Category: history

Absurdity

Bunk

One of the downsides to the information super highway is the amount of bunk that disseminates faster than ever before.  It has always been with us, though, so we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s the fault of the internet.  All the internet does is make this nonsense available faster, in more formats, and about more things than ever before, but the basic impulse has not changed since, well, forever.

Consider one of the earliest bits of nonsense that still gets some juice from time to time: Nero played while Rome burned.

Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, C.E. 37 to 68, emperor of Rome from 54 to his death by suicide in 68) became emperor after his uncle, Claudius, died.  He has been portrayed in popular fiction and some histories as a self-indulgent libertine.  The great fire that destroyed huge sections of the city in July of 64 has been laid at his doorstep for many reasons.  He was, in fact, a big urban renewal guy and one of the few theories circulating at the time that has any traction of being real was that he was doing some rather brutal slum clearance in preparation for a new construction project.  Even this seems unlikely, since the fire began very near to the Circus Maximus, which would be stupid if it were intentional, and also it began in a commercial area.  No one knows how it began.  It is much like the great Chicago Fire for which Mrs. O’Leary’s cow has been forever blamed, an assertion invented by a reporter that has become such a staple of the popular folklore that even people who “know” it isn’t true still cite it.

In the case of Nero, however, it appears that he wasn’t even in Rome when it began and when he heard he returned and immediately began organizing relief efforts.  The source of the “fiddled while Rome burned” is Suetonius and others who hated Nero.  Apparently it never happened and in this instance the exact opposite seems to be the case—he worked hard to save Rome and do what was possible after the fact.

But such is the power of bunk that people still talk about the callous and depraved Nero playing his lyre and singing The Sack of Illium in costume while the city burned.  It is a baseless piece of folklore, an urban myth of the first order.

There are two important things to take away from this.  The first is, of course, the power of images to fix the imagination in such a way that fact and truth have no chance of getting around the preferred myth.  The second is, such myths serve as distractions from genuine problems and redirect our attention from what is truly important onto fabulations that are easily manipulated and manipulative—because people who buy into them are more easily directed by such bunk in the hands of spinmeisters who would rather they didn’t pay attention to reality.

Because there was plenty about Nero that deserves serious ignominy.  Just not this.

The other thing such bunk does is paint a figure wholly one thing or the other.  There is no gray in such portrayals, no room for the ambiguities that are the way people really are.  I said Nero was a big urban renewal emperor, and this is true.  He was something of a reformer in this early reign and he did many public works that made him quite popular.  He successively extended the Empire and established rules over certain abuses by the Senate, and so forth.  Rome did not materially suffer under Nero.

But he had inherited the trend in Roman imperial life toward assassination as a means to consolidate power and even acquire it and apparently had his mother killed, who herself may have killed Claudius in order to secure the throne for her son.  As his reign progressed, an evident paranoia took hold and he became more and more erratic until finally there was an uprising in Iberia and he read the writing on the wall and took his own life.

He left a mixed legacy.

But all we remember him for now is Rome burning, bad singing, and orgies (which were more evidenced in his Uncle Caligula’s reign than Nero’s).  All the nuance is leached out and any lessons of value from understanding his reign are absent.

The other problem with bunk—you can’t learn anything from it.

I took some time with this business of Nero in order to lay the groundwork for my more contemporary point.  See, we can all of us pretty much talk about things that happened two thousand years ago with some dispassion.  (No one, I think, has a stake in falsely portraying Nero anymore.)  We can step back and look at the false picture and see where it came from and how it happened and understand something about how popular animosities have always given rise to distortions and outright falsehoods.

The reason we should always be aware of bunk like this is so we are not distracted from what may be far more important.  Bunk is noise, it is in a perverse way camouflage.  Not only does bunk mask what may be good about someone or something, but it works just as well as a mask for what may be significantly worse.  And for the one buying the bunk, it seriously erodes credibility, so that any valid criticisms he or she may have are suddenly given the same weight as the bunk—which is to say, none at all.  Bunk cheapens everything.

But there has always been bunk.  We love it.  Often we prefer the legend to the truth.  Legends are more colorful and certainly have the distinction of offering explanations that validate prejudices— but they do so without adding one worthwhile bit to any serious discussion.  Often just the opposite happens.  People who maintain the bunk version of events often impede constructive understanding and, if pressed, may actually turn on those trying to educate them out of the bunk.  Bunk can be very hurtful.  At the very least by taking up space where something useful might exist.  But also by providing a convenient test for determining who is or is not a friend or enemy.

I don’t think I need list the various manifestations of bunk that currently make the rounds of the internet and fill people with rationales for their displeasure and explain absolutely nothing.  We’ve all seen it.  Worthless allegations, unsubstantiated accusations, constructions of arguments that miss the real point, false comparisons, and outright slander.  We can recognize bunk because it always fails two major tests—logic and Occam’s Razor.  I suppose, though, that those tests are really different sides of the same one.   To put it simply, if something requires too many parts and demands the silent participation of too many people, or is simply far more complicated than seems reasonable, it is likely bunk.  (It’s best not to attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by oversight or incompetence.  History, after all, shows us that, with very few exceptions, most conspirators are incompetent—and they usually always overlook something.)

Anyway, I wish you all a bunk-free day.  It’s too much to hope for a bunk free year.

culture

Any Time They Want

I sometimes wonder who Rush Limbaugh is speaking to anymore, but the evidence suggests someone tunes in.  I wonder how many think it’s a comedy show, sort of a political version of an old Andrew Dice-Clay routine.  (Remember him?  No?  Well, there’s hope after all.)

In the wake of Rush’s remarks about Sandra Fluke he has been losing sponsors, a few Republican politicians have been condemning him, and everyone seems to want to keep as far from him as possible.  No one but a few academics are talking about this in historical terms, though, and I think that’s a mistake.  Because this is so typically male-dominant behavior, the kind that feminists— the ones Rush has had it in for lo these past decades— point to when describing cultural oppression that someone should be raising a banner and saying “See?  This is what we’re talking about!”

 

Here’s a conversation.  I’ve scripted it, but it is based on reality, and if we’re honest we have all heard something like this.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a fundraiser for an NGO.  We operate in twelve developing nations trying to implement grass roots reforms in education.”

“Wow, that sounds really interesting.  How do you get work like that?”

“Well, after I earned my Masters from Stanford, I went into private sector work for a big agro firm. Part of what I did there was coordinate large scale testing of new cultivation methods in order to improve yield per acre in a variety of conditions.  At first I was pretty hands-on with the researchers, but more and more I took over the actual negotiations, which meant a lot of PR work.”

“You traveled a lot?”

“Oh, I’ve been to China, Japan, Indonesia, India, plus a good part of the EU.”

“Must have been a lot of language barriers.”

“Some, but I speak Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and a bit of Urdu.”

“Sounds like a full-time job.  Do you do anything for fun?”

