I Do Not Hear, I Do Not See, Blah Blah Blah. WHAM!
Filed Under Environment, Porchy | Leave a Comment
Friend of the Porch Jimmy Cochran shared this story through Google earlier this morning which I thought deserved some brief commentary.
The first thing to note is that, yes, polls that ask Americans what they think about certain scientific facts are interesting and potentially useful.
They are interesting because it is fun to note, as Yglesias does, that more people believe that the US has secret contracts with extra-terrestrials than believe that our president isn’t an American citizen. Fun with numbers! My 7th grade math teacher Mr. McGee was right! (Go Graham Park Lions!)
And they are also useful for various political and advocacy groups. If you are interested in getting people to agree or disagree with the claim “Catastrophic global climate change is happening and Man has the ability to prevent it” for either philanthropic or political reasons, then it’s good to know the scale of the work you have cut out for yourself and the scale of your failure or success in implementing your current plans.
But what polls like this do not do, and this cannot be emphasized enough, is determine the truth of the above claim. It doesn’t matter if 100% of all people everywhere think that catastrophic global climate change is not happening. They may believe that and it may yet be true. Funny thing about facts, like God, their existence is not determined by whether you believe in them or not.
A Thought on the Meaning of Hurt Locker
Filed Under Big Ideas, Cinema, Iraq, Porchy, Review, The Arts | 4 Comments
I finally saw Hurt Locker this past Sunday, on the evening it would later be awarded the Oscar for Best Picture. Since then I have read a lot of discussion on what the movie meant. Indeed, seconds after my roommate pushed the Open button on the DVD player we bandied about the question ourselves.
Our conclusion was that Sgt James’ character was desperately searching for meaning and being thwarted at every turn. But the ending to the movie called that into question and seemed to push the movie into being lumped into the genre of “well done character sketch.”
After a few days of consideration I think that undersells the movie and I think it does have a broader statement about war and the human condition and that from the very first frame of the film Bigelow is as upfront about her message as she can be without pulling out her Oliver Stone hammer.
"The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug."
The movie opens with an epigraph, “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” I recognized its source immediately because I read it in my War and Conflict class a few years ago. The source of that quote is Chris Hedges’ book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning.
I don’t have to tell you what his argument is because Hedges graciously inserted it into the title.
I also shouldn’t have to tell you what a controversial argument it is either. It calls to mind Robert E. Lee’s famous quote, “It is good that war is so terrible, lest we should grow to fond of it.” It is one thing to look at yourself in the mirror and see someone who has come to terms with the necessity of war. It is quite another to suggest that war might also be meaningful.
Hedges doesn’t say that war is good but it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that that’s what he’s saying. After all, having meaning can’t be bad and Hedges is a journalist not a philosopher; he’s not going to dive into the Foulcaudian world where having meaning may be bad because it limits us and stunts our personal evolution. Meaning, after all, is as much about what something is not as it is about what it is. And once we say what something is not, it is hard to consider that that is what it may be. (You gotta love the verb “to be.”)
So the movie starts with a quote from a book called “war is a force that gives us meaning” and from there begins to tell us the tale of Staff Sergeant William James—named after America’s first important philosopher known for his theory of pragmatism. Not to be brief or overly dismissive, pragmatism is a narrow utilitarianism that shuns metaphysics. I don’t know if the philosopher William James offered thoughts on war or not, and I don’t know whether Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal is familiar with those thoughts if they exist. But I do know that a cursory reading of James’ works on pragmatic truth could lead you to believe that “William James” is a good name for a guy who at first futilely grasps for meaning before deciding that the true meaning lies in doing, not thinking.
But that’s not entirely accurate either. Sgt James is a man seeking enlightenment. We know that from his first appearance when he removes the plywood from the barrack window because he “likes the sunshine.” Indeed, like Plato’s cave escapist, he seems mad in his pursuit of meaning but his pursuit is not always futile.
James’s first on-screen disarmament is the establishment shot for his character. Danger, in the form of IED’s, at first seem like a straightforward and easily defeated foe, but closer examination forces him to realize that danger is, in this case literally, all around him. Saying it that way undermines the power of the moment of discovery in that shot.
In this first suspense sequence we see James as just plain mad, whereas the direction of his madness begins to be seen in his second mission, the embassy car bomb. Here James risks his life, and the life of his teammates, when he tries to figure out how to disarm the bomb even after the building has been evacuated and the risk has no reward, other than the personal reward for James of being the king problem solver. “I will figure this out,” he mutters to himself as he attempts to puzzle it out.
In this second scene, perhaps as foreshadowing to the end, he is actually successful. In deciphering the bomb rigging James is able to provide meaning to the bomb and he is able to provide a definition of himself as a guy who disarms bombs, 873 of them we learn immediately after. James has been counting because if he stops disarming bombs, he stops being.
James then suffers through a series of setbacks in his quest to find meaning. For the first time viewer, this part of the film is something that looks like a plot and seems to have more importance. So by the time we get to the supermarket scene near the end, it seems that the plot of the movie has been a man searching for meaning and failing to find it. Bigelow’s point then must be the horribly banal “war is confusing” because knowledge is limited…blah blah blah, fog of war…blah blah blah…
The success of finding the meaning of the embassy bomb, because it is anomalous in its success, is ignored.
