"What If I Don't?": Declaring a Major, Authority, and a Trumpian Turning Point

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, you have one kind of 

authority, the sort relevant for politics, 

when you can tell or order people to do something 

and they do it, without your needing 

to persuade them or threaten them. — Rich Erlich

My first lesson in "Question Authority!" was asking a real question about changing a college major.

             I had entered the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) in Specialized Chemistry, with the goal of becoming a biochemist, and one with a degree from a major institution in the field. The motivation for my decision on a major was in part my name: "Erlich" is the Yiddish variation on "Ehrlich," and I'd grown up on biopics about the famous chemists (in part) Paul Ehrlich, Marie Curie, and Louis Pasteur. 

It wasn't as bad as the lies the movies told about the Indian Wars — which I learned from the US Army had been a time of crime and disgrace for the US Army — but the movies had misled me about the life of a chemist. In the 20^thcentury, chemistry was largely physics and math, and although I did well in school in both, I really preferred words. 

In any event, I'd taken part in a quiet mini-revolt by Specialized Chemistry students who said we'd do like the Chemical Engineering students and take five years to graduate if we had to, but while we were at a major university, we'd try to pick up some more general liberal education, beyond the many required courses in Specialized Chem.

(Eat your hearts out young-folk: Tuition and fees were something like $300 a year or maybe a semester for us — a service charge, actually — with the rest of the cost paid by the generous People of the State of Illinois. [Trust me, I paid them back: with an MA from Cornell, I worked for five years for the U of IL as a teaching fellow, teaching assistant, and "merit instructor" — What did the "merit" mean? About six grand a year less than a real instructor — and made enough to live pretty well on, with some grey-market extra … "emoluments," but still bupkes.)

They later took a 180-degree turn on the matter, but in the early 1960s, the U of I Chem Department didn't want incipient bio-chemists taking biology courses, and my genius adviser — self-taught in literature even as he'd learned to play the cello — couldn't see why I'd need courses in English, my native language. Like, I'd eventually get some literature in my German courses, and I could read on my own … eventually. He well understood I'd have no free time as an undergrad in Specialized Chem.

Anyway, the next semester I took Microbiology 101, the most totally irrelevant history course I could find — "Well we have one that starts in the Neolithic — Paleolithic? — and gets up to Alexander the Great" — and a course known as just "Fiction." And I ended up with an English major and a split minor of Microbiology/History. (The "credentials analyst" said "We've never had one of thosebefore," and kind of assigned me my minor.)

The story here is how I got there.

I liked registering as a Chem major. Student folklore had it that Chem majors had our cards put through the computer right after varsity jocks, and I had pretty much always gotten the courses, sections, and times I wanted. I didn't intend to give that up. Soooo … so when I went into the office of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to find out about such things, they told me, "You have to file the paper-work to switch from Chemistry into English." And I asked a crucial question: "What if I don't?"

The answer was that they didn't know since no one hadn't before, or at least that they knew of. They told me to come back "later" and when I asked "When?" they told me just not near the beginning of the semester since they were always swamped with work for the first six weeks or so. So, a couple or three years later, when I was ready to graduate, I waited a while into the semester and went in and declared myself an English Major. And talked with the Credentials Analyst — one of the thousands of little old ladies who actually run many non-military offices — and she officially recognized me as an English Major, with a Microbiology/History minor.

And I learned a crucial lesson for moving farther into the 1960s and beyond, "When someone tells you you must do something, it's often a good idea to ask, "What [will you (try to) do to me] if I don't?"

I later learned from my reading Hannah Arendt and such that Authority is giving an order that people follow, without asking "And what if I don't" and without the authority-figure needing to make any threats. I was prepared for that idea a few years earlier when a couple new-initiate brothers in my fraternity asked me, "What would you have done if you gave us pledges an order and we hadn't obeyed?" And I paused and seemed to think for a moment and replied, "Why … why, that never occurred to me." And then I laughed and told them I was amazed when anyone did what I told them to. And I suggested that they go over to the ROTC unit and watch the regular Army officer and noncoms and (for what not to do) take a glance or two at the more asshole-ish cadet officers. The military pros never raised their voices, were always polite — and gave quiet orders at least giving the impression that it never occurred to them that they wouldn't be obeyed.

And after a couple of asshole moves of my own as a new initiate, I had taken care to keep my orders few and reasonable (with good projection but without "raising my voice") — and when I ordered something unusual and really unpleasant (bailing out our sunken patio and basement dining area during a cloud-burst in the middle of the night, say) I knew to lead the work.

Authority is better than tyranny — much better — and free people must often Question Authority (and listen to hear if there's an answer). Whenever there's a "you must," there must always be the potential for "And what if I don't?"

Which brings me to Donald Trump and these our unfortunate days of much misplaced mistrust of institutions and celebrations of "Bad Boys" and "Wild and Crazy" Gals, in which "macho" can be used as a compliment, where "to disrupt" as a generalized verb is used as a Good Thing, whatever disrupted, and a big part of popular culture teaches that following rules and conventions is for wimps. And where a fair number of Americans accept Donald Trump as a capital "L" Leader, opposed by a Deep State and media who are Enemies of the People, and whose main political opponent should be locked up.

