Claremont McKenna College Acts Like a Spoiled Brat, Won’t Share Toys, Tickets to Clinton Speech

Recently, former president Bill Clinton came to speak at Claremont McKenna College. CMC is a part of the Claremont Consortium, which is where I went to school. Specifically, I’m a Pomona alum. The two schools do have a rivalry, and obviously this may indicate a bias on my part. Nevertheless, I see a disturbing trend with regard to CMC.

For his recent speech, President Clinton was kind enough to waive his usual speaking fee, with the assumption that most of the audience would be students. That’s why the decision on the part of the CMC administration to exclude students from all the other colleges from participating in the event was — in a word — sucky.

As Pomona student Jenn Wilcox wrote:

This event seems like a slap in the face to the concept of an educational consortium. The whole point of shared resources (like a large auditorium located on Pomona’s campus…) is that they can be accessed by the entire community, not one college desperately trying to draw more applications and climb up the ranking system.

Yes, President Clinton was CMC’s speaker. And yes, it was absolutely appropriate that they allocated enough tickets to make sure that all of CMC’s students and faculty were able to see Mr. Clinton speak. But the rest of the tickets should have been made available to the other students in the consortium, rather than given away to donors.

Claremont McKenna consistently scores lower in the college rankings that Pomona. Recent crises of leadership further underscore serious issues with the college. Unsurprisingly, CMC’s students take it to heart. They walk around with a chip on their shoulders when it comes to Pomona. In one particularly egregious incident, they defaced a priceless mural belonging to Pomona College.

With this most recent act of disrespect to the entire consortium, it appears that the destructive rivalry between the two schools has finally found its way into CMC’s administration. By way of a solution, I suggest that CMC President Pam Gann be fired. Obviously, the school needs much sounder leadership.

Keep Your Grubby Fingers Off My Chocolate

I don’t mind sharing with the world that I am in the midst of a full-blown hormone attack at present. It’s the kind of hormone attack that comes every 28 days and leaves me slightly cranky and fiending for chocolate.

So when my buddy Mark sent me this link to Don’t Mess with Our Chocolate, I had to pass it along to you guys.

Basically, the price of key chocolate ingredients is going up. To keep chocolate prices stable, the chocolate industry is lobbying the FDA to change the regulations for what they can call “chocolate.”

The problem with this is that I like my chocolate without additives that have nothing to do with chocolate. I’ve made this clear to the FDA and you should do the same.

Just be prepared for chocolate prices to go up once the FDA puts its foot down. Not that I mind. I’d pay $10 for a good bar of the stuff about now.

On Wilting Flowers

I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to anthropomorphize wilting flowers as I throw them away. I put them inside the plastic liner and imagine them screaming.

They’re past their prime, and shedding pink petals all over my living room. But they’re still too beautiful to sit in a trash can.

Perhaps I should start composting.

Happy Birthday Tony

birthday String void(Tony){
for(i==1; i==4, i++)
System.out.println("Happy Birthday);
if(i==3){
System.outprintln("Dear Tony")
}else
System.out.println("To You")
}
}
System.out.println("And many more!");
}

Crazy Saturday

Andy and I just got home from another one of our great adventures. He spent a lot of the day climbing at Exit 38 with a friend, while I ran about town like a crazy person and got in some climbing with some other friends indoors.

We also decided that we’re moving to Mercer Island. It’s more convenient for Andy’s job and I really like how close it is to downtown Seattle. We signed some paperwork today and we’ll be moving mid-month.

Lots going on! Will be back to more serious blogging tomorrow.

The Queen, the Demolition of the Barrier Between Public and Private, and The New Web

Andy and I watched Helen Mirren’s impeccable performance in The Queen (iTunes) this evening. He wasn’t as enthusiastic to see the film as I was, but we both wound up enjoying it.

The film got me thinking about issues of transparency and how far our culture has moved from Her Majesty’s heyday. Technology — first the television, now the “personal” Web — has brought human flaws and struggles to the forefront and pushed institutions into the background. Corporations whose goal was once to preserve brands now use new media to humanize themselves. The same must be true of the monarchy if it is to survive in Britain.

