We Call It Blowback
Current mood: fermented
Category: News and Politics
I almost feel bad for them.
Almost. Is it possible I have a single subscriber on the Right who can give me the inside track on how this elephant graveyard of wormeaten dogma is going to rally itself back into undead supremacy? (i.e. see italicized elegies below)
As a contrarian, my identity thrives on the threat of annihilation via enemy artillery. Without an intellectually potent opposition-party that lives to tear down godless pinko foot-soldiers like me, my rage calluses may erode to silky softness. My spiky armadillo hide rubbery and toddler-friendly like a Pokemon bath toy.
The battle surgeon prescribes extra doses of AM talk-radio and a subscription to the-now-Rupert-Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal.
Ed Rollins, campaign director for Ronald Reagan:
"Rove knew his voters, he stuck to the message with consistency, he drove that base hard---and there's nothing left of it. Today, if you're not rich or Southern or born again, the chances of your being a Republican are not great."
Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the House:
"The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run anti-Obama, anti-Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins) anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail."
Yuval Levin, former Bush White House official and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center:
"There's an intellectual fatigue, even if it hasn't been made clear by defeat at the polls. The conservative idea factory is not producing as it did. You hear it from everybody, but nobody agrees what to do about it."
David Brooks, conservative columnist for the New York Times:
A.) "An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American. People want something melioristic, they want government to do things."
B.) "You've got to learn from failures. But Republicans have rejected the entire attempt. For example, after Katrina, House Republicans wanted nothing to do with New Orleans. They were like, 'We don't care about those people.'"
C.) "American conservatives had one defeat, in 2006, but it wasn't a big one. The big defeat is probably coming, and then the thinking will happen. I have not yet seen the major think tanks reorient themselves, and I don't know if they can."
D.) "You go to Capitol Hill---Republican senators know they're fucked. They have that sense. But they don't know what to do. There's a hunger for new policy ideas."
Richard Lowry, editor of the late William F. Buckley's National Review:
"Most of the Right was in lockstep with Donald Rumsfeld. We didn't want to admit we were losing and said anyone who said otherwise was a defeatist. One thing I've loved about conservatism is its keen sense of reality, and that was totally lost in 2006."
David Frum, neoconservative speechwriter for George W. Bush:
A.) "There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well."
B.) "The thing I worry most about is if the Republicans lose this election---and if you're a betting man you have to believe they will---there will be a fundamentalist reaction. Not religious--but the beaten party believes it just has to say it louder. Like the Democrats after 1968. A lot of the problems in the Republican party will not be fixed."
C.) "[George W. Bush's reign] wasn't a successful presidency, and that's a painful thing. And I was a very small, unimportant part of it, but I was a part of it, and that implies responsibility."
Pat Buchanan, right-wing presidential candidate, commentator and former aide to Richard Nixon:
"A.) L.B.J. built the foundation and the first floor of the Great Society. We built the skyscraper. Nixon was not a Reagan Republican."
"B.) Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
Boredom Rescued By Terror
Current mood: implacable
Category: Writing and Poetry
Teen nostalgia for early middle-agers like myself usually revolves around first kisses, post-prom parties at the boardwalk, bongs in basements, garage rock, the chalk-and-ammonia waft of early-morning classrooms, and the wingnut fallacy of believing College will mean Deliverance.
My own centers around adolescent fantasies of recreating the Kennedy assassination in a shopping mall.
Lunatic stunts for an invisible fringe who, in the depraved idiocy of their youth, think school shootings and WTC-style terrorism the only performance-art worth contemplating.
(You'll be grateful to know that this phase is largely behind me. My whack-job stint in the U.S. military (summer of '99) was a vibrant exorcism.)
I have J.G. Ballard to thank for that, and well over a decade hence, am both astonished and disturbed by the degree to which this avuncular old Brit has formed my personality. (And so many of my peers. A regular perv network.)
Yes, we post-Ballardians like to believe we're the only worthy aesthetes, the only sane (wo)men in a fallen cosmos, but then, so do the Islamic medievalists we love to hate. Extremism in art has given us Da Vinci and Shakespeare. But it's a noble, gentleman's extremism. One all committed Humanities students measure their life against.
Many of Ballard's epithets and requiems seem rather trite and hamfisted these days (or just performative and obscurantist, sometimes lazily aberrant), mostly because he's succeeded in predicting and/or inventing our current consensus reality.
