One
of the more interesting comments I received on a student evaluation was
in my Science Fiction Film course, with the student saying, "I'm glad I
took this course; now I understand why my parents find The Simpsons so much funnier than I do."
Good point.
Homer Simpson floating around in the space shuttle, snarfing up potato chips with schmaltzy music in the background is mildly amusing. Homer Simpson in a shot-by-shot parody of the docking sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), complete with Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube waltz is funny. And if you grew up on 2001 as a semi-sacred film "text," then a Simpsons parody of the docking sequence or (more so) Homer as the Star-Child is borderline blasphemous and very, very funny.
Similarly, one might chuckle at Lisa Simpson's conditioning Bart with
electric shocks as negative reinforcement for stealing cupcakes. Bart reaching up for cupcakes with
frosting and red cherries with stems, desperately trying to overcome
his conditioning, exactly like Alex reaching for a pair of
perfectly-formed model's breasts in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) — Bart reaching for cupcakes topped with cherries pretty much where the model's nipples are: that cracked me up.
In my Satiric Film course, I showed a Reader's Digest version of the 1979 Monty Python's Life of Brian
(and for any studio lawyers reading this blog: I have long since Ceased
and Desisted in this exercise, so don't send me threatening letters).
The clips got some snickers, but only one student really laughed: the
one leftist who'd been to meetings of contemporary versions of, so to
speak, "The People's Front of Judea" — and not, definitely not "The Judean People's Front." If you've ever been to an interminable meeting of political radicals, you know how accurate is the satire of radicals in Life of Brian. Python's Brian includes
also highly effective satire of imperialists, gullible fanatics,
militant optimists, and law-and-order conservatives; and close to the
end, Brian gets to the
most concentrated, devastating critique I have ever encountered on
Liberals: Michael Palin's rosy-cheeked Roman officer (Nissus Wettus)
handing out crosses at a mass crucifixion, and trying to make everything
nice — while continuing to participate in an atrocity.
Anyway, "The first duty of a critic is to state the obvious," as I was
taught in graduate school, and we can pause here with the obvious point
that different people will get different jokes in movies depending on
which allusions and parodies they get, and whether or not they can
relate a comic bit to their own experience, eliciting (or not) "the
laughter of recognition."
From this obvious small point, however, critics go on to the larger
point that coming from different experiences, different people will see,
while watching the same movie, at least slightly different movies. And
as we get older and develop new experiences, we will see slightly
different movies each viewing.
And similarly with other works of art — and stuff more important than
art; but arguments over movies are usually, not always, but usually,
nonlethal, and familiar ("Everybody's a critic" — especially movie
critics).
So I'll continue on toward larger points with another movie from my
Satiric Film course, a film I included as one kind of "limiting case": Animal House,
by Harold Ramis et al. (1978), with the et al. including Chris Miller,
Dartmouth alum, class of 1962, member of Alpha Delta Phi social
fraternity, and author of the series, Tales of the Adelphian Lodge, of which Animal House, set in 1962, is one.
Chris Miller is a satirist and a lot nastier than I am, but we are roughly contemporaries, and his AΔΦ isn't particularly like the fraternity chapter I ended up pledging but is very much like the TΔΦ chapter I walked out of during Rush Week. More to the point, I knew Doug Neidermeyer, the cadet commander of the Faber College ROTC Corps. That is, I knew a "Neidermeyer"
still in his larval state: the cadet lieutenant who was my platoon
leader my sophomore year of Army ROTC. So I laughed a laugh of
recognition with Neidermeyer and laughed a laugh of cruel satisfaction
when the "Where Are They Now?" portion of Animal House
had Neidermeyer killed by his own troops — fragged — in Vietnam. I had
also "wallowed in Watergate" and laughed at the notice of Greg
Marmalard's becoming a Nixon White House aide and ending up raped in
prison. (I am not as nasty as Chris Miller, but being a nicer person
than a satirist still leaves a lot of room for nasty; plus, when the
theater lights go down, we can all get pretty amoral.)
For my students most of my teaching career, Animal House was a classic comedy. For my students near the end of my career, by the time one could teach a course in Satiric Film, Animal House
was mostly old, politically incorrect, sexist, gross-out farce, and it
took a good deal of explaining to my students ca. 2004 how Animal House in 1978 could have been mostly a sexist gross-out farce but also subversive satire.
Two final examples, from outside of classes: The first was my baptism
in watching different movies while watching the same movie; the second
was my final confirmation in the theory — at least before MetaCritic
came along and one can demonstrate the phenomenon a couple times a week.
Exhibit One: Franklin J. Schaffner's, director, Francis Ford Coppola,
first-listed writer, and George C. Scott, very memorable star: the 1970
movie, Patton. By 1970, I had read and once or twice taught Dwight Macdonald's essay "My Favorite General" — and felt pretty sure the Scott movie had cleaned up Patton, most particularly omitting his anti-Semitism. Still, I saw Patton as a worthy successor to Shakespeare's Henry V
in giving a Machiavellian, objective view of a military winner. (If you
grew up on Lawrence Olivier's World War II propaganda film Henry V, check out Olivier's cuts from
Shakespeare's script and one big addition: the Battle of Agincourt as a
romantic visual spectacular. Olivier did a very elegant script-editing
job to make Shakespeare's Henry V an unambiguous boy-scout hero.) At the
end of Patton, I gathered
up my stuff to leave the theater thinking about how beautifully the
film had shown the General to be a dangerous whack-job, but situated —
destined? — to be the exactly right whack-job to lead the US Third Army
against German forces in Europe. After the War, however, Patton was
mostly just dangerous, including dangerous to important policies of the
United States (although I doubt he was assassinated for his views — however much that would make a hell of a movie).
As I started to walk out of the theater, I heard behind me what sounded
like a grandfather telling his grandson how good it was that Hollywood
had finally made an old-fashioned patriotic movie about a pure hero:
George S. Patton. That Richard Nixon might come to love the movie I had
seen didn't surprise me; but that old man and perhaps his grandson had
experienced a film very different from the one I saw and heard.
That was in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in 1970. Much later, in 1997, I
was in Hamilton, Ohio — "The Heart of It All," USA-wise — watching Paul
Verhoeven's Starship Troopers
and eventually noticed I was the only one in the auditorium laughing.
And among the cast, only Neil Patrick Harris made it clear he understood
his character was among a group of "fresh-faced fascists" in a "twisted
space opera" that isn't "a sendup for the ages," as the USA Today
reviewer called it, but certainly a sendup. I was waiting for Harris's
young-20's Colonel Carl Jenkins to light a cigarette in a cigarette
holder, adjust his monocle, and say "Ve haf vays of makink der Bug
Brains talk …."
And we have arrived at serious issues.
I am a staunch member of "the reality-based community" and will stress that Starship Troopers
or any other movie — or anything else on the human scale — has real
existence, Out There, independent of our perceptions and opinions.
Meaning, however, is created in the interaction between a work of art
and its audience: which does not mean anything goes and all
interpretations are equal but that we have to be careful and responsible
in constructing meaning.
We have to watch and listen attentively and speak carefully.
We have to bring background information to the work and be aware of the
likelihood of our ignorance of other background.
We have to listen to other people's opinions and understand that we're
all likely to miss and to misunderstand aspects of a work.
And we have to think through our experience of the work and the experiences we bring to the work.
Or we can say, "To hell with it; that was fun, but it ain't worth
talking about." And then shut up. Or talk about the movie, but admit
cheerfully we are, as the picturesque expression has it, talking out of
our asses.
The background part (and lack thereof) is what can get scary, that and
the values people bring to movies, other art, politics. An American
audience should know when we're dealing with Fascism and the fascistic,
and Starship Troopers is
not exactly subtle. An American audience should catch on to, "Oh, I'm
being asked to enjoy a fascistic fantasy. I can do that — but I don't
approve of the upshot of the fantasy." And then, having that bit of
conflict, think about it.
There's nothing new here. Back around 1600, Elizabethan audiences
should have thought, Gee, Shakespeare's Henry V threatens to spit naked
infants upon pikes if Henry doesn't get his way with the French city of
Harfleur (see 3.3.3-43); how should I feel about that? Henry doesn't as
things work out — doesn't kill babies or massacre the people of Harfleur
— but he says he would, and if, in the affairs of princes results, as in winning, is all that counts, shouldn't Henry spit a few French infants (etc.) if that's what it takes to win?
All things considered, General George S. Patton is one of the good guys
of World War II; but with this guy there are a lot of things to
consider. Indeed, should we complain too loudly if it turns out Patton
was assassinated shortly after the war? Old "Blood and Guts" was willing
to spill a lot of other people's blood to achieve US war aims in his
way. If we approve of Patton's philosophy and actions, should we be
very upset if his figurative blood was part of the cost of as much peace
as was had at the end of World War II?
