Adaptability & Cyclability
I’m only 31, but I think I’ve started to understand why old people are so resistant to change. I’ve realised that even small transitions, like from uni semester to holidays and then back again, have begun to knock me around much moreso than they would have five years ago. A few late nights, a few sleep-ins, a few lazy days doing nothing, and all of a sudden I’ve slipped out of a routine and I’m having trouble getting back in.
It’s a big contrast, considering that I used to pride myself on flexi-sleep. I used to be able to exist quite happily for up to two weeks (on my own delirious reckoning) with an absolute minimum of sleep (maybe two hours’ a night), and then put in a couple of sixteen-hour specials and be back on my feet again, feeling no ill effects. Or at least, I say there were no ill effects. It might have been that they were carefully disguised beneath my own fascination with the idea of a jazz musician’s lifestyle. Still, suffice it to say that it never used to bother me if I knew that I had some bizarre hours coming up. These days, as much as I enjoy my Thursday night gig that finishes at 1:30am, I know deep down that it’s going to take me most of the weekend to recover.
On an unrelated note, I’ve been having some thoughts about road safety. I’m going to start cycling from Brunswick to Bundoora four days a week (notoriously un-permissive weather permitting), and this has elicited a bit of concern from my nearest and dearest. They’re concerns that I share, of course - I’m as committed to my own continued physical integrity as anyone. I went over all these thoughts before I ever decided to buy a new bike and a set of panniers and embark on this campaign of cycle-commuting. But I’ve had to gather all these thoughts together again in order to rationalise my decision to people who would rather see me do my commute encased in a comforting coccoon of plastic and steel.
First of all, I reason, it’s important to separate the things you have control over from the things you don’t. In the case of cycling, there’s a lot that you can control (or at least, should control). I’ve been cycling without any significant mishaps for over twenty years, so I don’t think it’s an outrageous conceit to claim that I’m fairly familiar with the hazards of the road and how to avoid them. There are a lot of things that I see other cyclists doing that make me cringe. Some things are obvious (not riding past parked cars at speed unless you can give clearance to the dickhead who’s going to open his door in front of you), others not so (like making sure you get to the front of the intersection when the lights are red so that you can get out in front of the traffic where they can all see you). There’s probably a fair bit of experience and intuition that comes into this as well. The awareness of vehicles approaching dangerously from behind is something that’s not that easy to describe, but it’s certainly real, and it’s often saved me from a risky situation.
Still, anyone who takes to the road in any vehicle has to acknowledge that there’s some chance that they won’t reach their destination. Or, for that matter, anyone who goes by foot or takes public transport. Getting on and off trams in Melbourne is incredibly hazardous, and most of us who live here have experienced near misses doing it. Riding a bike is obviously no exception. People do get killed, sometimes in circumstances that were beyond their control.
It’s easy to be frightened for cyclists. Mean drivers in fast cars sometimes don’t seem to give a shit whether we live or die. We’re out there, weak and vulnerable, an unprotected body pedalling for dear life amidst the growling mass of aggression that is city traffic. Without making any claims to immortality or special protection from freakish circumstances, though, I’d like to suggest that a safe cyclist can probably be about as safe as a safe driver.
On the downside, you’re clearly less protected on a bike. Whatever hits you, hits you, and we’re not built with crumple zones. Also, you’re less visible, so there’s less chance of a driver being able to actively avoid you.
Those things sound scary, but they need to be balanced against the upsides, the safety advantages that cycling can have over driving. You’re travelling much more slowly, you have much greater manoeuvrability and a much shorter stopping distance. That straight away eliminates a lot of the dangers that car drivers face routinely. For instance, not too many cyclists get killed by hitting a stationary object like a tree or a light post, something that kills a lot of drivers. Cyclists are much more able to get themselves to the safest part of the road. They’re almost never involved in head-on collisions, because they’re nowhere near the centre line. They will almost never be rear-ended at the traffic lights, because they will a) be too close to the left of the road to be hit, and b) probably have other stationary cars behind them which they have already cycled around.