For old devotees like me, whose adult lives have been creatively ruined by his touch, this short documentary will be a wistful repast of sprightly teen misanthropy. For those who've yet to crack a Ballard grimoire, an enjoyable, well-produced primer. (Ballard's recent diagnosis of late-stage prostate cancer means his canon will soon be at an end.)
Also, I love the part when Martin Amis feels the need to assert that Ballard is "not a nerd"...!
Fight Choreography For Midgets (My Forte)
Current mood: amorous
Category: Parties and Nightlife
As Sir David Hill's authorized biographer, my presence was critical at last week's Dave Hill Explosion at the UCB Theatre on West 26th St.
I'm happy to report that my protege and close personal confidante, Sir David, took all of my production suggestions to heart, most notably the half-naked midget love brawl, whose choreography we butted heads over for weeks, nearly ending our ever-explosive collaborative mentorship.
Happily, the creative tension led to a stirring live-action allegory on the promethean glories of uncompromising dwarfdom.
Wee man steals fire from the gods (or in this case, chubby hairy-chested GOD).
The audience was equally impressed by my erstwhile pixie girlfriend Amy Sedaris bringing her crafts box onstage, showing us how to simulate shattered teeth blowing out the side of our mouth post-bitchslap.
This woman loves me. And really, how could you blame her?
In any case, I look forward to promoting my young paduan and publishing Vol. 1 of his biography, David Rex: A Prehistory of the Explosion, in early 2012.
(Initially, Dave begged to author my biography, but a few poker nights later here I am. Fucker.)
As an added bonus, here's one of my favorite Hill coming-of-age YouTube fables: "Actors Movement...And Parties...And Olden Times"
Currently
reading
:
Rainbows End
By
Vernor Vinge
Release date: 03 April, 2007
Presidential Reading
Current mood: working
Category: Quiz/Survey
I'd like to lurk at the MySpace pages of the presidential contenders.
Not the fakester campaign profiles, but the real ones that will never exist.
Or maybe something in between: Policy bullet-points would be plotted out in their About Me area, while the Who I'd Like To Meet box should simply be a donor link to the war chest.
I really liked it when the 2000 GOP contenders were asked who their favorite political philosophers were, and why. I was even open to Bush's claim for Jesus, if he'd bothered to follow it up with a snazzily erudite theologico-political gloss on the legislation history of compassion and universal brotherhood.
Great philosophers surely "change your heart," as Bush put it, but you can't throw that spaghetti against every wall of your house.
With the candidates on MySpace, I wouldn't be able to help scrutinizing their favorite Books, Films, Music, and Role Models. Being as scatterbrained and irrational as any other indie swing-voter, a rousing overlap of consumer prejudice might just win my vote.
So I did a little digging, and discovered that the question of bibliophilia did come up on the campaign trek.
This is not a satire. These are the actual books cited by the candidates as their lifetime faves.
HILLARY
Little Women and The Poisonwood Bible
For the Literati, this is an even greater skeleton in her closet than Whitewater.
Alcott's novel is the great-granny of all Chick Lit, while Kingsolver's melodrama on missionaries in Africa is a faux-Art Novel for folks who turn to stone at the thought of cracking Proust or Mann.
As a Machiavellian super-wonk, Hillary might do well enough. I just get dizzy at the thought of being sucked into the dynastic Clinton timewarp of the preceding millennium.
Hillary is the time-machine candidate. And not in a sexy steampunk way.
BARACK
Moby-Dick and Song of Solomon
Hard to see how Obama's cotton-candy gospel can stand fast in the Melvillean storm winds, an unleashed Gnostic fury where God is rendered (accurately, if He exists) as an albino Leviathan of eternal vengeance, a chthonic juggernaut of implacable hostility, arbitrarily dispensed, an amphibious Yahweh who brooks no dissent, reasoned or otherwise.
Of course, the classic American canon (Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Emerson, James) has been spade and neutered by well-meaning educators, downplaying their more outrageous Sadean dimension. The repressions and evasions of their truly fucked-up side. (By "fucked-up" I mean clear-sighted, but abominable, unthinkable, unacceptable to everyday folk.)
Toni Morrison may be the flagship author of Oprah's book club, but some of her prose has real heft and power. The smarmy sentimentalism of Beloved (the ice-skating scene made me projectile vomit) made me wary of Song of Solomon, but if Barack is elected, I may give it another go.
