Again, Which Victims Count, Which Count Less

The occasion here is the 14 July 2017 edition of the WBUR-Radio show On Point, "Debate Over the Media’s Duty to Vulnerable Viewers," itself occasioned by the debate over the Netflix movie TO THE BONE (2017). I had several comments as someone who taught many years, including controversial films, and who has an associate producers credit on a film where the male lead lost and gained 40 pounds for his role as a drug addict (MOST HIGH, 2004).

I missed hearing the phrase in the discussion, "per 100,000" and some statistics on just how serious a public health problem eating disorders are, among various populations. And how eating disorders are perceived. Other numbers that are important respond to the challenge, "Well you can't measure the value of a human life!" You can come up with numbers for insurance issues and tort cases at law, and "you" can get approximations as to how much various lives are valued by measuring newspaper column-inches, minutes of TV and other electronic media coverage, and other coverage devoted to various deaths, kidnappings, disappearances etc. There isn't a competition going for what the comedian Mort Sahl called "The Grimmy Award" for Worst. Problem. Ever. — but, per 100,000 relevant populations, we should hear the stats on "morbidity and mortality" for various eating disorders. Also: what kind of coverage across a number of media do you get for, say, anorexia among young white women and older girls compared with that of obesity among Black or Hispanic women and girls? 

For the actress losing weight for TO THE BONE: There's also a bit of actorly macho/macha in the background here. Real men and Real women working as actors are (in the macho/a theory) willing to lose and gain a lot of weight, and the more weight gained and/or lost the more impressive for their dedication to really get into a role. The value system here can get a little silly and sometimes dangerous.

In movies, we can look at how the camera (so to speak) treats death and pain of various victims, and we can get ideas about how audiences react. Feminists were correct to stress how "the male gaze" sometimes luxuriates in the suffering and death of women. The flip side of that is what we called "The Law of Todd," named for a Miami University film student, on the casualness of the handling of the deaths of healthy young men — and the rule with no exceptions I can think of that The Camera never handles casually the deaths of children. It's a sight gag in HOT SHOTS PART DEUX (1993) when Iraqi soldiers are artfully mowed down with a running total at the bottom of the screen, and the final announcement (quoting from memory), BLOODIEST MOVIE EVER! There's a serious point here: If some "red-shirt/Corporal Deadmeat" unnamed character has a gun *he* (almost always until recently) can be shot down casually. Indeed, violence against nasty young men — Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) is the example I studied — will not be recalled strongly, nor, often, will it be seen as violence. And memory can get interesting even with more neutral characters. "The Rape Scene" in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is called "The Rape Scene," and a number of my students only vaguely recalled that the scene also shows, graphically, the beating and as it turns out crippling of an older man. 

So "Attention must be paid" to the suffering of victims perceived in mass culture as generally young, thin, and mostly pretty White girls. If the statistics indicate there are larger health issues elsewhere, it would also be nice to get coverage and works of art on the issues confronting older and/or fat and/or average-looking and/or non-White people.   

The Most Important Thing, He Said, He Learned in College ...

I've been thinking about a line by one of my students at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), probably in the late 1980s. I've forgotten what the context was, but there was a context; this wasn't off the wall. Anyway, the student said "The most important thing I've learned at college is, 'Not everybody is Catholic.'" And this was at Miami U at Oxford, a school with a lot of conservative Irish (and some Polish) Catholics.

Not everyone is Christian or monotheist or theist either.

Good for him. However woefully ignorant many American Christians are of their religion(s), however much the US of A is a (revolutionary, secular) Republic, and not a nation, Christian or otherwise — there's still an issue with us of "Do fish know they're in water?" Much of American culture is strongly inflected by Christianity, and the Christianity of the Western, Roman Church and its dissenting (and agreeing) descendants. E.g., what I as an outsider see as an otherwise strangely strong concern with beliefs and attitudes and "state of mind" is understandable among people who must seriously deal with the line "By Faith and Faith alone shall ye be saved" (unless it's irresistible Grace or the Sacraments of Holy Church).

