This September marks the tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. One can scarcely imagine how many articles and blog posts will begin with similar sentences during the next few weeks. We'll see different angles, hear different tones, and be exposed to all manner of insights and illusions on the subject of 9/11. After all the words, though, and after this much time, will we be any closer to understanding what happened? We all share certain emotions about those traumatic events. What kind of understanding do we share?
9/11 was initially seen as a great unifier and quickly became one of the most divisive events in recent memory. It was a declaration of war, and as Chris Hedges points out in his book of the same title, war is a force that gives us meaning. Unity wasn't just a result of the attacks. It was an imperative result. Any disruption of that unity was seen as a threat to our security, certainly, but it was also more than that. It was a threat to our sense of duty, honor, and courage...because war is what promised to restore all of those things.
For these reasons and others, objective analysis of the conflict, the enemy, and the respective strategies was generally unwelcome. Any attempt to understand Bin Laden's motives, for example, was said to be "too soon" for the still grieving American psyche. Moreover, any such attempt was probably itself motivated by sympathy for terrorists and a desire to justify their cause. Our own president put it very simply. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Granted, his statement was addressed to other nations who might have considered harboring our enemies, but in many people's minds the distinction between foreign enablers of terrorism and domestic critics of the War on Terror was slight, at best.
But it's been ten years now. Osama Bin Laden is dead, which means that at least one of our goals--and ostensibly one of the most significant--has been achieved. We've had time to recover, to plan a strategy and set it in motion, and to see at least some of the results. A few questions seem appropriate to consider. What did Bin Laden accomplish before his death? What have we accomplished? Who is the enemy now, and where do we stand with respect to them? To those interested in the factual background of what follows, I recommend Adam Curtis' documentary The Power of Nightmares and the books Why Nothing Works by Marvin Harris and Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges.
As of the year 2000 or so, Al Qaeda historically had had limited appeal among the Muslims Bin Laden aspired to rule. The group's extreme fundamentalism made it fractious and prone to violent infighting, such that it's questionable whether they even had a coherent philosophy to offer. Intolerance of disagreement, however, was a constant. It extended especially to other Muslims, who have always been the principal targets of Al Qaeda's wrath. In the fundamentalist view, Muslims who demur in the smallest detail are no Muslims at all, and in fact are worse than infidels who never knew the truth. This has led Al Qaeda to practice extensive campaigns of violence against other Muslims.
For the most part, predictably, Al Qaeda's efforts to terrorize their coreligionists into submission backfired, bringing their popularity to a low point before 9/11. Their one reliable sales pitch was opposition to American policy, particularly American military action in Muslim countries. On this it seemed everyone could agree. That is not to say Bin Laden was a freedom fighter. On the contrary, he was thoroughly anti-democratic, power-hungry, and unscrupulous about the use of financial and drug crime as well as wanton violence to expand his field of domination in any way possible. He was, in other words, the mirror image of the American interests ultimately responsible for his training when he was our ally against the Soviets. But even if he was a thug, to Arabs and Muslims he was their thug. In the face of American hegemony, this lent him a certain credibility.
In their desperation, and with the inspiration of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda devised a plan to take advantage of their one remaining strength. They would launch an attack on the US itself, an action of such boldness and scale that it would become a symbol and a rallying point for anti-American resentment throughout the Muslim world. In doing so they would win the widespread support of Muslims who felt oppressed by American power. And there was a second element to the strategy. Al Qaeda calculated that while the US couldn't be defeated on the battlefield, we also couldn't sustain an extended war without drowning in debt. By drawing us into full military commitment in the Middle East and using cheap guerrilla tactics to prolong our expenditures, they would finally drive us out once and for all. They would defeat us not militarily, but economically.
How then does Bin Laden's plan look, ten years out? There was a brief surge in his popularity after 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The results were short-lived, however. This part of the strategy seems not to have succeeded in the long term. On the second point, it has been far more successful, though it's not clear that Congress or either of the post-9/11 presidents have recognized it. The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has officially passed the 3 1/2 trillion dollar mark. Meanwhile our metamorphosis into a Third World nation, already well underway before 9/11, has strikingly accelerated. Inflation, if it were measured by the same Consumer Price Index that was used in the 1970s, would probably be around 10 percent. Unemployment, including those who have stopped looking for work or settled for part-time jobs, is around 15 percent and rising. In 2010 the ratio of national debt to GDP passed the 90 percent threshold. In 2011 it passed 100 percent, and this month the United States' credit rating was reduced to subprime for the first time ever. Representative Barney Frank, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, cited war spending as the primary reason for the downgrade.
Operating on a cost-plus basis, the defense industry has long been generating monstrous inefficiencies that have spilled over into other industries. This is to the extent, of course, that other industries continue to exist. Since WWII, the manufacturing base for productive goods has virtually disappeared in the wake of war socialism, Soviet style. Of course, not all our economic ills result from the War on Terror. But the fact remains that we now spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. We spend ten times as much as the first runner-up, China, and this is only counting programs in the Pentagon budget itself. War-related spending in other agencies probably brings the total near a trillion dollars annually. President Obama recently challenged the Afghans to develop an economy not based on war. The comedian Harry Shearer quipped that this sounded like a wonderful idea...and when would it be our turn?
As we go on competing with extremists for control of the Middle East, the people of that region continue to be caught in between. The great majority want to be dictated to neither by the US nor by Muslim fundamentalists. This attitude seems as unfathomable to us as it is to Al Qaeda. Obama has basically stayed the course, yet Afghanistan remains without a viable government other than the Taliban. The Russians learned that you can't conquer Afghanistan, and lost their empire in the process. We're now learning that you still can't conquer it even when you pitch the operation as something other than conquest (a most salesmanly and most American expedient that was supposed to make all the difference).
Those who wrote Bin Laden's obituary this year mostly described him as a failure, a man whose unrealistic ambitions made him foolish enough to trifle with a superpower. There is some truth to this narrative. Bin Laden failed to build significant support for a new fundamentalist caliphate in the Middle East. This is a good thing, so far as it goes. But he may well have succeeded in his ancillary goal of bankrupting the American empire. Even though he is dead, the endgame he set in motion has played out more or less successfully. Each day we are two billion dollars further in debt and that much further from claiming the upper hand.
Michael Scheuer's indispensable book Imperial Hubris, published anonymously in 2004, essentially narrowed our realistic options down to two. We will either have to annihilate the Muslim nations or learn to do business without using coercion. Neither is likely to happen any time soon. The only remaining choice is to steel ourselves for future conflict and loss. Scheuer has some advice that seems especially appropriate on the tenth anniversary of the attacks:
Stop Celebrating Death and Defeat
Since the 11 September attacks, many Americans have engaged in an almost nonstop celebration of the massive US defeat suffered that day. Purportedly sorrowful commemorations of the dead, these endless, well-planned and -scripted effusions of grief, international contests for memorial designs, and, most of all, rivers of stilted, never-forget oratory serve no purpose save to recall our utter defeat and allow us to wallow in dread of the pain to come. In my own organization in 2003, we celebrated "Family Day" by treating visiting relatives to this sort of celebration of defeat. In the main corridor stood a shrine erected to the debacle of 11 September. Beautifully matted photos of the twin towers burning and collapsing, framed artist renderings of architects' plans for memorials to the dead, photos of pseudo-Diana flower piles placed in front of US embassies abroad, and--the macabre centerpiece--a glass display case holding metallic shards from the World Trade Center. All these are, to use an old-fashioned phrase, unmanly. Americans are made of sterner stuff--or, at least, better be, for, as Robert D. Kaplan wrote about our current foes in the Atlantic Monthly, "In a world of tribes and thugs manliness goes a long way."
9/11 memorials have always been a heady mixture of arrogance and self-pity. The tenth promises to be the most extravagant orgy yet, but as Scheuer observes, such things serve no real purpose. After ten years, perhaps it's time to move on. Perhaps we might stop reminiscing on our brief moments spent basking in the world's sympathy and start reflecting on why so much of that sympathy has been lost. We might take a cold look at our response to what happened and judge carefully whether it has helped or hurt us. It remains to be seen whether America is "ready" for such a course. But if we can't be smart about it, let's at least be manly.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
Life During Wartime
The sequel to Todd Solondz' Happiness was released on DVD last month, just a few weeks before the scheduled premiere of his latest film, Dark Horse, at the Venice Film Festival. Life During Wartime is a worthwhile if not entirely satisfying update on the lives of the three sisters Helen, Joy, and Trish. All the principal characters from Happiness, as well as some from Solondz' earlier film Welcome to the Dollhouse, are played here by different actors.
Incidentally, I don't necessarily agree that the timeline of Solondz' universe is skewed, as some reviewers seem to think. Judging by the ages of the characters and the various pop culture references in the films, one could plausibly assume that Welcome to the Dollhouse takes place around 1990, Happiness in 2000, Storytelling around the same time, and Palindromes during a span between 2000 and 2006. Life During Wartime would most likely take place in 2008. Each film is then set roughly at the time of its release, with Dollhouse happening several years earlier and Happiness slightly later. None of which is very important, but I had fun with it while spending a weekend in Solondzville watching the newest chapter and revisiting the old ones.
While all of them are good, it was the underrated Palindromes that really made me sit up and take notice. The subjects of the satire in the earlier films are solidly bourgeois, making them easy targets for a hip audience. Palindromes' treatment of the abortion issue and the main character's rebellion against "liberal" values made it a somewhat riskier film. It was the work of an artist who clearly didn't give a damn whom he offended. And it was all the bolder considering that its concessions were sure to be lost on pro-life viewers, few of whom would have the sensibility for R-rated (or unrated) movies about pedophilia and rape. This is always the exciting thing about Solondz, though. He goes where the subject leads, without any apparent concern for who's following.
The newest work was originally called Forgiveness, which is a good statement of its theme--or half of it. The cliché "forgive and forget" is stated several times in the film, and for some of the characters at least, the second part of the admonition seems much easier to deal with. Trish, whose ex-husband Bill has been in prison for child rape, has left New Jersey and found what she considers a new life in Florida. She understandably refuses to dwell on the past, but by the same token she also denies its troubling effects on her family, a denial that skews her son Timmy's emotions and ends up hurting them both. For Helen, forgiveness is a weapon. She has picked up on the idea that it makes one a "better person" and interpreted this to mean that forgiving puts her in a position of superiority. She deploys her new-found tactic aggressively and, to her sister Joy, somewhat confusingly. For her part, Joy sees forgiveness as something to be passively received, an easy gift to which she is entitled. Her ghosts, however, see it differently. Bill's struggle with the idea may be the most complicated. When he gets out of prison and goes to visit his older son, now at college, he asks for forgiveness and is denied. He's obviously crushed, but he may also be reassured to know that Billy can't put himself in his father's shoes.
The choice of new actors for the roles, though sometimes dismissed as a gimmick, is indeed revelatory in many instances. As portrayed by Jane Adams in Happiness, Joy was a character whose flaws could almost be overlooked. Shirley Henderson makes a caricature of Joy's childlike qualities, and in doing so reveals their falseness. Trish, the priggish housewife who was paradoxically the most interesting and human character in Happiness, is the center of attention here. Allison Janney brings out a desperate vivacity behind the fear and neurosis. Ally Sheedy plays Helen, a character whose impressive drive and intensity are ever more focused on self-loathing. She's awesome to watch, if only for one brief sequence. Helen's treatment is actually rather perfunctory, which bears on the real shortcoming of the sequel. It seems unfinished, as if the storylines needed more attention. What's there is great, but there's not enough of it.
Perhaps the most problematic re-casting is that of Michael Kenneth Williams as Allen, the role played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the first film. As one critic put it, "[T]here's no way that a chunky, blond white guy and a dark-skinned black man with an eight-inch scar down the middle of his face could've had the same life experience growing up in America." Considering similar issues with other roles, the reviewer concludes, "These are just not the same people."
Is this true? In a strictly literal sense, it is. Probably no two people of different colors have exactly the same experience growing up in America. But does this mean that no chunky, blond white guys are ever involved in street crime? Or that no muscular black men ever lead lives of pathetic, self-loathing solitude? I confess that I found the new Allen difficult to accept, probably because of assumptions like these which I didn't even know I had. But they are interesting assumptions, and deserving of the questioning to which Solondz subjects them. Janney's Trish is also problematic, but here again the difference seems designed to test our biases. Is it possible that a stuck-up, judgmental suburban housewife could have a real lust for life and even, perhaps, some sense of irony underneath it all? Surely not...yet Solondz asks us to rethink.