EDWARDS
The Trial of Socrates
The most impressive selection of all the candidates, especially since Stone's portrait of the pug-nosed Athenian raconteur and granddaddy of Western thought is refreshingly anti-sentimental, a smug elitist whose vaunted humility ("All I know is that I know nothing.") was a blind for very deep wells of sustained pride and condescension.
Socrates is like Jesus – their genuflecting initiates claim anything and everything for their hero, while knowing nothing (for sure) of what these historical personae actually said or did (and in JC's case, whether the dude actually existed, or was a mythic amalgam of syncretic hearsay). As with God-belief, questers for these figures find what they want to find, unearthing sermons under stones they themselves planted.
What's remarkable is that you can't tell whether the aristocratic Edwards is on the side of the aristocratic Socrates (who was hostile to democratic common rule, and as puppeted by Plato gave us the first blueprint for a Leninist-style collectivism), or the coin-flip populist side of Socrates, who eschewed institutional power to be a freewheeling hobo of epistemology, a god among dropouts with rarely enough scratch for a bank account's minimum balance. Does Edwards read the novel as a cautionary tale about plutocracy-empowering philosopher-kings, or simply appreciate the back-and-forth between Lockean democratic ideals and the hieratic platinum-city fascism of Plato?
MCCAIN
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Hemingway's least nuanced novel among the early, more well-known works, this paean to testosterone and self-sacrifice spirals through McCain's DNA like a cadeceus.
Though I bet he loves Little Women too.
HUCKABEE
The Bible and Mere Christianity
And if pressed, might go on to cite The Left Behind series.
Was it Kirk Cameron who starred in the lame straight-to-video version?
ROMNEY
Battlefield Earth
I am not making this shit up.
My two favorite home-grown American cults, Mormonism and Scientology, bizarrely intersect in what appears to be one of Romney's truly spontaneous, uncalculated expressions of personal sensibility.
The 1000-page Hubbard book is considered, among SF readers, one of the most staggeringly inane space operas ever to kill a forest, as if Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen were a real franchise.
Lest you doubt L-Ron's genius, the opening pages of Battlefield contains such awe-inspiring prose poetry as "Terl could not have produced a more profound effect had he thrown a meat-girl naked into the middle of the room."
Because a "meat-girl," fully clothed, would have been markedly less profound.
I remember in the early '90s Stephen Brown, editor of the late-great SF Eye, offered a lifetime subscription to anyone willing to read and review the entire series. There were no takers.
In the same spirit, it's possible his L-Ron endorsement is just poor Mitt's baffling attempt to show his hip side, like admitting he's into console-gaming or the NBA. But Battlefield is also salvageable as what I call "Are we there yet?" fiction, the fat paperbacks you buy off of airport wire-racks for long trips. Like chewing gum, or setting your iPod to "shuffle" as you nod off. (I mean "salvageable" in the sense of salvaging Romney's public image as a non-android.)
Or maybe Battlefield Earth strikes Romney as a serious, weighty allegory because when propped against the benchmark of the Book of Mormon it is an epic of Joycean viscosity and Proustian sweep.
Erik the Grey in "Wabbit a la Carte"
Current mood: touched
Category: Friends
Erik is the Red-Tailed Raptor who nests in the highest tree in my front yard in rural New Jersey.
He and I have had an amiable kinship (perhaps one-sided) for the past several months, since he arrived at my house last Spring.
I read philosophy on the patio, syncopating each printed line with his squawks and screeches.
I am happy.
Most of the below photos were taken on my knees, or creeping along on my belly through the moist leaves.
Now I'd like to believe Erik granted me access (as close as two feet away) because I am so pure of heart, so pristine of soul, emanating druidic waves of animal empathy that make Dickon Sowerby from The Secret Garden look like Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons.
But the reality is that my obsidian-eyed friend was simply standing guard over his wabbit dinner.
If he was a bit hungrier, I may have gotten a talon or two raked across my dopey, smiling face. (If only someone was around to photograph me photographing Erik, but alas....) Still, I love and admire this creature, in a mushy, obnoxious, Timothy Treadwell sort of way, and a few love pecks from ol' Erik wouldn't have fazed me a bit.
Raptor scar tissue on your face makes for a fun ice-breaker.
