Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014 - 9/24/2014 (Part 1)

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/13/2025] 

What else am I to do here in this prison? Take classes and rehabilitate myself? There are no such classes, and the federal government cares nothing about rehabilitation. The federal government care about punishment. That punishment consists of warehousing me for so many years I will be incapable of any tender embraces. This leaves me with time for reading, thinking, writing.

Yesterday, I finished a pile of New Yorkers and Harpers. I almost find myself swamped mentally by a certain sort of Eastern sensibility.

The August 11 & 18, 2014 New Yorker has Claudia Roth Pierpont's "A Raised Voice: The many battles of Nina Simone." I feel a bit embarrassed to say how little I have heard of Nina Simone, against her part in civil rights and the place of dark women. Harper's Magazine for June 2014 has "The Civil Rights Act's Unsung Victory: And How It Changed the South" by Randall Kennedy. Back to The New Yorker for Malcolm Gladwell's "The Crooked Ladder: When crimes pay and when it doesn't." Gladwell writes how Italian (and Irish and Jewish) mobsters wanted to move up the economic ladder to respectability. The result? Black criminals given no means of reaching respectability. The Supreme Court further waters down minority, racial minority, participation in their government. But the icing on the cake comes with The New Republic's "The Rich-Get-Richer Dynamic" from Robert M. Solow, which reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (May 12, 2014), which leaves me thinking those without capital - white or black - are headed towards lives very like the working class of a Dickens novel, or the unskilled workers of a William Gibson novel.

The black drug dealers here apparently think their way of life will go on forever. I know of only one drug dealer - a white man about my age who was a grower of marijuana - who even thinks about the effects of legalizing marijuana. He thinks he will get a job in the field. Hated to tell him how the legal marijuana field will probably be like legalized gambling: no felons need apply. I saw a recent Nation at the prison library exposing pain medicine companies backing the anti-legal marijuana groups. These people may be the only recognizing the danger legal marijuana poses to our opioid epidemic, as well as the network of illicit drug sales created by our war on drugs. I see these dealers going back to their neighborhoods, their projects, to find the money has gone out of illegal drugs. What will these people do when they have no means of advancing economically?

Doesn't help that Thomas Frank's "Donkey Business" (Harper's Magazine, vol. 328, no. 1964, pg. 5) paints a picture of the Democrats as feckless. The cover of the May 12, 2014 edition has "The Democrats" above a picture of buffaloes pitching over a cliff.

Reading The Atlantic's "Secrets of the Creative Brain" by Nancy C. Andreasen and Joshua Wolf Shenk's "The Power of Two"  got me thinking of my own creativity. Question: how did T.E. Lawrence appear out of a family of comparative dullards? He was a little crazy, after all. Am I even talented? Or was I talented and have mutilated that talent beyond repair?

sch

[Continued in Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 2) sch 6/13/2025.]

Nina Simone (6/13/2025)