Despite a certain thinness to the narrative, Life During Wartime again shows Solondz doing what he does best, as he would say, challenging preconceptions instead of flattering them. Possibly the trick casting started as an adaptation to necessity, but if it was an accident it has proved to be a happy one. These characters were always full of complexity and contradiction, and the sequel only explores a bit more of what was already there. There's a lot of potential in Solondz' strategy of freeing his characters from the limitations of particular actors. He took full advantage of it in Palindromes. Let's hope he does so again.
Incidentally, I don't necessarily agree that the timeline of Solondz' universe is skewed, as some reviewers seem to think. Judging by the ages of the characters and the various pop culture references in the films, one could plausibly assume that Welcome to the Dollhouse takes place around 1990, Happiness in 2000, Storytelling around the same time, and Palindromes during a span between 2000 and 2006. Life During Wartime would most likely take place in 2008. Each film is then set roughly at the time of its release, with Dollhouse happening several years earlier and Happiness slightly later. None of which is very important, but I had fun with it while spending a weekend in Solondzville watching the newest chapter and revisiting the old ones.
While all of them are good, it was the underrated Palindromes that really made me sit up and take notice. The subjects of the satire in the earlier films are solidly bourgeois, making them easy targets for a hip audience. Palindromes' treatment of the abortion issue and the main character's rebellion against "liberal" values made it a somewhat riskier film. It was the work of an artist who clearly didn't give a damn whom he offended. And it was all the bolder considering that its concessions were sure to be lost on pro-life viewers, few of whom would have the sensibility for R-rated (or unrated) movies about pedophilia and rape. This is always the exciting thing about Solondz, though. He goes where the subject leads, without any apparent concern for who's following.
The newest work was originally called Forgiveness, which is a good statement of its theme--or half of it. The cliché "forgive and forget" is stated several times in the film, and for some of the characters at least, the second part of the admonition seems much easier to deal with. Trish, whose ex-husband Bill has been in prison for child rape, has left New Jersey and found what she considers a new life in Florida. She understandably refuses to dwell on the past, but by the same token she also denies its troubling effects on her family, a denial that skews her son Timmy's emotions and ends up hurting them both. For Helen, forgiveness is a weapon. She has picked up on the idea that it makes one a "better person" and interpreted this to mean that forgiving puts her in a position of superiority. She deploys her new-found tactic aggressively and, to her sister Joy, somewhat confusingly. For her part, Joy sees forgiveness as something to be passively received, an easy gift to which she is entitled. Her ghosts, however, see it differently. Bill's struggle with the idea may be the most complicated. When he gets out of prison and goes to visit his older son, now at college, he asks for forgiveness and is denied. He's obviously crushed, but he may also be reassured to know that Billy can't put himself in his father's shoes.
The choice of new actors for the roles, though sometimes dismissed as a gimmick, is indeed revelatory in many instances. As portrayed by Jane Adams in Happiness, Joy was a character whose flaws could almost be overlooked. Shirley Henderson makes a caricature of Joy's childlike qualities, and in doing so reveals their falseness. Trish, the priggish housewife who was paradoxically the most interesting and human character in Happiness, is the center of attention here. Allison Janney brings out a desperate vivacity behind the fear and neurosis. Ally Sheedy plays Helen, a character whose impressive drive and intensity are ever more focused on self-loathing. She's awesome to watch, if only for one brief sequence. Helen's treatment is actually rather perfunctory, which bears on the real shortcoming of the sequel. It seems unfinished, as if the storylines needed more attention. What's there is great, but there's not enough of it.
Perhaps the most problematic re-casting is that of Michael Kenneth Williams as Allen, the role played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the first film. As one critic put it, "[T]here's no way that a chunky, blond white guy and a dark-skinned black man with an eight-inch scar down the middle of his face could've had the same life experience growing up in America." Considering similar issues with other roles, the reviewer concludes, "These are just not the same people."
Is this true? In a strictly literal sense, it is. Probably no two people of different colors have exactly the same experience growing up in America. But does this mean that no chunky, blond white guys are ever involved in street crime? Or that no muscular black men ever lead lives of pathetic, self-loathing solitude? I confess that I found the new Allen difficult to accept, probably because of assumptions like these which I didn't even know I had. But they are interesting assumptions, and deserving of the questioning to which Solondz subjects them. Janney's Trish is also problematic, but here again the difference seems designed to test our biases. Is it possible that a stuck-up, judgmental suburban housewife could have a real lust for life and even, perhaps, some sense of irony underneath it all? Surely not...yet Solondz asks us to rethink.
Despite a certain thinness to the narrative, Life During Wartime again shows Solondz doing what he does best, as he would say, challenging preconceptions instead of flattering them. Possibly the trick casting started as an adaptation to necessity, but if it was an accident it has proved to be a happy one. These characters were always full of complexity and contradiction, and the sequel only explores a bit more of what was already there. There's a lot of potential in Solondz' strategy of freeing his characters from the limitations of particular actors. He took full advantage of it in Palindromes. Let's hope he does so again.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
The Oscars
Owen Gleiberman has a few words about the new new Best Picture nomination process, in which the number of films nominated will vary depending on how many get chosen as first pick by a certain percentage of the voters...or something like that. He appreciates the effort to recognize indie films and blockbusters, but he feels that the tinkering is absurd and not very effective.
I won't say much about my attitude toward the Oscars because I've never really stopped to examine it. I suppose I don't agree with the Academy's taste much of the time, but there's no use pretending I'm not interested in it since I do watch the show or at least look up the nominees and winners every year. In any case, there's obviously a bit of a conundrum here. How do we recognize a better range of films without watering down the award?
I think the ten-nomination system is a response to a real problem, which is that genre films typically don't get considered for Best Picture (blockbusters being essentially a subcategory of the genre film). The Best Picture Award could more accurately be called the Best Historical or Inspirational Drama Award. There have been some exceptions, like Return of the King, so credit where credit is due. Unfortunately these exceptions prove the rule--they're somewhat bloated and tedious, as if the Academy was treating genre candidates with its usual "bigger is better" approach while simply giving the screenwriting a pass. That's not really the same as recognizing and honoring what makes a great genre film a great work of art.
Which brings us to the problem with the new system. In reality, it's an attempt to honor genre films without actually honoring them. We're still going to have our five slots for the real contenders (i.e., the tearjerkers and costume dramas), but we're also going to "recognize" a few other films that everyone knows will never win. Genre pictures are still second-class citizens, and all we've really accomplished is to make the award less meaningful.
I don't think there's any quick solution. I would hope, now that the issue has been spotted, to see a gradual change as the Academy chooses more members with a broader perspective. All types of films have their conventions, so in a sense they all have a genre. And all films are about people, so in a sense they're all the same. The best "genre" films can illuminate some of the most important issues we deal with as human beings (Children of Men), while even the most ostensibly serious films can trivialize those issues and waste the audience's time (The White Ribbon, which one critic aptly described as an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a Ph.D.). Let them all contend on the same field, and may the best picture win.
I won't say much about my attitude toward the Oscars because I've never really stopped to examine it. I suppose I don't agree with the Academy's taste much of the time, but there's no use pretending I'm not interested in it since I do watch the show or at least look up the nominees and winners every year. In any case, there's obviously a bit of a conundrum here. How do we recognize a better range of films without watering down the award?
I think the ten-nomination system is a response to a real problem, which is that genre films typically don't get considered for Best Picture (blockbusters being essentially a subcategory of the genre film). The Best Picture Award could more accurately be called the Best Historical or Inspirational Drama Award. There have been some exceptions, like Return of the King, so credit where credit is due. Unfortunately these exceptions prove the rule--they're somewhat bloated and tedious, as if the Academy was treating genre candidates with its usual "bigger is better" approach while simply giving the screenwriting a pass. That's not really the same as recognizing and honoring what makes a great genre film a great work of art.
Which brings us to the problem with the new system. In reality, it's an attempt to honor genre films without actually honoring them. We're still going to have our five slots for the real contenders (i.e., the tearjerkers and costume dramas), but we're also going to "recognize" a few other films that everyone knows will never win. Genre pictures are still second-class citizens, and all we've really accomplished is to make the award less meaningful.
I don't think there's any quick solution. I would hope, now that the issue has been spotted, to see a gradual change as the Academy chooses more members with a broader perspective. All types of films have their conventions, so in a sense they all have a genre. And all films are about people, so in a sense they're all the same. The best "genre" films can illuminate some of the most important issues we deal with as human beings (Children of Men), while even the most ostensibly serious films can trivialize those issues and waste the audience's time (The White Ribbon, which one critic aptly described as an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a Ph.D.). Let them all contend on the same field, and may the best picture win.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Why Nothing Works
The anthropologist Marvin Harris was a developer and proponent of cultural materialism, a theory that emphasizes factors of production and demographics in the analysis of social phenomena. While this may sound somewhat esoteric, its main implication is fairly simple. It is the infrastructure of everyday life, the methods of producing goods and services, and the pattern of economic relationships in a society that determine that society's attitudes, beliefs, and ideology...and not, as we often assume, the other way around. Most often, a culture conforms its ideas to its conditions as a way of explaining and coping with them. Harris' popular book Why Nothing Works, published in the 1980s, dealt with the rapid changes in American social life following World War II and tried to explain, among other things, feminism, the gay rights movement, increasing crime rates, inflation, cults, fundamentalism, and the decline of marriage and the single-income family.
Harris' theory stands in contrast to some conservative modes of analysis, which tend to privilege (or vilify) abstract ideas as the source of social change. For example, champions of "family values" see the 1960s as a true pivot point in the history of American domestic life. In this reading, the change in mindset brought about by the feminist movement caused women to leave the home and pursue careers, which in turn had various detrimental consequences for children and society. Harris points out, however, that the entry of women into the workforce actually preceded the women's liberation movement by at least a decade. Women went to work for other, more mundane reasons and developed a theory of equality and liberation as a response to the new problems they faced. In Harris' view, most of the changes in American life in the last few generations can be explained by the increasingly dominant influence of corporate monopolies (or oligopolies) and government bureaucracy.
The question then arises, who is right? Did Harris find the real answer in economics? Or are there deeper forces at work, as reactionaries would have it, like the loss of religious faith or a general "moral decline?" As convincing as much of Harris' argument is, there is still something compelling about the thought that ideas matter in and of themselves. If we can shape our own ideas, and in turn shape the world with them, we are empowered. If our ideas are simply a function of technology and convention, we are reduced.
To begin with, Harris has some things in common with conservatives. Although he sees feminism as an understandable (and perhaps inevitable) response to certain economic realities, it doesn't follow that the two-income family is entirely a good thing. In fact, Harris sees the employment of married females as an adjustment to the increasing power of large corporations and increasing economic pressure on employees. To the extent that the women's movement compensated for this shift in power by winning more equal treatment, it was beneficial. But at the same time it also served to entrench and legitimize the forces that drove women out of the home in the first place, often against their preference. In this sense it has actually left women, and workers generally, with less power and fewer options. Thus Harris stands somewhat apart from political feminism. And while he borrows the Marxian emphasis on factors of production, he does not seem to be an ideological Marxist. In Why Nothing Works he explicitly rejects the post-modern agenda, which is based on Marxist critical theory. Indeed, he devoted his final work, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, to denouncing the political effects of post-modernism.
To the second generation Marxists who laid the groundwork for post-modernist theory, ideology was of course all important. With his concepts of quiet revolution and the long march through the institutions, Antonio Gramsci located the battlefield squarely in the ideological realm. Economic change was the goal, but cultural change had to come first. Christianity was particularly an obstacle, as Gramsci wrote, because the civilized world had been saturated with it for 2000 years. If only because of the sense of continuity it provided, religion was a kind of immune system against radical change.
On the other side we find those I'll label as traditionalists, opponents of political correctness, Marxism, feminism, etc. They are mostly religious and conservative in the broad sense and are often, but not always, identified with the political right. They agree with post-modernists on one essential point, which is the importance of ideology and especially religion. They would look with suspicion at Harris' thesis that big business is to blame for social chaos (though it should be mentioned that Harris also includes big government monopolies as part of the problem, a point that would likely draw some selective agreement). Instead, traditionalists blame the leftists who claimed to have planned capitalism's demise. As the communist activist Willi Münzenberg put it, "We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks." Where Harris asks a series of questions and finds corporate oligopoly as the answer to each--why nothing works, why the help won't help you, why America changed--traditionalists would instead find a lack of spiritual sense, right morality, and respect for authority both human and divine. To them, a declining economy is the direct and visible result of the West's broken immune system.
