Age of Blight Read Free Page A

liftoff. In an hour or two, the heat became unbearable. The thermal insulation was coming off. And there I was inside a space capsule without a window, orbiting the earth, slowly cooking.
    You should know that there are no speed bumps in zero gravity. Freefall is a wonderful experience, but only if you are still alive to enjoy it. Oh, speed bumps would have been most welcome.
    I remember being in the backseat of a car once. There is a child beside me, and he is giggling. The child’s mother is in the front seat, the back of her head refuses to look at us, but I am happy because the child is happy. That’s as far back as I can remember before I ended up prowling the farmers markets of Moscow. Speed bumps would have been nice, would have jolted me back to where I could be sitting right beside you—you could be that child or his mother. Inside the car, I remember the woman’s voice intoning: I know, I know. All you do is watch, hide, watch, hide. See that? Is she talking about the anger of the discarded, as it is the only thing in the world that is instantly recognizable? No one can look away from it without first being challenged. And that’s my kind of anger, the one felt by the discarded, the type of anger that most people are compelled, for purposes of survival, to ignore. When you look at me long enough, you might catch a glimpse of it. Do you feel challenged? It’s true that we always grow back into our triumphant stable shapes, where we pose asif to contain something, something with a purpose, something with a will to entertain, to love, to hope.
    In my memory of being in the backseat of a car with people who appear to be my keepers, the woman in the front seat and the small child giggling beside me, something must have happened. I just cannot remember what it is. But I know it is important. One of the child’s fingers is crusty with peanut butter. That stained little finger points out to something outside the car. Outside the moving car, there is so much to see. But there is no one out there to follow or to beckon with an arm that’s not yet fully formed. The child’s mother says: I told you not to touch, I told you not to touch .
    She may have been talking to me or to the child with the peanut-butter-coated finger. Outside the car, I think I see you. You are body. You are highway. You are bridge. You are water. You are mountain. You are space. You, who summons and aches to refill what has been lost, open your solar-paneled eyes. Look at me.

No Little Bobos

    C onducted in 1961 and 1963, the famous Bobo doll experiments of Albert Bandura were able to shed light on the nature of human aggression. The Bobo doll experiments showed that children readily “learn” aggression by imitating the aggressive behavior of others. First, the Bobo doll, a plastic clown, was violently attacked by an adult “model.” A film of the aggressive behavior was then shown to each child in the test group. When the children were afterwards placed in a room filled with attractive toys, they exhibited only mild interest in the toys. But when they were led inside a room that contained toys which resembled the Bobo dolls, they then imitated the violent behavior they saw on the film. Divided into a test group and a control group, there were thirty-six children in all, ages three to six years. All of them were from the Stanford Nursery School. Around 88 percent of the children in the test group copied the aggressive behavior towards the Bobo doll. After eight months, approximately 40 percent of the same group of children were observed to have retained the same violent behavior towards the Bobo doll. The experiment remains controversial to thisday. In 2008, a study conducted by Vanderbilt University’s Craig Kennedy and Maria Couppis showed that the brain treats aggression as a form of reward, thus shedding light on the human predilection towards violent sports. Ninety-two years later, in the