Editing/Ethics (Legal) Issue: Royal Pudding Jingle from Long Ago

"Royal...Pudding...

Rich, rich, rich in flavor!

Smooth, smooth, smooth as silk,

More food energy than fresh, whole milk!"

The folklore, anyway was that Royal Pudding was required by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or other regulator to remove their eminently memorable jingle because it was misleading. The two main ingredients in Royal Instant Vanilla, e.g., are "SUGAR [and] FOOD STARCH MODIFIED, " with some cottonseed oil lower on the list, but there, for your desert basics of sugar and fat. So of course mixing Royal Pudding with "fresh, whole milk" yields an enticing dish with "more food energy" per unit weight than even pretty high-caloric "fresh whole milk."

The FTC — or whoever — ruled that the ad was misleading, making Royal Pudding sound downright healthful as opposed to a high-calorie dessert suitable for only occasional eating, unless one wanted to gain weight (a high-calorie pudding helped save the life of one of my cats when he needed to start eating again after a serious jaw injury).

But "food energy" is what is at issue here — the thing in itself — and "calories" just the unit of measurement in colloquial American; so the ad as it stands should be preferred, one might argue, to stating that the prepared pudding has "more calories per unit of weight than whole milk" (ca. 19 kcal per ounce in one on-line chart, vs. 100 per ounce for Jello Chocolate pudding according to another).

Sooo ... folks who edit now and then or for a living — how would you come down here? Exactness of meaning as stated, or what most of an audience will hear? And lawyers out there (or just fans): Should it be illegal to mislead an audience speaking truth to their ignorance or just failure to think through a jingle?

Equality Before the Law: One Idea, and Not Always Dominant

There was a pre-Watergate turning point in US popular culture in a film where Harry Morgan, who'd played straight-arrow Detective Joe Friday's partner, and Peter Lawford, JFK's brother-in-law, were agents of the law facing the problem of getting sensitive (medical? psychiatric?) records. The Harry Morgan character said the only way he knew to do a search was to get a warrant. The Peter Lawford character gave him a look — and quick cut to the two of them with small flashlights going through records in a darkened office. Then the Charles Bronson character in DEATH WISH (1974 f.) and a line of figures responding to the rhetorical question and the misquoted answer, "Rules and regulations — who needs them? / Throw them out the door." 

Combine that with the literally ancient idea that laws are for the little people, or, from at least The Code of Hammurabi on, the idea of different laws for different classes and classification — and there's a point many of us need to deal with. Equality before the law is one theory. And sometimes it's "All the people who (fully) count" are equal before the law. There's a line in a play by Aristophanes of a young citizen claiming his rights: "I'm Athenian, male, of age, and free" — democracy was for men and citizens, not resident aliens, women, girls, boys, or slaves. 

"No one is above the law" is an ideal, and not one everybody supports all the time.

Politics and the Summer Flick: A Note on the Climax of THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD (2017)

Note: I'll get into an important plot-point here; if that's a "spoiler" for you, and you intend to see THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD (2017), stop reading now. Also, please note that I came out to California in part to become a Hollywood Whore but never made it beyond Burbank Bimbo, Toronto Trollop, and, arguably, Chicago Chippy; I was not consulted on BODYGUARD.

THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD is a fairly-well-received, fluffy summer romantic comedy, just with language coarser than usual and a very, very high body-count. It also has an A-list cast, good production values, and handles more seriously than usual — i.e., more than tangentially — Interpol and the International Criminal Court in the Hague. BODYGUARD raises the question precisely of international criminal justice and the possibility of justice under law as opposed to vigilantism.

The climax of the movie is a moment of choice by the Hitman between do-it-yourself justice and law; and if I had been asked for Notes — and recall that I definitely was not — I would have complimented the script for drawing the choice so starkly and pointed out that the writers and film-makers in turn had a political choice to make. Should we have a change in the Hitman, bringing him over to justice under the law, or should he continue to cooly continue — and this is Samuel L. Jackson cool — continue to continue in doing his murderous thing?

You have one guess.

Jackson's serial-killer Hitman, of course, kills the mass-murderer, tyrannical motherfucker villain, for part of the traditional comic happy ending.