“Oh, sure.  I really like climbing and whenever I get the chance I do whitewater canoeing.  I also play piano, but to really unwind I cook.  I did a semester at a culinary institute, so…”

“Your husband must like that.”

“Oh, I’m not married.”

“Too bad.”

“Not really.  Maybe someday, but right now I just don’t have time for a full-time relationship.”

(Significant pause.)  “Is there anyone special in your life?”

“There are a couple of men I see fairly often, but most of the time it’s just casual dating.”

“Hmm.”  Goes away thinking: slut.

A joke?  Unfortunately not.  Seems sometimes no matter what a woman does professionally or otherwise, no matter what her achievements might be, if she is in any way nonmonogamous, for many people that’s the only thing that matters.  Whore, slut, garbage, trash, scum.  More than one penis gets in there by her choice, everything else is worthless.

But with a man?  The more successful professionally, the more it seems expected that he has had a string of “conquests.”  It’s part of the perks that come with virile masculinity.

Yes, I know this is not a universally held attitude, but it is the majority default reaction, so the more thoughtful “good for the goose, good for the gander” attitude does not hold sway.  We pander to the concept of the Man Who Lays Many.  It’s cool, whether we like to admit it or not.  We feel sorry for the male virgin and we have a variety of labels for him that are not particularly nice, the number one being Loser.  (Yes, Loser appends to many other traits, but even the millionaire computer geek who can’t get laid is seen as pathetic.  Money’s nice, but come on!  And then there’s the second-tier attitudes toward men who use prostitutes: “You have to buy it? Jees!”)

The double standard, in other words, is not only alive and well, it’s stormed into the party and is wrecking the buffet.

There are many causes of this, it does not emerge from any one source—if it did, we might be able to do something about it more effectively—but all sources have one thing in common—fear.  It’s not that men fear women as such.  They fear being irrelevant, and at the end of the day success with women, especially passive, noncompetitive women, is balm to the savaged ego of many men.  To have women compete directly or even (gasp!) exercise the right to indulge their sexuality the way men do (or are supposed to) is an intolerable threat.

This is sexual politics 101 and why we have to go over this again after the Sixties and Seventies baffles me.  Unless the lesson simply didn’t matter.

There has been a growing tsunami of reaction since the Women’s Movement broke down the walls into what had been seen as an exclusively male domain.  It has washed up on the beach now and into the halls of power where it is being made a Cause by men who, try as they might to spin it some other way, just can’t stand having women live independent lives.

So, yes, this whole nonsense over contraception is nothing less than an attempt to put women back in “their place” and people like Rush Limbaugh seem to think there is traction and resonance in labeling women sluts because they have sex “any time they want.”  Of course, what is implicit in that “any time they want” is that they can say No any time they want.

And that’s probably what bothers the Rush Limbaughs the most.

culture

Meltdown

I considered writing something about the recent primaries in Michigan and Arizona, in advance of Super Tuesday, but things have become so mind-numbingly bizarre I’m not sure I’d have anything relevant to say, at least not about this particular election cycle.  As a personal observation, I’d like to say that any of the Republican candidates still vying for the nomination disturb me. Romney is the least noxious, but that’s hardly a reason to vote for someone (and yet, we often do).  I don’t find him as objectionable as the other three, and in another era he would probably be a half-way decent president.  But he would be a creature of his party and right now the GOP is in the process of a major meltdown.

 

Whether you agree with their policies or not, this is simply a fact that cannot be denied.  Of course, many Republicans are very good at denial, which is one of the reasons their party is in the shape it’s in.  Climate change, bailouts, evolution, birth control…their favorite word has become No and unfortunately for them you can’t run a government that way, much less a country.  With the addition of the small but inordinately vocal and strident Tea Party contingent in 2010, the internal workings of the GOP have become untenable.  If you don’t believe me, just look at John Boehner sometimes when he’s not being interviewed.  The man is, I think, reasonable, but he’s saddled with an unruly bunch of pseudo-libertarians who think the best way to fix things is to do a complete tear-down and start all over.  Combine them with the contingent that seems to believe the only citizens in the country are in the seven-figure income club and you have a recipe for doing virtually nothing for ordinary citizens.  Boehner is not just trying to herd cats, he trying to guide a creature that is a cross between a honey badger and a burro.  (I know, I know, that’s supposed to be the Other Party’s symbol.)

It has been so long since the sides in this war were formed, most people can be forgiven if they don’t really know what the fighting is all about.  Here’s a quick rule of thumb for the battle lines that were drawn up way back in the Sixties and had concretized by the Nineties.

Republicans have traditionally been the party of the individual.  This is the party that supports the self-made man, the entrepreneur, but there was a time that did not always mean the millionaire.  They believe that America is made strong by encouraging and even occasionally forcing individuals to strive, on their own, to Make It.  That interference from government hinders that potential, therefore as little control from above as possible should be applied.  Let people go out and struggle and then reap the rewards of their efforts.

As quaint as that may sound, it’s a good philosophy, and it’s based on sound principles borne out by experience.

Democrats have traditionally been the party of factions.  Large groups are their natural constituency, often groups made up of those who have been unable to compete in the individual struggle and ended up at the bottom of the heap.  Consequently, they have been the advocates of trade unions, minorities, and various organizations that claim to speak for the voiceless.

You can see how this played out during the Great Depression.  Few of the programs that FDR pushed in his first years were in any way original—or Democratic.  Hoover started most of them.  But Hoover did so with such penny-pinching trepidation, bolstered by his belief that direct government aid would damage the American worker and make him hopelessly dependent, that none of them did a bit of good.  Still, he might have sold it had not the Bonus Marchers been met with the same pecuniary stinginess and, when they refused to go home, tanks.  As soon as General Douglas MacArthur finished burning the shanty town of impoverished veterans out than Hoover told his staff that they had just handed the election to Roosevelt.

FDR funded Hoover’s programs to the hilt and started the slow process of digging the country out.  He wasn’t much interested in the effect government aid might have on individuals, all he knew was that one-in-four American workers were unemployed, and that 25% made a big group that had to be dealt with, individuals be damned.

The philosophical differences could not have been more manifest.

And FDR was right.  This was not a crisis of ordinary proportions, it called for something more.  Hoover and the Republicans worried over the effects of big government and were willing to let people starve to preserve the principle.  (Not really, but they kept insisting private charity should take up the slack, ignoring the growing evidence that private charity was as overwhelmed as everyone else.  They didn’t really want anyone to starve, they just thought it should be compensated for privately, not through government.  Sometimes, size matters.)

