Thursday, April 16, 2009

Tortured Logic

I'm very pleased today. I've always dreamed of going to work for my government and torturing people. Waterboarding. Sleep deprivation. Food deprivation. Making human beings wallow in filth. Forced nudity. Mocking their religions. Whatever. I have a special dream of taking people who have a neurotic fear of insects and locking them in little boxes full of bugs.

Yeah, I know torture almost never yields any useful information and often causes prisoners to say any stupid thing just to make it stop. I don't care. I also don't care if the people I torture are guilty of anything. If they just arrest you at random or have you confused with someone else, I'll torture you. I may not even pretend it has any value for national security or come up with bad spy novel stories about nuclear bombs that are about to go off and can only be prevented if I torture you. I just like the idea of torture and I know there are Americans out there who'll cheer me on. Even if it harms America's standing in the world and invites all sorts of comparisons with barbaric regimes.

So today I'm happy. Because I know now that if someone writes a memo rationalizing all this...if I can just say I was following orders "in good faith" — that's right, torturing people in "good faith" — I won't be prosecuted. If I shoplift a pack of gum, I'll go to jail...but inflicting pain on someone and bringing them as close as possible to death? What, you got a problem with that? Torture's not illegal if someone tells you what you're doing isn't really torture.

And I'm not stopping there. I'm going to find me a lawyer who'll write me a memo saying that if I walk into a bank with a gun, demand cash and flee with it, that doesn't constitute bank robbery. It won't be difficult to get that brief. You can find a lawyer who'll say anything. Then just as soon as a bank somewhere gets some money, I'll be set.

So it's a great day for those of us with no conscience, no bothersome notions about any "wrongness" in inflicting pain or death on another human being. This makes up for the killing spree I didn't get to go on because Phil Spector was acquitted. That verdict scared me because for a minute there, it looked like it might start a trend of punishing crimes of violence. Good to know we can still make exceptions, especially if it might embarrass someone.

• Posted at 9:49 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Hey, remember that clip of Susan Boyle you watched here or on some other site? The lady who wowed them on Britain's Got Talent? Well, my ex-partner Dennis Palumbo has a good point to make about her and the reaction to her.

• Posted at 1:58 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

And here's Ezra Klein defending the Teabaggers. Sort of. His view of them is not completely incompatible with Matt Taibbi's.

• Posted at 1:56 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

I have three or four correspondents who will write to scold me for linking to this Matt Taibbi piece because he name-calls and talks dirty but the guy makes a strong, important point: The protests about government spending were negligible when we were shovelling billions into corporate coffers or rebuilding the power grid in Bagdad. They didn't even complain when huge sums designated for the Iraq War completely disappeared. It only became the kind of outrage where you have to take to the street with signs when we started spending money on the infrastructure of this country.

• Posted at 12:03 PM · LINK

Where I'll Be

The weekend of April 25-26, my partner Sergio Aragonés and I will be in another country...guests at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. Sergio will be sitting at a little table, selling books and artwork and doing sketches for those who bring the proper amount of cash. I will be most often found on the dais of one panel or another. I'm doing five in two days, as you can see from the programming schedule. If you're there, come say hello or howdy or whatever those foreigners up there say.

Then I don't think I'm doing another convention until July and the spectacular Comic-Con International in San Diego. This is the fortieth one of these and it'll be the fortieth one I've attended — a boast that only three or four people can make. If you intend to be there and you've yet to purchase your membership, you're woefully negligent. Four-day memberships are sold out, Saturday passes are gone...and any day now, Friday will also be off the menu. It's frightening to think how big this thing would be if the convention center could magically expand to handle everyone who wanted to attend. I'm guessing the number would be about as many as Nate Silver estimates attended those silly "teabagging" protests yesterday. And the crowd in San Diego might even get something accomplished.

• Posted at 10:33 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

The pilot for the TV series Get Smart was directed by my old friend, the late Howard Morris. Howie was best known as an on-camera actor — for his work with Sid Caesar and for playing Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show, among other roles — and he also did lots and lots of cartoon voices. But he also directed TV shows, movies and tons of commercials, and he helmed the Get Smart pilot.

One of his many contributions was to suggest Ed Platt for the role of The Chief. Not long before, Howie had directed an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Actually, he directed several (and appeared in one) but the one we need to mention here is the one where Rob accidentally used a deck of marked cards in a friendly game of poker. Mr. Platt was in that episode and when the time came to cast The Chief, Howie remembered how good the actor had been in it.

A week or two before the Get Smart pilot was to be filmed, the producers decided to shoot one scene. Once in a while, the programming needs of a network time out such that they really don't want to wait for an entire pilot to be filmed and edited before they commit to a new series...so they buy from a "demo" of one or two scenes. The agents handling Get Smart thought there was a chance NBC would do that this time so a scene was hurriedly filmed, edited and shipped off to New York. It was so well received that the network tenatively bought the project based on this. The rest of the pilot was filmed a few weeks later.

Here's some (not all) of the scene in question. The voice you'll hear on the intercom is that of Mr. Howard Morris. Gee, I miss that little guy.

• Posted at 12:05 AM · LINK