All things considered with Starship Troopers,
even if our enemies are giant Bugs — should we engage in species-cidal
war against them if it's just possible some of our people provoked the
war? Should species-cide be a war aim, even if our opponents are literal
Bugs? And what if, in the real world, we come to see our enemies as
"bugs"? Is genocide OK if we are convinced our enemies are vermin?
What we bring to a work of art and "where we're coming from" will
greatly influence what we experience in the work and how we experience
it. The work, though, isn't passive in all of this: once we've
experienced the work, it is a new experience, one we bring to future
experiences. To some extent, we shape the film as we watch it; to a
lesser extent, it shapes us.
We need to be aware of how this works, or, minimally, at least that it's happening.
Showing posts with label comedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comedy. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Learning from the "War on Men" — and Stephen Colbert v. Fox News (30 November 2012)
In the "The Word" segment of The Colbert Report for Wednesday, 28 November 2012, many of us who do not watch much TV news beyond Colbert and The Daily Show could learn that Fox News is reporting a War on Men, part of which has resulted in American men not wanting to get married.
I overstate and oversimplify here — and my scholarship is, let's say, casual — but all that’s pretty decorous given Fox reporting, and not just Fox.
(I gave up on TV news after a drug warrior told Jim Lehrer that the major problem he encountered in the war on drugs was the large number of people who used cocaine without serious problems. Lehrer didn't ask a "WTF??!!" follow-up question. This occurred at the time PBS funding was under attack in Congress, though that may've been a coincidence. But as so often, I digress.)
Anyway, in the beginning of this males-and-marriage brouhaha, as it came through on the Report, was a survey on attitudes on the importance of marriage wherein was found that among young women — or probably, at most, young American women — 28% thought marriage important in 1997 and 37% thought it important in 2010/2011. My arithmetic has that coming out to an increase of 9 percentage points. Among young men, 35% thought marriage very important in 1997, vs. 29% in 2010/2011, for a decrease of 6 percentage points, and putting young men in 2010-11 finding marriage more or less as important as young women did a dozen or so years earlier. (But don't trust my arithmetic; I tend to screw up "percentage" vs. "percentage points"; the point, though, still holds.)
On the Fox News website, on 26 November 2012, Suzanne Venker took these data seriously and concluded in Colbert's paraphrase that "Sisters Are Doing It to Themselves" in this declining male interest in marriage in that, in Venker's words, "Women aren't women anymore" but angry and defensive.
And the cause of decline in femininity was the sexual revolution, which I think means feminism here since the sexual revolution in terms of sex was in the 1970s, and its effects would've been felt long before 1997.
For a nice evisceration of this analysis, listen to Colbert: the "The Word" segment is about ten minutes into the broadcast. My problems with the Venkerian conclusion start with her taking way too seriously any survey about attitudes. If you want to find out what people really believe, yeah, just ask them — but then check out in detail what they do.
Still, The Daoist teach that we should listen carefully even to people we know are lying, and they have a point. Sometimes it may seem like picking out the peanuts from the elephant dung, but we should listen to one another and profit from what we hear as best we can.
So consider this.
Writing from a thoroughly sexist and patriarchal point of view (though enlightened and progressive ca. 1516), Sir Thomas More has his non-Christian Utopians very strict about sex outside of marriage. Not just adultery — which can get you a sentence of penal servitude for a first offense and death caught twice — but "Any boy or girl convicted of premarital intercourse is severely punished, and permanently disqualified from marrying" unless pardoned on the no-marriage part, and the adult couple in charge of the offending household is "publicly disgraced for not doing their jobs properly. The Utopians are particularly strict about that kind of thing because they think very few people would want to get married — which means spending one's life with the same person, and putting up with all that inconveniences that this involves — if they weren't carefully prevented from having any sexual intercourse otherwise" (Book II, Paul Turner's translation, 1965: 103-04 [punctuation Americanized]).
Now the stripping down of the family to its nucleus has been fairly recent, and big-family-man More would have been a little shocked by the isolation of contemporary Americans, and his Utopians were downright communal and communistic: More's Utopia is like one huge monastery. More presented a society where one could get companionship and intimacy in the general course of life; if you could also get sex, he asks provocatively, why marry?
With the sexual revolution, it did become easier in the US to get sex outside of marriage, but alienation elsewhere increased, and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if women in 2010 — if indeed this is the case — were more interested in marriage than in 1997. Women are increasingly in the workforce, and, as Colbert hints, more non-poor women now perform the alienating shit-work of a lot of jobs, and this may have more hungering for the companionship, intimacy, and relative stability of marriage: that shelter from the outside world for the Victorian father of the family.
What about those young men, though, whose declining interest — and this may well be the case — needs some explanation?
The major explanation may be economic, and indirectly educational. Guys haven't been doing all that well of late, and marriage would make most sense to us economically if we were to "marry up": as Colbert hints even more strongly, guys might want to marry a woman who could support them as househusbands.
Gals, though, may be reluctant to marry down, and most of what's going on here may be that women place greater importance on marriage because it has become more of an issue for them because of a lack of marriageable men — but "No marriageable men around" may often mean no men it would be economically and socially advantageous to marry.
So guys may find marriage less important because they feel less likely to marry. Aesop's fable on "sour grapes" points to the human tendency to assert, sometimes, we don't really want that which we are unlikely to get.
More women want equality in marriage, and to a large extent are getting it, and that is all to the good.
But, arguably, it's all to the good more for women than for men.
Patriarchal marriage had a lot of advantages for men, especially for men who figured out that one of the most important things a human being has is time.
Now a cousin of mine just sent me the latest viral video of a Rube-Goldberg device where, with much ado, a humongous chain reaction leads to some guys getting doused with paint. Etc. — check out Facebook and YouTube, to say nothing of XTube! So, obviously, a lot of people have a lot of free time on their hands. Still, one of the most important things we have is time, and traditional patriarchal marriage was very good to men in terms of time and labor: women did most of the work at home.
An equal marriage nowadays is much less advantageous for men.
Middle-class standards of housekeeping are very high in today's America, and few people can afford servants. Under strong traditional pressure, often from other women, women's standards for household neatness tend to be higher than men's — tend to be; clearly some men are neat and some women are slobs — and equitable division of labor in a married household probably means the husband spends significantly more time on housework then he did or would as a bachelor. When children come along the time constraints and other pressures on both parents nowadays are tremendous, and women want men to share that load.
A "night club" when I was growing up meant a place my parents went. I had good, conscientious parents — who didn't think they had to come out to watch me swim or play football, much less coach a team. (By high school, we had "SACs," social-athletic clubs and fraternities, and we ran our own athletics.) And, of course, even middle-class and well-to-do kids until recently could be sent out to play on their own and were expected to walk most places or take public transportation.
When kids come along, contemporary US parents are under tremendous strain — poor people probably more than the middle class and rich (though in different ways) — and significant numbers of women will work very hard to get men to share the burden.
Much of that "burden" is self-imposed and a good deal enjoyable, but much is not.
If a guy finds love and a "soul mate" — and that's an additional issue: the newish idea that every couple seeking marriage has to be Romeo and Juliet and powerfully in love, and working on the relationship — if a guy finds love and a soul mate and he can bring some wealth and skills to the marriage … well, yeah, he'll want to marry and probably will marry. But that may not happen.
So, if young guys nowadays say marriage is less important to them than guys said in 1997, it could be sensible on their part: sensible if they're less likely to get married and if they are lucky enough to get companionship, some sex, and maybe even intimacy outside of marriage.
There's no war on men, but there has been reduction in male privilege, and guys may be responding to that reduction in socially and economically rational ways.
The nuclear family is a relatively new invention, and it's a bad idea. We're in an awkward period moving on to other possibilities. Get over it, conservatives, and start acting like real conservatives: working to increase community, and social supports.
I overstate and oversimplify here — and my scholarship is, let's say, casual — but all that’s pretty decorous given Fox reporting, and not just Fox.
(I gave up on TV news after a drug warrior told Jim Lehrer that the major problem he encountered in the war on drugs was the large number of people who used cocaine without serious problems. Lehrer didn't ask a "WTF??!!" follow-up question. This occurred at the time PBS funding was under attack in Congress, though that may've been a coincidence. But as so often, I digress.)