That may be the most important thing going away to college teaches. The Truth is out there, but we see it from different angles and with different suppositions, right down to differences in training in different sub-fields. (The one time I did real science in what came down to a classic physiology lab, our data sets were a few dogs or maybe a few dozen rats. Things were different in microbiology, where we usually dealt with bacteria and such by the millions and billions. You asked different kinds of questions.)

Back in the 1980s, the State of Ohio was still pitching in a bit to subsidize the education at public schools like Miami of Ohio residents; with this student, the taxpayers got their money's worth.

"Notes" for THE LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE, Motivation for Don Jr. E-Mail Leak

Memo

THE LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE

A SiliconCorp/MouseFilm Co-Production

From: Script Analyst Division

To: Suit #435

Date: 17 July 2017  3 August 2017

Subject: Your memo on our Notes on script draft 12

      re: Motivating Leaking of Trump Jr.'s e-mails on meeting with Russian agents OR
           "Payback is a Mother*cker"

Solly, Sweetheart!

We've suggested conflating several Intelligence big-wigs into a composite character we're calling Alan Foster and picturing, say, Willem Dafoe for the role. For the small-scale version of the film, he could be in one location: a spartan, windowless office through whose door we get glimpses of a 21st-c., high-tech version of a bureaucracy out of Kafka. 

We've recommended cutting much of the dialog on Foster's motivation and replacing it with visuals in the office and with a repeated — repeated within reason — intercut with historical footage. 

Visuals: On Foster's desk is a photo of him in combat gear as a young man in Vietnam; depending on what rank we want him at that time we have either on his helmet or the helmet of someone else visible the slogan "Payback is a motherfucker." Posted on his office walls, increasing as the film goes on, are printouts of news stories of Donald Trump Sr. dissing the Intelligence services. 

Intercut in LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE we'd like historical footage of Trump at the CIA, before their commemorative wall with the words clearly visible, "In Honor of Those Members of the Central Intelligence Agency Who Gave Their Lives in the Service of Their Country." Audio here would make it clear that Trump is winging the speech and digressing to gripe about media coverage of his inauguration. No big chunks, but sound-bite by sound-bite selections from such as this:

And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media.  They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.  (Laughter and applause.)  And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.  And I just want to let you know, the reason you’re the number-one stop is exactly the opposite -- exactly.  And they understand that, too. 

We did a thing yesterday at the speech.  Did everybody like the speech?  (Applause.)  I’ve been given good reviews.  But we had a massive field of people.  You saw them.  Packed.  I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field.  I say, wait a minute, I made a speech.  I looked out, the field was -- it looked like a million, million and a half people.  They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there.  And they said, Donald Trump did not draw well.  I said, it was almost raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and he said, we’re not going to let it rain on your speech. 

In fact, when I first started, I said, oh, no.  The first line, I got hit by a couple of drops.  And I said, oh, this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it.  But the truth is that it stopped immediately.  It was amazing.  And then it became really sunny.  And then I walked off and it poured right after I left.  It poured.  But, you know, we have something that’s amazing because we had -- it looked -- honestly, it looked like a million and a half people.  Whatever it was, it was.  But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument.  And I turn on -- and by mistake I get this network, and it showed an empty field.  And it said we drew 250,000 people.  Now, that’s not bad, but it’s a lie.  We had 250,000 people literally around -- you know, in the little bowl that we constructed.  That was 250,000 people.  The rest of the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument, was packed.  So we caught them, and we caught them in a beauty.  And I think they’re going to pay a big price. 

Some of the sound-bites could be coming through a speaker in Foster's office, with him listening very carefully while doing other work. He shows very little emotion, but is getting increasingly pissed off. 

So: When Foster finally passes along the e-mail intercepts to be leaked to the press (New York Times as it turned out historically), there's no problem whatever with his motivation and no need for extended dialog. This guy is of the school, "Don't get mad, get even," and he's going to be infuriated by Trump's being oblivious not only to his immediate audience but to their dead, commemorated behind him.

