Police force mergers are unnecessary and miss the point; the best policing is local

Much of the focus during the PCC elections has been on the principle of representation. Will Tanner argues that localism is equally important and that the future of policing in England and Wales must be local and democratic, not regional and bureaucratic

Emerging Methods in Research Participation and Empowerment Processes in Nepal

Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology - Volume 7, 200

Cape Fear and Cuckoo’s Nest: Cultural Discourse on Dangerous Men

Cape Fear, the movie, and Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, both debuted in 1962. The film, adapted by James Webb from John D. MacDonald’s 1957 crime fiction, The Executioners, was grounded in the cold war mentality of the 1950s. Kesey’s novel heralded social change and became emblematic of 1960s counter-culture by the time it achieved film fame in 1975. While seemingly unrelated texts, their intersection in 1962 and the timeline of their novel-to-film trajectories can be approached as a revealing cultural discourse regarding masculinity, the cold war, and social change. Analysis of this discourse also invites consideration of genre differences associated with mass market and literary fictions. The significance of this intersection in time is magnified by similarities in the authors’ respective representations of provocative, dangerous men: Max Cady in Cape Fear and R. P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Both are physically imposing, sociopathic, psychologically manipulative, convicted rapists. Both are ex-servicemen and ex-cons who, when released from prison, disrupt stable social orders. Both use sexual threats to defy law and authority. And, both are killed in climactic scenes. But, Cady is a villain and McMurphy is a hero. Cady is a libidinous monster whose amoral desire for women and girls signifies the antithesis of civilization, while McMurphy’s overflowing libido is a life force that rescues fellow psychiatric patients from a desiccated wasteland. Cady must be destroyed to preserve law, society and family. McMurphy must be sacrificed to inspire male liberation from an authoritarian matriarchy and false democracy. Cape Fear is pulp fiction melodrama and Cuckoo’s Nest is a dense and literary American romance. It is tempting to conclude that this textual discourse simply pits the conventions of crime melodrama against the convention-breaking esthetics of high art, and conservative against destabilizing politics. This polarity has validity, but juxtaposing these two representations of dangerous men and their fates indicates late 50s/early 60s cultural ambivalence toward overt male sexuality and negotiation of perceived threats to “healthy” sexuality from below and above, from id and superego. The narrative designs of both texts require that dangerous men (villain and hero) must die, but their respective characterizations constitute a cultural discourse on changing social and sexual mores. Synthesis of these opposing representations is found in MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, launched with The Deep Blue Goodbye in 1964 in which detective McGee embodies an idealized autonomous man, a version of K.A. Courdileone’s “liberal superman,” characterized by vigor, confidence and the freedom to live and love simultaneously in and outside of society

Portraits, Power, and Patronage in the Late Roman Republic

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequence

The Perils of Government Investing

The current Social Security system is unsustainable. As President Clinton has pointed out, the only alternative to tax increases or benefit cuts is to increase the rate of return to investment of Social Security funds. That means either allowing individuals to invest their own Social Security taxes or allowing the government to invest them. Supporters of government investing claim that it would allow the government to reap the benefits of the higher returns available in private capital markets, incur lower administrative costs than individual accounts, and allow the government to spread the risk of poor investment performance. On the surface, that approach may have some appeal; in reality it is fraught with peril. It could potentially make the federal government the largest shareholder in American corporations, raising the possibility of government control of American business. In addition, there are serious questions about what types of investment the government would make. Political considerations and "social investing" are likely to influence the government's investment decisions, allowing the government to manipulate economic markets