Currently
reading
:
The Road
By
Cormac Mccarthy
Release date: 26 September, 2006
Yahweh, Stand-Up Comedian (Part Deux)
Current mood: productive
Category: Religion and Philosophy
In my previous MC Yahweh blog, I bemoaned the absence of redemptive mirth and jocularity in Abrahamic scripture.
I could find no Patron Saint of Rollicking Jests (er, St. Burstyn of Myrth?), no Jesus jokes (that is, Christ having the humility to lampoon himself), nothing but the sneering cackle of superiority, the mustache-twirling bombast of Yahweh raining terror on his hapless golems. "For I am the Lord, and My deep motives lie beyond all sketch comedy."
Further digging has both confirmed and leavened this snark-storm of priggish tut-tutting from Above.
I'll start with the bad news.
The otherwise-admirable Percy Bysshe Shelley is reported to have snickered at our human capacity for mirth. "There can be no entire regeneration of mankind until laughter is put down." The truly noble and perfectible spirit would never stoop to a guffaw. Laughter, as Baudelaire understood it, was a satanic impulse, requiring a victim (or a faceless demographic of victims) as pedal-point to the damning punchline. The comedian essentially says, "We are in the know. We are secret sharers. The yokels are fuel for our laugh-engine. Grist for our molars."
Is laughter truly born of the Fall? Can a perfected soul in heaven laugh at anything? Or, given the nitrous-oxide cloud of Schadenfreude that explodes like a flash-grenade at the heart of every punchline, divorce cruelty from mirth?
What the atheist Shelley seems to be saying is that our capacity to laugh is the burning sulphurous glow of the eternally unreconciled, the gnostic cackle of a doomed seeker forced to wander the precincts of his tangled, circuitous imperfections. A truly noble soul, one who'd passed through the crucible of Shelley's own poetic labyrinth of medusas and succubi, could integrate himself, sand down all the pockmarks, embrace the cosmos by matching its breadth and complexity (and perhaps inevitably, its detachment) with a post-Stoic visionary intensity that reduced pratfalls and slapstick to a sort of sloughed skin -- like the genomic junk-DNA of bacteria, earthworms, and primates that all humans carry within, embedded in our evolutionary narrative, but a gene-line that no longer "expresses" itself in the polished phenotype.
Hobbes notoriously entwined laughter with self-admiration, with pride, in short. "[A] sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly."
Are stand-up comedians just little Yahwehs? Raining satiric brimstone on the uninitiated? On the un-chosen? The not-elect? Do all successful career-comedians preach to the converted?
Great comedians know how to make fun of themselves (and of their audiences, which they perhaps see as a marginally less up-to-date version of themselves, their pre-Enlightenment cult followers, gorging on the mana of impending revelation), but the sincerity and generosity of spirit required lavishes an important dividend: it generates Socratic self-esteem.
"I know myself. I fuck up now and again, I behave ridiculously, I say and do all the wrong things, but my superego is seated on Mount Olympus, cackling at my dopey avatar like the gods ribbing themselves over the looney antics of the Trojan War. Boy my pre-enlightened prank-monkey of a Self sure is a knee-slapper!"
As Nietzsche wrote beautifully, "To laugh means: to take joy in mischief, but with a good conscience."
Comedy becomes a self-corrective, hilarity the joyous self-realization of freshly-minted Socratic power, a release of tension that often accompanies a new degree of self-control, of self-knowing, of self-esteem, and ultimately, of separation, an elitism that isolates.
Hence, from a Christian point of view, where submission to God (and the reigning liturgy) was the only real source of self-regard, selfhood via dissolution in groupthink, where the humility of Mystery triumphed over gnostic self-knowing, the anarchic ironies of comedy and jest have often been taken to task. Comedians were of the devil's party.
Here's a snarky gob of bile, from the otherwise liberal 19th-century French Catholic Abbe' Lamennais:
"Laughter ever implies a motion in the direction of the self and ending up in the self, from the dreadful laughter of bitter irony, the frightful laughter of despair, the laughter of Satan, defeated and still resisting, hardening himself in unbending pride, down to the degraded laughter of idiot or madman, or to that which is sparked by an unexpected naivete, a silly blunder, a bizarre mismatch. Never does it lend the countenance an air of sympathy or good will. Quite the opposite, it causes the most harmonious visage to grimace, it expunges beauty. It is one of the faces of evil: not that it expresses it outright, but it points to the seat of evil."