So, back to the question of who's right. There is potentially a lot of common ground between the traditionalist approach and Harris' materialistic analysis. If religion is our society's immune system, and the immune system is weakened, this is certainly a significant fact, just as a weakened immune system in a medical patient is significant in all kinds of ways. An observation of compromised immunity, however, is not the same as a diagnosis. It remains to be discovered what is actually causing the disease and by what mechanism. It seems plausible that faith gives a us a certain amount of immunity from the vagaries of economic life. That is to say, it's plausible that a more spiritual people might also be more civil despite the growing influence of impersonal corporations and bureaucracies. Yet it's doubtless also true that our economic infrastructure affects our character, and that the effects are at least somewhat predictable.
Of course this all begs the question of what role religion plays in sustaining morality and civility, whether it is a necessary role, and how exactly it works if it works at all. These are issues I plan to visit in a later post. They're beyond the scope of a book like Why Nothing Works, which shouldn't be understood as offering any answers to "why" questions of the philosophical sort. But Harris certainly does offer insight into what doesn't work, or perhaps how nothing works. If anything, his answers seem even more valid after 25 years.
Harris' theory stands in contrast to some conservative modes of analysis, which tend to privilege (or vilify) abstract ideas as the source of social change. For example, champions of "family values" see the 1960s as a true pivot point in the history of American domestic life. In this reading, the change in mindset brought about by the feminist movement caused women to leave the home and pursue careers, which in turn had various detrimental consequences for children and society. Harris points out, however, that the entry of women into the workforce actually preceded the women's liberation movement by at least a decade. Women went to work for other, more mundane reasons and developed a theory of equality and liberation as a response to the new problems they faced. In Harris' view, most of the changes in American life in the last few generations can be explained by the increasingly dominant influence of corporate monopolies (or oligopolies) and government bureaucracy.
The question then arises, who is right? Did Harris find the real answer in economics? Or are there deeper forces at work, as reactionaries would have it, like the loss of religious faith or a general "moral decline?" As convincing as much of Harris' argument is, there is still something compelling about the thought that ideas matter in and of themselves. If we can shape our own ideas, and in turn shape the world with them, we are empowered. If our ideas are simply a function of technology and convention, we are reduced.
To begin with, Harris has some things in common with conservatives. Although he sees feminism as an understandable (and perhaps inevitable) response to certain economic realities, it doesn't follow that the two-income family is entirely a good thing. In fact, Harris sees the employment of married females as an adjustment to the increasing power of large corporations and increasing economic pressure on employees. To the extent that the women's movement compensated for this shift in power by winning more equal treatment, it was beneficial. But at the same time it also served to entrench and legitimize the forces that drove women out of the home in the first place, often against their preference. In this sense it has actually left women, and workers generally, with less power and fewer options. Thus Harris stands somewhat apart from political feminism. And while he borrows the Marxian emphasis on factors of production, he does not seem to be an ideological Marxist. In Why Nothing Works he explicitly rejects the post-modern agenda, which is based on Marxist critical theory. Indeed, he devoted his final work, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, to denouncing the political effects of post-modernism.
To the second generation Marxists who laid the groundwork for post-modernist theory, ideology was of course all important. With his concepts of quiet revolution and the long march through the institutions, Antonio Gramsci located the battlefield squarely in the ideological realm. Economic change was the goal, but cultural change had to come first. Christianity was particularly an obstacle, as Gramsci wrote, because the civilized world had been saturated with it for 2000 years. If only because of the sense of continuity it provided, religion was a kind of immune system against radical change.
On the other side we find those I'll label as traditionalists, opponents of political correctness, Marxism, feminism, etc. They are mostly religious and conservative in the broad sense and are often, but not always, identified with the political right. They agree with post-modernists on one essential point, which is the importance of ideology and especially religion. They would look with suspicion at Harris' thesis that big business is to blame for social chaos (though it should be mentioned that Harris also includes big government monopolies as part of the problem, a point that would likely draw some selective agreement). Instead, traditionalists blame the leftists who claimed to have planned capitalism's demise. As the communist activist Willi Münzenberg put it, "We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks." Where Harris asks a series of questions and finds corporate oligopoly as the answer to each--why nothing works, why the help won't help you, why America changed--traditionalists would instead find a lack of spiritual sense, right morality, and respect for authority both human and divine. To them, a declining economy is the direct and visible result of the West's broken immune system.
So, back to the question of who's right. There is potentially a lot of common ground between the traditionalist approach and Harris' materialistic analysis. If religion is our society's immune system, and the immune system is weakened, this is certainly a significant fact, just as a weakened immune system in a medical patient is significant in all kinds of ways. An observation of compromised immunity, however, is not the same as a diagnosis. It remains to be discovered what is actually causing the disease and by what mechanism. It seems plausible that faith gives a us a certain amount of immunity from the vagaries of economic life. That is to say, it's plausible that a more spiritual people might also be more civil despite the growing influence of impersonal corporations and bureaucracies. Yet it's doubtless also true that our economic infrastructure affects our character, and that the effects are at least somewhat predictable.
Of course this all begs the question of what role religion plays in sustaining morality and civility, whether it is a necessary role, and how exactly it works if it works at all. These are issues I plan to visit in a later post. They're beyond the scope of a book like Why Nothing Works, which shouldn't be understood as offering any answers to "why" questions of the philosophical sort. But Harris certainly does offer insight into what doesn't work, or perhaps how nothing works. If anything, his answers seem even more valid after 25 years.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Winter's Bone
Winter’s Bone, directed by Debra Granik and based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl named Ree Dolly who lives in the Ozark Mountain region of southern Missouri. Ree’s father, a methamphetamine manufacturer, has signed away the family’s land for his bail bond and then disappeared, leaving her to take care of her incapacitated mother and two younger siblings. To keep from losing the land, Ree must find him before his court date, but she finds herself opposed by her own extended family as her investigation touches on closely guarded secrets.
The story is a sharp observation of what might be called rural decay. Most obviously, it could be taken as a cautionary tale about how the drug trade ruins families and communities. The film wisely does not foreclose this reading, since it is true as far as it goes. Winter’s Bone goes deeper, however, avoiding a simplistic “blame the drugs” message and touching on a number of related issues that ought to be considered.
The 2007 documentary American Drug War: The Last White Hope described a community that was similar in many ways—Compton, California during the height of the “crack epidemic.” Hysteria over that particular form of cocaine led to the enactment of notoriously harsh laws, some of which are only now beginning to be reformed. The war against crack had predictably harsh consequences for black communities like Compton, where lifelong residents were driven away. Their properties were quickly snapped up and later resold as a new, gentrified community emerged. Today, many people whose families lived there for generations can scarcely dream of affording a house in Compton.
Too often scenarios like this are dismissed as symptoms of a characteristically African-American problem. As the story goes, young black men without good role models are drawn into the drug trade by the lure of easy money. Others condone their behavior or at least turn a blind eye. Without family values and a strong work ethic, a sense of entitlement prevails, and the community pays the price as a result. We can hope that the subculture will change for the better, but ultimately there’s nothing we can do since everyone is responsible for their own actions and decisions. Case closed.
This has long been the mainstream attitude toward black communities plagued by unemployment. Winter’s Bone presents us with a white community in very much the same circumstances responding in very much the same way. Other than the drug business, few opportunities exist. The best option is the military, and indeed the film portrays the public school as little more than an intake facility for the Army. But parents (especially single parents), would-be entrepreneurs, those with an independent bent, or anyone who wants to stay close to home for whatever reason may well find that choice unworkable.
As in Compton, there is a great deal of potential value in the land that the families own. Here the value is not in location but in timber. And as always, wealthy interests are ready and waiting to buy up the property forfeited by the ne’er-do-wells. As Ree’s uncle warns her, they’ll cut down a hundred years’ growth in a matter of weeks when her father misses his court date. Best to have it done right away if she wants a share in it.
The film shows a culture in which family loyalty has almost completely died and been replaced by a gangster code of conduct. It's a transformation far too deep and too frightening to have been accomplished by home-cooked stimulants alone. In urban black communities it was accomplished by powerful institutions, both private and public, that disregarded human values and wrote off unemployment, crime, and poverty as externalities of business. In Winter's Bone, we see the same disregard at work in a different setting. We're left with no excuse to continue believing it's someone else's problem.
The story is a sharp observation of what might be called rural decay. Most obviously, it could be taken as a cautionary tale about how the drug trade ruins families and communities. The film wisely does not foreclose this reading, since it is true as far as it goes. Winter’s Bone goes deeper, however, avoiding a simplistic “blame the drugs” message and touching on a number of related issues that ought to be considered.
The 2007 documentary American Drug War: The Last White Hope described a community that was similar in many ways—Compton, California during the height of the “crack epidemic.” Hysteria over that particular form of cocaine led to the enactment of notoriously harsh laws, some of which are only now beginning to be reformed. The war against crack had predictably harsh consequences for black communities like Compton, where lifelong residents were driven away. Their properties were quickly snapped up and later resold as a new, gentrified community emerged. Today, many people whose families lived there for generations can scarcely dream of affording a house in Compton.
Too often scenarios like this are dismissed as symptoms of a characteristically African-American problem. As the story goes, young black men without good role models are drawn into the drug trade by the lure of easy money. Others condone their behavior or at least turn a blind eye. Without family values and a strong work ethic, a sense of entitlement prevails, and the community pays the price as a result. We can hope that the subculture will change for the better, but ultimately there’s nothing we can do since everyone is responsible for their own actions and decisions. Case closed.
This has long been the mainstream attitude toward black communities plagued by unemployment. Winter’s Bone presents us with a white community in very much the same circumstances responding in very much the same way. Other than the drug business, few opportunities exist. The best option is the military, and indeed the film portrays the public school as little more than an intake facility for the Army. But parents (especially single parents), would-be entrepreneurs, those with an independent bent, or anyone who wants to stay close to home for whatever reason may well find that choice unworkable.
As in Compton, there is a great deal of potential value in the land that the families own. Here the value is not in location but in timber. And as always, wealthy interests are ready and waiting to buy up the property forfeited by the ne’er-do-wells. As Ree’s uncle warns her, they’ll cut down a hundred years’ growth in a matter of weeks when her father misses his court date. Best to have it done right away if she wants a share in it.
The film shows a culture in which family loyalty has almost completely died and been replaced by a gangster code of conduct. It's a transformation far too deep and too frightening to have been accomplished by home-cooked stimulants alone. In urban black communities it was accomplished by powerful institutions, both private and public, that disregarded human values and wrote off unemployment, crime, and poverty as externalities of business. In Winter's Bone, we see the same disregard at work in a different setting. We're left with no excuse to continue believing it's someone else's problem.
Democracy And Coke
A common myth holds that when Coca-Cola was first invented, the recipe included not only caffeine but also another stimulant called cocaine. This ingredient is what gave the drink its name, and it’s the reason why today the two products are both known as “coke” (or “Coke,” depending on whether you’re referring to the illegal or the legal substance).
Like a surprising number of myths, this one happens to be quite true. Cocaine was legally available in the 1880s, when Coca-Cola was introduced, and the soft drink originally contained a significant dose. It still contains coca flavoring extracted from the same leaves that yield the drug, but except for trace amounts that may linger in the flavor extract, the name on the can is all that remains of the original ingredient. This doesn’t stop us from referring to Coke Classic as the original Coke, which is understandable enough. Cocaine was removed from the recipe in the early 1900s. Coke Classic is the “original” as opposed to New Coke, which was introduced about 100 years after the real original.
Coca-Cola is perhaps the supreme corporate symbol of free markets and the American way of life. Only McDonald’s arguably stands ahead of it. When a smiling Arab or African or Latin American child holds a can of Coke and poses for a photograph, the image says all that needs to be said about America’s relationship with the world. We export joy and vitality, and deep down, everyone wants to buy.
Of course many cannot afford to emulate our lifestyle. Luckily, we have the formula for prosperity as well as refreshment. That formula is, of course, democracy. It’s the type of government that has made us what we are, and it’s primarily the lack of democratic values and institutions that mires the Third World in violence and poverty. So serious is this lack that it is in our vital interest, as well as everyone else’s, to liberate those people who don’t yet have democracy. Coke, McDonald’s, Apple, and the like are all symbols of our mission. Where they go freedom follows, and indeed, it already has a foothold.