            And who features in photo-ops a portrait behind him of Andrew Jackson. 

            Now I certainly prefer Andrew Jackson to Andrew Johnson (also relevant here) and a lot of politicians, but part of Jackson's legend is the attributed line, that Chief Justice "John Marshall has made his decision" and the U.S. Supreme Court along with him; "now let him enforce it!" And in the folklore that came down to me, though not in historical fact, the association of this line with Jackson as prime mover of "The Indian Removal Act" and "the Trail of Tears." That last part is highly historical and adds weight, in his legend, to Andy Jackson as good ol' populist, keeping his promises to his constituents, whatever the price and pain to other people: probably misapplying a phrase from Rudyard Kipling, the suffering of Other, "lesser breeds without the law."

            So, put the case that Robert Mueller has a Federal grand jury subpoena Trump to testify in a case of great importance to the Constitution and the Republic, and the subpoena controversy gets fought out in the courts pretty quickly up to the Supreme Court of the United States. And said Supreme Court tells Mr. Trump he must testify.

            And if his response is "What if I don't?"

            The first and obvious answer is "There will be a Constitutional Crisis." And if Trump responds that he was elected to shake things up, to by-pass the Deep State and its surface bureaucracy and the mare's nest of laws and regulations and customs that block the will of The People, his people? If he responds that he was elected precisely because he was a manly man like Old Hickory, who wins, in spite of the rules of a game rigged against him? That he is one warlock who will hunt the hunters (assuming that Trump knows what a warlock is and is capable of making a joke about a witch hunt).

            Or consider the possibility that Trump just fires Mueller and much of the Justice Department and pardons everyone in the Trumpian orbit charged with crime, including himself? Who will demand that the President respect the Rule of Law, and how many are willing — in Congress to start with — to offer a vigorous response to a Trumpian semi-rhetorical question, "And what if I just {say 'Screw You All!' and} don't?"

            One major reassurance that the American Republic isn't going the way of the Weimar has been that Trump et al. lack a private militia like Hitler's SA (or SS — though that gets complicated). The Tiki-Torch Trolls from Charlottesville and elsewhere don't seem like a major threat, and if they go up against some militarized police department or National Guard unit, they may find themselves bringing AR-15s to a drone fight. Okay, but the latest incarnation of Blackwater and other mercenary firms are around and ready for work, and in a USA that's well-stocked with firearms and smart phones, "flash mob" could take on dangerous meanings.

            As suggested by a caller to the NPR show 1A, it would be a good idea to gets statistics on support for Donald Trump in the various officer corps of the US military, and among our now all-volunteer rank-and-file. It's even more imperative, I think, to get statistics on the extent and depth of support for Mr. Trump among gun owners and, as a subset, gun owners who feel their primary loyalty is to Trump personally and the (White, Christian, straight, manly) American nation he is making great again, and not to some abstract American Republic and un-studied Constitution.

            The American Left and its allies talk a good game of questioning authority, intervening in discourses, disrupting business, and "Revolution Now!" If Trump asks, "What if I don't?" in obeying basic decencies and the rule of law, he may get strong enough support from the Right to get away with it — possibly through two terms or longer.

            Trump said, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters." And that may be the case, especially if the shooting victim is Black or Muslim or an Enemy of the People. Certainly, he might offer a whole series of "What if I don't?" responses to demands upon him to obey or enforce the law, or to fulfil a number of boring, wimpy, conventions of everyday decency. 
           And to that question, our Leader and President for Life — or until he gets thoroughly bored — may get get no effective answer.

Warnings and Cautions, No Triggering Required

The Atlantic piece cited Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as two classic texts that have

stirred calls for trigger warnings due to their racially motivated violence

and domestic abuse, respectively.

— Katy Waldman "The Trapdoor of Trigger Words"

Slate on Line 5 Sept. 2016

            Before "trigger warnings" became widely known (and conditioning their meaning), there were — still running and more widely seen than trigger warnings there are: MPAA ratings on films, and less formal cautions for parents and others on games and music. And these ratings and cautions and warnings make judgments about what may harm kids and disturb some adults, and most of them, like literal trigger warnings, concern violence and sex, with taboo words and drug use a close third and other potential triggers in line to join the list, if the more fastidious posters on the Internet will set the standard for sensitivity.

            In the early 1980s, putting together a "List of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF," Thomas P. Dunn and I anticipated the current crop of the fastidious and decided that sex and violence and "dirty words" were far from the only potential dangers in works we annotated; so we began adding additional CAUTIONs and a few WARNINGs, with the desire to provide useful information and perhaps chide those overly concerned with sex, violence, and dirty words.

            Thom and I did this for the "Lists of Works Useful" accompanying the essay anthologies The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction (1982) and Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF, and also for Clockworks: A Multimedia Bibliography [sic] of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF (1993).