Anyway, in the beginning of this males-and-marriage brouhaha, as it came through on the Report, was a survey on attitudes on the importance of marriage wherein was found that among young women — or probably, at most, young American women — 28% thought marriage important in 1997 and 37% thought it important in 2010/2011. My arithmetic has that coming out to an increase of 9 percentage points. Among young men, 35% thought marriage very important in 1997, vs. 29% in 2010/2011, for a decrease of 6 percentage points, and putting young men in 2010-11 finding marriage more or less as important as young women did a dozen or so years earlier. (But don't trust my arithmetic; I tend to screw up "percentage" vs. "percentage points"; the point, though, still holds.)
On the Fox News website, on 26 November 2012, Suzanne Venker took these data seriously and concluded in Colbert's paraphrase that "Sisters Are Doing It to Themselves" in this declining male interest in marriage in that, in Venker's words, "Women aren't women anymore" but angry and defensive.
And the cause of decline in femininity was the sexual revolution, which I think means feminism here since the sexual revolution in terms of sex was in the 1970s, and its effects would've been felt long before 1997.
For a nice evisceration of this analysis, listen to Colbert: the "The Word" segment is about ten minutes into the broadcast. My problems with the Venkerian conclusion start with her taking way too seriously any survey about attitudes. If you want to find out what people really believe, yeah, just ask them — but then check out in detail what they do.
Still, The Daoist teach that we should listen carefully even to people we know are lying, and they have a point. Sometimes it may seem like picking out the peanuts from the elephant dung, but we should listen to one another and profit from what we hear as best we can.
So consider this.
Writing from a thoroughly sexist and patriarchal point of view (though enlightened and progressive ca. 1516), Sir Thomas More has his non-Christian Utopians very strict about sex outside of marriage. Not just adultery — which can get you a sentence of penal servitude for a first offense and death caught twice — but "Any boy or girl convicted of premarital intercourse is severely punished, and permanently disqualified from marrying" unless pardoned on the no-marriage part, and the adult couple in charge of the offending household is "publicly disgraced for not doing their jobs properly. The Utopians are particularly strict about that kind of thing because they think very few people would want to get married — which means spending one's life with the same person, and putting up with all that inconveniences that this involves — if they weren't carefully prevented from having any sexual intercourse otherwise" (Book II, Paul Turner's translation, 1965: 103-04 [punctuation Americanized]).
Now the stripping down of the family to its nucleus has been fairly recent, and big-family-man More would have been a little shocked by the isolation of contemporary Americans, and his Utopians were downright communal and communistic: More's Utopia is like one huge monastery. More presented a society where one could get companionship and intimacy in the general course of life; if you could also get sex, he asks provocatively, why marry?
With the sexual revolution, it did become easier in the US to get sex outside of marriage, but alienation elsewhere increased, and perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if women in 2010 — if indeed this is the case — were more interested in marriage than in 1997. Women are increasingly in the workforce, and, as Colbert hints, more non-poor women now perform the alienating shit-work of a lot of jobs, and this may have more hungering for the companionship, intimacy, and relative stability of marriage: that shelter from the outside world for the Victorian father of the family.
What about those young men, though, whose declining interest — and this may well be the case — needs some explanation?
The major explanation may be economic, and indirectly educational. Guys haven't been doing all that well of late, and marriage would make most sense to us economically if we were to "marry up": as Colbert hints even more strongly, guys might want to marry a woman who could support them as househusbands.
Gals, though, may be reluctant to marry down, and most of what's going on here may be that women place greater importance on marriage because it has become more of an issue for them because of a lack of marriageable men — but "No marriageable men around" may often mean no men it would be economically and socially advantageous to marry.
So guys may find marriage less important because they feel less likely to marry. Aesop's fable on "sour grapes" points to the human tendency to assert, sometimes, we don't really want that which we are unlikely to get.
More women want equality in marriage, and to a large extent are getting it, and that is all to the good.
But, arguably, it's all to the good more for women than for men.
Patriarchal marriage had a lot of advantages for men, especially for men who figured out that one of the most important things a human being has is time.
Now a cousin of mine just sent me the latest viral video of a Rube-Goldberg device where, with much ado, a humongous chain reaction leads to some guys getting doused with paint. Etc. — check out Facebook and YouTube, to say nothing of XTube! So, obviously, a lot of people have a lot of free time on their hands. Still, one of the most important things we have is time, and traditional patriarchal marriage was very good to men in terms of time and labor: women did most of the work at home.
An equal marriage nowadays is much less advantageous for men.
Middle-class standards of housekeeping are very high in today's America, and few people can afford servants. Under strong traditional pressure, often from other women, women's standards for household neatness tend to be higher than men's — tend to be; clearly some men are neat and some women are slobs — and equitable division of labor in a married household probably means the husband spends significantly more time on housework then he did or would as a bachelor. When children come along the time constraints and other pressures on both parents nowadays are tremendous, and women want men to share that load.
A "night club" when I was growing up meant a place my parents went. I had good, conscientious parents — who didn't think they had to come out to watch me swim or play football, much less coach a team. (By high school, we had "SACs," social-athletic clubs and fraternities, and we ran our own athletics.) And, of course, even middle-class and well-to-do kids until recently could be sent out to play on their own and were expected to walk most places or take public transportation.
When kids come along, contemporary US parents are under tremendous strain — poor people probably more than the middle class and rich (though in different ways) — and significant numbers of women will work very hard to get men to share the burden.
Much of that "burden" is self-imposed and a good deal enjoyable, but much is not.
If a guy finds love and a "soul mate" — and that's an additional issue: the newish idea that every couple seeking marriage has to be Romeo and Juliet and powerfully in love, and working on the relationship — if a guy finds love and a soul mate and he can bring some wealth and skills to the marriage … well, yeah, he'll want to marry and probably will marry. But that may not happen.
So, if young guys nowadays say marriage is less important to them than guys said in 1997, it could be sensible on their part: sensible if they're less likely to get married and if they are lucky enough to get companionship, some sex, and maybe even intimacy outside of marriage.
There's no war on men, but there has been reduction in male privilege, and guys may be responding to that reduction in socially and economically rational ways.
The nuclear family is a relatively new invention, and it's a bad idea. We're in an awkward period moving on to other possibilities. Get over it, conservatives, and start acting like real conservatives: working to increase community, and social supports.
Of Pranks and Pride and Malicious Mischief (11 Dec. 2012)
I want to look at a line in the Associated Press's coverage of
the December 2012 telephone prank by Australian DJs Mel Greig and
Michael Christian, a prank that seems to be at least the occasion of the
suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who received and forwarded the
call: "Whatever pride there had been over" the success of "the hoax was
obliterated by worldwide public outrage […]."
In that sentence, Kristen Gelineau, the author of the AP story, hints at something important.
In the prank, Greig and Christian impersonated — probably badly — the United Kingdom's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip and successfully sought information about the condition of the royal granddaughter-in-law, the pregnant Kate Middleton Windsor (so to speak), Duchess of Cambridge, who was hospitalized for acute morning sickness.
The prank has been called "sophomoric"; Gelineau is more instructive in her use of "pride."
I'll object to "sophomoric" because college students as well as US high school students go through a sophomore year, and "College is for grownups," or should be, and some maturity should be expected of at least college sophomores.
"Pride" is more like it because pranks are at the relatively harmless end of practical jokes, and practical jokes pushed far enough get to what's called, significantly, "malicious mischief."
Shakespeare's tragedy Othello — SPOILER coming up … — ends in a bloodbath (although a restrained one as Jacobean tragedies go), and Greig and Christian, much to the contrary, intended no serious harm. Still, why prank someone at all? Why do people pull practical jokes or go further and do malicious mischief.
The villain of Othello, the treacherous Iago, speaks about slander, his major method of operation for doing evil in this play. " Good name in man and woman, dear my lord," Iago says to Othello,
Revenge might be one intelligible reason, and Shakespeare's villainous Shylock is easier to understand than Iago: Shylock bears a grudge and tries to exact bloody, as we say, repayment.
A revenge explanation doesn't work well for Iago: he's third in command under Othello, probably the greatest general in Europe, and he's reached this position at age twenty-eight. Iago may've hit a pewter ceiling, but for a guy who can't do the math required in the (Early) Modern military, he's doing very well, a hell of a lot better than, say, I was doing at age twenty-eight, and probably a whole lot better than you did or will do. However much Iago may feel slighted now and again, he owes Othello, big.
Now Iago says he thinks Othello has cuckolded him, but that is really, really unlikely to have happened, and Iago doesn't dwell on that accusation. As the great Shakespearean critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it — he wrote some poems, also — as Coleridge put it, Iago's bringing up the idea seems like "the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity."
Iago, I think, and have taught, is ticked off at subordination — which we good democrats should sympathize with — and has, let's say, issues with love and with ideals that don't fit into his anti-romantic views of the world (with which we should also sympathize). As dramatic characters go, Shakespeare's included, Iago is one twisted puppy and a complicated guy.
