On the Joy of Not Having to Care: Ethnic Casting, Jewish Subdivision

         In early June (2017), there has been some discussion on the web on how the Israeli actress Gal Gadot gives us a Diana in Wonder Woman who is princess of the Amazons, and Jewish. Aside from some weird issues here about race — issues that could be disposed of by just saying, "Yeah, at root we Jews are Semites, not Aryans" — what's at stake in this minor debate isn't that Ms. Gadot is Jewish but Israeli. So the film has gotten involved in the standard agit-prop over the existence of Israel/the Zionist entity and the 50^th anniversary of Israeli occupation of lands generally recognized as Palestinian. Well, Israel was the deep topic, plus informing people who don't know the history of comics the dark secret that the major comic book superheroes were created by Jews.

         The horror! But do keep the Yiddishkeit of the many of the creators of comics in mind if you ever study the attack on comic books in the 1950s and their role in the Seduction of the Innocent.

         But since "everybody is talking about" Wonder Woman — an excellent movie, by the way — I want to follow my usual custom and talk about something else, taking my "Jagged Orbit" off on a tangent.

         So: Consider the movie Norman (2016), subtitled "The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer," and definitely a New York Jewish fixer — who gets involved in Israeli politics and saving the synagog of a definitely New York Jewish congregation.

         Norman Oppenheimer in the film is mostly a small-time fixer, "mirrored" by Srul Katz, an even smaller-time fixer, played by Hank Azaria in a very small role.

         Hank Azaria is Sephardic Jewish, and the Israeli characters are played by actors at least generally Jewish, a safe inference with the major character, Micha Eshel, played by an actor named Lior Ashkenazi. Norman is played by Richard Gere, who is neither Jewish nor New Yorker (b. Philadelphia). The relevant rabbi, Rabbi Blumenthal, is played by Steve Buscemi, who was born in Brooklyn but raised Roman Catholic, and not Jewish. Ditto for not New York, not Jewish — there's a website where one can look up such things — for the English and Welsh actors who played the other major New York Jewish roles.

         Matters are similar for that fine movie on Jewish and other partisan resistance to the Nazis, Defiance (2008), where one of the three heroic Bielski brothers is the emphatically Jewish Liev Schreiber, but the other two are the English actors Daniel Craig, who is not Jewish, and Jamie Bell, who is probably also not Jewish.

         The point with Norman and Defiance is that if there are people out there who give a rat's ass about the ethnicities of the actors playing Norman or the Bielski brothers, they've been quiet about it, or, anyway, any complaints have failed to gain traction on the web and other media.

         No accusations of cultural appropriation; no complaints about the impossibility of these gentiles to embody the Jewish experience, the "inappropriateness" of their trying.

         And, the point of this little essay: that's a damn good thing.

         It might not continue given the Furies that can be released by a failed — or all-too-successful — Presidency of Donald J. Trump, but at least into 2016 of the Christian Era, Jews in the West were in a strong enough position that we could be happy that competent and popular actors were portraying us on film in positive or neutral or at least nuanced roles.

         The ideal for every minority group is a world free of ethnic hatreds and contempt. On the road to utopia, though, a decent mile-marker is where you can save your anger for blatant attacks and can take cultural borrowing as a compliment and not have to worry about such relative trivia as who gets cast to play whom in movies.

         It's good to see a nice Jewish girl kicking Aryan ass in Wonder Woman, but it's not a big deal. And Richard Gere made a most excellent Norman, and Steve Buscemi was well-cast as a nervous rabbi.

            And, for that matter, I prefer Irish-American Owen Wilson's Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris (2011) to pretty much any of Woody Allen's Woody Allen.

The Great Warming (Again)

            Yo, liberals! One last time: Stop playing on guilt and insisting on Truth and that global warming is caused by people. 

            It's enough if we accept that Earth is going through a warming period, that the period looks to last a long time, and that the last time around — the "Great Warming" of the Middle Ages — that trend was peachy-keen for the Vikings and northern Europe but very bad for people in hot, dry places. 

            A standard book on the Medieval warming has the subtitle "Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations" — and the "fall" part got nasty. 

