Harboring a masked bandit

In 2007, I wrote a few paragraphs about the guy in Oregon who rescued an injured fawn, nursed it back to health, and kept both it and its subsequent offspring on his property -- only to have them seized by the state wildlife department, probably to be put to "sleep." I suggested a certain over-zealousness by game officials, and a certain lack of rationality.

Arizona has gone a step further. A man named Stan saw a raccoon drowning in the Colorado river. Being a kind-hearted sort, he jumped in and rescued it. The raccoon, now named Sonny, was quickly domesticated. Locals got used to seeing Stan walking around town with Sonny perched happily on his shoulder.

Uh uh uh uh, boys and girls! Don't you ever go trying to rescue a raccoon in Arizona! Under state law, the raccoon "is the only animal in Arizona that can be legally taken with a firearm at night." It can't be kept as a pet without first obtaining an "exotic animal license." The Arizona Game and Fish Department somehow heard about this peculiar miscreant walking about with an exotic masked bandit on his shoulder. And they pounced!

Stan was arrested. No, not given a ticket. Arrested. Sonny was seized and taken into custody where he will learn -- in his final moments -- never to trust the animal called "man." (This being Arizona, he'll probably be strapped into a tiny electric chair.)

I've entertained you on occasion with my on-going wars against neighborhood raccoons who attempt to enter my house and eat my cats' food. The varmints have been quite a pain in the neck, although I seem to have them stymied at present.

But despite my adversarial relationship with raccoons, I now declare: Arizona, this is just one more of your totally imbecilic outrages! I suggest we put the Oregon and Arizona game department officials on a sinking raft headed down the Colorado, facing the prospect of drowning.

I won't bother throwing them a rope.
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Photo: Sonny

UPDATE (2-25-12): State officials state that Stan was arrested on an outstanding misdemeanor warrant, not for harboring the raccoon. They also state that Sonny will be put to "sleep" only if tests show an infectious disease. Otherwise, he probably will be adopted by some appropriate institution. Better an orphanage than "inappropriate" parents, as we've discussed in a different context.

Out of many ...

E pluribus unum: "Out of many, one."

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us -- the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of "anything goes." Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an "awesome God" in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

--Barack Obama, 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Speech

As I puzzle my way through the world of American politics, I try to understand how the right wing thinks, as well as the left wing and the center. And, in doing so, I run into a constant thread of visceral dislike of and disdain for President Obama -- not just for his political and economic positions, but for him as a person. And I've wondered, why?

I've wondered, because most of his political agenda -- achieved or proposed -- is fairly typical fare for a Democratic politician, certainly not much different from that of a centrist such as Bill Clinton. And yet, Obama is denounced, both by politicians and by average Joes commenting on web pages, as the most dangerous president this nation has ever confronted -- a socialist, a foreigner, a denier of American "exceptionalism," a man "who is not one of us." I could only assume that this vitriol represented a racist reaction to the first black man to serve as president, as well as distrust of his unusually cosmopolitan upbringing. And, in part, this may well be the case.

But I've been attending a bi-weekly series of lectures about the 2012 campaign at the University of Washington, offered by David Domke, the Chairman of the UW Communications Department (an excellent and highly entertaining speaker). Last night, during the fourth lecture of the series, Domke contended that President Obama -- consistently since his 2004 keynote address -- has pushed an agenda of "inclusiveness." Obama has insisted that America is a family, and that our family's membership is broad enough to include all races, religions (including atheists and agnostics), marital statuses and family types, sexual orientations, and varying national origins and customs.

Domke noted that right wing politicians who hint that Obama "is not one of us" are correct in believing that Obama is different from every prior president in his embrace of all faiths, in his insistence on the common ideals of the three "Abrahamic" faiths, in his color blind approach to race, in his ease with and around gays. But, Domke added, Obama actually does not differ greatly in his "inclusiveness" from the American people of today -- probably not differing from a majority of the voters, and certainly not from a great majority of the younger cohorts of voters.