            To start with an example of an innocuous, there's this one with Dan Simmon's The Fall of Hyperion: "TEXTUAL WARNING: If using the 1990 Doubleday edition, be sure there's an errata sheet giving p. 305." This alert we thought would be useful, but it might also reflect a bit my own mild annoyance that the folks at Doubleday had managed to misplace a whole goddamn page.

            Arguably less innocuous examples can be found among the whole range of CAUTIONs we used in Clockworks. For example:

                        For Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon (1913) we note failed attempts at ethnic humor, including attempts to render non-WASP dialects that might be offensive to contemporary ears, or, on esthetic grounds, the ears of those who grew up reading Mark Twain, who had some talent at reproducing on paper different varieties of English.

                        We found Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1926) silly in its conclusion (though we didn't mention that), but still great visually and of profound importance for an early female robot; but we thought Thea von Harbou's novel version (1926/27) should bear the "Caution: The owner of the Metropolitan exotic-drug and whore house is negatively characterized in terms of the nations contributing to his genealogy." Hint: They're not Aryan, and "The politics of the novel generally (definitely including its gender politics) differ from the film's somewhat, but may be even more simplistic."

                        Anne McCaffrey's The Rowan (1990) was more bellicose than we had expected from her The Ship Who ____ series, outside of The City Who Fought, and also strongly pronatalist, a political position of great importance but one insufficiently recognized by heterosexual readers as political, and one that should be highly controversial.

                        For the re-issues of Philip Francis Nowlan's "Armageddon — 2419" and "The Airlords of Han" (1929), we added the "CAUTION: As [Alan] Kalish et al. demonstrate, the revised versions remove the 'Yellow Peril' language of the original but are still racist (sexism in the revised stories is more complex)." These seminal Buck Rogers stories are significant in prefiguring atomic warfare, but also genocide, and to have genocide "normalized" and even celebrated for young readers is, we thought, a more serious matter than some scenes of fornication or repetitions of the word "f*ck" or even some racial slurs.

                        Dealing with an insightful but definitely post-structuralist reading of Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky (2001), I felt a need to add, "CAUTION: Some proofreading problems aside, this is an excellent essay in the late-20th-c. style of cyberpunk critique, quite useful for studying fictional characters and real people as social-cultural creatures living in postmodern, late-capitalist, sophisticated urban areas of the planet Earth. For such postmodern people, nature is safely inside of human culture and identity is problematic; however," I thought I should remind our readers, "there is a good deal of natural world beyond our small planet, and even in advanced-capitalist countries it is arguable that most people are barely modern, let alone pomo. And it is possible that human beings are spiritual as well as social-cultural animals, and as certain as anything can be that we are animal animals, with an evolved genome and a range of basic behaviors that preceded specifically human culture." Like, a lot of theorists of postmodernism really do need to get out of The City more and deal with a nature that has existence, validity, and power outside of and without humans and which can deconstruct humans quite quickly. And readers into postmodern theory should, on occasion, be cautioned about that. (Such readers — and more so authors — need stronger and more specific cautions before, say ocean sailing or backpacking on glaciers.)

                        Most useful, I think, was our suggesting the need to note the cop stories, movies, and TV shows — even in science fiction — for which people should exercise, "Caution: Contains material offensive to the 4th Amendment and other parts of the American Bill of Rights." If Americans and others have been too acquiescent in the chipping away of our rights in the interest of safety and police power, part of the reason is watching all those television cop shows and shoot-'em-up movies in which police respect for the Bill of Rights, due process, and simple courtesy — is for wussies. Consider the case of a sympathetic White cop with racial prejudices but who follows rules and has the courage to take a bullet rather than shoot an unarmed suspect; and consider a sympathetic cop of impeccable attitudes and sentiments on race and is militantly equal-opportunity in "Taking out the trash" by manfully shooting first and asking questions … pretty much never. Other scholars and teacher issues warnings about racial attitudes; I thought we should say something about the Bill of Rights and US  Civil War Amendments.

                        And we should note racism, sexism, xenophobia, jingoism, religious hatred, natalism, teen-bashing, homophobia, authoritarianism, macho assholery, and other nastiness with assiduous militancy equal to those who spot sex and violence. And we should note them where they appear, e.g., I'll remind people that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), mentioned in the headnote, can do probably without a trigger warning for racial violence necessary for the story, but should have a mild caution that it is certainly open to a charge of casual acceptance of traditional sexism.

Der Arnold und The Donald: Macho and Consciousness and The Terminator

            I recently read a column in The Nation magazine on line on Donald J. Trump bringing in, very briefly, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Okay, this much about that.

            When teaching James Cameron's and Gale Anne Hurd's THE TERMINATOR and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY — nuanced but hardly subtle films — I noted that my students had trouble understanding them because they lacked background in the imagery of German extermination programs in World War II — ordered by an Austrian — and because they lacked the phrase, concept, and category, "Macho Asshole." For my students, "macho" was usually an unambiguously positive term, so some missed the point of TERMINATOR that the ultimate macho man isn't a man at all but a killer robot, and more missed the point in JUDGMENT DAY that if a woman totally Terminator-izes herself to where she has the toughness to murder a wounded man in front of his wife and child — her acquired toughness would be that of a Nazi who could kill infants, women, children, and men for a Higher Cause.