Never was this gap in the generational understanding of the public/private divide made more clear than in the days after Princess Diana’s death. As the movie illustrates, Her Majesty was never brought up to wear her heart on her sleeve. “Duty first, self second,” she states primly to Prime Minister Tony Blair as the film nears its end.

What she didn’t understand was that her duty changed as technology changed her people. Diana was so beloved in England because she put a human face on an institution that has sought to submerge humanity beneath layers of protocol since its inception. Her great physical beauty and poise, and her compassion for ordinary people only made her foibles more endearing. She was photographed — quite literally — to death. The exposure of her every move cemented her role as “the people’s princess.”

The newest phenomenon of people using the Web — it has been variously styled as “Web 2.0,” “emerging media,” “new media,” and “consumer generated content” — to tell their personal stories is a natural extension of the global culture that lauded Princess Diana and decried the Queen for her lack of public empathy with the people. Companies, and corporate communicators in particular need to understand that.

Quick Music Quiz for a Friday Morning

Five questions about music:

1. Has a song ever lifted you from sadness to joy?
2. Has a song you’ve known forever ever taken on new meaning?
3. Has anyone ever “ruined” a song for you?
4. Has a song you heard for the first time ever spoken immediately to you?
5. What is your theme song of the moment?

My answers after the jump:
Read more

Explosion in Motion

While digging around for my paper on Eve, I found a poem I wrote for Andy the summer of 2003. It’s one of my favorites:

My heart is an explosion in motion / an experimental drum full of ocean

A fever-pitch pounding / a shofar sounding / redefining fervor / calling me forward

Zion is our land / your hands, your lips could heal those bloodied sands

Ancient and war torn / broken and lovelorn / but for your friendship / this heart would be

My body is a constellation of nations / a dark and powerful inspiration

Hips swaying, breasts swelling / your body compelling / you drive me to fury / you push me to peace

Depression and Mass Murder: What Can We Do?

I must admit to a certain fascination with Seung Cho. I know it’s not entirely useful to be an armchair forensic psychologist. I should be using this space to agitate for a return to the days of mental hospitals and involuntary commitments, as I did earlier this week. I would probably be making more of a contribution to the well-being of the world if I did that.

That said, I do spend a lot of time thinking about this guy. I think part of it is because I understand him. I’ve dealt with depression and suicidal rage before. I’ve experienced what it feels like to be profoundly alienated, on the outside looking in on all the shiny, happy people having fun.

One of the most destructive features of depression is the stubbornness it gives you. There are days when you know you should get out of bed, but you stubbornly refuse to obey the better angels of your nature. You know that it’s probably a good idea to go outside and run around. You know that the endorphins will make you feel better. You know that picking up the phone when a friend calls is the healthiest thing to do. But depression gives you immense strength to resist the kindness of the world and focus instead on its injustices. It gives you immense strength to do the unhealthiest thing possible.

This feature seems to be a unique asset if your goal is to kill a whole lot of people. As Newsweek’s Mary Carmichael writes:

Once a person has decided to commit mass murder, he’s extremely unlikely to admit to being depressed or to seek psychological help, and he may also cut off many relationships with friends who might encourage him to do so. In other words, the people who need counseling the most are those who will try hardest to avoid it.

As it turns out, there was a time when Seung Cho responded to the efforts of his classmates to include him:

At Virginia Tech, some of his classmates tried to include him. His suitemates took him to a frat party, and he indulged in drinking games, downing vodka and Kool-Aid and playing beer pong. He was adept, if a bit joyless, at lobbing Ping-Pong balls into cups of beer. “Down to the last shot, he made it, without any expression in his face,” one of his suitemates, Andy Koch, tells NEWSWEEK.

But depression has a funny way of pushing those memories from your mind. It’s so easy to focus only on the times when you have been scorned, rather than on the times when people reached out. It’s so easy to remain joyless even when those in your life want you to share in their joy. And when you’re trying to craft your self-narrative, to explain how you became the joyless human being you are. It’s very easy to remember only the sad, joyless times.

Sometimes that joylessness becomes so intense that the mind tries to make sense of the experience. Unconsciously, it can be easy to assume that there has to be a specific reason why everything feels so much harder for you than it does for everyone else. It’s possible that Seung Cho truly was sexually abused as a child, as so many have come to believe due to the nature of his written work. But it’s equally likely that those themes of incest and abuse in his writing were generated by his mind’s attempt to make sense of its own pain. Sometimes it’s not enough to just be desperately sad and lonely. You need a reason.