As a physical substance, Coke is relatively easy to define, although as we’ve seen even that definition is somewhat complicated. Not surprisingly, the idea of democracy turns out to be even more problematic. It’s generally understood as a type of government in which the people choose leaders to represent their interests and limit the state’s power through laws and a constitution. It stands in opposition to dictatorship, for example, in which an executive holds power indefinitely, or the police state, in which there is no due process.
One would expect the history of American involvement in the Third World to show a pattern of support for democracy and opposition to dictatorships and police states. Interestingly, the actual pattern is somewhat the opposite. Since at least 1953, when we helped the British overthrow the government of Iran, the United States has tended to oppose rather than support democratic movements. The pattern has continued even through the occupation of Iraq, as we found ourselves attacking elements of the elected parliament that refused to vote our way on the question of oil interests. Our arch-enemy, Al Qaeda, has its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical organization formerly nurtured by Western powers as a counter to emerging nationalist (read democratic) trends. Hamas was nurtured in the same way for the same reasons, until we and Israel decided they had become too powerful and suddenly threw our support to their nationalist rivals. It remains to be seen how long that support will last if Fatah threatens to make any significant gains on behalf of its constituency.
While claiming to promote democracy, mostly by military conquest, the US seems to work tirelessly against actual populist movements and in favor of despots who cater to our interests. Nor can this be explained on the grounds that the populists are radical Islamic fundamentalists; in fact we’ve shown that we’ll even support the fundamentalists rather than risk ceding our influence to the popular will.
What then is the relationship between the kind of democracy we export and our signature brand, the red and white Coke can? A few parallels come to mind. Both are aggressively “marketed.” Neither contains what its name suggests. And in both cases the substance advertised is not only not being offered, it’s being actively suppressed, largely because it’s considered too dangerous in the hands of non-whites. “Democracy” still functions as a brand name, its associated good will providing a sense of continuity with the best of our civic values. But the content of the brand has changed. Instead of representative government, liberty, or the rule of law, it now means simply this—compliance with American wishes. Call it New Democracy, or if you’re a bit more savvy and audacious, perhaps Democracy Classic. But whatever you do, make sure you don’t get caught peddling any unapproved substitutes.
Like a surprising number of myths, this one happens to be quite true. Cocaine was legally available in the 1880s, when Coca-Cola was introduced, and the soft drink originally contained a significant dose. It still contains coca flavoring extracted from the same leaves that yield the drug, but except for trace amounts that may linger in the flavor extract, the name on the can is all that remains of the original ingredient. This doesn’t stop us from referring to Coke Classic as the original Coke, which is understandable enough. Cocaine was removed from the recipe in the early 1900s. Coke Classic is the “original” as opposed to New Coke, which was introduced about 100 years after the real original.
Coca-Cola is perhaps the supreme corporate symbol of free markets and the American way of life. Only McDonald’s arguably stands ahead of it. When a smiling Arab or African or Latin American child holds a can of Coke and poses for a photograph, the image says all that needs to be said about America’s relationship with the world. We export joy and vitality, and deep down, everyone wants to buy.
Of course many cannot afford to emulate our lifestyle. Luckily, we have the formula for prosperity as well as refreshment. That formula is, of course, democracy. It’s the type of government that has made us what we are, and it’s primarily the lack of democratic values and institutions that mires the Third World in violence and poverty. So serious is this lack that it is in our vital interest, as well as everyone else’s, to liberate those people who don’t yet have democracy. Coke, McDonald’s, Apple, and the like are all symbols of our mission. Where they go freedom follows, and indeed, it already has a foothold.
As a physical substance, Coke is relatively easy to define, although as we’ve seen even that definition is somewhat complicated. Not surprisingly, the idea of democracy turns out to be even more problematic. It’s generally understood as a type of government in which the people choose leaders to represent their interests and limit the state’s power through laws and a constitution. It stands in opposition to dictatorship, for example, in which an executive holds power indefinitely, or the police state, in which there is no due process.
One would expect the history of American involvement in the Third World to show a pattern of support for democracy and opposition to dictatorships and police states. Interestingly, the actual pattern is somewhat the opposite. Since at least 1953, when we helped the British overthrow the government of Iran, the United States has tended to oppose rather than support democratic movements. The pattern has continued even through the occupation of Iraq, as we found ourselves attacking elements of the elected parliament that refused to vote our way on the question of oil interests. Our arch-enemy, Al Qaeda, has its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical organization formerly nurtured by Western powers as a counter to emerging nationalist (read democratic) trends. Hamas was nurtured in the same way for the same reasons, until we and Israel decided they had become too powerful and suddenly threw our support to their nationalist rivals. It remains to be seen how long that support will last if Fatah threatens to make any significant gains on behalf of its constituency.
While claiming to promote democracy, mostly by military conquest, the US seems to work tirelessly against actual populist movements and in favor of despots who cater to our interests. Nor can this be explained on the grounds that the populists are radical Islamic fundamentalists; in fact we’ve shown that we’ll even support the fundamentalists rather than risk ceding our influence to the popular will.
What then is the relationship between the kind of democracy we export and our signature brand, the red and white Coke can? A few parallels come to mind. Both are aggressively “marketed.” Neither contains what its name suggests. And in both cases the substance advertised is not only not being offered, it’s being actively suppressed, largely because it’s considered too dangerous in the hands of non-whites. “Democracy” still functions as a brand name, its associated good will providing a sense of continuity with the best of our civic values. But the content of the brand has changed. Instead of representative government, liberty, or the rule of law, it now means simply this—compliance with American wishes. Call it New Democracy, or if you’re a bit more savvy and audacious, perhaps Democracy Classic. But whatever you do, make sure you don’t get caught peddling any unapproved substitutes.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Welcome
This is my first post written specifically for the new blog. For the previous entries, I've imported some posts from social sites over the last few years and dated them according to when they were written. I hope many old and new friends will enjoy reading here.
Why the name "Marxa~Cola," especially for a blog written by a non-Marxian? I hope it will serve as a hint to some of the issues that interest me. I hope it's catchy. Most of all, I hope it suggests contradiction. It was chosen because it's problematic. The older I get and the more I learn, the more questions I have and the more difficult it is to apply political labels. I see this as a good thing. In some ways I've gotten more "conservative," in other ways more "liberal." Part of what I'd like to do is challenge others to question the labels they apply to themselves.
I don't mean to say that categories are useless, or that all values are relative. But what seems important to me, before anything else, is to know the nature of the paradigm through which one views the world. Is it fashioned from experience and observation, or was it fabricated for sale and picked up from a shelf like any other item offered for consumption? Do we engage with the ideas that make us who we are, perhaps even participate in fashioning them, or do we merely pay our money and put them on?
Most of all, I'm interested in the unthinkable, the outdated, the yet-to-be-tried, that which is not worthy of consideration. Most problems have unworkable, discarded solutions that are buried in footnotes and warrant no more than a blank stare or perhaps a polite shrug on the rare occasions when they are mentioned at all. It seems to me that the more contentious and confusing our times, the more likely it is that these solutions are the right ones. I hope you'll feel free to challenge my solutions and offer new ones of your own.
Why the name "Marxa~Cola," especially for a blog written by a non-Marxian? I hope it will serve as a hint to some of the issues that interest me. I hope it's catchy. Most of all, I hope it suggests contradiction. It was chosen because it's problematic. The older I get and the more I learn, the more questions I have and the more difficult it is to apply political labels. I see this as a good thing. In some ways I've gotten more "conservative," in other ways more "liberal." Part of what I'd like to do is challenge others to question the labels they apply to themselves.
I don't mean to say that categories are useless, or that all values are relative. But what seems important to me, before anything else, is to know the nature of the paradigm through which one views the world. Is it fashioned from experience and observation, or was it fabricated for sale and picked up from a shelf like any other item offered for consumption? Do we engage with the ideas that make us who we are, perhaps even participate in fashioning them, or do we merely pay our money and put them on?
Most of all, I'm interested in the unthinkable, the outdated, the yet-to-be-tried, that which is not worthy of consideration. Most problems have unworkable, discarded solutions that are buried in footnotes and warrant no more than a blank stare or perhaps a polite shrug on the rare occasions when they are mentioned at all. It seems to me that the more contentious and confusing our times, the more likely it is that these solutions are the right ones. I hope you'll feel free to challenge my solutions and offer new ones of your own.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
If We Cared About Narcotics Trafficking
This is a response to Mark Osler's interesting new take on the drug war. He suggests that if we really want to cripple the drug industry we should stop attacking its labor source, which is limitless, and instead focus on depriving it of capital.
I agree that we need to bring our drug policy into line with the best of our core values, but I don’t think this is the way to do it. There are other, darker values at work here, and I think we eventually will have to revisit our most basic assumptions about drug use and see those values for what they are. Many people are rightly concerned about the disproportionate effect that mass incarceration has on minority communities. We shouldn’t mistake this for some unfortunate by-product of drug criminalization, however. Instead we should recognize it as one of the policy’s raisons d'être. In that light, targeting cheap labor makes a lot more sense. The Harrison Narcotics Act originated in the belief that marijuana would cause black men to "step on a white man's shadow" or to "look at a white woman twice." Opium laws were a response to the flood of Chinese immigrants who were seen to threaten American jobs. Harassing labor, minorities, and the poor was always the real point, anyway. Mainstream America’s alarmist notions about the drugs themselves followed from our fear of minorities and, especially since the 60s, our fear of political dissidents.
Likewise, the benefits reaped by Third World dictators are not entirely contrary to our policy goals. Those who benefit may be in the “friendly” class of thugs because they oppose communism or terrorism or because they otherwise cooperate with our business interests. In those cases, turning a blind eye to the drug trade is a good way to prop up our friends without officially including them in the budget. It’s only the “unfriendly” ones that we want to target seriously, so in that sense the drug war is a policy tool more than a law enforcement agenda. Osler's proposed solution is especially complicated by the fact that, as in the case of Manuel Noriega, the good guys and the bad guys may be the same people at different times. The question which is which depends on other factors that often have nothing to do with drugs, public health, or any domestic issue at all.
To make matters worse, even the legitimate economy depends to some extent on the drug trade. There’s evidence that drug money may have saved the international banking system from failure in 2008 by providing crucial liquidity during the financial crisis. This is hardly surprising; an industry so big can’t exist in a vacuum. As long as all that money is working to support the economy, it’s at least serving some productive purpose. The consequences of diverting it directly to law enforcement would be unpredictable at best, and more than a little frightening. I don’t relish the idea of a federal police force with an extra $100 billion a year on its hands casting about for something to do in order to justify its existence.
While it is true that drug abuse undermines families and productivity, the same can be said of alcohol abuse. We learned that prohibition undermines them more, and we should take the same lesson here. The law may define anyone who self-medicates with a controlled substance as an abuser, but we should be careful not to confuse the law with the facts. Clinically speaking, narcotics are no more pernicious than alcohol. They’re actually less addictive and less damaging physiologically. If you ask most people which drug is so addictive that withdrawal can kill you, most will say it’s heroin. The correct answer is not heroin, but alcohol. Facts like these need to become part of the public’s perspective in this debate.
As for productivity, I question the assumption that we should use the criminal law to maximize it. It strikes me as a direly Puritanical idea. But assuming we should, the truth is that narcotics are not necessarily incompatible with productivity. Look at Freud, for example. One can agree or disagree with his ideas, but a quick glance at his collected works on the library shelf is enough to show that he at least had a lot of them. As heretical as it sounds, productive drug users are the norm rather than the exception. The basket cases typically encountered by lawyers and doctors in the course of their work aren’t representative. In fact, they’re part of a group that’s self-selected for pathology.
My solution? If we really want to help the communities that are most damaged by drug activity, we should simply acknowledge that there’s a market for narcotics and bring that market into the open. Our inability to do this depends, I think, on the retributive instinct that Osler talks about. I’ll offer an analogy that I've found instructive. Opiates, as we know, are a family of prescription drugs related to heroin. They include codeine and morphine, and they’re among the oldest and safest painkillers known to humans. They also have the drawback of lending themselves to addiction, which we all know leads to disaster. Generally speaking, though, even ongoing use of opiates doesn’t kill people or create serious health issues. Drug manufacturers have solved this problem by adding Tylenol to most prescription opiates. Tylenol’s effectiveness as a painkiller is negligible compared to that of codeine, but unlike codeine it is highly toxic to the liver and will kill you fairly quickly if you overuse it. This is what’s known as a strategy for “preventing addiction.”