It is this sense by the right wingers -- that Obama represents the future -- that has fueled their desperate opposition. Their opposition may be expressed by the more adroit as opposition to specific policies -- and of course conservatives do oppose those policies -- but it is their sense that the America they know, love, and understand is slipping away through their fingers that infuses their opposition with so much emotion. It is their sense that America as a Christian nation -- for many, a white Christian nation, a nation that sits down to dinner and says grace as a nuclear family, as portrayed by Norman Rockwell in his paintings -- is being submerged by wave after wave of new customs, new colors, new languages, new family groupings, and new religious practices. It's their conviction that America's greatness rests on the bedrock of the happy families shown in the old Dick and Jane readers, in the Rockwell paintings, that leads to their deeply felt fear that America is "doomed."

Understanding these fears makes it easier -- for me, at least -- to understand contemporary American politics. As of this date, it's uncertain which party will win the 2012 elections. But the trend for the future is undeniable, and it is not a trend that favors the right wing. Professor Domke displayed a complex graph that showed support for gay marriage to be higher among voters aged 18-30 in Mississippi (in Mississippi!) than it is among voters over 65 in Massachusetts -- the two states that overall represent opposite poles with respect to support for that issue.

The nation is moving rapidly away from the comfortable images portrayed in the old Norman Rockwell paintings, moving toward a far more cosmopolitan society. Obama is not the cause of this movement, although he understands and supports it. He is merely a reflection of where our society is today, and certainly where -- necessarily, as a result of simple demographics -- it is heading.

Every political issue is worthy of dispute on its merits. Conservatives are not always wrong, and liberals are not always right. But to oppose the president because "he is not one of us" is to stand opposed to where we're irreversibly heading, to stand opposed to America's future.

And that's not a winning strategy.

Deportation

When John Smith, Sr., was 18, he spent a year in China on a church mission. While there, he met a local girl; one thing led to another, and his son was born in Hong Kong. The couple never married, but John returned to the United States with his baby, John Jr. Immigration officials assumed that the baby was a citizen and did not ask for documentation.

John Jr. grew up in the U.S. and never returned to China or Hong Kong. When he was 29, John Jr. was convicted of "trademark counterfeiting" and served a short term in prison. On his release, he was ordered deported to China as an alien. Just seven days later, he was put on a plane to Hong Kong.

Children of American parents born overseas usually become American citizens by birth. However, for a citizen father to pass on American citizenship to his child born overseas, he must have lived in the U.S. for at least five years after the age of 14. Since John Jr.'s father was only 18 when his son was born, it was impossible for him to meet that requirement, and John Jr. did not qualify for citizenship.

Following his deportation, John Jr. hired a lawyer and filed a motion to re-open the matter, based on constitutional objections to the statute under which he had been deported. But another surprise awaited him: a statute provides that once the claimant leaves the U.S., by deportation or otherwise, he is barred from re-opening the question of his citizenship and deportation.

John Jr., thankfully, is not a real person. But he could have been, and his story may in fact be based on a real set of facts.

I served on a three-attorney panel last night at the University of Washington law school, judging the semi-finals of an appellate advocacy competition. As usual, the student "lawyers" were excellent. Since the participants were students who had survived earlier rounds and had reached the semi-finals, I was seeing some of the best of the best. Their legal arguments involved minute dissection of a web of statutory and regulatory law, as well as issues of constitutional law.

But I tell John Jr.'s story because it points out how absurd America's immigration laws can be in practice, and the gross injustices that can result in individual cases. As one of my fellow judges asked the "U.S. Attorney," what's to stop California police from sweeping up large numbers of persons with Hispanic names or appearances on routine drug charges, for an immigration judge to determine that those unable to produce appropriate documentation are illegal aliens, and for them to be deported virtually overnight to Mexico? American citizens caught up in this drug sweep, unable for some reason to produce proof of citizenship before the immigration hearing would -- once deported -- be unable to re-open the queston of their citizenship once they ended up in Mexico.