Depression doesn’t turn everyone who suffers from it into a mass murderer. But all of the mass murderers studied by forensic psychologists were reacting to some kind of perceived injustice. Depression is extremely efficient at generating that perception. It’s also great at reinforcing it by encouraging those who struggle with it to shut out the world. And while mass murderers may not fit a specific profile, almost all of them have some common threads that relate back to depression.

According to Newsweek:

They are not, on the whole, psychopaths, although they are often identified in the media as such. “A psychopath is someone with little conscience, little interpersonal bonding, someone who’s smooth and manipulative,” says Schlesinger. “That personality has nothing, zero, to do with mass murder.”

Indeed, the personality type most often associated with mass murder is in some ways the opposite of a psychopath. He is far from cool-headed; instead, he is aggrieved, hurt, and above all paranoid. Some mass murderers may be trying to exercise power over a world that they feel has left them powerless. “These people often feel some great injustice has been done to them. They’re angry and they want to take it out on the world,” says Schlesinger. “Then they develop the idea that committing murder will be the solution to whatever their problem is, and they fixate on it. Eventually they come to feel that there’s no other solution.”

The problems that the murderers, however horribly, are trying to “solve” can be almost anything—the loss of a job, a financial setback, or a bad breakup (several of Cho’s classmates have told reporters that he was looking for his girlfriend). But these relatively minor setbacks are merely the events that push the killers over the edge; they don’t put them near the edge in the first place. They are usually the last in a long string of perceived insults and hardships. “You don’t just get a D on your report card and then open fire on 30 people,” says Levin. “It takes a prolonged series of frustrations. These people are chronically depressed and miserable.”

So it would seem that if we want to stop to stomp out this “depressingly American” trend of gun-fueled mass murder, we need to get much, much better at recognizing and treating depression. Unfortunately, government can’t be relied upon to do this in any kind of reliable way. Other than reversing course on community mental health, there’s very little that can be done in the political sphere.

What do you guys think? What more can we do?

First Presidential Debate Held Tonight

Democratic Presidential hopefuls Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Gravel, Biden, Dodd, Kucinich and Richardson had their first debate today at 7 pm (EST) on MSNBC. A brief breakdown:

All 8 candidates waffled on abortion, saying, “I am pro-choice. But please don’t tell too many people.”

The big three (Clinton, Obama, and Edwards) are in favor of gun control. Again they would prefer if you didn’t tell anyone. The other five candidates are current or former gun owners.

All 8 candidates want out of Iraq, feel the war is a disaster, and think Bush is incompetent. And they REALLY want to tell everyone.

Unfortunately, that’s all the information I have, as the debate is NOT available online. I would LOVE to watch it, but apparently MSNBC does not want it uploaded onto YouTube or Google Video.

If any readers out there know where I can read a transcript of the debate or view footage please let me know. I’m going to have to vote for one of these guys in a year or two.

P.S. Right now I’m leaning towards Jack Bauer as a write-in candidate. I wonder what his stance is on health-care reform.

Blaming Women

Some of you expressed interest in reading my junior English paper on the character of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In the interest of discouraging plagarism of the paper, I’ve exported and uploaded it as a PDF. I’ve also reverted it to rough draft form in a few key places. Anyone who steals this paper will likely miss at least one or two mistakes, thus lowering their grade. Be forewarned.

Here it is.

Miss America’s Father Must Give Permission for Jailbait Sting Operation

The incomparably lovely Miss America 2007, Lauren Nelson recently participated in a statutory rape sting for an episode of America’s Most Wanted. Police used photos of Nelson as a young teenager to lure four separate men to a secluded cabin for sex.

Nelson chatted with the men online and pretended to be a teenage girl.

But what really struck me as odd was this paragraph from the AP report:

Art McMaster, president and CEO of the Miss America Organization, said he initially was hesitant about Nelson participating in the sting, but agreed after speaking with Nelson’s father and the producers of “America’s Most Wanted.” Emphasis mine.

Let me get this straight. At twenty years of age, the Miss America Organization still thinks that Ms. Nelson is not fully capable of making her own decision to risk her safety and physical well-being. So the president and CEO of the company had to consult with her father first?

