Life in Central America

Marilyn Monroe, the innocent victim of sexual abuse

There is nothing pretty about sexual abuse, but Marilyn Monroe made it look that way. She helped make sexual exploitation acceptable in our time. She made it beautiful and glamorous.

She will probably be the most famous woman in history – or actually, the most famous girl in history. She was the girl who never grew up. She was also a girl that never existed. She was a stage personality, and like many other stage personalities she was the exact opposite of the real person behind the image. Marilyn Monroe, the happy innocent, was neither happy nor innocent.

I am now reading her biography by Barbara Leaming, which came out in 1998. Norma Jeane Baker’s problems started before she was born. Her grandmother was manic-depressive, and she died in a straightjacket in a state mental hospital. Her grandfather died of syphilis. Many of the men in her family were violent alcoholics. Her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who alternated between violent rages and interludes of rigidity and muteness. Norma Jean grew up in a series of foster homes. At one point she picked up a stray dog, which she named Tippy. Every morning, the little black-and-white dog followed her to the Washington High School, waiting outside until she was finished. When she was seven, a neighbor attacked Tippy with a garden hoe, and in front of the screaming child, sliced the dog in two.

Later, she was expelled from several foster homes after she was sexually assaulted. The abusers were never punished, but Norma Jeane was. In her early years as an aspiring model-actress, she often attended parties for Hollywood executives where the young women at the party often accompanied the men to the upstairs bedrooms.

Marilyn Monroe, a really amazing person, managed to turn this history into a triumph in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. To quote from Leaming:

For all her intense sexuality, Marilyn communicated that on some level, she, too was as uncertain about sex, and as vulnerable to being hurt by it as anyone else. Far from being the doomed sinner her mother branded her, she was actually a sweet, innocent, good girl whom everybody should love. Audiences were thrilled and relieved to discover that is was all right to laugh at sex; but so, in her own, every touching way, was Marilyn. That personal element infused her performance with special power.

We are not good at making software

This is so obvious it hardly needs to be said. Our best software experts have been working on this problem for decades, and working hard, but they haven’t make much headway. It’s time we faced up to the problem.

And it’s time we faced up to the big problem: “Why haven’t improved methods of software development taken hold? ” Working on the small problem: “How can software development be improved?”, has not worked. The problem is social, not technical.

And I think we can take it further than that: the problem is cultural. Our culture is not good at making software. What culture? The global affluent culture which is the parent culture for the global software culture. This culture has been good at making hardware, but not good at making software.

Believe me, culture is important, it is all-important. Try living in an underdeveloped country for awhile (as I do) these cultures are not good at doing anything, except making tortillas and couscous. (I am a big fan of tribal cultures, on the other hand, they are good at doing everything.) But I digress, let me return to the 21 century.

We have been trying to move from a hardware culture (the market economy) to a software culture (the gift economy), and we have gotten nowhere. We need to make a quantum jump from one kind of place to another, but cultural changes of this magnitude take a long time—and it usually end up in strange places.

The most optimistic scenario would be for software to influence our cultural development, much like hardware did in the last three centuries. But this may be difficult, our concentration on hardware-based affluence has used up much of the earth’s resources—and produced a culture that wants still more hardware.

This culture can tolerate terrible software; it is only interested in hardware.

TV is hot

This posting is by Daniel Boorstin, Budd Schulberg, and me (with a bow to Marshall McLuhan).

Budd Schulberg wrote the scenario for the movie Waterfront, which was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Marlon Brando. Schulberg (and everybody else) thought the film was excellent. But Schulberg decided to write a novel anyway because he felt he had more to say than could possibly be said in a movie. He says:

The film is an art of high points. It has no time for what I call the essential digression. The “digression” of complicated, contradictory, character. The “digression” of social background. The film must go from significant episode to more significant episode in a constantly mounting pattern. It’s an exciting form. But it pays a price for this excitement. It cannot wander as life wanders, or pause as life always pauses, or contemplate the incidental or the unexpected.

Boorstin continues:

The nuance, the perspective, the contradictions of historical development and social interaction were not made for the camera eye. A film must act, a book has time to think and wonder. The book is still the essential civilizing influence, able to penetrate the unknowns of human aspiration. We have lost our grip on reality when we let ourselves believe that the movie can ever give us the nub of the matter. (Many writers, Boorstin included, mistake the world of books for reality itself.)

