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Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Farrow and the Consequence of Fame

There were two remarkable, maddening, things that happened over the weekend. Both events were related to fame and the failure of human consequence against the living, but the terms of the punishments were different: Both eternal, but one forever ended.

On Saturday, we read in the New York Times about the harrowing child abuse Dylan Farrow suffered at the hands of her infamous father, writer, director, actor and movie producer, Woody Allen.

On Sunday, we learned of the early death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman who, at age 46, lived up to his earlier prescience about fame and fortune leading to a quick Hollywood death.  He made his point real in New York City with a needle jabbed in the arm of his corpse.

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The Cruelty of the Duct Tape Parents

As you are well aware, I am not at all a fan of backseat parenting — I don’t see parents doing something with which I disagree and rush right over to tell them all about the error of their ways. There are limits to this, of course, and lines in parenting that cannot and should not ever be crossed — that line was crossed by a couple in Arizona who posted photos of their children tied up with Duct tape, mouths taped shut, and hung upside down.

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The Times on Torture

The Bush administration’s love and support of torture in the wake of 9/11 will become their indelible legacy long after all the Bush cronies are dead in the ground.  Bush couldn’t get away with a torture policy all on his own, though.  Bush had to have help.  He had a lot of help from the mainstream media, including perennial “liberal bogeyman” for “The Hard Right” — The New York Times — who played coy with using the word “torture” in their reporting even though torture is precisely what the Bush administration was doing. Why hide the word? Why not call torture torture?  Who and what were the New York Times protecting, and why?

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Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

We have been slowly learning the terms of the CIA torture program’s “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” — and we applaud President Obama’s search for the truth — and as citizens of the world, we need to know precisely what we’ve been doing to other human beings if we ever hope to lead the world back into the light of day instead of living in the night terrors of the darkness. 

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Blood on Barack: The Fifth Guantanamo Suicide

One of the risks Barack Obama takes in the infancy of his presidency is in keeping bad Bush administration policies in place for too long without taking proactive measures to dismantle the horrors.  The wages of that waiting is that some of the blame will rub off on Obama and new bloodshed will belong solely on his hands. 

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Cheney Torture

Why is Dick Cheney sowing the whirlwind with his scare talk about Guantanamo and torture and the treat to America if his policy of torture and incarceration is abandoned?

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When Doctors Torture

John Walker Lindh was the first real victim of the new American torture policy.  Naked, and bound to a stretcher with a bullet in his leg, he was denied basic human rights and healthcare and was given less respect than an animal prepared for the slaughterhouse.

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