Newtopia | Issue #7 - January 2003: "Rights for All Creatures"

As the United States Supreme Court is wrestling this term with the question of whether "cross burners" can be convicted and imprisoned as felons, a former noose-dangling Southern politician just got a promotion because a fellow Southern politician was demoted after he made a "racially insensitive" remark at a birthday party for a really old Southern politician who used to be a segregationist. Real life, it seems, is sometimes stranger than fiction.

It seems safe to say that how a country treats its animals is a reflection of its political, economical, and cultural state. Regarding the United States, we've come a long way baby, no doubt.I'm thinking about chimpanzee sanctuaries, sexy mercenaries, and animal activism climbing out of the fringes and into mass consciousness. Yet for all the advancements, there's plenty of setbacks. The state of animal rights is as complicated as is our sometimes Jekyll and Hyde culture.

Wolves form tightly knit social communities; elephants cry and remember their ancestors. Humpback whales compose songs which they remember and add to year after year for their entire lives. Robins fall in love; dogs give their lives for their masters. In short, every virtue we used to think of as being uniquely human has been shown to occur in the world of non-human species.

...as we stand today, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, the existence of a total of 24% of the world's mammals, 12% of its birds, 25% of its reptiles, 21% of its amphibians, 30% of its fishes and 29% of its invertebrates (including insects, mollusks and crustaceans) have been listed as "Threatened"... ...which means, in the most common terms, that these species and subspecies run the risk of disappearing forever...

If a mind that is capable of simultaneously holding two contradictory thoughts is considered highly developed, what is the clinical definition of a mind that holds contradictory thoughts simultaneously without realizing they are contradictory? This question is not one of academic interest for it is directly relates to how the mind of George Bush -- and by default, the collective mind of the right wing of the Republican party -- seems to work

My image of Haiti has changed in recent years. Increasingly saddened by the violence and environmental desolation of a culturally rich nation, I am unable to share the beauty of my ancestral home with my child. It would be irresponsible of me, as a parent, to place my innocent and defenseless child in such danger. So what about the children that must live there everyday? Their future is dismal. We are the home of the free and the brave. We care about helping the helpless of the world. So how is it that we regularly repatriate Haitians who have crawled upon our shores right back to the persecution that they flee?

Social criticism today remains a necessary enterprise, an important form of questioning and challenging dominant social ideology and ruling political elites. Conditions commonly taken for granted in affluent societies are frequently lacking throughout the so-called third world. Social divisions within the rich countries are deepening alongside massive accumulation of wealth. The social critic needs to question conditions at home and abroad; by pointing out inter-relations and naming the social forces driving globalization as a political project, awareness and consciousness can be heightened, protest and progressive political action as a concrete possibility can be promoted.

The visage of those who care for values, although they are a minority. For them, Gandhi remains a colossal figure - larger, and taller, than Mt Everest, notwithstanding the fact that many of their own progeny, so to speak, have lost sight of his greatness. A posture that is symptomatic of what ails India, or the world, today - and, in particular, our inability to recognise true character and leadership.

The real reason you won't see an end to terror is that terror is a weapon with many uses. The terrorists use our fears to control us, but so do our leaders. Think about all of the new powers we have granted to our leaders and their agents, powers that we accept will probably be used against us in time. We've watched so many of our rights and freedoms get quashed, and we are basically okay with it because we know that the same rights are no longer in the hands of the terrorists. It's a question of power and it's a question of industry. If fear compels us to spend, and it offers significant new powers to the government, then why on earth would they ever want this ride to end?

From the shattered streets of Israel and the Occupied Territories comes a vivid account of one man's anguish and determination to make sense of a conflict seemingly without end. Living at the very heart of East Jerusalem, Henry Carse, writer, practical theologian, scholar, and father of four children living amidst the mayhem, ventures out to engage with Israeli and Palestinian friends alike to starkly reveal the desperation and hope that thrive in that barren place.

From the shattered streets of Israel and the Occupied Territories comes a vivid account of one man's anguish and determination to make sense of a conflict seemingly without end. Living at the very heart of East Jerusalem, Henry Carse, writer, practical theologian, scholar, and father of four children living amidst the mayhem, ventures out to engage with Israeli and Palestinian friends alike to starkly reveal the desperation and hope that thrive in that barren place.