            "Der Arnold" has acted the macho asshole since his introduction to a general audience in PUMPING IRON (1977) where on camera he hides the lucky T-shirt of Lou Ferrigno: der Arnold's main competition, colleague, roommate, and, Ferrigno might imagine, friend. In his relationship with a number of women, part of what's going on is that Schwarzenegger is a macho asshole and acts it. On other occasions, he seems to have sufficient self-consciousness to be acting a role, and it is in part the audience's fault if we miss the touch of irony and if we don't recognize that "macho asshole" is a variety of figurative asshole — with apologies to the anus, an innocent orifice and evolutionary breakthrough — and a Bad Thing to Be.

            Far more than der Arnold, The Donald seems radically deficient in self-consciousness and hasn't been acting a role at all in his presidential campaign and really is a macho asshole with little sense of irony or of the significant existence of other people outside of their relationship to him (preferably awe).

            Der Arnold shouldn't be left unchaperoned with women or girls (or boys or men if his tastes change with age); California, however, is doing okay after his terms as governor. The Donald is more dangerous on any scale and should never ever be allowed the power of the presidency or anywhere near it.

            The people supporting Trump need the category Macho Asshole and need to know enough to recognize a fascistic appeal when they receive one — and be ethical enough to reject both.

Bleeding-Heart Conservatives & Macho Wimps (20 Nov. 2009 / 29 March 2015)

                 They're hardly the worst people in the world, but among the more annoying breeds of Americans are bleeding-heart conservatives and macho wimps.

         I'm not bad-mouthing "compassionate conservatives" here. People should be compassionate; conservatives are people; so conservatives should be compassionate. The bleeding-hearts I refer to, mostly, are religious or social conservatives who can't bear the thought of (figuratively) God's straying sheep destroying their lives and, more important, damning themselves to hell. Bleeding-heart conservatives want to intervene and save these lost sheep; they differ from bleeding-heart liberals because their interventions often involve serious jail time, and some of the lost sheep wind up as mutton.

         The debate over gay marriage ultimately has to do with full-citizenship, sodomy and sin, and ancient and modern attempts to preserve the boundaries around categories — male and female, here — and semi-conscious programs to increase our tribe's population by limiting sex to the reproductive. This is an important debate, and rapidly getting resolved: a growing proportion of Americans, when pushed, accept "Different strokes / For different folks" with gays, or will allow that American adults have the right to go to hell as they, and we, choose.

        An armistice in The War on Drugs is also approaching, if more slowly.

         States approaching bankruptcy can't afford "the New Prohibition" of recreational drugs other than booze. We can't afford the investment in policing; we can't afford the gang wars over sales territories; and we can't afford incarceration of people who hurt mostly themselves. Abroad, the United States can't afford the figurative "War on Drugs" when it interferes with a far more literal war against the Taliban, ISIS, and other zealots.

         The 12-step people — Alcoholics Anonymous and its offspring — say this much that is true and important: that you really can't help addicts until they want help, and they often don't want help until they hit bottom. You want to be a compassionate conservative? Make sure every addict that wants help gets help. No waiting time to get into rehabilitation programs — and good programs. Until then, let these lost sheep, too, go to hell in their own ways: limit "intervention" to matters of public health.

         The currently most troublesome macho wimps, in my unhumble opinion, are the people pushing the excellent slogan, "Freedom isn't free" while militantly unwilling to take risks themselves.

         There are arguments to be made against closing the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. Those arguments do not, however, include, "Keep 'em locked up forever without trial in an iron cage 'cause I'm afraid to have a possible terrorist in my area code!"

         Freedom is not free; neither is decency nor effective foreign policy. They all require risks. Indeed, to modify a bit a teaching of Thomas Jefferson, freedom, decency, and even crass policy all require, from time to time, that nice people will die.

         Most Americans would be safer in a police state than a free one, but we haven't gone to a police state. To establish unlimited police powers would be macho in a way: tough; to do it to protect our own precious butts, however — the reason it gets done — is the act of dangerous wimps.


         So, bleeding-heart conservatives and macho wimps: toughen up! Throwing people in jail for doing some drug is not compassion; wetting your pants in fear that a suspected terrorist might get acquitted and walk among us isn't manly, or womanly: it's wimp.

Clichés, Ethics, Afghanistan (1 Nov. 2009)

                   Clichés are useful, but dangerous when they stop arguments and stifle thought, so we should demand that people at least think about our clichés.

                  Start with thinking about them literally.

                  The Washington Post had an editorial headlined, "Mr. Obama punts" (27 Sept. 2009). The editorial attacked the Obama administration on a decision on detaining terrorism suspects at the US base at Guantanamo, and I agree with the Post. There's a problem, though, if people assume that punting is necessarily a bad idea; if you think that you're not thinking enough about football, where a punt may never be heroic but is often the only sensible play.