Hal says:

The TV has the same limitations, only worse. A movie has hours to tell a story, but a news show has only seconds to present a dramatic message before the viewer changes channels. The viewer has become God; he can change the world, because the world he sees on TV is the world for him. This is a world that thrives and action and violence. It cannot dwell on the subtle ideas that make for a contented, simple life.

Star wars

When I lived in Santa Barbara, CA, back in the Sixties, one of my neighbors was an old taxi driver who knew every character in town. He used to tell me about an old-time movie star who lived in Montecito, an expensive suburb of Santa Barbara. She would pick up men in bars and tell them wonderful she was going to treat them—in the back of his cab. He got tired of listening to her spiel. She would give them a beautiful house, a big car, she would make them famous. The object of her attentions was probably so drunk he could hardly sit upright, but that made no difference. He was someone she could overwhelm with her grandeur. The next morning, he was probably lucky to get enough money for taxi fare back home.

The movie industry of fifty years ago had far-reaching effects on our lives. It not only showed us how to behave, it showed us what to believe in. And one of those things was the star system. Everything (and everybody) could be rated: Good, Better, and Best, as the Sears Roebuck catalogs of the time advertised. Of course you wanted the best, if you could afford it.

The big movie studios could afford it; indeed they couldn’t live without their stars. And today our big corporations can’t live without them either—or at least they think they can’t. They pay outrageous sums to CEOs, to get the stars, believing they will bring in the bucks just like the movie stars did. But the CEOs have a much easier time of it. All they have to do make a name for themselves in the business world. The movie stars had to make a name for themselves in the movie world, a much larger world with the perfect rating system: the box office.

In the business world, celebrities are celebrities because they are well known. They are proof that power feeds on itself. The buddy system is at work; powerful people have powerful friends who can turn them into stars. But like the brightest stars in the sky, they don’t usually last long—just long enough to retire stinking rich.

Turning over power in Iraq

The International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch recently pointed out to the Bush administration that, under the Geneva Conventions, with sovereignty officially being turned over to Iraqis on June 30, POWs like Saddam either had to be charged with crimes or released. The leaders of the new "interim government" promptly demanded that Saddam be turned over to them; George Bush initially refused. Now, Washington has suggested a "compromise," which tells us a good deal about what power is being assumed by whom: "It said it would retain physical custody of Saddam but legal custody would go to Baghdad."

I could comment on this, but it is not really necessary.

The death of the celebrity

As I was reading about this subject this morning, all of a sudden it hit me: we don’t have celebrities anymore—and we don’t have heroes either. Both of them have become dispensable—like most of our other belongings. Instead, we have an endless parade of nobodies on the ticker-tape parade of people in the news.

We don’t have the time to make celebrities anymore, and we certainly don’t have enough time to make heroes. As Boorstin¹says:

The hero was born of time; his gestation required at least a generation. As the saying went, “he had stood the test of time.” A maker of tradition, he was himself made by tradition. He grew over the generations as people found new virtues in him and attributed to him new exploits. Receding into the misty past he became more, and not less, heroic. This is not a rational process, as some modern historians have pointed out, in considerable detail.

The celebrity, on the contrary, is always a contemporary. The hero is made by folklore, sacred texts, and history books, but the celebrity is the creature of gossip, of public opinion, of magazines, and ephemeral images of movie and television screens. The passage of time, which creates and establishes the hero, destroys the celebrity. The very agency which first makes a celebrity destroys him. This terminal publicity may not be deliberately malicious, but this is small comfort to the ex-celebrity. Witness the status of our present president.

There is no tragedy in a celebrity’s fall, for he is a man returned to his proper anonymous station. The dead hero becomes immortal.

When I ride the bus into town, I often go by Kennedy Square, which is situated close to the University of Costa Rica, which features a bronze bust of Kennedy. Every time I go by, there is new coat of paint on it to hide the effects of last week’s graffiti. Time has not been kind to Kennedy either, at least on the UCR campus, where the US is not very popular.