Our fictitious John Jr. came to the U.S. as a baby in his father's arms. He grew up an American, with no subsequent contact with China. Both he and his father believed he was an American. Twenty-nine is a late age for such a person to learn for the first time that he's actually Chinese. Seven days after that determination is an early time to find oneself on a one-way flight to China. But, as the student attorney for the government pointed out, under present law, not even excusable ignorance of your non-citizenship is a bar to deportation.

This moot court appeal points out one of the many ways in which American immigration law -- rigidly applied as it is, with no real sense of equity in individual cases -- is unfair both to American citizens somehow caught up in it, and to those who would be American citizens but for a technicality of which they were understandably unaware.

A rustle in the dark

... as you may well imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.

--M. R. James, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"

Thus ends one of M. R. James's most famous horror stories, a story about something that comes when one whistles, something that embodies itself in crumpled bed linen. Linen that moves about the room at night.

I re-read James's masterpiece after reading an article about the author's life and work in last week's New Yorker. James was the quiet, studious provost at King's College, Cambridge. He spent his life locating and poring over old manuscripts. But he's best known for writing several volumes of chilling short stories.

James was an interesting character, and his stories may or may not be self-revelatory psychologically. But the stories are the sort that make the hair rise on the back of your neck, despite a total absence of blood, gore, and decapitations. Merely a sheet on a bed that moves about -- once the candle is snuffed out.

The New Yorker article, and my subsequent glancing back through a volume of James's stories, instantly took me back to a summer day when I was 14. It was a hot day, and I had walked over to the house of a vacationing aunt and uncle, where I performed my daily job of moving the sprinklers from place to place about the yard. I had brought a recently-purchased book with me -- Tales of Terror, edited by Boris Karloff. I set up the sprinklers in their initial positions, got them running, and went inside the cool house to relax and amuse myself for a half hour until I'd have to move them again.

The story I began reading was -- as I now discover -- a classic: "The Willows," by Algernon Blackwood. A camping story, about a couple of men who are canoeing down the Danube near the Austrian/Hungarian frontier. They pull up to a small sandy island to spend the night, an island forested with willow trees. During a night somewhat reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project, they sense that the willows are malevolent or are at least the expressions of something that's malevolent. At the climax of the story, the body of a peasant floats past their campsite with bizarre funnel shaped gouges in his face, the mark of whatever forces surround them in the willows.

Blackwood's story ends. But before I finished reading, I became conscious that I was sitting and reading all alone in a cool, dark, quiet house -- a small, simple rambler with which I was totally familiar -- and that my heart was pounding. The house was dead silent, except for the slow "tick tock" of a pendulum clock on the mantle. Not only the house was silent, but the entire world, indoors and outdoors, seemed hushed.

I quickly exited the cool house and sat on the back porch in the hot sun. I continued reading. I still had a couple of hours of sprinkling to oversee. But I read outdoors, free of whatever menace my aunt's normally friendly home, now at my back, seemed to offer.

A truly well written ghost story, or "tale of terror," doesn't jump at you or spatter you with gore. It merely suggests that all is not as you think it is, that worlds exist far beyond our powers of perception, and that those worlds may well be hostile and menacing. A world, as "The Willows" suggests, which is

a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly, [a world where] great things go on unceasingly...vast purposes...that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul, ... an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows.

For some reason, I felt safe sitting outside, where the sun beat down on me, the breeze blew in the trees, and the sprinklers spurted rhythmically. I hadn't yet read anything by M. R. James. His stories would have warned me that the greatest horrors can present themselves in the most pleasant, mundane and unassuming of locations.

The ability to be scared out of your wits by a good yarn is part of the charm of being 14. It's surprising (and a bit alarming) how a good enough story can make your hair stand on end, even as an adult.

I can't find my old childhood copy of Tales of Terror. I've just now ordered a used copy through Amazon. Parts of us never grow up.

Why I'm not voting "libertarian"

As you approach the Grand Canyon, driving north from Phoenix and Flagstaff, you pass through the town of Tusayan, just five miles south of the national park boundary. Tusayan's 558 residents live in 313 households, clustered in an area of a quarter square mile. Its voters first voted to incorporate as a town in 2010.