Now we come down to the present.  Since Reagan came to power, these traditional lines have hardened.  There are problems with the Democratic insistence that groups matter more than individuals.  People cannot be dealt with in cookie-cutter fashion.  Democrats have long been blinded by the unstated but implicit assumption that individuals who can take care of themselves (A) don’t need anything from government and (B) are dangerous to programs aimed at groups.  This has led to some disastrous legislation from time to time, as in the Welfare Act of 1965 and Department of Education policies that ride roughshod over local school districts.  Their one-size-fits-all approach has caused damage, just as unintended, I’m sure, as Republican’s inability to recognize when individuals just can’t get out of a hole on their own.

In times when there was an equitable distribution of reasonableness across both parties, these differences offset each other.  Not perfectly, but things got done that actually did the country good.  Sometimes you have to treat problems from a group perspective.  Other times, you have to stand up for individuals.

But in both instances, these are policy problems, not something for which you go to the mat as though your soul depended on it.  As the prime motive of an ideology, they are dangerous, and we’re seeing the results of just such an embrace now.

An underlying part of the disparity of viewpoint between the two, related to their fundamental differences, is their respective attitudes toward systems.

Let me explain.  As people mingle, communicate, build, etc, they inevitably build systems.  Infrastructure, certainly, like roads, railways, canals, telephones, and the like, but also social systems, which are like the deltas of great rivers—channels dug by long use that are difficult not to use, that direct the flow of people and sometimes ideas along lines that become preset.  We sometimes call this culture, but culture is more than just a social system.

It seems—and my own interaction with Republicans over the years tends to support this—that Republicans don’t care to credit systems very much.  Their traditional insistence on the hegemony of the individual underplays and often rejects the idea that systems matter much.  An individual genuinely self-motivated can circumvent or even ignore systems.  Which suggest that for those who don’t, can’t, or won’t do so choose not to.  Hence you get the belief that poverty is indicative of the person’s will or character rather than a consequence of systems.

Democrats for their part tend to fall to the other side and place an overemphasis on the effect of systems, that in fact they are all that matter, and those individuals who can effectively ignore them are aberrations.

Now, I don’t suggest that each individual Republican or Democrat consciously thinks along these lines—but taken in aggregate the trends are obvious.  (In a curious way, it’s almost a Nature vs Nurture argument, and when you look at the rhetoric of the extremists on both sides this emerges quite clearly—American exceptionalism on the one hand, American Imperialism on the other.)

What has also been clear historically—and I am speaking now of all history, not just American—is that those who grasp the fundamental operation and importance of such systems usually end up acquiring the power.  (As a dramatic example, consider the French and the Germans of 1870.  The French believed in elan, the courage of the individual French soldier, that as long as one had elan, nothing could defeat him.  The Germans believed in training and logistics.  The Germans won.)

The GOP has gone through a curious metamorphosis, though, over the last 30 years.  While still operating from their basic premise that individuals matter most—and I have actually not heard any of them state this as a principle in a long, long time—they have fought the Democratic Party for control in order to save the country from an overburden of systems, which the Democrats consistently advocate as solutions to all sorts of problems, often to the detriment of the very people they seek to serve.  In order to do this, they have honed their tactics and policies to the point where in order to deprive the enemy of the ability to conduct the war they have focused on funding and, paradoxically, on a kind of intellectual eugenics.  While the individual matters most, they seem to advocate, only a certain kind of individual is really meant.  This has led them to abandon the progressivism that once made up a significant part of their party philosophy—because progressivism was becoming more and more a matter of systems, vis a vis the so-called Safety Net and through federal education initiatives and so forth.  Now, to take the extremist view, only True Americans are important, and they are defined by—

Well, that’s a problem.  What constitutes a “true” American?

No matter.  Someone will do that along the way, in fact the very individuals they are defending and encouraging will do the defining, and that has led them into a cul-de-sac wherein the members of the club are setting the admission standards and they get stricter and stricter every year.

This year, whether they intended it or not, they seem to have defined women out of the club.  Along with gays and along with certain economic minorities and along with anyone who might otherwise qualify for membership who supports the aforementioned groups.

What I fear is they have defined themselves out of a viable constituency, because the definitions are narrower even as in the general population the definitions are broadening.  The Democrats are better able to make political gains in this situation, if they so choose, because this is how social systems operate, and they are all about systems.

I’m not optimistic about this in the long run.  As usual, both parties are missing certain fundamental realities.  The Democrats have always bothered me the way trade unions bother me.  I think we need more unions, but I don’t like them.  I see them as necessary monsters, because, as unitary systems, they have little room for individuals with needs that aren’t part of the whole.  I think we need them because the people who own the businesses are not kind and gentle souls, but single-minded, acquisitive wolves.  It is not that such people don’t care about people but that people to them are simply components.  Components in a system under their control.

And paradoxically these are the people that Republicans tend to support as examples of individuals.

I do not want to see the destruction of an organized conservative party.  Unbridled progress can be as destructive as the utter suppression of progress.  We need both in order to have a viable community.  The worst aspects of the Democratic Party have not manifested for a long time simply because the Republicans waged a somewhat successful campaign against liberalism and the Democrats, in order to hang onto some power, moved to the right, and are now almost as centrist as Republicans of the Sixties and Seventies were.  Systems, remember?  They followed the runnels of the systems.  But if the GOP melts down and fragments completely, we may see a different sort of Democratic Party emerge.

Right now, though, it appears to me that meltdown is on its way.  The GOP has lost touch with the average American in a big way.  They are becoming marginalized and if not this year then by the midterms of 2014 we will see them grappling with the death throes of becoming irrelevant.  They have bent their ear to individuals, true, but only the individuals who still seem to talk to them, and they are a rarefied group indeed.

On the other hand, I may be overstating it.  Whatever the case may be, something has to change within the GOP.  They cannot survive as a party of extremists.

culture

Narratives and the American Landscape

I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.

At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American.  Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.

It might be reassuring to keep in mind that it is at the rhetorical and ideological extremes where this happens, that the larger portion of the population is between the extremes, and by inference less rigid in their misapprehensions of both sides, but in reality this may not matter since it is those who establish the most coherent narratives who dictate the battle lines.  And we have come to a point where a willingness to hear the opposite viewpoint gets characterized as a kind of treason.

As an example, try this: for the Left, any suggestion that corporations are important, vital, and often do beneficial things for society is relegated at best to a “So what?” category, at worse as an attempt to excuse a variety of evils committed in the name of profit.  For the Right, any criticism of the shortcomings of corporations and attempts to regulate activities which can be demonstrated as undesirable is seen as a direct attack on fundamental American freedoms.

We can go down the list.  Attempts to regulate the distribution and availability of firearms is seen by the Right as a threat to basic liberties while for the Left the defense of an absolutist Second Amendment posture is seen as irresponsible at best, the promotion and propagation of a culture of violence at worst.  Environmental issues divide along similar lines—for the Left, this is, using Jonathan Haidt’s term, sacred, but for the Right is again an assault on the freedoms of Americans to use their property as they see fit.  And taxes? For the Right, taxes have become a penalty, for the Left a kind of grail for equitable redistribution of wealth.

