Prohibition=violence

I am not the first to make the comparison between the prohibition of alcohol and the prohibition of illicit drugs.  My aim is not some hippie dream of legalized drugs, but to show the real effect of prohibiting: violence.  Extreme violence over the control of an item that is restricted, is not healthy, and is not morally justifiable. Alcohol prohibition was put into law in order to help free the country from the perils of alcohol. But all it did was make gangsters such as Al Capone rich, and get a lot of people murdered.  

The prohibitions of drugs like marijuana and cocaine have a very similar history to the prohibition of alcohol, with one major difference; alcohol is no longer illegal.  Prohibition can best be explained with economics.  First, prohibition creates a supply-vacuum after a substance is declared illegal. Then, someone who is willing to risk the law fills the demand. But the issue does not stop there. The problem is that there is so much money to be made, that gangs start to fight for control.  

In the first image, I chose to show the famous picture of women sitting in front of a sign that says “Lips that touch liquor shall not touch ours.”  This sign is typical of the temperance movement, which was one of the driving forces behind the 18^th amendment.  Although I do not know anyone who would give up a drink to kiss one of those sourpusses; this image shows the anti-alcohol movement that was taking place around the turn of the 20^th century.  This image is supposed to be slightly humorous so people can see that the idea behind prohibition may have been noble, it was ultimately foolish.  

For my second picture I chose to show several men pouring out alcohol in compliance with prohibition.  This image shows the attempts at controlling the alcohol supply by dumping it out.  I chose this because I wanted to show that alcohol prohibition was enforced and to use it as a bridge to my next images.  This image might evoke sadness, if you are a beer drinker, but mostly I want it to be slightly comical. Like the first image, I want to show the foolishness of attempts at controlling booze.  As if pouring all of the beer out, would prevent someone from making more.  

For my third image, I chose a smiling Al Capone with a big fat cigar in his mouth.  I chose this picture to show Capone almost gloating over his success.  His facial expression is almost gloating, and he is dressed in a nice suit. I want it to seem like Capone is almost laughing at prohibition, and the first two images. This image is supposed to inspire loathing, at this repugnant man who profited off of violent crime.    

My fourth picture is the emotional hammer. After the first 3 images set the stage, this bloody picture shows the true consequences of prohibition.   This is a disgusting scene with bodies and blood strewn, and I want my audience to feel that disgust as well as horror that such a thing could happen.  I want people now to feel the same way that people who saw the image when it happened felt.  The St. Valentines day Massacre, as it is called, seemed to be a breaking point for the prohibition movement, because it showed people the horrific things that prohibition can inspire.  

The fifth picture is the last in a sequence.  This image is of a newspaper headline in 3 inch letters stating “Prohibition ends at last.”  The headline seems to have a “thank god” kind of relief to it.  I want this image to inspire hope and relief.  Hope, because American’s were able to overcome a deadly mistake and relief because I want my audience to feel the same relief that people back then felt; relief from the dangers of prohibition-fed gang violence.

My sixth image is the first in a new sequence that parallels the first sequence.  I want to show, by using similar images how similar the prohibition of alcohol is to the prohibition of other drugs.  For this I chose a poster which details the horrors of marijuana.  The poster promises “Murder! Insanity! Death!” but I did not choose the image for its portrayal of the effects of “Marihuana.”  I chose this to show the desire to limit this drug for the greater good. This image is a reflection of the “lips that touch alcohol” picture, and I chose each of them to show how each prohibition began with a genuine attempt to improve the country.  

My seventh image shows a police officer and police dog, standing in front of giant bags of marijuana, some cash, and a few guns.  I want people when viewing this image to think about how despite the best effort of the police, that marijuana is commonly available. I also want this image to inspire fear, because despite the calm and friendly image of pot dealers, there are many who traffic in large volumes and carry guns.  This is similar to the picture of beer being poured out from the early 20^th century. Both of them show that prohibiting drugs (alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, etc) does not stop people from selling or using them.

The eighth picture is of the modern day Al Capone.  Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera was recently listed in Forbes magazine as a billionaire.  This is a scary, powerful, and rich man who should scare people, because he is very dangerous.  I chose this image in parallel to the Capone image to show how similar these two men are.  Both have profited immensely of off prohibition, and both are willing to kill to keep there power. 

