E-mail from anonymous moron, with my comments interspersed in green:

Hey Bunny, From your past blogs I noticed that I consistently don’t like you. [Please excuse me for not caring.] Your always grouchy. Why are you always grouchy? [I'm not always grouchy. You should see me with ice cream in a cone.] Why so negative? [Since I'm too "negative" for you, perhaps instead you should  write to Pinky. She has very good manners and won't actually tell you what a douchebag you are.] Maybe someone forgot to brush you ha ha. [Ha ha... *bored*] So my question is this the Pinky Show is always pointing out what’s wrong with the whole wolrd but you don’t ever provide solutions to anything. It’s a lot harder to come up with a solution and easy to complain. That’s what I had to say. [That's not a question but alright...]

Okay, this is something Pinky and I used to disagree on a lot, especially when we first started working on the Pinky Show. We couldn’t agree on whether or not at the end of each episode we should include spelled-out “solutions” for people to take away. Pinky’s position is that human beings are intelligent and flexible enough to come up with all kinds of possible solutions; my position is that there’s a lot of stupid people out there and it wouldn’t hurt to spoon-feed them answers. So we’ve had many, many conversations and arguments about which way to go.

To make a long story short, basically we agreed to focus more on the process of asking questions (short episodes) or doing structural analyses (longer episodes) without wrapping each episode with a set of “solutions”. The rationale for this is that, in general, we think too many people tend to fixate on “solving” problems they don’t actually understand. By eliminating or minimizing the solution part, we’re hoping to direct more attention towards understanding the nature of problems. So, it is a calculated trade-off. Pinky has a tremendous amount of confidence in people’s ability to produce fair and sensible solutions to a problematic situation when the situation is seen for what it really is. (For all you postmodern losers out there asking yourself “But what is really real?” - forget it, you’re hopeless) Personally I am less impressed with human beings’ track record regarding fairness and logic; I’m more interested in the open nature of Pinky Show episodes because I think that lets it function a little better as a sort of ethical Rorschach test.

Next e-mail, this one from Patricia:

Hi Pinky, I enjoy your show but I am curious why you only criticize America? Why don’t you have any episodes about Chinas treatment of Tibet? What about suppression of Buddhist dissent in Myanmar?…

Thanks Patricia, I’ll respond to your question even though you weren’t talking to me. Simplified answer: 1) Our focus is America because we live here. 2) Because 60% of our viewers are U.S. Americans. 3) The most direct way for us to reduce the total amount of violence circulating globally is to stop/reduce America’s contribution to the international violence-economy (unfortunately America is #1 when it comes to cultivating and exporting many forms of violence). Which isn’t to say that violence perpetrated in other places is any less worthy of criticism - we’re happy to note that there are many others out there criticizing away and I’m sure they’ll keep going till the cows come home. For ourselves, our main goal is to tidy up our own house before going over to someone else’s house to vacuum, dust-mop, and so on. Not that “we” actually own this house, but that is a whole other can of worms.

End of Bunny Mailbag for today. See you all later.

Bunny

Pinky & Bunny have assigned me the responsibility of marketing the I Want To Punch Your Face book. I don’t know anything about marketing so if any of you have ideas about how to market an anti-violence picture book please send comments to me care of the info@ e-mail. Click the book’s cover (below) for more info about the book.

In other “news”, recently I found a very interesting PBS/Bill Moyers interview of Dr. William K. Black on YouTube. It’s a nice compact summary of how the financial industry imploded and the logic behind the subsequent bailout. I highly recommend it.

Posted by Mimi.

One of my heroes is Aung San Suu Kyi.

After nearly two decades of almost continuous imprisonment she is in imminent danger of being re-sentenced to another 5 years of confinement. The international community needs to show the government of Myanmar that we are all witnesses to their actions - please help us flood their offices with demands for her release! The Amnesty International website has a pre-written letter that you can send if you don’t want to (or don’t have time to) write your own personalized letter. It literally takes only 1 minute - please go here: These letter-sending campaigns often really do make a difference!

Thank you,
pinky

Please don’t mind me - just parking some resources here for a presentation I’ll be doing next week. The following illustrations are from Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis’s classic Schooling in Capitalist America (1976):

Bowles & Gintis, Figure 5-1.

Bowles & Gintis, Table 7-1.

Bowles & Gintis, Figure 8-1.

Bowles & Gintis, Figure 5-4.