By far the biggest dangers for cyclists are unexpected things emerging from the side of the road. Car doors are an obvious one. The answer there is to give them clearance whenever possible, even when that means slowing down traffic behind you for the ten seconds it takes to get past. If you can’t give them clearance, slow right down and watch hard. Travelling slowly, a bike has a tiny stopping distance, so you should be alright, but just in case, be prepared to turn into the hazard if a door does open, to ensure that if hit you fall towards the car and not towards passing traffic. Also, you need to be prepared to break road rules in circumstances where it’s safer to do so. I know that car drivers sometimes get shitty when they see cyclists doing things that are, strictly speaking, illegal. All I can say is that if the road rules were designed with bikes in mind, it wouldn’t be necessary. Things being as they are, I’m quite happy to disobey the rules as long as I’m not compromising anyone else’s safety (which I never do). I’m not prepared to indulge sanctimoniousness on anyone’s part when it comes to protecting my own safety, so bugger you, I’ll ride on the footpath if that’s the safest thing to do.
(By the way, I’m not condoning the activities of those cyclists do compromise other people’s safety. But I don’t think cyclists should be banned from footpaths just because of the activities of a few reckless cycle couriers.)
Yes, so on the one hand there are these ways in which cycling is more dangerous than driving, and on the other hand there are ways in which cycling is safer, providing that it’s done sensibly. Neither mode of transport can guarantee you against an early death, but which is safer? I don’t know, but I’m not prepared to accept that being in a car necessarily makes you safer, just by virtue of the fact that it looks safer.
You Know What It’s About
Okay, here’s my take on the war in Iraq.
You’d think that someone like me, who has been (let’s face it) an anti-American from way back, would have been thrilled at this groundswell of Bush-hating. Doesn’t this mean that the masses have finally started to agree with me?
Kind of, but the trouble is that I’ve moved on. Not that I’m any less critical of American foreign policy, not that I’m any less a hater George Bush and all that he stands for. The thing is, I’ve learned just enough to realise that I don’t understand what’s going on. I can see the results, I know that it’s bad, but I can no longer pretend to be able to find those “root causes” that we of the let’s-change-the-world ilk like to seek out. The only trouble with getting angry at George Bush is that George Bush is not the problem. In a way, even hating the man is buying into the propaganda about him. To believe in George Bush the Evil One is to believe in George Bush the All Powerful One. If you believe in the power of Bush, then there’s actually a comfort in that, because he’s an elected leader. (Okay, he was elected by hanging chads in a democracy that’s tainted by coroporate dollars, but some democracy is probably better than none). To hold GWB responsible for this war is, in some sense, to hold the voters of America responsible, and they could still vote him out.
Let’s run this idea up the mast: if Al Gore had won the last presidential election, would the situation have been any different? If you believe that it would, then you’re placing a high estimate on the power of democracy (dimples notwithstanding).
This war will take hundreds of billions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money and channel it towards military hardware manufacturers and suppliers. Hundreds of billions. It’s easy for those sort of numbers to be glossed over. Imagine if you were busking, and every man, woman and child on the whole Earth was standing around watching. And imagine that each and every one of them reached into their pocket and pulled out twenty-five US dollars and put it in your banjo case. You could change all that money at the bank and hand out $100,000 Australian dollars to every man, woman and child in Melbourne, and still have about $30 billion left over for a hotdog and a donut.
You see? Even constructing the most extravagant example I could imagine, I was still left with $30 billion at the end. None of us has a model for understanding those sorts of figures. That’s why, I think, we can be duped into underestimating the sort of power that this sort of cash can wield. And we haven’t even started talking about the oil yet …
George Bush? Spokesperson, puppet, actor, who knows? The only thing you can be sure of is that he didn’t come up with this idea.