I wonder if Ms. Nelson’s father needed to be present when she signed the Miss America contract. Did he also need to offer a sworn statement that his little girl grown daughter had never been pregnant or engaged in any kind of “moral turpitude.”

Yes, the Miss America organization is one of the biggest providers of scholarships to young women in the world. The women who participate are not dunces. In most cases, they’re reasonably intelligent, talented, hardworking and decent. They also happen to be incredibly beautiful. And celebrating great beauty is not a crime.

What bothers me here is the complete lack of respect for Ms. Nelson’s autonomous judgment. If she says she wants to participate in a televised sting operation to raise awareness about sexual predators online, I think that’s enough for the Miss America Organization to stand aside and let her do her work. They don’t need to call daddy just to make sure it’s OK.

Dennis Kucinich Lays The SMACK Down

By which I mean, Representative Dennis “The Ultimate Warrior” Kucinich, introduced articles to impeach Vice-President Dick Cheney, based on Cheney’s initial push to invade Iraq.

“The Vice President is beating the same drums of war against Iran that he beat against Iraq under false pretenses, and he’s doing it all over again, against Iran,” said Kucinich, as throngs of fans cheered (or at least I did anyway). “And I say that it’s time to stand up to that. Our country couldn’t afford this last war. We can’t afford to go into another one. And somebody has to challenge the conduct of this Vice President.”

The three articles for impeachment submitted were that Cheney fabricated the threat of weapons of mass destruction (we still haven’t found any), made up a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq (although to be fair, they are all over the place now), and is threatening war with Iran. All three of these violate the Constitution.

Kucinich has decided it makes more sense to impeach the Vice-President first before taking on the President, as he feels back-to-back Presidential Impeachments might be trying to the country.

So far, no other Representatives have had the balls to co-sponsor this legislation. I promise to donate $30 in campaign funds to whoever does (this is a reward, not a bribe).

The following is a brief poem I wrote about how much I love Dennis Kucinich:

Hey Dennis, you’re so fine.
You’re so fine, you blow my mind.
Hey Dennis! Hey Dennis!

I’ll update you ASAP as soon as other Congressman and Women join Dennis in “growing a pair.”

Bush Cites Progress On Iraq

“There’s been some progress,” Bush told reporters today after meeting with General David Petraeus, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, at the White House. “There’s been some horrific bombings, of course. There’s also a decline in sectarian violence.”

Bush continued that he’s also really “stoked” about recent progress by the Memphis Grizzlies, Oakland Raiders, and Kansas City Royals. “Everybody loses a few games, but championships are about heart, not wins and losses.”

In other news, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that the World Series champion will now be “appointed” by the executive branch.

Lethal Injection isn’t as Humane as it Looks

Lethal injection has long been regarded as one of the more humane ways to execute a condemned person. After all, there’s no screaming, no smell of frying flesh, no sudden jolt as the neck breaks in the noose. From the audience’s perspective, the prisoner just goes to sleep.

But while lethal injection may make watching the carefully orchestrated, involuntary death of another human seem less violent, that doesn’t make it so.

A recent study concludes that executions by lethal injection in this country have been woefully mismanaged. Doctors and other health care professionals are barred from participating in executions by professional ethics. Because of this, condemned prisoners are often given wrong doses of the three drugs that are commonly used to kill them. In some cases, this makes the prisoner’s final minutes into a painful nightmare.

According to CNN:

Most states use three drugs — thiopental, an anesthetic; pancuronium bromide, a nerve blocker and muscle paralyzer; and potassium chloride, a drug to stop the heart. Each is supposed to be capable of killing all by itself, but if not, the anesthetic is supposed to render the inmate unconscious while the other drugs do the job.

But sometimes, the thiopental is administered in such a small dose for a prisoner’s size and weight that it wears off after the pancuronium bromide has taken effect but before the prisoner is dead. When the potassium chloride is injected, the prisoner is paralyzed by the pancuronium bromide, but fully aware of an asphyxiating, burning sensation that, according to one study author would feel, “something like being put on fire.”

Granted, this study’s findings may well be biased by the obvious anti death penalty sentiments of its authors. But other scientists have said that they are satisfied with the scientific methodology.