Contrast this to Robert E. Lee. After the Civil War, he was offered a job as the president of a corporation, at a huge salary. Lee was puzzled by the high salary, because he didn’t think he was worth that much. “What we are really buying is your name”, they said. Lee replied, “My name is not for sale.” He steadfastly refused to write his memoirs, “I should be trading on the blood of my men”, he said.

We don’t make heroes like this anymore.
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1. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, 1987

The Outside World

When I was on Ometepe Island, in Nicaragua, I could see how TV is a deadly drug, an addictive experience that native peoples cannot resist. Their little, battery-operated TVs were a direct window into the Outside World. A world that seemed far, far superior to their own. They could see for themselves that the Outside World was better than the real world all around them, populated with pigs, chickens, corn fields, and ordinary people with homemade clothing. Like people all over the world, they became the victim of a carefully crafted illusion that sold them a different lifestyle—one that would have to be purchased with money.

They immediately forgot their village life, which had met their real needs for centuries—especially their social needs. They wanted a life full of things they didn’t really need—but had to have, because they saw them on TV. They became part of the Outside World.

Bush's rise to power was similar to Mussolini's and Hitler's

From the Associated Press, June 24

Judge Guido Calabresi, 71, of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, drew an audible gasp from lawyers attending Saturday's convention of the American Constitution Society in Washington, according to the New York Sun, which quoted the speech in Monday's editions.

"In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States ... somebody came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power," Calabresi said. "The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy.

"The King of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister," the judge continued. "That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in."

Calabresi told the lawyers: "I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual."

Calabresi went on to say the public should expel Bush from office to cleanse the democratic system. "That's got nothing to do with the politics of it. It's got to do with the structural reassertion of democracy," Calabresi was quoted saying.

He later apologized for his partisan remarks.

The psychosocial effects of violence

Ignacio Martín-Baró was a Jesuit priest working in El Salvador. He was interested in the effects of violence, and he documented his theories in The Psychological Value of Violent Political Repression. He was in the right place to study violence, El Salvador was, and still is, a very violent country. In 1989, during their civil war, he was one of six Jesuit priests assassinated by the Salvadoran Army’s US-trained Atlacatl Battalion. His book was published in 1994 by the Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

According to Martín-Baró, these effects are different among the repressor, the victim and the spectator. For the repressor, the effects include both a cognitive dissonance - the psychic discomfort of an individual facing two or more contradictory thoughts - and the learning of violent behaviors. Cognitive dissonance, a term popularized and researched by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, implies an “incongruity or an inconsistency with the self...an unbalance that the individual feels compelled to overcome”. Military training attempts to negate this impulse through the dehumanization of the “victim,” causing a progressive distancing between the repressor and the victim.

The effects on the victim include those produced by physical damage, and these increase the victim’s levels of frustration and aggression towards the repressor. In turn, the repressor escalates the levels of repression necessary to contain the growing levels of frustration and aggression.

The systematic and protracted use of state terror reinforces violent cultural attitudes with regard to resolving various kinds of conflict – personal, communal, and social – in the society.

This applies to Iraq too. The Hussein dictatorship instilled a culture of violence on the country. The American occupation gave the frustrated Iraqis something to shoot at - which made the Americans even more violent.

Violence is not a good way to solve social problems. WWII taught Americans a bad lesson, it made them believe in war, and in the American military. Unfortunately, a succession of failed wars: Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq have not changed American attitudes.

Viruses attacking genetic codes

We are familiar with viruses for computer codes. The Downloaded Aborted! Site is asking us to consider a much scarier scenario: viruses that attack genetically-engineered biological codes.

What happens when a bio-cracker unleashes a plant virus on all the wheat in North America, when the genetic code to all this wheat is closed-source, patented code owned by a corporation?

For my more technically-challenged readers, let me explain the difference between closed-source code and open-source code. (I assume you know what code is.) With closed-source code the company that sells the code (Microsoft, for example) keeps the original code secret. This can produce sloppy code and huge security problems. Most of the computer viruses in the world are aimed at Microsoft software.

Open source software, by contrast, is community property, and it is constantly being improved by an army of independent programmers. The key word here, is independence. A lot of independent people working on the same problem can be extremely intelligent. A lot of company employees working on the same problem can be amazingly stupid.

Can you see the problem?