Close brushes with fame . . .

Gotta love NYC. How neat to grab a slice of pizza and walk across the street to watch David Duchovny direct Robin Williams ("House of D").

However, my brother Nathan, serving as an x-ray technician in the Navy, reports:

"Yesterday, at work, I got a chance to see Master Chief Carl Brushear. He came in for an appointment. I got to shake his hand and meet him. For those of you who don't know, He is the man the movie Men of Honor is about. Pretty cool huh?"

Pretty cool, indeed! Men of Honor (starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Robert DeNiro) is a good movie about an incredible person: in 1970, Carl Brashear struggled against the prejudices of his age to become the the first African American Deep Sea Diver in the history of the U.S. Navy.

Even after losing a leg during the recovery of a nuclear warhead in the Mediterranean in 1966, he refused to retire. He remained on active duty, proving his skills and earning the rank of Master Diver in 1970 -- the highest level one can attain in the diving community.

Now that is even cooler than watching Robin Williams film a movie across the street.

Neil Postman 1931 - 2003.

Neil Postman died of lung cancer on Sunday, October 5, 2003. He was a professor at New York University, specializing in the theory of communications and known for his perceptive criticisms of media and technology. I really enjoyed some of his books (readers will probably recognize Amusing Ourselves to Death, a powerful critique of the television industry).

There are some who dismiss him as a Luddite, and although he did not deny an appreciation for the historical movement he did not identify himself as one of them:

I am not at all a Luddite. I have, for example, no hostility toward new technologies and certainly no wish to destroy them, especially those technologies, like computers, that have captured the imagination of educators. Of course, I am not enthusiastic about them, either. I am indifferent to them. ¹

Rather, Neil Postman devoted his life to the practical assessment of the costs of humanity's use of technology. He was motivated by a concern for the influence of media upon the cognitive and moral development of children, and media technology's debilitating effects upon literacy, language, religion and education. Conscious of technology's "Faustian bargain", he was a skeptic who couldn't help but question those who embraced the conveniences of technology with overwhelming enthusiasm (or what he might call a rash optimism). I'm just going to cite two passages helpful in understanding his perspective. First, in regards to visual media, specifically television, he said:

I am not against visual forms of communication except when they become so dominant that they displace the function of discursive or linguistic expression. Language by its nature is slow moving and hierarchical. It lays out a path of illumination to be followed step by step. It permits reflection.

You can evaluate the meaning of a sentence and say no to it. You can't say no to a picture.

When literacy declines and people repair to television for their news and political or religious views, analytic capabilities decline, as does the capacity for sustained reflection - that is, attention span. The capacity to comprehend context and continuity diminishes.

Language is always about context. When someone says "I was quoted out of context," they mean that if you knew the circumstances and conditions in which the words were imbedded, you would arrive at the correct interpretation.

Television always decontextualizes simply by presenting pictures. Pictures can't present historical background or psychological disposition. Images are a crude epistemology, stressing simultaneity and the instant without framework.

If television were a supplement to reading, the problem would not be serious. When television replaces reading it becomes a cultural catastrophe.

Secondly, responding to an audience of computer enthusiasts, he reminded them:

The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future.²

Given Neil Postman's writings, it may seem ironic to pay tribute to him by way of a blog. But perhaps he would approve, in that by conveying his words to a broader audience on the web it may provoke us to further reflect on our everyday use and interaction with technology.

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1. From "Of Luddites, Learning & Life". TECHNOS Quarterly Winter 1993 Vol. 2 No. 4.
2. From Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness. Viking Press (November, 1986).
3. "Informing Ourselves To Death" given at a meeting of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart (sponsored by IBM-Germany).

The Execution of Terry Schiavo

The court-ordered execution of Terry Schiavo by forced starvation began at 2PM today, on the feast of her patron saint, St. Teresa d'Avila. In a desperate attempt to prove that she is not in "a persistent vegetative state," her parents released a video (defying court orders) showing Terri laughing with her mother some 24 months ago. In reaction, her husband's attorney's have revoked the parents' visiting privileges unless her husband is present.

I've seen a number of the videos on the parent's website -- Terri is extremely incapacitated, but judging by her reactions to stimuli I personally cannot see how one could describe her as being in a "persistent vegetative state." Especially considering that from the moment her husband Michael Schiavo assumed control of a Medical Trust Fund (consisting of money she received from a malpractive suit) he denied her any kind of rehabilitation treatment and confined her in a nursing home where she is "maintained," contravening the purpose of the funds (which he will inherit when she dies).

It will take between a week to ten days for Terry Schiavo to die by starvation -- something to contemplate as you go about your week.

Conspiracy

I just finished watching the HBO film Conspiracy, about the Wannsee Conference, a meeting of 15 Nazi generals, SS officers and government ministers at a villa on the shore of a Berlin lake Wannsee on a cold winter's afternoon, Jan 20, 1942. Organized by Chief of Security Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, they would politely discuss and determine over wine and dinner the "the final solution" to the "Jewish question." The meeting lasted only 90 minutes. According to the Holocaust Memorial Museium, the Wansee Conference

. . . did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland.

The minutes of the meeting were taken by Adolf Eichmann and edited by Heydrich. It never explicitly mentions the killing of Jews, or the methods used to do so -- according to Eichmann's testimony, all 15 attendees of the meeting were quite aware of what was meant by the euphamism "evacuation", and discussed the use of gas chambers and crematoriums in the process. Of the 30 copies that were made only one remained, found by American investigators in the Reich Foreign Office in 1948 and became the "smoking gun" during the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Conspiracy is an excellent film, with a first-rate cast and script (based on the minutes of the conference). It is very well done -- and chilling to the bone. If I ever chose to rent it again, I would most likely do so in conjunction with Spielberg's Schindler's List: the calm and collected dialogue of the conference room juxtaposed against the screams of the gas chambers and the stink of the ovens is something to think about. There are many cases of genocide in human history, but Conspiracy reinforces the dreadful uniqueness that was the Holocaust.

• Germany Marks a Dark Anniversary, Jan. 18, 2002. CBSNews.com.
• Protokoll der "Wannsee-Konferenz" vom 20. Januar 1942. The actual notes of the meeting themselves.
• House of the Wannsee Conference, now a Memorial and Educational site for the Holocaust.
• Conspiracy - HBO Movie website.