See ROBOCOP, the original one, and cf. Shakespeare's romantic comedies and what we might call The Challenge of the Alazon. Tragedies move toward isolation of the hero, often — well, *always* in Shakespeare — the final isolation of death. Comedies move toward integration, with a new and somewhat better society coalescing around a central heterosexual couple (that's a formula out of Northrop Frye, with me correcting the chemical image — Frye suggests "crystalizes" — and nowadays specifying sexuality). Comedies tend to incorporate as many people as possible, but that "possible" doesn't always include everyone. Often there's an "alazon": a guy (usually) who demands too much, the comic villain who can be expelled and not included in the final comic "Komos": revelry, party or, often in Shakespeare, a dance. That gets tricky, and Shakespeare finally gets it totally right with Malvolio in TWELFTH NIGHT, who exiles himself.

BODYGUARD could have made Jackson's character more dynamic and on its way to the final happy ending — with dancing — could have made a small but real contribution to popular ideas of justice under law and international norms. A lot of very smart, very talented people, with prodigious resources to work with, missed or passed up that opportunity. I'm not sure I want to hear any of them any time soon mouthing off in public against real-world political violence.

"Yes mean yes" Revisited: Guides to legally safe sex on campus (Oct. 2015)

"Yes mean yes" Revisited:

Guides to legally safe sex on campus (Oct. 2015)

           

           The Associated Press reports that Governor Jerry Brown has signed "legislation aimed at making California the first state in the nation to bring" into a number of high schools "lessons about sexual consent required" at California colleges and universities.

            This mandate follows action in California and then New York State "to require colleges and universities to apply an 'affirmative consent' or 'yes means yes' standard when investigating campus sexual assault claims. That policy says sexual activity is only considered consensual when both partners clearly state their willingness to participate through 'affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement' at every stage."

            The mandate for high school training in the meaning of consensual sex should also call close attention to the implementation of the California and New York at the affected colleges and universities.

            I taught for thirty-five years at a public university — Miami University in Oxford, Ohio — and performed much of the "Service" portion of my job as a faculty member of our Student Affairs Council, and spent a fair amount of that time helping to write rules for our Student Handbook and, now and then, check up on how the rules were explained and applied by our Division of Student Affairs.

            The Student Affairs Council of Miami University ("SAC") wrote rules and sent them on to the Trustees for approval and that was usually that. The membership of SAC was faculty, students, and staff. Staff members served as part of their jobs as staff members; the students were mostly student body officers serving ex officio; and, again, we faculty chalked up our service to Service, which was 20% of my contractual obligation as a professor.

            Only on rare occasions did the Trustees need legal opinion, and for many years that could be handled by someone on the staff of the Ohio Attorney General, or by a contracted local lawyer.

            That will not be the case for Affirmative Consent, where University regulations will be difficult to write and more difficult still will be preparing brochures and presentations advising students on "legally safe sex."

            Generally, the Affirmative Consent discussion has assumed vanilla heterosexual sex between two unmarried young people "hooking up." But even at Miami University at Oxford, with a student body dominated by 18-22-year conservative, middle-class, Catholic/Christian "kids" — even Miami was more diverse than that. Married students can commit and suffer rape and sexual assault; guidance for legally safe sex would have to set up guidelines that would include married couples, and it will be tricky for State institutions to involve themselves with guiding the sex lives of married people.

            It will be both difficult and awkward to advise on legally safe sex of non-vanilla varieties. On the one hand, I'm not sure I'd like to write rules or put together a brochure or website entry for sexual encounters involving handcuffs and a ball gag, especially if the major objective of the game is domination and silent submission. On the other hand, it is naïve to think that no students at no time are going to engage in 20-shades-of-off-white S&M, one of the more popular perversions.

            Alternatively, advising students that sexuality of non-vanilla varieties is legally risky is a possible course, but it is problematic to have State involvement in the details of people's sexuality and to return indirectly to concepts of (potentially) Sexcrime.