Editor-in-Chief Charles Shaw tries to make sense of a senseless world and provide a blueprint for tomorrow.

13. State Sanctioned Murder

The current state of affairs in sex, relationships, and sexuality from a global, political and cultural perspective. All things cold, detached, multi-partnered and hedonistic.

Newtopia's resident mother hen chimes in on Motherhood and its role in the New World Order.

9. The Holy Mutter Choorch
10. On Being Too Fat

A monthly musing from our boys across the pond at CODE UNCUT MAGAZINE

When it's cold I want to cry. / Step across a checkered floor: / black and green. / Your feet are bare. /Your lines are soft and swallow light. / My head throbs and blurs the sounds: / the running water, / your tender voice. / They pour into my sleepy skull / and sink so still into the dark

red, red, blood red / against the darkest night / a hanging orb on high / missing a bitten bite

There is something positively glamorous about a raised handprint on white skin and that thrill, like a rock thrown into the well of your stomach when he pulls his fist back and you know that this time he won't hold it, this time its going to connect and connect and connect and you hit the carpet and so do his hands and the blows fall down like hail only not so cold but even harder.

A courier delivered the silver box today. My name is on the address label but I wait for him, knowing he will be more excited. He knifes the tape, then splits open the shaped white polystyrene and gazes at the ball-shaped white object nestled inside it. I am conscious that he has not looked so favorably at me for a long time.

The de-institutionalization of the 1980s would later bring an astounding amount of mentally ill people to the park. I suppose that's around the same time that the pond and its precariously inaccessible island were finally removed to prevent crime, when Reagan created so many of those new urban modern-day Neanderthals. Who knows what unspeakable things happened in that little island during those nights back then. If MacArthur Park was an old swampland during the late seventeenth century then it had now become an open-aired asylum and haven for the disturbed.

The world is alive. It is full of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures; in short, living is a sensual experience, from which it is possible to derive immense joy, and exercise great desire. In this magical novel, Jean Giono conjures the pastoral community of Gremone Plateau, and the sensory rich landscape in which it exists.

It has always been a delicate territory to tread - the parallels between science and religion. Besides, the very idea of such a 'bond,' albeit not all-encompassing, in terms of both precept and percept, rubs up people the wrong way - on both sides of the 'barrier.' Scientists, for obvious reasons, dislike the orientation of their work being guided by dogma - not inquiry, or data. Theologians, likewise, fear that attempts to connect religion to empirical study of the world would knock off-balance the very essence of faith itself. Result: a truly palpable stalemate in the all-too-familiar 'battle royal' to link the two great fields of study, or knowledge, that has existed for ages.

At the height of his directorial powers in the 1940s and 1950s, Elia Kazan was regarded as a big dynamo in a small carriage. As a semi-recluse in his nineties in the new millennium, many in Hollywood wish he would just get the last take over with. Kazan reminds too many industry people of too many things, and not all of them carry the dust of 50-year-old history. Typically, he has even survived considerably past receiving a controversial 1998 Lifetime Achievement Oscar that was supposed to have brought closure to decades of enmities and resentments. He has always been skilled at slipping through windows while doors are being slammed shut.

CinemaShrink Says, "In The Piano, as Ada sought Baine's help to return by horseback for her beloved piano left abandoned by her husband, Stewart, on an isolated beach, the camera hesitates for a moment on the eye of Baine's horse. What vision is being sought of the danger that's brewing as Ada breaks with convention? Why do we believe animals can see what we cannot, or will not, see? What wisdom lies behind their eyes?

CinemaShrink Says, "Not the usual flashy Almodovar cutting up cultural stereotypes of gender identity and sexuality with a lot of high-handed dark humor, Talk To Her probes slowly and deeply into the emotional relationship between two men who love women who are half-dead.

CinemaShrink Says "Fate may deal girls a hard hand at birth, endowing them with a sexual allure that will bring out the best and the worst in their fathers, husbands and the odd assortment of boys and men to come across their path. However, Personal Velocity turns fate around, spot lighting the nature of a woman's nature as a powerful card of her own design not to be underestimated when it's in play.