tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40828927610997516712024-03-19T03:47:38.425-05:00WordBasketA Close Look at Modern Mythology, Pop Culture, Hot Media, Book Reviews, and the Psychology That Makes Our Society HopKevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.comBlogger1572125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-65940813171380923542024-03-15T05:30:00.003-05:002024-03-15T07:08:14.565-05:00Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2<blockquote><i>This essay follows my prior review, <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2024/03/everyone-loves-dragon-queen.html">Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen</a>. In the review, I attempted to avoid spoilers. In this essay, I make no such effort; if you would like to watch the movie, please do so before reading any further here.</i></blockquote>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjJ3dKBI-I66mbJkyRkQCkLNj0ZXI3YXV75bAsCqtPsvYD2Y7cP8kZrNr_6vJhbL2SF0g8RHMtgGzi0OYU-Ob5XQYPTTxLOfKgnfwqBD91zmN_-l-XBI8Gr0od9zfUAJyAOpp5i2c8ZbruhbuEepnC5wAvRA5l1Q9H30I8uaq4tvsC9gomPF8jjxF1/s16000/princess_elodie.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) has had it with your myths, in <i>Damsel</i></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>When Prince Henry tosses his bride, Princess Elodie, into the dragon’s chasm, on one level we witness a conventional myth. Like Jesus or Orpheus, Elodie must pass through the grave, defeat the chthonic monster, and return bearing the truth. On another level, we witness an uncomfortable reality that past myths elided: that the truth our hero brings from beyond the grave isn’t what we want to hear. And we don’t know how that truth will change us.</p>
<p>Tolkien and Lewis aggressively embraced fairy tales in a specific context, following the degradations of two world wars. Both fought in World War I before becoming scholars, then sat helplessly through World War II and the Blitz. As Christians, both men believed true morality existed, but they couldn’t see it around them. So they sought moral certitude in distant lands and times, an evasion of the present which Lewis himself <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2014/02/cs-lewis-and-invention-of-love.html">acknowledged outright</a>.</p>
<p>Today’s fairy tales, like the movie <i>Damsel</i>, emerge from a different context. Where both Tolkien and Lewis yearned to restore divinely anointed god-kings to their fairylands’ thrones, we live in the backwash of colonial empires, unable to pretend the past we admire consisted of unadulterated goodness. No matter where we live, our land was seized from another people, maybe recently, maybe centuries ago. But literally everyone lives on stolen land.</p>
<p><i>Damsel</i> enacts this myth in stark realism. Queen Isabelle of Aurea and her superficially charming son, Henry, live on land stolen from the dragon. They admit this during the closing rituals of the marriage ceremony. They must propitiate this distant past through continual sacrifice, through the blood of those descended from the original settlers. Aurea’s continued glittering prosperity relies on someone reënacting that original conquest.</p>
<p>Here we might benefit from consulting prior religious scholars. Émile Durkheim believed that religion begins by extoling the people’s innate virtues; God, Durkheim believed, came late to religion. What Durkheim called “primitive” religion simply preserves the people’s shared virtues by ritualizing them. Mircea Eliade went further, seeing the liturgical calendar as a continuing reënactment of the religion’s founding moments. We walk forever in our prophets’ shoes.</p>
<p>In this regard, Queen Isabelle acts not as her nation’s political leader, but its priest. (No commoners speak in this movie; every character is aristocratic, or an aristocrat’s courtier.) She enacts her nation’s founding sacrifice, preserving peace and stability through blood. Sure, she uses a technicality to weasel out of the actual sacrifice, making beautiful foreigners pay Aurea’s actual blood debt. But the forms matter to national religion, not the spirit.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWmchvL9vJG9WLYi65dKi0GITKm3oxNDEtf5SNJIgfVi6ppaW0V1F7SLKC5GFUR1vWPPef1koX6dgUlI-1jtCihY2MpylgslgfvIBcp2haI0nGJdpaO5vhkc1BbfR8nQQvcEqPlRxWHQGSadMNmlYmoEKiDeieG-CDp3rfk_6_ZjhLmSzaWYDyD4oo/s16000/damsel.jpg" /</td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) and Prince Henry (Nick Robinson)</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Passing through the grave, Princess Elodie returns with the capital-T Truth that Aurea’s founding myth is a lie. Aurea’s founding king attacked the dragon, not to preserve his people, but to enlarge his own glory; he slaughtered the land’s original inhabitants, the dragons, purely for spite. The dragon appears monstrous to living humans because mythology has created this terror, but Truth says humans must abandon this belief and confront their own guilt.</p>
<p>The parallels with modernity are so stark, they need acknowledged but not explicated. As an American, I realize my Anglo-Saxon ancestors seized this land from its prior inhabitants. But that’s what Anglo-Saxons do, as they also previously conquered Britain from its Celtic inhabitants. Not that those Celts were innocent, as their mythology describes seizing Britain from Albion, a terrible giant whose exaggerated evil resembles that of Elodie’s dragon.</p>
<p>Every human nation sits on conquered land. Every nation also has founding myths to justify that conquest. Virgil invented a conquest myth to justify Roman military might, and India’s earliest Vedic poetry is a fight song in praise of seizing a neighboring tribe’s women. Only recently has public morality evolved to consider conquest unsavory, mostly after two World Wars, when technology made conquest both visible and grisly in wholly new ways.</p>
<p><i>Damsel</i> ends with Aurea’s capital in flames. Though the camera lingers on Queen Isabelle’s death, we know nothing of the civilians caught in that conflagration. Because although every myth and fairy tale agrees that exposing the Truth will liberate the oppressed, we don’t know what comes next. The Bible claims that the triumphant Truth will simply conclude this Age. This movie follows the scriptural precedent, burning human kingdoms down and sailing into a vague future.</p>
<p>Lewis and Tolkien loved fairy tales because they believed their mythology could address modern questions without modern moral blurriness. <i>Damsel</i> arguably takes the same tack. However, it proceeds from an assumption that the mythic past wasn’t as pearly as prior generations believed.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-81643760845848562002024-03-12T05:30:00.003-05:002024-03-12T05:30:00.164-05:00Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi09MrHgRnna5N00u_0SNBHlU5BuKC5BwcvQtbRweVuvtnRvfijnLsyNDVUe58eZbITYIGoC45OOuwJdkUfbfQ__rGlDmDOyuWUeLWZWrckDni7RX9CpcZ4r7xGF8AhCHfFKl3fVxl9pTHAGHV7zDEzLtF9jt93HzQc92qkq8o0uLEFw-B-D3s6u8ED/s545/mbb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi09MrHgRnna5N00u_0SNBHlU5BuKC5BwcvQtbRweVuvtnRvfijnLsyNDVUe58eZbITYIGoC45OOuwJdkUfbfQ__rGlDmDOyuWUeLWZWrckDni7RX9CpcZ4r7xGF8AhCHfFKl3fVxl9pTHAGHV7zDEzLtF9jt93HzQc92qkq8o0uLEFw-B-D3s6u8ED/s16000/mbb.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Millie Bobby Brown as Princess Elodie in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's <i>Damsel</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />What is it with filmmakers chopping off Millie Bobby Brown’s
hair? The haircuts are explicitly gendered, too, or anyway counter-gendered. In
her first featured role, <i>Intruders</i>, she gave herself a weirdly
genderless half-bob to emphasize the show’s supernatural themes. <i>Stranger
Things</i> obviously involved her learning how to be a girl. Now, in <i>Damsel</i>,
another self-inflicted haircut signposts her transition from “princess” to “warrior
queen.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Any analysis of <i>Damsel</i> necessarily involves admitting
this is a movie for mainly young audiences. Grown-ups will almost obsessively
notice the prior media products this movie pinches from. This includes obvious
borrowings from <i>LotR</i> and <i>Game of Thrones</i>, and less widely viewed
fare, like 2019’s <i>Ready or Not</i> and your nephew’s latest Dungeons &
Dragons campaign. There’s even a helpful map carved into a wall, guiding player
characters to safety.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Younger viewers, unburdened by prior experience, will
probably enjoy this movie, simply for MBB’s character. Princess Elodie spends
nearly half the movie onscreen alone, sometimes accompanied by a CGI dragon.
She’s dressed inappropriately for the environment, still wearing her wedding
dress, and has no tools, weapons, or food. She extemporizes survival gear from
whatever comes to hand. Princess Elodie is, admittedly, gripping to watch.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Queen Isabelle tempts Elodie from her icy, impoverished
homeland by promising her son, Prince Henry, as a groom. Elodie, though a
princess, is reasonably self-reliant, and chops wood herself to provide for her
subjects during an unusually bitter winter. But Prince Henry and the Kingdom of
Aurea offer Elodie the opportunity to see a larger world and live without
constant fear. Despite her youth, Elodie acquiesces to this arranged marriage.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Unfortunately, the movie’s trailer already spoiled the twist
that caps Act One: the marriage is a lie. Isabelle and Henry need Elodie as a
sacrifice for a nameless dragon whose mountain overshadows the kingdom. Cast
headlong into the dragon’s lair, Elodie must struggle not only to escape, but
to uncover the long-simmering ancestral lie that makes her sacrifice necessary.
Because her survival doesn’t matter if Queen Isabelle sacrifices Elodie’s
sister.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Robin Wright, who kick-started her career playing a
similarly betrothed ingenue in <i>The Princess Bride</i>, portrays Queen
Isabelle with the same oily deceit she probably learned from her co-star, Chris
Sarandon. (Yet another cinematic borrowing.) Meanwhile the dragon, voiced by
Iranian-American actor <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2013/07/tehran-tea-and-slow-blooming-rose.html">Shoreh
Agdashloo</a>, seems transplanted from <i>Shrek</i>—yes, seriously. Because
Elodie’s and Shrek’s dragons share character motivations entirely female in
nature.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yes, that’s a stereotype, but a useful one.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi77YPgIQwXqFTypxiiP6ex57ujznC7bOsLUY0z_vOyXsF81EiIS9K4T8h8QOBrUg77USNchbrufzAaRjl7JGYg-jjxYhoH5NuJgjMOvvmYa0rAGGVxDtGAt2RfMYvvYC13RQdjI2Q2rV216HC5JkhiIdggfy-E9OypxezRqu-h5M3W935_E_xifMMI/s545/robin_wright.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi77YPgIQwXqFTypxiiP6ex57ujznC7bOsLUY0z_vOyXsF81EiIS9K4T8h8QOBrUg77USNchbrufzAaRjl7JGYg-jjxYhoH5NuJgjMOvvmYa0rAGGVxDtGAt2RfMYvvYC13RQdjI2Q2rV216HC5JkhiIdggfy-E9OypxezRqu-h5M3W935_E_xifMMI/s16000/robin_wright.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robin Wright as Queen Isabelle in <i>Damsel</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Elodie’s character arc isn’t new, or even particularly recent.
The “Princess Rescues Herself” trope certainly predates my awareness of fantasy
literature: almost from the moment Tolkien solidified the genre’s standards,
fans began rewriting Arwen-type characters into greater self-reliance. But MBB invests
this road-tested story arc with the gravitas she brings to characters like
Eleven. Elodie is strong, not because it’s a genre boilerplate, but because she
has no other choice.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Brown conveys her internal transformation externally. She’s
thrown into the dragon’s pit still wearing her satin wedding dress, without
tools or weapons. The more determined Elodie becomes to survive, the more
pieces of her elegant gown tear off. She fashions bandages from her skirts, a glowworm
lantern from her sleeves, a climbing piton from her corset stays. Piece by
piece, the emblems of luxury transform into the tools of survival.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This results in an outcome that may give some parents pause:
the more resilient and self-assured Elodie becomes, the more naked she becomes.
That’s also where the hair-chopping comes in, as her long, elegant tresses
become an impediment to survival. Elodie emerges victorious and muscular, but
also showing plenty of skin. She saunters into her triumphant scene reduced to torn,
scorched undergarments, looking like a Frank Frazetta splash panel.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Given the movie’s primarily young target audience, this
nakedness, coupled with some <i>Game of Thrones</i>-ish violence, will give
some parents pause. It doesn’t rely on explicit sex or coarse language, and
anyway, most middle-grade viewers have probably seen content more graphic online
anymore, so tweens and early teens will undoubtedly enjoy it. If your kids are
grade-school-aged, though, maybe consider watching beside them, just in case.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Some prior critics lambasted this movie for unrealistic
standards. Eldie outruns fire, survives catastrophic injury, and handles a
sword correctly the first time she grabs one. Apparently some people find this
implausible in a movie with an immortal fire-breathing dragon. Picky, picky,
picky. The movie’s intended audience will have no such qualms; they’ll simply
enjoy watching Elodie survive. And parents will enjoy watching their kids enjoy
it.</p><p></p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-53034948445189429542024-03-02T05:30:00.003-06:002024-03-02T07:04:51.444-06:00The Modern Anglo-Japanese Troubadour<p><b>Jan Miklaszewicz, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WHKJFDL/">The Promise: A Narrative Poem</a></b><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="554" height="1" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho5ZPF9uAviiArCDCS-XqX_soHMR0AM0rNOrNL-LC1UAT_PkFE-Q19wT6zDSdU629KaqhqWSC-Q566l0b9xOdm3zZnzfVRLzw6qViuy6J6Db-zCC1arfRn_Qhyphenhyphen_6cuU5jSQ4YVF-jeGLoFmeazTvkhOmmS0b85vSbPF5O5VuFAyN9EQGano6SlAa7j/s320/miklaszewicz_promise.jpg" width="1" /></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WHKJFDL/"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp9qiGqdV5aaCxUCZvy5B_-x7flLSeGWqtCBCEm2_vhnU8f-ZmMnsVktFQ23IlzDtLbs8kqTa18lAFXzUOwluYnPKwCflwrFEqRm0tcX22RopZBuNM1_m6q454gCaMpo6DBUuRwR8cO7hHdHdsBAVT8919TsGxLfeaT_mnlXSkrjcVXzTi0TEimFKo/s16000/the_promise.jpg" /></a></div><p>In a distant valley of a distant nation, the word comes down: our prince is going to war, and the knight of the village must report. The knight’s wife has a grim premonition, but it isn’t within the knight’s star to say no, so he girds on his sword and marches into battle. Every night she walks the village parapets, watching to see whether and when her beloved soldier returns.</p>
<p>English poet Jan Miklaszewicz dresses his narrative in Japanese vestments; his knight is a samurai, and his lord a daimyo. But the themes of Miklaszewicz’s verse novella are familiar from countless Childe ballads and French troubadour rhymes. The image of a knight with conflicting duties occurs in numerous folksongs and official poetry. We only wait to see whether the beloved’s fatal visions are doomed to come true.</p>
<p>Miklaszewicz writes his novella in <i>tanka</i>, a major Japanese verse structure. Usually written in a single line of kanji, the English-language tanka usually breaks into five lines, with strict syllable counts. Japanese tanka usually aren’t narrative themselves, but most often embedded in a larger prose narrative, like their more famous offshoot, the haiku. Miklaszewicz instead expands the form, using the syllable count to define the stanza counts of his chapters.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>The feudal Japan Miklaszewicz describes is a dreamland, a no-place devoid of proper nouns. It’s dotted with waving grasses and ancient shrines, and village life is languid until the daimyo’s call arrives. Attentive readers will recognize the landscape from Chretien de Troyes’ mythical Arthurian Britain. This isn’t a knock against Miklaszewicz’s storytelling: <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2014/02/cs-lewis-and-invention-of-love.html">as C.S. Lewis pointed out</a>, true virtue is always in another time, in a distant land.</p>
<p>Thus freed from strict realism, Miklaszewicz lets his familiar troubadour themes play out. Nothing really new happens, if you’re familiar with the English folk ballad tradition, but that doesn’t mean there’s no suspense. The Childe ballads contain enough variations that their stories could go multiple directions, and we never know what comes next until it happens, then it seems downright inevitable. The same thing happens here.</p>
<p>And Miklaszewicz uses his medieval verse form artfully. His language is so rhythmical that readers can practically here the plucked shamisen behind the stanzas. Miklaszewicz’s Japan evokes images from sumi-e paintings and Hokusai’s block prints: fragrant, melodious, and mythical.</p>
<blockquote>In their village home<br />
she senses a subtle shift,<br />
a kindling of hope,<br />
and in the eye of her mind<br />
she glimpses his sweet return,</blockquote>
<table align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZvA-oJADwYOSs-tfEce57APw7iNU_DgfWMLN3YfgvXmV5Do8h9mR82UFIUtbjYRyYjqt0dHdxUc0EE9_TYt0_yBuOMCrEwipIg6Bc4wWJG30HLDIlP3KDpK5FiNnv9qZm6YXD_eREinFCJS7WkUcL_F1ERkNMtINbQGxO8N-VazA9mAeTxMONSO6Z/s16000/jan_miklaszewicz.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jan Miklaszewicz</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>(Every stanza and chapter ends with a comma, emphasizing that we haven’t reached the end. Miklaszewicz doesn’t include a period until the final line.)</p>
<p>Let me interrupt myself to address an important concern that more attentive readers might’ve already anticipated. I recognize the risks inherent in a Western poet using Japanese verse forms and a Japanese mythical setting. Colonial-era European writers like Lord Byron or Rudyard Kipling exploited “inscrutable Orient” twaddle to romanticize imperial conquest. I’ve read enough Edward Said to know that Orientalist mythmaking has had adverse consequences.</p>
<p>Yet Japanese poets themselves wrote considerable volumes of similar dreamland exploration. Bashō, who popularized the haiku form, wrote travelogues so expansive and mythical that recent critics question whether he visited the described places. Travel, to medieval Japanese writers, wasn’t about accurately depicting the visited lands; it was about the subjective experience of abandoning one’s comfort zone and wandering off the map.</p>
<p>In that regard, Miklaszewicz does what most modern Anglophone poets aspire to accomplish: making the familiar unfamiliar, the distant near, and the real world subjective. He uses comfortable themes his likely readers will recognize from folk ballads and traditional poetry, but filters them through his imagination. The product is cozy, without being sleepy. And it rewards multiple levels of reading, from the casual to the scholarly.</p>
<p>I mentioned French troubadours previously. These traveling poets, and their Irish colleagues the bards, made their names by composing and singing verses about distant lands, mythical battles, and noble warriors. Miklaszewicz joins that tradition, updating it for a more cosmopolitan and literate age. His versifying is both familiar and new, using pre-Renaissance storytelling conventions for an audience more familiar with a diverse world. His product is surprising and comfy.</p>
<p>This poem is melodious, sweeping, and short: committed readers could savvy it in one sitting. Miklaszewicz’s storytelling carries readers along without resistance. Yet like the best poetry—including the Childe ballads I keep mentioning—the verse rewards a slow savoring and lingering contemplation. Reading it, we feel transported outside ourselves, and upon returning, we feel we’ve truly traveled somewhere magical.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-2990131977072426012024-02-28T05:30:00.033-06:002024-02-28T06:49:20.869-06:00Burnt Offerings in America, Part Two<blockquote><b>This essay is a follow-up to <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2024/02/burnt-offerings-in-modern-america.html">Burnt Offerings in Modern America</a></b></blockquote>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtO7bCUdmfuctC-TPOc5AOjPkNYwEdJ9sqBjAreC_MxMaZiCb3UwoJLO1HYCdY4MHS4uabFjERMTfxCejJuVtRe62NvWRvT3Gm29COU8kC8W0lFJ_izXtDQP4p3CRZOkvS2uHcSWmU/s16000/emile_durkheim.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Émile Durkheim</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Unfortunately, when men (and it’s mostly men) like Thích Quảng Đức, Mohamed Bouazizi, or Aaron Bushnell offer themselves as burnt offerings, we don’t know where those offerings go. With burnt offerings of animal flesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Hebrew Tanakh, offerings go directly to God or the gods, who take delight, pleasure, and nourishment from humans’ sacrifices. Nowadays, we lack such confidence.</p>