Our whole drug policy is a version of the same strategy. Our prejudices (against people and ideas, not just substances) have told us that drugs would destroy us as a society. Rather than giving up our prejudices, we’ve found a way to make it so.
I agree that we need to bring our drug policy into line with the best of our core values, but I don’t think this is the way to do it. There are other, darker values at work here, and I think we eventually will have to revisit our most basic assumptions about drug use and see those values for what they are. Many people are rightly concerned about the disproportionate effect that mass incarceration has on minority communities. We shouldn’t mistake this for some unfortunate by-product of drug criminalization, however. Instead we should recognize it as one of the policy’s raisons d'être. In that light, targeting cheap labor makes a lot more sense. The Harrison Narcotics Act originated in the belief that marijuana would cause black men to "step on a white man's shadow" or to "look at a white woman twice." Opium laws were a response to the flood of Chinese immigrants who were seen to threaten American jobs. Harassing labor, minorities, and the poor was always the real point, anyway. Mainstream America’s alarmist notions about the drugs themselves followed from our fear of minorities and, especially since the 60s, our fear of political dissidents.
Likewise, the benefits reaped by Third World dictators are not entirely contrary to our policy goals. Those who benefit may be in the “friendly” class of thugs because they oppose communism or terrorism or because they otherwise cooperate with our business interests. In those cases, turning a blind eye to the drug trade is a good way to prop up our friends without officially including them in the budget. It’s only the “unfriendly” ones that we want to target seriously, so in that sense the drug war is a policy tool more than a law enforcement agenda. Osler's proposed solution is especially complicated by the fact that, as in the case of Manuel Noriega, the good guys and the bad guys may be the same people at different times. The question which is which depends on other factors that often have nothing to do with drugs, public health, or any domestic issue at all.
To make matters worse, even the legitimate economy depends to some extent on the drug trade. There’s evidence that drug money may have saved the international banking system from failure in 2008 by providing crucial liquidity during the financial crisis. This is hardly surprising; an industry so big can’t exist in a vacuum. As long as all that money is working to support the economy, it’s at least serving some productive purpose. The consequences of diverting it directly to law enforcement would be unpredictable at best, and more than a little frightening. I don’t relish the idea of a federal police force with an extra $100 billion a year on its hands casting about for something to do in order to justify its existence.
While it is true that drug abuse undermines families and productivity, the same can be said of alcohol abuse. We learned that prohibition undermines them more, and we should take the same lesson here. The law may define anyone who self-medicates with a controlled substance as an abuser, but we should be careful not to confuse the law with the facts. Clinically speaking, narcotics are no more pernicious than alcohol. They’re actually less addictive and less damaging physiologically. If you ask most people which drug is so addictive that withdrawal can kill you, most will say it’s heroin. The correct answer is not heroin, but alcohol. Facts like these need to become part of the public’s perspective in this debate.
As for productivity, I question the assumption that we should use the criminal law to maximize it. It strikes me as a direly Puritanical idea. But assuming we should, the truth is that narcotics are not necessarily incompatible with productivity. Look at Freud, for example. One can agree or disagree with his ideas, but a quick glance at his collected works on the library shelf is enough to show that he at least had a lot of them. As heretical as it sounds, productive drug users are the norm rather than the exception. The basket cases typically encountered by lawyers and doctors in the course of their work aren’t representative. In fact, they’re part of a group that’s self-selected for pathology.
My solution? If we really want to help the communities that are most damaged by drug activity, we should simply acknowledge that there’s a market for narcotics and bring that market into the open. Our inability to do this depends, I think, on the retributive instinct that Osler talks about. I’ll offer an analogy that I've found instructive. Opiates, as we know, are a family of prescription drugs related to heroin. They include codeine and morphine, and they’re among the oldest and safest painkillers known to humans. They also have the drawback of lending themselves to addiction, which we all know leads to disaster. Generally speaking, though, even ongoing use of opiates doesn’t kill people or create serious health issues. Drug manufacturers have solved this problem by adding Tylenol to most prescription opiates. Tylenol’s effectiveness as a painkiller is negligible compared to that of codeine, but unlike codeine it is highly toxic to the liver and will kill you fairly quickly if you overuse it. This is what’s known as a strategy for “preventing addiction.”
Our whole drug policy is a version of the same strategy. Our prejudices (against people and ideas, not just substances) have told us that drugs would destroy us as a society. Rather than giving up our prejudices, we’ve found a way to make it so.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Scream 4
The 2006 documentary Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film expresses a bit of common wisdom that seems to be accepted by horror fans and critics. The most successful horror movies, it is believed, do more than tap into general, universal fears. They also exploit fears that are specific to their time and place. So, for example, the sci-fi monster films of the 50s and 60s were about Cold War paranoia and nuclear weapons. Later films dealt with generational conflict, economic distress, and so on.
The original Scream, written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Wes Craven, is famous for its slyly self-referential quality, which inoculated it from certain criticisms about its plot and gave young, sophisticated audiences an excuse to buy into it. Craven and Williamson created a new type of slasher villain for a new generation of viewers. Unlike the killers in earlier films, those in Scream are not crazy or abnormal in any way that’s easy to identify. They’re just two high school kids, apparently happy and good-natured, who kill for no reason. Motive, as one character in the film points out, is incidental. Scream came out three years before the Columbine massacre, but it’s hard not to think about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold when you watch the film now. Like Harris, the killers in Scream have the true psychopathic gift for lying and charming their way out of trouble in order to appear normal.
Scream 4, released 11 years after the third installment, is the first really satisfying sequel to the original. Scream 2 and Scream 3, though not without merit, were mostly forgettable pot-boilers that veered too far into the ridiculous. Granted, the story necessarily becomes less plausible with each installment, and this one is no exception. Unlike the previous two, however, the new film eschews contrived revenge motives and gets back to what was disturbing about the original, albeit with a twist. Pure psychopathy is once again the driving force, but Scream 4 traces a link to the relatively common narcissism that exists on the other end of the anti-social spectrum. It suggests that mass media are at least partly to blame for nudging the villain's psyche toward violence. Like in some of the classic horror films of past decades, there's an element of social critique here. Without giving too much away, one could say the killer is a kind of post-modern capitalist who seeks to market the appearance of Sidney Prescott's victimhood without the substance.
More than any of the other Scream films, this one takes on the issue of media-driven violence directly. In doing so, it practically dares any Ghostface wannabes in the audience to imitate it. With each chapter, more and more critics complain that the filmmakers seem tired of horror, that the films' running commentary on themselves is an expression of hatred for the genre and the audience. This is where the critics get it absolutely wrong, I think. Because Craven and Williamson understand that post-modern audiences are more emotionally distant from what's being signified on screen, they understand the need to implicate those audiences in the action. And because the audience believes itself to be skeptical and more attentive to the signifier than the signified, the films have to address them where they are in order to involve them. An obvious example is the opening of Scream 2, where the killer attacks his victims in a movie theater while they're watching a fictional horror film based on the "real" events in the preceding film. Scream 4 goes furthest of all, implicating us not only as victims but also as voyeurs and therefore, it suggests, as villains.
It's an open question whether today's horror audiences really are as skeptical and as attentive to the techniques of the medium as we imagine. To me the Scream films suggest otherwise. Each one has some discussion of the rules by which horror films operate, with the suggestion that the characters (and the audience) can use these rules to their advantage and figure things out before they happen. This is tedious to some critics, who observe that tired conventions are no less tired for being pointed out. What's less often observed is that the Scream films don't really follow the rules that they trumpet. More often than not, their recognition of these "rules" is just another way of setting up expectations which they can then manipulate. The tactic is ingratiating in a way that plays well to a po-mo audience, but it's really no different from what horror films have always done. The cool thing is that it still works. Whatever others may believe, I imagine this pleases a venerable scare-meister like Craven quite a bit.
The other big question, at least for a lot of non-horror fans, is why anyone would want to subject themselves to all of this. As they usually put it, "Why do you pay money to be scared?" Stephen King explains that horror films confront us with the most unpleasant realities--there exist pain, suffering, even cruelty, we're all liable to be victims, and in any case we're all made of flesh and blood and destined to die. But in the end the movies also tell us that none of that is going to happen this time. The characters on screen may not have survived, but for now, we did. The comfort we get from horror, according to King, is in that little addendum.
Peter Straub sees another aspect, which he finds even more important than fear. According to him, the true defining emotions of the horror genre are grief and loss. Scream 4 explores these emotions in the main character, Sidney. At this point, after the events of the first three films, she is anything but fearful. She seems more sad than anything else, her demeanor recalling the scene in Scream 3 where she explores a haunting simulacrum of her childhood home on a movie set. Neve Campbell brings an unexpected gravitas to the role of the older Sidney, playing her as weary but somehow strangely empowered by her scars.
From my own perspective, the first thing I thought about when I walked out of the theater and into the daylight was my son, still struggling in intensive care three weeks after being born. My heart sank a little as I remembered that he'd had a setback and we were still waiting to find out how serious the complications were. I may have thought I was scared a few minutes earlier, but as I stepped back into real life, I knew that wasn't really true. What's inside the theater isn't what's scary. It's just a pretty good imitation, good enough to make you forget the real thing for a while. No doubt, a comedy or drama can also take your mind off things. But for me at least, I guess there's a special psychic zone reserved for anxiety, and perhaps the best way to drive it out is with a story that takes over and occupies the same zone. So, that's my explanation for why I pay to see horror movies. Contrary to what the question usually assumes, I'm paying money not to be scared...for a while.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
The One Percent, And What's Wrong With Milton Friedman
In keeping with my ongoing drift to the left side of economic issues, I recently watched Jamie Johnson's documentary The One Percent. The title refers to the small number of people who control about 40 percent of the country's wealth. The filmmaker's family, heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, are part of that small number. His father is also a former documentarian who, as a young man, ran afoul of his parents and their advisors by making a film about South Africa.
Jamie is young, and he's often unprepared to meet the arguments of the people he interviews in the film. Interestingly, his subjects go a long way to make up for his limitations. They're so defensive and paranoid, it's almost impossible not to believe he has a point. Warren Buffett's reaction is perhaps the most telling even though he doesn't appear in the film. Jamie meets and interviews his granddaughter Nicole instead, whereupon Buffett disowns her for her participation and writes a letter stating that she is not his real grandchild. Her twin sister is apparently still a genuine descendant, though.
The economist Milton Friedman sits for an interview and bullies Johnson rather ungracefully. Even he seems defensive, especially considering his credentials. He asks a question that sums up the right-libertarian response to the issue of income disparity--since the income of the poor is also increasing, what's the problem? Would it be better if wealth were more equally distributed but we all stayed poorer?
Anyone who knows Friedman has heard this argument a lot. I'd like to suggest that the answer is a qualified "yes." Given the choice Friedman posits, in some ways it would be better if incomes did not increase. Alexis de Tocqueville explained why. He noted that, contrary to what one might expect, low income is not always correlated with discontent or lack of public morality. Poorer societies may be happier while richer ones are full of turmoil. What causes conflict, according to Tocqueville, is not poverty but injustice or the perception of injustice. Most people are going to be angry when they get ripped off, even if they happen to get somewhat wealthier in the process. The more marginal the gains are, the angrier they're likely to be.
In a similar vein, Friedman points out that someone must always be lowest on the ladder. We must have someone to sell the french fries, mop the floors, and so on. It's hard to argue with this truism, as far as it goes. What Friedman doesn't address is the question of opportunity, meaning not just theoretical but actual opportunity to improve one's station. This is one of the essential elements that distinguish capitalist from pre-capitalist societies, which already had private property, the profit motive, and most of the other features that famously distinguish American capitalism from Soviet communism.
So, are we to assume that forced redistribution of wealth is the only solution? No. Like Friedman's question whether it would be better if we all stayed poor, this presents a false dichotomy. The One Percent happens to show an example of how redistributive policies actually create injustice--the Fanjul brothers. The Fanjuls are a pair of Florida sugar barons who have used government subsidies to shut out competition and become fabulously wealthy while seriously damaging the environment and getting taxpayers to cover the cost of cleaning it all up. Unfortunately, people like the Fanjuls aren't what most "libertarians" have in mind when they talk about cutting welfare.