            Even with the usually-envisioned young, unmarried, heterosexual couples there are complexities. When does requesting affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement at every step become sexual harassment? When advising students on legally safe sex, what should campus authorities advise on when to start asking explicit questions? In one form of ideal world, young people would go up to someone they find attractive and say, "Hi. I find you sexually attractive. Would you like to talk a bit and see if we'd both like to go over to my place or yours for sex acts we'd both enjoy?" In one form of ideal world such a conversation would be unremarkable, but that is not a world we live in.

            There are also deeply-ingrained if generally unconscious theological and moral considerations influencing much sexual behavior.

            Even vanilla sex among unmarried people is fornication, and Miami University at Oxford was far from unique in having a lot of young students brought up on "Just Say No" to fornication.

            "Good Kids Don't": They especially don't consciously choose to sin. To paraphrase a Miami philosophy major channeling George Carlin, what good kids do do is "Get drunk, get stupid, get laid, get penitent, get absolved — and repeat."

            This student was highly sophisticated, but the theology she argued is straightforward, especially for a traditional Catholic. To get drunk and get animalistic is to engage in bestial sins abhorrent to puritanical cults and subcultures; but wordless, drunken, animalistic rutting is less sinful than getting demonic by warping one's divine Reason and Will with "affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity," i.e., in traditional Christian terms, for the unmarried, to engage in the mortal. Falling into sin is one thing; consciously choosing sin and articulating your choice is literally willful disobedience and an enactment of Satanic Pride.

            Brochures and presentations on Affirmative Consent would have to advise unmarried students to engage in conscious, mortal sin or give up on sex. Such advice can be framed, but it will take very clever lawyers and student affairs officials to avoid either entering a theological thicket or acting in bad faith and denying that theological issues exist. It could also require a willful blindness to the function of drugs in human sexuality, alcohol especially, since at least the time of Gilgamesh for beer (ca. 2100 BCE) and Euripides's The Bacchae for wine (405 BCE). 

            Indeed, "Yes means yes; no means no; and maybe means maybe." Going beyond that to "'affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement' at every stage" raises difficulties that should be watched with care.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

"But most of all, my brothers and sisters, never take an oath."

(James 5.12) 

                 According to the rules of the Supreme Court of the State of North Dakota, and, probably more to the point, according to every court-room drama set in the US I've ever seen, "Unless an affirmation is used, an oath ubstantially in the following form must be administered: [***] To a Witness. Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? So help you God."

            The rules in North Dakota and America generally allow you to sincerely affirm rather than solemnly swear, and you don't have to put your hand on a Bible or end with the God part; but I would probably get into at least temporary trouble on the rest of the oath.

            First off, I'd be really, really tempted to recycle the old joke, "Hey, if I knew 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' I'd be God." A joke, even an insightful one, would probably be a bad idea: agents of the US criminal justice system routinely handcuff people just accused of crimes or make anyone they feel even slightly threatening get down on their knees or get "nose and toes" on the ground, so we're talking serious control freaks who probably aren't much into law jokes or any other kind of humor.

            I might try, "I promise to answer the questions put to me truthfully, as well as I can and as completely as I may." If the judge demanded an explanation for my not just responding to the oath question with "Yes" or "I do," I might try, "Well, the oath you want me to take made some sense back when witnesses were just ordered to tell their stories, but nowadays a witness is supposed to respond to questions, and even the best answers to bad questions might not help reveal the truth — and as far as the whole truth goes, that could require more time than a trial allows. I really do try to be honest, and I don't want to swear to do something I could go to jail for trying to do." As in responding to a question with something like, "Look, counselor, that question isn't going to get us anywhere; what happened was —" And then I'd probably be offered the choice of answering the question or contemplate the majesty of the law while locked in a cell. Ditto if I tried to answer at sufficient length to get to "the whole truth."

            For me, anyway, a student of language (well, and a curmudgeonly smart-ass), there's an irony here: People casual about words and about speaking truly can take the witness oath without qualms; those who take words, and their word, seriously might find themselves in trouble with the law.

No Immunity for Those Who Torture (a Quick Note)

The logic is really quite simple.

      If the threat to the American people (or whomever) is sufficiently great to justify my torturing someone, it should be sufficiently great that I'd be willing to die or go to prison to meet that threat.

      If I am not willing to face a death penalty — or far more probably some government agent isn't willing even to do serious jail time — then the situation isn't serious enough to warrant torture.