But good or bad science is really not at issue here. We need to look at this from a policy standpoint. I think there’s enough evidence here to call for a moratorium at the very least. We as a society will have to suspend our lust for revenge long enough to make sure that we’re not slowly torturing people to death.

Back to Bedlam: Jonathan Kellerman, Community Mental Health and the Virginia Tech Massacre

It’s human nature to try to explain the inexplicable. When we are hit with a shocking tragedy, the community tries to make sense of it. So now we find ourselves struggling to understand what turned a seething young outcast into a mass murderer.

It’s easy to get lost in the “why?” Andy and I have spent a lot of time over the past week retracing the killer’s steps, writing our own profile of his last hours. We want to understand what set him off just as much as anyone. But the reality is that we will never fully understand.

But as we overcome our shock and devastation, we must move on from asking unanswerable questions. As a society, we must turn our attention to how we can prevent the next Virginia Tech.

This is the subject of Jonathan Kellerman’s excellent editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. The piece explains the “liberationist” sentiment of the early 1970’s and walks us through the shutdown of our national system of mental institutions in favor of ineffectual community mental health centers.

He argues that if an infrastructure for mental health-based incarceration had remained in place, Seung Cho would have been involuntarily committed for the long-term in the fall of 2005 when he became suicidal after two separate women rejected his romantic advances as stalking. At the very least, he might have been placed on a list that would have made it impossible for him to buy a gun legally.

Writes Kellerman:

No one who knew him seems surprised by what he did. On the contrary, dorm chatter characterized him explicitly as a future school-shooter. One of his professors, the poet Nikki Giovanni, saw him as a disruptive bully and kicked him out of her class. Other teachers viewed him as disturbed and referred him for the ubiquitous “counseling” — an outcome that is ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness and akin to “treatment” for a patient with metastasized cancer.

But even that minimal care wasn’t given. The shooter didn’t want it and no one tried to force him to get it. While it’s been reported that he was involuntarily committed to a “Behavioral Health Center” in December 2005, those reports also say he was released the very next morning. Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary “warehousing” were absent. The rest is terrible history.

That is not to say that anyone who pens violence-laden poetry or lets slip the occasional hostile remark should be protectively incarcerated. But when the level of threat rises to college freshmen and faculty prophesying accurately, perhaps we should err on the side of public safety rather than protect individual liberty at all costs.

If the Virginia Tech shooter had been locked up for careful observation in a humane mental hospital, the worst-case scenario would’ve been a minor league civil liberties goof: an unpleasant semester break for an odd and hostile young misanthrope who might’ve even have learned to be more polite. Yes, it’s possible confinement would’ve been futile or even stoked his rage. But a third outcome is also possible: Simply getting a patient through a crisis point can prevent disaster, as happens with suicidal people restrained from self-destruction who lose their enthusiasm for repeat performances.

At the very least, in a better world, time spent on psychiatric watch could’ve been used to justify placing the Virginia killer on a no-buy gun list. I’m not naïve enough to believe that illegal firearms aren’t within reach for anyone who really wants them, but just as loud dogs deter burglars and crime rates drop during harsh weather, sometimes making life difficult for a would-be criminal is enough.

So as we overcome our national grief and dry our eyes, how do we use the momentum of this senseless tragedy to move forward nationally? After reading Kellerman’s article, I think we have a mandate to re-start our national mental health care system. Community mental health care and voluntary outpatient treatment don’t help everyone. And when we combine permanent, residential mental health facilities with the profound advances we’ve made in psychopharmacology since the 1970’s, perhaps we can do better to effectively treat our nation’s mentally ill.

This is not about being a tax-and-spend, bleeding heart liberal. Kellerman is right when he says that some people are just plain dangerous to themselves and others. For the sake of the next Seung Cho and the many people whose lives he will eventually snuff out, I hope that we are able to transform the national grief into action.

My New Favorite Radio Station

I read about the Dallas-based Lone Star 92.5 radio station in the Wall Street Journal this morning and blogged about their new media inspired advertising structure over at my company blog.

Then I started listening to their online stream. It turns out that Lone Star plays all of my favorite music (Steve Earle, Willie Nelson, ZZ Top) and some stuff that I never knew about but now LOVE.

I only wish there were a country/rock station in Seattle that played stuff from outside the Nashville beltway.

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