Finally, a few words about the flatscreen high-definition TV. I mention it because this technology has become the poster boy for bad economic decisions by the lower classes. If you can afford a widescreen TV, why don't you have medical insurance, and how can you complain? On closer inspection, this argument is far from the truth. Given a choice between buying medical insurance for a family for two months and buying a TV that will last for ten years, anyone with any sense is going to buy the TV. My son was recently on a heart-lung bypass machine that was less technologically sophisticated than my TV, yet the procedure cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.
The TV should really be a poster boy for what's wrong with the system. Entertainment consistently gets cheaper while medical care gets more expensive. Many don't have insurance, and those who are lucky enough to have it are tied to their jobs and may have to forego other opportunities for fear of emergencies. That's not an environment that encourages creativity or entrepreneurship. In fact, it's not capitalism.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
The Politics Of The Self
I'm a political junky, but I try to handle my addiction with as much class as I can manage. In my college years, I was a bit like the clammy, unkempt junky who shoots up in public and ends up passed out on a park bench. Today I'm a somewhat less clammy, somewhat less unkempt junky with a professional life, so I've learned to indulge my habit more discreetly, as is fitting for secret vices.
Still, a part of me has always resented having to hide my lifestyle from others. It grates on me when people say politics is a private or personal thing. What could be less private than the business of the polis ("the city") or the res publica ("the republic," literally "the public thing")? Nena Eliasoph's fascinating book Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life goes a long way toward explaining how this came to be, and how we junkies came to be second-class citizens. Specifically, she notes an inversion of the public and private areas of discourse in recent decades. At the same time when politics has become a hush-hush topic, matters that used to be more private (e.g. sex, relationships, diseases, neuroses) have become mainstays of casual conversation. If you've ever been at a party and found your mind wandering while your hostess entertained the rest of the group with that droll anecdote about the time she accidentally sharted at work, you know what I'm talking about. And you might be a redneck...but I digress.
The question remains, why this inversion? A documentary film I saw recently, Adam Curtis' The Century of the Self, may provide a clue. It deals with the work of Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, who applied Freud's theories to marketing and advertising in the United States throughout most of the last century. The same theories were also applied to political campaigns since at least the late 1970s. In sum, American corporations and politicians systematically trained the public to base their political thinking on deeply rooted, and deeply personal, fears and desires. Most of these emotions are so profound that the individual isn't even consciously aware of them. That's why they're so powerful and at the same time so manipulable. Regardless of what one thinks of Freud as a philosopher or healer, the film does show some evidence that his theories worked as applied by Bernays.
I wonder whether the phenomenon described by Eliasoph in her book could be a side-effect of this conditioning, a consequence of redefining the political and the personal at an unconscious level. If politics is the business of the polis, then idio-tics can only be the business of the idios, that is, the self ("idiot," in Greek, being defined as "the private person, the layman, the ignorant"). No one wants to hear others go on about what are, after all, just their own idiosyncrasies. And it's all the more offensive, far more in fact, when they start questioning mine. Would this explain why people feel the need to guard their opinions like shameful secrets? Might it also explain why civilized disagreement and rational, productive debate seem to be less and less common?
Still, a part of me has always resented having to hide my lifestyle from others. It grates on me when people say politics is a private or personal thing. What could be less private than the business of the polis ("the city") or the res publica ("the republic," literally "the public thing")? Nena Eliasoph's fascinating book Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life goes a long way toward explaining how this came to be, and how we junkies came to be second-class citizens. Specifically, she notes an inversion of the public and private areas of discourse in recent decades. At the same time when politics has become a hush-hush topic, matters that used to be more private (e.g. sex, relationships, diseases, neuroses) have become mainstays of casual conversation. If you've ever been at a party and found your mind wandering while your hostess entertained the rest of the group with that droll anecdote about the time she accidentally sharted at work, you know what I'm talking about. And you might be a redneck...but I digress.
The question remains, why this inversion? A documentary film I saw recently, Adam Curtis' The Century of the Self, may provide a clue. It deals with the work of Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, who applied Freud's theories to marketing and advertising in the United States throughout most of the last century. The same theories were also applied to political campaigns since at least the late 1970s. In sum, American corporations and politicians systematically trained the public to base their political thinking on deeply rooted, and deeply personal, fears and desires. Most of these emotions are so profound that the individual isn't even consciously aware of them. That's why they're so powerful and at the same time so manipulable. Regardless of what one thinks of Freud as a philosopher or healer, the film does show some evidence that his theories worked as applied by Bernays.
I wonder whether the phenomenon described by Eliasoph in her book could be a side-effect of this conditioning, a consequence of redefining the political and the personal at an unconscious level. If politics is the business of the polis, then idio-tics can only be the business of the idios, that is, the self ("idiot," in Greek, being defined as "the private person, the layman, the ignorant"). No one wants to hear others go on about what are, after all, just their own idiosyncrasies. And it's all the more offensive, far more in fact, when they start questioning mine. Would this explain why people feel the need to guard their opinions like shameful secrets? Might it also explain why civilized disagreement and rational, productive debate seem to be less and less common?
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Scariest Thing About American Health Care
Last night I heard a story about a 57-year-old man who was visiting a relative at a local hospital and unfortunately had a heart attack while he was there. It happened around 11:00 PM while he was standing on the sidewalk just outside the door of the emergency room. Of course no one wants to have a heart attack, but if you're going to have one, this is probably one of the better places you could choose.
Or maybe not. When an employee discovered the man passed out in the bushes on her way in to work, she called the emergency room, identified herself, and asked for someone to bring out a wheelchair (she didn't try to move him herself because it's against hospital policy). After the receptionist lazily asked questions for several minutes (from 30 feet away) in order to assure herself that it wasn't a hoax, the employee was finally allowed in. There followed still more questions, an eventual call to the night watchman, and some confused haggling over who should find and haul out the wheelchair. After more than ten minutes, the ER staff at last made their weary way outside to pick up the patient...who was now dead.
Since I only heard this story because I know someone who was there, I have to wonder how often things like this happen. It reminded me of the excellent article "How American Health Care Killed My Father," in which the author, David Goldhill, talks about some of the built-in disincentives to excellence that exist in our health care industry. But as I talked to my friend who saw the whole thing, I also thought about another factor that's much simpler and more disturbing, at least for me. The whole half-assed endeavor was really just another example of the ubiquitous phenomenon that I've called post-modern capitalism--an economy based on goods (or services, in this case) that are designed for appearance rather than function. No doubt the hospital staff went home in the morning with their McGriddles and coffee feeling that they'd done their jobs. A life may not have been saved, but they had in fact staffed a hospital. What more do you want?
For me then, the scariest thing about American health care is that it's run by us Americans--the same people who run the DMV, the cable company, the fast food chain, and every other establishment where the employees treat you like a menace to their God-given sense of entitlement. Despite all the ideological battles over the merits of private vs. public enterprise, this is one thing they will always have in common. Some blame the government for our faults, some blame the capitalists, and some blame a lack of religious faith. I don't know all the answers. Everyone's probably right to some extent. The question is, how do you reform a system in which we all seem trained to think like cattle, going from the milker to the pasture and back again, with no sense of purpose and no concern for anything that may fall in our way?
Or maybe not. When an employee discovered the man passed out in the bushes on her way in to work, she called the emergency room, identified herself, and asked for someone to bring out a wheelchair (she didn't try to move him herself because it's against hospital policy). After the receptionist lazily asked questions for several minutes (from 30 feet away) in order to assure herself that it wasn't a hoax, the employee was finally allowed in. There followed still more questions, an eventual call to the night watchman, and some confused haggling over who should find and haul out the wheelchair. After more than ten minutes, the ER staff at last made their weary way outside to pick up the patient...who was now dead.
Since I only heard this story because I know someone who was there, I have to wonder how often things like this happen. It reminded me of the excellent article "How American Health Care Killed My Father," in which the author, David Goldhill, talks about some of the built-in disincentives to excellence that exist in our health care industry. But as I talked to my friend who saw the whole thing, I also thought about another factor that's much simpler and more disturbing, at least for me. The whole half-assed endeavor was really just another example of the ubiquitous phenomenon that I've called post-modern capitalism--an economy based on goods (or services, in this case) that are designed for appearance rather than function. No doubt the hospital staff went home in the morning with their McGriddles and coffee feeling that they'd done their jobs. A life may not have been saved, but they had in fact staffed a hospital. What more do you want?
For me then, the scariest thing about American health care is that it's run by us Americans--the same people who run the DMV, the cable company, the fast food chain, and every other establishment where the employees treat you like a menace to their God-given sense of entitlement. Despite all the ideological battles over the merits of private vs. public enterprise, this is one thing they will always have in common. Some blame the government for our faults, some blame the capitalists, and some blame a lack of religious faith. I don't know all the answers. Everyone's probably right to some extent. The question is, how do you reform a system in which we all seem trained to think like cattle, going from the milker to the pasture and back again, with no sense of purpose and no concern for anything that may fall in our way?
Sunday, January 3, 2010
The Twelve Days Of Christmas
I'm finding it a little sad that while it's only the tenth day of Christmas, decorations have already disappeared and there are no more parties to go to. So, in honor of my favorite season, I offer a new version of the beloved holiday song, rewritten for a more modern, more fiercely productive age.
On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me
A partridge in a pear tree.
On the second day of Christmas, we all went back to work.
The End.
Somehow it just doesn't have the same ring to it. But anyway...no post-holiday blues for me just yet, and I hope not for you, either. Merry Christmas, all!
Friday, December 18, 2009
Avatar
James Cameron is back for the first time, more or less, since 1997's Titanic. Among other things, Avatar is his way of trying to reclaim the art of movie-making for the movie theater. He spent his hiatus pondering the idea of audiences watching movies on cell phones, and he didn't like the implications. With Avatar, he proposes to raise 3-D film-making to a new level and bring something altogether different to the theater setting. I'm definitely in the Cameron fan club, so I had little doubt that he could accomplish this if anyone could. The results are mixed, in my opinion, but worth seeing. So...my thoughts.
The writing is the first thing about this movie that demands your attention, and not in a good way. Be warned, this isn't just the usual snarking that people always feel obligated to do with science fiction movies. It really is bad. This is especially surprising from Cameron, who normally stands head and shoulders above other genre writers. The dialogue in the early part of the film is so blatantly expositional that you wonder why the characters don't just drop all pretenses and talk straight to the camera. "This is the video log...we want to get in the habit of documenting, blah, blah, blah." The familiar Cameron characters are here--spunky female pilot, slimy corporate suit, belligerent jarhead--but the roles don't have much life in them. And for all the film's length, it seems too rushed to develop a detailed, lived-in world like the ones in Aliens and The Abyss. Overall, it doesn't play like a Cameron film.
As for the political overtones and supposed anti-Americanism, they don't require much comment. America is the bad guy here, which has proven quite a shock to the legions of sci-fi fans who either didn't see the Star Wars movies or somehow didn't notice what they were about. Apparently there are more of them out there than you would think. Cameron doesn't spend much time belaboring the point, but instead draws things in very simple strokes. The military basically works for the corporations, everyone's out for the resources, and we'll kill anyone who gets in our way. In other words, it's the same as real life, but because the action takes place so far from Earth it's all carried on straightforwardly and without any mumbo-jumbo about spreading democracy. Nothing here that should be controversial unless you've been living under a rock for the last 60 years or so.
Aside from the writing and directing, the other potential disappointment with Avatar is the 3-D. This will depend on what you expect going into it. My guess was that Cameron would create a much smoother, more integrated 3-D world and one that you could really get lost in without thinking of it as an "effect." This isn't really what Avatar does, though. The environments have the familiar pop-up book quality, meaning they look like multiple layers of flat elements rather than a real three-dimensional world. They're often rich and beautiful, and just as often busy and distracting.
What is groundbreaking about Avatar is not the 3-D but the expressive computer-generated characters. It has aptly been described as "breaking the CG barrier" because, like The Abyss and Terminator 2, it's a film that will change the way CG is used. An actor will be able to play any sort of character in CG form, including human characters of any age or description, and fit seamlessly into a realistic setting. The non-humanoid creatures are a step up, too, moving in a wild, energetic way that's terrifying at times.