The ninth image is once again an emotional hammer. This is a sickening picture of decapitated heads. The heads are a consequence of the drug trade across the Mexican border. The image is truly nauseating to look at.  I want people to feel sick and to fear this kind of violence.  This mirrors the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, in its grotesqueness. I want people to see the comparison and to see that the underlying cause of both of these tragedies was prohibition.

The final image is missing. Simply a question mark stands in its place, because this is where the comparison of prohibitions ends.  While The American People saw the light and ended the alcohol prohibition during the Great Depression (bonus effect: revenue stream, hint, hint) the prohibition of other drugs continues. So does the violence.  Maybe American’s allow it because it is our poor brown neighbors to the south that are getting killed, instead of Midwesterners.  Or maybe, people do not remember the lessons of history.  Prohibition does not stop whatever it is trying to stop.  Prohibition makes criminals rich, wastes money on enforcement, and worst of all: kills innocent people.

I am going to end this analysis the same way that I end my Prezi, with a question: Why do we, as Americans, insist on trying (unsuccessfully) to curb peoples access to drugs, when it is clear that people can get drugs whenever they want, and the measures to limit those drugs foster an illegal drug trade that has killed thousands along the US/ Mexico border?

Link to Prezi

Image Sources:

1. “Lips that touch liquor…” 
http://officespam.chattablogs.com/archives/Lips-That-Touch-Liquor-Shall-Not-Touch-Ours.jpg

2.  Beer pouring

http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2010/06/09/sharron-angle-prohibition/

3.  Al Capone

http://www.paranormalknowledge.com/articles/al-capones-ghost.html

4.  St. Valentine’s Day Massacre:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/e-strategycom/1053322811/

5.  Prohibition ends at last

http://www.mutineermagazine.com/blog/2008/12/75th-anniversary-since-the-death-of-prohibition/

6. Murder! Insanity! Death!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Killerdrug.jpg

7.  Marijuana police bust:

http://www.funzu.com/index.php/crazy-pics/photos-of-a-mexican-drug-lords-home-after-being-raided-19052010.html

8. Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera

http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2009/03/14/mexican-drug-lord-makes-forbes-billionaire-list/

9. Heads…

http://mcauleysworld.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/heads.jpg

"More Intensity" or "For relaxing times, make it Suntory time"

 Well, at least Massumi decided to put down the thesaurus he attacked the introduction with.  Once Massumi starts to tone down the adjectives and gets down to his theory, it almost starts to make sense. But for me to understand it, I am going to try and unpack what he is trying to say.

Intensity.  Massumi uses this word a lot, and uses several different comparisons and descriptions to explain it.  I have gathered the different quotes using intensity from chapter 1 together to hopefully gain some perspective on his meaning.

...the strength or duration of the image's effect could be called its intensity." (p24)

"Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static - temporal and narrative noise.  It is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption.  It is like a temporal sink, a hole in time, as we conceive of it and narrativize it. It is not exactly passivity, because it is filled with motion, vibratory motion, resonation. (p26)

"Intensity is the unassimilable" (p27)

"For present purposes intensity be equated with affect." (p27)

"...emotion and affect -if affect is intenisty- follow different logics and pertain to different orders" (p27)

"Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that affect has waned, it is because affect is unqualified.  As such it is not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique." (p28)

My interpretation from this is that he is using intensity as a way to separate the similar ideas of emotion and affect.  For Massumi affect seems to be similar to emotion, but less definable.  As he says, emotion is "intensity owned and recognized." He also says that "intensity should be equated with affect."  But he also says that "emotion and affect... follow different logics"  What I take all of this to mean is that intensity seems to be like a pie.  A slice of the pie is emotion.  It is the defined, and understood part of intensity.  Affect is the rest of the pie.  We feel its effects, but we do not understand them, and we do not have words for them.

Speaking of words lacking, Massumi mentions (I think, but I cannot seem to find where I read it) the lack of appropriate language or words to describe affect.  So for a possible solution I propose: amotion.

