Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at May 7th, 2004

As Ed mentioned, I have been fearing the possibility of our troops abusing Iraqis for a while. This is not because I expect our troops specifically to do such things. It’s the result of my taking an undergraduate course in social psychology during college.

In the interest of honesty, I must admit that haven’t specifically been expecting such news out of prisons. I’ve been thinking of our soldiers’ position in Iraq as being similar to guards in a a prison. They have power. The people of the occupied country don’t have much. In some, power does corrupt.

The unfortunate thing is that corruption in a power structure has a way of ensnaring people. I remember watching a documentary film about the process of creating torturers in Greece during a particularly bad period in Greek history. First they had people (who had never tortured before) guard outside the torture room, then later guard inside, and after that they had them take part themselves.

People have a tendency to follow orders and when desensitized to violence, ordinary, decent people have been known to do horrible things.

Thus, some relatively unsupervised people have the power to create a culture in which causing hurt to Iraqis is expected. The prisons, in this case, happened to be unsupervised enough and may have been under a certain amount of pressure from above to make life unpleasant for the Iraqis under their control.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this issue, if we had more troops there (whether US or UN) this might not have happened. Stretch your resources thin and you probably get more of this sort of abuse.

Posted by Jim at May 6th, 2004

As Ed mentioned, we went to see Yes on Wednesday night. It has been a while since I’ve had time (or money) to see live music. Graduate school, children, and work combine to kill any opportunity to do stuff like that.

I was amused to note some fans waving their cellphones and pda’s after songs. Apparently not enough people smoke, so say good-bye to lighters.

In any case, I’ll give a general rundown of the concert:

The Band:
For those of you who don’t really have much of anything come to mind when you think about Yes, I’ll give you some quick background. Yes came out of the ’70’s prog rock movement. In their music you can hear hints of Folk, Rock, Jazz, Blues, Country, and Classical music. In short, they’re eclectic.

In the 70’s, their best known songs were probably “Roundabout” and “All Good People.” When they got back together in the 80’s, they came out with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” a song that sounds very little like their earlier music.

The 80’s stuff sounded like pop music. There were even dance mixes of it. The 70’s stuff was sometimes 20 minutes in length and influenced by Igor Stravinsky.

Honestly, I was introduced to them with the 80’s version of the band, but I like the 70’s era band much better. Currently, after a series of convoluted personnel changes, they’ve got one of better the 70’s line-ups in place.

The Set:
Yes was known for the strangeness of its album covers, featuring the work of Roger Dean. Dean does surreal landscapes. He also designs Yes’ stage sets.

This one appeared to be inflatable and had a sea theme. The lights turned the vaguely crablike thing, a growth of seaweed, and a bunch of totally unknown, unidentifiable things green, blue, orange, and red.

For the longest time I could not figure out what the fishbowl-like things next to the drumset were supposed to be. According to Ed, they were drums. I spent the longest time speculating. Were they upside down mushrooms? The helmets of enormous, decapitated astronauts? I was at a loss.

The Songs:
You can get the song list on Ed’s blog, but I’ll just mention some of the highlights.

Ritual: This is from “Tales of Topographic Oceans.” That album consisted of four, 20 minute songs. I cannot imagine listening to the entire album live, but every time I’ve listened to a piece of it, it’s been great.

Rhythym of Love: Off of “Big Generator” from the 80’s, one of Yes’ worst albums. Live, at least, I liked “Rhythym of Love” to my great shock.

Turn of the Century: I just like this song. I’m not sure which album it comes from originally.

Songs they did not play (thank you!): “Circus of Heaven,” “Don’t Kill the Whale,” and “Hymn to an Arriving UFO.” All of these are off of the same album: “Tormato.” The cover art for that album included maps of tors and smashed tomatos. I don’t know why.

It would have been cool if they’d played “On the Silent Wings of Freedom” (also from “Tormato”), but I shouldn’t complain. They did play “And you and I,” one of my favorites.