                  Similarly there was a Congressional to-do over the line, "cowards cut and run, Marines never do." Back when the expression had the most meaning, literal cutting and running wasn't a decision for a Marine but for a naval commanding officer.

                  If you commanded a modest American frigate on a solo mission during the War of 1812, and you were at anchor in a small bay and looked out and saw the fog clearing to reveal a rapidly approaching, not-so-modest British squadron —any one ship of which had you outgunned — then, sir, it would have been your duty to order cut the ropes that held the sails furled and also your anchor cable(s). And then you would run, perhaps before the wind, perhaps not, depending on which way the wind was blowing, because your duty, sir, was to get the hell out of there before your ship was sunk or captured.

                  In football, sometimes you punt; in naval warfare, sometimes you cut and run. And in ground warfare, "Come back with your shield or on it" meant, "Don't throw away your shield and run off," not "never retreat." Infantry have to know how to retreat, sometimes at high speed.

                  And if you can't stand the heat do get out of the kitchen, unless there's some important reason for being in the kitchen.

                  American politicians, pundits, and standard-issue citizens are going to have to debate continued US military action in Iraq and, more pressingly, Afghanistan. And we will use clichés, including the macho clichés. Just ask yourself some literal questions and work out their geo-political equivalents.

                  Where is the ball in Afghanistan? How do you get a first down? Where, and, what are the goals? Alternatively, is this a "kitchen" we belong in? Is the meal worth the effort, and the cost? If politicians and pundits talk figuratively of heat and kitchens, we should also ask just who is sweating in the Afghan "kitchen." It's Afghans and NATO military people (primarily American troops), not politicians or pundits.

                  And so forth.

                  There is nothing unmanly about getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan if that's the right and reasonable thing to do: men are the second-most common variety of human beings, and humans are, in theory, uniquely ethical animals, capable of reason.

High-Speed Car Chases (2 June 2013)

        I just watched a Fast and Furious movie — it was the 2013 edition, but that's irrelevant — and then Now You See Me, a somewhat more thoughtful film, although that's not saying a whole lot.

       Anyway, I enjoyed both movies, and the previews for similar films, and I got thinking about a lot of movies I've enjoyed less because I've been bored by the car chases. And then I got thinking of my life in the greater Cincinnati area 1971-2007 and about real-world high-speed police chases.
       And then I got pissed off at the makers of many "action" films.

       The web is unfortunately overstocked with troll-attorneys trawling for business, but try a search for actual "high-speed police chase" and accusations of "wrongful death." What popped up first in my search was the story of how "Kelly Spurlock, the widow of NASA engineer Darren Spurlock who was killed when he crossed the path of a high-speed police chase in 2008, is moving forward with her wrongful death lawsuit against the fleeing driver, the City of Huntsville [Alabama], and three officers who participated in the chase" — apparently a "high-speed chase at midday" in a busy area "where it […] put other motorists at risk."

       The Cincy case that comes up early on Google is the recent one reported by the AP with the lead: "The wife of [Mohamed Ould Mohamed Sidi,] a Cincinnati cab driver killed in a crash at the end of a high-speed police chase" in March of 2011 "is suing the city." The short form of the story ends with the sentence, "Cincinnati Solicitor John Curp said the city is not responsible for the criminal acts of others." Now it is certainly true that the City of Cincinnati is not responsible for the criminal acts of its "civilian" residents, but there remains the question of the potential responsibility of the City if three of its police officers "were negligent and caused," fairly directly, "Sidi's death."

       (The "civilian" isn't part of what I'm quoting; it's in "scare quotes" because I recall the chuckles when I first heard cops talk of "civilians," meaning their non-cop fellow citizens. That was during The Troubles in the spring of 1970, on a college campus in central Illinois and far, far away from the slaughter of the Vietnam War, where there were more old-fashioned varieties of civilians and combatants. This encounter with a new word-usage occurred at a meeting between police and protesters arranged by local Christians who took their faith seriously ["Blessed are the peacemakers"]. We protesters chuckled and then both groups adopted the usage: "'civilians', plural noun: neutrals at demonstrations or just in town, not cops and not protesters — folks neither out protesting nor policing the protests." But I digress, though relevantly.)

       It may be hidden on the web — at least without LexisNexis — but very strong in my memory is the debate over high-speed police chases in Cincinnati occasioned by one that killed, injured, and/or endangered a mother and child. My memory is a baby in in a baby carriage while the mother pushed it across the street, resulting in legal action where the cops were cleared and so was the City — although the City at least undoubtedly struck some deal out of court.

       The point here is the debate, which included some older police officers' complaining in public about cop cowboys and an tendency among their younger colleagues to substitute for "Serve and Protect," "Get the Motherf*ckers!"

       I paraphrase, or at least I paraphrase what went into the media, but some older cops did criticize strongly a kind of macho cop culture. The accusation was general, but as the debate went on, at least one cop blamed COPS, the TV show, and nowadays I'll blame even more the techno-porn speed-worship of the high-speed car-chase movie, especially when those chases are engaged in by officers of the law. Cops and many other armed agents of the State are sworn to serve and protect; and the have at their disposal such low-key technological wonders as radio, not to mention nowadays traffic cameras and computers and devices for tracking down an escaped suspect.