The vote to incorporate followed strong lobbying from developers, businessmen who hoped to construct their proposed development with minimal governmental interference. The newly elected town council -- whose members now face a recall election next month -- obediently approved the requested development.

What kind of development did the council of this small town approve? How about 3 million square feet of hotels, spas and retail outlets -- in a town with a population of 558? According to a story in today's New York Times, the council's approval of the development faces a referendum vote in May, a referendum that the developers are fighting in court to prevent.

The town itself has only two wells, a water source that barely provides for the existing population. The impact of such a massive development on the national park itself is even more worrisome.

... it pushes up against the limits of what we can provide,” said David Uberuaga, the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. “Everything is getting maxed out. They’re just doing it for the almighty dollar. It’s a gold mine they’re trying to exploit.”

It's schemes like this that turn me against the wave of support for "libertarianism," at least libertarianism in its purist form and taken to its logical conclusion.

Ron Paul, as Wikipedia notes, is "a free-market environmentalist, he asserts private property rights in relation to environmental protection and pollution prevention." According to the SourceWatch wikipedia:

Paul's stand on the environment is well-known. He is for the dissolution of the EPA, FDA, Department of the Interior and other government agencies whose overt mission is to protect citizens and the environment. Paul has also called for the privatizing of the National Park system .... Republicans for Environmental Protection gave him a score of 17 out of 100.

Libertarians, at least in their purist form, believe that property rights are absolute, and that every landowner has the absolute right to use his land as he pleases. They ignore what economists call externalities -- the fact that using your land as you please may impose costs on neighboring landowners and on the public in general.

Just as a steel mill built in downtown Beverly Hills would cause an enormous decrease in property values for miles around, so a 3 million square foot mega-mall on the border of Grand Canyon National Park may well destroy or damage the values for which the park was created, values that visitors travel from all over the world to experience.

This doesn't mean that nothing should ever be built within five miles of a national park. It does mean that values are at stake in addition to the developer's right to develop the property that he has acquired for development. Those values include the integrity of the neighboring national park, as well as the effects on residents of the small town itself in which the project is to be constructed.

Various land use regulatory agencies -- at the city or town, county, state and federal level -- protect these interests. The process for gaining regulatory approvals may seem cumbersome, and at times could well be improved. But libertarianism would strike down all regulatory protection for the public, and leave national parks and other environmental treasures to the mercy of developers and the free market.

We're not that kind of country. Nor should we be.

My cats drive me nuts!

The text used in my college survey course in psychology included a series of amazing paintings by Louis Wain, an early twentieth century painter afflicted with schizophrenia. Wain's paintings of cats became increasingly abstract and even frightening over time, as his symptoms worsened. My psych text offered the paintings, presumably, as an illustration of how the mental illness may affect the perceptions of its victim.

I found the paintings interesting for that reason, as well as aesthetically pleasing, and I've had them posted on this blog's sidebar almost since its inception. (I've always expected someone to ask some pointed questions about why I seemed so interested in madness, but, of course, no one ever did.)

It never occurred to me that the subject matter of the paintings -- cats -- had any relation to Wain's mental illness. Not until today, when I read an article in this month's Atlantic.¹

If you spend much time around your cat's litter box, you've probably been exposed to a parasite found in cat feces called Toxoplasma gondii. T. gondii can be found in about 20 percent of Americans, and is known to be a health hazard to people with weakened immune systems. In healthy individuals, however, it causes at most mild flu symptoms before the parasite is overcome by the body's defenses and ends up dormant in the brain. This has been scientists' common understanding for many years.