Scary Drunken Yes Fans
You wouldn’t think that a band like Yes would have scary drunken fans. One time I went to see Yes (with Joe and Mike) we ended up sitting next to a guy who had evidently come to the concert already drunk. Even before the concert he was shouting about his enjoyment of Chris Squire’s music (”CHRIS SQUIRE RULES THE WHOLE FUCKIN’ WORLD!”) and insulting random passersby (”HEY! You in the green shirt! You think you’re cool, but you’re really a jerk!”).

While Ed and I didn’t have to contend with anything that rivaled that, we were both amazed to notice some people dancing. “How drunk do you have to be,” Ed asked, “before you forget that you can’t dance to Yes?”

I didn’t know. I’ve never been that drunk.

Still, it was a good night.

Posted by Jim at May 3rd, 2004

Here’s something I find amusing about a two party system.

People constantly complain about how their preferred party is not far enough left/right. Simultaneously, people in the other party publish negative information showing that the party they dislike is so far to the left/right that they may as well be Controlled By Satan.

I imagine this results from both the Republicans and the Democrats simultaneous needs to:

1. Energize their base (which tends to be willing to accept even some of the more ridiculous statements about the Other Party)
2. Pander to the middle. There’s simply not enough people in either party’s base to allow you to win an election unless the other party stays home.

I imagine there must be a thin line to walk in order to get the middle without losing your base.

Democrats are as close to an anti-war party as we have, but Kerry voted for the war and isn’t advocating an immediate troop withdrawal. People who want to withdraw have nowhere to go but Nader–potentially costing Kerry the election.

I’m sure that Bush has a similar dilemma on certain issues. For example, it’s good to have proposals for more spending on education and healthcare, but I imagine Bush can only go so far there without causing the size of government to increase more than his strongest supporters would be enthusiastic about.

It makes me wonder whether this situation more often results in a helpful moderation of extreme views or the watering down of good ideas to a point where they don’t solve the problem they were meant to solve.

Posted by Jim at May 2nd, 2004

Sometime last year after we’d gone into Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein from power I went to dinner at the house of someone at my church. It was a group of randomly chosen people, meeting for the purpose of getting to know people in the church better.

The topic of conversation (as it inevitably does) turned to Iraq.

One person was optimistic that in the end things would work out. Another, fairly confident that they wouldn’t. I, as always, felt to be somewhere in between to be closer to the truth.

My thoughts on Iraq went more or less like this:

1. Weapons of Mass Destruction would be one reason to consider going in, but I hadn’t personally seen enough evidence of that to invade on that reason alone.
2. Saddam Hussein appeared to be horrible and deserved to be removed.
3. In order to have a reasonable chance of keeping order we needed more troops than our nation alone could provide (something like 500,000–we’ve got somewhere around 130,000 in Iraq) and we needed support from more countries than the “Coalition of the Willing.”

and then there was my final point…

4. Occupying a country tends to bring out the worst in some people. Get a bunch of people, take away their families/communities, put them in charge of people they have conquered and incidents are inevitable. Someone will decide to entertain themselves in ways they would never consider if they were at home. I fear the effects of doing such actions (and even war in general) on people who do them as someday they are coming back home. For example, both Timothy McVeigh and the older of the Washington D.C. snipers were Gulf War veterans.

Here’s one thing I didn’t think about at all though… The media.

When those troops do horrible things, it will inevitably be reported and make the situation that much worse.

When the US occupied the Phillipines (which we did for quite some time), the army had an amusing (in a horrible way) method of publishing the muslims who attacked them. They hung them in pigskin, making them unclean and thus presumably destined for Hell.

Supposedly this kind of behaviour did the US some good while occupying the Phillipines, but I doubt it would do much today. All it would do is anger Muslims. When the US occupied the Phillipines, there was no Al Jezera.

The Bush administration seems to want to bring democracy and stability to Iraq. To do this, it seems that they might need the Iraqi people to admire the US on some level. Occupation works against that.

Hopefully Bush will figure this out and get the UN to become more involved while the US becomes less involved.

We’ll see.