In any event, torture should be treated as a crime as serious as murder, and punished as severely. If there are mitigating circumstances, such as actually finding the ticking hydrogen bomb (so to speak) and saving Dallas from annihilation, let the relevant Executive commute the sentence after a few years of imprisonment, and perhaps give the criminal a medal.

If torture is not treated as a major felony, it can become routine, and far too often, it does.


If patriotic cops and CIA agents are unwilling to risk execution or even just a few years of hard time to prevent some disaster, they don't find the threat existential — and they're probably correct.

About that Second Amendment ... (30 Oct. 2014)

Rate: 1 Flag

What TV news I watch is from an elliptical trainer, and I work hard to avoid commercials — every time you listen to a commercial the hucksters win — so I skip channels a bit and set the TV to mute fairly often and listen to an audio book. So I'm often confused about who said what on which program, but I got the clear message that my fellow Libs Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Chris Hayes, and/or Rachel Maddow got fairly shocked by the idea of a Republican candidate for office addressing gun enthusiasts and bringing up potential use of firearms to defend oneself against — i.e., shoot at with intent to wound, kill, or maim — various folk in the Federal government.

Uh, yeah. That goes with a reading of the Second Amendment that I heard from the 1960s on. The logic is straighforward. The Second Amendment is second only to the First — free speech and all that — in that the Right to Bear Arms ensures the other rights against the threat of a tyrannical government.

After all, Tom Jefferson and the guys held as self-evident axiomatic "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights [...] That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Under the Bill of Rights that we eventually got from the Revolution (or Counter-revolution, if that's your theory), citizens of the Republic could exercise our rights and peaceably assemble and shoot our mouths off "to petition the government for a redress of grievances." But let's say there's no redress: not this time, not for a long time. Let's say the newfangled Federal government, or "any Form of Government" starts destroying rights rather than protect them? Well then it is our right, nay, our duty to try "to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as  [...] shall seem" to us "most likely to effect [... our] Safety and Happiness" and renewal of The Tree of Liberty.

Governments, however, don't like to be altered or abolished, and they fight back, with guns. (Mr. Jefferson was clear as to just what would water/manure the figurative Tree of Liberty.)

Now as a practical matter, the real revolutionary parts of revolutions are often pretty bloodless in the initial takeover. The fighting back comes after a bit, and what decides it isn't usually the weapons the peasants and revolutionary pros have but, instead, which way the troops finally decide to point their weapons. When the soldiers refuse to fire on the crowd and shoot instead their officers — or when military leaders join the rebels — that's when the revolution wins, at least for a while (until it gets betrayed ... and eventually the cycle starts all over again).

Still, at least in the initial stage of the revolution and maybe in the following guerilla warfare, it helps to have a well-armed populace to secure The Right of Revolution.

Which "Right," unfortunately, usually means some hotheads or fanatics gunning down cops or a standoff like Ruby Ridge and the siege at Waco leading to a skirmish and death. Or Shay's Rebellion. Or leading up to something as major as the US Civil War.

Which leads to the side of the Second Amendment coming from the other side of Tom Jefferson's life and that of a goodly number of the Founders and Framers: The need for well-armed White folk to put down any "servile insurrection" (or Indian attacks), or, later, just "uppity n*ggers." "[T]he right of the people to keep and bear arms," except for brief periods, meant the right of White folks to keep firearms, while you can — or more likely I can — get arrested for "open carry" of a knife.

(The joke is that a Liberal is the guy who brings a knife to a gun fight; in terms of "home defense," I live the joke.)

Anyway, Jon or Stephen or Chris and/or Rachel shouldn't be surprised at gun fans indicating a willingness to shoot agents of the Federal government: Federal Marshals, FBI, ATF — whatever. That's part of the theory. It's also close to rebellion, insurrection, or treason, and the Federal government can be expected to shoot back. Maybe not Sherman's march to the sea this time, or even a drone strike, but far heavier shit than dreamt of by people who hold such theories.

And if they keep talking that way and arming themselves quite so assiduously, then we can expect even more militarization of our police forces and the irony of the Second Amendment working not to preserve the Republic but to put it in danger.