The Texas juvenile detention system…

Mary Jane Martinez’s son Jimmy entered the Texas criminal justice system in 2003 because he missed his school bus. He was charged with truancy and destruction of property (for throwing rocks) and sent to live in a county juvenile detention center for a sentence of six months. After five months, instead of being released, he was transferred to an academy 400 miles away, managed by the Texas Youth Commission, the agency that oversees detention and treatment centers across the state. Jimmy finally came home, four years after he was sent away, a period his mother now describes as a living hell. His best friend had been murdered, and Jimmy had been beaten and raped—both, Mrs. Martinez testifed, by TYC guards.

Read this article, and please consider what will happen if you turn America over to Rick Perry. I just covered how Iraqi police are treating kids, and here’s a story talking about a “culture of child rape” in the Texas juvenile prisons. People can’t seem to generate much concern about stories like this, and I find this endlessly frustrating. Why is it that peoples’ commitment to kids really only amounts to a bunch of angry growling, and usually at the wrong people? Nobody is growling Perry out of this election for his record. Hell, some people are even calling him a viable contender.

Seriously, if you elect another good ol’ boy from Texas to fuck everyone in the ass, don’t you dare say you’re opposed to sodomy. You must like it, because you keep looking for the guys guaranteed to make it a painful fucking. Then you say things like “He’s the guy I’d most want to have a beer with.”

He’s not your fucking drinking buddy. He’s supposed to be the guy most qualified to bail us out of this fucking mess, which was made by the last good ol’ boy from Texas that you thought would make a great drinking buddy. Pick a better fucking standard for who you elect, for the love of God. And if you can’t do it for God, at least do it for your country, or for your kids. Rick Perry has an atrocious education record, and his record with kids in the juvenile system is just as awful. Don’t let him do this to everyone else’s kids all across the country. For once, have the common sense to turn down the good ol’ boy act. Please.

What is art?

I’m sitting here listening to Amy Winehouse. After her death and people talking so much crap about her, I decided to go buy a CD. Funny thing is, I’ve been listening to Amy for years. Her voice is all over the place here in Italy, especially the top 40 stations. They like her more classical style, which is similar to singers here from the sixties and early seventies. So I’ve heard almost everything from her album and I just never knew it was her.

And I had a thought to someone on Facebook who said, “Yeah, I listened to her, and she’s overrated. Musical genius? I don’t think so.”

It’s easy to dismiss any artist in this way. Don’t like the art? Then say, “This isn’t real art,” or variations of it. Then the object of your disdain is dismissed. No one checks the critic’s credentials, because everyone is qualified to decide what art is and is not.

I disagree. People have the right to decide what they like. This much is true, and it is also true that not every piece of art works. Consider Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, which he loved, but even his brother, his biggest fan, just couldn’t see the appeal. Now it hangs in a museum where artists marvel at it for hours. But we marvel it now through a lens of time, and with a filter of Van Gogh’s entire career. The viewers of his time had no reverence for him the way we do, so this was just another art misfire.

But, it is still art. It is just art that initially missed its target market.