Comfort Food: No one brings dinner when your daughter is an addict. Larry M. Lake, Slate, November 8, 2013
Friends talk about cancer and other physical maladies more easily than about psychological afflictions. Breasts might draw blushes, but brains are unmentionable. These questions are rarely heard: “How’s your depression these days?” “What improvements do you notice now that you have treatment for your ADD?” “Do you find your manic episodes are less intense now that you are on medication?” “What does depression feel like?” “Is the counseling helpful?” A much smaller circle of friends than those who’d fed us during cancer now asked guarded questions. No one ever showed up at our door with a meal.
Stephen Colbert schooled Fox News hard: Comedy, Bill O’Reilly and the exposure of right-wing patriotism lies, Sophia A. McClennen, Salon, December 12, 2014
Consider this: When Colbert first launched his new show as a spinoff from “The Daily Show” our nation was awash in the culture of fear that followed the attacks of 9/11. In those pre-torture report days anyone who criticized the Bush administration was immediately accused of treason. Those who thought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ill-conceived and immoral, who staunchly opposed torture, and who believed our nation depended on an active, inquisitive and critical citizenry were silenced. In those days it was common to hear of journalists and professors losing their jobs because they had dared to question the administration and ask more of the media.
That was the atmosphere when Colbert took the stage in 2006 to roast President Bush to his face at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Standing only a few feet away from the president, Colbert dealt a scathing blow to the hubris of the administration and the docile media that covered it. The moment was a real watershed in our nation’s history, because it was the only time in the entire eight years of the Bush administration that anyone had directly critiqued Bush in such detail to his face.
How’d he get away with it? Well, one way he did it was by being a comedian. Behind the mask of satire Colbert was able to impersonate a Bush-loving pundit. He wasn’t disagreeing with anything Bush did — he was exaggerating his enthusiasm. He was out-Bushing Bush. As he liked to put it: “George Bush: Great president or greatest president?” Thus one of his favorite ploys was to play the role of the uber-patriot. Colbert wasn’t going to let Bush and his cronies dictate what it meant to love your country: He was going to outdo them.
78-year-old Iowa legislator is prosecuted for having sex with his wife, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, Eugene Volokh, Washington Post, December 11, 2014 [Volokh makes reference to “unrevoked consent” in this piece, which I generally find to be an extremely problematic concept, but I think he raises a number of valid and important points.]
If the law criminalizes sex among lovers altogether once one of them has become mentally incapacitated, however warm their relationship was beforehand, that’s a lifetime constraint. And it’s not just a constraint once the incapacitation sets in. It’s a burden even on people who are not yet incapacitated but who know they are getting there, and who are upset that for many years to come they would be unable to give this sort of pleasure to their life partners — or to get this pleasure from them. If you were facing such a mental decline, would you want to know that the law will “protect” you from your beloved husband or wife this way?
