From: Digestifier To: Subject: Dead-Flames Digest #346 Dead-Flames Digest #346, Volume #48 Tue, 20 Sep 05 17:00:02 PDT Contents: Harrison Bergeron ("volkfolk") Re: Brave New World ("Steve Terry") Simon Wiesenthal RIP (ba ba booie) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "volkfolk" Subject: Harrison Bergeron Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 19:41:33 -0400 Here for your reading enjoyment and consideration is the story I mentioned in my previous post http://kenmentor.com/courses/legaltheory/harrison_bergeron.htm Harrison Bergeron Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away. It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains. George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about. On the television screen were ballerinas. A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm. "That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel. "Huh?" said George. "That dance--it was nice," said Hazel. "Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced. So did two of the eight ballerinas. Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been. "Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George. "I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel, a little envious. "All the things they think up." "Um," said George. "Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion." "I could think, if it was just chimes," said George. "Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General." "Good as anybody else," said George. "Who knows better'n I do what normal is?" said Hazel. "Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that. "Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?" It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples. "All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while." George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me." "You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. just a few." "Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain." "If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just sit around." "If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it--and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you? "I'd hate it," said Hazel. "There you are," said George. "The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?" If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head. "Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel. "What would?" said George blankly. "Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?" "Who knows?" said George. The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and gentlemen-" He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read. "That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard." "Ladies and gentlemen-" said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men. And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive. "Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous." A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall. The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever borne heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides. Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds. And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that. he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggletooth random. "If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not-I repeat, do not-try to reason with him." There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges. Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake. George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have-for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!" The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head. When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen. Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die. "I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook. "Even as I stand here-" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened-I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!" Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds. Harrison's scrapiron handicaps crashed to the floor. Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bars of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall. He flung away his rubberball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder. "I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne! A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow. Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask. She was blindingly beautiful. Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded. The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls." The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs. The music began again and was much improved. Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it. They shifted their weights to their toes. Harrison placed his big hands on the girl's tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers. And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang! Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well. They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun. They leaped like deer on the moon. The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it. And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time. It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor. Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on. It was then that the Bergeron's television tube burned out. Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer. George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying?" he said to Hazel. "Yup," she said. "What about?" he said. "I forgot," she said. "Something real sad on television." "What was it?" he said. "It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel. "Forget sad things," said George. "I always do," said Hazel. "That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head. "Gee-I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel. "You can say that again," said George. "Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy." This short story is included in: Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Welcome to the Monkey House. New York: 1988; Bantam Doubleday, Dell Publishing begin 666 astonrul.gif M1TE&.#EA6 (*`'<``"'_"TU33T9&24-%.2XP#0````%S4D="`*[.'.D`(?\+ M35-/1D9)0T4Y+C 8````#&US3U!-4T]&1DE#13DN,! "(,7>`"'_"TU33T9& M24-%.2XP& ````QC;5!02D-M<# W,3("``$(;,!3_@`A^00!`````"P````` M6 (*`(3 P,#,F3/,F0#,9@#,,P"99F:99C.99@"9,P"9``!F9F9F9C-F,V9F M,S,````````!`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,! M`@,!`@,!`@,!`@,$_Q#(2:N]..O-N_]@*(YD:9YHJJYLZ[YP+,]T;=]X_A'# M0/P(`@?1^Q&"')[/*-0YG]"H=$JM6J\RHL\G&"2+7.]&RR-TL>BT>@U8&!;P M^*+@ELOI][I<\8[C[7M]<'Q\=G2">7Z @V^"AW.+@8&%>8B*EX"%CGJ/BW]P MG7&4H)&BB(26H8FDBYJ*IY: ;P<(6CT!<9M]M+8#N)^OO#VWIJN>N8NZQYAV MKJ2PIQD-:0E/-W MC7 &!09]^?Q8FO>)#Z)Y"NCYP_9IGYN%< *"&IB-T4%T"O^5*Q5O@<1Z]_\B M&G+83Z/'D78(!KJ8,!=$<15C$C30H&40(D1XT&Q9T,#-(\/F&3 (Z&?.`2?U MZ2GY)A\AD?YJLK*82R*_EX#,&2N)+J @A(.FHC,9DZ@W>?3FA$PJ<.E+J_Y2 MEB5[DN?*5OW8UK&7""[)MRCEJ#3UU0]$JW.L-JAGF*XQ!?80['\ MX6O)^''D6'WRZ@FH^5EFT5+WNFF:57%GM9+%0L:*["%EMJ6OG=Y,&5]M.L!* MU@J2X("/M@#A##^2,RQ&C726U_+!=*.H/T/+.20M.EZLCAXY9_-*ZL],C)"Y MYHO+6N#VQNWON*[XV?J@^M.NWN9^>?5H^'J!,M_N'_AEM4>!M8F6G&5Q2)10 M/MG!P0!&SB&6FU2+Q42A;6^TM(I50T5865(+>1C1@Z\YQ^&&F(#X5(,PSO&/ MB6%!Z.&$'K9D(6HH:NAA7AT:."(_+XZXWHQG5=9 7';<= `02&7RAY-0GJ,C ME4#IPUN&YAG"I)0QYI+01965F&127 H9#3I='A@F1C;&@:,H0S(8GD Subject: Re: Brave New World Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:47:38 -0500 "Roxanne McDaniel" wrote in message news:oz_Xe.474$i31.387@newssvr17.news.prodigy.com... > > wrote in message > "Having seen the effects of Ritalin on Sam, I would advise parents to > try any other avenue before resorting to drugs." > ************************************************ > In grad school, we discussed this issue ad-nausem! > > Some people thought that kids with ADD & ADHD were the spawn of the 70's > recreational drug users. Don't laugh... Lots of these people will be in > a > school near you!! Is it over prescribed? Or is it the demand? > Personally, > Ritalin would be my last resort. This time last year, my almost 5 year > old, > looked hyper. So I talked to a child-shrink. We looked at sensory > integration and found some deficits. The prescription? Occupational > therapy. Exercise routines that look similar to gymnastics. This year, > he > looks like a different kid, READY for school. The brain is a remarkable > organ! One example. It worked for us. Would that work for every kid? > Maybe, maybe not? But Ritilin can't be the ONLY answer. The important > thing is to get the hyper-ness under control so that the child can focus > on > learning. We have a two year old who, to our eyes, appears to be a candidate for Ritalin. I'm glad to hear that there are alternatives. Thanks Rox. ------------------------------ From: Jazare@webtv.net (ba ba booie) Subject: Simon Wiesenthal RIP Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 19:40:08 -0400 Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal dies. By DANICA KIRKA, Associated Press VIENNA, Austria - The concentration camp guards stood with their rifles ready, awaiting the order to fire at Simon Wiesenthal and other prisoners standing along the edge of a pit where their bodies would topple. The future Nazi hunter waited to die. And waited. Hours later, after many of the condemned slumped in exhaustion, the camp commandant strolled to the line and delivered a reprieve: Soviet troops were coming and the prisoners would be taken away. "We thought we were going mad," Wiesenthal wrote after World War II. "Perhaps we feared (or hoped) we were mad already." Wiesenthal, who died Tuesday in his sleep at his Vienna home at age 96, was driven by his memories of the Holocaust to fight for justice for its victims, dedicating himself to tracking down Nazi war criminals and to being a voice for the 6 million Jews who perished. "I think he'll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives during the war. He survived five Nazi concentration camps and seven other prisons, weighing just 99 pounds when a U.S. Army armored unit liberated him and other inmates at Mauthausen in May 1945. Enlisted by the Americans to research war criminals, the architect pursued the mission long after Allied forces lost interest. Wiesenthal spent more than 50 years hunting Nazi war criminals, speaking out against neo-Nazism and racism, and remembering the Jewish experience as a lesson for humanity. He estimated he helped bring some 1,100 Nazi war criminals to justice. "When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it," he once said. Israeli President Moshe Katsav praised Wiesenthal as the "biggest fighter" of his generation. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl noted the Nazi hunter personally "felt the shadow of history in its brutality." Wiesenthal was first sent to a concentration camp in 1941, outside Lviv in what is now Ukraine. In October 1943, he escaped from the Ostbahn camp just before the Germans began killing all the inmates. He was recaptured in June 1944 and sent to Janwska, but escaped death when his SS guards retreated with the prisoners to escape Soviet troops. Wiesenthal's quest began when he was freed by the Americans. He said he realized "there is no freedom without justice," and decided to dedicate "a few years" to that mission. "It became decades," he said. Even after turning 90, Wiesenthal continued to remind and to warn. While appalled at atrocities committed by Serbs against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the 1990s, he said no one should confuse the tragedy there with the Holocaust. "We are living in a time of the trivialization of the word 'Holocaust,'" he told The Associated Press in 1999. "What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date." He was troubled recently by deteriorating relations between Muslims and Jews in Europe and by a rise in anti-Semitism on the continent, said Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal center's director for international affairs. "That was the greatest disappointment for a man who had invested his whole life in this," Samuels said. Wiesenthal's life spanned a violent century. He was born on Dec. 31, 1908, to Jewish merchants at Buczacs, a town near Lviv in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. He studied in Prague and Warsaw and in 1932 received a degree in civil engineering. He apprenticed as a building engineer in Russia before returning to Lviv to open an architectural office. The Russians occupied Lviv, then the Germans marched in and the terror began. After the war, working first with the Americans and later from a cramped Vienna apartment packed with documents, Wiesenthal tirelessly pursued war criminals. He was perhaps best known for his role in helping find one-time SS leader Adolf Eichmann, who organized the extermination of the Jews. Eichmann was tracked to Argentina, abducted by Israeli agents in 1960, and tried and hanged by Israel. Wiesenthal often was accused of exaggerating his role in Eichmann's capture, although he never claimed sole responsibility. Eichmann's capture "was a teamwork of many who did not know each other," Wiesenthal told the AP in 1972. "I do not know if and to what extent reports I sent to Israel were used." Among others Wiesenthal tracked down was Austrian policeman Karl Silberbauer, who he believed arrested the Dutch teenager Anne Frank and sent her to her death at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. That pursuit began in 1958 after a youth told Wiesenthal he did not believe in Frank's existence and murder, but would if Wiesenthal could find the man who arrested her. The search led to Silberbauer's arrest in 1963. Wiesenthal never caught up with one prime target =97 Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz, who died in South America in 1979. Wiesenthal's quest for justice sometimes stirred controversy. In Austria, which took decades to acknowledge its role in Nazi crimes, Wiesenthal was ignored and often insulted. In 1975, Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, himself a Jew, suggested Wiesenthal was part of a "certain mafia" seeking to besmirch Austria and even claimed Wiesenthal collaborated with Nazis to survive. Ironically, Wiesenthal finally won esteem in Austria as a result of the international furor over the election of Kurt Waldheim as president in 1986 despite lying about his past as an officer in Hitler's army. His refusal to call Waldheim a war criminal drew criticism from outsiders, but Austrians saw that he did not indiscriminately condemn everyone who took part in the Nazi war effort. Wiesenthal did demand Waldheim's resignation, seeing him as a symbol of those who suppressed Austria's role in the war, but he turned up no proof that Waldheim took part in war crimes. Even after turning 90, Wiesenthal worked regularly at the small downtown office of his Jewish Documentation Center. "The most important thing I have done is to fight against forgetting and to keep remembrance alive," he said in the 1999 interview with AP. "It is very important to let people know that our enemies are not forgotten." Wiesenthal's wife, Cyla, died in 2003. Their daughter, Paulinka Kreisberg, lives in Israel, where Wiesenthal will be buried Friday. A memorial service was scheduled in Vienna on Wednesday. ___ Associated Press writer Ian Gregor in Los Angeles contributed to this report. ___ On the Net: Simon Wiesenthal Center: http://www.wiesenthal.com bbb wrote: ***"The most important thing I have done is to fight against forgetting and to keep remembrance alive," he said in the 1999 interview with AP. "It is very important to let people know that our enemies are not forgotten." *** These are words to live by. A good man, done gone. booie bowing his head in silence. : ( .. .. .. Have you checked these sites out today? http://www.jambase.com http://www.jambands.com http://www.jambase.com/festivals .. Find out where your favorite band is playing. Pollstar (the concert hotwire) http://pollstar.com ------------------------------ ** FOR YOUR REFERENCE ** The service addresses, to which questions about the list itself and requests to be added to or deleted from it should be directed, are as follows: Internet: dead-flames-request@gdead.berkeley.edu Bitnet: dead-flames-request%gdead.berkeley.edu@ucbcmsa Uucp: ...!{ucbvax,uunet}!gdead.berkeley.edu!dead-flames-request You can send mail to the entire list (and rec.music.gdead) via one of these addresses: Internet: dead-flames@gdead.berkeley.edu Bitnet: dead-flames%gdead.berkeley.edu@ucbcmsa Uucp: ...!{ucbvax,uunet}!gdead.berkeley.edu!dead-flames End of Dead-Flames Digest ****************************** .