It's "Show, don't tell," and we stand by our recommendation to cut the invented dialog here to a minimum and let the visuals and Trump's own words do the work.

I hope this will answer the concerns of The Powers That Be. We in my Division are all very excited about THE LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE and thrilled to be working with so fine an operation (and if you can get Dafoe for a small but crucial role, we'll be ecstatic).

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

Addendum: We're working in Trump's Tweet on Trans-sexuals in the military — leading from the rear by Twitter! — and the release of the transcripts of conversations with Mexican and Australian leaders. I'm thinking a darkly comic montage of action/reaction, with the Trump character totally oblivious of how much he's pissing off the intelligence services and military brass with his casual contempt.

        

North Korea, Nukes ... Existential Threats

I responded to a "What's on your mind, Richard" — though if they knew me well enough to call me by my first name, they'd know I go by "Rich" — I responded to one of those "What's on your mind prompts on Facebook with this. Caution: It's depressing.

What's on my mind is the 4th of July fireworks offered by North Korea, leading to thinking about Tom Lehrer's song, "Who's Next," on nuclear proliferation, leading to a line by Sergeant Yanek, the teacher of the course I took in the early 1960s in CBR: Chemical, Biological, and Radiological warfare.

Another student in the course tried to waste some time and/or was really interested and asked Sergeant Yanek about concerns publicized on the upcoming test by the USSR of some 50 megaton or 100 megaton or whatever really big "device" and Yanek said that there was some worry that an explosion that large might crack the crust of the Earth or get the planet wobbling a bit on its axis, which in turn could crack the crust .... And the student said, "You don't sound too concerned," and Yanek paused a beat and said, "Well, I probably shouldn't say this since the motto of the course is 'Survive, Struggle, and Prevail,' but the way I figure it, by the time the Russians set off their bombs and we set off ours, and the English and French and Chinese and maybe Israelis and God-knows-who-else set off theirs, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!! So, no, I'm not worried about no 50- or 100-megaton Russian superbomb."

A North Korean bomb that can go on an ICBM is an issue, but I live next to a US West Coast deep-water port with container-ship traffic, and if the DPRK or anyone else can make a bomb small enough to fit into a shipping container and not be too obvious, well, "they" can take out a lot of Americans, including, even in California, a lot of Republicans.

In terms of existential threats, the North Koreans aren't an issue. The Americans and Russians are: between us we have enough warheads to risk nuclear winter or at least put big parts of human culture back to the late Medieval. And our leaders really need to keep working on that (things were worse during the Cold War).

It would make me very unhappy — more exactly, very dead — if Port Hueneme, CA, and a big part of Ventura County got reduced to a rapidly expanding ball of white-hot plasma; but H. sapiens and the USA could take the loss. A serious thermonuclear exchange, and "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!" or at least risk species death. And we came close to that in my lifetime: not just the Cuban Missile crisis, but on the quiet day of 28 September 1983, when the balloon almost went up, and a whole lot else, because of a computer glitch.

Whoops. Messrs. Trump and Putin et al. need to stop messing around.

Blood Libel: Donald Trump, Mika Brezinski, Genesis 9.5 (and Leviticus et al. passim)

I'm not going to write a formal post on the subject — with a draft on MS-Word and revision and proofreading and all that — but this much I'll add to the commentary on Donald Trump's tweet of 29 June 2017 on Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski, as reported on Business Insider: "I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!"

To tweak for the tweet an old snarky comment: we knew Trump was a bully and sexist when the Electoral College hired him, so we have only a limited right to complain. Even allowing that limitation, however — and as an American I claim complaining as a God-given right, Constitutionally protected — even allowing that limitation, there are three serious problems with the tweet, in addition to its being a tweet (and sorry folks, but the President of the United States shouldn't be tweeting, period, except maybe an occasional "Happy Thanksgiving" or such).

First, blood comes with taboos in our culture and others: Biblically, it's the life of an organism and forbidden as human food in God's covenant with Noah. (So religious folk all upset over homosexuality shouldn't speak on the subject while eating blood sausage.) On the positive side, as the life of the organism it's a crucial point of Christian communion: "Take; drink." / "for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins." And there are concerns with menstrual blood in the cultures of the Israelites and Jews and others.