Emotion. noun. (as defined by Merriam-Webster)
a:  the affective aspect of consciousness.
b:  a state of feeling 

c:  a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body 


Amotion: noun. (as defined by me)
a:  the affective aspect of sub-consciousness
b:  an unfeeling state 
c:  a unconscious mental reaction subjectively unknowingly experienced in a way that cannot be described, because it is undefinable

Brennan and Dumping

 (Late but better late than never)

Dumping is a term I hear often.  Sometimes when my fiance gets off the phone after talking with her mother she has the saddest look on her face.  When I ask her what's wrong, she shrugs "my mom just dumped all of her problems on me."  I then give her a big hug, and convince her that it is not her job to worry about her mom's anxieties.
But I am always amazed at how much her effect the conversation can have on her.  She can go from happy-go-lucky to depressed from a 10 minute conversation. My fiance is not prone to wild swings of emotion either.  Another interesting thing is that, as far as I can tell, her mother seems to end the benefit from the conversation (at least as far as I can tell from what my fiance says). 
Brennan seems to doubt whether "the quavering notes of language are sufficient to carry the unconscious from one being to another." (pp: 32-33)  But I tend to think that they are.  Again to use my fiance as an example (don't tell her please), conversations she has with her mother are not by words alone depressing.  But my fiance's mother's affect does seem to bring my fiance down emotionally.  Maybe the strength of the mother-child relationship enables the transmission of affect more.  Indeed, chapter 2 in Brennan deals extensively with this dynamic, because of the power of this relationship. 
But I (as stated earlier) am able to sometime overcome her motherly induced depression by talking to her and hugging her.  But I am most likely transmitting my affect onto her as well, which (sometimes) is able to overcome the affect dumping by her mother.
This is something that has puzzled me for a while, and if Brennan is correct then I think I finally understand it.
I am going to stop before I get even more personal than I already have.  I do not know if I am reading this correctly, because as several other people have pointed out, this is incredibly tedious to read.  But if I am, Brennan makes some very interesting points, and I am inclined to believe her based on my own life experience. 

written pathetic

This is my appeal to stop deep water Oil drilling.  I was recently fortunate to sit next to a scientist on a plane who was studying the impact of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill that happened 22 years ago.  He expressed the severe and long lasting devastation that occurred there.  His description of the impact on salmon and trout species inspired my thoughts about the human impact of such disasters.  I want to tie in the continued devastation in Alaska with the oil spill in the gulf.  I hope to inspire people to persuade our government that this is not the solution to our energy needs.  The risk is not worth the reward in such situations.

 here it is

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uf_pJ5Qe6_i0ebWIxL79whnEe-lxIfIyyOFyZQ2oj_I/edit?hl=en&authkey=CIfCo8wO#

2 thoughts on George Kennedy

2 thoughts on Kennedy

First, this article brings to mind an idea that has long perplexed me. Why does a poorly delivered, great speech seem less effective than a well delivered, average speech?
Kennedy says,"The faculty of rhetoric, more than anything else in nature, is probably responsible for the development of individual personality, and thus in the highest forms of animal life, of a sense of selfhood. The basic reason for this is that rhetoric is expressive of the integrity of the individual."
This helps explain why (at least to me) the quality of a speech is determined by the quality of the presentation almost as much as the quality of the actual words spoken.  It seems that our nature inherently prefers the quality of a speech that is delivered by a individual of integrity. (at least if I can claim that personal integrity has a correlation to speech quality in the eyes of the audience).

Second, feral pigs and immature elephants.

"Among higher animals,
rhetorical skills are transmitted culturally by imitation and leaming,
not genetically"

I was watching a TV show about wild pigs the other day, and it mentioned that pigs, when they escape, can turn feral really quickly.  This was really surprising to me. So I googled 'feral pigs' and Wikipedia told me that all sorts of animals can go feral if they escape the other herd.  Then I thought about what Kennedy said about rhetorical skills being transmitted "culturally by imitation and learning" and I wondered if the feral pigs are just pigs who started to forget the rhetoric of the herd (or flock or whatever masses of pigs are called). 
Then I started to think about this other nature show I watched about young elephants who were raised without parent elephants on a nature preserve.  When these elephants reach adolescents they start acting like total 'shits' and pick fights and attack other animals and people. They become out of control teenage elephants, because they do not have older elephants there to tell them what to do and how to act. Again it seems that there is a rhetoric missing for these animals which, is normally provided by the elders.  It's almost as if elephants legendary docility is a learned behavioral rhetoric from older elephants.  What do y'all think?