Tragically, none of these hardened positions—none—addresses the reality of most Americans’ lives.

Oh, there’s some truth in all the positions, otherwise it would be simpler to dismiss them.  But the hardest truth to get at is the one being used to advance a false position.

What Haidt suggests—and I’ve heard political strategists talk about this—is that the difficulty lies in the particular narrative embraced. The story we use to describe who we are.  In the past, that story has been less rigid, porous in some ways, and flexible enough to include a variety of viewpoints from both Left and Right, but in recent years both narratives have taken on the stolidity of religion.

But the related problem is that really there’s only one narrative, at least one that’s cogent and accessible, and that happens to be the one best described as conservative.

Recently, I’ve been giving thought to this dichotomy of Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative.  I’ve been uncomfortable with it for a long time, but have found myself shoved into the Left-Liberal camp as a reaction to policy proposals I find unacceptable which always seem to come from the Right-Conservative side.  In the hurly-burly of political competition, sometimes there isn’t room for the kind of nuance which, say, historians can indulge.  You find yourself defending or attacking in an attempt to preserve or change and the finer points of all positions are reduced to sound-bites and slogans.  I’ve never been particularly pleased with the welfare system, but faced with conservative assaults that seem determined to simply tear it down and leave a great many people without recourse  has found me defending it against any criticism that seems aimed at finding a reason to end it.  It has always seemed to me that people opposed to it are not interested in offering a viable alternative (“They should all get a job!”) and dismantling welfare would do nothing but leave many millions of people with nothing.

But nuance, as I say, gets lost.  I don’t care for the way in which welfare is administered, but that’s not the same as saying we should not have a system for those who simply cannot gain employment.  And in the economic environments of the last forty years, it is simply facile posturing to suggest there are plenty of jobs.  If you want to see a real-life consequence of the kind of budget cutting being discussed, look at the upsurge of homelessness after Reagan gutted the HHS budgets and people who had been in mental hospitals were suddenly on the streets.

But I don’t want to continue the excuse making.  The problems Haidt elucidates have to do with an avoidance of reality on both sides and a subsequent process of demonizing each other.

And with a political mischaracterization that has resulted in the alienation of a great many people from both camps.  Often such people are given the broad and thoroughly undescriptive label Independent.  I consider myself that, though I have voted consistently Liberal-Democrat since 1984.  (Admission time.  I voted for Nixon in 1972 and I voted for Reagan in 1980.  In hindsight, it would seem I had always been looking for the Other Designation—Progressive—for which to cast my ballot, but that’s a very slippery term.  Reagan was the last Republican I voted for in a national election.  I have felt consistently alienated by GOP strategies and policies, but the reality has been that my votes for Democrats have usually been “lesser-of-two-evils” votes, not wholehearted endorsements.  Until Obama.  He was the first presidential candidate since John Anderson in 1984 who I felt actually had something worthwhile to offer rather than merely a less odious choice to the Republican.)

Once upon a time there were Liberal Republicans.  There are still Conservative Democrats.  But I think in general we no longer know what these terms mean.  The narrative that has been driving our politics since Reagan has buried them under an avalanche of postured rhetoric designed to define an American in a particular way that no doubt was intended to transcend party politics but has instead cast us all in a bad Hollywood movie with Good Guys and Bad Guys in which a final shoot-out or fist-fight determines the outcome.

I think it is fair to say that this America is ahistorical.  On the Left, it is a country demanding atonement, built on the backs of the abused and misused, hypocritical,  concerned only with power and wealth.  On the Right is the only country ever that has offered genuine freedom for its citizens and has stood on the principles of fairness and justice (which are not always the same thing) and because it has done more good than not its sins should be absolved if not ignored.

Neither portrait is true, although many true details inform both.

What perhaps needs to happen is for new storytellers to come to the fore.  I’m not sure how they’re going to be heard through the constant din of invective-laden blaming, but I think Obama took a stab at it.  He got drowned out more often than not and didn’t finish constructing the narrative, but he seems to have a grasp of how important the story is.

Because here, almost more than anywhere else, the Story is vital.  When we broke free from England, our story up till then had been England’s story, and it was long, deep into the past.  When we stepped away from that it was into political and social terra incognito, and if there was going to be a story for us it would have to be one that looked into the future.  We had no past at that point, not one we could claim as our own.  We have been constructing that narrative ever since.

Here’s where the crux of the problem now lies, I think.  For one side, there is the sense that we finished the story quite some time ago and that it is fine as it was and should go on unmodified.  For the other side, that narrative is too filled with burdens of a past it seems no longer applies.  This ex stasis has left us in a kind of limbo.  Neither side seems willing to admit that the other might have something of value to add to the narrative and that maybe some of the narrative went off the rails here and there.  Neither side wants to admit that their version of who we are really needs the other as well.  Until that occurs, those caught in the crossfire find themselves having to pick and choose the parts of both narratives that work for them and then figure out which way to go with the hodge-podge so assembled.  By these means we lurch on into an uncertain future.

I’m likely going to revisit this from time to time.  For now I think I want to do without labels.  But I’ll leave off for now with this: My Way Or The Highway is absolutely idiotic when we’re all still building the road.

culture

Moyers & Haidt On Moral Psychology

I have a lot of things to say about what is discussed in this video, but first I’d like people to give a listen.

Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

As a teaser, let me say that what Jonathan Haidt has to say needs to be heard by both sides of current political divide in this country before we completely screw ourselves out of a functioning community. More to follow.

culture

Trust In Your Message?

There’s an aspect of this flap over Obama’s insistence that health care policies offered by institutions with religious affiliation cover birth control that I don’t see many people discussing.  All the posturing over how this is anti-religious and a blatant slap at religious freedom, blah blah, is both predictable and irrelevant.  For one, it’s not.  For one thing, it doesn’t even approach the kind of infringement of a basic freedom that Bush’s infamous “gag rule” on abortion information represented, which Obama overturned.

But there is a common link between both that Bush-era ruling and the current stance taken by the Catholic bishops.  Namely, a complete lack of confidence in their message.  What it comes down to is a denial that people have not only the right but the ability to make decisions for themselves based on good information.

It’s simple.  The Gag Rule assumed that if people never found out about certain options, then they wouldn’t use those options, but that if they did learn about them, they would.  It represented a complete lack of confidence that people could both hear all the options and then make decisions in their own best interest, some of which would be consistent with the policy Bush’s administration was backing.  Likewise here.  Just because birth control is covered by an insurance policy purchased for the benefit of employees does not automatically mean that all these people will start using birth control.  If the Catholic message is sound, if it has merit, that option will never be exercised.

But no.  Safer, they must think, to restrict access, to keep it off the table, to ban the pamphlet, and remove the service than to trust that people will do what the Catholic Church wants them to do.

For all the posturing about what is or is not “American,” this is as unAmerican as it gets.  Honored more in rhetoric than practice, the right of the individual to decide for him or herself is supposed to be at the heart of what makes us who we are.  So how does barring choice square with that?

