Greek riots: ritual outlet for frustrated nation

Christopher Torchia reports for Forbes:

A stun grenade exploded in the hand of a Greek riot policeman, severing a finger. Police and demonstrators ceased combat and scoured the debris-strewn street, uniting in a frantic search for the missing digit.

They found it. The finger was rushed off in a wet towel to a hospital, where doctors reattached it to the injured man. The brief scene of solidarity, witnessed by an Associated Press photographer, was one of many twists in a wild drama on the stage of central Athens this week.

[ ... ]

Greeks had indulged in another contained eruption, heavy with choreography and symbolism, to convey disgust with their political class. The culture of protest and violence by a hardened minority is now a routine form of collective therapy.

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Musical Innerlube: Rage Against The Machine - Sleep Now In The Fire

In Defense of Flogging

By Peter Moskos, The Chronicle of Higher Education

A crazy idea came from a dinner in New Orleans. I had cold-called (or whatever the e-mail equivalent is) a writer and his wife because I was a fan of his work and thought we had much in common. They were gracious enough to arrange a meal and treat me, without much justification, as a professional equal more than a stalker. The conversation turned to corporal punishment in public schools. They were amazed not that such a peculiarity existed in a city ripe with oddities, but that such illegal punishments were administered at the urging of and with the full consent of the students' parents.

"Fascinating," I drolly replied, but I wasn't shocked. If I'd learned one thing as a police officer patrolling a poor neighborhood, it was the working- and lower-class populations' great fondness for corporal punishment. No punishment is as easy or seemingly satisfying as a physical beating. I learned this not because I beat people, but because the good citizens I swore to serve and protect often urged me to do so. It wasn't hard for me to resist (I liked my job, and besides, I wasn't raised that way), but I agreed that many of the disrespectful hoodlums deserved a beating. Why? Because, as the old-school thinking goes, when people do wrong, they deserve to be punished.

For most of the past two centuries, at least in so-called civilized societies, the ideal of punishment has been replaced by the hope of rehabilitation. The American penitentiary system was invented to replace punishment with "cure." Prisons were built around the noble ideas of rehabilitation. In society, at least in liberal society, we're supposed to be above punishment, as if punishment were somehow beneath us. The fact that prisons proved both inhumane and miserably ineffective did little to deter the utopian enthusiasm of those reformers who wished to abolish punishment.

Incarceration, for adults as well as children, does little but make people more criminal. Alas, so successful were the "progressive" reformers of the past two centuries that today we don't have a system designed for punishment. Certainly released prisoners need help with life—jobs, housing, health care—but what they don't need is a failed concept of "rehabilitation." Prisons today have all but abandoned rehabilitative ideals—which isn't such a bad thing if one sees the notion as nothing more than paternalistic hogwash. All that is left is punishment, and we certainly could punish in a way that is much cheaper, honest, and even more humane. We could flog.

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A new book explores the highly peculiar legacy of Wilhelm Reich

From The Great Proselytizer of Orgasm by Peter D. Kramer:

Christopher Turner, author ofAdventures in the OrgasmatronToday when sex combines with politics, the likely result is humiliation. We think of the crotch shot, the Sofitel suite, the airport restroom stall, the stained blue dress. The sex, which we see as sleazy and compulsive, is a sign of a defective self: risk-prone, greedy, compartmentalized, deluded, and hypocritical.

It's hard, perhaps, to recall that once sex was—in the ideal—radical politics conducted by other means. When Wilhelm Reich coined the phrase "the sexual revolution," he meant transformation in every sphere: health, marriage, economics, morality, and government. It was in sex, he believed, that we found the integrated self, liberated from the alienating culture and the authoritarian state. Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron is in part a report from that past, when sex held the promise of social reform. His book bears the subtitle, How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, but mostly what Turner offers is a sex-centered biography of Reich, the great proselytizer of orgasm.

Because of his belief in orgone, an imagined form of energy, Reich is now a figure of fun. (Orgasmatron is Woody Allen's name, in Sleeper, for a parody of Reich's orgone accumulator, a telephone booth-sized plywood and metal box said to store a healing and enlivening force.) But Reich is a fascinating, unfairly overlooked figure. If he had done nothing else, he would perhaps be known for the great work of his youth, Character Analysis, a book that forever changed the way psychotherapy is done. What he went on to do—crazily, confusingly—was to elaborate a dream of a society saved by sex.

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Women against sexism - the new French revolution

By John Costello, Independent

They may have a reputation for being skilful and sensuous lovers, but when it comes to sex it appears Frenchmen are more Benny Hill than Casanova.

Despite its reputation for cultural superiority and sexual sophistication, a tidal wave of revelations in the wake of the scandal surrounding former IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn has unmasked France as the dirty old man of Europe.

Since Strauss-Kahn was charged with sexually assaulting a Manhattan hotel maid, complaints against "casual" sexism in the country have rocketed an astounding 600%.

Women have been marching on the streets of Paris vowing to expose the pervasive macho culture in France, where sexism and abuse can thrive.

While Strauss-Kahn's alleged behaviour caused outrage, it was the reaction of prominent Frenchmen who questioned the victim's judgment and the seriousness of the charges that sparked the reaction from French feminists.

Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy claimed Strauss-Kahn had been "thrown to the dogs" and asked why had the maid entered his hotel suite alone and without knocking.

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