<p>Nearly all early civilizations practice some form of blood sacrifice. Some are dramatic, like Abraham’s averted sacrifice of his son Isaac, or Menelaus’ unaverted sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to start the Trojan War. Others are merely grotesque, as the human sacrifice supposedly practiced among the Mexica (often misnamed the Aztecs), a narrative mainly remembered in lurid Spanish retellings. But early religions agree, the gods require blood.</p>
<p>However, religions generally move away from blood sacrifices. They gradually replace spilled blood with the first fruits of the people’s harvest, or gold, or ultimately the cheerful work of devoted hearts. We might imagine, optimistically, that True Believers gradually realize their gods require human hands to perform divine missions. More realistically, they probably realize that propitiating sky spirits with gifts doesn’t do much by itself.</p>
<p>Émile Durkheim believed that pre-literate Earth Spirit religions started without gods. Early peoples, in Durkheim’s telling, sought the people’s well-being, and selected a totemic image, usually an animal, to represent the people’s collective spirit. Across succeeding generations, though, worshippers forgot the image’s original symbolic meaning. They took metaphorical stories literally, and started worshipping spirits which their priestly ancestors never intended anyone to factually believe.</p>
<p>Durkheim, and his rough contemporary Sigmund Freud, wrote extensively about what they termed “primitive” totemic religions in Africa and Australia. Unfortunately, they wrote without visiting those places. Both thinkers wrote mainly about their own places and times. Watching religion fade from French public life, Durkheim saw “<i>Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité</i>” and images of Marianne, the personification of France’s national spirit, march into the spaces God recently vacated.</p>
<p>No society, Durkheim believed, could survive long without having something it considers sacred. Societies create mythologies, wither of sky spirits or of national heroes like Robespierre and George Washington, to embody the nation’s spirit and embolden shared identity. Whether the object of worship is Jehovah or Paul Revere, what we worship isn’t really the identity which might have existed somewhere, once. It’s the moral principle that identity represents.</p>
<table align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm1NcIuLITJydQ3n3oEyH7yLzxSGDk_YZXYxp80B7t1glaVOrxTGpwL_ppbfxyXV1LCMX-XlwtOfnb_bFAc8yMMzava-BF_fL9wAxzWtw6HQYBhjN_9IIRUXiSd4KonCj4YF9uYZCm7mFKkJ8T5OJM0g0whAcbYwtOoEMZ6vUkOB_jmgTyx4FzCpUW/s16000/aaron_bushnell.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aaron Bushnell</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Which necessarily elicits the question: what principles do Americans consider sacred?</p>
<p>American patriots seek sacred principles in the Declaration of Independence or the Federalist Papers—while conveniently ignoring impolitic passages, like the “Merciless Indian Savages” clause. Without either a king or a state church, America has recourse only to Enlightenment philosophy and humanist precepts. Christian Nationalists might think America has a state church, but only in vague terms; pressed for details, they, like most Christians, fall quickly to infighting.</p>
<p>Americans demand that schoolchildren learn <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2022/11/thanksgiving-and-american-state-church.html">the mythology of Thanksgiving</a>, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily. These myths and rituals serve social needs left vacant by religion’s retreat from public life. They give Americans a unifying narrative and shared identity, while we recite public moral statements in unison, exactly like the Apostles’ Creed. As in church, these secular values are vague, but they’re shared, which is what really matters.</p>
<p>Those American principles, however, have not withstood scrutiny. Tales of American atrocities which trickled in slowly from the Philippine-American War or Mexican Border War, accelerated in the Twentieth Century. War crimes in Vietnam or Operation Desert Storm hit the nightly news, and the hideous violence and mission drift of the Global War on Terror happened instantaneously online. Now America’s proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza are streaming live.</p>
<p>When Aaron Bushnell immolated himself this weekend, he wore his military uniform, then <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68405119">live-streamed his suicide on Twitch</a>. Therefore, he didn’t just destroy himself. American secular religion, embodied in his uniform, burned first. And he distributed the image to goggle-eyed Americans instantaneously, circumventing a commercial media apparatus that’s often seen its independence undermined by state intervention, especially during wartime. This wasn’t just a statement, it was a religious declaration.</p>
<p>Therefore, only one question remains: will True Believers accept this declaration? Bushnell’s suicide was only secondarily about his stated beliefs; like the Pledge of Allegiance or the Apostles’ Creed, his final manifesto was necessarily vague. Religion isn’t about information, it’s about the True Believers themselves, and it doesn’t intend to educate them, but to transform them. Are we, who take Bushnell’s principles seriously, willing to let ourselves be transformed?</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-24850357722036885252024-02-26T05:30:00.009-06:002024-02-28T06:50:17.191-06:00Burnt Offerings in Modern America<table align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm1NcIuLITJydQ3n3oEyH7yLzxSGDk_YZXYxp80B7t1glaVOrxTGpwL_ppbfxyXV1LCMX-XlwtOfnb_bFAc8yMMzava-BF_fL9wAxzWtw6HQYBhjN_9IIRUXiSd4KonCj4YF9uYZCm7mFKkJ8T5OJM0g0whAcbYwtOoEMZ6vUkOB_jmgTyx4FzCpUW/s16000/aaron_bushnell.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aaron Bushnell</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Yesterday afternoon, a man identified as an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst <a href="https://time.com/6821425/israel-embassy-air-force-protest-fire-self-immolation-aaron-bushnell-latest-updates/">lit himself on fire</a> outside the Israeli embassy in Washington. Firefighters smothered the flames and rushed the individual, tentatively identified as Aaron Bushnell, to a local hospital, but Bushnell died of his injuries. According to his manifesto, Bushnell described Israel’s ongoing barrage of Gaza as a “genocide,” and described his military participation as “complicity.”</p>
<p>Two years ago today, I published an essay entitled “<a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2022/02/war-is-not-answer-except-when-it-is.html">War Is Not the Answer, Except When It Is</a>.” I compared Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a war that remains ongoing, with Operation Desert Storm, America’s first military intervention in Iraq. An American response in Ukraine sure looks justified, I wrote, but it looked justified in Iraq, too. We now know the justification for war in Iraq was falsified by PR professionals.</p>
<p>PR surrounding the current conflagrations in Ukraine, Gaza, and Yemen have been spotty. After initial international furor, the Ukraine war has retreated from headlines, except when Republicans withhold funding for military support. America’s decision to jump into Yemen attracted initial outrage, but failed to sustain feelings. Only the Gaza conflict remains a reliable headline-grabber, and not necessarily for the right reasons.</p>
<p>The Gaza death toll threatens to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/25/gaza-death-toll-set-to-pass-30000-as-israel-prepares-assault-on-rafah?ref=upstract.com">exceed 30,000</a> this week. As the Netanyahu government forbids Palestinians to leave Gaza, but continues strafing civilian neighborhoods, the conflict increasingly resembles the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. Yet English-speaking journalists find themselves shackled to a pro-Israeli narrative. Public-facing writers for <a href="https://presswatchers.org/2023/11/msnbc-cancels-mehdi-hasan-a-truth-teller-in-a-time-of-crisis/">MSNBC</a> and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/23/as-israel-pounds-gaza-bbc-journalists-accuse-broadcaster-of-bias">the BBC</a> have found themselves benched, their stories spiked, for criticizing Israel.</p>
<p>Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation makes sense in historical context. From <a href="https://allthatsinteresting.com/thich-quang-duc-burning-monk">Vietnam</a> to <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/mohamed-bouazizi-self-immolates-arab-spring">Tunisia</a>, protestors have lit themselves on fire to force change in the public awareness, and to draw attention to widespread government corruption. Thích Quảng Đức’s suicide in Vietnam closely preceded the coup which overthrew President Dien’s illegal regime. Mohamed Bouazizi helped kick-start the Arab Spring, leading to pro-democracy revolutions.</p>
<table align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilKxRV6qzTrRMecwhoeO30Uhv513X7YassHsUEa6ictNpOafwW70x4DsmoJVVJpMxNfa40iRmJ-aGL_VkBOUPtzZJk7iKkP2SMhp4CjYrxJ99YbBWV8BiJjtKgYaSLB6I-y_rjk56Zd4i96T9FeGZLbrYoptAhqIkBhQFcbpPS2dZFIUGO9KFMgjMm/s16000/mehdi_hasan.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mehdi Hasan</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Yet one cannot help questioning whether either death did any good. American involvement in Vietnam dragged on another decade after Thich’s death, while the <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-syria-we-never-knew.html">Syrian civil war</a>—which, like the Ukraine conflict, has lost Western front-page headlines—is currently well into its thirteenth year. If Aaron Bushnell’s death moves the needle for American public awareness, I applaud his sacrifice, yet I wonder whether it’s actually done any good.</p>
<p>Taken together, these facts force me to question who benefits from the current trajectory in American and world affairs. American silence on the Gaza atrocities has damaged the Biden Administration, but it hasn’t exactly won favor for opposition Republicans, who are aggressively pro-Netanyahu and pro-Putin. Networks losing their star journalists aren’t exactly seeing ratings boosts. Nobody but defense contractors profits from blood and destruction.</p>
<p>American presidents love overseas war. Because presidents also serve as commander-in-chief of the military, American military successes accrue to the President’s reputation, while defeats tarnish his name forever. Flag-waving, naming enemies, and ginning up nationalist slogans, help unify American voters around the state, and the President as head of state. The opposition party knows this, certainly, and will withhold money to deny the other side a win.</p>
<p>Except that hasn’t happened this time. Unlike Operation Iraqi Freedom, which certain candidates famously voted for before they voted against, American commitments in Ukraine and Israel have not produced massive national unity. Nobody’s flying flags and chanting “United We Stand” in facing down dictatorial right-wing regimes in Moscow or Jerusalem. George W. Bush parlayed Iraq into a second term, but Joe Biden is currently <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2024/01/an-open-letter-to-american-center-left.html">watching his coalition shatter</a>.</p>
<p>Like Lyndon Johnson before him, we’re watching the Biden Administration snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. A fairly popular president with a relatively successful economic agenda (more on that to come) managed to alienate his own backers by supporting an unpopular war in an anti-democratic state. Just as Johnson’s personal collapse ushered in the manifestly criminal Nixon, Biden is currently holding the door for Donald Trump.</p>
<p>It’s tempting to describe Aaron Bushnell’s suicide as a sacrifice. But we often forget that, in origin, the word “sacrifice” doesn’t mean to give something up, it means to make something holy. Just as many early civilizations relinquished burnt offerings to petty, tyrannical gods as bribes to protect the people, Bushnell’s death represents a cosmic order that doesn’t protect the ordinary people from overwhelming whimsy on high.</p>
<p>For Bushnell’s death to actually sanctify America, we must start by asking ourselves: what in our country requires burnt offerings? What do we hold sacred, and why isn’t it helping?</p>
<vr><br /><blockquote><b>Continued in <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2024/02/burnt-offerings-in-america-part-two.html">Burnt Offerings in America, Part Two</a></b></blockquote></vr>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-80838058277518932342024-02-24T05:30:00.034-06:002024-02-24T05:30:00.150-06:00Twilight of the Global Bullies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="326" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD_Z7Jo5c_jUuMKOrtNaipTRaXUjCv2m9NXNmeuGXNRpJK0cvIfYd9eqK0KVqA5R4yEAppZLKNSvxzClMNS2igLQzcglRfOGwyVIsuJ8uewPwXcZqzQ7bwhaFBD4moYGdtYGxkrjbt/s16000/bullies.jpg" /></div><p>In my childhood, I had a deeply conflicted relationship with bullying, as children do. Whenever confronted by bullies, the adults around me—parents, teachers, concerned outsiders—encouraged me to cultivate internal strength and resilience to remain unperturbed. But if my internal strength manifested as pushing back against bullies and asserting my own dominance, those same adults punished me. I was supposed to be strong, but not strong <i>like that</i>.</p>
<p>As an adult, I understand the difference. Child bullies appear strong in the moment, and children, lacking perspective, think the current moment will exist forever. Children haven’t seen swaggering, overstuffed bullies cross that invisible line and get smacked down. Adults realize bullying bluster always contains the seeds of its own destruction (though we frequently forget in contentious moments). Children only know that big Jimmy punched me and adults did nothing.</p>
<p>Children are fairly singular, notwithstanding their unique and diverse personalities. They perceive reality as eternally present, assuming that past and future essentially resemble now, with different set dressing. Not until early adolescence to children develop the ability to perceive change in the historical context, to understand that the domineering forces in their lives right now, including both adults and bullies, cannot possibly hold sway forever.</p>
<p>Such development isn’t inevitable, however. We all know adults who continue behaving like childhood bullies, and seemingly get rewarded for it. Workplace jerks whose infantile bluster ensures nobody likes them, but they get promoted anyway, because management knows who they are. Financiers who gambled with the stored value of customers’ homes, and imploded the economy in 2008. The IDF, currently bombing hospitals and neighborhoods in Gaza.</p>
<p>We now know, as children cannot possibly know, that empathy for other people’s suffering has a neural basis. As a bullied kid, I thought some people just learned empathy later in life, but no: <a href="https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/neuroscience-empathy">empathy is a stage of brain development</a>. People who see others emotions, good or bad, and remain unmoved, aren’t just unskilled or unlearned; they’re suffering a form of brain damage in their mirror neuron system.</p>
<p>Perhaps we see this most evidently in wealthy people. Readers of a certain age will recall the stories surrounding the Enron collapse, when we discovered that corporate executives <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/enron-traders-caught-on-tape/">literally celebrated their customers’ suffering</a>. More recently, Elon Musk has aggressively acquired corporations, then demolished them, to settle personal grudges. Then there’s the watchword of modern far-right politics: “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/">the cruelty is the point</a>.”</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicOBCQZyeEO0wyhNiG7peLqPeQsSY55cBMZxQ6Q3t1ULt3ahtEeWp-ntVFB8vhRe_Mnk9hfXqHfMQCWLV2esMaMKbAyv_5NlnR4qlgVypAPKz9bzDiSqvCQPqejWf3A9yIxQT4t5ApAOsUk3KZJ_6R2D9hI6BR07wXyfk7v2dOCfXMY-mB4CQsfX3e/s16000/stop_bitching.jpg" /></div><p>These people, either wealthy themselves or desperate to ally themselves with wealthy idols, demonstrate incapacity to feel others’ pain. Like schoolyard bullies, they take pleasure at seeing poor people or smaller kids crying. This forces a necessary question: did they never learn to see other people, and their feelings, as equally real to their own? Or did they maim and scar their own brains to make such knowledge go away?</p>
<p>I’m guessing a little of both.</p>
<p>Few people achieve positions of power without some demonstrated will to ignore others’ feelings. No matter which party holds the White House, Number Ten, or other halls of power, the winners probably stepped on others’ necks to get there. George Dubya’s Global War on Terror, or Barack Obama’s targeted drone killing campaigns, are only the most globally visible manifestations. Winning power always necessarily entails lack of empathy.</p>
<p>However, the present offers a rare opportunity to change this dynamic. Only the most ridiculous political sophists can deny that the Netanyahu government’s campaign of terror in Gaza, or Vladimir Putin’s interminable war in Ukraine, demonstrate a failure of baseline empathy for others’ suffering. But the ripple effects of both conflicts have demonstrated the weakness of countervailing forces, like NATO, which pick and choose whom to defend from atrocities.</p>
<p>As governments immolate, as police forces prove themselves deaf to justice, and as capitalism flips like a pancake, I believe we’re witnessing an important moment. Not the collapse of the economy or the social structure, but the collapse of the man-children who have profited from the structure’s weaknesses. Centuries of domination by people demonstrating what we now know is brain damage, may perhaps end within our own lifetimes.</p>
<p>What if, rather than choosing our leaders by their ability to dominate debates, we chose them by their demonstrated ability to care? Seems far-fetched, admittedly, in a society that favors glib charisma and photogenic glamor. Yet if we organize ourselves, if we take time to determine what standards of empathy and accomplishment we consider worthy of reward, then why not? Our current self-seeking leaders have international egg on their faces.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-40322138075115302132024-02-14T05:30:00.003-06:002024-02-14T06:58:52.749-06:00In Dispraise of “Originality”<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAnHrDmZftCjI0UyKYRD8geKSnEsp3QSiBUNFevLNJlt_JA_uhSyBX3w2dgM_1qCy6KLk6L1Fz-BTXKc43tWA8JDMLJ5CBpiwb2d343HFXwjQMTUYo_75V6lf7netpZGzN1u_ABfnc/s1600/led_zeppelin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAnHrDmZftCjI0UyKYRD8geKSnEsp3QSiBUNFevLNJlt_JA_uhSyBX3w2dgM_1qCy6KLk6L1Fz-BTXKc43tWA8JDMLJ5CBpiwb2d343HFXwjQMTUYo_75V6lf7netpZGzN1u_ABfnc/s1600/led_zeppelin.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jimmy Page (with guitar) and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin</td></tr></tbody></table><p>“You mean other people are allowed to use and repurpose music that already exists?” Sarah exclaimed, eyes wide and jaw dropped. “When I took the composition class in college, they insisted I had to invent my music out of whole cloth!”</p>
<p>I’ve forgotten how we reached the topic—casual conversation is frequently winding and byzantine. But I’d mentioned the multiple lawsuits surrounding <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2016/04/is-led-zeppelin-threatening-creativity.html">Led Zeppelin</a>, who have costly judgements against them for appropriating works by Black American songwriters, making fiddling changes, and slapping their own bylines on them. I’d explained the likely explanation: there’s a long blues tradition of songwriting by jamming around existing songs until a new song emerges.</p>
<p>This left Sarah flabbergasted. “My professor so thoroughly insisted on complete originality that she demanded we start composing with random notes, and building the piece around that.” I could completely believe that, too. Having attended our college’s new music showcase a few times, I remembered the preponderance of discordant, atonal music. I thought every undergraduate considered themselves another John Cage. Turns out the professor liked that effect.</p>