Relevant here, though, is that he's a trickster, or Trickster-figure, with a capital "T": a prankster with a sense of humor who goes way, way, too far. He's an instructive case at the extreme end of a continuum that's starts near those two unlucky, dumb-ass Aussie DJs.
Iago's mischief is truly malicious: it stems from malice, which in the old Christian psychology is precisely doing evil without any obvious gain.
So if you want to seriously condemn the call from the merry Australian pranksters, don't call it sophomoric or immature but say that it begins to border on malice.
And if you follow through on an analysis of malice, you can at least reach to something basic that we can understand, and that Kristen Gelineau points us at: pride.
Pride may not be the worst of all sins or the source of all evils (Radix malorum Superbia est), but neither is it the virtue we've made it into today.
We pull pranks to show how clever we are, to have that moment of trivial glory over other people.
And sometimes the other people feel serious hurt.
It may be that Jacintha Saldanha death can't, finally, be attributed to the prank phone call. OK, then we could go back to the suicide of Tyler Clementi and note that in addition to whatever hatred of gays was involved — and that could be minimal — there was much glorying in the embarrassing of another human being.
Iago sings, ironically, "'Tis pride that pulls the country down" (2.3.90), and that, too, is an exaggeration. But pride is a problem when it moves us to mess over other people for kicks; it is a worse problem when we get into the habit of doing so. A habit of mischief is a serious problem when it overcomes empathy and moves us to find serious joy in embarrassing — thereby hurting — others.
It's rare that practical jokes lead to tragedy; but far too often they lead to more pain than cheap laughs and tackier thrills can justify.
In that sentence, Kristen Gelineau, the author of the AP story, hints at something important.
In the prank, Greig and Christian impersonated — probably badly — the United Kingdom's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip and successfully sought information about the condition of the royal granddaughter-in-law, the pregnant Kate Middleton Windsor (so to speak), Duchess of Cambridge, who was hospitalized for acute morning sickness.
The prank has been called "sophomoric"; Gelineau is more instructive in her use of "pride."
I'll object to "sophomoric" because college students as well as US high school students go through a sophomore year, and "College is for grownups," or should be, and some maturity should be expected of at least college sophomores.
"Pride" is more like it because pranks are at the relatively harmless end of practical jokes, and practical jokes pushed far enough get to what's called, significantly, "malicious mischief."
Shakespeare's tragedy Othello — SPOILER coming up … — ends in a bloodbath (although a restrained one as Jacobean tragedies go), and Greig and Christian, much to the contrary, intended no serious harm. Still, why prank someone at all? Why do people pull practical jokes or go further and do malicious mischief.
The villain of Othello, the treacherous Iago, speaks about slander, his major method of operation for doing evil in this play. " Good name in man and woman, dear my lord," Iago says to Othello,
Why would someone slander someone else? Why would any do that "which not enriches him" but "makes me poor indeed"?Is the immediate jewel of their souls.Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;But he that filches from me my good nameRobs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. (3.3.155-61)
Revenge might be one intelligible reason, and Shakespeare's villainous Shylock is easier to understand than Iago: Shylock bears a grudge and tries to exact bloody, as we say, repayment.
A revenge explanation doesn't work well for Iago: he's third in command under Othello, probably the greatest general in Europe, and he's reached this position at age twenty-eight. Iago may've hit a pewter ceiling, but for a guy who can't do the math required in the (Early) Modern military, he's doing very well, a hell of a lot better than, say, I was doing at age twenty-eight, and probably a whole lot better than you did or will do. However much Iago may feel slighted now and again, he owes Othello, big.
Now Iago says he thinks Othello has cuckolded him, but that is really, really unlikely to have happened, and Iago doesn't dwell on that accusation. As the great Shakespearean critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it — he wrote some poems, also — as Coleridge put it, Iago's bringing up the idea seems like "the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity."
Iago, I think, and have taught, is ticked off at subordination — which we good democrats should sympathize with — and has, let's say, issues with love and with ideals that don't fit into his anti-romantic views of the world (with which we should also sympathize). As dramatic characters go, Shakespeare's included, Iago is one twisted puppy and a complicated guy.
Relevant here, though, is that he's a trickster, or Trickster-figure, with a capital "T": a prankster with a sense of humor who goes way, way, too far. He's an instructive case at the extreme end of a continuum that's starts near those two unlucky, dumb-ass Aussie DJs.
Iago's mischief is truly malicious: it stems from malice, which in the old Christian psychology is precisely doing evil without any obvious gain.
So if you want to seriously condemn the call from the merry Australian pranksters, don't call it sophomoric or immature but say that it begins to border on malice.
And if you follow through on an analysis of malice, you can at least reach to something basic that we can understand, and that Kristen Gelineau points us at: pride.
Pride may not be the worst of all sins or the source of all evils (Radix malorum Superbia est), but neither is it the virtue we've made it into today.
We pull pranks to show how clever we are, to have that moment of trivial glory over other people.
And sometimes the other people feel serious hurt.
It may be that Jacintha Saldanha death can't, finally, be attributed to the prank phone call. OK, then we could go back to the suicide of Tyler Clementi and note that in addition to whatever hatred of gays was involved — and that could be minimal — there was much glorying in the embarrassing of another human being.
Iago sings, ironically, "'Tis pride that pulls the country down" (2.3.90), and that, too, is an exaggeration. But pride is a problem when it moves us to mess over other people for kicks; it is a worse problem when we get into the habit of doing so. A habit of mischief is a serious problem when it overcomes empathy and moves us to find serious joy in embarrassing — thereby hurting — others.
It's rare that practical jokes lead to tragedy; but far too often they lead to more pain than cheap laughs and tackier thrills can justify.
Perrier, Pubes, Condoms, Morēs, & Morality (10 Feb. 2013)
"Manners Are Small Morals"
I didn't put "spittoons" in my title here, because it's a somewhat long word and a word that might in itself turn away some readers; also, in combination with "pubes," it might attract readers for a different kind of writing than this essay.
I want to start out with spittoons, though, and the fact that you probably have never seen one outside a Western.
I'm old enough to remember spittoons in a gym locker-room in Chicago in the 1950s, and a friend of my youth tells me he saw some as recently as the 1970s: in an old-fashioned Chicago pool hall. He wasn't sure if the 1970s spittoons were actually used, or were just traditional decor. The ones in the locker-room were used — and I won't go into details about how I'm sure of that. (Hint: Emptying them was obviously not something the janitors like to do.)
What's significant here is that I won't go into details because the details disgust me and very likely would disgust you, even a macho guy "you." Within a century or so, spittoons have gone from a sign of increased civilization — a way to avoid spitting on the street — to just gross.
Part of that change was motivated by concerns for health and hygiene, and enforcement of health regulations, but mostly it was a change in "morés," in social standards and customs.
I've written before about the power of fads and fashion, and I'm going to reinforce that idea here, but looking more at the up-side. Especially as multiple-antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis becomes an increasing health hazard, it becomes increasingly a good thing that most Americans no longer casually spit on the street, or even in spittoons — and, mostly, that change in behavior came from a change in morés, in customs, social standards, "manners."
A couple more items of evidence: more in terms of what people do than what they don't do, with continuing emphasis on guy behavior but bringing in (very crucially) you gals.
While having my car serviced in a recall, I went into the Parts Department to check out costs for installing fog lights and noticed that they had a refrigerated display with beverages to purchase. So far so familiar: the gas stations I grew up with often had Coca Cola machines. However, the featured item in this Parts Department in 2013 was Perrier Water.
Trust me, when I was growing up, guys at the gas station who wouldn't shell out a nickel for a Coke, drank the gas station water out of a hose, or (as part of the creeping socialism of the 1950s) from a water fountain. That a trucker checking out mudguards at the Parts Department might drink water from a little green bottle, and pay for the privilege, is a tribute to the power of changing fashions, and to the power of advertisers and marketers to change those fashions.
Now, moving closer to, uh, home, let us consider the pubic hair of my title.
I grew up with the folklore about guys' playing nasty honeymoon tricks on their friends, with the nastiest trick getting the groom drunk at his stag party, then (de)pantsing him and shaving his balls. Really, really nasty and perverse friends — the real weirdoes — would shave the guy from waist to thighs, so he'd look prepubescent (not that they'd know the word) and ridiculous when his bride saw him naked.
As The Simpson's Nelson Muntz would say, "Ha-ha!"
A quick check of my local porn site (which seems to be in Holland) indicates that a lot of guys have no problem with shaved balls or what may be full-body shaving, with a couple movie comedies' indicting guys' doing the pubic part by themselves to themselves — have the shaving done by a really close and trusted friend.