The first page of Chapter 1 from the same book:

Those who take meat from the table
Preach of contentment…
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come…
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For the ordinary.
- Bertolt Brecht, 1937

“Go West, young man!” advised Horace Greeley in 1851. A century later, he might have said: “Go to college!”

The Western Frontier was the nineteenth-century land of opportunity. In open competition with nature, venturesome white settlers found their own levels, unfettered by birth or creed. The frontier was a way out - out of poverty, out of dismal factories, out of the crowded Eastern cities. The frontier was the Great Escape.

Few escaped. Railroad companies, mine owners, and before long, an elite of successful farmers and ranchers soon captured both land and opportunity. The rest were left with the adventure of making ends meet. But throughout the nineteenth century, the image of the frontier sustained the vision of economic opportunity and unfettered personal freedom in an emerging industrial system offering little of either.

And now a couple of old quotes from the same book.

The government of schools… should be arbitrary. By this mode of education we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have not known or felt their own wills til they were one and twenty years of age. (Benjamin Rush, 1786)

In order to compensate for lack of family nurture, the school is obliged to lay more stress upon discipline and to make far more prominent the moral phase of education. It is obliged to train the pupil into habits of prompt obedience to his teachers and the practice of self-control in its various forms. (from a statement signed by seventy-seven college presidents and city and state school superintendents and published by the U.S. government in 1874)

Blocking exercise:

1) Time spent in life. (sleeping, eating, transportation, TV/movies, etc.)
2) Time spent at work.
3) Areas of study and consciousness.
4) Participation in Dominant Economies.

And finally, two points of reference that I’ll be using in the talk (from Terry Eagleton’s Ideology: an introduction):

1) Ideology is a group of ideas characteristic of a particular social class which help to legitimate a dominant political power over other social classes.

2) The process of legitimating these ideas generally follow one or more of the following strategies: promoting agreeable beliefs and values; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge them; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself (a.k.a. ‘mystification’).

~ pinky

¡Hola! A couple of days ago we received an e-mail from a Mr. Hernández of elPeriódico de Guatemala (a daily newspaper) informing us that he wrote a short article about our We Love Museums… episode, as this past Monday was “International Museum Day”. We are always very happy to be written about, but to make an appearance in a Guatemalan newspaper is extra special for us since we got to meet some of the H.I.J.O.S. people last year in Slovenia (we miss you!!!). We have been doing some studying about the history of Guatemala since then and also (slooowly) trying to learn Spanish.

Here is the article - please click on the picture below to open a bigger PDF version.

Or you can read a translated-to-English (thanks Google) version by clicking here.

Thank you to Mr. Hernández! The elPeriódico de Guatemala website is at: http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/

Take care,
pinky

[ note from Kim: I have never seen my face that big before! Wow! I feel famous! ]

Last Sunday afternoon Bunny and I were wandering around a school campus, just passing some time before a meeting we were going to got started. We were walking under a tree when I heard a sound - pat!

Bunny: Hey, that bird just fell out of the tree.

It was a very tiny bird, looked like she had just hatched pretty recently. She was lying on the grass, not able to walk or speak.

Me: Do you think we should feed her?

Bunny: I think she’s going to die.

Me: Maybe we can find a paper cup or a little box or something and put her in there.

Bunny: She just fell 20 feet onto the ground. I think we should prepare her for death. Oops, she’s dead.

I looked at the bird again and she’d stopped moving.

Bunny had some napkins in her backpack so I put the tiny bird on some napkins and then loosely wrapped her up. I could feel through the napkins her body was still warm. The ground in the area is hard and sandy and I didn’t have anything to dig with, so I just put the small bundle under a small pile of leaves next to the school building.

Me: Is this disrespectful?

Bunny: Worms and ants have to eat.

(I’m glad she didn’t ask to eat the bird)

Today, out of the blue, I receive a postcard from my friend. It had a quote on it:

“Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world; a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. ~ Buddha

I’d been wondering to myself why a tiny bird would be born into this world, only to leave just a few days later. But I suppose this is all of us.

pinky

Apparently there is some anecdotal evidence coming to light that President Bush actually did have a really good reason to invade Iraq: God told him to do it. He (Bush - not God) was very determined to fight the forces of Satan and rid the world of God’s enemies in the Middle East. Somewhere in this whole bizarre story are Satan’s allies, Gog and Magog.

“In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated… In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on ‘a mission from God’ in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.”

Interesting? Read more here.

Posted by Bunny.

[ note from Kim: I wanted Pinky to draw Gog wearing a fur coat but she didn't do it. ]