An even more grouchy, systemic condemnation comes from Bishop Bossuet's Maximes sur la comedie (1694), a broadside fired at a rival clergyman who had the gall to say nice things about comedy:
"I know of none among the ancient [fathers] who, far from looking on jesting as an act of virtue, did not think of it as vicious, though not invariably criminal or damnable. The least harm they find in it is its uselessless, which enters it in the ranks of that idle talk about which Jesus Christ teaches us that we shall have to render an account on Judgement Day.... Saint Paul, after taking the jest under its fairest guise and naming it by its fairest name, ranks it among the vices.... Saint Ambrose, having recalled the words of Our Lord, Woe unto you that laugh, marvels that Christians could 'seek occasions to laugh'.... The Fathers tended to take literally those words of Our Lord: Woe unto you that laugh now! for you shall mourn and weep. Saint Basil, who concluded therefrom that it was not licit to laugh 'in any matter, if only on account of those who offend God by despising his law,' tempers this saying by the following in Ecclesiasticus: 'A fool raises his voice in laughter, but a prudent man at the most smiles gently.' In conformity with that saying he allows us, with Solomon, 'to light up the countenance a little with a modest smile.' But as to those 'great outbursts and bodily upheavals' which are akin to convulsion, they do not, according to him, belong to a man 'virtuous and self-possessed.'"
What breaks my heart about this passage is that, over the years, the more I've "developed," the more "intelligent" and sensitive I feel I've become, the more prone I am to laughing at nothing -- or laughing with a Yahwehian sneer of cocky self-elevation and wrath.
Alcohol (and to a lesser extent marijuana) is ubiquitous in our culture, and produces nothing if not laughter. But at the expense of the intellect. We laugh when drunk or high because we've willingly (and happily) deevolved into a vapid, tard-state of the Easily Amused. And we congratulate ourselves for this willed, narcotic idiocy. "Dude, I was sooooo wasted last night, a haw haw."
So what's the good news, you ask? Wherefore the countercurrent?
Well, check out the medieval Feast of Fools, the Feast of Asses, and (my eternal favorite) Holy Innocents' Day, accounted here by Christian comedy adherent M.C. Hyers:
"On Holy Innocents' Day (festum puerorum), the gravity and grandeur of the holy office of bishop was suspended in the appointment of a boy bishop. For a day the awesome authority and responsibility of the church was returned to the playful innocence of childhood, with the boy bishop officiating at a service in which the ecclesiastical positions and functions were assumed by children.... The Feast of Fools (festum stultorum) had less of the aura of innocence about it. In a period of revelling following Christmas, the inferior clergy burlesqued the offices and roles of their superiors. In many cases a Lord of Misrule was appointed to supplant the holder of the baculus (wand of office), his installation occurring at Vespers during that portion of the Magnificat beginning with the words, 'He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted them of low degree' (Luke 1:52)."
This, of course, is clearly a pagan remnant of the Roman Saturnalia, where slaves traded place with their masters, topsy turvy shaking off the yoke of docility and orthodoxy.
Could it be possible that contemporary evangelicals (hilarious though they are) could incorporate so radical a festival into their calendar of devotion (without resorting to the smarmy sentimentalism of Kevin Smith's Dogma, or the formulaic teen-comedy swill of Saved)...? How about letting poor ghetto blacks galumph across the polo fields of New England's upper crust? Or Mexican day labors sit in the corporate campuses of white power?
Is there anything comparable to Holy Innocents Day amongst today's less starchy Christian adherents?
"Star Wars Kid" Diagnosed With Depression
Current mood: giggly
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
Yup, it appears that the French Canadian Darth Maul (pictured below, doing a cameo in Family Guy-spinoff American Dad) has finally collapsed under the mantle of his peerless web celebrity.
I feel for the guy. I mean, when I found out there was a geek lobby to circulate a petition to get Lucasfilm to cast Ghyslain in Revenge of the Sith, my dorkboy heart did somersaults in its chamber.
And now...well...I wouldn't be surprised if the poor guy is up in Quebec chopping nose-candy on a pocket-mirror and overdosing on diet pills.
Here's to you, friend. I am in your corner.