<p>Sarah felt faux outrage at the injustice of having been told that every composition had to be original. (Okay, “outrage” is overselling it. But definitely astonishment.) Yet while classical and orchestral composers, trained in frequently grueling college and conservatory programs, have an ethos of complete originality drilled into them persistently. Meanwhile, working songwriters crafting genres people actually pay money to hear, pinch and repurpose existing themes regularly.</p>
<p>Bob Dylan described his early songwriting style as “love and theft.” His earliest recordings show how frequently he lightly reworked existing Woody Guthrie or Dave Van Ronk tunes. Only with years of experience did he develop his own songwriting voice. Lennon and McCartney are among the bestselling songwriters ever, yet three of the Beatles’ first four albums are half cover songs, because the Beatles hadn’t found their voices yet.</p>
<p>I have no songwriting experience; I’m about as musical as a steel anchor. Yet in college creative writing and playwrighting classes, my textbooks espoused a similar ethos of complete originality. I remember one textbook pooh-poohing genre fiction as a “guided tour” of existing repurposed themes, while “literary” fiction always strives to be completely original. Don’t be like those popular paperback writers, the textbook urged; always create something new.</p>
<p>Our professor smiled ruefully and reminded us that textbook authors have their blind spots, too.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="295" data-original-width="525" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyJBIobyZxKQR8g-kY48_H-u6n20QdoXDxQrv6aovqPIAB48viNYKahygUXvlnT30IWF91KzhIpIZtIdMEC8jZIXOSibL9Z1FU4il-sQGvslFLr-Usdzee-NFuRuwd-g1cTDrE6kxM/s1600/beatles.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Beatles, photographed at the peak of their star power</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Literary authors and playwrights mimic one another relentlessly, and their genres are intensely fad-driven. As a playwright, it too me years to shed David Mamet’s influence, like songwriters struggle to differentiate themselves from Dylan. Most college-educated American writers pass through their John Steinbeck, Elmore Leonard, and Toni Morrison phases before achieving distinct voices. The lucky few see those exercises published.</p>
<p>Originality emerges in art, where it does, only gradually. Both Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, famous for nonconforming paintings, began their careers with Renaissance-style portraits and church scenes. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2016/04/fuck-picasso.html">Jackson Pollock</a> tried several techniques before uncovering his dribbling, wholly non-objective Abstract Impressionist style. Importantly, all these artists were disparaged when their approaches first appeared; they achieved acclaim only latterly, sometimes posthumously.</p>
<p>Yet even incidental mimicry draws ire. Returning to music. Former Beatle George Harrison’s signature hit, “My Sweet Lord,” made his solo career. Yet within months of release, lawyers fired off a <a href="https://ultimateclassicrock.com/george-harrison-my-sweet-lord-plagiarism/">lawsuit</a> because it resembled the Chiffons’ forgettable 1963 hit “He’s So Fine.” That lawsuit commenced in 1971, and wasn’t wholly resolved until 1998, dominating his solo career, and rendering him timid as a songwriter forever after.</p>
<p>This trend achieved its culmination with the “Blurred Lines” lawsuit. Heirs of Marvin Gaye <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/robin-thicke-pharrell-williams-blurred-lines-copyright-suit-final-5-million-dollar-judgment-768508/">claimed</a> the songwriters behind Robin Thicke’s icky 2013 hit stole Gaye’s “groove.” That is, they claimed the song resembled, not something Marvin Gaye wrote, but something Marvin Gaye <i>could have written</i>, and therefore was plagiarized. <i>And they won</i>. This sets a courtroom precedent that simply imitating venerable artists, even while creating wholly new art, is plagiarism.</p>
<p>No wonder Sarah’s college composition professor (now retired) favored originality over tone. Instructors, textbook authors, and now courts demand that artists constantly reinvent the wheel. Blues icons jamming in some underlit cellar are now plagiarists, not artists. Don’t build your next track around a riff from “Crossroads” or “John the Revelator,” boys, the boundaries of ownership are set!</p>
<p>Artists aren’t unique individuals; they’re a community of give-and-take, constantly improving one another’s raw material. Yet the ownership ethos demands nobody pinch from anybody, even incidentally. The mere fact that working artists have never done this doesn’t change the story.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-21499960436819512022024-02-07T05:30:00.003-06:002024-02-07T07:05:25.653-06:00Some Parting Thoughts on Toby Keith<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf3I3nnIegLCpMh0v8OxoIJlBLSazlaXK-ozxbY2SOs6InfnO7ZjR9KILGD2cTtE8n9NqvbeVvttPjOyx8_1DD4UH9BkLCk1n_ifjsBnDfCjcPMKv17Zd0rPacByIr1th81f4KEpbnTNt7Cgb0Pzc99UIcS7JxtDdZ9hwEFfBPQPDre4rHwpBEQKhy/s16000/toby_keith_1993.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Toby Keith as he appeared at his debut,<br />with that signature icky 1990s mullet</td></tr></tbody></table><p>When Toby Keith’s debut single, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” raced to #1 on the Billboard country charts in 1993, I still listened to country radio. I hadn’t grown jaded on the peppy country-pop hybrid that would overtake mainstream country music in the 1990s, an overtaking that Keith helped facilitate. Therefore, I heard it go into regular rotation, as country disc jockeys praised Keith’s tapping into the key country music zeitgeist.</p>
<p>“Should’ve Been a Cowboy” dropped when Keith was 31 years old. That’s older than most aspiring musicians get before they quit, disgusted with dead-end opportunities and industry gatekeepers. It’s also remarkably old to debut in country music. Despite its middle-aged conservatism, since the 1990s, country music has notably disdained artists past forty. America teems with musicians every bit as competent and inventive as Johnny Cash who quit because they needed groceries.</p>
<p>Despite being only nineteen myself, I recognized the sentiment dominating “Should’ve Been a Cowboy.” Keith’s surface-level themes aren’t exactly concealed: his life lacks spark that would’ve been present had he lived in another time and place. I appreciated the sentiment as, in 1993, I struggled with meaningless jobs while living in a Western Nebraska town that celebrated its cattle drive-era heyday. It’s impossible to ignore the past’s alluring appeal.</p>
<p>However, I also recognized something below Keith’s surface-level themes. Despite longing to be a “cowboy,” his song never mentions the workaday tedium of cowpunching. Instead, he cites <i>Gunsmoke</i>, <i>The Lone Ranger</i>, and the classic “Singing Cowboys,” Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. He wants to romance women, chase outlaws, and sing around the campfire. He presents a cowboy mythology completely devoid of actual cattle work.</p>
<p>In 1993, I lacked the vocabulary to explain something that I innately understood, but would only verbalize years later: the legendary Wild West didn’t exist. American culture celebrated cowboys only after they were dead, inventing <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/12/cowboys-and-power-of-storytelling.html">fine-sounding fables</a> about heroism, hard work, and gun-barrel justice. Owen Wister’s <i>The Virginian</i>, the novel which defined the Western genre, begins with a prelude lamenting that cowboys, like chivalric knights, now remain only in memory.</p>
<p>So in extolling cowboy goodness, Toby Keith yearned to time-travel to a time that existed only in paperback novels and Hollywood fantasies. He wanted a life with the dreary bits removed, with moral ambiguity excised, with heroes and villains clearly demarcated by the color of their Stetson hats. I don’t say this unsympathetically: Keith, a former oil derrick worker, understood intimately how modern labor strips life of meaning.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7corNUnI8-AK5OIf9BjrhQzTPD8FNLvvSj4-MOMGQPcTg5SS3-TGuUhfPTJOv5skzqIvdP02-bXjO3ju5EGP-OEQB33DHJzlaq3Rt5DGJEoUH7rnn5Xyn2Q88OxZnxtjqGOtCBDPGIotCAzqiG10BDxigt5grRRfoIgkx6iduF0OBW-LZclZxy0D5/s16000/toby_keith_2023.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Toby Keith as he appeared in 2023, thinned<br />by the cancer that eventually killed him</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Yet the yearning for moral clarity and escapism in “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” eventually overtook Keith’s work. Through the 1990s, Keith released middle-of-the-road Nashville fare like “How Do You Like Me Now?” and “I Wanna Talk About Me,” songs that were okay and did well on the charts. But he struggled to find his unique voice. This matters especially since, unlike other controversial Nashville artists, Keith <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/07/jason-aldean-and-nashville-outrage.html">wrote his own material</a>.</p>
<p>He finally found his <i>metier</i> after September 11, 2001. That’s when he released the songs likely to define his legacy: “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” and “Beer For My Horses.” The former, known colloquially as “the Boot in the Ass song,” became an anthem of pro-war Americans during Bush’s War on Terror. The latter is a cartoonish pro-lynching song extolling cowboy myths of civilian justice.</p>
<p>That’s when the cosplay cowboy ethos behind Keith’s breakout single finally consumed him. No longer satisfied yearning for a past that never existed, Keith dropped himself narratively into America’s moral conflicts. Backed by Nashville’s multi-million-dollar publicity machine, he pretended to be a sandbox soldier and civilian justice-bringer. He traveled the lucrative arena circuit whipping audiences to think likewise.</p>
<p>Keith’s musical persona embraced absolutes. He favored “this country that I love” and inveighed “against evil forces.” He never explained exactly how he identified evil forces, except that they didn’t love America like him. In Keith’s world, apparently, evil is as evil does. Morality equated to conformity, pro-Americanism, and buying into the official state narrative. His cosplay righteousness wasn’t in the past anymore, it was merely silenced in the present.</p>
<p>But the shine eventually wore off the War on Terror. As America abandoned absolutism and relearned that difficult situations deserved more nuanced treatment, Keith stopped making hits. His songs remain popular with the flag-waving crowd, but he last creased country’s Billboard top twenty in 2012. His final years were characterized by silliness like “Red Solo Cup.” Country music moved on, leaving his absolutism behind. So, I hope, did the country.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-58028064885354772742024-02-03T05:30:00.011-06:002024-02-03T05:30:00.159-06:00The Devil Walks on Rural Roads<p><b>Ania Ahlborn, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Crept-Novel-Ania-Ahlborn/dp/1476783756/">The Devil Crept In: A Novel</a></b><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="413" height="1" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPvUW1PBxc8f0qKkhsPiLqSUxkItY7-VGVIHCcU_S-Vp614ZTFHi2QysWT0y-qcYCduz-muK3mrZOVGT406MrGY1DG7PYD3920uWYUfKQEWzvNdcTJN6TZSC6IDAU6iPQ2asF0JWirXnvqgmUHAMFjsKozykbKiA4GNYmmWD-xuAF0hllKxrmIrgx_/s320/ahlborn_devil.jpg" width="1" /></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Crept-Novel-Ania-Ahlborn/dp/1476783756/"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="193" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1HcEzNPRPKh-6mVZLWj0knPYi1NR113EGlnPyd0dUYiAbjkaL1HKXRSPd0s-v6WdZxKrSgIPn0sL4MQpTG1II46M6ocbsA4qLeu02pO5RtY29cUnPVDh33kMlKcxqE6j6TFMkOuFNjVIVzAUqbVlyEmgOzFViX3LvlWZesHKJe8DAhB5qwWuJnsEH/s1600/devil_crept_in.jpg" width="193" /></a></div><p>Young Stevie Clark has watched enough cop dramas to know a lackluster investigation when he sees one. Police in Deer Valley, Oregon, aren’t taking Jude Brighton’s disappearance seriously. As Jude’s cousin and best friend, Stevie decides to pursue the case himself. Retracing Jude’s steps, he finds a monster lurking on Deer Valley’s periphery. But poor, tongue-tied, neurodivergent Stevie can’t make anyone take his warnings seriously.</p>
<p>This is my second Ania Ahlborn novel, and I wonder whether it’s too early to identify a pattern. Ahlborn takes familiar horror boilerplates, and revisits them from another angle. This time, Ahlborn spotlights a joyless small town, a dysfunctional family, and a community that doesn’t need to bury its secrets, because it hasn’t accepted that it even has any. If this sounds familiar, these are the Lego blocks Stephen King regularly builds with.</p>
<p>Initially, Stevie’s investigation more resembles mystery than horror. Disgusted with Deer Valley’s shrugging, nonchalant investigation, Stevie seeks answers himself. Notwithstanding his sighting a monster, Stevie’s story has more personal drama than out-and-out terror. As we follow Stevie’s parallel investigation, though, we discover facts about his relationship with Jude. The two pre-adolescents seem less friends, more trauma-bond survivors.</p>
<p>Stevie resembles King’s frequent child protagonists: preternaturally bright, but surrounded by authority figures too entrenched to heed his warnings. He’s also, despite his intelligence, an unreliable narrator, plagued with echolalia and visual delusions. That enables Stevie’s abusive stepfather and willfully blinkered mother (two other King standards) to discount Stevie’s warnings, even when the mystery starts penetrating their house and family.</p>
<p>Behind this front-story, another narrative unfolds. Rosie Alexander believes herself unloved and unlovable, especially when she miscarries immediately before her husband’s fatal accident. She retreats inside her rural cottage, just her and the secret she cannot let anyone else discover. Rosie shares her house with a slavering creature of appetite, a carnivorous hungry ghost she cannot kill, because in her twisted way, she loves it.</p>
<p>Deer Valley binds Stevie’s and Rosie’s stories together (though they unfold asynchronously). It’s a melancholy community, a graveyard of hope where nothing happens and everyone is doomed to disappointment, despite apparently being fairly populous and having a picturesque downtown full of people. Nobody in Deer Valley keeps pets, despite the numerous feral cats. Nobody talks about the future, because apparently there isn’t one.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMIGFRVaiD0HBfXs3IOYHqIDnYxFhITJHdfmZeA9JVFUSRRI3vbX8Z-tIlpvEAao1ySb1Mt30ECpOP77J7WPhAbjZtOjWc0MYV7NxX-KjnHjDYcZmXtJv2-rjSEdvf7555dnCrz8Xo_K5kAUME8wNToRLrE8aJOovEc4TnIaqOrDV24yP5q6QJgA/s16000/ania_ahlborn.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ania Ahlborn</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Years earlier, something happened to Max Larsen, a Deer Valley child who didn’t heed his parents. Max’s story is every parent’s nightmare, but it’s also the phantom adults use to scare children into complacency. Stevie has heard Max’s story, and considering that his mind frequently manifests his fears, he walks a tightrope between giving into Deer Valley’s mindless blandness, and pursuing the truth he knows exists, out there, somewhere.</p>
<p>Ahlborn’s two protagonists, Stevie and Rosie, who never meet, and the sepia-toned community they share, seem almost comforting in their bleakness. Their story seems remarkably familiar. That’s because Ahlborn pinches them wholesale from King’s Castle Rock novels, in theme if not actual words. Both communities teem with people merely going through the motions because they’ve forgotten that anything else exists.</p>
<p>In comparing Ahlborn to King, I don’t mean this disparagingly. Ahlborn writes an homage to King’s style and themes, but places her spin on them. King’s child protagonists, like Danny Torrance or the Losers’ Club, regularly struggle with surrounding adults, yet we know, with the clear-eyed conviction of youth, that they’re telling the truth. With Stevie, whose senses regularly deceive him, we have no such assurance.</p>
<p>Stephen King is, essentially, the Beatles of mass-market horror: a commercial force so monolithic, other artists only achieve success by passing through him. But he’s also an industrial product. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/09/new-from-stephen-king-factory.html">As I’ve written recently</a>, King’s <i>oeuvre</i> is consistent enough that other writers can effectively create new Stephen King material without his actual involvement. Like the Beatles, other artists could mimic King and sign their paychecks.</p>
<p>By contrast, Ahlborn both embraces and resists this propensity. By writing her own Stephen King novel, revisited from her unique viewpoint, Ahlborn demonstrates that King’s technique is still artistry, <i>provided</i> authors have their own voice. There’s nothing wrong with giving audiences what they want; bakers make the bread people will eat, not what expresses their inner turmoil. But every baker perfects a technique totally their own.</p>
<p>Ultimately, Ahlborn squeezes terror from a subject readers will find excruciatingly familiar: a large soul in a small, constricting world. Stevie can’t accept Deer Valley’s pervasive lies, so Deer Valley must make him fit. We only wonder what tortures Deer Valley will inflict to preserve its myths of comforting blandness.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-5389523075150629842024-01-29T05:30:00.016-06:002024-01-29T07:04:36.507-06:00Those Who Escape the Cult<p><b>Daniella Mestyanek Young, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Uncultured-Memoir-Daniella-Mestyanek-Young/dp/125083547X/">Uncultured</a></b><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="544" height="1" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg795tdNNPwUg8Y1ORrM9XAPTewCcTFaLfSyIYyb8te1BMHnono35XC33AsIXvxcF2_8aDEArtCilrTJUf29DhJ6xdFE3fPgNA6YA_FZevDVHTiqZfzrQOoi7fNNCVIKjesBPQEIs3zRBh5BPdeSCeNnLpLDbz1fXyDPuzFLajJbFkPTF4Hm6TL4suC/s320/young_uncultured.jpg" width="1" /></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Uncultured-Memoir-Daniella-Mestyanek-Young/dp/125083547X/"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCGMNU4o34tOq_t2AytWb58eHYP815opyzMJ9HkQEu70vOC_KMYUxhCFn3wv-a08hLXehtpFK_FcwlpT84X25n0ndjNSWPOf1QSNya1Je7zAVro-x1AdOCR-120LkHssTwAJtRm1tJg8Zq6PTfZDX-Nwtw3IdJoQa5MfzRHT0PdPqLw-TicDzlmlhQ/s16000/uncultured.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>Daniella Mestyanek grew up in a Brazilian compound with dozens of other children and adults, but not really in Brazil. Her home was an international colony of the Children of God, a strange Christian splinter group notorious for its isolationism and weird sexual mores. When she finally escaped the group at age 15, she found it had warped her thinking and left her permanently vulnerable to exploitation by powerful, amoral people.</p>
<p>Mestyanek, who writes under her married name Young, divides this memoir into three main thematic parts. Each involves her increasing awareness of private abuse and covert violence hiding behind smiling systems. Her time with the Children of God (proper name, The Family International) is perhaps the strangest and most pointed, as it differs most remarkably from her audience’s likely experience. Yet it sets the tone for power abuses which dot her entire life.</p>
<p>The Children of God arose as merely one among the Jesus Freak youth ministries of the 1960s. However, the group’s leader, David Berg, like his rough contemporaries Jim Jones and David Koresh, internalized his culture’s Woodstock-era grandiosity, and believed himself a prophet. He began issuing apostolic decrees which his adherents believed carried God’s signature. His pronouncements became increasingly weird, especially when he gave God’s blessing to sexual exploitation.</p>
<p>Unlike comparable cults, the Children survived years without a conflagration. Because of this, not only was Daniella Mestyanek born into the religion, so was her mother; Daniella was a third-generation True Believer. Except she lacked the fervor her faith community demanded. She asked questions, demanded respect, and felt free to express her doubts—challenges which a leadership appointed by God couldn’t accept. This resulted in increasing tensions.</p>