Of course, no discussion would be complete without some mention of the battle sequences. They're good, and at times they almost seem about to be magnificent, especially in the aerial battle near the end. But after nearly two hours of lazy narrative and self-indulgent "aww...pretty!" shots of assorted flora and fauna, there's surprisingly little payoff in this department. It doesn't help that the grand finale is a ridiculous hand-to-hand brawl on the forest floor. Then again, it is interesting that Cameron revisits the alien vs. loader theme with the alien as the good guy this time.
Avatar is a breakthrough of sorts, though maybe not the one Cameron hoped for. As of now, we still haven't seen anything in 3-D that isn't essentially a gimmick film with some flashy effects to make up for its shortcomings. Except Coraline, but that doesn't entirely count. Maybe Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland will buck the trend. Meanwhile, Avatar is at least worth seeing, both for its own merits and as a preview of what special effects are about to be.
The writing is the first thing about this movie that demands your attention, and not in a good way. Be warned, this isn't just the usual snarking that people always feel obligated to do with science fiction movies. It really is bad. This is especially surprising from Cameron, who normally stands head and shoulders above other genre writers. The dialogue in the early part of the film is so blatantly expositional that you wonder why the characters don't just drop all pretenses and talk straight to the camera. "This is the video log...we want to get in the habit of documenting, blah, blah, blah." The familiar Cameron characters are here--spunky female pilot, slimy corporate suit, belligerent jarhead--but the roles don't have much life in them. And for all the film's length, it seems too rushed to develop a detailed, lived-in world like the ones in Aliens and The Abyss. Overall, it doesn't play like a Cameron film.
As for the political overtones and supposed anti-Americanism, they don't require much comment. America is the bad guy here, which has proven quite a shock to the legions of sci-fi fans who either didn't see the Star Wars movies or somehow didn't notice what they were about. Apparently there are more of them out there than you would think. Cameron doesn't spend much time belaboring the point, but instead draws things in very simple strokes. The military basically works for the corporations, everyone's out for the resources, and we'll kill anyone who gets in our way. In other words, it's the same as real life, but because the action takes place so far from Earth it's all carried on straightforwardly and without any mumbo-jumbo about spreading democracy. Nothing here that should be controversial unless you've been living under a rock for the last 60 years or so.
Aside from the writing and directing, the other potential disappointment with Avatar is the 3-D. This will depend on what you expect going into it. My guess was that Cameron would create a much smoother, more integrated 3-D world and one that you could really get lost in without thinking of it as an "effect." This isn't really what Avatar does, though. The environments have the familiar pop-up book quality, meaning they look like multiple layers of flat elements rather than a real three-dimensional world. They're often rich and beautiful, and just as often busy and distracting.
What is groundbreaking about Avatar is not the 3-D but the expressive computer-generated characters. It has aptly been described as "breaking the CG barrier" because, like The Abyss and Terminator 2, it's a film that will change the way CG is used. An actor will be able to play any sort of character in CG form, including human characters of any age or description, and fit seamlessly into a realistic setting. The non-humanoid creatures are a step up, too, moving in a wild, energetic way that's terrifying at times.
Of course, no discussion would be complete without some mention of the battle sequences. They're good, and at times they almost seem about to be magnificent, especially in the aerial battle near the end. But after nearly two hours of lazy narrative and self-indulgent "aww...pretty!" shots of assorted flora and fauna, there's surprisingly little payoff in this department. It doesn't help that the grand finale is a ridiculous hand-to-hand brawl on the forest floor. Then again, it is interesting that Cameron revisits the alien vs. loader theme with the alien as the good guy this time.
Avatar is a breakthrough of sorts, though maybe not the one Cameron hoped for. As of now, we still haven't seen anything in 3-D that isn't essentially a gimmick film with some flashy effects to make up for its shortcomings. Except Coraline, but that doesn't entirely count. Maybe Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland will buck the trend. Meanwhile, Avatar is at least worth seeing, both for its own merits and as a preview of what special effects are about to be.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Balloon Boy: A Defense
It seems obligatory to open any essay on Falcon Heene with a few paragraphs about how tedious and irrelevant the whole thing was. Instead, I’m just going to be honest—I was fascinated by it. It’s one of four times I can remember watching TV recently, the other events being the Iraq invasion, Hurricane Katrina, and Michael Jackson’s death. Why was I fascinated? Because there was a home made balloon flying thousands of feet in the air with a kid supposedly aboard, and we didn’t know what was going to happen or had happened. That’s it. That’s why.
I know what you’re going to say…children die every day. Shouldn’t we be paying more attention to all the children dying in Iraq/Afghanistan/Africa/wherever instead of paying attention to Balloon Boy? I partly agree. I absolutely think we should be paying more attention to the people who die every day in tragic ways, and to the reasons why they die. It’s the “instead of” part that I want to quibble with. In other words, is Balloon Boy really the problem with the American media?
Consider that we’ve been killing people in Afghanistan for eight years now. The Balloon Boy incident lasted one day. What were we thinking about the rest of the time? And yes, it’s true that children die every day, but the possibility of someone dying isn’t what made this a story. Rather, it was the possibility of someone not dying. Specifically, of someone in imminent danger being rescued by the concerted efforts of a “community.” Someone who could have died but didn’t…or maybe someone who might have been rescued and wasn’t, depending out how it turned out.
All of which probably happens every day, too. Then again, you could say that about almost anything. Political corruption? Every day. Police brutality? Every day before breakfast. Sexual abuse? Every day and twice on Sundays. But it’s still a story and always should be. We’re in trouble when it isn’t. Consider what you’d do if Balloon Boy were a “real person,” perhaps someone adrift over your own neighborhood. Would you yawn and stretch, close the blinds, and go back to pondering the death toll in Darfur without even one little peek overhead? Unlikely.
But isn’t this pretty much how we’re being told we must respond if we want to be sophisticated consumers of information? The greatest crime seems to be in displaying that hint of credulity that marks a consumer as a novice. We’re told it’s obvious that the media should be less gullible. That they should do more “fact-checking” before trying to pawn off these second-rate melodramas. That they should evaluate these stories more critically.
Well, let’s evaluate the criticism for a moment. The first thing that’s obvious about the Balloon Boy meta-commentary is that its practitioners have no idea how news reporting is supposed to work. We didn’t expect the police to sit passively and wait for facts to accumulate before they took any action. We expected them to go get the facts as quickly as possible. The media’s job is very much the same. “Fact-checking” was exactly what we witnessed during the Balloon Boy incident, and it was messy. That’s how it looks when you see it in real time, and that’s how it works with a breaking story. Remember the point where the TV networks reported, “We now have confirmation that Falcon was in the balloon and that he has fallen to his death?” No, because they never reported that. They reported what they knew—that certain people had said or seen certain things—and checked their facts before reporting anything more. If the audience inferred anything more, it was because of their own lack of sophistication.
Which brings me at last to my point. I don’t think people are pissed off because of the way the media reported the story. I think they’re pissed off because the story made them feel credulous. And, going a bit further, I think they’re pissed off because it was bad entertainment. They may not know what reporting is supposed to be, but if you read their complaints in the same way you’d read, for example, a critique of some TV drama show, they make a lot more sense. After all, the whole narrative set up some very obvious expectations, either that the boy would die gruesomely or that he’d be rescued dramatically, and so forth, and the expectations pretty clearly failed to pay off. Who’s to blame if not the TV People? They’re the ones who create this stuff.
And to go further still, Balloon Boy is a scapegoat. It’s perfectly natural and healthy to be interested in a story like this. Was it healthy to be interested in the Heenes and all their oddities when they were the subject of Wife Swap? Is it healthy to be interested in season after season of daytime gossip and prime time hack work? Is it healthy to watch several hours of TV advertisements a day? Or even to believe that TV news would be informative if not for stunts like Balloon Boy?
Probably not, but I don’t see the same outcry about all of that other stuff. I wonder why?
Monday, August 24, 2009
Inglourious Basterds
When I hear people say, “I don’t know whether it’s a masterpiece or a mess,” I usually think, “That’s because you’re an idiot.” I know it’s mean. That’s why I just think it instead of saying it…so, give me some credit. But this time, I have to admit I don’t know whether it’s a masterpiece or a mess.
I like Quentin Tarantino a lot, even though I don’t think he’s in the same league at all with some of the filmmakers he imitates. This comes down to the fact that Tarantino, unlike Martin Scorsese or David Lynch, usually has nothing to say. However, his movies are more fun than just about anything else you can see in a theater these days. What he does, he does superbly. A new Tarantino film is a big event if only for that reason.
So, what to make of Inglourious Basterds? Is it just supposed to be fun, or is it a more ambitious kind of Tarantino film? How does it succeed or fail at whatever it is that it’s trying to do?
On the level of pure fun, I’m in the camp that calls IB a smashing success. Don’t listen to anyone who says Brad Pitt is out of his depth in this role. He gives his character, Lt. Aldo Raine, a single-minded quality that’s both laughable and strangely lovable. When he tells a German officer that he’s in the “killin’ Nazi bidness,” he’s treating us to his own version of light-hearted understatement. Killing Nazis is much more than a business with him, and more than a passion…it’s closer to a religion.
The German officer Col. Landa, played by Christoph Waltz, is far more well-rounded. He’s fluent in at least four languages and appreciates a fine pastry. At least, he appreciates it right up until he buries his cigarette in it--for all his sophistication, he sees French culture as a status symbol to be taken up, consumed, and discarded. He doesn’t see it as something to be lived in or informed with. This is in contrast to Shosanna/Emanuelle, for whom culture is everything. “I’m French…we respect directors,” she says to the German soldier Frederick Zoller, who is his own nation’s Audie Murphy. This holds true even though she hates Zoller and his army.
Brad Pitt’s Lt. Raine stands in contrast to both the German and French characters. For him, culture is neither sacred nor swanky. It’s something he’s just not aware of at all. His virtue as a practical American is to be concerned only with justice. This is what sets him apart him from the hauteur of the French and the vulgarity of the Germans. He’s the quintessential American, a man in the bidness of doing what’s right—nothing more, nothing less.
So far, so good. The film works well on the same level as those to which it pays homage, that is, as a rousing good vs. evil story. America represents integration and freedom from prejudice, as we see from the example of the Jewish/German/Austrian Basterds. We have the pure-hearted Joes rescuing the cheese-eating surrender monkeys from the Hun pigs…all of which comports well with our own American mythology. But Tarantino complicates matters even at this level. The Americans and British bungle the operation at every turn, and the French aren’t so hapless after all; it’s only because of Emmanuelle’s craftiness (and Landa’s selfishness) that the operation succeeds.
Not only is the effectiveness of the Americans a complicated question, but so is the nobility of their actions. This is the second level at which the film invites analysis. Starting with the first chapter (called “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France,” a reference to the director Sergio Leone of spaghetti Western fame), the story features an ongoing cowboys vs. Indians motif. The traditional American mythology is inverted here, with the cowboys (Nazis) as the bad guys and the Indians (Jews) as the good guys. In the first chapter, Col. Landa is framed in the French family’s doorway like John Wayne in a visual quotation from The Searchers. This is bold, to say the least…but it makes sense. John Wayne’s character in The Searchers is somewhat like Col. Landa. He would happily rid the world of Native Americans, just like Landa is trying to rid the world of Jews. And, in fact, Hitler studied the white settlers’ extermination of the natives, admired it, and based some of his own policies upon it.
The motif continues in the following chapters, with the Basterds resembling Indians in several ways. Aldo, their leader, is referred to as The Apache. Other team members have descriptive names with a Native American ring to them, such as “Bear Jew” and “Little Man.” And, of course, they ambush and scalp their Nazi enemies. By drawing this parallel between occupied France and the American Old West, Tarantino shows the struggle against fascism as part of a larger struggle against intolerance and oppression in general. And he suggests that the USA is on the wrong side of the struggle sometimes. The picture of the righteous American is therefore more ambiguous than it appears on the surface. On the first level, which is the straightforward narrative level, the film is a celebration of American heroism. On the second, intertextual level, it’s a critique of American racism. It should also be noted that the Basterds’ tactics are indeed inglorious. They gladly partake of the same cruelty and dishonor as their enemies.