'Star Wars Kid' Sues, Settles Lawsuit Over Web Video
Completely off-topic but since it's a weekend, here goes. It seems as though the "Star Wars kid," a roly-poly French Canadian boy whose awkward copying of a light saber fight made him into an ironic web celebrity, apparently wasn't happy with being made the object of fun. (Or was it that the petition to get him into the third SW prequel failed?)
In any case, Ghyslain Raza, now 18, reached a settlement with three former schoolmates who put out the video which has since spawned scads of derivative works. The deal, whose terms are not known, averted a lawsuit that was supposed to go to trial Monday. Canada's Globe and Mail has the story:
Lawyers for the three schoolmates had suffered a setback after they were not allowed to introduce as evidence a transcript of a phone conversation Mr. Raza had with a blogger, Jishnu Mukerji.
The blogger had posted a transcript of the exchange on the Internet.
Conducted a month after the video and parodies of it began circulating, the conversation has Mr. Raza calling the spoofs "interesting" but not expressing much distress. [...]
In the transcripts, Mr. Raza said the experience left him unable to attend school.
"It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class," Mr. Raza said.
He said the situation left him feeling drained of energy, and that he let himself go and no longer lifted weights to keep fit. [ ]
He said he was diagnosed with depression by a pedopsychiatrist at Montreal's Sainte-Justine Hospital and his lawyers, in their fillings, said they wanted to have a psychiatrist and a psychologist testify, along with producing his medical file.
Under questioning, Mr. Laflamme and Mr. Rheault conceded their role in spreading a video that Mr. Raza, then 15, had made of himself and left on a shelf in the school TV studio.
Mr. Laflamme said he discovered the tape in April of 2003, when he took school equipment to film a varsity football game.
He showed the tape to Mr. Rheault, who made a copy of it.
"I thought it'd be an interesting prank . . . I wanted Ghyslain to know what I knew of him, what I had seen," Mr. Laflamme said.
"All I did was take the cassette, digitize it on the studio computer to pull a joke on Ghyslain. After that, I had nothing to do with it," Mr. Rheault said he later told the school principal after the controversy erupted.
He said that when a school counsellor confronted him about Mr. Raza's misfortunes, he replied, "It's no fun what happened here, but that's the problem with the Internet. Things travel fast."
Mr. Caron, who says he didn't even know the two other pranksters, said in examination that as the tape was being e-mailed among students, he created a website and posted the video on it.
According to court filings, the video first appeared on the Internet on the evening of April 14, 2003.
NOTE: The best site to lose your Star Wars Kid virginity is right here.
Too True to Be Good: The Neuroscience of Conformity
Current mood: sympathetic
Category: Life
Needless to say, neuroscience, even at its strongest, can't capture every variable, account for every anomaly, but this recent experiment resonates very strongly with my own views on human nature, and the novelty of the research scenario is both hilarious and chilling.
Too true to be good, to quote G.B. Shaw.
Doing the right thing: A common neural circuit for appropriate violent or compassionate behavior.
King JA, Blair RJ, Mitchell DG, Dolan RJ, Burgess N. - Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Anatomy, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK.
1: Neuroimage. 2005 Nov 21; [Epub ahead of print]
Humans have a considerable facility to adapt their behavior in a manner that is appropriate to social or societal context. A failure of this ability can lead to social exclusion and is a feature of disorders such as psychopathy and disruptive behavior disorder. We investigated the neural basis of this ability using a customized video game played by 12 healthy participants in an fMRI scanner. Two conditions involved extreme examples of context-appropriate action: shooting an aggressive humanoid assailant or healing a passive wounded person. Two control conditions involved carefully matched stimuli paired with inappropriate actions: shooting the person or healing the assailant. Surprisingly, the same circuit, including the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, was activated when participants acted in a context-appropriate manner, whether being compassionate towards an injured conspecific or aggressive towards a violent assailant. The findings indicate a common system that guides behavioral expression appropriate to social or societal context irrespective of its aggressive or compassionate nature.
PMID: 16307895 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
fermented
implacable
amorous
working
weird
I have seen the signs. 
touched
geeky
productive
giggly
Completely off-topic but since it's a weekend, here goes. It seems as though the "Star Wars kid," a roly-poly French Canadian boy whose awkward copying of a light saber fight made him into an ironic web celebrity, apparently wasn't happy with being made the object of fun. (Or was it that the petition to get him into the third SW prequel failed?)]
sympathetic