<p>The problem isn’t that Family leadership believe themselves right; it’s that they believe themselves chosen by God. Such absolute leadership cannot brook doubts, questions, or challenges. The longer little Daniella defies their dictates, the more brutal and repressive their tactics become. Tactics include isolation, physical violence, and sex. But rather than force her back into line, these tactics harden Daniella’s resolve to leave.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQvMREy7VOvqA7rjFZXIWGmS-qky7w5P32Sjd-oUexCsR965fC5VtMGl130qSOQ7l7J52h8UNq-uiNINeY3GEWdUzLV-J7r90SveWwKen5KNHhWix0n4W0VVBT2L96lmTi-bXu2XguUdzr9bp-1mMmGeO2bg5WhuCW7W5FztE0m79nMqS-jmrYv2jg/s16000/daniella_mestyanek_young.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Daniella Mestyanek Young</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Once out, and forced onto her own resources at only fifteen, Mestyanek must negotiate another power dynamic that also doesn’t permit doubts: the American education system. It takes time, but she eventually learns school’s intricate, unspoken rules, even when the occasional petty dictator uses those rules against her. She achieves the book learning she always wanted, but which her religion denied, since Armageddon was always happening soon.</p>
<p>Her formal education, however, culminates in graduation into two new power dynamics: marriage, and joining the Army. Her first husband makes her feel included and desirable, two traits she never felt previously, notwithstanding the Family’s mandatory sexual inclusion. But she quickly realizes that he considers her a consumable resource, not a partner. The Army authorizes her to stand on her own two feet, which empowers her to escape him.</p>
<p>If this sounds familiar, I appreciate my long-term readers. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-long-walk-out-of-home.html">Lauren Hough</a>’s memoir is pointedly similar, with the arc out of the Family, and into the only organization bold enough to provide the structure she needs—in her case, the Air Force. Both women find strength enough to free themselves from learned shackles, which in Hough’s case means her closeted sexuality. But they achieve that strength only after enduring systemic abuse.</p>
<p>Mestyanek initially flourishes in the Army. She rises through the ranks quickly, and becomes one of America’s first women officially authorized into front-line combat. But she also quickly notices the overlap between the Army’s conditioning, and the Family’s. Both rely on name-calling, shame, and in-group behavior to enforce desirable behaviors. Both are riddled with sexual violence. And both actively squelch independent women.</p>
<p>This isn’t a surprise revelation; Young declares this realization early. She doesn’t, however, deeply analyze the parallels; this isn’t a scholarly monograph on cults and their organization, it’s Young’s memoir of coming to grips with patterns of power and abuse in her life. Our author becomes aware of the power structures most of us take for granted, and rebels against them. But this isn’t a how-to, it’s her life story.</p>
<p>As such, Young’s memoir makes for gripping reading. She struggles to maintain her identity when confronted with powers that see her, a woman, as a lesser person to exploit. Though she escapes from the unspoken rules governing life in the Family and the Army, she’s still, in the final pages, finding her own beliefs. She gives us reason to believe that we, too, can escape the exploitation dominating our lives.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-35510346256946178882024-01-26T05:30:00.005-06:002024-01-26T05:30:00.138-06:00How To Write in the Middle of the Road<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="340" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixZGw_T3khNbLlmYRtxj8mIa18rZ26nFWoFjCYt0vq2ZjvTlI1C78Y6a10wy3YQFx5RMkHG3W6k6k7MlsXELlR85yYBVXG7J3ZCfg3WcHZ4DKxEHP2iC2d9CvEUy5gagTI95Wmv2_RzRVi2g-beL05FU0qrBP0Lq56zscTl-5gQdeuvgzXAroO6_-g/s16000/so_sentence.jpg" /></div><p>As the website formerly known as Twitter continues its slide into irrelevance, posts like this one have become more common. Don’t, says the would-be teacher, whose name was removed from their post before I encountered it, ever begin a sentence with the word “so.” Similar posts rehash Stephen King’s notorious demand to excise every possible adjective or adverb. Others include some variation on Quiller-Couch’s orphan injunction: “<a href="https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-kill-your-darlings">Kill your darlings</a>.”</p>
<p>I acquired my distrust of gnomic advice early. In grade-school creative writing, teachers warned students to avoid the word “said” in dialog tags, lest our writing become monotonous through repetition. Somewhere between there and college, the zeitgeist shifted. Now writing teachers admonish us to avoid any word <i>other than</i> “said” in dialog tags, lest we become overblown, adjectival, and show-offy. Thus I realized that writing advice is faddish and insubstantial.</p>
<p>Stephen King warns writers to avoid adjectives and adverbs, and to remove all unnecessary content, advice he notably doesn’t follow. His books are often so overwritten, they’re physically difficult to hold. Matching advice to trim supporting characters, side plots, and world-building digressions, aim to reproduce the terse, telegraphic prose famous from Ernest Hemingway or Elmore Leonard. In other words, it’s about following the crowd to bestseller status.</p>
<p>This week, as I contemplated how to rebut these specious proverbs, seemingly designed to produce work that authors and audiences inevitably hate, news came down the pike. <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/arizona-state-and-openai-are-now-partners-what-does-that-mean">According to <i>The Chronicle of Higher Education</i></a>, Arizona State University has launched a pilot program with OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, to tutor freshman composition students. This becomes another opportunity to trim boring old teachers, with their salaries and demands, from the education process.</p>
<p>Despite the popular rhetoric, ChatGPT isn’t artificial intelligence; it’s a computer learning heuristic, a dynamic program designed to let computers learn from existing material. In particular, ChatGPT browses existing prose content, and teaches itself how to construct content passably similar. Technology philosophers argue whether it has any capacity to understand the content it reads or creates, but it doesn’t matter. ChatGPT is essentially a high-tech mynah bird.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqBVG5_FJBaFoUlflfiIBegh1UoZIKI4-VNcMWIImdKkim8OAbRna3mG-PkqsPYw8AVn66xbK4KUFKTxsHvDZou1OLnq4Rf0Gh-gjaNXk1M8a2F_Ksly_6Y7mYEZ-rvyWaeNLi5kPK/s1600/stephen_king.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stephen King</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Therefore, if we expect ChatGPT to teach college-level writing, we can at best anticipate that it will encourage students to write sentences and paragraphs which fit the program’s heuristic. It will regard individual voice, unique narrative, or personal interest as distractions. Just as ChatGPT itself only produces prose that satisfactorily resembles existing prose, it’ll demand likewise from students. This will produce bland, unoriginal writing that its own writers hate.</p>
<p>Much like the rules-based writing taught on Xitter.</p>
<p>Learning heuristic writing defies the purpose of college writing. It presents prose not as an attempt to explore the human condition, convey valuable information, or <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2011/09/spinning-line.html">spin a constructive line of bullshit</a>, but as a product to extract, like coal from a mine. If extracting text from human writers proves too costly, time-consuming, and laborious, fire them; outsource it to machines. Human writers are dangerous anyway, and use excessively big words.</p>
<p>Elaborate, oppressive writing rules share the same message. Excising adjectives and adverbs, the words that give nouns and verbs their flavor, or trimming side quests to create a sparse narrative that translates to film, all declare authors the enemies of prose. Anything that shows individual personality or a spark of character impedes slick commercial prose, which should roll out like cars from a Detroit assembly line.</p>
<p>Please understand, I’m not exaggerating. I’ve used this example repeatedly, but it remains relevant: <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2014/03/success-an-owners-manual.html">according to Charles Duhigg</a>, record label executives expected Outkast’s single “Hey Ya” to become a runaway hit. Not because they particularly liked it, but because in-house software declared it sufficiently like previous hits that passive listeners would devour it. When it initially struggled, industry insiders gamed the market to achieve the software’s projected outcomes.</p>
<p>Now we’re applying similar principles to writing. By making new prose sufficiently similar to existing prose, and excising any spark of character or enjoyment, we ensure readers can consume writing passively, like they consume petroleum. It matters not one whit whether writers craft novels, scripts, business reports, or journalism. We expect everyone to read as submissively as if they’re doomscrolling Xitter.</p>
<p>As a teacher, I cajoled students to use their own voices; several of them succeeded. Several youths who grew up resenting reading and writing found an unanticipated joy when they discovered writing wasn’t just crinkum-crankum grammar exercises. But now forces want to walk this progress back. Whether it’s human-made rules or computer learning heuristics, some forces would make writing as bland and joyless as possible.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-60510553672942929892024-01-20T05:30:00.022-06:002024-01-20T05:30:00.127-06:00The Disappearing American Dignity<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHEM_r9lL5vdsG0L2rgfkodvUwYcwYmuD96P-kQw8kDoT8DRwxoGwmKIwZrqCbpMms6rHoqEFmPPJurvJQ7oUDf1Zui1TToIcsTd3In2-X_hlFVd0accAXsyrw5AUXDTXjbVYNCpG78PPPumJ3_MiFAFX0vowc0Te4KjHoghA4lTmxTP8BUX_0nSFL/s16000/john_mcwhorter.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John McWhorter, Ph.D</td></tr></tbody></table><p>I personally don’t mind the trend toward letting people wear jeans to church. As an unusually tall person, jeans are often the only off-the-rack britches available in my size, so I wear jeans everywhere: work, church, school, job interviews. This growing willingness to let people remain informal during formal situations means I can wear comfortable clothes which fit. I’ll never demand increased formality for formality’s sake.</p>
<p>That said, increased informality creates new opportunities for friction. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2024/01/a-short-course-in-speaking-englishes.html">John McWhorter writes</a> that, as more Black Americans feel comfortable using Black English in mixed-race situations, White Americans feel increasingly convicted by the language. McWhorter mostly means workplace situations, but we’ve seen this happen in other public spheres too. Last year, conservative spokespeople <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/04/white-americans-and-death-of-rhetoric.html">expressed outrage to learn</a> that Black politicians changed their tone depending on which audience they addressed.</p>
<p>Growing informality isn’t uniquely Black. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-white-working-class-is-revolting.html">Historian Nancy Isenberg writes</a> that Elvis Presley began mainstreaming White redneck culture when he refused to moderate his Memphis accent on camera. For Isenberg, that trend culminated with President Bill Clinton, who didn’t only retain his Arkansas accent, he exaggerated it on camera. He parlayed his “plain folks” appeal to victory over George H.W. Bush—a lesson Bush’s son took to heart eight years later.</p>
<p>Again, nothing against informality; our increased willingness to speak without mediating mannerly conventions provides opportunities to communicate more deeply and effectively. Unfortunately, while we’ve seen formality become less prized in American society, we’ve seen a plurality of Americans also sacrifice dignity. This isn’t a semantic difference. While formality generally means adherence to rituals and ceremony, dignity means treating oneself, and others, as possessing worth and character.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz7fKxWWzszVjRroetv5Qx0ct9JPE381VjSyXJLpUO4He5KjIe7llUa0I_Vtm5b6cU10AFgXpWP0meoT6cHx5uLXta07EQCpj711BCYhXcM2yCVX0gXafJ7lcIthL-veiUkhpu7NT-/s1600/nancy_isenberg.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. Nancy Isenberg</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>Earlier this week, <a href="https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/01/15/a-question-still-worth-asking/">Nebraska journalist George Ayoub</a> compared Donald Trump’s third Presidential campaign to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist paranoia. When, Ayoub wonders, will someone direct the same question at Donald Trump that Joseph Welch lobbed at McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency?” Popular history contends that Welch’s question began the process of turning American voters against McCarthy’s scare tactics.</p>
<p>Much as I appreciate Ayoub’s position, I believe he’s mistaken, because we already know the answer: Donald Trump has never possessed decency. He began his first mainstream Presidential bid by hurling racist insults at immigrants, mocking the disabled, and snuggling with neo-Nazis. Trump’s partisans have spent the subsequent nine years repeatedly saying “He didn’t mean that” whenever Trump says something indecent which he clearly meant.</p>
Quoting Ayoub again, he laments how today’s politics lacks “decorum, simple manners and any semblance of compassion.” Here, Ayoub and I agree. Politicians work for the American people, and therefore treat the people with respect and dignity (in principle anyway, if not in practice). There’s a categorical difference between George W. Bush’s informal chumminess, and Trump treating broad numbers of American citizens with public contempt.<p></p>
<p>Put another way, we’re witnessing the disappearance of Eddie Haskell. This supporting character from <i>Leave It To Beaver</i> knew how to modulate his tone, behaving manipulatively and even downright viciously with his peers. But when confronted by adults, he changed his tone, assumed dignity, and became downright deferential. We all attended grade school; probably all knew kids who acted accountable whenever adults were watching.</p>
<p><table align="right" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidrzzMEFD1TnND_PuJWjut097704NzLcc7-vEzTZ9RFS0F_VKYZd_vR4HvTxs_n9bOVtytNrqRhdMhZb-fo8UM0MPNGAFZYHE2z6jrf0Vk09d9JdOSLSi8MdUSUNFIXv6X4x1ovsHM5qJsgD_1jtnean_mDbmT1dxm96vmgyyQB-pjgb5K-PsIS0Dt/s16000/george_ayoub.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">George Ayoub</td></tr></tbody></table><p>But as Americans increasingly feel no need to behave with formality, some also feel increasingly empowered to shed dignity or accountability. In this week’s Iowa caucuses, Nikki Haley, a seasoned politician with rhetorical skills and actual policies, finished third behind Trump and Ron DeSantis, whose interpersonal skills haven’t visibly improved since fifth grade. Those voters motivated enough to caucus, see bullying and indignity as leadership qualities.<p></p>
<p>As the cleft between America’s political parties continues widening, the practical difference is no longer between left and right wings, more or fewer protections for women and minorities, or stronger or weaker economic controls. Often, partisans differ on dignity. The people most likely to vote Trump, wear branded red hats, and wave Trump flags, also frequently think it’s funny to treat customer service representatives and panhandlers poorly.</p>
<p>To repeat, I approve of increased informality in America’s public sphere. Much social and psychological repression in the Gilded Age or Eisenhower Administration arose because people felt so circumscribed by ceremony that they couldn’t face themselves, or each other, honestly. But for too many, rising informality means rejecting dignity, in themselves and others. Freed from inherited ceremony, too many people unmasked their ugliest, most vicious selves.</p>
<p>As long as schoolyard bullies with no personal dignity have national platforms and set our society’s morals, we’ll see the current public ugliness continue to get worse.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-84835873529329211792024-01-18T05:30:00.007-06:002024-01-18T05:30:00.138-06:00A Short Course In Speaking English(es)<p><b>1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 116<img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="398" height="1" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKISBmlJXrTeO2y1e5579ZgLTlB5j4la71ws1Roe90o18hzv8jGacFfnOb7Jd8RMATXGJBl_6vxbvJcir4dVcnxd0hoL9CbSsKD_ZIxlJtxPYqAGU_wh7n2JKtabPUdliNxVC8HZX0SNYOtA7qG1gNLP7d2Y9-lrNZ9au-_Xs5-6ZAezorcV9CzE7_/s320/mcwhorter_books.jpg" width="1" /><br />John McWhorter, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944/">Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Back-Black-Truths-Americas/dp/1942658583/">Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca</a></b></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944/"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi82ohy4mbMRJsceJYMI_ji_bcjdalb47UpgTZaIeZ2ZhsVoE9zIzuPpqjd9fRHRq1BymdxdlV6G33ooDLWpnrkKWaUkFrxjPT3YI-YuksohgLE3Rh85VWDe6tGJrguEDr3aGI8igKHdaNpDiZPvM3dncg0aTIVo8rcNI588u3_V57yKQ4JQBKZs8eF/s16000/bastard_tongue.jpg" /></a></div><p>Sixteen centuries ago, the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain, bringing their Germanic language with them. Sometime after that, Vikings invaded, then Normans, each changing English in different ways. Then the Empirehappened, and <i>voilá</i>! English as we know it happened!</p>
<p>If your grade-school English linguistics history resembled mine, you probably received a version of this just-so story. English underwent massive changes in the distant past, until it eventually resembled today’s vernacular, and the peasants rejoiced. Even then, I found this narrative unsatisfying. Apparently John McWhorter, Cornell linguist and sometime pundit, felt equally dissatisfied. He’s spent his career documenting how English has evolved, and continues to evolve.</p>
<p>English language evolution is substantially hidden because nobody left written records of change. McWhorter finds clues hidden in what historians and scholars wrote, but also in what they omitted. Languages which rubbed elbows with early English, including Welsh, Cornish, and the now-lost Danish Viking dialect, provide valuable clues. English, McWhorter believes, evolved in hybrid, among bilingual populations.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Back-Black-Truths-Americas/dp/1942658583/"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQwg6MuWaX6leat8P9AEUlhkjjUrgtGIerKQwiwGlFcUTXePwOHFgfoJnm3hoVrWhlbGWp1Fg5s4wsNu7590F_9fg_W_1YwGzctfpxEvDP9QqDv0n19UXOYLA-i10GA_I0GkSHoO8VPir7N79ak1a5_u8RvDbVE7PSzaJWDACO4tbbo_BNjLuI9utu/s16000/talking_black.jpg" /></a></div><p>For instance, English lacks case endings, the word mutations that make Latin and German difficult to learn. But it has the present progressive tense, missing from most Indo-European languages. McWhorter finds other languages that possess, or lack, these functions, and wouldn’t you know? They’re all language that interacted heavily with English, often at swordpoint. From this, McWhorter surmises a history of lively linguistic give-and-take.</p>
<p>McWhorter works from the documentary record, but also from hypothesis. He considers it logical that Celtic languages seeded spoken English with new verb constructions, even as written English (Anglo-Saxon) resisted change. Indeed, in some cases, McWhorter considers the lack of written evidence as proof of deep-seated cultural prejudices and systems of power, which manifest themselves in what literate Anglo-Saxons consider to commonplace to record.</p>
<p>In <i>Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue</i>, McWhorter reconstructs linguistic change in distant history and written record. But English never achieved some perfect form, and stopped. In <i>Talking Back, Talking Black</i>, McWhorter applies the same narrative reasoning to the most vibrant form of linguistic evolution happening today: Black American English. Far from merely “broken” English, as critics accuse, McWhorter finds lively, vibrant growth taking place.</p>
