Arkansawyer

Shuffling off this digital coil

If I knew the author approved of embedding, you’d be seeing it without clicking.

(Note: Why did I leave this in draft form for eight months?)

Okay, I’ll bite. The ten(nish) books that most influenced me are these, which I read well before I turned twenty-one:

1. Billy Bass, by R. W. Eschmeyer From this book I gained two things in particular: The “fact” that fish don’t feel pain and a visceral revulsion toward pollution.
2. The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker, and The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, by Robert Brent and Harry Lazarus Our friend and veterinarian Doc Sturdivant gave me the Treasury when I turned six, and I discovered the Experiments in the St. Paul’s library in second grade. I still have my original Treasury. My parents gave me (over time) two copies of the Experiments; I know where one page of one copy is.
3. The Freddie the Pig series, by Walter R. Brooks These books fueled my imagination, with the Federal Animal Republic, the clockwork boy, the overt anti-communism, the whole enchilada.
4. Marie Curie, by an author I can’t place I also discovered this at St. Paul’s Lutheran in second grade and it’s stuck with me over time. One dreadful detail of fact haunted me for years: jura Znevr erprvirf Cvreer’f rssrpgf, vapyhqvat gur pybgurf ur jnf jrnevat jura ur qvrq, fur pbzrf npebff n fpnes ba juvpu cneg bs Cvreer’f oenva unf pehfgrq. (to translate)
5. Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein These books bent my mind, in both good and bad ways, and the traces remain to this day.
6. The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 7th Edition, edited by Judith Merril There are about a dozen pieces in this anthology who helped shape my thinking: Fritz Leiber, Shari Tepper, Fredrick Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Mack Reynolds, James Blish, Leo Szilard, Cordwainer Smith, Maxine Kumin, Edward Gorey, Kit Reed, Anne McCaffery, Lawrence Durrell, Alice Glazer, Merril herself. All Merril’s anthologies were good, but this one was great, at least for me.
7. The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber, and Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delaney These two books, as different from each other as War and Peace from Ulysses,  were the earthier side of my Heinlein obsessions.
8. Sometimes A Great Notion, by Ken Kesey It’s the best novel written in English in the twentieth century, in my opinion.
9. First Course in the Theory of Equations, by L. E. Dickson, and Calculus, third edition, by George B. Thomas These books opened my mind to higher mathematics. The Dickson book was a way of thought that I’d never before encountered; Thomas developed basic calculus in a way that eventually made real analysis much easier and much more meaningful.
10. Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins Robbins’ unashamed sensuality and iconoclastic sensibility fit me perfectly at the time, and I hope does to this day.
11. Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson and Masks of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson Books full of lies, truths about lies, lies about lies, lies upon lies. Truly a case of the abyss staring back.

There are other, possibly more disreputable books I could put on, but this is my list. I’m not sure where I’d cut it. It seems Mad Magazine and The National Lampoon should be on there, too. There are also books I read much later which are, in their way, influential on me. What we read when we’re young, though, that’s what grooves into our brains. ”What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a chlid?”

Jim Carroll is dead. I still think of him as Hawk from “Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones”. I always will.

Now hitting on all 16 cylinders, the Beatles bolted back to the woodshed for The Beatles, a blandly designed masterwork that could inspire any reasonable citizen of California to launch a race war. To this day, we don’t know much about the four men who comprised the Beatles, but listening to this exceedingly non-black album makes one detail totally clear—these guys truly loved each other. How else could they make such wonderful music? In fact, they adored and trusted each other so much that they didn’t even feel the need to perform some of the songs together. It must have been a great era to be in this band. Amazingly, they even wrangled a cameo from noted blues musician Eric Clapton (still best known for his contributions to John Mayhall’s Bluesbreakers). The Beatles is almost beyond an A+; in retrospect, they probably should have made this a triple album.

For once, I don’t have words of my own to add:

The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay.

Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration.