Granted, we do it all the time.  We do it in drug use, we have age-specific restrictions dealing with movies, bars, driving, we have all manner of qualifying rules and regulations that keep people away from certain options, and a lot of it makes perfect sense.

But this is not one of them.  If we were going to ban coverage of birth control from all insurance policies, then there would be no controversy over religious issues.  It would be controversial for a different reason, but since the ban would be universal it would not be liable to the kind of ideological argumentation we’re now seeing.  But if you’re going to offer it to some and not others based on where they work, then you have a basic civil rights question.

Look, this isn’t even about making churches provide birth control.  It’s about church-affiliated institutions with large employee payrolls that are not denomination-exclusive—like universities and hospitals—being required to serve that employee base in accord with the standards every other employer must meet.  Despite the association with a religious institution, what we’re talking about is workplace rules where the institution and the community interface on the level of employment.

But that argument will be made in court, no doubt. What strikes me about this is the so far unremarked tendency in this country to not trust in our own messages.  We do this all the time, suppressing certain ideas, barring certain speakers from addressing certain audiences, criticizing open discourse over things which we fear—it’s arguable that most Americans had no idea what communism actual was back during the Cold War, debatable whether we do now, but we so feared it that we wouldn’t even talk about it—and frankly that’s not us.  It’s not who we claim to be, not who we’d like to be, but there it is.

Of course, in this instance the Catholic bishops have a real concern.  According to studies, 98% of Catholic women use or have used birth control.  Obviously, the message the Church wants delivered doesn’t have as much traction as they’d like.  By that token, taking a stand on this is clearly in response to evident failure.

But it’s still a matter of personal choice, something the Catholic Church—or, for that matter, any church—has never been comfortable with.  Trusting an individual to make a decision like this for herself has always been fraught with the likelihood that they will make the right choice—but not the one desired.

This is vestigial moralizing.  If we accept as a concept that all people should be considered equal, then it follows that the opportunities and privileges available to everyone should be equal.  At one time, that equality was meted out based on the notion of a family unit.  The family, represented by the man, enjoyed the rights and privileges of the community.  With changes in technology and the economy, the focus has shifted more narrowly on the individual, which has eroded the primacy of the male as women have become more and more able to act independently*.  If we are serious about equality, then it should come as no surprise that we have to make adjustments for those things that enable the expression of equality.  That is the American message and all this political posturing over birth control is exactly apposite that message.

In the wake of the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood kerfluffle, it seems finally enough people are waking up to the fact that if we do not assert the primacy of that message, we could lose what equality we’ve gained since—

Well, since the 1920s when you could receive a prison sentence for distributing pamphlets about birth control.  Or since the 1940s when women were forced out of jobs they had held all during WWII and were told they were incapable of doing those jobs by virtue of their sex.  Or since 1965, when finally the Supreme Court declared that couples had a basic right to contraception.  Or—

The Catholic Church obvious doesn’t trust its people to heed its message.  It may be that the message is flawed.  Or maybe Americans are beginning to trust their own message.

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*I am talking here about the way society was structured, not the right or wrong of the distribution of rights and privileges.  It is an unfortunate fact that the basic biological reality concerning reproduction has placed women in a vulnerable position in regards to power relations.  My belief is that there has never been a excuse for the disenfranchisement of women, but until effective birth control and the subsequent changes in economic life that resulted, the initiative has been with men to set the rules.  Even so, it took a long time for men as a group to accept equality as a reality, never mind as a principle, and I do not for a minute believe that the majority of men who now take it as given are of sufficient numbers to guarantee we would never return to a culture of female subjugation.  The attack on reproductive rights strikes at the main foundation of contemporary political freedoms for women.

culture

Let Us Not Snicker In Complacency

Rick Santorum won the three primary-type elections yesterday.  Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado.  A sweep.  But really, I should put that Won in quotes.  He “won” by virtue of garnering more votes than the others, which I admit is the traditional way in which winning is established.

But, really, did he?  The largest voter turn-out was Missouri, with 6% of eligible, registered voters going to the polls.  Out of that he took somewhere around 40%, which means he got less than 3% of Missouri’s potential vote.  It was worse in the other two states, Minnesota with 1% and Colorado with 2%.

And yes, these are caucuses, nonbinding, no delegates are assigned based on these, it was more a moral support effort.

But still.  In the past, it has been the Republican base that has been the most energized in these things, and this time their showing was pathetic. Less than.

So, what exactly did Santorum win?

Not much, but please, let us not make assumptions.  It’s a long way to August, much less November, and all kinds of bizarreness can happen before then.  The idea that Rick Santorum could be the GOP nominee for president fills me with both glee and trepidation.  Glee because the only candidate the GOP has fielded that has a chance of challenging Obama is Romney, no matter what the Party faithful might wish to believe.  Trepidation because I tend to hedge my mental bets these days concerning the political landscape and the thought that Santorum might actually unseat Obama scares the bejeezus out of me.  In his own way, he is as polarizing as George Wallace in 1968.  (Gingrich less so, for two reasons—he is inconsistent in his message and he is far too intellectual.  He’s the closest thing the GOP has right now to an Egghead, something they have tended to vote against for a very long time due to a nebulous perception that “average” Americans won’t vote for someone who is too smart.)  The positions he has taken on privacy issues troubles me no end.  Even if he couldn’t get his program through Congress on these matters, the fact that enough of my fellow citizens would put him in office would frighten me.  It wouldn’t be Santorum who would concern me so much as my next door neighbor.

Hence, my admonition that we should not feel smug, we who would rather see Obama get a second term than any Republican who has the remotest chance of winning.  National politics is a fey and fickle creature and has surprised people before.

But more than that, if I read this correctly, we are seeing the self-dismantling of a major political party.  For the first time in decades, the Democrats are showing more solidarity and cohesion than the Republicans, and may end up being the remaining “super power” when this is over, the GOP having splintered into factions that will eventually recombine into something else.

There is a danger here that comes with all such victories, that of self-satisfied, uncritical assumption of Being Right.

Being Right is the disease to which the Republicans are succumbing.  Not that they have been—right, that is—but that they have built their entire strategy on the assumption that (a) this is what people vote for and (b) that they in fact are right.  It has led to a number of unfortunate distortions of the political process in the name of saving the country that, I think, have also led to their current malaise.  It has pushed the Republicans into more and more strident and restricted positions from which they have become ineffective in the actual job they’ve been hired to do—namely, govern the country.  (I mean, seriously—who gives a damn about who is or is not allowed to get married when there are 58 million adults without jobs?  And given the ranking of American schools in math, science, history, and reading, does anyone think allowing prayer in the class—which as a silent practice is not now prohibited—is really the issue we need to focus on?)

