Pursuing praxis

Perusing books late at night, I came across the quote page behind the table of contents in Bob Carroll’s Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. The quote is too good to pass up. I’ve never completely "gotten" poetry, but the kinds I like tend to rhyme and have a nifty beat and cool message. This one’s a little light on message, but hey, it has to do with fossils. Here ya go:

Last night in the museum’s hall
The fossils gathered for a ball.
There were no drums or saxophones,
But just the clatter of their bones,
A rolling, rattling carefree circus
Of mammoth polkas and mazurkas.
Pterodactyls and brontosauruses
Sang ghostly prehistoric choruses.
Amid the mastodonic wassail
I caught the eye of one small fossil.
Cheer up, sad world, he said, and winked -
It’s kind of fun to be extinct.

–Ogden Nash, "Carnival of the Animals"

I’ve taken to reading blogs by ER staff and ambulence drivers. I don’t recall how I stumbled into that realm of the blogosphere, but it’s some great reading.

Ambulence Driver shares some memorable vignettes from the ER.  

An important message from M.O.D.: HTFU 

I’ll put political links in a separate one. They’re not funny. 

This is an update to the previous post, Protest by Katie.

In the course of doing some reading-up on other political brouhahas in Berkeley and elsewhere, I have since learned about the anonymous bay area photographer named zombie (as far as I know, it’s all lowercase, all the time). Evidently, zombie is an ex-leftist whose mind was changed when documenting an anti-war rally in San Francisco back in 2003.

zombie has done some great photo-journalism over the years, and covered the Berkeley Marine Recruiter Protest insanity, starting with the daily Code Pink protests in front of the recruiter’s office, and then the big protest in the park I mentioned above. 

I think zombie really does aim for neutrality in reporting, and as far as I can tell, zombie isn’t hesitant to call a nutjob when he sees it. But, unless I’m mistaken, there’s no photograph on zombietime of the "Waterboard the liberals" guy and his sign, or ones like him. Maybe that’s just by chance, and zombie was elsewhere or got tired of it all and missed the guy. Still, while there are many sane, grounded patriots on the right that I support and sympathize with, neither the left nor the right is homogenous. I think it’s important to point out the nutjobs on all sides of our largely one-dimensional political spectrum, and also give some sense of how prevalent they are and what views they espouse, which I think zombie does a good job of doing.

I remember the newspaper saying something about the protesters making a show at the Police Headquarters as part of the days’ festivities. I guess a couple little punks got a little too punky and got arrested. And I only say that half-perjoratively - they were 13 or 14 years old. Well, zombie got most all of it on photo, and a couple notable things stand out.

1. The police did a tip-top job, given the complexities of their task. See #2. It appears they did everything right. I wonder where the news story is on that? When was the last time we saw a headline like "Berkeley PD does exemplary job in face of unpleasable crowd". There were hints of it in a couple of articles reporting the event, but they never get singled out for doing a difficult job well. But oh boy, touch one person, or sshoot an armed attacker threatening violence, and the rabid leftists and their media side-kicks are all over it, with the presupposition that the police/officer was in the wrong, and justice calls for defense of the attacker. But I digress.

2. The leftists try to egg the police on, or lure them into a fracas, so they can later claim police brutality. So the police have twice as much work as they should, since they have to try to be one mental step ahead of their ill-intentioned (and highly illogical) provocateurs. Remember, the police are there to prevent and stop hostilities between people or groups who break the law; if that doesn’t happen, there should be no reason for the police to do anything. But this kind of confrontation has in principle nothing to do with whatever other protesters are there. The left turns it into The Police vs. The Self-Appointed Victims, taking advantage of the fact that it’s the police’s job to be there and to take no political position and not verbally or intellectually defend themselves. Way to intellectualy attack a lawfully silenced protector. I guess that’s what you have to do when you can’t form coherent arguments anyway (see zombie’s account, particularly of the teenagers).

3. The police had their own headquarters seiged! But because of the practically-guaranteed lynching the media would deal them if they did anything more than just barely keep the hundreds of people out of the building, they had to physically man the entire perimiter of their own building, presumably pulling more than a dozen officers off of positions or patrols elsewhere. For what? A bunch of hooligan teenagers playing school-sanctioned hookie, following the orchestrations not of their teachers (or parents) but of the America-hating anti-war groups Code Pink, MoveOn, and The World Can’t Wait (a communist group). Sigh. All in a day’s work for the Berkeley PD. Dad, can you even imagine this in Ktown?? More and more, these days I appreciate the rationality, sensibility, and reasonableness of rural America. There is so much more decency, even between people who strongly disagree with each other.