Notes From a Park Bench in Moorabbin
We’re playing at a jazz festival in a pub. We’ve done our first set, and there are two other bands playing before we go back on. When I heard the news, the first thing that I thought was: great, how am I going to go about escaping from this scene until it’s time to play again? And that’s led me to think about what it takes to really be happy as a jazz musician. Wouldn’t you think that someone who really loved this music would be happy to hang around, no matter how noisy and uncomfortable the surroundings, to listen to other people play? It doesn’t help that the other bands (not to mention the one that I’m playing with) suck. But even so, I know of plenty of people who would be quite happy hanging around listening to it and soaking it all in. Whereas I’m much happier sitting on a park bench in the sun typing blog entries. What does that tell you?
First of all, let me say that I enjoy doing jazz gigs. Only very seldom do I leave the house on my way to a gig without looking forward to it. What I’m trying to do here is to have a look at some of the reasons why that enjoyment is not enough to convince me that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
In deciding to study law, I (implicitly) decided that a career as a jazz musician cannot give me everything that I want out of my career. That’s fair enough - after all, many people would say that there’s more to life than playing music. But I also wonder if it’s a life that I’m somehow intrinsically unsuited for. As much as I enjoy doing gigs (which, as I’ve said, is mostly), there are aspects of that life that I don’t think I could ever feel totally comfortable with. The noisy, crowded atmosphere that surrounds so much of the work, for instance. Thankfully smoke is not such a problem any more, but there’s still the physical and mental strain that comes with spending extended periods of time surrounded by people, surrounded by noise, not being able to leave, not feeling free to express any dissatisfaction or give any outward sign of how irritating I find it. Would I still want to be confronting that in 20 years’ time?
I’d also really have to like obsessing over music, because most musicians do. Most of them don’t think there’s anything strange about living life around a CD collection. Most of them enjoy talking about it, enjoy being expert at it. It all makes me feel just a bit uneasy. I mean, I do listen to a lot of music, and I have listened to a lot, and I do know a lot about it. I just don’t really like to go on about it. To be honest, I find it a bit boring. I’m happy to play it, and I’m happy to listen to it (if it’s good, and if the environment is comfortable), but I really don’t get off on discourse about music, not like some people. I always find myself inclined to change the subject.
Lots of people are passionate about music, and I think that’s great. I don’t want to sound as if I’m down on anyone who wants to do music for a career, wants to obsess about it, to be surrounded by walls of CD’s, to spend all their time thinking about it and talking about it. They might not be a riot at parties, but that’s not the end of the world. It’s more about what makes them happy, and if that means music, music and more music, then I have no problem with that at all. (My only caveat is the extent to which people in that position can sometimes be inclined to appoint themselves dictators of the artistic agenda, but that’s a topic for another post).
I love music too, but there’s only so much of my life that I’m prepared to give over to it. The passionate obsession is missing. I’ve tried living my life around it, and it hasn’t worked out. What I’m going through at the moment is a process of ruling boundaries around the section of my life that I still devote to music. So far, the boundaries haven’t been very substatial - the odd gig knocked back for the sake of an important lecture, the odd band practice missed to write an essay, that sort of thing. Unfortunately music isn’t the sort of career for which it’s is easy to specify your own hours. I can’t just say I’d like to spend two-and-a-half days on music and the rest of the time on other things. But I can start (and have started) to challenge the assumption that used to underlie my professional life: that music has to come first no matter what.
Murdering Babies
There’s nothing like infanticide to spark a spirited discussion. And to bring out some beliefs that you didn’t even realise you had.