Americans as individuals can make the call as to what is right.  That’s not what we send representatives to Washington do establish.  We send them there to conduct the people’s business, a phrase I haven’t seen in general use for a very long time.  Yes, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about that, but this is a tactical question.  I do not look to Washington to tell me what my morals should be.  Nor do I want Washington telling my neighbor why I am not to be trusted because I have ideas that might run counter to the current rhetorical postures on offer.

Democrats have no better claim than Republicans on that.  While much lip service is given to America’s pluralism, at the end of the day, when the campaign ads run, and the blood flows in the primaries, both parties indulge in the politics of false unity.  They both paint Americans as this or that and our differences are minimized to the point that if someone actual has a distinct need or identity, we either ignore it or try to force him or her into a mold that conforms to current prejudice.

A political party that feels it has a mandate as representing True Americans is a dangerous thing, because it can forget to represent All Americans.  Cycles of rapid turn-over in congressional seats are indicative of the kind of blunt messaging an ill-served electorate sends when they elect someone who then goes to Washington and doesn’t do what they were sent to do, but instead takes winning that seat as a ticket to try to make the government conform to his or her vision of True America.  (I sent you there to rein in spending, not gut the SEC.  I sent you there to fix Social Security, not blame the Democrats for pursuing socialism.  I sent you there to do something about education, not shoehorn in your pet projects.)

The Democratic Party has its share of blindnesses and prejudices and we should all be wary of seeing them burgeon into the kind of bombastic over-confidence that the Republicans are now paying for in their own party.  Since the Depression, the Democrats have more and more become the party of the One Solution To Fix It All, blithely ignoring local conditions and the very uniquenesses both parties like to brag about but neither really knows how to deal with.  If there is a problem, a federal agency must be created to fix it, and while that has certainly been effective in some things, in other matters it has been an irritant if not downright destructive.

(The model for federal agencies, it seems to me, should be NASA.  No, seriously.  When you look at NASA and how it is structured and what it is actually supposed to do, it’s a terrific idea.  It hasn’t, of course, stuck to its original concept, but close enough for an example.  NASA is publicly seen as a government space program that is supposed to do all of our off-earth exploring and so forth.  This is a mischaracterization.  NASA was established as a federally-funded research-and-development organ that would create the technology to be used in space exploration, with the idea that, once developed and tested, this technology would be available to the private sector or to universities to do with as they will.  NASA was supposed to continually develop solutions that we could then take off the shelf and use.  It was never intended to set priorities and dictate the direction we would take, although by default it has done so.  This would be an effective model if deployed more as it was intended.  Other agencies do exhibit these protocols—OSHA, for example—but many are imperial, dictating rather than assisting.  This is a product of the kind of arrogance we have yet to figure out how to be rid of in government.)

Starting now, with what is so evidently happening to the Republican Party, all of us should be more aware of what the Democrats do.  I shy away from predictions with too much specificity—the more detailed you get the farther off target you fall—but if not this year then by the next election cycle I would not be surprised to see the rise of an effective third party and the eventual obliteration of the Republican Party as we have known it.  I don’t think this would in itself be a bad thing—in 1976 they courted and in 1980 brought in an infection that has transformed it into something its own leadership is uncomfortable with and cannot effectively control—but I don’t think it would be automatically a good thing, either.   We have seen what happens in countries with only one political party and we should fear it.

 

culture

Stepping Up

I’ve been hesitant to write anything about the Susan G. Komen fiasco.  Not for fear of invoking controversy, but because things started unraveling so fast it was difficult to know when it would play out.  Here is a handy overview of the series of events.  The position taken by the Komen charity group shifted, mutated, and reeled in the sudden upwelling of negative response, that on any given day whatever I might have said would be irrelevant the next morning.

One aspect, however, strikes me as significant.  That response.  It came swiftly and it came from all quarters and it came with cash.  I cannot recall a similar response happening so swiftly and so decisively in this ongoing struggle over abortion rights.  One of the most annoying things about being progressive and/or liberal is the tepidity with which we meet challenges.  It would appear that all of us who espouse a progressive view, when it gets down to the nitty gritty of political position-taking and infighting, have feet not even of clay but of silly putty.  It is actually heartening to see an abrupt and united response that is categorically decisive for once.

It would be even better if this were the harbinger of the rediscovery of our collective spine.  The Religious Right has been canvassing, politicking, and buying politicians for a long time now, absolutely dedicated to their position, over which it has been clear for over three decades that what they want is not negotiable.  What hasn’t been so clear till the last few years has been the full extent of what they want and finally—finally—progressives are beginning to understand that this is not a disagreement but a war.

Thanks to people like Rick Santorum the full program of the antichoice movement is impossible to ignore.  If they were interested in eliminating abortion only, there would have been several points along the way over this long and acrimonious struggle where common cause could have been made.  But the fact is they wish to eliminate what they see as inexcusable permissiveness, sexual license, and immorality, and they would do this by eliminating access to all forms of birth control.  What they doubtless assume is that if pregnancy once more regained its power to scare women into celibacy then the United States would become the country they prefer to live in and their version of morality would hold sway.  They have a number of reasons for pursuing this, some less plausible than others, but at the end of the day they very much want people to stop having safe sex.

Safe, that is, in terms of pregnancy.

Rick Santorum has gone on record believing that even within marriage sex for pleasure is a no-no.  Probably most people think that’s just an eccentricity of his and that he would be unable to actually turn the clock back to try to make such a condition a general reality.  More and more people, I think, are beginning to realize that there is a rather large and loud segment of the population that would support him in this.  Not a majority, not by any means a majority, but the political Right acts like it speaks for the majority all the time, so it might be understandable if people in general had the idea that the majority of their fellow citizens were like this.

They also don’t realize, probably, that the foundational Supreme Court case establishing a right to contraception—Griswold v. Connecticut—was over a married couple’s right to control their reproductive life.

I also don’t think a lot of people, especially young women, have given much thought to the kinds of opportunities that would close up in their faces in such a regime.  They do in some states.  Whether or not abortion is  legal and a right nationally, there are some states where the anti-choice movement has made it so difficult for clinics to remain open—often using extra-legal means—that this is a right in name only.

I’ve been wondering how much more would have to happen before the actual majority finally said enough and acted.  Planned Parenthood lost a grant of roughly $640,000 from Komen.  They’ve received over three million as replacement.  The outcry of protest has been loud enough that Komen is trying to backtrack.  They’ve made noises about reinstating the grant, but it remains to be seen if they actually will.

In the meantime I have had some exchanges with people who think what Komen did was absolutely correct and a moral victory and the troubling thing about these was the mendacity attached to the arguments.  One response to me was that only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget went to non-abortion services, while in fact the reverse is true.  As argument continued, I responded with actual numbers.  Planned Parenthood performed around 325,ooo abortions last year.  They provided contraceptive services to nearly five million women.  And contraceptive services do not account for even half of what they do.  The rest are services for STDs, counseling, and related health services.  The counterargument ended there.