And there are women who go way beyond shaving.
Jeff Foxworthy and I don't agree on a lot of things anymore, but we do agree that if Bikini waxing is ever forced on people, Amnesty International would be sending investigators — and women pay to have it done!
Even more weirdly and permanently people of both sexes are getting pierced and tattooed — and posting videos of themselves performing naked on the Internet. I'm talking about more or less normal, or at least non-pathological people, who are institutionalized if at all on college campuses and maybe the occasional barracks. I'm talking about people painfully marked, performing private acts to an international public, with faces visible and school colors up so identifying the performers is pretty straightforward even before The Powers That Be start buying genital-recognition software.
Okay, I'm kidding a bit here but dead serious about how standards can change quickly and how strongly behavior can be modified: piercing, waxing, and tattooing are painful. I joked once that next would come scarification and branding, and, goll-dang, you can get it done in Los Angeles by people reviewed on Yelp!
People are enduring serious pain in places and ways I want to think about even less than spittoons.
These changes occurred in less than a generation, and they are major changes in individual behavior and social standards.
So there is hope for more positive shifts.
Smoking tobacco is already becoming rare, and chewing and spitting tobacco even rarer. With more social pressure, ashtrays can go the way of spittoons, and smoking in public the way of spitting in public.
If fads and fashions can get guys to shave their pubes to look like a child or porn star (or gay body-builder?), you can get guys regularly and consistently into condoms when they're lucky enough to find some sex. And until there are more elegant means of birth-control and sex relatively safe from STDs, those condoms are important for public health.
O, tempera; O, morés! indeed; but we can go with that. People don't change much — not most of us individually, definitely not humans as a species — but our behavior can change.
Steven Pinker goes over 800 pages on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), showing as much as anything how terribly grossly horrible human beings can be; but he also demonstrates his point that we can do better and are doing better.
Read Pinker on the earnest topic of decreasing violence, and note that he also discusses manners.
We can't change much, but we can do better. Look around you and note the absence of spittoons. Watch an old movie and note how many people were smoking cigarettes then and how few now. Consider the utter weirdness of what people do to their bodies, the images they put up on porn sites — and have some hope that, among other improvements, we can reduce the number of unwanted, unplanned pregnancies — and abortions — and reduce the occurrence of sexually-transmitted diseases.
Never get a pretty much smoking-free California (or wherever)? Never get guys to see condoms as cool? Maybe, but it's worth a try. "Manners are small morals" and some achievable changes in morés are imperatives of commonsense, responsibility, and morality.
Literally (Word Usage Literal and Figurative) [28 April 2013]
I'm going to start out with a kind of disclaimer. Shortly I'm going to talk a bit about a segment on The Colbert Report and note that it's kind of fan-boy esoteric. Since I don't often write about The Colbert Report, my reference below might imply that there's something unusual about a bit of allusive complexity on Colbert,
and I want to clarify that the segment I'll refer to is a tad more
esoteric than the Colbert-ian norm, but not much; indeed the one I'll
get to is barely in the same sport, let alone in the same league, as the
awesome nerdocity of the first J. R. R. Tolkien-geek smackdown between Colbert and James Franco (5 April 2011). The Colbert/Franco scherzo and fugue on Lord of the Rings
trivia reached levels of dorkoid esoterica I have never encountered,
and I am a member of the International Association for the Fantastic in
the Arts, have friends who have written books on Tolkien, and was named
first faculty advisor (as the first chapter prank) by the Miami
University Society for Creative Anachronism.
That being clear — I've hesitated to comment on misuses of the word
"literally" in part because Stephen Colbert said all that needed to be
said on the subject — for some audiences.
The occasion was one of the long series of Republican 2012 Presidential
Primary Debates, one a couple weeks after President Obama announced the
withdrawal of most US combat troops in Iraq. Candidate Rick Perry said
in the debate that he'd return US troops to Iraq, lest we "see Iran […] move back in [into Iraq] at literally the speed of light." Colbert
sensed the figurative blood in the figurative water and figuratively
did whatever the technical term is for what sharks do when they take a
big bite out of a thrashing, wounded prey creature: “The speed of light," Colbert quoted. "Not figuratively, literally. […] Folks, forget nuclear weapons. Iran has developed the warp drive.
Those centrifuges were actually enriching dilithium crystals. And
unless we stop them, Captain Mahmoud Ahmad-kirk-ejad will soon be
getting it on with 72 space virgins.”
To truly, if figuratively, savor this moment, it helps to know that
there seems to be no way that matter in our universe can move as fast as
or faster than the speed of light; as one version of the T-shirt has it
"299,792,458 meters per
second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law!" It also helps to know
that science fiction writers fudge one way around the limitations of the
speed of light barrier by invoking theories of a space warp where the
shortest distance between two points in our universe can be through one
or more higher dimensions so that a space ship at point A can get to
point B in what looks like a speed faster than light.
This idea became canonical for a generation with the Warp Drive, especially on classic Star Trek,
the series featuring William Shatner as Captain James Tiberius Kirk. It
made sense in the 1960s. One way to get FTL (Faster Than Light) travel
was to have a chapter explaining theories how it might be possible, as
Arthur C. Clarke did in his novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). Another way was just to say, "Warp two, Mr. Sulu." If humans can
break the Sound Barrier and go faster than sound at Mach 2 and 3 and
all, it stands to whatever substitutes for reason while we watch a movie
or TV show that going "Warp 2" or "Warp 3" will get us FTL. It's what
Walt Disney called "The Plausible Impossible" (Disneyland 3.08, which is blocked on YouTube, so don't bother).
And the Warp Drives on vessels on Star Trek were powered by "dilithium crystals," which have something to do with antimatter.
Further, the President of Iran at the time was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and
one set of Muslim beliefs has it that male martyrs to the faith will be
greeted and serviced in Paradise by seventy-two virgins — morphed into
"space virgins" by the old SciFi convention of "skify-ing up" a phrase
by just putting "space" before all manner of words.
Follow that?
Enough members of Colbert's audience could that Colbert got a laugh,
and the clip seems to be popular. So for some folks, for a while, a
figurative stake has been put into the figurative heart of "literally."
It's not enough, though, and it is too much.
The Colbert routine isn't enough because of the limited demographics;
it's too much for a number of reasons, starting with all my uses above
of "figuratively."
We use figures of speech all the time, including the hyperbole of "all
the time." To say "figuratively" every time would, as the figure has it,
get old fast.
And the word in question, "literally," can get complicated.
In the section on his "[…] Theory of Symbols" in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye contrasts literary symbols that are descriptive and refer to things outside the text, and those that are what he calls literal. As the Wikipedia article has it, "To Frye, literal
means nearly the opposite of its usage in common speech; to say that
something 'literally' means something generally involves referring to a
definition external to the text. Instead," in Frye's usage, "literal refers to the symbol's meaning in its specific literary situation while descriptive refers to personal connotation and conventional definition."
Uh, huh. Even among those of us who continued to like Frye after the
1960s, this usage of "literal" never caught on. But no less a serious
thinker about language than Northrop Frye used "literal" that way, and,
if you go back far enough, he had a point. The Oxford English Dictionary's
etymology for "literal" begins, "of or relating to literature
(beginning of the 14th cent.), of or relating to the ‘letter’ of a
text," — and only after the 1300s came to mean "of or relating to the
‘letter’ of a text, obtained by taking words and passages in their
primary or usual meaning" — i.e., what we usually mean by "literal" and
"literally": the words as they usually mean, not getting figurative
(metaphorical, allegorical, mystical — fancy schmancy) on their
figurative asses.
Fairly recently, but long before the 2012 elections, some rhetorically
daring people came upon the (bad) idea of using "literally"
figuratively, as in the OED's definition 6.c, noting a colloquial literally,
"Used in figurative or hyperbolic expressions to add emphasis or as an
intensifier: veritable, real; complete, absolute, utter" and giving as
their first example a quotation going back to a magazine article from
1857: "We hurried on to Baden Baden. Let no American send his son
thither if he have any penchant for the card-table or the roulette. It is a literal hell." The OED
editors immediately add that this usage is "Often considered irregular
in standard English, since it reverses the earlier sense ‘without
metaphor, exaggeration, or distortion’."
No shit?!
Baden Baden is a spa town in southern Germany, and it may've been a
very sordid place in the 1850s. Still, it wasn't hell or even,
literally, "a hell"; at worst, it could be seen as a very large
"gambling hell," in the manner of, say, Las Vegas.