I’ve been developing this idea (which, quite probably, has been better developed elsewhere by someone else but I haven’t read it yet) about ethics and about the simplified way in which ethicists seem to go about balancing people’s interests. Specifically, about the way in which they seem to regard (perhaps for simplicity’s sake) people as having their own interest which can be separated from everyone else’s. For instance, in discussions about infanticide and the rightness or wrongness of killing severely disabled infants, it tends to be an assumption that the interests of the infant itself should be the primary, and perhaps the only, consideration. You shouldn’t, they say, start asking questions about how the family feel, or how the staff in the hospital feel, etc etc, but only whether the baby, if it is allowed to live, will lead a life that is worthwhile to it. I can see why they want to argue that, but I think there are some realities that they’re not facing.
Let’s say a baby is lying there, chronically ill, and it’s going to die within a few weeks. The nurses, prohibited from sedating or killing it, are forced to stand there, looking at the poor little bugger crying and screaming, in obvious distress. But here’s the thing: whose distress is the greater? The baby, who is experiencing physical pain and distress that she would (presumably) like to go away? Or the nurses who are forced to stand there and watch this poor little innocent creature suffer? It’s impossible to say, but I don’t think it’s out of the question to suggest that the nurses are suffering more, or at least as much. Why are the nurses suffering? They’re not in any physical pain themselves. Their own interests are not being impeded in any way whatsoever. But I’m pretty sure that most of us would concede that they’d be going through hell.
This is a pretty simple, pretty common scenario, but think about the position of the ethicist who believes that only the baby’s interests count. Already it’s starting to look oversimplified. Let’s say that the nurses, given their choice, would end the baby’s life. Would their position really be determined by the baby’s own interests, asserting that the child itself would not want to stay alive and continue to suffer? Or would it stem from their own interest in ending their own trauma, given that that trauma is itself derived from images of the baby suffering? All of a sudden we can start to see an interconnectedness between the interests of the child and the interests of the nurses caring for the child, such that they can’t easily be separated.
So here’s the thing: total hermits aside, everyone in the world is connected in some way to other people in the world, who are themselves connected to their own group of people, and so on. If I was to become terminally and painfully ill, the suffering that I experienced personally as a result of the illness itself would be only a small part of the equation. People who had to care for me would suffer, not only (or even primarily) from the impact on their own lives of having to spend that time looking after me, but from the emotional stress of watching me suffer. I, in turn, would see the negative impact that my illness was having on people that I cared about, and I would feel worse, making them feel worse. In a sense, the fact that the illness was located in my body would be incidental to the fact that this whole group of people would begin to suffer. We know that emotional pain causes just as much suffering as (if not more than) physical pain, so why do we deny its existence or write it off as an insignificant side-effect?
I’ll tell you why: because there’s this morbid fear of people being killed because their illness is inconvenient to society. The thing is that it’s a process of empathy and compassion that causes suffering to spread from the affected individual to the people around him. It seems to me that it’s actually a pretty good system. That the welfare of society would be better served by respecting and valuing this network of compassion, rather than by isolating one individual on the network and trying to assess their interests separately. It’s not in any individual’s interest to be treated that way. It’s also not in any individual’s interest to try to regard their own interests separately, say for instance to get rid of an inconvenient relative, simply because they (pathological killers aside) would only suffer more as a result. If I’d decided to kill my mother when she started to get sick so that I didn’t have to put in the time to look after her, would I really have been better off? Of course not, even assuming that I’d gotten away with it. I would have been an emotional wreck, even moreso than I already was. I might have an interest in living a life unencumbered by a needy relative. But I have a much greater interest in living a life free from the emotional burden of having killed someone.
I know that this is not really approaching anything coherent. Still, I think it’s worth jotting down.
Arrow Head
The homicide test had this guy’s kid being grabbed by a neighbour when he (the kid) goes to retrieve a ball. Turns out Dad’s an archer, who goes ahead and shoots the next door neighbour in the head with an arrow as part of his attempt to get the kid back. The neighbour survives the shot in the head, but the ambulance crashes on the way to the hospital and the arrow goes in deeper and kills him.
I’m not sure what’s most bizarre - the story, the fact that someone comes up with the story, or the process that we have to go through to try to make sense (sic) of it all.
