent ignorance, callous indifference and general meanness become a pox on the rest of the planet.

Like I said, I draw the line at torture. Still, I am just about to download the season finale. Aargh…

So which superhero are you? (It turns out I am Wonder Woman, not surprising. At least that is when I am not busy being my super villain alter ego Mystique.)

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The Quigleys eat out.

I’ve spent a lot of time roaming around the country and have said a lot of goodbyes. But lately it has become especially hard for me to say goodbye. I think partly because I don’t have a network of close friends in Boston. And also I don’t work with my friends on a daily basis as I did in Wisconsin. In fact, it wasn’t until I moved to Boston that I fully realized that I am the kind of person who cannot thrive without the security that comes from close relationships. I am not sure why I was oblivious to this truth in the past, I can only assume that it was because even though boyfriends came and went, I always had a close friend or two around whose shoulder I could lean on. I knew that I felt crappy with the end of a romantic relationship, and I knew I relied on my friends to get me through the sadness and to encourage me to open up to someone new, but I didn’t realize how vital the security of those friendships was until I got to Boston. Not only had I taken friendship for granted, but I had seriously misunderstood the nature of my own so-called independence. Yes, I could live without a boyfriend, but only because I had been blessed with solid friendships.

And what better friendship is there than that between a happily married couple? (The psychologist I was talking about Mindy, the one who can tell if a couple will divorce within the first five minutes of meeting them was Gottman, who argues that “happy marriages are based on deep friendship.”)

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Mindy. Presale. 7:00 a.m.

Ah, the yard sale! (Or as we say in the Midwest, the rummage sale. I hear in Britain they call them car boot sales.) On Saturday, I helped Mindy with our third, and possible final, yard sale. Thus a little bit of reminiscing is in order…

My friendship with Mindy developed during my first year of graduate school at UNC, when we were partnered for a year to coordinate an academic conference. I was a little dazzled by Mindy (she is a wonderful storyteller and very funny) and felt self-conscious about my extreme self-consciousness and occasionally off-putting nervous energy. But we worked amazingly well together and had lots of fun and she didn’t seem to mind my neurotic streak. Still, my insecurity about my own worth meant that for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why she kept inviting me to do things with her. But she did, and I went, and seven years later I still admire her astounding ability to simultaneously play well with others and get things done with maximum efficiency — all while looking fabulous ; - ) I’ll miss you Scottish Mindy!

So… back to yard sales. Saturday’s sale in Durham was fairly tame. I only made up one fake identity for myself while talking with a customer that I believed was attempting to scam us. Mindy & Paul sold all the furniture. (As any yard saler knows, it is a happy moment when that last piece of furniture goes!) Of course, not everybody likes yard sales. For a funny, bitter (and all true) rant on the yard sale read 3mote.

If you are reading this blog from outside of the United States you may not be familiar with the American cultural phenomenon of the yard sale. Basically, a sale where you take your old junk — books, clothes, furniture, kitchen plates, anything really — and put it on display in your garage, on your lawn, or on the sidewalk if you live in a city. You price everything very cheaply, say 50 cents for a shirt. Then you pull out the lawn chairs and spend a Saturday morning and afternoon drinking coffee, eating donuts, chatting people up, and, of course, haggling over prices. Early in the morning sellers are somewhat inflexible on prices, but by the end of the day you are offering people amazing deals with the wild hope that you will not have to repack all that shit and haul it back inside. Often the yard sale has a carnivalesque feeling. Best of all, aside from getting money for your junk, you meet lots of people, some stranger than others.

To get a taste of what yard sales are all about check out the trailer from the documentary, “Yard Sale.”

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