But a Czech scientist named Jaroslav Flegr has discovered evidence that the parasite, rather than being dormant, works silently in the brain, rewiring connections in a way that affects the host's behavior. The purpose of this rewiring is to make the usual post-feline hosts, rats and mice, act in a way that will result in their being easily killed and eaten by another cat. For example, the "rewired" rodent becomes sexually attracted to the odor of cat urine, a response called "fatal feline attraction." When the cat eats the rodent, it also ingests the T. gondii that infects the rodent. The parasite finds itself cozily back in a feline environment, which happens to be the only environment in which it can reproduce. T. gondii has no interest in humans as such, and any effect by the parasite on human behavior would be inadvertent from an evolutionary standpoint.

But such behavioral effects do exist, Flegr has shown. For most of us, the effects are minor. Infected males, for example, tend statistically to become a bit more introverted, suspicious, uncaring about others' feelings, and inclined to ignore rules. (No, I'm not going to try drawing political conclusions!). But for persons who are genetically so inclined, Flegr believes, the parasite may also trigger the onset of schizophrenia.

Interestingly enough, so far as we know schizophrenia did not seem to exist until the late 1700's -- which is also the time when large numbers of urban Europeans began keeping cats as pets. And recent studies have shown that schizophrenia is two to three times as prevalent in persons infected with T. gondii parasites as in those who are not.

My cats and I watch each other, as we always have, with mutual curiosity. My own curiosity, however, is now tinged with surges of suspicion. Are my furry friends responsible for those psychedelic nightmares I seem to have at times? Do they explain the voices outside my window -- the ones just barely intelligible, but who seem to utter my name with contempt? I shudder. I feel increasingly introverted, as I regard Loki and Muldoon with a newly critical eye -- and with less concern for their own feline feelings than in the past.

The article does have reassuring things to say, I have to add, and I recommend its perusal to my own readership. I certainly suggest you read it before you drown your own cats, or before signing yourself into a mental hospital.

Still, one might as well be prudent ....
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¹ Kathleen McAuliffe, "How Your Cat is Making You Crazy" (The Atlantic, March 2012)

Free the Malvinas?

I haven't offended a large nation for some time, so how about firing a shot over Argentina's bow? What's with all this latest news about Argentina and the Falkland Islands?

I don't have any strong feelings about the Falklands (or the Malvinas, as the Argentinians call them), but -- with all the various crises threatening world peace -- this seems like a strange time to heat up a strange issue.

At least, this time around, Argentina is simply filing a protest with the United Nations regarding the status of the British colony -- not attempting a sudden invasion as it did in 1982. The Argentine government also is reported to be contemplating banning (again) LAN Chile's weekly flight, over Argentina territory, between the Falklands and Chile -- the only regularly scheduled commercial flight to the Falklands, and a flight that carries food as well as passengers.

Despite the fact that the Falklands have been under British rule since 1833, and that all 2,500 inhabitants are English-speaking British subjects --70 percent of them being of British descent, with most of the others descended from French, Portuguese, Chilean, and Scandinavian immigrants -- the Argentinians continue to claim the islands as their own. Their claim is based primarily, it seems, on the fact that the Falklands are only 288 miles from the South America mainland, together with claims of British shenanigans before 1833.

The British say that the colony will remain British until the inhabitants vote otherwise. The British offered to submit the dispute to the International Court of Justice in 1947, but the Argentinians refused the offer.

While colonization ia generally agreed to be a bad thing, turning a close-knit community over to a foreign country that speaks a different language and possesses a radically different culture also seems a questionable practice.

If Argentina somehow succeeds, I think Canada should immediately demand title to St-Pierre and Miquelon -- a far smaller (93 sq. mi. v. 4,700 sq. mi.) French territory located just 15 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The six thousand inhabitants speak French and happily conduct their business using the euro, rather than the dollar. But they're much closer to Canada than the Falklands are to Argentina, and if propinquity is the key, they should be Canadian. Unlike the Falklands controversy, with its linguistic difficulties, lots of Canadians speak French. In fact, the erstwhile French islands could be united with Québec. So what if they like being French? They'd grow to love being Québécois.

It's strange that Canada allows the sore of St-Pierre and Miquelon to fester just 15 miles off its coast. Maybe Canadians are sufficiently self-confident to consider the islands a tourist attraction rather than an affront to their sovereignty.