Irregular usage, though, is no big deal, and no one should spend time
attacking Northrop Frye for getting ingenious with "literal" or for
anyone still using the phrase "gambling hell." What is a big deal is
"literally" as a hyperbolic intensifier. Nowadays we suffer
from serious language inflation, and overstatement is becoming not just
an issue of grammar but of politics and ethics.
"He's literally as bad as Hitler" is figurative language; the figure of
speech is hyperbole, overstatement — and unless that statement refers
to a mass murderer on the order of Genghis Khan, Tamburlaine, Stalin, or
Mao, the statement on its face — no argument necessary — is
overstatement that's massive and bordering on the obscene. Matthew White gives
for the death toll for World War II as some 66 million people and cites
for "Who usually gets the most blame: the Axis, especially Hitler" (The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, p. [400]). Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature
passes along as at least plausible, theories of "No Hitler, no
Holocaust" and no Hitler, no World War II, at least not as the
"hemoclysm" World War II became (208-9).
"As bad as Hitler" — literally? Cut the crap. Figuratively.
That being clear — I've hesitated to comment on misuses of the word "literally" in part because Stephen Colbert said all that needed to be said on the subject — for some audiences.
The occasion was one of the long series of Republican 2012 Presidential Primary Debates, one a couple weeks after President Obama announced the withdrawal of most US combat troops in Iraq. Candidate Rick Perry said in the debate that he'd return US troops to Iraq, lest we "see Iran […] move back in [into Iraq] at literally the speed of light." Colbert sensed the figurative blood in the figurative water and figuratively did whatever the technical term is for what sharks do when they take a big bite out of a thrashing, wounded prey creature: “The speed of light," Colbert quoted. "Not figuratively, literally. […] Folks, forget nuclear weapons. Iran has developed the warp drive. Those centrifuges were actually enriching dilithium crystals. And unless we stop them, Captain Mahmoud Ahmad-kirk-ejad will soon be getting it on with 72 space virgins.”
To truly, if figuratively, savor this moment, it helps to know that there seems to be no way that matter in our universe can move as fast as or faster than the speed of light; as one version of the T-shirt has it "299,792,458 meters per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law!" It also helps to know that science fiction writers fudge one way around the limitations of the speed of light barrier by invoking theories of a space warp where the shortest distance between two points in our universe can be through one or more higher dimensions so that a space ship at point A can get to point B in what looks like a speed faster than light.
This idea became canonical for a generation with the Warp Drive, especially on classic Star Trek, the series featuring William Shatner as Captain James Tiberius Kirk. It made sense in the 1960s. One way to get FTL (Faster Than Light) travel was to have a chapter explaining theories how it might be possible, as Arthur C. Clarke did in his novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Another way was just to say, "Warp two, Mr. Sulu." If humans can break the Sound Barrier and go faster than sound at Mach 2 and 3 and all, it stands to whatever substitutes for reason while we watch a movie or TV show that going "Warp 2" or "Warp 3" will get us FTL. It's what Walt Disney called "The Plausible Impossible" (Disneyland 3.08, which is blocked on YouTube, so don't bother).
And the Warp Drives on vessels on Star Trek were powered by "dilithium crystals," which have something to do with antimatter.
Further, the President of Iran at the time was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and one set of Muslim beliefs has it that male martyrs to the faith will be greeted and serviced in Paradise by seventy-two virgins — morphed into "space virgins" by the old SciFi convention of "skify-ing up" a phrase by just putting "space" before all manner of words.
Follow that?
Enough members of Colbert's audience could that Colbert got a laugh, and the clip seems to be popular. So for some folks, for a while, a figurative stake has been put into the figurative heart of "literally."
It's not enough, though, and it is too much.
The Colbert routine isn't enough because of the limited demographics; it's too much for a number of reasons, starting with all my uses above of "figuratively."
We use figures of speech all the time, including the hyperbole of "all the time." To say "figuratively" every time would, as the figure has it, get old fast.
And the word in question, "literally," can get complicated.
In the section on his "[…] Theory of Symbols" in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye contrasts literary symbols that are descriptive and refer to things outside the text, and those that are what he calls literal. As the Wikipedia article has it, "To Frye, literal means nearly the opposite of its usage in common speech; to say that something 'literally' means something generally involves referring to a definition external to the text. Instead," in Frye's usage, "literal refers to the symbol's meaning in its specific literary situation while descriptive refers to personal connotation and conventional definition."
Uh, huh. Even among those of us who continued to like Frye after the 1960s, this usage of "literal" never caught on. But no less a serious thinker about language than Northrop Frye used "literal" that way, and, if you go back far enough, he had a point. The Oxford English Dictionary's etymology for "literal" begins, "of or relating to literature (beginning of the 14th cent.), of or relating to the ‘letter’ of a text," — and only after the 1300s came to mean "of or relating to the ‘letter’ of a text, obtained by taking words and passages in their primary or usual meaning" — i.e., what we usually mean by "literal" and "literally": the words as they usually mean, not getting figurative (metaphorical, allegorical, mystical — fancy schmancy) on their figurative asses.
Fairly recently, but long before the 2012 elections, some rhetorically daring people came upon the (bad) idea of using "literally" figuratively, as in the OED's definition 6.c, noting a colloquial literally, "Used in figurative or hyperbolic expressions to add emphasis or as an intensifier: veritable, real; complete, absolute, utter" and giving as their first example a quotation going back to a magazine article from 1857: "We hurried on to Baden Baden. Let no American send his son thither if he have any penchant for the card-table or the roulette. It is a literal hell." The OED editors immediately add that this usage is "Often considered irregular in standard English, since it reverses the earlier sense ‘without metaphor, exaggeration, or distortion’."
No shit?!
Baden Baden is a spa town in southern Germany, and it may've been a very sordid place in the 1850s. Still, it wasn't hell or even, literally, "a hell"; at worst, it could be seen as a very large "gambling hell," in the manner of, say, Las Vegas.
Irregular usage, though, is no big deal, and no one should spend time attacking Northrop Frye for getting ingenious with "literal" or for anyone still using the phrase "gambling hell." What is a big deal is "literally" as a hyperbolic intensifier. Nowadays we suffer from serious language inflation, and overstatement is becoming not just an issue of grammar but of politics and ethics.
"He's literally as bad as Hitler" is figurative language; the figure of speech is hyperbole, overstatement — and unless that statement refers to a mass murderer on the order of Genghis Khan, Tamburlaine, Stalin, or Mao, the statement on its face — no argument necessary — is overstatement that's massive and bordering on the obscene. Matthew White gives for the death toll for World War II as some 66 million people and cites for "Who usually gets the most blame: the Axis, especially Hitler" (The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, p. [400]). Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature passes along as at least plausible, theories of "No Hitler, no Holocaust" and no Hitler, no World War II, at least not as the "hemoclysm" World War II became (208-9).
"As bad as Hitler" — literally? Cut the crap. Figuratively.
The "No-Visible-Scars" Approach: Disciplining/Harming Kids and Others (29 June 2013)
Most
of us learned as kids, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words
can never hurt me," which we modify as adults to add, "Words just leave
those invisible wounds that fester for years and years, poisoning
relationships and our lives …."
I am a life member of the American Civil Liberties Union and close to
an absolutist on free speech; and contrary to some of my allies in
feminism and on the Left, I strongly differentiate between speech and
actions and limit a phrase like "speech acts" to something like, "I now
pronounce you husband and wife" (or whatever), or "You're fired!" And I
note again that David Sedaris tells stories, and even if they are 100%
true to his perceptions and memories, we don't hear from his parents and
siblings. Still, to my ears, the elder Sedaris comes through as
something of a villain.
I can forgive him his heavy spoon and (far more easily), his occasionally swatting a bratty son. Cutting the kid down, though, figuratively, hitting him with "verbal negativity" at just about every exchange — now that is kind of barbaric and cruel.
I was going to write on this topic again anyway — indeed, I'd already written that opening paragraph — when I listened to David Sedaris's Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls
(2013), which includes a story in which a young Sedaris gets paddled by
his father. In earlier books, Sedaris had talked about his father's
dinner-table custom of hitting his wise-ass kids on the heads with a
heavy spoon, and I thought that a bad thing for the father to do: scalp
wounds can bleed a lot, nerves in the scalp damage easily and take a
long time to heal, frequent head trauma of even a minor sort can harm
the brain, and I agreed with the instructor of the one psych course I
took that it's unethical for big people to beat up on little people.
Still,
the instructor noted that kids are pretty resilient and that the
research as of that date (mid-1960s) indicated that all sorts of systems
of discipline could work with children so long as the general
environment was loving and the system applied fairly and consistently.
As the instructor threw in, "It won't warp their little psyches if you
hit 'em now and then; and there's your psyche to consider" — and then
repeated the ethical point that adults shouldn't beat up on kids, ever.