       Some place along the line, I want to see a movie where some sympathetic hot-shot cowboy cop buddies hit that baby carriage, kill the little girl therein (and her new puppy) and have to live with that the rest of their lives. I want to see some movies where the camera goes back to a flipped car and gets some medium-duration fairly close shots of what a real-world-style traffic disaster actually does to the human body.

       I came out west mostly for the climate, but in part to live on the edge of the film industry and as much as I can whore myself to Hollywood. So far — in my usual joke — I've made it only to Chicago chippy and Toronto trollop, with some hope of getting to Burbank bimbo; and, indeed, I lust after the sort of resources that allow filmmakers to execute a high-speed chase sequence. Also I taught literature for forty years and film long enough to know that most people can differentiate quite well between real life and power fantasies.

       But come on, guys!

       Those chase sequences normalize policemen behaving badly, irresponsibly; they set up a kind of perverse ideal of disregard for everyday people. This fits into a larger pattern of normalizing bad behavior by cops and other sworn agents of the State — more on that elsewhere — and such normalizing (romanticizing, idealizing) is not right.


     The City of Cincinnati is not responsible for the criminal acts of criminals, and moviemakers are not responsible for stupid and dangerous acts by people who don't know fantasy when they see it. The City of Cincinnati is, however, responsible at least in part for the actions of its employees and agents; American cities and film-makers, story-tellers and artists are responsible when they encourage bad behavior by peace officers by presenting as an ideal the shift from the wimpoid "To Serve and Protect" to macho (and nowadays macha), "Get the Motherf*ckers! (And if Some 'Civilians' Get Smashed, Well, They're Not Our People)."

A-Rod, Macho, Masochism, & One Cheer for Performance Enhancing Drugs (9 Aug. 2013))

"No pain / No gain."

         I'm writing at the time of another scandal about performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sports, and I want to join those making a provocative fringe-view assertion and then go off on my own, on sports and PEDs briefly, but mostly on the more general topic (singular) of machismo and masochism.

         After all the responsible, and respectable, and true things are said against PEDs — all the proper health-warnings promulgated and sermonettes on fair-play rehearsed — let us consider that, on the other hand, on balance, it might be better for really dedicated and/or obsessed athletes to take PEDs than to put in the workout and practice time it would otherwise take to be world-class athletes. There's a kind of perverse puritanism working that condemns warping lives through drug use and admires warping lives through too much dedication to what are, finally, conditioning, skill-acquisition, and games. 

         Let me repeat a story. When teaching at Miami University in, significantly here, Oxford, Ohio, I had a student varsity athlete, a swimmer, tell me how exciting she found her life at Miami U. Where, I asked, was she from; and her answer was "Sydney." "Sydney, as in Sydney Australia?" I asked, mostly rhetorically (she had a strong Australian accent). "Sydney's a great city!" I said. The nature of Sydney, however, wasn't something she knew: "I was swimming all the time." Now that was overstatement; she had to sleep and eat and go to school and all — but allowing for overstatement, that was pretty much her life: if she was awake, she was probably in the pool or weight-room. She didn't really have a childhood.

         Now I wouldn't have kids injected with PEDs or other sports-related drugs. Another of my students had his knees shot up with a pain-killer and anti-inflammatory so he could finish a high school football game, and if the coach and trainer had been taken out and shot for that, I would protest — I'm a staunch opponent of the death-penalty and supporter of due process — but my protest would be muted. (The guy's father did punch out the coach; I regret, as I'm sure he does, that he did not get to punch out the trainer — and apparently didn't successfully press charges or sue.)

         The high school football player could have been crippled, and he answered my question, "Uh, how are you now?" with "Well, I can walk — but I'm not playing football any more." The coach and trainer are guilty of child endangerment and child abuse, and the endangerment part at least would apply to any parents who had their kids use PEDs.

         But college athletes and older are adults, and if my swimmer student saw her only choices as PEDs, obsessive training, or never quite making the Olympics, I would fear she would choose PEDs and excessive training and hope that she'd lower her athletic expectations — or, failing that, try moderate drug use, sensible training, and having a life. In the case of children, I'll continue on the fringe and say that parents who make their kids train for sports (or music or theatre or anything) to where the kids have no other life are as guilty of abuse as those having their kids shot up with PEDs or painkiller plus anti-inflammatories.

         I'm far from the only person making such arguments, and what interests me here is that our effect on policy has been somewhere between inconsequential and nil.
         Obviously there are problems with literally equating over-pressuring parents as child abusers, and obsessive athletes with the pathologically obsessive: it's a bad idea to break up families and jail parents for pushing too hard for gymnastics or ballet, or to commit committed jocks to "Hotel California" in the sense of some insane asylum (besides, the Camarillo State Mental Hospital is now Cal State Channel Islands, a different kind of mental institution). And there is much to be said against the sort of low-pressure child rearing that has the goal of instilling high self-esteem, regardless of low achievement.