The present rumblings from Buenos Aires seems to have more to do with Argentine internal politics -- Americans know how that affects foreign policy, right? -- than it does with any immediate plan to seize the Falklands. Apparently, "freedom" for the "Malvinas" is the one issue on which all Argentinians can agree.

Let's hope that this time, it goes no further, and that Argentinians can satisfy their national pride sufficiently by their prowess on the soccer field.

Music frozen in amber

Despite frequently expressed concerns that "classical music" is a dying art form, in many ways, listeners have never had it so good. Not only is music performed live by orchestras and artists in virtually every city of any size, but a large number of interpretations of any given piece are available on CD (and vinyl).

Even those of us with the tinniest of ears appreciate that music heard in a concert hall differs from music heard at home on a sound system. Recorded music offers the closest the artist can come to perfection, albeit filtered through an electronic medium; live performance is more spontaneous, and the music may not be free from the performer's small errors or questionable judgments.

How does a musical piece get recorded and packaged for a CD? That's the question that pianist Jeremy Denk addresses in a witty and very well written article in this week's New Yorker. I've heard Denk play a number of times with chamber groups in Seattle. He's a fine pianist, and plays with odd postures and facial expressions that have become -- in my mind, at least -- his trademark. It's a pleasure to see past the guy at the piano to the man worrying about how his playing will sound once it's recorded.

Denk's writing reveals much of himself -- as does his playing itself, I'm sure, to those who know how to listen.

When I go home to visit my parents, my father has his stereo on all day. Surrounded by my junior-high-school spelling and typing trophies, I stew in my room, thinking of all the hours and tears that went into his musical wallpaper. I remember my parents hounding me to practice continuously, with the best intentions but without having to practice themselves. I fall prey to childish resentment: has my dad really earned the music that fills his house?

And he suspects that these recordings to which his dad listens, electronically tuned to perfection, aren't the real thing.

They're manicured artifacts, from which the essential spectacle of human effort has been clipped away.

But then Denk's manager asks him to prepare his own "manicured artifact," to record his interpretation of Charles Ives's "Concord" sonata. And so he shares his experience with us.

The first lesson he teaches is that the artist doesn't just sit down at a piano in front of a mike, flex his fingers, and let 'er rip. Instead, he plays each individual section of the sonata numerous times, varying his interpretations; the final recording is to be a composite of the best sections drawn from many playings. Then, Denk sits down with the sound engineer and listens to what he has played.

Every piano sounds different. Every individual microphone has different characteristics. The distance of each microphone from the piano, the angle at which it's oriented -- all these factors affect the sound that's actually recorded. Even when perfection in the instrument and recording devices seems achieved, the artist feels frustrated:

The most maddening paradox of recording is that what you hear in the playback does not resemble what you're sure you played. You hear two tracks at once: what you desire and what you have produced.

Denk and his engineer work their way, section by section, through the sonata, trying to match the recorded track to the ideal track in Denk's head.

He realizes, as he works, that technical perfection may not even be the proper goal. For example, slight misalignments in the piano's works, where the damper touches the string after each note, can result in what Denk calls an "aural schmear." He works with his engineer to remove all of these imperfections, only to discover that, once they're finished, they have somehow lessened the quality of the listening experience.

Eventually he [the engineer] plays me a schmear-free version. He looks so proud and satisfied that I can't bear to tell him that the result seems somehow sanitized. It's as if the reality of the piano had evaporated. I miss the schmear.

In the end, Denk, with the assistance of his engineer, pieces together relatively perfect segments of the sonata, recorded at different times, into a seamless whole -- resulting in an overall performance more perfect than any musician could achieve in a live concert.

And yet, the perfection achieved is never absolute. And it's in this lack of perfection that Denk actually finds relief -- there will always be something finer to which he can aspire.

No matter how wild the performance, something about the "Concord" always needs even more. I pressed eject on my stereo, thinking, No, you haven't made me redundant just yet. ... I realized that I couldn't wait for the next performance, when I would do it completely differently.