In
the story with the paddle, however, the young — but not all that young —
David Sedaris wasn't beaten up by his father and had behaved really,
really like a brat. What bothered me in the Let's Explore Diabetes
stories about the elder Sedaris (and remember that these are stories,
and we haven't heard Dad's side) — what bothered me with this
to-some-degree-fictionalized Dad wasn't that he'd once paddled his son
but that he consistently undercut him verbally.
There
may be something in my personal background working here. I can recall
only one occasion when my father hit me — on the arm, with an arrow I
had loosed in the apartment — but our parents didn't work very hard to
disguise that (CLICHÉ ALERT!) I was our mother's favorite and my sister
my father's favorite. Also, I was "the good one," the occasional
arrow-equivalent notwithstanding, and my sister "the smart one": all the
way through to at least my PhD and getting tenure at a respectable
university.
Quick
story. My sister called me one time laughing and saying that she'd
called our father to tell her that her son had made Phi Beta Kappa. My
father sent on his congratulations, paused, and said, "Well, that can't
be such a big thing; Rich made Phi Beta Kappa."
Anyway,
and for sure, I was kind of sensitive to — let's call it "verbal
negativity" and leave "abuse" for more serious issues — to verbal
negativity by the time I was a junior or senior in college.
I
recall helping to run my fraternity chapter's Hell Week then and having
some inspectors from the Interfraternity Council show up for yet
another surprise inspection and getting into a moderately friendly
discussion with one on pledge training. He politely declined my
invitation to camp out in our foyer (or some similar snarky remark) and
noted that he and his colleagues had returned because there were rumors
that my fraternity chapter included sweat sessions of the boot-camp
persuasion in our pledge training. Neither confirming nor denying the
rumors, I noted that IFC held us responsible for the behavior and, as we
said back then, discipline of our pledges and wondered aloud what
sanctions for pledge-ly mischief he would recommend.
He
told me that his house used line-ups where a pledge would be verbally
dressed down (and verbally torn down) in front of his pledge brothers.
"The 'No-Visible-Scars' approach …?" I said, innocently, and thought "Now that
is barbaric" and said that we didn't do that, and wouldn't. We'd line
pledges up and yell at them as a group, but if we were going to say hard
things about a pledge we said them to the pledge in private; and
however much we were willing to use Parris-Island techniques for
motivational aerobic exercise, we avoided the Marine tradition of
tearing a guy down (destroying a boy to build a man, breaking the man to
build the Marine [see Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket or just about any Marine movie prior to the 1990s).
I can forgive him his heavy spoon and (far more easily), his occasionally swatting a bratty son. Cutting the kid down, though, figuratively, hitting him with "verbal negativity" at just about every exchange — now that is kind of barbaric and cruel.
Trayvon Martin, Yoshihiro Hattori: Law and Logic ("Indirect Proof") [17 July 2013]
Mathematics
and logic games can get very difficult, but their world is essentially
simple, elegant and frequently beautiful. Liars always lie;
truth-tellers always tell the truth; and statements can be simply true
or simply false and mutually exclusive, and that is that. For good and
for ill, the real world is typically complicated, usually inelegant, and
only occasionally beautiful.
In the neat world of math and logic, let's say you want to prove that a statement, a "proposition" is true or false, but you can't do so directly. Let's name it California style, Prop-1, and you want to prove it true but can't figure out a way to do so and have at least a strong feeling that a direct proof just isn't possible. What you can do — in a world of abstraction — is note that if Prop-1 is true its negation is false, and vice versa. Let's continue California style and piss off some logicians and call that negation Proposition-2.
What you can assume that Prop-2 is true and proceed logically from there, and, if you're clever, you can show that accepting the truth of Prop-2 leads to an absurdity. Then you go back and check your logic. If accepting Prop-2 leads to something clearly wrong, and your logic is OK, then Prop-2 is wrong. If Prop-2 is wrong, Prop-1 is right, and you get to write "Q.E.D." at the bottom of the proof, with seventeen additional Lifetime Geek Points if you add "per Reductio ad Absurdum." ("It has been proven by a reduction to the absurd.")
In one variation of this game, you can assume that it's OK to divide by zero and work out from there a logical proof that 1 = 2 (or maybe it was 1 = 0). Since we can be pretty sure that 1 = 1, we can conclude that in ordinary arithmetic and algebra problems, it's a bad idea to divide by zero. (If you want to get into infinities, that's a different thing — and probably a more advanced math course.)
In literature, things are more complex than math, and there is usually more emotional content: only a small number of people get emotionally involved with math, while more people react emotionally to literature and art generally than is healthy. (If you spend time and expend a good deal of energy complaining about the crap on TV or in the movies, you probably should consider writing letters for Amnesty International or protesting at your State capital against some significant evil.) Still, most of us, most of the time, can keep emotional distance in art, even when that art bears directly on current events.
This ability of art to distance an issue allows artists to — sometimes, quietly — walk around our prejudices and other defenses and work on our heads, including working on our figurative heads and hearts logically.
In science fiction, there's the kind of narrative called "If This Goes On," named after a 1940 story by Robert A. Heinlein. In stories like these, a contemporary trend is extrapolated into the future, where we see its very bad results. That is, the science-fictional technique of extrapolation is combined with what in satire can be called — and is called by the SF writer Yevgeny Zamyatin — reductio ad finem, pushing a bad trend to its conclusion, e.g., Vladimir Lenin's going over to capitalist "scientific management" getting trashed in Zamyatin's get SF satire, We (ca. 1920). If we don't like what will happen "If This Goes On," then we should try to stop it now.
The dramatic action in William Shakespeare's King Lear pretty well undercuts any idea of natural bonds between people logically justified in terms of human society as part of some cosmic Great Chain of Being. In such a world, one can't prove that bonds of compassion exist, but Shakespeare does a nice job showing an effect of not feeling such bonds: in an action and scene often called — SPOILER! — The Blinding of Gloucester (3.7). The Earl of Gloucester is an old man and a feudal vassal of the Duke of Cornwall; he's the Duke's host, and, old Gloucester might think, the Duke's friend. But Cornwall and, maybe more so, his wife Goneril, are angry at Gloucester, feel politically harmed by Gloucester, and have Gloucester in their power. So, what the hell, they gouge out his eyes. On stage. Traditionally, they "Pluck out his eyes" as graphically as the state the art of stage effects can manage.
The scene is obscene, in the old sense of the word, and intentionally so. Done well, even with an audience raised on torture-porn Saw films, it ought to send one or two wise-ass groundlings running to the john to puke.
Old Will is saying to us, "as 'twere": okay, I cannot prove that you should — absurdly perhaps, imprudently most likely — feel compassion, but here is one logical consequence if you don't; if that turns your stomach, think about it.
The classic example, however, is Jonathan Swift's once well-known essay, "A Modest Proposal" (1729), originally published to look like an anonymously written but legitimate and earnestly-argued political pamphlet. In the early 18th century, poor Irish people were again, as often, starving, and at least part of the cause of the famine was a set of conscious economic policies by the ruling elites in England and Ireland. Swift could argue wonkish economics with the best of his time, and had a price on his head for doing so in The Drapier's Letters; but he got to very basic basics in "A Modest Proposal." In classic economics, "The value of a thing is what the thing will bring," and "thing" obviously included sub-human animals — sheep or pigs, say, or even horses — which were bought and sold in markets and whose value clearly was the market price. (Human slaves were also bought and sold, but that wasn't an immediate issue in Ireland — although it's a useful point for background.)
What's the value of poor Irish?
The "modest proposal" is that poor Irish should sell their babies at a year old to be slaughtered for food for the rich; and it is crucial that that conclusion follows rigorously from "the cold equations" derived from seeing Man as (Solely) an Economic Animal. More poignantly, Swift's Projector demonstrates that the baby-meat option is less despicable, indeed, more compassionate, than current policies wherewith weakest of the poor are "already dying, and rotting, by cold and famine, and filth, and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected."
Q.E.D., baby — and if you're out there puking again, consider strongly the possibility that the "Proposal" has just reduced to the grotesque, if not precisely the absurd, the idea that "The Irish are animals" or that the only value to a human being is a kind of economic price.
Got the principle?
Now consider at least as a thought experiment that in the summer of 2013 trial of George Zimmerman for the slaying of Trayvon Martin, the six women, good and true, of a Florida jury reached a logical decision, to wit, that a large, fully adult White man could shoot and kill an unarmed Black teenager of slight build — legally.
Given Florida law on self-defense, given instructions to the jury that incorporated Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, such a conclusion was possible.
Given the premise that any White person might well fear any noncrippled Black male, that conclusion was pretty likely.