These are publicly available figures and the number of abortions is a mandated report.

Komen handled this badly.  They have suffered resignations within their own organization over it.  Brinker herself tends to the Right politically, but she hired a vice president who is on record as having run on an anti-abortion, anti-choice platform—unsuccessfully—and from appearances seems to have used her position to strike a blow against Planned Parenthood.

Again, what I found most encouraging in all this was the sudden and clear reaction on the part of people who may finally be reaching their limit over the hypocrisy of this conflict.

Hypocrisy?  One of the more interesting facts about the whole anti-choice movement has been the numbers of women who end up in the very clinics they have been protesting when they come up pregnant.  Some even sit in the waiting room preaching at the others there how they will all go to hell for killing their babies, and then go in and have a D and C to rid themselves of their own “inconvenience.”  I’m not particularly surprised or shocked by this.  People compartmentalize.  What seems to be the case here is a desire for the law to change to prevent them from doing what they know they’ll do if something they detest is legal.  They can’t face up to their own responsibilities so they want the rest of society to make them do it.  But for that to happen, everyone else has to be under the same restrictions.  “Somebody stop me!”

What may finally be changing is the forebearance of all the other people whose lives would be negatively affected by the changes being demanded.  We can tolerate easily the hypocrisy in our neighbor—until such hypocrisy becomes a national movement and threatens our freedoms.

I know there is a genuine disagreement over the basic question here—not so much when does life begin but when is such life Human?  If you believe that it is from the moment sperm fertilizes egg, well and good.  But if, like me, you believe “human” is more than a biological definition and requires a personality, then we’re talking about a progression from nonhuman to human that takes nine months and then some.

That leaves the decision up to each individual, though, and I can even understand the argument that collectively we cannot endorse murder.  And yet we have numerous legal distinctions to qualify the taking of life that is not murder.  We all understand what constitutes murder and we all understand what constitutes self defense and all the shades in between.  As a practical matter, to me, abortion is self defense.  In very real terms, an unwanted pregnancy is a life-threatening condition.  Perhaps the mother will not die from it, but that does not mean her life will not be threatened with profound and in many instances unwanted and detrimental change.  In the case of the poor, this is a materially significant fact.  If you can’t feed yourself, how to you feed another that you didn’t even invite into your home?

And the Komen decision to end that grant went straight to poor women, because that’s who received the benefit of that money.

Let’s be clear—abortion has always been available to people with means.  It did not become an issue until the poor came into the equation.  And if it is once more rendered illegal, women with money will still have access.  Only the poor will suffer.  This is reality.

In combination with Occupy Wall Street, there is a groundswell of populist anger directed toward the basic inequities in our society.  We will never be rid of certain inequities—that is human nature, and let’s face it, our success, at least economically, is based on such inequities and the promise of “rising above”—but we should at least strive to eliminate the grosser aspects that serve only to rub the less fortunate’s collective face in the mud of failure.  People do not have to be rich in order to be safe and comfortable and feel secure and invested in their society.  They only have to feel that in certain fundamental ways they are treated fairly and have the same rights as any one else, rights that are not exclusive to the wealthy, the privileged, or the hypocritical.

___________________________________________________________

As a coda to all this, here is a report on one of the items offered as part of Komen’s awareness outreach.  In conjunction with a weapons distributor, a pink Walther P-22 is available for purchase to support Komen’s program.

It has always struck me how often the aggressive advocacy of 2nd Amendment rights, support of the death penalty, and a kind of libertarian default to the power of the gun seem to be expressed by the very same people most vocal about the “immorality” of abortion.  The horror, it sometimes seems, of  taking human life is very categorical.  The apparent contradiction evaporates when seen from a religious viewpoint that centers on spiritual concepts of innocence and an oft unspoken assumption that this is a determining factor in deciding the appropriateness of killing.  Adults are not innocent by definition and fall automatically into a different category than a fetus which has never had a chance to “sin.”

Even so, the apparent hypocrisy is even less difficult to understand when seen from the viewpoint of people determined that their ideas of public morality should trump all personal rights that fall outside of a tightly-defined range of so-called “decency”—a view advanced and backed up by the implicit threat of violence demonstrated by a political posture that sees no contradiction between a “right to life” stance on the one hand and a willingness to mete out death to the deserving on the other.

 

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One more addendum in a story that I am sure will continue to repercuss for months if not years to come, the person at the center of the policy flap at Susan G. Komen has resigned.   Of course she is trying to spin the situation, but where there is smoke, as the saying goes.  I suspect at the core of this was a ploy of some orchestration between Ms. Handel and certain politicians—enactment of the “policy” then the move to investigate Planned Parenthood—or maybe not.  Maybe this was all just a confluence of unlikely coincidence and no one had an ulterior motive.  What’s that about pigs and air travel?

Art

The Last One

The last motion picture theater of my youth is gone.

For several years, The Avalon, sitting on Kingshighway, across the street from a mortuary that has now become a church, has been shuttered and slowly decaying and finally has met its inevitable fate.

In a way, good.  It has been an eyesore for some time, a constant reminder of neglect and a ruin of a bygone era.

Hyperbole? Indeed, yes, but true nonetheless.  As you can tell by what remained, it was an elegant, simple building, with a lovely facade.  A symbol of an age thoroughly gone—the single-screen, stand-alone movie theater.

The last film I saw there was back in 1986 or ’87—The Last Temptation of Christ.  The theater had passed into the hands of a single owner who was a bit of an eccentric, and he tried everything to keep it going.  He had a bit of a windfall with that film because of the timidity of every other movie theater in the city and county.  They all refused to show Scorcese’s flawed depiction of Jesus’ final days.  The Avalon announced it would screen it and it was no doubt the last time it had sell-out audiences for several days.

By then, the wear and tear was already very apparent.  One of the speakers had been busted for years, generating an annoying buzz off to stage left, and he had never, evidently, made enough money to fix it or replace it.  For ordinary dialogue it was fine, the buzz only became noticeable during very loud sequences.  Probably a torn cone.

But the air conditioning worked, the concession stand still operated, and the seats were kept in repair.

After that, we never went back.  When the doors closed, I expected someone to buy it and try to restore it, but I always thought that during the ’80s and ’90s, when so many of these disappeared one way or the other.

There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s film Radio Days that shows the family Going To The Movies during the 1930s.  In Allen’s handling, it is a reverential scene, like people going to church, slow, a processional, and while I never quite felt that way, there is certainly something of that in my memory.  Nostalgia often becomes a frame for reverence.  Going to the movies for us was a Big Deal and our major entertainment, up till the age of VCRs.  I have vivid memories of a childhood with many options for movie-going.  St. Louis was full of them.

A few of the buildings remain.  The ultra-modernist Martin Cinerama is still there, but it serves as a church now, which pains me.  It was the most expensive theater to go to, but it was the only Cinemascope screen in town.  I remember seeing Grand Prix there.  I also saw 2001: A Space Odyssey there four times.  But not much else.  We may have seen How the West Was Won there, but my more vivid memory of that was seeing it in our local theater, The Shenendoah, and being annoyed at the peculiar warp in the center of the screen where the wide Cinemascope picture had been compressed.

The Melvin is still there, but it, too, is a church, one of those little revival things that can barely support itself.

And of course The Fox is still there, majestic centerpiece of our threater district, and up the street a little bit is Powell Hall, which was once The American, a movie house of the grand tradition.

The rest?  All the stand-alone neighborhood theaters are pretty much gone.

The ones I spent my adolescence in were within walking distance, albeit long walks:  The Shenendoah, The Ritz, The Washington, and The Columbia.  I saw Gone With The Wind in The Columbia.  To be fair, that one is somewhat still there.  The building is, anyway.  After the theater closed, it was converted into a sports facility for a while, with handball courts.  It burned.  Now it is a private home, a showcase bit of architectural bravura owned by the architect.  I sometimes wonder how many people anymore know what it once was.

But the others are just gone, torn down.  Parking lots.  That’s also what became of The Granada, another of my favorites.  I remember when it was demolished, standing in the remaining space and trying to fit the immense theater of my memory into the claustrophobic area of the empty lot.  That’s another one I recall the last picture I saw in—Star Crash.  It rained hard that night, too.

The Granada in particular galls.  I knew a bunch of people, my age, who had formed a company to try to buy it so they could turn it into a revival theater.  The owner, for reasons that escaped us all, refused to sell, delayed and delayed, until one year the roof fell in and the building became a hazard.  The cost of renovation at that point was too high and soon after it fell to the wrecking ball.

The Ritz…yes, I remember the last picture I saw there, as well.  The owners had tried to convert it into a multi-screen venue, which sort of worked, but the crowd had deteriorated into a Roman mob and I was threatened with a knife in the hands of a ten-year-old I told to shut up.  The film?  Airplane II.

Not sure about all the others.

The litany is long, like absent friends.  The Crest, the Crestwood, the Ambassador,  all the Loews theaters, Midtown, State, another one that eludes memory just now, the Mark Twain, the Creve Coeur…

I remember the first time I went to a multiplex.  I didn’t know then that it was the wave of the future.  My dad took me to The Des Peres to see 2001, on a screen not much larger than a widescreen LCD you can put in your home now.  They were known as “Jerry Lewis Intimate Theaters” and we thought they were a joke.  Well.

Movie houses, as they were once affectionately called, suffered, I think, the demise of the B Picture more than anything else.  In an era where the cheapest Hollywood production can only be done for close to ten million, the need for box office returns simply will not support the way theaters used to operate.  Oh, there are certainly B pictures, but they go direct to television (cable) or direct to DVD.  No one is going to pay the cost of an evening at the theater for less than a major motion picture, so the bread-and-butter of the former age is gone.

I can understand, intellectually, what happened, and if I had been a businessman in the movie house business back then I probably would have taken the same series of decisions that has resulted in the current loss of what for many decades was an American institution.

Going to the movies is a social activity.  It’s not like gathering a couple friends at your home to watch a DVD.  It is a civilizing activity when conducted the way it once was.

One benefit of this, probably unforeseen (I didn’t see it), is the revival of live theater.  If you’re going to pay a lot of money to go be entertained, the novelty and impact of the stage is the thing that draws the audience.  Not, perhaps, large audiences—many local theater groups struggle—but devoted audiences, and this, I think, is a good thing.  Live theater is about the story, the characters, not the special effects.  At live theater, you have to pay attention.

I miss going to the movies.  We stopped doing it years ago because, frankly, it was just more convenient to rent the video.  The “pause” button has spoiled us, weakening out bladders, giving us opportunity to replay what just happened because we don’t pay as close attention as we used to, and avoiding sitting in a hall with people who don’t know how to shut up during the film.  It became expensive and a bother.

Now it’s a special event, something we might do once or twice a year.  (I have every intention of going to see John Carter of Mars at the theater.)  And, yes, there are still theaters—multiplexes, often in shopping malls (although that peculiar institution itself is struggling, so who knows what may happen)—and they are expensive.  Now we have OMNIMAX theaters, which, impressive as they sometimes are, is nevertheless part of an ongoing tradition in film to try to coax people to leave their homes and go to the movies, like VistaVision, Todd-AO, Cinemascope and a dozen others, all trying to offer people what could not be had on television.  The current revival of 3-D is such a gimmick.

Anyway, I thought I’d take some space to lament the passing of yet another monument from my youth.  The intersection where The Avalon once stood was home once to a remarkable piece of urban architecture, a Famous-Barr department store that, when it was built, was shocking for its modernity.  That’s gone now, too, a strip mall in its place with a Walgreens and an Office Max.  Around the neighborhood you can see the architectural motifs on apartment buildings and private homes that speak of a more optimistic, confident time—and, perhaps, a more thoughtful time.

Or not.  Nostalgia is deceptive and memory a dangerously mutable realm.  But there is still some comfort there, to go along with the melancholy.

 

culture

Equality Means Just That

Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark. I’ve seen him on other occasions and he is articulate and, from what I’ve seen, fearless, a rare combination today in politics. In this excerpt he’s talking about gay marriage.

No, that’s not right. He’s talking about equality. And that’s what is at the heart of so much today. Listen:

He says what I believe. Being an American, to me, means something very basic and unequivocal. Equality is not a commodity, available for a price, which some folks can afford more of than others. it comes with the territory and the idea that we still, after all this time, have to have special legislation to defend various aspects of what should be presumed without question irritates me.

His remark about the utility of popular votes is also spot on. We like to assume democracy is applicable in all cases, but it is not. This is one reason we have a republic rather than a full-blown democracy. A democratically empowered republic, yes, but in a republic the passions of the moment do not hold sway, or should not. Lest anyone thinks otherwise, for a vast portion of this country slavery existed by dint of popular mandate. So did the chattel condition of women. While it may be true that these things would have (and did) erode in time, that is not the same as saying democracy worked. Other factors were involved, but in the case of slavery a war had to be fought in order to enforce what ought to have been recognized as a fundamental right.

Americans are no different in many ways than any other person on the planet. We have our foibles, our prejudices, our blindnesses. Many of us really don’t think through the meaning of our convictions and in some uncomfortable areas we would rather the issue never come up than have to deal with it. And doubtless a great many of us want to feel special if not superior in relation to others. We have many euphemisms for those with whom we wish to have no association, and most of them are class-based, some are race-based, others are behavior-based. None of them should be permitted to dictate legal status.

Equal means equal. Until we internalize that, breathe it like the very air we take for granted, we will continue to suffer the kind of strife that often renders our politics abusive and fruitless.

Just sayin’.