<p>The arguments surrounding Black English have mostly fallen along two lines. Linguists and sociologists, often writing in specialist journals, insist that Black English has its own sophisticated rules, complex textual history, and social status. Meanwhile mass-media critics, Black and White alike, decry how Black English differs from Standard or “Correct” English, and bemoans the dialect’s backward social status. Both consider their positions apparent.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHEM_r9lL5vdsG0L2rgfkodvUwYcwYmuD96P-kQw8kDoT8DRwxoGwmKIwZrqCbpMms6rHoqEFmPPJurvJQ7oUDf1Zui1TToIcsTd3In2-X_hlFVd0accAXsyrw5AUXDTXjbVYNCpG78PPPumJ3_MiFAFX0vowc0Te4KjHoghA4lTmxTP8BUX_0nSFL/s16000/john_mcwhorter.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John McWhorter, Ph.D</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Obviously, McWhorter rejects the mass-media narrative. However, he doesn’t do so offhandedly; he makes a persuasive case for Black English and its rich linguistic heritage. For McWhorter, language doesn’t merely convey information; it also builds social bonds and creates communities. In diverse ways, he emphasizes how Black English doesn’t merely let Black Americans communicate knowledge, it also reinforces their communities and binds them together. It also reflects power dynamics in a historically divided America.</p>
<p>Unlike his morphology of Anglo-Saxon, McWhorter has ample material evidence to demonstrate how Black English evolved within living memory. Black Americans left ample books, audio recordings, video performances, and other serious documentary evidence. Therefore he’s able to track, with remarkable precision, exactly when and where Black English underwent significant changes. He makes a persuasive case that Black English remains lively and evolving, adapting to meet society’s changing needs.</p>
<p>He also makes the case that Black Americans, speaking their historic dialect, are “diglossic,” equally fluent in two linguistic forms simultaneously. Unlike me speaking French, having to desperately translate every phrase and sentence internally, Black Americans simply know both dialects, and apply them correctly. Both forms come equally readily, and Black Americans can deploy Standard English when the context demands it.</p>
<p>McWhorter wrote these books separately, but they serve as a pair. One establishes and demonstrates his philological principles in an historical setting, while the other applies the same tools to contemporary settings. Both books run short, under 200 pages plus back matter, and both are comprised of mainly freestanding short thematic essays. This allows sampler-style reading without needing to commit to treatises founded on dense technical terminology.</p>
<p>Throughout, McWhorter maintains his casual tone, conversational digressions, and friendly vibe. Even when he goes beyond ironclad proof, you always believe he’s led you to think about things more deeply. Especially for general audiences, whose familiarity with applied linguistics is probably scanty, McWhorter’s approach will probably guide them through his difficult thought process. That makes these books good introduction to linguistics, an often overlooked field.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-16589870008952599032024-01-16T05:30:00.036-06:002024-03-05T18:22:13.894-06:00An Open Letter to the American Center-Left<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEi6komxB-r8WgfSB6ZRJV1zpy3CiTwHe7yGGBODS4nhpQaUfBd3ziO87LctvIheQfFlBQFayq7thaeJHTQJE6y1Y4qcWTY3jXXUgY8m_WPmmHITgVHu_P-l-YncAU9SQASHjMK8jW/s1600/joe_biden.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">President Joe Biden</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Dear fellow center-left coalition:</p>
<p>Look, I get it, we’re all disappointed in Joe Biden for one reason or another. We have our unique reasons; after all, the American center-left is a massive slumgullion of diverse groups with separate wants and needs, and President Biden has found ways to ignore us all. I won’t enumerate a list, because doing so would probably enflame tensions, as some people would be angry if I excluded their pet concerns.</p>
<p>President Biden, and indeed the office of the Presidency itself, are by-products of an 18<sup>th</sup> Century electoral structure that hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1789. The only substantive changes have been the 12<sup>th</sup> Amendment, which streamlined Presidential elections, and the 17<sup>th</sup> Amendment, which provided for the direct election of Senators. America’s electoral process remains mired in the era of powdered wigs and knee breeches.</p>
<blockquote><i>(A critic has notified me that the preceding paragraph elides both the 15<sup>th</sup> and the 19<sup>th</sup> Amendments, which extend the vote to minorities and women, respectively. I made this mistake because I was focused on voting</i> procedures<i>, rather than the voting</i> franchise<i>. Notwithstanding my intent, this is a serious oversight, and one for which I wholeheartedly apologize.)</i></blockquote>
<p>This is a major problem, and a gift to oppressive majorities. Please understand, I appreciate your grievances, because I likewise wish we had an alternative to the current winner-take-all voting system. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-anti-democracy.html">Levitsky and Ziblatt</a> suggest abolishing the Senate, and establishing proportional representation in the House of Representatives. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2017/01/america-and-amazing-two-headed-president.html">David Orentlicher</a> suggests a two-member Executive Branch. However, these solutions would require a Constitutional amendment, which hasn’t happened since 1992.</p>
<p>Some young voters endorse third-party candidates. Jill Stein and <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/08/what-cornel-west-means-to-me.html">Cornel West</a> have the largest followings. However, neither has significant elected office experience (Stein served one-and-a-half terms as a Lexington, Massachusetts, town board member). Neither has shepherded a bill through committee, and equally important, neither has any discernible down-ballot strategy. Without a congressional coalition, their dead-letter legislative agendas will make today’s Congress look busy and productive.</p>
<p>Third-party candidates also split coalitions like ours. Though conservatives have their third parties, including the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party, these have virtually no support. The center-left is historically more receptive to third parties. But voting for them presents the likelihood of a situation like happened in 2000 and 2016, when a clear majority supported a center-left ballot, but split the ticket, and conservatives won on a technicality.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4NXpirATk7HYvh16Tzuly0cPbPu8H3QJmOK6SPsh38xbQJ6BW218Y0xpys6YkkunwttgvAKkwpkfvf5YpWg53OChCIL_pFX8JbgMa6Go1DSRvSByutYHFytGifhZcVBh2XvPvg9_L/s1600/donald_trump.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Former President Donald Trump</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Splitting the 2024 ticket will hand another term to Donald Trump—a man who recently pledged to criminalize LGBTQIA+ activity, and who previously pledged to forcibly relocate homeless people to camps in the desert. Disappointing as President Biden is, another Trump administration would be catastrophic for queer people, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/3-migrants-drown-near-shelby-park-eagle-pass-texas-soldiers-denied-entry-federal-border-agents/">immigrants</a>, the disabled, and other marginalized communities. It would also be catastrophic for remedying the problem later.</p>
<p>You’ll occasionally hear idealists, mostly White, mostly college-aged, wax rhapsodic about “revolution.” This comes mostly from comfortable, secure people who never expect to <a href="https://youtu.be/0BM-Q3BDrkw?si=jY5b3pBFTzWwwA12">man the barricades</a>. Further, <i>contra</i> Marx and Engels, revolution rarely ushers in substantive change. Historical revolutions have either been free gifts to landholders and capitalists, as happened in the U.S. and Mexico, or descend into sectarian civil war, as happened in France and the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>For many years, I misunderstood the word <i>realpolitik</i>. I thought that, like other forms of “realism,” it meant finding the most cynical, pessimistic interpretation of events, and using that to justify jerkish behavior. Not until I read <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-brief-history-of-germany-before.html">Katja Hoyer</a> did I understand Bismarck’s actual meaning: that you must accept the political system you have, flawed and toxic though it may be, and work within it, to make change that others can’t snatch back.</p>
<p>These constant cries of “fire Joe Biden,” “vote Cornel West,” and “<i>viva la revolution!</i>” come mostly from people who have never participated in ground-level politics. Most are committed voters, I’ll grant that. But they’ve never attended local Democratic Party meetings, participated in canvassing sessions, or helped cultivate regional strategy. For too many, politics is a seasonal spectacle, like the Super Bowl, which they cheer from the sidelines, distracted by Taylor Swift.</p>
<p>Please don’t misunderstand: I don’t advocate complacency. Our system is senescent and broken, as I already acknowledged. But the much-repeated charge that refusing to participate, or breaking it even worse, will hasten substantive change, is ignorant of actual history. Systemic change through breaking the system has only happened when circumstances got so bad that the survivors were literally mopping their friends’ blood off the streets.</p>
<p>Attending meetings and canvassing neighborhoods lacks romance, admittedly. Schoolbook history loves tales of sudden, paradigm-shifting change, usually stripped of the brass tacks that made such change sustainable. Nobody ever made Broadway musicals about get-out-the-vote campaigns. Yet any demand for change, without a matching commitment to the daily, dirty business, is guaranteed to fail. Politics is a process, not an outcome, and you must participate to make change.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-43416463694794098162024-01-13T05:30:00.041-06:002024-01-13T05:30:00.161-06:00Bronze Medal in the Oppression Olympics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIYcSRFIRUZ2LOBBDkTXtgMLeL5UhztXmxC3cSc3uATdlFP1lzsuDRFlco7TlNn5pVQMWYfFkQZVbisvxD4-6oK9AFJ6TPjhBav-_hfPBoAWU8g1m8hIQsIHGrl2lhBNAip8YpFhoggHj59Qsx43CDsS01sQ6i8JWhAkyejR3t6WbqGr2yeYX66ZOC/s16000/concrete_jungle.jpg" /></div><p>Which comes first, “wilderness” or “civilization”? Sociology professors have used this question on first-semester students for generations. Most people assume that wilderness precedes civilization, because humans had to carve permanent settlements out of undeveloped wild land. But that’s deceptive: nobody needed a name for “wilderness” before they invented civilization, wild land was simply everything that existed. Only once humans built “civilization” did they name everything else “wilderness.”</p>
<p>I remembered this lesson recently, when some message board <i>dummkopf</i> repeated a popular conservative claim: “’Cis’ is the n-word for everyone outside the alphabet soup, and anyone who uses it is a heterophobic racist.” My initial response was to consider this statement obviously silly and beneath contempt. People simply reached into Latin and coined a term to describe something nobody previously gave a name to, that’s hardly racism or bigotry.</p>
<p>Yet on consideration, I realized the claimant had a legitimate point—just not the one they intended. This joker probably wanted to participate in the Oppression Olympics and pretend to be marginalized because one-half of one percent was mean to them. But this person raises an interesting point about how we create categories, and equally importantly, how we enforce them. The process begins, obviously, by giving the category a name.</p>
<p>We could extend the wilderness/civilization dichotomy out through similar pairs. Nobody had to be heterosexual, for instance, until the word “homosexual” was invented in 1836—and extended its definition to include people’s identity following the international scandal surrounding the trial of Oscar Wilde. Ian Haney López has written that <a href="https://www.amazon.com/White-Law-10th-Anniversary-Construction/dp/0814736947/">the White race didn’t exist in America</a> until lawmakers needed to formally define the Black race. New categories create their opposites.</p>
<p>America’s growing willingness to admit that transgendered people exist, requires the creation of a category for people who aren’t transgendered. People like me, who simply accept (or, arguably, have learned to accept) our bodies, previously didn’t need a category name. We invented names, many derisive, for those who wanted or attempted to change their bodies: transvestites, catamites, queers. But we had the luxury of considering ourselves merely “normal.”</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr1elbs3a-7I4p_cDY1-GBdMuJ6m9p2fdZx6KTLQQsb7KEWl54DKyOM7TVIcBJbRCex2gU54vrqaGVs2Ys9A0ZChyphenhypheneULA0rqJnFH-Fm9A01GvdBC0EX3mdXJK9_p_tCXBS-FGdoNCSraz1wUy7LjLUBnguXhbXULUIK-9UBk7q2VXuGqNRYLpLL3mN/s16000/amy_boesky.jpg" /></div><p>Of course, this normality was enforced; it didn’t merely exist. Laws about gender expression, traditions about “male” and “female” attire, and the occasional violent put-down of nonconformists, all served collectively to push everyone into a ready-made box. A rising left-libertarian coalition has decried this enforcement for what it is, violence, and called for a cessation. Many people, for the first time in generations, feel safe expressing their inner selves externally.</p>
<p>The rise of a peaceful demographic that calls itself “transgender” undercuts the previous terminology. The previous concepts of “normal” and “aberrant” no longer apply, because the violence used to crush aberration has fallen on political disfavor. People like me can no longer passively accept ourselves as “normal”; we must define ourselves in a positive, proactive manner. Thus we reached into the Greco-Roman lexicon and found a corresponding moniker: “cisgendered.”</p>
<p>Therefore this person complaining that “cisgendered” is an oppressive word, isn’t really complaining about the word; they’re complaining about the stacked presumptions that make this word necessary. Pushed outside the comfortable domain where they were simply “normal,” they must accept the “cis” handle and accept that they’re part of a demographic group. Maybe not a literal minority, but treated like one in America’s winner-take-all social order.</p>
<p>Which returns us to the Oppression Olympics I mentioned earlier. Historically, the “winners” have determined law, policy, and economic advantage, while forcing “losers” into subordinate positions. Subordinated losers must accept the scarlet letter category names enforced upon them by society’s winners: Black, refugee, homeless, gay. By forcing cisgendered people to accept a category name, they’re admitting the winners’ circle has been rewritten.</p>
<p>For instance, when we think of “gender studies,” we think of women, and women’s issues. Because men, fundamentally, aren’t a gender (or weren’t, until recently), we’re simply normal. Likewise, racial issues refer to Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous issues, while Asian issues have crept up latterly. Because White people aren’t a race, we’re simply normal. Newcomer groups, like the Irish and Italians, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Whiteness-Making-American-Working/dp/1844671453/">have competed to become seen as “White</a>”.</p>
<p>My initial inclination, to simply make fun of this joker as ill-informed and outdated, is mistaken. This person has a legitimate, if poorly founded, grievance: for the first time, they have to think of themselves as belonging to a group. And if they belong to a group, then society could, potentially, push them outside that group. For the first time, this person’s grasp on America’s levers of power is slipping.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-92019274648257533412024-01-08T05:30:00.011-06:002024-01-08T06:12:15.747-06:00How Americans Make (and Remake) History<p><b>Clint Smith, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Word-Passed-Reckoning-History/dp/0316492922/">How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America</a></b><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="523" height="1" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizzpKnbr8q52ITb4dbghQLcH0wnv04I7SQIkGYzyS2OBxpfv26tei-kxvWB52-JgsHvImsk9RhNvaEjZAjIsnR3w05P1NivcRKRYG47BUMd1zmAbHBMLIXBOx-gL2w1UG5-nAQbB3ucwJmL95TIdA7buPD6w7kpKolTVL6zpZN8gk-9NVfkhgzbSTo/s320/smith_word.jpg" width="1" /></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Word-Passed-Reckoning-History/dp/0316492922/"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOCl8AZyILakuuKSiwbefpA_db4LKG2hcdkFQyNBSnABgYnlFa5i_wEEvzsjk_b75ITNbR1AR1loW7xB2aHAn5zm1ooE1fXCRMRSY5JrOPgD2MBwiidtSAi4LdPEmudgn7GUM-EMN4_28GjeZ67go_OQH7Ff8aO-RWeBh-yvasMQlbX4YvBcpdkRcu/s16000/how_the_word_is_passed.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>At the height of the controversy over American historical monuments, Harvard poet and <i>Atlantic</i> staff writer Clint Smith visited
some of them. He wanted to see firsthand the places where America memorializes people, places, and events associated with slavery. For those who love terminology, Smith was primarily interested in <i>historiography</i>, not <i>history</i>; that is, he cared more about how we tell our stories than necessarily what stories we tell.</p>
<p>Smith presents a detailed travelogue of seven historical sites: six in America, and one African slave port. Smith records the visiting experience, talking with the guides and conservators responsible for transmitting the historical narrative onto listening audiences. He records how the stories told to audiences, including tourists, corresponds with the documentary record—and how it doesn’t. The differences can be astounding for dedicated history readers.</p>
<p>Some locations have unsurprising responses. Smith visits the Whitney Plantation, a tourist destination dedicated specifically to slavery. There he finds a painstakingly restored image of the sufferings enslaved Black Americans endured, even at putatively benevolent masters’ hands. He also visits Blandford Cemetery, the largest surviving Confederate graveyard. Visitors flock to revel in Lost Cause mythology, while pained curators try to correct the record for audiences who don’t want to hear.</p>
<p>Other locations prove more unexpected. Monticello, for instance. The historical trust that owns Thomas Jefferson’s plantation once notoriously whitewashed his reputation, and aggressively denied his relationship with Sally Hemings, but has reversed itself, becoming a haven for serious historians and truth-seekers. Gorèe Island, off the Senegal coast, has moved millions to tears with its brutal narrative of the Transatlantic Slave Trade—a narrative Smith admits is probably mythologized.</p>
<p>Between the locations, Smith finds an America caught in an awkward transition. Americans overall, including White Americans, have become more willing to face our slaveholding history, and the long-term consequences which slavery continues to wreak on the present. But faced with this rapidly changing shared history, some Americans simply refuse to face the evidence. Others, even worse, cling to myths that contradict the copious documents and works of serious historians.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEhwDqZp76gWTCd_ulZ1fx7IoBJTdbgdTGCWsn3f-suwBnQx4xp6laQfPOBPBpRaH8GjVmT0A5nE31g9nNIusJPY_JeNFJ-lFrQ7PAPyBsoXP_9juyKGEGNoKvroM3mynnaGohXfu7ZnNpAKxA94tt1UyoLB7fU6kf5EJTI1vCAYQ_WGCMGU0sSojv/s16000/clint_smith.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Clint Smith, Ph.D.</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>History isn’t just a matter of scholarship and research. It also involves storytelling, in oral and written form. For instance, Smith visits Galveston Island, the site of the Juneteenth event, where Union soldiers proclaimed freedom to Texas’ enslaved population. Texas became the first state to proclaim Juneteenth as a state holiday, and historical reenactors perform the Juneteenth liberation every year, an event Smith describes as emotionally fraught and almost religious.</p>
<p>Yet Smith also notes that one in ten American public-school students attend school in Texas, where the state’s board of education continues to promulgate textbook standards which whitewash slavery’s impact. Lost Cause mythology permeates Texas’ official state history teaching standards. Sure, enacting Juneteenth is important for Texans to experience history. But that only reaches those who voluntarily make the pilgrimage, and I question how many White Texans do so.</p>