This leads us to the film’s third level, the self-referential level, where IB refers not to other works in similar genres but rather to itself. The significant parallel here is between IB and Nation’s Pride, the German propaganda film whose premiere is the setting for the finale. The similarity between us and the Nazi audience is apparent—we’re cheering the deaths of Germans just as they’re cheering the deaths of Americans. What’s less obvious is the relationship between the two films and the two audiences’ reasons for applauding them. As we’ve seen, IB resembles the extremely sincere war movies we all grew up with. Pitt’s character embodies the simplistic mindset that lets us, as Americans, see ourselves as the heroes in every situation. At the same time, the character is also a parody and the film a critique. The most obvious inference is that “our” movies are propaganda, too, and that we shouldn’t be too quick to judge other cultures when they appear to have blind spots. A nice sentiment, true as far as it goes, and one that many Hollywood filmmakers would be satisfied with.
But Tarantino isn’t satisfied with it. Judgment does come at the end of Inglourious Basterds…and it comes with a vengeance. Emmanuelle literally sets fire to the fantasy world of the Nazis’ propaganda and exposes them to a reality that’s entirely different. In the end, IB doesn’t see all the myths as equivalent. It does believe in a reality that exists behind the myth, and it shows the truth to be more powerful than propaganda.
Or does it? Because the interesting thing about Inglourious Basterds is this. The very moment when the Nazis’ fantasy world is annihilated by reality is the same moment when the film departs from reality altogether and enters a fantasy world of its own. When the theater explodes in flames, killing Hitler and his inner circle, all pretense of truth is abandoned. We’re in a world of pure vengeful catharsis now, a world grounded not in real history but in WWII-era comic books like Captain America…in other words, a world of propaganda. And there’s nothing in this finale that invites us to second-guess our emotions. IB embraces unreality at this point, in the name of fighting fascism, apparently without any qualms.
This is the tried and true philosophy of art as assault, which dates back to Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. There, the concept of a filmic attack on the audience is expressed with the image of a razor slicing through an eyeball. It’s the essential insight of Marxian critical theory since the Frankfurt School, which sees film as a means of direct revolutionary action. The Marxian project is to subvert film’s role as a transmitter of fascist (i.e., bourgeois/capitalist/patriarchal) ideology. It does this not by refuting the dominant ideology on its own terms; the Frankfurt School recognized that the masses were not directly susceptible to an anti-bourgeois agenda. Instead, it undermines the ideology by undermining the very idea of art as a medium of communication in the usual sense. In this view, film is not a means of communication, but rather a means of manipulation and control. It’s a form of propaganda.
The climax of IB thus moves beyond mere critique of American culture based on general moral principles and into subversion of culture itself based on specifically revolutionary principles. As such, it has much in common with the Nazis’ view of culture as something subordinate to political goals. In this view, it’s questionable whether the film’s portrayal of the Basterds’ atrocities is really a critique. The unironic good vs. evil story and the self-referential subversive agenda merge, frightfully, into the same thing. Instead of cheering the Americans because they’re Americans or because they represent “good” (how naive, that), a more sophisticated audience can cheer them because they represent an enlightened, anti-bourgeois agenda. But in the end, what we’re cheering is a raw assertion of power.
It’s anyone’s guess how aware Tarantino is of these overtones. I may be over-analyzing, but there’s no doubt that academic theorists will relish this aspect of the film. The disturbing thing, to me, is that Inglourious Basterds ultimately minimizes the struggle of real, bourgeois people under a fascist regime and turns it into the story of one power-based ideology competing against another. In a sense, that was what WWII was about—the struggle between communism and fascism. But in the real history of the world we live in, there are “glorious” ideals, one of which is the value of truth as opposed to propaganda. To some extent Americans have represented those ideals, however imperfectly. A film that criticizes our imperfections should always be welcome. A film that crosses the line from criticism to cultural pessimism in the Marxian fashion, perhaps less so.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
The Hurt Locker
I just saw the trailer for Katherine Bigelow’s new film, The Hurt Locker. I’d heard part of an interview with her and wanted to see it, but at the time it sounded like there wasn’t going to be a nationwide theatrical release…another one of those “wait for the DVD” movies. “Wait for the DVD” has a little bit different meaning when you live in a small town and like indie films, obviously.
The film is about Marines who do EOD work, that is, who dismantle roadside bombs. I knew a guy from my hometown who was killed doing EOD work in Iraq. The movie has gotten excellent reviews and is apparently both realistic and intense. It’s also had trouble getting distribution. I haven’t heard that it’s particularly critical of the war, but I suppose some criticism is implicit in the title--after all, it looks like they’re saying war can hurt. Anyway, the trailer was great, and what was even better was that it advertised a nationwide release on July 24. Since I finally have a break from school, I was excited.
So, I checked the local show times to find the following.
Aliens in the Attic
Funny People
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
G-Force
G-Force 3D (for extra emphasis, I guess)
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
My Sister’s Keeper
Orphan
Public Enemies
The Collector
The Hangover
The Proposal
The Ugly Truth (apparently not about war)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
I like action, horror, and comedy just fine, and I know that small town theaters don’t really cater to people who are looking for stuff like The Hurt Locker. So, no…I’m not saying I was surprised. But I do think there’s an interesting disconnect here. Where I live, people accuse Hollywood and filmmakers of being out of touch with America and especially with the troops. Looking at the schedule at the Starplex, I wondered who was really out of touch. There’s scarcely a whiff of reality anywhere in this line-up.
Now, I know the answer to this. We don’t need movies like The Hurt Locker here because they don’t tell the truth. They only give you the elite’s “biased” perspective on the war. This is what you’ll hear from the people who buy tickets at the Starplex. These are the same people who are taking their kids to see G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, apparently without much concern for what truths are being imparted there. G.I. Joe is barely even telling the truth when it calls itself a movie. At best, it’s a feature length toy ad, which is what it was mainly designed to be.
Isn’t this all just a matter of taste? Small town audiences are patriotic, they work hard, and they want to escape and have a good time. If New Yorkers and Austinites want to be serious and dwell on doom and gloom, that’s their choice. We all have our choices…to each his own, right? I’m not so sure. Like it or not, movies are part of a larger discourse. They all say something. What you see, and what you don’t see, when you go to the theater affects the way you perceive the world outside the theater, too. Small town America is sending its children to kill and die in the war, so it’s fair to ask what we’re watching and what we’re thinking about when we watch.
Consider the writings of Mr. Michael Ledeen, a war advocate and Washington lobbyist who could fairly be called a member of the elite. Ledeen sees small town America as a necessary source of manpower for a noble war effort. He also considers us a population of rubes who may have to be lied to if our support is to be secured. We know (yes, know) that the Bush administration shared this view and that we were lied to in preparation for the war in Iraq. Whether one supports the war is irrelevant here; the issue is why most of us supported it. Here’s where the contents of the movie marquee become interesting.
Imagine, if you have to, a world where big city elites draw on the young population of small towns for cannon fodder. Where our kids leave home and travel to the most far-fetched places to witness horrible events and suffer horrible mutilations in service of a larger agenda. And imagine that we, as parents, siblings, or friends, choose to isolate ourselves from part of the dialogue about the larger issues and the events that go along with them. More than that, we get positively offended when a filmmaker offers insights that could make us think twice about our participation.
It seems to me that if the agenda is as noble as we’d like to believe, it’s also big enough to withstand a little bit of scrutiny. So, what exactly are we afraid of? What are we really protecting when we take our kids to see G.I Joe and shield them from the likes of The Hurt Locker? I know many families who wouldn’t see the latter film because the parents don’t want their kids exposed to violence and vulgarity in movies. But what’s wrong with seeing it in the movies before they sign up for it in real life? Does it hurt more if they have a chance to think about it first?
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Neverland
I.
As if he were put together each day
from a box of pieces, carefully
stored in his locked room,
guarded at night by large,
black men with bulging shoulders
and dark, shiny glasses.
He appeared occasionally. His skin looked
unprepared for the sun, as if it had been chosen
without a thought of natural light.
In his bathroom mirror, when the large black men
finished brushing the powder onto the cheeks,
setting the wig straight above his forehead,
balancing the sunglasses gently
with thumb and finger on the vertical
bridge of his nose, his complexion
seemed more than perfect.
Marble, like a goddess of antiquity.
But which goddess? Not Aphrodite,
with her long red hair and woman’s
hips. Or Athena, with the iron warrior’s
eyes, or Diana…even she was too rough.
Too mannish, in a way. In the end,
it didn’t matter. One deity is always
as good as another, one name as sturdy
as another, to hang an image on.
As the ancient media scholars observed,
the marble is the message.
II.
He appeared to us constantly, like a playful sprite
on heavy rotation in a child’s daydreams.
Like all the spirits, he was sexless.
But he played at sex, and sang at us,
and made us wonder where he came from
and what he wanted from us.
Pinnochio was on TV
with one hand on his crotch, dancing
like so: spin, kick, masturbate;
spin, kick, masturbate,
as if one of our toys had come to life
and started making lewd gestures at us.
We watched and wondered in our bedrooms
and in the record store at the mall as he spun
around the graveyard. Wooden limbs, straight
like a doll’s, but seemingly inflamed.
III.
After the first few tunes, it was less about the music
and more about the reality. He was told that
he was Michelangelo and Peter Pan and Einstein rolled into one.
He transcended himself. This was his trap--
to be known for being known, loved for being loved.
Then it was about who, if anything, was behind the costume.
After the universe’s secrets are opened
come the sleepless nights. Even Einstein
has to figure out how to be Einstein.
After relativity, something has to be next.
IV.
All the pieces went back into the box.
It was solid gold, or it seemed to be,
in honor of his status, his rank.
Death almost seemed the logical extension
of his fashion sense. At last he was
preserved, ageless, untouchable.
His brother is due to speak.
He is famous, too, in his small way. He wears
a red rose in the lapel of his suit.
He sings what brothers always sing
on these occasions. His voice is
clearer, his pitch more perfect,
and we expect to love him more
because his grief is somehow more pure.
But it is not more pure. It is angry. He cries
for a few minutes over his brother’s veins,
angry that the undertaker’s job
was stolen, that they were drained too soon
and filled with poison. He is angry
that sleep took hold and left his brother
frozen. For a moment, the music is
the reality. There is no pantomime
of sex, or death, or any other ecstasy.
No reaching for childhood.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
What's Hot?
How does society define what's attractive?
I think there are two main factors--genetics and economics. The genetic factor is pretty simple. It pertains to inherent qualities that indicate good potential for procreation. The economic factor is more complicated. It pertains to variable qualities that indicate a high social status. For example, being plump has been considered attractive in some societies because it was supposed to show that you were well off. In our society it's not considered attractive because, I would speculate, it's supposed to show that you're indolent. We're rich enough to assume everyone is fed, so now we're more interested in who's competitive.
Media images of women show the emphasis on competition. Supermodels are uniformly muscular and mannish-looking. Give Kathy Ireland a haircut, and she could pass for Rob Lowe. But beyond that, the intolerance of blemishes shows how economic factors largely govern our evaluation of beauty. Models look like money was spent on them. Their hair is just so. Their clothes are the most expensive. Their every imperfection is covered with make-up. Any problem that remains is assigned to a team of electronic air brush artists who spend valuable time smoothing it over. I would argue that the time and dollars spent are more significant than the aesthetic quality of the end result, which in some cases is questionable, if not bizarre. On some level, we don't think women who spend money on their appearance are hot because of the way they look. We think they're hot because they look like they spent money on their appearance.
Moreover, the least attractive thing a female celebrity can do is neglect her career and play a motherly role. See, for example, Britney Spears. She's pretty plain. The girl who used to work at the convenience store in my neighborhood was hotter. Britney was idolized because someone spent money to make her look (and sound) like something we should notice. But when she started having kids, the men and boys of America convulsed in a collective hurl. Some expressed it in terms of "OMG, what's she doing to her career?" Others expressed it in terms of "OMG, what's happening to her looks?" It was all the same sentiment, though. She was no longer the superwoman who could go out and kick ass in the real world, then come home with a load of cash and kick ass in bed. She was just an ordinary girl with mediocre clothes and probable stretch marks. What could be more disgusting? She almost looked like you'd have to take care of her.
Not that women necessarily have to be taken care of or that there's anything wrong with their having careers. It's possible to be a professional and a mother, and it's also okay not to be a mother at all. But men presumably have careers, too. So, since when do we take only the most intense symbols of female independence as the standard of beauty? Maybe it's because many of us are children of divorced parents and are looking for someone strong to take care of us. Maybe it's because the single-income family is no longer sustainable for most people and we have to look for a capable partner. In the most pessimistic view, maybe we've become so materialistic that the economic factor outweighs everything else.
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