            If current warming has its root cause in subtle variations in energy production by the sun or in the Earth's orbit or inclination (etc.), there's nothing we can do about root causes. What we can do is slow the warming by reducing greenhouse gasses in Earth's atmosphere or at least slow down the increase in those gasses. 

            The obvious way to slow down the release of greenhouse gasses is to burn less carbon, which we should do anyway on the conservative principle that we owe future generations oil and coal and other carbon-stuff they might want to use. 

            And we really need to slow down climate change because there are a lot more humans than there were in the Middle Ages, we still like to live in areas subject to flooding, our civilization is much more complex, interdependent, and vulnerable, and we're armed with far more dangerous weapons. 

=========================

REFERENCE: The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations Paperback – March 3, 2009, by Brian Fagan

"Pronatalism": Explaining Sex Rules and Getting Down to Nationalism's Biological Basics

"We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."

— Steven King, (R-Iowa)

Then a new king […] came to power in Egypt. “Look,” he said

to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us.

Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become

even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join

our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”

 So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, […]  

But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied

and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites

(Exodus 1.8-12)

            "Pronatalism" is a word we don't hear much any more, not for a generation or so, but it's an important word — increasingly important in a time of heightened nationalism — and needs to be recycled (recycled here from a couple of my essays from 2008 f.).

            "Pronatalism" refers to social policies encouraging the production and successful raising of children. Often these policies have included conscious policies on population; more often, pronatalism has been incorporated into religious beliefs and from there into law and custom.

            It doesn't matter much where pronatalist practices come from. "Cultural evolution" is more than a figure of speech: customs that function to help cultures survive will tend to be retained the way useful genetic traits are retained--and pronatalism, by its nature, has been useful for survival.

            Until recently. Until humankind's population went into the billions, and the unchecked reproduction of humans became a threat to human species-survival. Until some cultures became somewhat democratic and individualistic, and the press of population put stresses on democratic principles and individuality. It has always been difficult to argue that any individual human is special; the argument becomes almost impossible when there are over seven billion other human individuals. "Freedom" has been defined informally as the right to swing your arms until you endanger someone else's nose; some place along the line, population density gets to where there's little room for figurative arm swinging.

            Alternatively, an individual human has the same right as any other animal to urinate in the local stream; the people of a small village probably have the right to put their excrement in the river; towns and cities, however, have no right to dump in the river untreated sewage, poisoning decreasing supplies of water.

            More of that later. For now keep in mind that surviving societies often have built in a strong degree of pronatalism.

            You need to know this if you're to understand the underpinning of the sex laws and "morēs" of the United States, including our rules on marriage and attitudes toward the wide range of sexual activities.

            Start with obvious questions: Why would people care about occasional or even frequent masturbation in private? Why were there ever laws against oral or anal sex, or just about anything done between or among two or more consenting adults in private? The short and most basic answer, one that underlies both religious and secular, official and popular-culture prohibitions, is "pronatalism."

            Humans are highly sexual animals, and across a significant population people will practice all sorts of sexuality. Cultures, though, can evolve ideologies and customs that tend to direct sexuality into practices that are reproductive and nurturing. Consciously or unconsciously, societies can try to limit sex to vaginal sexual intercourse between fertile couples who are likely to conceive, bear, and then raise babies.

            Cultures can try to limit sex to "making babies" by people who'll stick around to raise babies: for a very important example, limiting approved sex to married heterosexual couples who have conception as a goal--and, hence, don't try to prevent conception and who avoid sex when the woman is menstruating.

            Sound familiar? It should if you know the traditional rules for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews.

            Under a doctrine of pronatalism, such rules make sense, and pronatalism itself makes a lot of sense in military, nationalistic, and economic terms.

            Pronatalism becomes a bad idea when it's a game many societies play and the human population rises rapidly, when the standard of living rises enough among many of those societies that they strain the environment.

            Think of a billion or two Chinese and Indians starting to live like rich Americans.

            Pronatalism in our time makes sense for individual countries that want to maintain their eminence; pronatalism makes sense for older generations who want to retire and be supported by lots of young workers.