<p>One of Smith’s most telling narratives happens in Manhattan, a site not normally associated with slavery. But New York State didn’t abolish slavery until 1827, so binary narratives of “slave” and “free” states don’t hold water. With a professional tour guide’s assistance, Smith finds a plaque memorializing a slave market which existed for fifty years on Wall Street, within spitting distance of the Stock Exchange that now embodies American capitalism.</p>
<p>This plaque exists because of citizen activism. Manhattan’s Black population remembered the slave market in oral tradition, but no official body remembered anything. Then, during the Occupy Wall Street protests, one activist took it upon himself to comb the historical records. The activist, whom Smith doesn’t name, pulled maps, records, and images demonstrating the exact location of Wall Street’s market, forcing city fathers to create the first-ever official memorial.</p>
<p>Examples like this flood Smith’s narrative with exciting life. History, in Smith’s telling, isn’t only events which happened; it’s also the living, breathing humans who transmit those events to coming generations. Some historians make scrupulous efforts to preserve facts accurately, even when they reflect poorly on our ancestors; others market a feel-good panacea, sometimes because their hidebound audience will accept nothing else.</p>
<p>One wonders how Smith’s book will read for future generations. We exist in times of turmoil, as Americans increasingly favor honesty over mythology. Our official history, what Smith calls our “public memory,” is changing rapidly, and nobody knows what final form it will take. Smith provides a snapshot of that transition, taking place in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Smith shows us history as process, not product.</p>
<br /><br /><br />
<blockquote><b>On a similar topic: <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2022/08/leaving-church-of-st-robert-e-lee.html">Leaving the Church of St. Robert E. Lee</a></b></blockquote>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-66518438945080537832023-12-30T05:30:00.005-06:002023-12-30T05:30:00.137-06:00Cowboys and the Power of Storytelling<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="315" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcJnISmo8XusVqvpu6Ryp8PrHYEunWxbqnY6VbRcspBy5RkC1ER_OM2OO4j74u9kn7B95yNeitqKbBlkuFoQm3R00FTmfc71n_KwQX3oMzPQVpkcLsZX1LijHPAF-5sYijw1SrQoxxBFYoUGqmZEIPkd-ttkmc5p9DTAKhyphenhyphenX7Xb9dyuWJl9LKOyC3l/s16000/unforgiven_1.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From left: Jaimz Woolvett, Morgan Freeman, and Clint Eastwood in <i>Unforgiven</i></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>I saw Clint Eastwood’s <i>Unforgiven</i> in the cinema when it was first released in 1992, and loved it. Then I didn’t watch it again for thirty years, until this week. Given my family’s conservatism, I grew up surrounded by Westerns, especially John Wayne and James Arness, but my parents specifically exempted Clint Eastwood. My mother disparaged <i>Unforgiven</i> as, in her view, a return to his youthful form of violence for its own sake.</p>
<p>Then as now, I felt Mom misunderstood what happened. When it came to dispensing actual violence, Morgan Freeman’s character, Ned Logan, can’t actually stomach it; he’s grown a conscience in his old age. Eastwood’s William Munny feels every human emotion while sober, and can only become the killer he once was after numbing himself with alcohol. Their ally, the self-proclaimed Schofield Kid, likewise feels every inch of pain.</p>
<p>Rewatching <i>Unforgiven</i> in adulthood, however, I noticed another theme which teenaged Kevin missed. The characters spend remarkable swathes of time telling one another stories. From the moment the Schofield Kid enters Munny’s homestead, he demands to know which among the many legends of Munny’s violent exploits are true—legends which the Kid repeats giddily. The Kid enjoys stories he’s heard, and wants to become a story himself.</p>
<p>Almost simultaneously, the contract enforcer “English Bob” enters Big Whiskey, Wyoming, accompanied by his official biographer. This author, Beauchamp, almost matters more than English Bob himself. Beauchamp has dedicated himself to setting English Bob’s exploits in print, preserving Western storytelling for an Eastern audience thirsty for lurid adventures. When Beauchamp discovers English Bob’s stories are fabricated, he drops his ally and attaches himself to another storyteller.</p>
<p>Beauchamp is himself a fabulist, who uncritically repeats stories of White men dispensing karmic justice, protecting innocent (White) women, and taming a land wrested from savage Indians. He describes a world where judicious applications of White male violence bring order to a putatively disorganized land. His character’s entire point, of course, is that he abandons his preferred story when Sheriff Daggett humiliates English Bob and offers an alternative story.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="270" right="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfiTHSW4gE3NT5PDT93lNBzDgn0a91WFkpMM7FmYQvNHDAuK7hlgaC_wUq96pp07WlACUDHIN_xT0u5VYnQnQ4eDHnWsBJIqjgbntUc1sLfUYAYBpGWvwH4lFmrNwroioquld3XDMmmzlLzVc6yd1wQCoyahTLthtQMHZuwWE4UQH0thbVovQJE4c1/s16000/unforgiven_2.jpg" /></div>
<p>Much of what we believe we know about the American West comes from fabulists like Beauchamp. People who survived the West told their stories to an uncritical penny press, which devoured their frequently ridiculous memoirs. We remember Wyatt Earp, and forget his arguably more accomplished brothers, because Wyatt survived and had a press agent. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show sold an almost entirely fake account of western settlement.</p><p></p>
<p>These characters and their hyperbolic stories made good fodder for the nascent film industry. Early stars like Tom Mix, who pioneered the white-hat cowboy mythology, presented a world of moral absolutes, swift civilian justice, and libertarian freedom. Mix bequeathed the reins to similar morally unambiguous performers like the “singing cowboys,” Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, then to the cowboys my parents loved, Marshall Dillon and Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn.</p>
<p>We mustn’t forget, however, that these performances served a social role. Tom Mix corresponded with the rising social tensions which preceded World War I. Rogers and Autry sang their sermons during the Great Depression, while John Wayne and James Arness flourished during the Cold War. John Wayne arguably kept trying to re-fight the early Cold War well into his seventies, limping along, mortally wounded by exposure to nuclear test fallout.</p>
<p>Owen Wister’s genre-defining Western, <i>The Virginian</i>, begins not with character or action, but with a preface lamenting the disappearance of cowboys. The cowboy, to Wister, represents an absent ethic in American life, a moral purity unadulterated by civilization’s decadence. Just as Homer believed true Greek greatness ended with the Mycenaeans, and Arthurian romance locates chivalry among knights of yore, Westerns imply American greatness happened “back then.”</p>
<p>The spaghetti Westerns which made Eastwood’s career, with their moral ambiguity and their casual brutality, arose as the Cold War dragged on interminably. The Italians who made these movies, including Eastwood’s mentor Sergio Leone, witnessed firsthand how flag-waving stories of bygone national glory looked pale against events actually occurring in Europe. They presented a counter-narrative of the cowboy West as brutal, amoral, and already dead.</p>
<p>By 1993, however, even that counter-narrative had become disappointing. Eastwood presents the differing stories of America’s West—the Kid’s romantic savagery, Beauchamp’s redemptive violence, Daggett’s tales of law and order—as equally disappointing. All characters, in this West, wind up equally lonely, aiming for the same cold clay. “The Wild West,” this movie acknowledges, never existed; it was a story we told ourselves. Like all stories, it has to end.</p><p></p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-8352558297614826972023-12-29T05:30:00.052-06:002023-12-29T05:30:00.140-06:00Confess Your Crimes in Sand and Blood<p><b>Eric Jager, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Last-Duel-Movie-Tie-Scandal/dp/059324088X/">The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial By Combat</a></b><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="525" height="1" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFi0HF3QT0DmQ27hKHAEkDIydeAfk0cgz8ga9obbfeQW8dO9qaSeuAsglxxSmNfLNwB-633C6WF6uwfol8ZSd62cOhdf4uwgjQABCIPkb6woLtP32AEYHMhOp7fHuWRGz9jTv6e3AjMAXlT3nWgCGoaHrA6BNCoBLfw0lKfX47IvWbKTFBsG1x0DR/s320/jager_duel.jpg" width="1" />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Last-Duel-Movie-Tie-Scandal/dp/059324088X/"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ZSsdVBXtHa7UiQKhKgFHwYnwPDaIaoCj-iVgV0DZ_IMh05QKMzGt0ZI5MR3wG7lslZDcfv3Mp9oOPRSLtO5S76I2MXcs6VGsZ5X3NbWGhVMVhUNw2kQf2XW8Ej5oylhsQ7OhcZqusRBWlWPQB7K2w1Ox40FWFDpqE_syjstoTuvdapyaeTUgKbgA/s16000/last_duel.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>One rainy afternoon in January 1386, a crime transpired in the undefended castle overlooking the sleepy French hamlet of Capomesnil. Exactly what happened, and why, jeopardized the French legal system. Jean de Carrouges, a knight with a reputation for stroppy behavior and no aptitude for court intrigue, claimed his rival invaded his mother’s nearly abandoned château and savaged his wife. The rival, Jacques le Gris, a talented courtier and squire, denied everything.</p>
<p>UCLA medievalist Eric Jager stumbled upon the Carrouges casewhile researching another project. It struck his imagination because Carrouges’ accusations against le Gris escalated into violence. Not Red Wedding-ish violence that pulls audiences into mass media, but France’s sluggish late-medieval justice system. Carrouges, a minor aristocrat himself, believed his feudal liege ignored the crime for reasons of court politics, and appealed for a rare option: a “judicial duel.”</p>
<p>Jager reconstructs the events preceding this exceptional outcome—which would, though nobody knew this then, be the last trial by combat authorized by the French monarch. He also provides a guided tour through a distant nation that, if any ever has, deserves the name “foreign.” Though Jager name-checks places you could visit today, like Paris, Bordeaux, and England, the standards and traditions circumscribing everyday life differ wildly from ours.</p>
<p>Jean de Carrouges was an accomplished warrior, descended from accomplished warriors, amid the interminable slog of the Hundred Years’ War; he was knighted for distinguished combat services. But he proved a lousy courtier, ill-suited for house politics and prestation. Carrouges ascended quickly through the court of Count Pierre of Alençon, then fell equally quickly. His easily bruised honor required frequent satisfaction, and he burned bridges faster than he built them.</p>
<p>Jacques le Gris lacked Carrouges’ pedigree, but proved more adept at court politics. He and Carrouges began as allies, but as le Gris out-earned Count Pierre’s favor, Carrouges felt himself slighted. The two squires (before Carrouges’ knighthood) intermittently fought and reconciled. But by early 1386, Carrouges discovered his newly-minted knighthood meant nothing at court, and the courtiers found themselves irreconcilable. LeGris swore revenge on Carrouges’ household, and targeted his wife.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPr_pDphitehqT_vdRUfqScfRUVWKPbOT62ZkZZ9h7_KTakQX9ZMxWN9JrQSXWnHSn3DEN1z4curuZj33v_5v_iPyr0-IMZVLdMDrqobAhSaIa-e6XgMhEyT9vsse7GvYvzKsI4RTh0JfTC3GlwGpZxzX1sYq6yhlnA2KLfFE8kECqe3K0L2mQ0fjc/s16000/eric_jager.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eric Jager, Ph.D.</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Reading this book, it’s impossible to miss how Carrouges’ world differs from ours. The government received its power from inheritances, not merit, and lesser courtiers received advancement based on personal connections, not competence or hard work. (Okay, maybe not so different from ours.) Because King Charles VI supposedly received his crown directly from God, “justice” meant whatever dribbled from the king’s lips, which immediately became holy writ.</p>
<p>Carrouges’ world turns on two liabilities: war and distance. Kings fight other kings, not to achieve any advantage, but because <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-and-failed-state-era.html">it’s what they do</a>. Lesser nobles gain whatever limited fraction of power they possess by furthering that goal. Meanwhile, before motor vehicles and mass transportation, distances were truly huge. Twenty miles is an arduous overland slog which, depending on weather, requires a commitment of days; even light war requires months.</p>
<p>Therefore, Carrouges’ decision to appeal his lawsuit to Paris is no small obligation. But rape, it seems, was no small accusation, either. Despite the recent trend in “<a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2022/12/in-dispraise-of-realism.html">grimdark</a>” medieval fantasy pitching rape as banal in feudal society, Jager notes that it remained a capital offense, at least among the nobility. Violating a titled lady’s virtue jeopardized the assurity of legitimate offspring, which threatened the entire system of male agnatic primogeniture.</p>
<p>Feudal hierarchies, in Jager’s telling, appear remarkably brittle. The state remains stable only while lords and vassals accept their place in the hierarchy and serve the aristocratic state. Therefore, whatever happened in Capomesnil in 1386 threatened the entire social order, since someone transgressed their roles. This is the archetypal “he-said, she-said” case, as nobody but le Gris and Lady Carrouges (and le Gris’ man) saw what actually happened.</p>
<p>When logical arguments fail, two trained warriors resolve their differences with weapons. But again, in defiance of paperback fiction, this is hardly an outburst of premodern savagery. A judicial duel required ceremony and strictures that make today’s courtrooms seem loosey-goosey. When we discuss modern courtrooms as “level playing fields,” we copy the rules of the dueling ground, tightly controlled to ensure nobody but God granted either combatant an advantage.</p>
<p>History records who, exactly, won this duel (though Jager plays coy). What matters more, in Jager’s telling, is reconstructing the world in which this event occurred, a world where invested noblemen believed their battles bespoke God’s favor, and might literally made right. A world where justice is both necessary, and costly. A world violently different from, yet also surprisingly much like, our own world.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-41953929151158748042023-12-28T05:30:00.004-06:002023-12-28T05:30:00.132-06:00Life In These “United” States<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="325" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFdHCbtChZLVXQ11iCarcOmsenOKPpuOXmPTiKmVRVIkK3Bq5CRhy1wC9aFSEt-q6Jzqfu54A-O_eqaaXLr9YIhPTYYgZOJbIqNd1HzOwrKjjgrDxnyq6SbWE1Q2pBL9Ibe1hxtgBOKV8ZroRt4SxQD1SmXqok_HdSwFJ37i2Jv_TjBUadAzuMangn/s16000/texas_state_capitol.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Texas State Capitol, in Austin</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Texas is threatening to <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/texas-secession-question-2024-ballot-1848890">secede from the Union</a>, because that worked so well the first time; and countless progressive Americans are laughing. Interesting how they didn’t laugh so loudly during the Trump Administration, when Left Coast progressives threatened to enact “<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cal-exit-meet-the-movement-for-californian-secession/">Cal-exit</a>,” or California seceding from the union. It’s almost like, whatever party controls the White House, states controlled by the other party want to leave the country altogether.</p>
<p>California is considered so staunchly Democratic, and Texas such a Republican bastion, that journalists regularly call both states’ Presidential outcomes before any voting precincts report in. Yet both states consistently split by <a href="https://www.270towin.com/maps/2020-margin-of-victory">less than ten points</a>. If Texas seceded to mollify conservatives, millions of progressives would find themselves foreigners in their own nation. The reverse applies in California. Therefore, even if secession were possible, it would be wildly impractical.</p>
<p><a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-matthew-effect-and-american-senate.html">I’ve written before</a> that America’s state lines are dangerous and make little sense. Drawn entirely in the 18<sup>th</sup> and 19<sup>th</sup> Centuries, these divisions have become liabilities in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century. Growing populations, changing demographics, and advanced technology have packed dense numbers into absurdly small spaces, while massive acreages go unused. It’s become <i>de rigeur</i> to moan that tiny, sparsely populated Wyoming has the same Senate representation as massive California.</p>
<p>Except, I’ve recently realized there’s an additional wrinkle. Wyoming, the least populous state in the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2023/01/02/what-state-has-lowest-population-us-states-ranked-population/10476960002/">2020 Census</a>, is more populous than the second-most populous state in the <a href="https://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/reference/assets/us-census-1790-4.pdf#:~:text=According%20to%20U.S.%20Census%20data%2C%20what%20were%20the,Virginia%20%28747%2C610%29%2C%20Pennsylvania%20%28434%2C373%29%2C%20and%20North%20Carolina%20%28393%2C751%29.">1790 Census</a>, Pennsylvania. Wyoming, sometimes derided as tiny, might’ve seemed crowded and buzzing to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The Founding Fathers, mostly farmers (or more accurately, plantation owners), couldn’t have imagined our dense urbanization.</p>
<p>We call our nation “The United States of America” because the Founders envisioned a loose affiliation of independent political units. Americans often say “states” the way other countries say “provinces,” but in poli-sci parlance, a “state” is a top-level, independent polity with a central government, and the ability to write and enforce laws. In casual conversation, Americans describe such polities as “nations” or “countries,” also words with different formal definitions.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7hWOq7zm0JqTWhvtHGMLtgxq5pdMNFQeiEhikMS7mn4JZoqgzZ5Q6fzWGgm2ezra-tUO4HZ-CAkw-e4n49JVJa4aaRcuVm4uvJY7cgIxUrnfRPt3xESp0k9k0i1-XICtCc3eY4eXn/s1600/nebraska_sower.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The "Sower" statue atop the Nebraska<br />capitol building reflects the state's<br />agricultural heritage</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>The Founders invested principal power in states, and considered the federal government only latterly, to enforce standardized trade and foreign policy. Even Thomas Jefferson, the third President, esteemed the federal government so lowly that he didn’t include his Presidency on his <a href="https://www.parkspresidentsandparks.com/blog-page/2018/5/9/what-did-thomas-jefferson-write-for-his-epitaph">epitaph</a>, which he wrote himself. This level of local autonomy turned sour, however, resulting in the Civil War. Afterward, the federal government began coordinating law and justice nationwide.</p>
<p>This prompts the question: do states with fixed borders and lawmaking authority even serve any purpose today? Even after the Civil War, states continued serving some legal function, since government acted at the speed of paper. The early telegraph and overland railroad expedited some government functions, sure. But in our digital age, where information blasts across the country and into our homes instantaneously, do we still need states?</p>
<p>Municipal and county governments remain useful. Local law enforcement can identify individual malefactors (pause briefly the question of <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2022/04/a-kinder-gentler-war-on-poor.html">whether we like the police</a>), and local officials can make on-the-ground decisions about, say, road maintenance and urban development. But states, which merge multiple regions under one umbrella often built 150 years ago, have become battlegrounds for what forms of injustice we’ll willingly accept. That includes staunchly partisan states <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/05/uvalde-abortion-and-you.html">like mine</a>.</p>