         Still, it's a question why it's immediately obvious to most Establishment Americans that PEDs are bad but excessive training and workaholic behavior are somewhere between no big deal and virtues.

         The answer to such a question lies in part in our Puritan and (small "p") puritanical heritage, and also in part in our concepts of macho as well as, and perhaps increasingly, macha.

         It is after all, called, in Max Weber's phrase, "The Protestant Work Ethic," and the founders of New England were about as Protestant as you can get: people who had given up on purifying the Church of England and ended up in the overly-tolerant Netherlands and then moved on to the new world to found pretty strongly Calvinist and definitely radical-Protestant Congregationalist congregations and colonies. Work for them wasn't just punishment after Eve and Adam got our asses kicked out of Eden but a downright good thing. Hard work was even better than just work, and success from hard work was a sign you were one of the few Elect and not part of the many totally depraved and damned.

         Success from hard work: good. Easy success because of natural ability and good luck — unless you're a really strict Calvinist and believe in Election, not that pagan good luck: questionable. Quicker, less painful success through chemistry: bad.

         More, there's that small "p" puritanism that sees pleasure as an evil and a snare, and a subgroup of that that goes one further: if pleasure is bad, pain is good.

         We can see this in extreme asceticism, especially when asceticism takes the final step and goes over into not just denying the body pleasure but into outright self-abuse: and by this I mean something like self-flagellation, as opposed to "self-abuse" as a perverse term for masturbation (a twisting of words that is a triumph of puritan-PC linguistic engineering).

         And this brings us to one of those odd areas of agreement between various religious and culturally conservative doctrines, and what I have called "The Macho Creed."

            When I was in my thirties— so a while back but still in the late 20^th century — there was a US military recruiting ad using the theme of "DISCIPLINE," an ad I was able to parody by reprinting the text, just with the addition after the final "DISCIPLINE" of, "AND OCCASIONAL BONDAGE." My intention was to point out the irony of how much pain and guff "real men" are willing to take in proof of manhood.

            Boot-camp hard-ass Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick'sFull Metal Jacket (1987), is an exaggeration — I recall Lee Ermey saying he never inflicted on any one cohort of recruits all we see inflicted on the platoon in the movie — but the abuse was based in fact. All that was done to Pvt. Joker's training unit, Sgt. Emery had done at one time or another to recruits he was putting through Marine initiation at Parris Island. And, until it gets overly brutal or lethal, such hazing has its place: serious initiations need to require high cost for the initiates, and, given the uses to which Marines are put, their initiations need to be serious. I just object to seeing submission as all that manly or honorable, and I don't think much beyond a fraternity hell week can be justified in contexts less than preparing for combat.

            Which gets us to athletic "fun and games" (as we used to call the more unsavory hell week humiliations back at my old frat lodge) — which gets us back to various kinds of abuse in athletics.

            The least problematic cases are with self-abuse. You have the expression from personal training "No Pain / No Gain," and this makes some sense in weight training, where to gain muscle mass you need to put some strain on the muscles: work them toward fatigue if not to and beyond. Real pain, though? I was taught in PE and told by my physician, "Pain is nature's way of telling you 'Stop doing that.'" The mantra "No pain, no gain" is controversial with individual fitness training, but is far more questionable with team sports. As soon as more than one person is involved, the question becomes, "Pain for whom, gain for whom?" In the case of the coach and trainer who shot up my student's knees, future pain for him was immediate gain for the coach: depressingly small gain, actually, given what was at stake, since my student's team was winning the game, and the coach had a winning record — and tenure as a PE teacher.

            Less sensational but also harmful is verbal and emotional long-term abuse of athletes. Again, I'm willing to accept the logic of hell week or Hell 10-Weeks of initial Basic Training; that's initiation and indoctrination, and is okay so long as the hazing stops fairly quickly and, throughout, is stopped short of brutality. But there are too many coaches spending too many seasons on the brink, and too many athletes who have to put up with more than a week or a few weeks of systematic humiliation. Part of the problem is lack of a tradition of young athletes organizing to demand respect and (with modesty and prudence) draw some lines. A good rule of thumb is that of E. E. Cummings's character Olaf, with my emphasis (and capitalization): Speaking this much truth to power, that "There is some shit I will not eat."

            Another part of the problem is that masochism inherent in parts of machismo and machisma.

            I'll handle machisma first since the concept is weird and, public health excluded — a major exclusion! — not as threatening a matter as machismo, which, health matters excluded, it's pretty much a part of.

            Another student, another story: This one staggered into my office, sneezed, coughed, wheezed, and dropped off a paper on my desk, only somewhat spotted by her bodily fluids. She rasped, "Here it is," and waited for my thanks and appreciation. She didn't get any; I said something like, "Okay, now go home and get some sleep; I would've given you an extension." I wasn't going to thank her. I wasn't going to be impressed. What was going through my mind was (1) that she'd exposed me to Whatever Is Going Around — although I'd probably been exposed already (students are notorious disease vectors) – and (2) that far from being impressed that she'd trekked over with the paper, I thought her socially unskilled that she couldn't get a friend to drop it off and/or unsophisticated about modern technology that it didn't occur to her to just send me the essay as an e-mail attachment.