Trump's mentions of blood, though, are unusual nowadays, and creepy.

They move from creepy into dangerous with at least two other considerations.

That Mika Brezinski and Joe Scarborough would track down Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago three nights running would indicate a great need to get to Mr. Trump; that they'd do it while Brezinski was undergoing complications from surgery would make them nearly desperate to contact him.

Whatever else was going on, such insistent attempts would indicate either pathetic stalking or a pathetic attempt to get to the Mr. Trump for one reason or another. As an absolute certainty, it would indicate a power relationship in which Mr. Trump is the superior.

Trump is the President of the United States; it's weird he'd brag about power in such a relatively trivial relationship.

It's weirder that he'd brag in such a way that he can be easily and quickly be shown to be lying.

Mike Brezinski is a TV personality only, so she's without significant power; she does have significant exposure and people could see whether or not "She was bleeding badly from a face-lift" on or about New Year's 2016/17. News outlets simply need to publish a photo, such as this one.

People lie for many reasons. For a person in power to tell a blatant lie is a power move. As George Orwell and Eric Hoffer pointed out primarily about "the old monster," Stalin — descriptive phrase from a Marxist opponent of Stalinism — Stalin's twists and turns functioned among other things to make intellectuals go into contortions to follow the Party Line. And more normal folk would have to show their faith in the great leader by showing it as unquestioning faith, ignoring logic and reason and sometimes their senses.

If "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four," then Power is the power to get people to say, and ultimately believe, otherwise. If Trump says Brezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift," that is that, whatever photos and other witnesses might say. For authoritarians and totalitarians and bullies and power-freaks from Shakespeare's farcical sexist Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (4.5) to tragedy-producing tyrants: for their inferiors "To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason" (The True Believer, §56).

And that means heresy against the word of the leader and treason as disloyalty, e.g.,  to assert that Mika Brezinski wasn't bleeding.

National Security Issues Generally and Terrorism Specifically Are Political Issues (Back to a Very Basic "Basic")

I'm going to disagree with an assertion I heard on a very respectable NPR program this morning that national security issues — with protection from terrorism most immediately in question — aren't, or shouldn't be, political. They are political, and should be. 

Let's go back to one really basic point among the Basics.

Among the ways we humans divide up, there is the Soft-Hearted School that says at an extreme that human life, or at least the lives of Americans, is/are of infinite value, and "If it saves just one American life, it's worth it." Opposed to that is the Hard-Headed school that asks just what "it" we are talking about and how much "it" costs, including costs in terms of other values, such as freedom.

That gets us into questions that are difficult and dangerous — involving philosophy, theology, religion, and really basic values — and political.

Most Americans would be safer in a police state, so if safety is an absolute good, let's move toward a police state. But "most Americans" isn't all Americans, and some people would be a whole lot less safe in a police state. Which gets us into politics: Who pays for that safety, in several senses of the word "pays," and who profits?

            If you don't get the point of the question, ask around among Black Americans, or families with memories of escaping the secret police and/or death squads of the Czar, KGB, Shah, Stasi, Pinochet government, and so on for a substantial list.

Most Americans would be safer in a police state, but necessarily less free. Which gets us into safety vs. liberty — and again into politics.

One can and should believe each individual life of infinite value, but when practical matters come up, people must be willing to suspend that belief. For a prime example where it is necessary to do so, it is a moral imperative to perform triage, which can mean selecting whom to treat and possibly save, whom to let die. If every life is of infinite value, and we're talking the same sort of infinities here, it becomes impossible to do the bloody arithmetic of choosing to let even one person die that others might live. If you're going to perform the ethical imperative of minimizing casualties and suffering when you can, you find yourself deciding — as a practical matter then and there —the STAR TREKian question of the needs of the few or the one vs. those of the many.