From here other themes expose themselves. But this is enough for me to say that Bigelow’s point is ontological not political. People reading liberal or conservative narratives into Hurt Locker are creating a less important and less powerful film. Bigelow is attending to a much more inward looking film with a really contentious thesis worthy of a lot of discussion. Is war a force that gives us meaning. What is that meaning? Does that present an ugly truth about ourselves as a species? If it is true that man can innoble himself through violent conflict what are we to take away from James’s two teammates, one who spends the entire movie on the verge of emotional collapse and the other who desperately wants to find meaning not in war but in a family life he doesn’t even have?
These are for more interesting question than whether Bigelow supported the surge or not.
Give Me Liberty Give You Chains
Filed Under Big Ideas, Porchy, Rant | Leave a Comment
I know I’ve said it before but I’m going to say it again. Very few people really want liberty. Very few people really want to live in a world of unrelenting dog-eat-doggedness. Very few people want to live in a world where our own futility of action forces us to watch the people we care about suffer through short lives of agony and die painful deaths. Very few of us want to deal with the consequences of only the physically strong succeeding. Very few of us want to deal with the uncontrolled noises, smells, and other by-products of our neighbors’ behaviors.
Some people have thought through the consequences of true liberty which, in the aggregate, sounds more like anarchy–which is not freedom at all but rather an unnatural prison of unchecked competition that rewards the most conniving among us.
If you are such a person, then fine, this post is not about you, but I will take a moment to say that you must obviously agree to allow me to vehemently fight against the consequences of that thing,that horrible thing you are fighting for.
I do want taxes. I do want government. I do want constraint on man’s lowest impulses. I want laws against murder and property theft. I want protection from well-armed enemies of the land I choose to live in. But in wanting laws against those things I know I create a land of criminal internment camps, which I also do not want. So I want the nation to collectively participate in activities that lessen the criminal impulse. I want public education, and feed the poor programs, and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse.
It isn’t an easy compromise trying to come up with an institutional balance between liberty and law, but that doesn’t mean we should just give up. Those that advocate absolute liberty (of which there are just a few) are wrong. Those that advocate abolition of choice (of which there are a few) are also wrong.
Leftwingers accuse those on the right of abandoning the social project or acting as fascists, respectively. These are both strawmen that avoid dealing with what rightists actually want.
Rightwingers accuse those on the left of playing Stalin or of wanton Epucirianism. These too, are strawmen that rightist can attack without actually dealing with want leftists want, their reasons for wanting those things, and the manner in which they hope to achieve them.
The truth is, and I know I won’t be shaking up any paradigms here, is that both sides want a world where people choose to act just like them and they hope, through exercising their power, that’s what they’ll get. People who already act like that support them, and people who don’t, oppose them. For people who already act like the people in power, the people in power are promoting a world of liberty—a world that rewards them for acting the way they already act and prevents people from stopping them from acting the way they already act.
The other side is proposing a world that would constrain them and prevent the arrival of future allies in their struggle to act as they want.
It’s one thing to get up in arms about a law that actually prevents you from doing something you want to do (or think that people should be able to do) and another to act like a law that would prevent a world where less people did that thing are the same thing.
Take drinking alcohol for example. I am pro- alcohol. And I’m even more pro-The Freedom to Drink Alcohol. But I also recognize that there are social costs to drinking alcohol. Not that I like taking a purely econometric view of life, but it is hard to deny the numbers. Car accidents and casual violence are two problems that share a strong correlative connection to drinking. Problem drinking often leads to missed days at work or school, job loss, broken marriages, and child or spousal abuse. Even light casual drinking can lead to impaired judgment that can aid someone getting someplace they wouldn’t be if they were more rational.
The proper response to this is not to just ban alcohol. Not only has that experiment already been unsuccessfully attempted, there’s no strong evidence that doing so would curtail the worst of the problems associated with drinking and would probably give rise to even worse social problems.
But I’m not opposed, on principle, to legislation that attempts to create a world where fewer people drink problematically. That’s not to say that I also, on principle support all anti-problem drinking legislation. Some legislation that is ostensibly aimed at problem drinking unfairly punishes all drinkers. And some legislation aimed at problem drinking is just flat ineffective.
But what I am not doing is caging my arguments against any legislation in terms of “Liberty.” I do not think that everyone should drink as much as they want to all the time. Not just because of the aforementioned “social costs” but also because I would be endangered myself living in such a world, as would the people I love and work with. I want sensible controls that look after the public welfare. Call it “paternalism” if that rocks your boat.
Given my cynical view of Man, it’s weird to me that I’m so often accused of being a lefty idealist who doesn’t deal with the “realities of the world.”
I know a good blog post on this subject would actually involve a link to a specific story to which to attach this rant, which would serve to give it context but the root is sort of cumulative right now. Specifically buried in the comments sections of NRO blogs and in the comments to newspaper stories about the bar raids in Pennsylvania last week.