<p>Somebody might respond by stating that state governments coordinate regional and municipal governments. I answer: do they? Nebraska, where I live, is notorious for its chronically neglectful state government. The state capitol, Lincoln, frequently doesn’t care what happens in rural areas, or anything happening more than a two-hour drive away. The state government regularly disregards over half the state, focusing on the prestige-heavy Interstate 80 corridor in the eastern half.</p>
<p>If my state government disbanded tomorrow, it might take months before half a million Nebraskans cared, or even noticed. I’ve heard similar complaints, voiced informally, from residents of upstate New York, inland California, or the Tennessee mountains. States regularly abandon their poorest, least represented residents for the prestigious urban, industrialized regions. This abandonment often goes unreported, since <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2020/02/when-rural-news-becomes-world-news.html">media also ignores poor and rural people</a>, but it definitely happens.</p>
<p>Disestablishing or reinventing state governments won’t magically fix ills, don’t misunderstand me. We’ll face massive conundrums, like how to apportion the Senate (or abandon it), and we’ll probably also have to <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2017/01/america-and-amazing-two-headed-president.html">revamp the Executive Branch</a>. In the near term, abandoning state government will create as many problems as it solves. Yet we must reconsider, sooner rather than later, our 18<sup>th</sup> Century government structure in our 21<sup>st</sup> Century society.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-53688886989095398532023-12-27T05:30:00.033-06:002023-12-27T05:30:00.133-06:00And That’s No Moon Either<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="305" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9sAlco3hFvLOrbA6QMnsv3yVM7B72_JK_7zhiFtOcDolNYoXClSLkPtGGIk8kbc1sqrczxyiL1FoSoUa5Md-nwesFwHN5BpKAnVKscJhc6fotu7bRnfVpwT1iDccc4tAJ8gvx3IJt2oPXoyhSNB1ZOL8S_AJVjGsxIHjDdT2pLhB2fGBFFkuIBtiT/s16000/rebel_moon.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charlie Hunnam (left), Michiel Huisman, and Sofia Boutella in <i>Rebel Moon</i></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>The Netflix movie <i>Rebel Moon Part One</i> isn’t as terrible as online buzz might suggest. Let’s start with that controversial thesis. Please don’t mistake me, it isn’t timeless art: a cadre of reviewers, professional and amateur, have skewered the movie’s numerous weaknesses. Its blatant ripoff of <i>Star Wars</i>, for one, and its reliance on director Zack Snyder’s trademark fight choreography, intercut with abrupt breaks into silly slo-mo cartoonishness.</p>
<p>However, I’d like to avoid the obvious and manifold shortcomings, and spotlight one overlooked strength. Pre-release press coverage emphasized how Snyder initially <a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/news/zack-snyder-star-wars-pitch-new-characters-r-rating-1235660427/#!">pitched the screen treatment to Lucasfilm</a> as a “more mature” take on <i>Star Wars</i>. He reworked his treatment as a standalone feature only after Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney, passed. This made me cringe, because filmmakers frequently think “mature” is a synonym for “violent, hypersexual, and visually murky.”</p>
<p>American culture often treats children as twee and precious, incapable of handling life’s harder edges. Disney, of course, notoriously sanded all the sex, and most of the violence, off Grimms’ Fairy Tales in their feature-length animation. Children’s books, movies, and TV shows model chaste heterosexual romance, and only stylized violence, reducing war to ballet. European media does something similar, but not to the same degree.</p>
<p>This includes the original <i>Star Wars</i>. According to historian <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Building-Remarkable-Real-Life-1997-10-03/dp/B01FJ1LITG/">Garry Jenkins</a>, Lucas modeled the original movie on 1930s Flash Gordon serials he watched on his parents’ black-and-white TV. His parents considered Flash Gordon acceptable viewing, because of its strong moral backbone, its clear division between heroes and villains, and no sex. (The episodes also broadcast out of sequence, which is why Lucas dubbed the first movie “Episode IV.”)</p>
<p>We’ve watched former child stars polish their adult <i>bona fides</i> by embracing sex, violence, and moral flimsiness. Countless former child stars, like Anne Hathaway or Lindsay Lohan, attempted to cleanly divide themselves from their childhood roles by appearing topless onscreen. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2013/08/miley-cyrus-is-least-of-her-own-problems.html">Miley Cyrus’ live national meltdown</a> continues to haunt her career even after she’s tried to atone. Achieving adulthood in mass-media culture means rejecting the preciousness of childhood.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLUK8pk9ptjD7Ipva8ubkRpiNJZiaOaHIJLVQVyyL21KGFYgKOsfcqknEQrNrLETgsMpSHk2nAAvPk2gao9rZeayA1fR25aZHStnk4SbFODwWCdmdxj7V6ztC1HQhq61APk21WR_J6-soCizA1CNiaQ6aVcNoKy-9RAdJZPZxogH_zrIPNsSvEg12D/s16000/zack_snyder.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Director Zack Snyder (promo photo)</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Snyder attempts something similar in <i>Rebel Moon</i>. The movie’s protagonist, Kora (Sofia Boutella), is a battle-scarred veteran fleeing her past. She aspires to live in rural, agrarian simplicity, hiding from her former commanders, but she also rejects overtures of romance. She describes herself as too hurt to love; her words form a lament, but her tone is boastful. Her story dribbles out gradually, but basically, she enjoys being damaged.</p>
<p>Despite Kora’s best efforts, the war finds her. When the Imperium murders her village’s headman and leaves a garrison in the barn, Kora decides to run. But before completing her escape, she interrupts the hard-bitten local garrison attempting to sexually assault a young village maiden. (Rape, here mercifully averted, has become the go-to form of low-friction motivation for movie protagonists. It’s sloppy and low-hanging fruit, but audiences react strongly.)</p>
<p>Having tied her fortunes to the village, Kora accepts the responsibility for organizing the resistance. Here’s where the movie’s one redeeming quality emerges: Kora accepts help from villager Gunnar (Michiel Huisman). Gunnar teases out the backstory Kora has concealed during her self-imposed exile, and in doing so, recognizes the injured orphan girl beneath her warrior-woman façade. The script treads lightly in admitting this, but Gunnar falls in love with Kora.</p>
<p>Gunnar is everything Kora wants to avoid being: generous, nurturing, and committed to his people and community. The more he uncovers Kora’s deep internal scars, the more he wants to relieve them. He’s impressed by her fighting skills, but they don’t define her. Instead, he sees her with levels of nuance and complexity which she has tried to reject, and in stray quiet moments, tries to steer her toward healing.</p>
<p>There we find this movie’s moral heart: one character accepts the most cynical possible interpretation of events, and even revels in them, while the other wants to nurture the whole heart, scars and all. Only fleetingly does Snyder admit this openly, but it lingers tacitly beneath the entire narrative. Though the surface-level story addresses the villagers’ resistance to Empire, the deeper story describes the tension between nurturance and violence.</p>
<p>Please understand, this movie isn’t good. Snyder borrows liberally from fifty years of blockbusters and B-movies to create a smorgasbord of reheated tropes. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2019/06/midnight-matinee-at-all-you-can-eat.html">Even that wouldn’t be so bad</a>, but the movie doesn’t appear to be having much fun. If we pause these glaring objections, however, and look at the less-obvious moral themes, this movie has something going on. Hopefully Part Two will give it flesh.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-38684882473199530192023-12-22T05:30:00.007-06:002023-12-22T05:30:00.176-06:00Manufacturing Armageddon<blockquote><i>This essay is a follow-up to two previous essays: <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-american-armageddon-factory.html">The American Armageddon Factory</a> and <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/12/another-product-of-armageddon-factory.html">Another Product of the Armageddon Factory</a></i><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="543" height="1" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisA7-P4nDqyvUMmv7VRHvlYFxz-Nu1xef1KYh070_hxvp1XDqe6nfLOSisulfUvy3qRQjMgrj4BvRVgNblJwollDQtTXJyQ6Cy0wLnirx69gMOLnHPYrEjxRFytv8dqwBfSFnV61_f2dtQPBotQoUw77uUi1NAQVbu88gVJvGPr1dyRSF_PnzMgScg/s320/america_world.jpg" width="1" /></blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkFqrnnsAVAYJzqnCooWuKKWW1iakB1iwWohPFw9xnO7w6YdEDDVSsWUBqm-0lx0EJxrV9w86narq2niz-BF6Z5DCR9IRA1tV9bklAu8BcJAt25ZDVl0VNaPTyPc-a8dCWOvnVOpkfN171bfpqEvZBj8KqrRIqvHAOMEz3cVY0UiJrYX3CBARLWA97/s16000/america_syndrome.jpg" /></div>
<p>Historian Betsy Hartmann’s book <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-american-armageddon-factory.html">The America Syndrome</a> identifies shared belief in imminent catastrophe as the underlying American public morality. From Puritan Christianity in the 17<sup>th</sup> Century, to Utopian social engineering in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century, to Global Warming in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century, Americans have always believed the world will end tomorrow. Corollary to this belief, Americans—or anyway a subset of us—have always believed America will survive Armageddon.</p>
<p>Most important for Hartmann, this impending apocalypse always has a moral implication. This is obvious in Puritan Christianity, which believes a Triune God is preparing to distribute justice, in the form of payback to unbelievers. But even in the less aggressively religious 20<sup>th</sup> and 21<sup>st</sup> Centuries, this moralistic judgement never abates. The defining apocalypses of those eras (nuclear war, Malthusian overpopulation, and global warming) always reek somehow of karmic consequences.</p>
<p>Viewed thusly, the movie <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/12/another-product-of-armageddon-factory.html">Leave the World Behind</a> both does, and doesn’t, continue the “America Syndrome.” It similarly presents a secular present stretched to its limits, and a population that clothes its awareness of imminent collapse in a crazy quilt of misanthropy, denialism, and on-demand entertainment. This world requires only light pressure to snap. As Mahershala Ali explains in his culminating monologue, America has enemies willing to apply that pressure.</p>
<p>However, the movie lacks the moral component Hartmann identifies in prior apocalyptic predictions. Some characters attempt to retroactively construct an explanation which makes the events a payback for Americanism, but this is ramshackle and unconvincing. Ultimately, as Julia Roberts and Myha’la watch New York burn from across Long Island Sound, we’re left to conclude that sometimes, things happen because they happen; justifications are flimsy, selfish, and meaningless.</p>
<p>Thus far, I’ve attempted to avoid spoiling the movie’s irresolute resolution, like a faithful reviewer. But the movie’s closing three minutes color how we perceive everything that’s happened before. The story’s youngest character, 13-year-old Rosie, has abandoned the main house, where adults or near-adults squabble for control and explanation. The grown-ups want meaning; Rosie has spoken Delphicly about wanting something else, which she now pursues.</p>
<p>We find Rosie in a neighboring mansion, gorging herself on starchy processed snack foods and fizzy water. Hearing her mother’s panicked cries outside, Rosie instead flees deeper into the house, where she discovers a fully equipped luxury fallout shelter, including a massive home entertainment system. She activates the TV and scours the DVD racks to find the Holy Grail she’s pursued throughout the movie: the final episode of the sitcom <i>Friends</i>.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqy9u8RXVz0t0xxvg8BO9jL-DLE6t-fc7xL9ELbmwpBctS8vW7A31HPFQsv6m1Mcu2BXlZkSMCzzloDSq_bA8a-M7Ib-8siBavV3oEMQyC9ZaHmkv-T2QAaOTxTuGC6fV25-TCFtzZ1mjCrB55KbofwQMZ5nQWMFg8LWO08wwpf9DSYT_7NDyATLj8/s16000/leave_the_world.jpg" /></div>
<p>Rosie, the movie’s youngest character and therefore the one most definedly possessing a future, instead flees into a low-friction sitcom that ended nearly twenty years ago. In case the symbolism seems too subtle for streaming audiences, Myha’la’s character Ruth previously derided <i>Friends</i> as “nostalgia for a time that never really existed.” Facing the world-altering consequences of… well, <i>something</i>, Rosie flees from meaning and buries herself in mass-media anesthesia.</p>
<p>This movie’s moral backbone, to the extent it possesses one, certainly deserves criticism. It suggests that, deprived of our technology and entertainment, Americans will descend into base impulses, racism, and paranoia. Rather than moral payback, as Hartmann postulates, this movie suggests Armageddon will expose our near-complete moral vacuity. There’s no karmic retribution, this movie implies, when Americans don’t hold anything holy anymore anyway.</p>
<p>Yet as bad as this moral lesson is, the final takeaway, delivered by Rosie, feels worse. Given a blank slate to look forward and reinvent society on firmer moral footing, Rosie instead seeks resolution in a sitcom’s concise narrative arc. Not just any sitcom, either, but <i>Friends</i>. Sure, the show ended in 2005, during America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; but it began in 1995, the decade colored by America’s brightly-hued Cold War hangover.</p>
<p>Clear back in 2009, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Capitalist-Realism-There-No-Alternative/dp/1803414308">Mark Fisher wrote</a> that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The pre-catastrophe world this movie depicts resembles ours: fashionably pessimistic but convinced we need one long family holiday to restore our morality. Yet we, like this movie, face an historical inflection point: some socioeconomic change must happen soon, or everything will break without a safety net.</p>
<p>But instead of moralistic challenge and opportunity, the defining traits of past apocalypses, this movie shrugs and retreats into nihilism. With no vision of the New Jerusalem, or something compatible, the creative team simply can’t imagine another future. Therefore, the narrative threads they introduce don’t deserve resolution. Everything is ultimately meaningless, and ordinary humans are too vacuous to deserve rescue.</p>
<p>Fuck it, let’s go watch TV.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-72056545504664225022023-12-19T05:30:00.050-06:002023-12-19T05:30:00.137-06:00Another Product of the Armageddon Factory<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="335" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQyIZB7PNI4OHNeCpfy2-uPnHpVlAxaEO3Roxfw4tWsdZ7lIwvnD94I1JMK4EgneZ5TM8zBMhrTAaWwh6vCb3nrt_wnF1dS42XNQDI9R1-0SyEJkpAe020XY0mxi9nGE-cS_wMZyin8RLJt_nXQOzLIrqA_uf8uOB7JiESvoqHLdNsEHQVzhF8vd3A/s16000/world_behind.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From left: Mahershala Ali, Myha’la, Jula Roberts, and Ethan Hawk</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller <i>Leave the World Behind</i> is subdivided into six roughly equal parts by interstitial title cards, like TV episode titles. While many creators behind streaming “television” have tried to position their series as multi-episode movies, this film feels like a compressed treatment for a later TV serial. This comparison becomes extremely pointed by the indecisive cliffhanger ending which resolves nothing, as though punting to the next season.</p>
<p>Overworked preppies Amanda and Clay Sandford (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke), burned out in Manhattan, spontaneously book a Long Island holiday cottage. They’re somewhat distressed to find unreliable internet and cell service, but hey, it’s an adventure. Except, on the first night, G.H. Scott and his daughter Ruth (Mahershala Ali and Myha’la) arrive, claiming to own the cottage. New York’s under blackout, they explain; can they borrow their house back?</p>
<p>This movie has few speaking characters. Besides the Sandfords and Scotts, we see the Sandfords’ teenagers, Archie and Rosie (Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie). Archie’s defining characteristic is he checks out girls; Rosie obsesses over 1990s pop culture, especially the sitcom <i>Friends</i>. Very late, Kevin Bacon appears as a survivalist neighbor; besides a brief appearance by a Spanish-speaking hitchhiker, Bacon is the only evidence that working-class Long Islanders exist.</p>
<p>Writer-director Sam Esmail bases this movie on Rumaan Alam’s novel. Therefore I wonder who exactly, Esmail or Alam, dropped the ball so badly. This movie reads like a masterclass in how to alienate your audience. Though different plotlines frustrate in different ways, we could summarize the magnitude of disappointment thus: the creative team introduces interesting questions, then ignores them. They expect us, the audience, to do the heavy lifting.</p>
<p>First, we never know exactly what’s happening. Apart from isolated flashes of information dropped without context, all we know is that we know nothing. The Sandfords and Scotts are trapped inside the house, reliant on outdated information and a noncommunicative government. Every attempt to leave the house ends in one catastrophe or another. It’s impossible to read this separate from the COVID-19 lockdowns that ended shortly before principal photography began.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil9hTBGsU-HAiOm1PbDx4VLOlfDvqKcIwXjwjDDXoDTvWs8WJW4yk5b_xoPtzuhsSE5VZ-_qQoMdeB6AugaZoME0yPFm4XFr7zXGG1W2vSVT5bkhwwCRSIaHbOzFxX-moitmv28S8h6KXq8QO1mMdok3zir8KB-8jg_uK0OZC95w5bRjPJDVuETArO/s16000/leave_the_world.jpg" /></div>
<p>Both the Sandfords and the Scotts are relatively well-off. Throughout the movie, their cottage never loses electricity or running water. Their supplies of coffee and alcohol remain limitless. Yet living in proximity brings out prominent tensions, fueled substantially because the Sandfords are White, and the somewhat richer Scotts are Black. Amanda even engages in frustrated, self-pitying monologues that reveal her poorly sublimated racism.</p>
<p>Oh, and the monologues! This movie consists primarily of conversations, but they aren’t really conversations. Every character has a thesis statement, and apart from the occasional bread-n-butter dialog to move the story along, the characters mainly discourse at one another. This is a Very Important Message Movie, and the characters remind us of that constantly. They don’t even interrupt the action to discourse; they interrupt discourse with occasional action.</p>
<p>As we approach the movie’s culmination, both Amanda and G.H. offer up monologues that, in another movie, might’ve come before the climactic confrontation. Except there’s no climactic confrontation. We reach the moment where experienced genre authors would’ve brought the families’ braided narratives together to unlock the secrets, and… the movie stops. Rather than resolving the manifold threads it’s introduced, the movie halts. Sad trombone noises.</p>
<p>I already anticipate counterarguments. Life is frequently disappointing, and lacking in resolution. In the technocratic apocalypse depicted herein, most people would never receive meaningful explanations. <i>But this isn’t real life</i>. Novelists and screenwriters make decisions—or, in this case, don’t make decisions. I’m reminded of “deep literature” I read in college, and wrote chin-pulling considerations of moral themes, when I really wanted to ask: “Why did the author stop mid-story?”</p>
<p>One suspects that Esmail and/or Alam raised interesting questions, then thought their responsibility done. This often happens in self-consciously “literary” writing, which often treats resolute answers as facile. The author ends with a discordant note, sometimes mid-action (as here), and expects the audience to contemplate the unresolved questions. I suspect the creative team wants us to ask ourselves: “What’s left when our machines, entertainments, and busywork disappear?”</p>
<p>Instead, I ask: “What screenwriting workshop did these guys drop out of?” Esmail made his reputation on similar morally ambiguous TV series, like <i>Mr. Robot</i> and <i>Homecoming</i>. TV audiences accept unresolved themes, expecting they’ll resume next episode or next season. In feature films, it simply feels like the creative team expects the audience to finish what the writers started. That’s a disappointing, rage-inducing conclusion to a good start abandoned.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-39107702908329544412023-12-16T05:30:00.042-06:002023-12-16T05:30:00.143-06:00Who, As a People, Do We Want to Be?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="339" data-original-width="525" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXTw7_4qLZoZ_MLLFyV3NbKF9u6YsUB7ds3COnFR__Tbywxp6NUXB1z-GTsrqs-EdeVwrND6RpVaVx482J9k5GgRmFZUmS4Vp01O9QFAJRd0RnuLtJvFVX56Nc3CALPlIjy8enti89KSX2I3HhXHhb7tRtn_Qge4XRtt228vs2Bjj5Wg2OuM48duhR/s16000/alexander_hall_princeton_university.jpg" /></div>
<p>A Wisconsin school board <a href="https://kaukaunacommunitynews.com/2023/12/12/parent-challenges-444-books-in-wisconsin-school-district/">removed 444 books</a> from its middle and high school libraries this week, pending investigation of claims from an irate parent. Don’t let that detail go unremarked: claims from <i>an</i> irate parent, singular. That’s the point America’s public discourse has reached, where outspoken individuals with bad attitudes arbitrate books for entire communities of learners. Remember, libraries are often the only book access disadvantaged students even have.</p>
<p>Earlier this year, a story got traction on social media: the recent spate of mass book bannings is orchestrated by nucleus of serial accusation-mongers. The story broke in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/23/lgbtq-book-ban-challengers/">Washington Post</a> (behind a paywall, sadly), before getting reproduced, with germane editorial insertions, in mainly left-leaning aggregator sites like RawStory and Vox. As few as eleven serial bellyachers in a representative sample filed sixty percent of actionable complaints with school boards.</p>
<p>Blue Facebook and Blue Xitter highlighted which parents—or frequently, “parents”—filed these complaints, and which books they rejected. The books overwhelmingly foregrounded queer characters; most of the remainder dealt with race and bigotry in America. <i>They’re trying to squelch free ideas</i>, the refrain goes; and, in close harmony, <i>history never looks well upon book banners</i>. Comparisons inevitably arise to the Nazi regime’s wanton destruction of the <i>Institut für Sexualwissenschaft</i>.</p>
<p>Fair dues, perhaps. But the leftists making this argument are hardly free-speech absolutists themselves. They wouldn’t tolerate these same libraries stocking, say, <i>The Turner Diaries</i> or <i>120 Days of Sodom</i>. These examples are extreme to the point of satire, obviously, but the point stands: everybody will agree that some books (and other artifacts, like <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-real-war-on-white-americans.html">Confederate statues</a>) don’t belong in public spaces. We only dispute which books and artifacts must go.</p>
<p>I’ve recently had leftist colleagues derail entire discussions over somebody’s use of outdated terms. I’m not talking about when somebody centers their discussion on offensive content, or uses actual slurs like <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2020/01/some-thoughts-on-n-word.html">the N-word</a>. I mean specifically examples like the fact that “handicapped” has fallen on disfavor, and advocates prefer “disabled”—a word I was taught to abjure in the 1980s, because it spotlighted what somebody lacked over what they were.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img align="right" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSvALW-RQ128COPaEetVIKhRqUDIjVVLm5GV2LTNS2MH984DqNfdPzgP1vS6gS4U4TlJt_V87pt_-pmq6PJt1QWjZ09IKCCq6Z6_fKOvq5INHsseHmt3zLpPC40p7PuWe1CU5cYMU8NsOIHGRuIMoBc8UWH4UOQM9By5wtrD7qeiXNpgBXjSJgd67s/s16000/science_travel.jpg" /></div>
<p>Already I anticipate conservative friends chortling over “political correctness gone amok.” But the right is hardly innocent of wanting to amend language to expunge offense. Recent attempts to turn “<a href="https://time.com/5782812/oklahoma-professor-ok-boomer-racial-slur/">Boomer</a>” and “<a href="https://www.them.us/story/is-cisgender-a-slur">cisgender</a>” into cusswords have turned unintentionally hilarious. The attempt to forbid certain words or turn language into a minefield of hurt feelings only differs on one point: exactly whose feelings we believe deserve protected from offense.</p>
<p>In the past, I’ve described myself as a free-speech absolutist. But like most absolutists, I’m far from absolute. Certain language doesn’t deserve protection. The Supreme Court has declared that, First Amendment notwithstanding, obscenity and incitement to violence aren’t protected speech. We can agree these forms of speech don’t deserve protection because they cause material, calculable harm. And in causing harm, they cross the line from “speech” into “action.”</p>
<p>Beyond the harm standard, though, what other yardsticks permit us to declare certain ideas off-limits? Some will argue moral disgust. These hyper-activist parents filing hundreds of book-ban requests want certain ideas removed from protected discourse because the content gives them moral heebie-jeebies. This, again, questions whose tender sensibilities need protection from the mean, terrible world. Why these White, conservative parents and not, say, me?</p>
<p>The very existence of accused human trafficker Andrew Tate and confessed queer-baiter Jordan Peterson offends my morality. To say nothing of Alex Jones, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67673623">who had his Xitter account restored this week</a> after a blink-and-you-missed-it poll. To me, and notably also to Elon Musk immediately after he purchased and eviscerated Xitter, silencing Jones in whatever hog-wallow he sleeps in is the obvious moral choice. That homunculus doesn’t deserve a platform.</p>
<p>Please don’t mistake me, the left has plenty of squishy, reactive, and morally vacuous history. We’ve done a good job of opposing everything Republicans and their allies like, even when it means abjuring our principles: Democrats demanded the Trump Administration “follow the science” regarding COVID-19, for instance, then turned deaf when Trump-aligned bureaucrats presented robust (but not ironclad) evidence that the virus <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57268111">escaped a lab</a>.</p>
<p>Admittedly, that example is slightly tangential. But it makes my point: both sides make decisions based on moral disgust, in a society that no longer even pretends to have shared morals. That means both sides are currently arguing about what public morals our society should have. Sadly, both sides have nothing to fall back on, besides their own morals. The arguments become circular, and our society becomes dizzy.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-76666416580467841432023-12-13T05:30:00.041-06:002023-12-13T05:30:00.155-06:00Dracula and the Problem With Modern Morality<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="306" data-original-width="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMVAreyb7i8YpvlVbQLGAUqED3Vz5K4kX4YOYCVVliyTOCVS8HLWFqJhiW4Wzr2Tadvmvfxrikxp6pxX7r5sIGwEGl5loKkHyoudHTZDUyLcXjnX1uWks0ABWVgoOZqLlzUGgZmRl1NtaMM4ZXeFifDZxbJ8SqkCqLvw2wi9UKpvMbYKs6PGR87b_-/s16000/dracula_1.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claes Bang as Dracula (left) and John Heffernan as<br />Jonathan Harker, in Moffat and Gatiss’ <i>Dracula</i></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Audiences who have read Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel <i>Dracula</i> will notice something about Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ 2020 adaptation: the Count is on screen <i>a lot</i>. Count Dracula is absent from over three-quarters of Stoker’s original novel, a looming presence whose terror grows more ominous because he could be literally anywhere. By contrast, Moffat and Gatiss foreground the character, who remains present and amorally aggressive even when characters (and viewers) need their rest.</p>
<p>Moffat and Gatiss are the creative team behind <i>Sherlock</i>. Yes, *that* <i>Sherlock</i>, the one that kickstarted Benedict Cumberbatch’s career and revitalized TV mysteries. The show was a rollicking success until it overstayed its welcome by one season, and the meme-driven zeitgeist turned against it. Steven Moffat previously paid his dues in contemporizing Victorian literature with <i>Jekyll</i>, which postulated a high-tech corporation wanting to harvest Mr. Hyde for profit. These guys know their modernized Victoriana.</p>
<p>All three original properties withheld information from readers, information which today’s audiences already have. Pretending that, for instance, Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde aren’t manifestations of the same person, would be naïve and coy nowadays. While some Massively Online Critics still complain that <i>Sherlock</i> suffered because the viewpoint characters withhold information from the audience, this overlooks that all three original properties did this regularly. Victorian audiences apparently loved last-minute reveals: “The killer was <i>here the whole time squeeeee!!!</i>”</p>
<p>Dracula isn’t mysterious anymore, as he was in 1897—though admittedly, more audiences probably know Todd Browning’s version than Stoker’s. Therefore withholding Dracula from audience view makes little sense. Instead, Moffat and Gatiss reveal him early, showcasing his rapacity, his sexual appetite, and his lack of common morals. Instead of making the well-known vampire appear falsely mysterious, our creative team must instead convince us why everything we believe about the famous story is wrong.</p>
<p>Therein lies the problem. <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2011/04/critic-of-weeksusannah-clements.html">As Susannah Clements writes</a>, <i>Dracula</i> represents a specific Victorian Christian morality. Van Helsing presents himself as a “man of science,” a much less precise term than we’d accept nowadays, whose scientific acumen hoovers up any stray evidence it encounters; yet in fighting Dracula, Van Helsing reverts to the language and doctrines of Christianity. The monster fears churches, crosses, and vicars. Fundamentally, he affirms that modernity cannot survive without ancient religious truths.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE7V-6ZbOPfrfO7lSOk48GDoZkgGeuoBTa8R1MvUjnADSFiOUJAQwqRJElq9IhxkxaBxuvVHd6ttx5kHsYwNH3_Y5A6d9UO3UdAz1BIsE3GW3B4X7wav5KllHkGJ6qT5YSh_M1A1CpoSaWZ8SKvzphTieYJTplgGn2Ns7RJCmFh9n9bXaL0Wn0V9cq/s16000/dracula_2.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dolly Wells as Agatha Van Helsing</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Except, the longer I live with Clements’ thesis, the less airtight it becomes, because that Christian morality was window dressing. Victorian England required a strong state to maintain the appearance of public virtue. William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” had become Britain’s background noise. Sherlock Holmes shot intravenous cocaine to control his moods. At this point, it’d be disingenuous to deny that Bram Stoker was probably a closeted homosexual; his schoolfriend Oscar Wilde was jailed in 1895.</p>
<p>Abraham Van Helsing (rendered by Moffat and Gatiss as Agatha Van Helsing, a Carmelite nun) didn’t restore foundering Victorian Christianity; he enforced a specific kind of moral vestment on a largely secularized, industrialized nation. He encouraged the cadre of men driving the story to punish Lucy Westenra, who had, in coded language, been sexually liberated enough to choose her own lovers. As punishment, the men took turns, <i>ahem</i>, driving their wooden stake into her.</p>
<p>Agatha Van Helsing, opposite her literary ancestor, has no patience for public morality. Though a nun, she’s substantially secularized; she describes her holy orders as “a loveless marriage.” Her Dracula reacts with the same vehemence as Stoker’s to crosses and other religious appurtenances, but Agatha rejects the religious explanation. She accuses Dracula of retroactively constructing a moral explanation for his abilities and weaknesses—then she does the same. For her, morality is as morality does.</p>
<p>The lack of underlying morality—even one the characters only observe for ceremonial purposes—is the defining difference between this <i>Dracula</i> and Stoker’s. Unfortunately, without such an underlying morality, the story has nothing to be about. Van Helsing speculates aimlessly about why medieval European morality still has power over Dracula, and reaches a resolution that satisfies her only in the closing minutes. For us peons watching, however, the explanation raises more questions than it answers.</p>
<p>Nobody could rewrite <i>Dracula</i> for modern audiences and retain Victorian morality. In Britain, Christianity has retreated to the second most common religious identity, after “none”; and even in America, which (unlike Europe) emerged from two world wars more religious rather than less, Christianity has fallen <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christianity-us-shrinking-pew-research/#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20by%20Pew%20Research%20Center%20and,identity%20of%20atheist%2C%20agnostic%20or%20%22nothing%20in%20particular.%22">below two-thirds of the population</a>. Our vampires today are Lestat and Edward Cullen, not Dracula. Yet as with Van Helsing’s religion, the premodern story keeps intruding on our modern world.</p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4082892761099751671.post-65994935712635256292023-12-08T05:30:00.041-06:002023-12-08T05:30:00.135-06:00The Courage to Change a Broken World, Part 2<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0ZOrSyPu7b2JWRxKTxB0EhNANLeK5kpQuL3tO_gSx58yQgecI2ZYfwSK_MDwWM6rvSTGMGqv2BqpRYDmUCsZ81UVLcoeS6hbayKH-aXF4-pfHjXjNH2ov6sVjsJkWjko45kkiCeu0/s1600/hispaniola.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="383" data-original-width="525" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0ZOrSyPu7b2JWRxKTxB0EhNANLeK5kpQuL3tO_gSx58yQgecI2ZYfwSK_MDwWM6rvSTGMGqv2BqpRYDmUCsZ81UVLcoeS6hbayKH-aXF4-pfHjXjNH2ov6sVjsJkWjko45kkiCeu0/s1600/hispaniola.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hispaniola, in a map from the <i>Encyclopedia Britannica</i></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>I first recall Haiti with clarity following the 1991 <i>coup d’etat</i> against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country’s first democratically elected president. I have vague, muddled prior recollections of Haiti in the news, particularly surrounding “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s expulsion; but I was too young to understand events in context. I was only eleven when Baby Doc fell, and remember wondering how bad somebody with such a cutesy-poo nickname could really be.</p>
<p>Finally old enough to understand the country’s historical context in 1991, I read Haitian history and culture avidly—to the extent I could. My local public library had exactly one book on Haiti, Wade Davis’ <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2012/10/an-american-in-land-where-dead-walk.html">The Serpent and the Rainbow</a>. (I’d watch Wes Craven’s feature film adaptation years later; the movie reduces Davis’ immersive anthropology to lurid exoticism.) I later discovered <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-courage-to-change-broken-world.html">Paul Farmer</a> when I started college. Sources were scarce.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">With no scope to understand Haiti’s internal forces, I struggled to encompass much about Haiti. Despite being the Western Hemisphere’s second-oldest nation, it hadn’t enjoyed the United States’ economic prosperity or internal stability. Though the nation was functionally independent by 1804, it couldn’t organize a nationwide election until 1990. Both countries had fertile soil, luxurious coastlines, abundant natural resources, and robust populations. But only one got rich.</p>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj15NiIYuGh8N2GgAFaxIJdwz-2w1rMFkwgawi4dUroFFADkywkeyrBJsaZa491ymWy1d65zaQMyAsGzlbeQryYORu5IL17BE3iM8wTEzVHHnN8Gxb6tRcEABGxVqqnngZdLsoCYF_e/s1600/wade_davis.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj15NiIYuGh8N2GgAFaxIJdwz-2w1rMFkwgawi4dUroFFADkywkeyrBJsaZa491ymWy1d65zaQMyAsGzlbeQryYORu5IL17BE3iM8wTEzVHHnN8Gxb6tRcEABGxVqqnngZdLsoCYF_e/s1600/wade_davis.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wade Davis</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>Back then, <a href="https://wordbasket.blogspot.com/2014/07/why-im-not-conservative-anymore.html">I was more conservative</a>, and believe me, I could’ve easily explained Haitian poverty dismissively. America’s founding (White) leaders were moneyed, aristocratic, and essentially bastions of old-world privilege. Haiti’s founders, former slaves all, were substantially illiterate and uniformly Black. Though it would’ve been impolitic to say so aloud in 1991, one underlying thread of American political discourse happily blamed the Caribbean Blacks for their own plight.</p>
<p>I couldn’t stomach such racism, then or now, despite Republican leanings. Accepting an entire nation’s inherent moral deficiency felt slovenly, until I’d exhausted other likely explanations. I quickly learned that French colonial masters made themselves obscenely wealthy through slave plantations and coerced labor. Revolutionary leaders chased France out in an overthrow that descended into a pogrom… and then, having no other model, cracked down on the citizenry.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">America’s revolutionary leaders claimed to commence a new nation, a new democratic experiment, then simply repeated English social structure. Aristocracy, peonage, and slavery were the hallmarks of Early America, and in some places, still are. Haitians likewise repeated the colonial administration, because it’s what they knew. This meant bloody reprisals for minor acts of willfulness and independence: public maiming, a legacy of French slavery, is still a Haitian political tool.</p>
<p>This became an important seed in my political awakening. Poverty, I realized, appears causeless and simply natural, because the social forces which cause it are so baked into our environment that we can’t see them anymore. The bloody reprisals enacted by the <i>Tonton Macoute</i> or by Raoul Cédras’ army always first hit those Haitians who showed leadership, entrepreneurship, or self-reliance. Haiti’s ruling elite paid handsomely to keep the poor impoverished.</p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAjhuBL7fSw06bczYv9RuZxamz4wdOHKfxg2D6F8hFYHOPfgvcg_mH3eLaTcY38_ho73NIuElT89GKc4xjbgu62WU2iuVXrdBALhPc9SEACWhXlCqrc41-MCT-At6yLOD8Uz3-smnwaDkfdb3Q5nAiId8A2QD3PCaNbB9zvikKMgHCH5bNHHyaIYTD/s16000/paul_farmer.jpg" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. Paul Farmer</td></tr></tbody></table>
<p>It took years before I applied this heuristic to American politics. Eventually I realized that some of America’s most lush, resource-rich states were the most economically impoverished, for exactly this reason. Chronically poor states, such as those in the Old Confederacy, have a long history of squandering their fertile lands, clear waters, and strong people, to keep ensure that Blacks, Native Americans, immigrants, and other “outsiders” don’t get any advantage.</p>
<p>We don’t call it that anymore, certainly, Since the middle 1960s, politicians can’t simply admit they’re engaged in Bull Connor-style naked racism designed to keep the designated underclass from rising. Yet that’s what happens with “law-n-order” crackdowns, or complaining about “handouts,” or making sure nobody receives a reward they didn’t “earn.” Entire American regions will squander abundant natural wealth to ensure the poor remain poor.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Read that way, Haiti’s struggles become instantly
comprehensible. Sure, America had certain early advantages, particularly an
existing moneyed class, and diplomatic recognition from the European powers,
that Haiti lacked. (France didn’t recognize Haitian independence until 1826, the
U.S. until 1861.) But both countries shared one important characteristic: <i>the
wealth of the nation wasn’t distributed equally</i>, and autocrats paid heavily
to ensure that inequality would survive.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The poorest citizens always paid the highest price, but
their allies came a close second. Paul Farmer avoided political activities,
simply providing peasants with medical care; yet treating the needy was so abhorrent
that the Cédras junta expelled him for three years. The ruling elites would
rather let their own citizens die than see them overcome their poverty. Viewed
that way, I seriously doubt America has one penny over Haiti.</p><p></p>Kevin L Nenstielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11303547273863502837noreply@blogger.com0