Read the whole thing.

via Making Light

The question is less about fucking up, but how a man reacts to it. He was kicked out of Harvard for cheating on an exam, so he joined the military (although he would achieve none of the glory of John and Joe, Jr.). When the Chappaquiddick incident happened, he nutted up and told the voters to decide on his fate. He was a hard-drinking son of a bitch who screwed around on his first wife, a Dean Martin-like punchline to jokes about alcoholism and a tabloid laughingstock. During that period, among other things, he was getting funding cut off to Chile because of Pinochet’s barbarism, pushing legislation to help political refugees, getting sanctions imposed on apartheid-era South Africa, negotiating with Gorbachev on nuclear missiles, stopping Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, and strengthening the Civil Rights Act. What did you do on your years-long bender?

via Making Light

More empathy for an easy target:

When the signs started to become clear, that the boy wasn’t right, that he was too isolated, underdeveloped, imperfect - we laughed, we stared, we assumed. He was our first boyfriend before he became our crazy cousin - always family.

We didn’t see the pain, we saw the bizarre, and we are vultures for scandal…

When it became clear that the boy’s face we had loved had become the face of a man who didn’t love himself; we judged him. We tore at him and he fell apart. He was living proof of the impact of our rabid pop culture, an early sacrifice to the new mechanisms of fame which allow no privacy, no time to learn, no mistakes.

Get that: “the new mechanisms of fame”. Welcome to the machine.

I’ve been following this terrible, terrible story with the sick dread a parent of a young child feels*, and looking for something good that might come from it. In the follow-up, I may have found it:

On Monday at 4:35 p.m., Katrina Markley reported her two children missing from their duplex at 347-A Sage St. The siblings were found in the trunk of the family’s car about a half hour later by their grandmother. They were pronounced dead at the scene.

The mother told police the children went outside to a neighbor’s house about 4 p.m. and she couldn’t find them 30 minutes later. Police searched door to door in the neighborhood until the bodies were discovered in the trunk.

Now, think this through with me. If a child is missing, where is the first place to look? Other people’s homes? No. If they’re with someone from the neighborhood, they are almost certainly okay, and a delay in finding them is not critical. But on a hot day, a child locked in a car, or a car trunk, or some other place is in immenent danger of death, time is of the essence, and therefore those are the first places to look.

The police started looking where they expected the children would be found, maybe where they hoped the children would be found. The grandmother looked where she hoped they would not be, in a life-threatening place. If the police search had begun there, and these children were found half an hour sooner, quite likely they would have lived.

I don’t blame the officers who searched. I assume they were following whatever training they’d gotten for finding missing children. I do question the training and those who designed it. There may be blame there.

You know the old joke, about the man looking for his car keys under the streetlamp, not because he thought the keys were there–he was sure they weren’t–but because the lighting was better? Same thing.

The police can do better than this, but they’ll need better training. For that reason, I make this proposal:

The Springdale Police Department should review and revise their training and procedures in searching for missing children, with an emphasis on searching quickly in places which are life-threatening for the child.

My heart goes out to the Markleys and their family, and their friends and neighbors, and the police involved in the search–what a horrible thing they had to deal with–and, well, really anyone involved. I’m sure there’ve been nightmares all around for everyone. But sympathy is not enough. There is a clear action to be taken in order to save the next child’s life.

*I’ve also been following the comments with a different sick feeling, from the utter lack of compassion in so many of the commenters. That’s another story. I’ll try to write that one someday soon.

This is an outrage:

FORT SMITH — A Sebastian County circuit judge has dismissed a lawsuit accusing Fort Smith police of negligence after a woman was fatally stabbed in a busy intersection.

Circuit Judge James O. Cox dismissed the suit filed by relatives of Christina Springs, who was stabbed to death by her estranged husband, Thomas Springs, after he rammed his car into hers in 2005.

Christina Springs did everything right. She got a restraining order against her husband. She went to a women’s shelter. She called the police when her husband violated the order and, in front of witnesses, threatened to kill her.

Now she’s dead.

Restraining order? Thomas Springs went to the school his children attended, violating the restraining order against him. He threatened to kill his wife. When the police arrived, did they arrest Mr. Springs? Why, no:

[Officer Brad] Lokey said that only one of three protective orders against Thomas Springs ordered him to stay away from the school. Because of the inconsistencies in the orders, Lokey said he ordered him to leave the school.