Given the premise that fear is not just an explanation but a generally acceptable justification for even violent action, that conclusion was probable.
And given the assumption under Florida law and Southern culture that White men at least have the right to literally bear arms and go out armed — added to the assumption that such armed White men would do well to literally go out practicing "self-help justice" and look for trouble — then the "not guilty" verdict was pretty much inevitable.
As many are saying as I write, "Do not blame the jury."
Indeed.
Instead note that the George Zimmerman case is hardly unique even recently. On 17 October 1992, Rodney Peairs shot and killed Yoshihiro Hattori in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Mr. Peairs stood his ground and defended his castle against a 17-year old exchange student who got the wrong house for a Halloween party. Pearis, too, was initially not prosecuted and, upon criminal prosecution, was acquitted. Mrs. Pearis had been frightened seeing the teenager come onto their property, and "The defense argued that Peairs was in large part reacting reasonably to his wife's panic." The trial took a week, and the jury voted to acquit in under four hours.
If you don't like the verdict in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, or that in the shooting of Yoshihiro Hattori, consider that those verdicts might be logical and legal and start working to change the premises that make them that way.
We cannot insist that people be heroic; we can insist that armed men act, as the expression has it, as if they had some balls, and some brains. We can insist that laws in action lead to justice, and when they don't that those laws get changed. We can get appropriately angry and verbally attack films and TV and news shows that demonize young Black men and teenagers generally and romanticize vigilantism and Wild-West gun worship.
And if the English and, a bit earlier, the Americans, can accept the Irish as fully human, so we can start valuing all human life, even teenagers near our property.
In the neat world of math and logic, let's say you want to prove that a statement, a "proposition" is true or false, but you can't do so directly. Let's name it California style, Prop-1, and you want to prove it true but can't figure out a way to do so and have at least a strong feeling that a direct proof just isn't possible. What you can do — in a world of abstraction — is note that if Prop-1 is true its negation is false, and vice versa. Let's continue California style and piss off some logicians and call that negation Proposition-2.
What you can assume that Prop-2 is true and proceed logically from there, and, if you're clever, you can show that accepting the truth of Prop-2 leads to an absurdity. Then you go back and check your logic. If accepting Prop-2 leads to something clearly wrong, and your logic is OK, then Prop-2 is wrong. If Prop-2 is wrong, Prop-1 is right, and you get to write "Q.E.D." at the bottom of the proof, with seventeen additional Lifetime Geek Points if you add "per Reductio ad Absurdum." ("It has been proven by a reduction to the absurd.")
In one variation of this game, you can assume that it's OK to divide by zero and work out from there a logical proof that 1 = 2 (or maybe it was 1 = 0). Since we can be pretty sure that 1 = 1, we can conclude that in ordinary arithmetic and algebra problems, it's a bad idea to divide by zero. (If you want to get into infinities, that's a different thing — and probably a more advanced math course.)
In literature, things are more complex than math, and there is usually more emotional content: only a small number of people get emotionally involved with math, while more people react emotionally to literature and art generally than is healthy. (If you spend time and expend a good deal of energy complaining about the crap on TV or in the movies, you probably should consider writing letters for Amnesty International or protesting at your State capital against some significant evil.) Still, most of us, most of the time, can keep emotional distance in art, even when that art bears directly on current events.
This ability of art to distance an issue allows artists to — sometimes, quietly — walk around our prejudices and other defenses and work on our heads, including working on our figurative heads and hearts logically.
In science fiction, there's the kind of narrative called "If This Goes On," named after a 1940 story by Robert A. Heinlein. In stories like these, a contemporary trend is extrapolated into the future, where we see its very bad results. That is, the science-fictional technique of extrapolation is combined with what in satire can be called — and is called by the SF writer Yevgeny Zamyatin — reductio ad finem, pushing a bad trend to its conclusion, e.g., Vladimir Lenin's going over to capitalist "scientific management" getting trashed in Zamyatin's get SF satire, We (ca. 1920). If we don't like what will happen "If This Goes On," then we should try to stop it now.
The dramatic action in William Shakespeare's King Lear pretty well undercuts any idea of natural bonds between people logically justified in terms of human society as part of some cosmic Great Chain of Being. In such a world, one can't prove that bonds of compassion exist, but Shakespeare does a nice job showing an effect of not feeling such bonds: in an action and scene often called — SPOILER! — The Blinding of Gloucester (3.7). The Earl of Gloucester is an old man and a feudal vassal of the Duke of Cornwall; he's the Duke's host, and, old Gloucester might think, the Duke's friend. But Cornwall and, maybe more so, his wife Goneril, are angry at Gloucester, feel politically harmed by Gloucester, and have Gloucester in their power. So, what the hell, they gouge out his eyes. On stage. Traditionally, they "Pluck out his eyes" as graphically as the state the art of stage effects can manage.
The scene is obscene, in the old sense of the word, and intentionally so. Done well, even with an audience raised on torture-porn Saw films, it ought to send one or two wise-ass groundlings running to the john to puke.
Old Will is saying to us, "as 'twere": okay, I cannot prove that you should — absurdly perhaps, imprudently most likely — feel compassion, but here is one logical consequence if you don't; if that turns your stomach, think about it.
The classic example, however, is Jonathan Swift's once well-known essay, "A Modest Proposal" (1729), originally published to look like an anonymously written but legitimate and earnestly-argued political pamphlet. In the early 18th century, poor Irish people were again, as often, starving, and at least part of the cause of the famine was a set of conscious economic policies by the ruling elites in England and Ireland. Swift could argue wonkish economics with the best of his time, and had a price on his head for doing so in The Drapier's Letters; but he got to very basic basics in "A Modest Proposal." In classic economics, "The value of a thing is what the thing will bring," and "thing" obviously included sub-human animals — sheep or pigs, say, or even horses — which were bought and sold in markets and whose value clearly was the market price. (Human slaves were also bought and sold, but that wasn't an immediate issue in Ireland — although it's a useful point for background.)
What's the value of poor Irish?
The "modest proposal" is that poor Irish should sell their babies at a year old to be slaughtered for food for the rich; and it is crucial that that conclusion follows rigorously from "the cold equations" derived from seeing Man as (Solely) an Economic Animal. More poignantly, Swift's Projector demonstrates that the baby-meat option is less despicable, indeed, more compassionate, than current policies wherewith weakest of the poor are "already dying, and rotting, by cold and famine, and filth, and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected."
Q.E.D., baby — and if you're out there puking again, consider strongly the possibility that the "Proposal" has just reduced to the grotesque, if not precisely the absurd, the idea that "The Irish are animals" or that the only value to a human being is a kind of economic price.
Got the principle?
Now consider at least as a thought experiment that in the summer of 2013 trial of George Zimmerman for the slaying of Trayvon Martin, the six women, good and true, of a Florida jury reached a logical decision, to wit, that a large, fully adult White man could shoot and kill an unarmed Black teenager of slight build — legally.
Given Florida law on self-defense, given instructions to the jury that incorporated Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, such a conclusion was possible.
Given the premise that any White person might well fear any noncrippled Black male, that conclusion was pretty likely.
Given the premise that fear is not just an explanation but a generally acceptable justification for even violent action, that conclusion was probable.
And given the assumption under Florida law and Southern culture that White men at least have the right to literally bear arms and go out armed — added to the assumption that such armed White men would do well to literally go out practicing "self-help justice" and look for trouble — then the "not guilty" verdict was pretty much inevitable.
As many are saying as I write, "Do not blame the jury."
Indeed.
Instead note that the George Zimmerman case is hardly unique even recently. On 17 October 1992, Rodney Peairs shot and killed Yoshihiro Hattori in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Mr. Peairs stood his ground and defended his castle against a 17-year old exchange student who got the wrong house for a Halloween party. Pearis, too, was initially not prosecuted and, upon criminal prosecution, was acquitted. Mrs. Pearis had been frightened seeing the teenager come onto their property, and "The defense argued that Peairs was in large part reacting reasonably to his wife's panic." The trial took a week, and the jury voted to acquit in under four hours.
If you don't like the verdict in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, or that in the shooting of Yoshihiro Hattori, consider that those verdicts might be logical and legal and start working to change the premises that make them that way.
We cannot insist that people be heroic; we can insist that armed men act, as the expression has it, as if they had some balls, and some brains. We can insist that laws in action lead to justice, and when they don't that those laws get changed. We can get appropriately angry and verbally attack films and TV and news shows that demonize young Black men and teenagers generally and romanticize vigilantism and Wild-West gun worship.
And if the English and, a bit earlier, the Americans, can accept the Irish as fully human, so we can start valuing all human life, even teenagers near our property.
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