            For the human species, and for humans who like freedom, pronatalism is a problem.

            "Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it" (Genesis 1.28) was good doctrine when humans were pretty powerless to master much, and it may be the one commandment we humans have fulfilled; but it is fulfilled now, and it's time to cut back.

            We--we humans generally--need to move rapidly toward zero growth in our population, which means rethinking the laws, policies, customs, and attitudes based in pronatalism.

            People are going to have sex, but it doesn't have to be reproductive sex; and contraception can be very low-tech, inexpensive, and almost as effective as abstinence in preventing sexually-transmitted diseases. To start, we need a campaign to "Wrap that Willy," making condoms readily available and condom-use a manly thing to do, and a womanly thing to demand.

            For other things to do, look at the pronatalists aspects of human cultures, and try to figure out practical ways to encourage contraception and reproductive restraint.

News in Depth: ISIS, the Crash of 2008, Kim Davis and "The Higher Law"

For where I'm coming from here:

            My first college term paper, sort of, was an exercise in a writing course where the assignment was to find a historical event from the week of one's birth, research it, and write about it. Having been born in 1943 — a year with a lot more history than is healthy — I had many options but chose to write on the Battle of Stalingrad, arguable the decisive battle of World War II and in any event one of the crucial battles in world history.

                        Some of my research was reading a military history book or two of the many on the subject, but what I spent most of my time on was reading the contemporary coverage in The New York Times, especially the official daily Communiqués from the Germans and from the Russians, and comparing (and contrasting) the Communiqués with what I was reading from the academic historians.

                        Somewhat surprisingly, especially given that— SPOILER ALERT! — the Russians eventually won the battle, the Russian communiqués generally included more lies than those of the Germans.

            I grew up during the Cold War, and could say with Bob Dylan, "I’ve learned to hate Russians / All through my whole life" and was propagandized on how the Ruskies couldn't talk without resorting to propaganda. Well, yeah, yeah, and so forth. But: But my grandparents fled the Russian Empire back when there was an emperor, one who proudly called himself "Autocrat of all the Russias," and I had some personal reasons to distrust Russians. Plus, crucially, I had also grown up on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and its detailed analysis — from a Left perspective — of how lying was built into Stalinism and had become a tradition in the new Russian Empire.

            So a couple weeks back I was surprised to find myself flipping to channel 216 on the TV in the exercise room of my condo complex to watch RT the Russian TV network for a fix of hard news. I wasn't the only one of the gym regulars, either: we no longer got Al Jazeera, and BBC America only had a couple hours of news a day during gym hours — so that left the Ruskies.

            More exactly, it left the Ruskies given how repetitive and shallow CNN and MSNBC have become — and how Fox remains what it was in the classic analysis and mea culpa of Bart Simpson: "Then I had this crazy dream that my family were all just cartoon characters and that our success led to some crazy propaganda network called Fox News."

Which is the rant on where I'm coming from, leading into a fairly brief, epitomizing rant on a few places where CNN, MSNBC, et al. can go to replace some of their incessant repetition and add a depth to their coverage. This comes from me, an amateur at best in the journalism biz, and on the basis of listening to just one pretty respectable NPR news-panel/call-in show covering a week in (perhaps significantly) early September 2015.

            * A listener called in to the show to mention the Colin Powell interview on Meet the Press for 6 September, where he came out in favor of the Iran nuclear deal. It was an important interview, not for its immediate political effects — which a panelist noted were minimal, given where the Republican Party is nowadays — but more for a major figure like Colin Powell's introducing into the debate on ISIS the double-m phrase: "Mass Movement." ISIS spearheads a mass movement in its militant phase, the phase featuring fanatics who embrace self-sacrifice (and don't much mind killing other people). We need news shows explaining and applying Eric Hoffer's 1951 analysis of The True Believer for the history of such movements through World War II and note how very closely some key elements of the situation today parallel those that saw the rise of the early Christian Church and Islam, and, perhaps more so, given advances in communications technology, the parallels with the Wars of Religion growing out of the Protestant Reformation and lasting through much of the 17th c., where the printing press was crucial. In a sense, ISIS is, as President Obama said, the "JV team," and al-Qaeda Little League — compared to the full-fledged mass movement likely to succeed ISIS, if they can find a charismatic leader to inflame the faithful.