For me, for whom even the most familiar sonata contains subtleties that I can't even understand, let alone sense while listening, it's both humbling and inspiring to realize that a sonata is imbued with so much depth, with such complexity, that I could spend a lifetime simply listening to -- forget about playing -- the sonata and never exhaust what it has to teach me.

As for Jeremy Denk -- he's happy to realize that however perfectly recorded may be the music his dad hears on his stereo, it doesn't compete with the music he plays in live concerts. The near perfection of a studio recording and the spontaneity and "reality" of a live performance: each has its place, and Denk favors us with both.

One girl's struggle

Somehow, I consider it a matter of pride to have no idea of what's going on in popular culture. But occasionally, popular culture sneaks up and bites me on the butt before I recognize it.

Thus, a week ago, following a helpful prompt from Amazon, I began reading The Hunger Games, a "young adult" (read, "for teenagers") fantasy trilogy that I suppose appealed to the only semi-dormant sci-fi passions of my youth. Only after availing myself of Amazon's all-too-easy "one click" purchase protocol did I discover that I wasn't alone -- not only is the trilogy extremely popular, but its release as a film in March promises to be one of the cinematic events of the year.

Today, the Yahoo! homepage contains a prominant link to one of several YouTube trailers for the movie -- a link presented not as advertisement, but as "news."

So be it. I'll mingle with the masses, or at least the younger contingent of the masses. I was up late last night, my eyes glued to my Kindle, and am now 70 percent of my way through Catching Fire, the second of the three books.

The story, for those of you who, like me a week ago, haven't a clue, takes place in a post-apocalyptic future. All the wealth now belongs to the citizens of the "Capitol," an affluent and technologically advanced city apparently located somewhere near present day Denver. Today's U.S. has been divided into twelve impoverished districts, each ruled with an iron hand by the wealthy Capitol, each responsible for producing raw materials and goods for the Capitol citizenry. (See any political allegories, students?)

To demonstrate its absolute control, and to punish the citizens for a failed revolt 75 years earlier, each district is required annually to furnish a boy and a girl, selected by lottery, to take part in the Hunger Games -- a no-holds-barred combination of survival game and deadly combat, fought out in a huge wilderness "Arena", until only one out of the 24 kids is left alive. The games are unscripted but fully televised, in a manner well known to followers of our own "reality" shows.

The author is Suzanne Collins -- atypically for such dystopian fantasies, a woman -- and the story is told from the point of view of Katniss, a tough-minded girl of 16. The story is, as you'd expect, full of struggle, killings, anguish, torture, and physical hardship. But -- and I try not to think in stereotypes -- the story seems to reveal the gender of both the author and her protagonist by simultaneously focusing on Katniss's complex and ever-changing relationships (friends? enemies? rivals? lovers?) with two boys, one of whom is a childhood friend back home and the other, her fellow representative from District 12.

The books also seem to focus at times to a weird degree on fashion, cosmetics, and food preparation. This focus could be another indication of femininity, but more likely is simply a device to contrast the effete superficiality of the "One Percent" (my term) who live frivolous, meaningless lives in the Capitol with the tough, quick minds and even tougher bodies of the youngsters from the districts, kids who have grown up familiar with hunger, poverty, and hardship, but have also learned to adapt and think quickly.

The games are played against long-smoldering opposition to the Capitol by the oppressed masses. Katniss's television persona appears both a precipitating factor pushing the districts to active revolt, and a beacon of hope for the rebels.

Having sneaked a look at Amazon reviews for the third book, Mockingjay, I realize that some weird things are waiting in my reading future. Roughly half of the readers appear anguished at the way the plot develops in the final book, and with the unhappy resolution for Katniss and all the people for whom readers had grown attached.

The other half of the reviewers essentially say, "That's life and that's war, toots. Learn to live with it." They loved the ending.

So, my attention will be absorbed a few more days while Katniss discovers and faces her Fate. Then my blog can return to its usual urbane fascination with post-modernist deconstruction of Elizabethan drama.