Women’s shelter? The Crisis Center for Women did their part of the job:

Kim Horton, a caseworker for the Crisis Center, testified that on Jan. 7 [, 2005] Christina Springs was transported to a women’s shelter in Tulsa for safety reasons, because her husband had been driving around the safe house in Fort Smith where she had been staying since leaving him [the month before].

Christina Springs returned to Fort Smith on Jan. 17 so she could appear in court the following day for a hearing on an order of protection she had requested, Horton said.

Three orders of protection and seeking a fourth, transported out of town after being stalked, and still, the police couldn’t protect her. The Fort Smith police couldn’t arrest a stalker who violated a court order.

But the police were called and promised to protect her. Ought to be helpful, wouldn’t you think? No:

Lokey, who left the police department in 2006, told Christina Springs and her sister that he would follow them as they drove to a women’s shelter where Christina Springs was staying, according to the lawsuit.

Lokey followed the women for a short distance, but the collision and stabbing happened after he stopped following them, the suit said.

In a reply by city attorney Rick Wade, Lokey claims he told the women only that he would follow them a short distance to make sure Thomas Springs did not follow them as they left the school.

And he did follow them, for a little while. Then perhaps other duty called. Or maybe it was break time. Maybe police officers don’t value women’s lives very highly. Who knows? This is what happened next:

Thomas Springs’ vehicle, a station wagon, then turned from a westbound lane on Rogers Avenue onto Greenwood Avenue, crashing head-on into [Christina Springs’ sister Kelly] Repking’s Honda, Repking said.

Thomas Springs approached the passenger side of Repking’s vehicle and yelled to his wife, “Roll the window down, bitch!” Repking testified. He then broke out the window with his fists, began punching Christina Springs and smashed her head into the dashboard, Repking said.

Thomas Springs left briefly and returned with a knife, which he used to stab his wife repeatedly in the chest, Repking said…

Let’s pause for a moment and skip the worst of the story, as sad and pathetic and predictable as you can imagine, and go to a comment on the story by one “MarkTheNarc”:

To the Springs family I offer my condolences in the murder of Christina; to Judge Cox I offer my praise for your sage decision. Even if Officer Lokey had been directly following Ms. Springs when her car was rammed, there is NO guarantee that he (Lokey) could have exited his unit and in time to stop her murder. In my opinion, this is another frivolous lawsuit that was a burden on the entire court system. [emphasis added]

Look at what happened and how long it must have taken:

• Thomas Springs rammed the car transporting his wife and his two-year-old daughter.
• He broke out a car window.
• He punched his wife.
• He smashed her head into the dashboard.
• He left and returned with a hunting knife.
• He stabbed her twenty-four times.

No guarantee? Guarantee is another word for promise:

• If, as he’d promised, Officer Lokey had followed Repking’s car to the shelter, perhaps Springs would’ve been scared away and not rammed the car. Springs didn’t ram the other car till the police stopped following. He might’ve run away.
• If, when Springs rammed the car, Officer Lokey had hit his lights and siren, Springs might’ve hesitated. He might’ve run away.
• If, while Springs was busy breaking the car window–not easy–and beating his wife, Officer Lokey had approched him, he might’ve hesitated. He might’ve run away.
• If, even if all Lokey did was call the incident in and then gone about his day, perhaps another officer might’ve gotten there more quickly. Perhaps an ambulance might’ve gotten there in time for the EMTs to keep Christina Springs, who took twenty minutes to bleed to death, alive till she got to a trauma center.

People on the scene tried:

Amanda Conrad of Fort Smith, who was in her pickup behind the Honda, testified she drove the pickup up to the passenger door to try to push Springs away from the window where Christina Springs was being stabbed. She said he jumped over the pickup’s hood and continued to stab Christina Springs as she tried to crawl out the car’s driver’s side.

She considered backing up to try to block Thomas Springs from the driver’s side but saw others were intervening.

And tried:

Robert Baker testified that he tried unsuccessfully to pull Thomas Springs away.

Mark Efurd testified that he took a crowbar from his vehicle and hit Springs once on the arm.

Brian Thomas testified that he and other passers-by forced Springs to the ground and held him until police arrived.

Can you imagine what this must be like?

[Christina Springs’ caseworker Kim] Horton testified that she happened to be stopped at the intersection and witnessed the attack, although at first she did not realize it was her client who was being attacked.