                        Osama bin Laden may or may not have read Hoffer when he concluded that what was needed to reinvigorate Islam was an attack by the Great Satan of America. The neocons in the Bush administration undoubtedly forgot their Hoffer and similar arguments when they responded to the attacks of 11 Sept. 2001 by giving bin Laden exactly what he wanted. But they did what they did, and this awakened not just the Arab Spring but the forces of sectarianism, tribalism, nationalism, and fanaticism that can consolidate into opposing mass movements that can shake the world as much as those of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (in Protestant terms) in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and Hitler and Stalin et al. in the 20^th.

            * A second story of the week was the decision of the US Department of Justice to go after big-time finance criminals, and a member of the news-panel noted that many of the disastrous financial moves leading up to The Great Recession of 2008 were legal. That is the story, people! That is the scandal! That is a more important issue than putting into jail a few bad actors on Wall Street and, in terms of its effects of most people's lives a hell of a more important story than finding parts of crashed airplanes. (I know it's perverse and paranoid to do so, but I sometimes wonder if CNN staff are tempted to shoot down the occasional aircraft on what for them is a slow newsweek. But I digress.) The bad actions of a compliant US Congress that allowed the Crash of 2008 and invite another one — that is the story that needs development over several weeks or months or as long as it takes to drum some basic ideas into the heads of at least the portion of the public that watch and listen to news.

            * On a lighter note, relatively speaking, there was the latest round of US Kulturkampfe ("cultural struggles") as evidenced in the story of the jailing and releasing of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples and then, with equal opportunity, to any couples.

                        When the dust settles, "Higher Law" appeals need to be taken seriously and argued about. In a portion of the Book of Deuteronomy that contains a lot of oppressive rules and some really bad ideas (Ki Teitzei), there is the commandment, "You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you; he shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place which he shall choose within one of your towns, where it pleases him best; you shall not oppress him" (23.15-16). The Code of Hammurabi and its successors long before and long after Deuteronomy "decreed death as the penalty for sheltering a fugitive slave" (RSV 244 n.); and the laws of the American colonies and the United States required returning fugitive slaves until 1864. There would be much to be said in praise of local officials and Federal Marshals refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — or clerks refusing to cooperate with the Nazi Nuremburg Laws on racial purity; and "Higher Law" arguments can be useful. We need some in-depth conversations there long after we've forgotten who Kim Davis might be.

                        We also need to discuss why adult Americans would need permission of the Commonwealth of Kentucky to get married, and we need some lawyers competent in simple English to explain on TV and in other media that the State doesn't get involved in marriage directly — or not so much any more — but in contracts for setting up a special kind of household. And then we can slog on to the legal privileging of those households that center on a married couple. Back when "Be fruitful and multiply" made a lot of sense as a commandment to human beings, such privileges also made sense, as part of a strategy to use marriage to encourage fertile heterosexual mating where it was likely to produce children who'd be raised in a stable family unit. The times they have a-changed, and our debates on the environment and resources have to turn to issues of population ... which leads us back to what sort of households the State should be encouraging to handle responsible reproduction and child rearing — and providing an effective home for people.

                        Gays should be pissed to hell that now that only with gay marriage US society might get around to discussing the privileging of marriage and how we'll define marriage — but, sorry, guys and gals and Other: inter-racial marriage wasn't enough to get the conversation going, but gay marriage is sufficiently controversial, a "sexy" enough news story, to do so.

                        So with this larger issue, too: Come on, US media, the chum is in the water and Kim Davis gave you had a nice feeding frenzy on sex, religion, and politics. "Life is uncertain; so eat desert first" — and it's time for your figurative veggies and protein and to get to more profound issues of the individual's obligations to the State in matters of faith and morals and crasser question of "Who gets what — Who profits, who pays?" in terms of marriage and households and taxes.