Personally, I'm of the pragmatic school and hold that the sanctity of human life is a fundamental and absolutely necessary myth, but necessarily mythic: the belief requires either the Leap into the Absurd of believing in a caring God who chose human beings to be special; or the belief requires the outright absurdity of thinking that human beings on our own have some sort of special value.

            As the Bible saith, or Koheleth the Preacher, anyway, saith, in a stretch of Scripture rarely quoted by the pious,

I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts.  For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity [=emptiness].  All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3.10-21)

It is very dangerous to deny the sanctity of even a single human life and sacrifice one for the survival of the group. It is also sometimes necessary. It is dangerous to assert the rights of privacy and movement and to put at risk the lives of Americans, including American children: lives that could be saved by government surveillance and freewheeling policing. If we wish to retain some privacy and freedom of movement, if we wish freedom from government control, we wish upon ourselves risk.

We don't have to resolve these issues, and we can't. We can try to balance various good things and risks and argue about the balance. That is, we can, and do, engage in politics.

Sy Hersh on Syrian Gas/Trump's Missiles, Rich Erlich on Where Rich Erlich Is Coming From on the Issue

Link to Coverage of Hersh Article (see below for link to the article itself).

At an informal high school group reunion after the end of US warfare in Vietnam, and later when I was talking to someone who'd been in the CBR biz during the 'Nam years (that's "Chemical, Biological, and Radiological warfare") — I was told that despite my training in microbiology I would not have gone to Fort Detrick to make new and better bubonic plague had I been drafted but would've been infantry in 'Nam itself, probably with a promising (brief?) career as a tunnel rat. Still, I considered submitting to conscription and trying to get to Detrick as opposed to other options, in part on the ethical grounds that if white phosphorous and napalm were okay, the threat of "germ warfare" wasn't all that out of line. (Bigger part was my not being keen on the outdoor life, plus some idea from ROTC about what infantry grunts do and can suffer.)

And from there I came to the question raised by a student in the CBR course I took of why the international conventions prohibiting CBR have mostly held, whereas there was no similar success with long-dead conventions against submarines' blowing ships out of the water without warning, or fleets of aircraft bombing cities and starting fire-storms that would incinerate civilians by the thousands. 

HINT: Check out probable casualties by kilogram of various lethal stuff. (I found the figures in the 1970 ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, and yes, Virginia, there are people who work out tables of such things, even as human beings before and during World War I worked out gunnery tables for rolling barrages that maximized enemy casualties while minimizing one's own, including casualties from "friendly fire.")

And from there I came to the conviction that we should support the international prohibitions against CBR on the grounds that any rules limiting weapons were better than none — but come off it! Biological warfare is inherently dangerous to the human species and therefore should be out of bounds, but gas warfare is ethically no worse than various ways of burning people with other kinds of chemicals, or using mines or cluster munitions to maim them. (And Virginia: There were people who worked out that maiming enemies is more effective than killing them. Do the math on how many people are taken out of military action by a death as opposed to severe bodily harm, and the psychology of what people — young men and older boys most specifically — most fear.)

And so I can't get too excited over "Red Lines" crossed in Syria with gas warfare and tend to believe that Assad et al. wouldn't use gas so long as they can deliver more effective agents to kill, wound, maim, and/or traumatized enemies and/or perceived enemies and/or people in the general vicinity thereof. (See "collateral damage" as the euphemism of choice for blowing the shit out of said people in the general vicinity. Or burning them. Well, etc.: There are lots of different munitions.)

And so I think we should definitely consider the argument by the usually reliable Seymour Hersh that the Syrians did not use Sarin gas and, therefore, weren't in line for the missile attack ordered by US President Donald Trump.

Please do see the article, and please try to help it go viral. Whether he's right or wrong in this case, the article and where it was and was not published raises important issues. 

Hersh article in Die Welt: Here

Note: The war wonks went from "CBR" to "NBC": Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical" warfare, which helped allow the G. W. Bush administration to conflate poison gas with hydrogen bombs as "WMD" (which has its own labelling issues) and now. for homeland security purposes, "CBRNE": Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosives.