I guess this is cool? Using homeless people as a means to teach a brand you’ll never buy a lesson they won’t hear? I guess?
I’m all for trolling giant corporations, don’t get me wrong. But if some bearded guy with a camera came up to me and said, “Hey! This retailer said only ‘cool people’ should wear their clothes! So put this T-shirt on! That’ll show ‘em!”, I wouldn’t feel like I was in on the joke.
Anthony Foxx, the mayor of Charlotte and Obama’s pick for the next Secretary of Transportation, issued two city proclamations yesterday. One of them recognized the National Day of Prayer; the other one declared the day to be a Day of Reason. The second proclamation noted that the country was founded on the principles of reason and that “it is the duty and responsibility of every citizen to promote the development and application of reason.” Even though we have no evidence that Mayor Foxx was taking a passive-aggressive swipe at the folks at Fox News, they decided to take it as an affront anyway, bringing on Penny Nance, the CEO of Concerned Women for America, to worry that once you start using reason, next thing you know, you’re committing a mass genocide and starting a world war: “You know the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust.”
I don’t remember most of the books I read, but one of the most profoundly affecting experiences in my college career was on the last day of my final Honors seminar class in my junior year. Freshman year was the classical tradition; sophomore year, the Renaissance through the Nineteenth; junior year, the Twentieth Century. Our professor had been in the habit of beginning every class with some piece of music – a movement from a symphony, some old jazz recording, anything that could be defined as a “classic.” Never having been intimately acquainted with classical music, most of it was new to me, but on the final day he played us a tape of the fourth movement from Beethoven’s Ninth – the “Ode to Joy.”
“This,” the professor said after the tape ended, “is considered one of the best performances of Beethoven’s Ninth ever recorded. It was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, in March 1942. The performance was reprised one month later for Hitler’s birthday.
“One of the great challenges of teaching history and philosophy,” he went on, “has been reconciling the beauty and enlightenment of the tradition of reason with the horrors of the Twentieth Century. How could a culture which produced such works as this also – not sequentially but simultaneously – engage in the extermination of millions? I haven’t found a satisfactory answer, and I don’t expect you to have one yet. But it’s what we’ve been grappling with all semester.”
That’s the first thing that popped in my mind when hearing about what some pundit on Fox News said about the Holocaust. As with most cultural content on the Internet, I heard about it from its sneering detractors first. And let me take nothing away from Marcotte or “Blue Texan” or any of the friends you’ll see linking this on Facebook. Nance’s assertion is uniquely stupid: the Holocaust sprang not from moral relativism but, if anything, a moral absolutism; “moral relativism,” as conservatives typically mean it, is a post-WW2 invention; the very act of forming the logical connections (as shoddy as they are) between cause and effect that Nance engages in is itself evidence of the utility of reason, and so forth.
But there’s an opportunity here to grapple with one of the great mysteries of the Twentieth Century – if the classical Western tradition did not dissuade millions of Germans from going joyfully along as their neighbors were immolated, what the hell good was it? – that’s being swept aside unexamined. It’s ignorant to say that reason caused the Holocaust, but the Age of Enlightenment certainly didn’t stand in its way.
“How?” asked the staring Professor. “Why?”
“Because I am afraid of him,” said Syme; “and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.”- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Jacob Bacharach observed something on his blog the other day that prompted a reminiscence of my own: my lingering fondness for Catholic novelists. G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, Walker Percy, Tim Powers, Walter M. Miller: I could pick up any of the novels of theirs I own and read them again today, for unexamined pleasure, no matter how many times I’ve read the book I pick*. They’ve survived for me, while the catechism has dwindled.
Why is that? Part of it involves the gentle wit of their style. Maybe they’re all cribbing Chesterton and Lewis, condemning the excesses of the secular world with sardonicism and a touch of smugness. A more savage satire would be off-putting, given its source, and that sort of bitterness gets tiring in heavy doses. It speaks to the snob in me, the man who’s been affecting world weariness for half his life, and it makes me feel like less of a boor for doing it.
Part of it likely involves their flavor of mid-century Catholicism. Late 20th-century readers, familiar with the Church of Rome only through encyclicals and headlines, wouldn’t recognize Catholicism the way it’s portrayed at the Order of Leibowicz or on Malacandra. It admits that, no, faith doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but what in secula seculorum does? Given the last century’s few benighted attempts at letting the intellectuals run the show, I can’t deny the appeal. There’s something Byronic in that doomed romanticism, something existentialist in the willingness to push on even in the absence of reason. The new atheists have yet to achieve such sentiment, anyway.
“One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
The third part, of course, is nostalgia.
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* Which isn’t to say I’m oblivious to their flaws: Chesterton’s tendency to pass paradox off as wisdom, Lewis’s bogus apologia, and so forth.
I struggled a lot with this post for several reasons. Chief among them is that not only do I know several first responders in Boston – EMTs, firefighters – I’m friends with one of the officials who conducted DHS emergency response drills in Boston for the last two summers. I’ve had beers and gone to weddings with these people; there are faces behind the badges. So not only does any post in which I’m skeptical of law enforcement feel like I’m slagging their jobs, it’s hard for me to write such criticism with a straight face. What, Lynn and DJ are gonna kick me out of my home? Like Mrs H. has a secret file on me because I wrote something nice about Occupy Boston once? G’wan, get outta heah.
Another stumbling block was that a lot of the critical writing I’d seen of the lockdown (Clark at Popehat being a widely cited example) focused on the financial cost of a day of lost labor. This sort of economic determinism always bugs me, whether from the right or left; it leads to bad policy and worse cable news. “Yes, three lives were lost and dozens horrifically maimed, but has anyone thought about the GDP?” It bothers me because, as soon as the debate is framed that way, the question becomes “how much did it actually cost?” Someone asserts it cost a billion dollars; Matthew Yglesias counters that no, it probably cost less. Frankly, I think that’s the wrong debate to have. So I struggled to find a way to voice my issues while distancing myself from that sort of bean-counting.
The last obstacle that kept me from publishing my first draft of this post is that the entire operation feels like such an unqualified victory. Especially in the greater context of the War on Terror, starting eleven and a half years ago with a horrific act of destruction, an act avenged by declaring war on every country except the ones where the responsible parties came from, wars that have cost thousands more lives, tens of thousands if you count non-Americans. Contrast this to last week: shocking tragedy on Monday, planes are in the air again by Tuesday, suspects identified on Thursday, caught on Friday. And we even got a day off work*! A lone 19-year-old bringing a major American city to a standstill may seem like a Pyrrhic victory, but compared to what nineteen hijackers brought us to, it’s a bargain.
But it’s that last observation that actually spurred me onward. I worry whenever people become inured to the use of power. Over the last ten years, American citizens have gone from outrage to discomfort to indifference at bag checks on the subway, gropings at the airport, and men with assault rifles and Kevlar meandering through public. Now a city gets locked down to find one man. It’s easy to cheer this as a victory. The hard part is playing with hypotheticals: what if it took longer than a week to catch him? What if they got the wrong man? What if this level of police coordination were used to crack down on protestors rather than terrorists? When we reach the point at which armored SUVs become objectionable to us, will there be too much precedent to object?
Seth Godin, in a much lighter context, wrote:
“You can’t argue with success…”
Of course you can. What else are you going to argue with? Failure can’t argue with you, because it knows that it didn’t work.
The art of staying successful is in being open to having the argument. Great organizations fail precisely because they refuse to do this.
American federal agencies and news bureaus** pounce heaviest on perceived failures in counterterrorism and turn hagiographic eyes on successes. If progress were the goal, it would be the other way around, to keep success from creating blinders and to keep fear of failure from encouraging the wrong behavior.
This is why, in the face of what’s apparently an overwhelming success in the War on Terror, I remain reticent.
Everyone has their own image of “what makes America great.” You can almost picture the montage: Little League baseball, fast cars on mountain highways, construction workers building skyscrapers, business executives shaking hands, kids on field trips seeing historical landmarks. When a major American city gets locked down, none of that is on display. I fear a generation that, when asked what makes America great, answers, “the ability to deliver swift, overwhelming force.” And I hate having to choose between those visions.
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* For knowledge workers, of course, there’s no such thing as a day off, not where wi-fi and 4G yet cast a shadow.
** But I repeat myself.
In 2001, my father worked in the DC area, sometimes commuting into the city depending on his work schedule. Obviously nothing happened any nearer than Arlington on September 11th of that year, but in the first couple hours we didn’t really know what was going on. When Seung-Hui Cho shot up the Virginia Tech campus in April 2007, he happened to pick a day when my brother didn’t have any classes. Yesterday, a series of explosions went off just two miles from my office, maiming dozens and killing (as of this writing) three. Terror has stalked my family like a hyena for the last eleven years, for no better reason than that we live on the East Coast.
“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
In the shadow of a tragedy like this, anger is a frequent response. I’ve already seen it a couple places on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. I understand the temptation: a day like this makes people feel weak. But lashing out blind doesn’t make you strong, especially if you already had the bigger stick. There are better ways to be strong:
Over the last few months I’ve found, in the weird corners of the Internet (Boing Boing, Vice, NPR), occasional references to ASMR – autonomous sensory meridian response. It is, to quote the Vice article, “a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine [...] a shortcut to a blissed-out meditative state that allows you to watch long videos that for someone who doesn’t have ASMR are mind-meltingly dull.” I stumbled across it on YouTube while looking for meditation/visualization videos, realized it wasn’t for me, then left it by the wayside. But it keeps coming up.
Here’s where I get tripped up: every article I’ve read on the subject refers to ASMR as “self-described” or “self-diagnosed.” The Wikipedia page calls it a claimed biological phenomenon. Boing Boing, citing the NPR segment, refers to it as “self-diagnosed” and links to a British professor who “doesn’t discount the possibility that it’s real.” There’s no outright skepticism, but everyone who reports on it seems to stand in the doorway, one hand on the frame, their mouth half-open and their head cocked.
From a certain perspective, though, isn’t every pleasure/pain phenomenon self-reported? Isn’t this why ERs still use 1-10 pain scales on admission forms, rather than hooking patients up to the agonometer and taking a reading? If thousands of people are independently claiming to get totally high on the sound of someone brushing a towel over a microphone, why qualify it as “apparent”? Do reporters think they’re lying?
Hey folks! I haven’t been updating here, I know, but I’ve been cranking out pop culture posts on Overthinking It for your entertainment:
Is Batman a Virgin?: Examining how Batman subverts the usual action hero trope of superior virility.
Suits and the Unsustainable Premise: How long can a show’s core premise strain our suspension of disbelief before breaking? And why do we let them get away with it?
Mass Effect 3 and the Ethics of Revolutionary Choices: In which we talk about the ending of ME:3.
The Evitability of Football Narratives: Why the stories we craft around sports – particularly football – are built differently from all other stories.
Note: every time I talk about sales figures for Too Close to Miss, I open the post with a very self-conscious apology for talking about sales figures. I still feel self-conscious about it! Focusing too much on sales numbers turns writing from a noble attempt to bridge the unfathomable gap between Self and Other into a P&L exercise. It feels mercenary and cheap, and while I am a mercenary I hate feeling tawdry. But, at the same time:
Enough throat clearing! The numbers:
From December 2011 through November 2012 – twelve calendar months of sales – Too Close to Miss sold 2728 copies. That’s across Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, various Smashwords platforms (primarily iTunes’ iBookstore), and hard copies on Amazon via Createspace. Total royalties, in my pocket, were $3984.
What does this mean?
Self-publishing Too Close to Miss was the right call. If a traditional publisher had bought Too Close to Miss, I would likely have made less money, made fewer sales, and wouldn’t even have the book in print yet. This way, it’s trucking along at its slow and steady pace, getting my name out there and generating interest in the Mara Cunningham series.
Too Close to Miss, the first Mara Cunningham novel, is still available just about anywhere you can buy books online – Amazon
Struggling after the fact to put my conflicting feelings about Django Unchained and Quentin Tarantino into words, I came up with this: Tarantino never makes films in the genres he admires. Rather, he borrows the trappings of genre to talk about subjects he finds important. With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino used the trappings of a war film to tell a story about the language of cinema as it relates to national identity*. Django Unchained dresses up like a Western, but its meaning should, well, be obvious.
It’s not only possible to get a good education in America – best high schools and colleges – without knowing just how bad slavery was, it’s pretty damned likely. This isn’t to say that we never covered slavery in civics class, or that our teachers overlooked Black History Month. But the narrative that most folks would agree to is that slavery was this awful thing that happened long ago, but the Civil War fixed it, and then racism just kept happening for some reason, but then Martin Luther King fixed that, and that’s why we get the day off. We don’t really get how bad slavery was, not in the gut. Six hundred thousand people kidnapped from Africa. Four million slaves in America at the dawn of the Civil War. Iron shackles on bare calves, knotted whips on bare flesh, starving in wooden pens that reek of shit. An evil on par with the Holocaust, an industry that was so ingrained in the infrastructure of this country that the regions that profited the most off it – like Mississippi, the setting of most of the film – are miserable pits today.
Tarantino’s tendency toward excess, which I’ve always had a hard time with, serves him well here. We’ve all seen after-school specials and 19th-century woodcuts on the evils of slavery, but nothing makes you recoil like seeing Kerry Washington getting whipped by a sweating, ugly slaver while her husband not only pleads with the overseer to let her go, but pleads with her in the language of his oppressors: how master wouldn’t want a good house nigger marked up. After a few displays like that, including one pivotal scene I won’t spoil, you’ll cheer when Jamie Foxx, as Django, pulls his pistols. The shootout scenes are equally indulgent – they literally wallow in blood – but are well deserved.
Sylvia and I parted ways on Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance. I bought into the caricature he was going for: the plantation owner with the Satanic profile, right down to the devilish goatee and dinner jacket; the spoiled brat grown up, still looking like a boy as DiCaprio always will, living in a paradise called Candieland and talking about how well he knows black folks. But DiCaprio’s never been a subtle actor, and if you can’t take that you won’t quite like him. I don’t know that I’m qualified to comment on the whole spiderweb of controversy surrounding Samuel L. Jackson’s character, save that it felt legit to me. Sylvia also pointed out that Kerry Washington’s character didn’t have much to do beyond the “damsel in distress” role, which is sadly true.
Tarantino’s drive to load a film with every cool bit he can think of hurts the overall narrative, as it always does. While every distinct scene is entertaining or moving, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. There were scenes I laughed out loud at that I would still suggest cutting. At two hours and fifteen minutes, the movie could have been a masterpiece. As it is, the length doesn’t take away from the gripping power of the most visceral scenes, but it does take away from the overall composition. See it once on the big screen to see what it does to your gut; after that, you probably don’t need to see it again.
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* Also, as with Basterds, the ostensive subject of the film, as depicted in the trailer, is discarded in the first 30 minutes. Oh, the Brittle brothers, yup, that’s them over there. I wonder if trailer editors have a hard time turning Tarantino’s bloated films into enticing packages, or if Tarantino perhaps salts enough narrative in there to give the marketing team something to play with.