            I discussed this matter with some women colleagues, and they told me the problem was Great Grandmother Ferguson.

            They'd all been brought up on some version of Great Grandmother Ferguson, "who dropped the twins while plowing the south forty; bit through the umbilical cords; put one twin to each breast to suckle; finished the plowing; then went home to nurse a houseful of cholera victims; and you, you little weakling, you're complaining about some minor appendicitis. Woman up! You're whining like a boy!" The rule was, "Real women don't get sick," or they don't allow a little pneumonia to get in the way of getting work done: that's for boys and men, who "never have to go through a three-day labor like I had to for you — and then you ripped me apart!"

            My colleagues explained to me, "Girls are brainwashed, Rich; it's the Macha Creed, and you just have to tell them that times have changed, and we're winning the Revolution, and now women and girls can take a day off to be sick the way men always could. Or at least rich men."

            I thought that story and line were great, and I repeated them back to the class, to which several young women responded, "Right! Boys are wimps! If they get sick they go to bed!" And I repeated the point to rather militant stares and repetition of "Boys are wimps!" and finally just said, "All right — all of you! If you're sick, don't come to class. I gave you a roster, with contact information; you're divided into groups; get someone to cover for you." And we moved on.

            Following "Erlich's Law of Equal and Balancing Absurdities," when many Americans aren't checking out the drug store's fifteen varieties of pain-killers, they're into theatrically enduring pain in semi-silence and bragging about it. With women, it will be birthing children — you want to compete with that, fellas, and you gotta get yourself maimed in a popular war — and, with women, the macha claim (as such) will be carrying on in spite of illness. With men, it's going to be a toned-down version of John Rambo's sewing up the wound in his arm in [Rambo:] First Blood (1982) — a pretty good movie, actually, which can't be held responsible for its sequels — or, and most especially, something in the manner of many of the movies of Mel Gibson.

            If we're going to talk loosely about "The Protestant Work Ethic," and I've done so, we can talk also about "The Catholic Pain Ethic." As George Carlin of blessed memory pointed out, there is the tradition — strong in parts of Irish Catholicism — where "The priests were always pushing for pain," even if, with guys anyway, "You were always pulling for pleasure" (Class Clown, 1972). The first sentence in the Carlin quote is what counts here, because it brings me to Mel Gibson and those other great analysts of culture, in the tradition of Weber, Carlin, and Lenny Bruce — Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In "The Passion of the Jew" episode of South Park (31 March 2004), it's not just that "Mel Gibson is crazy," but that he's crazy in a very specific manner: few are more macho than Mel Gibson in his movies, and Mel Gibson, Parker and Stone have it, is a very sick variety of masochist. Allowing for satiric overstatement, allowing for more than the usual satiric malice and downright terminal snarkiness — allowing that the great majority of sexual masochists are healthy people with variant, sometimes highly variant, tastes — the Parker and Stone evaluation is correct.

            In an essay in The New Republic for 30 May 1964, George Grella complained that James Bond's "only genius lies in an infinite capacity for taking pain" (p. 17, quoted pdf 12). Gibson's Christ has other qualities but from what I could see with a lot of fast forwarding through a borrowed DVD, in The Passion of the Christ, Gibson literalizes and makes flesh the idea of Christ's taking on "infinite […] pain."

            A recurrent theme in Gibson's movies is heroic suffering, with images stuck in my mind of Gibson's character Porter — just "Porter" — getting his toes broken in Payback from 1991, and Gibson's William Wallace inBraveheart (1995) moving into the evisceration portion of a historically accurate hanging, drawing, and quartering.

            The macho hero kicks ass — and at least a couple of critics have suggested that that's exactly what Gibson's resurrected Christ is on his way to do —  but Grella's suggestion for James Bond is true as well: macho (and macha) heroes take pain. If you don't believe that, ask your local film-noir detective; they get beaten up regularly. Same for a super-macho anti-hero like Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971); it's not what viewers remember, but if you count and time acts of violence — including high-tech torture — vicious little Alex spends as much time or more receiving pain and humiliation as dishing it out. We see such pain-taking in a lot in popular art, and the artistic motif both reflects and instills an ideal of macho that includes being kind of into pain.

            Which brings us back to "No pain, no gain" — or no gain many people will respect — and from there back to Alex Rodriguez and Lance Armstrong and the other PED users, with their short-cuts to winning and macho success.

            It's not just that these athletes have cheated; it's not just that they've upped the pressure on others to use drugs. It's also that we value work as such and want winners to sacrifice and suffer. We value taking pains and taking pain; and we value near-fanatical dedication to one's sport or art or calling.

            Fine, but "moderation in most things," if not "all things," and sometimes we in America — for all our hedonism, still descendants of Puritans and the puritanical — at times we Americans value sacrifice and suffering way too much.