I took a (Korzybskian) Semantics class in high school that taught me to be aware of Glittering Generalities and “truth, justice, and The American Way” was one our examples. I always knew that “liberty” was too but 9 years of post-9/11 hackery and the rise of the Tea Party has forced me to a place where the word “liberty” grates on my ears. And before I’m accused of hating “liberty” just know I literally have the word tattooed on my body. I don’t hate liberty. I hate overuse and abuse of the word and a lack of recognition that there is a difference between freedom and anarchy. In a world where everyone can do what they want, no one can.
This post is tagged as rant. Keep that in mind before commenting.
Obama’s Chicago Thugs
Filed Under Barack Obama, Domestic Politics, Indiana, Politics, Porchy | 5 Comments
One of the tropes I see dragged out frequently in the rightwing blogosphere is that “the White House,” or “DC” or “the national government” is now, thanks to Obama, “overrun with Chicago thugs.”
It is true that Obama is from Chicago. It is also true that Chicago has a less than shining political record. And, since it’s a Democratic city, the political operatives of the Windy City that have the most power are Democrats.
Even here in Indianapolis when we talk of congressman from the Region (the six counties that make up the northwestern corner of the state but mostly just Lake County) and all the cities therein that are basically suburbs of Chicago: Gary, East Chicago, Whiting, Hammond, etc., we often mention their political prowess as having developed under the “Old West-style politics” that anecdotally dominates Chicago.
But it is also true that the national government is very, very large and I just don’t see a large cultural shift toward anything more sinister than what was there just a little over a year ago.
Allow me to be a little more specific. What makes “Chicago politics” “Chicago politics” is that it is an exceptionally aggressive type of political hardball played over turf that ,to outsiders, is inconsequential. Sometimes it gets personal. It is rarely nice. Niceties are so out of the question that someone trying to convince you they were on your side are just as likely to slap you in public as give you a gift—a gift essentially being the tool-in-trade of the backstabber.
That description of the stereotype should serve.
So what makes it “Chicago politics” is that it’s DC politics played at the Chicago level; and even for that Chicago is not unique. New York’s Tammany Hall, for example was not only known for the same kind of Machiavellian maneuvering that marks “Chicago politics;” there is an actual physical connection as politicos that honed their craft under Boss Tweed wound up in the Midwestern commercial center. New Orleans is another example. So is Las Vegas.
Indeed, what all these places have in common is that they are not DC and yet they participate in very DC-style politics.
Moreover, each of the famously corrupt cities mentioned here, and I could add Hoboken to the mix, are not even their states’ capitol cities, but they are commercial centers for each of their states. They are each old mafia capitals. Do Philadelphia and Kansas City have reputations for “Kansas City” thugs and “Philadelphia thugs?”
It seems to me that Obama, if he really did flood DC with “Chicago thugs,” doing so merely meant he came equipped with his own DC-style thugs rather than having to find locals to serve that function for him.
Is there a good argument to be made why I should support one regional brand of thuggery over another that I’m missing?
And what if, however unlikely it may be, but what if Chicago sends up a presidential candidate. Certainly their thugs will be far worse than the entrenched thugs they defeated on their way up. Should we just discount that guy’s potential presidential bid because of our fear he will bring “ur-Chicago Thugs” with him to DC?
How is any political group that controls the monopoly on violence not a thug of some sort, whether they are from Chicago or a “nice” place, like Iowa?
Or does “Chicago thug” mean something else to those that are using it? The Republican Party has its own thugs. Nixon, Goldwater, Cheney, Rove, and the Bushes are testament to a particular form of southwestern dirty politics which more deserves the “Old West” moniker than Chicago style politics has (which shares more with mid-19th century New York).
Of course the real problem here is that Republicans like Republican thugs and Democrats like Democratic thugs. So the “Chicago” here, as I alluded to earlier, is really just a stand-in for “Democratic” since Chicago is a Democratic town.
So Rahmbo is bad but The Hammer was good. Good story, but I’m not buying.
Twitter Round Up
Filed Under MetaBlogging, Porchy, TwitterRoundup | Leave a Comment
Here’s the stories I tweeted this week (follow me @Porchy)
- Colts raise ticket prices (IBJ)
- Hostettler polls well against Ellsworth (CQ Politics)
- Informative Chatroulette Pie chart (also see below) (My heart’s in accra)
- Things to know about political polling (and reporting thereof) (CQ Politics)
- Talk of Mitch Daniels 2012 increases (NYTimes-Pro; Post-Pro; New Yorker-Con)
- Ellsworth more conservative than Bayh (TPM)
- Bunning was enthusiastically Pro deficit spending before he was enthusiastically against it (Yglesias)
- Bunning’s strategy seems to have been Step 1: Be anti worker, Step 2: Give up his integrity for nothing (NPR)
- Paul Broun (R-GA) compares Obama to Snooki (MSNBC)
- Tom Friedman takes pro-billionair advice from billionaire (Yglesias)
- Texas really knows how to pick’em (Ezra Klein)
- Liar says he’s psychic, SEC just calls him criminal (NPR)
- It’s unclear if teen unemployment was aggravated by minimum wage increases. (Nyhan)
keep looking »