That’s even worse than being an EMT arriving at a wreck turned fatal by lack of seat belts. Working at women’s shelters is not well-paid work, in money, but liberating women from domestic violence must be rewarding. Watching one you’d done your best to help stabbed to death, right in front of you, bleeding out for twenty minutes because the police couldn’t be bothered to arrest the killer–I can’t imagine that.

No guarantee? I’ll give you a guarantee: When the police and the courts don’t take violence against women seriously, women die. That’s a guarantee, and that’s a promise, and that’s a crying shame.

Christina Springs’ relatives claim Lokey promised to follow the women all the way to the shelter and his failure to do so was negligent and a violation of their constitutional rights. They also argued Lokey had information to justify an arrest at the school, which could have prevented the murder.

“He (Lokey) had no control over Thomas Springs, and the eventual murder of Christina Springs in a busy intersection could not have been foreseen,” Cox wrote.

Is the aptly-named Judge Cox an accessory after the fact to Christina Springs murder? No. He’s just responsible for the next one, if the police don’t learn to take violence against women seriously.

Are the Fort Smith police guilty of negligence and depraved indifference? Judge Cox says no. I say they didn’t make as much effort or take as many risks as the bystanders who tried to help Christina Springs.

Did Thomas Springs kill his wife, Christina Springs, in front of her sister and his two-year-old daughter? Did he make their children orphans? Yes.

Yes, Thomas Springs killed his wife, with a big batch of help from a legal system that didn’t give a damn about Christina Springs’ life, her childrens’ lives, even Thomas Springs’ life. None of them had to suffer like this, none of them had to die–and Thomas Springs is scheduled to die and leave their children orphans, one more needless cost of a series of bad decisions and official thumb-twiddling.

If you look around–I saw them, but won’t point to them–you’ll find the gun strokers who say she should’ve had a weapon (dying must’ve been her own fault, payback for thinking she had the right to live free from fear of violence in a free country), and the hang-’em-highers who salivate over the eye they’re getting for the eye that wasn’t theirs to give (but hey! it all evens out in the end, right?).

What I didn’t see, anywhere, was any sign of what the Fort Smith police are doing to keep the next woman alive and the next man from killing her.

How it should’ve ended was with Christina Springs alive and free from violence and fear. How it should’ve ended was with two parents alive for those children. How it should’ve ended was with Thomas Springs held to account for battery and stalking and violating court orders, and with a chance to learn to make his life a better life, through whatever means a hard-headed, compassionate judge might impose.

How did it end? It hasn’t. Those children are suffering, and will continue to suffer. Thomas Springs’s life is over, though it hasn’t ended. Christina Springs’ relatives are suffering. The witnesses will never forget what they saw. The same good hearts that powered those who tried to help will leave them hurting over their failed attempt. That poor caseworker, the shelter workers, the first responders, all of them, all suffering.

[Then-police chief] Reed is now Fort Smith city administrator. Lokey left the department in January 2006.

How nice that it’s worked out for them.

By the way, Christina Springs is still dead. That’s all the ending there is.

Think about it: Civil rights–really, a second (this time successful) reconstruction. Ending the Vietnam War. Second-wave feminism. Gay liberation. When you come right down to it, The Future.

I’d been thinking along these lines before running into this piece by Chris Hayes (via a commenter on Making Light), who goes at the question from a whole ‘nother angle:

The WWII that emerges from accounts of the late ’90s is one scrubbed clean of its moral complexity. There is no mention of American big business financing the build-up of the Nazi war machine, no America First campaign determined not to shed American blood for European Jews, no firebombing of civilians in Dresden. The war was difficult, yes, and bloody, but pure and just: a battle, not to put too fine a point on it, between good and evil.

In the hands of the men who would come to dominate American military policy in the Bush administration, this Manichean framework was a useful template to apply indiscriminately to any and all of the military confrontations they had long sought. To the neocons and some breakaway lefties, al-Qaeda members are “Islamofascists,” 21st century heirs to the murderous ideologies of Nazism, fascism and totalitarianism. It is always Munich 1938, every dictator is a “tyrant,” and anyone opposed to a state of perpetual war is guilty of “appeasement.”

It’s worth reading in full.