It’s funny, in the non-law studies that I’ve done so far, in history, philosophy, politics, it’s kind of granted that what you’re doing is looking for the truth. It almost seems like the law is different. It’s as if the law has its own version of the truth, handed down through generations of bewigged and berobed bozos, to whose opinion the whole profession is obliged to bend. It’s not that serious questions don’t get asked about whether that body of law is right or wrong, it’s just that it’s seen as irrelevant, so much more obiter dicta that students are welcome to be interested in but will probably never be examined on. What matters is your subscription an archival body of decision, and you’re best off saving your empirical inquiry for your own time.
So law is its own truth, or at least it claims to be. There are those who even suggest that it’s a superior truth. Maybe this bizarre paradigm seeps beneath the skin of lawyers and becomes part of their reality. Maybe that’s why they’re renowned for having no identifiable conscience. Ask me again in four years and I might be able to tell you.
This Week
This week I’ve got six gigs, a homicide test and a bioethics essay due. Not much else is going to happen.
Trial by Intimidation
I went to the Magistrates Court for the first time on Friday. I was there to make a start on an assignment. It was a waste of time in that respect, but I’m still glad that I went, if only because it got me fired up. I think it’s worth getting fired up, sometimes.
The thing that really struck me about the court was the mismatch. On one side was the court, all polished walnut and chrome, all bowing and scraping and stand please and silent please and your worship and if it please the court. On the other side is some poor drug-addicted semi-literate no-hoper standing there having one of the worst days of his life.
A lot of people would probably say that it’s a good thing that this guy is having the worst day of his life. After all, he’s committed some sort of crime or other, so maybe it’s a good idea if he gets to stand there shitting himself for a while. It might stop him doing it again.
I’ve got two problems with this. First of all, the intimidation applies to innocent people, as well. You can front the Magistrates Court as an accused without having done anything wrong. Why should your punishment start even before you’re convicted?
The other problem is more serious. It would be fair to say that most of the people I saw on Friday who were in trouble with the law were people who are not really functioning as part of the community. There are certain skills that most of us have little or no trouble with. Things like paying the rent, staying sober, staying off herion, staying out of bad relationships, not stealing things. These people had a hell of a lot of trouble with things like that. Most of them seemed to have live life in a downward spiral of some sort. Most of them, I’m sure, have never experienced anything like the sort of life that we, the housework-doing, degree-studying, job-holding-down, licence-holding, bill-paying part of the community enjoy.
It’s not that I felt sorry for them (although I did). It’s that there’s a problem that’s being made worse by all the la-di-da patronising bullshit. That is, the problem that these guys need to be able to see themselves as a part of the community before you can expect them to abide by its laws. As long as the community is presented to them (via the justice system) as this high-handed dispenser of humiliation, they can probably be forgiven for sticking with what they’ve got.
It wouldn’t take that much to make a big difference. Sorry, but there’s no need for the magistrate to sit up above everyone else in the courtroom as if she’s a deity. There’s no need for everyone to bow as they enter and leave. There’s no need for everyone to stand when the magistrate enters. There’s no need for anyone to be called “Your Worship”. How can you expect any offender to see themselves as an equal citizen with equal rights and responsibilities when you insist on treating them like bad little schoolchildren? (For the record, I don’t even treat bad little schoolchildren like that).
Interestingly, having had all these thoughts, I then pulled out the books tonight to do some study and found myself reading a few articles (as part of my course reading) that more-or-less said what I’ve just said. I must admit, it’s been a welcome surprise that the LaTrobe law school is prepared to be openly critical of the legal system. My experience of lawyers (which has primarily consisted of playing jazz at their wanky cocktail parties) had led me to expect large unhealthy doses of self-reverence from the teaching staff, instead of which it feels like something of a hotbed of dissent and reform. (Okay, that’s probably overstating it … )