Category: Best

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Little Piggies

At the end of the celebrated novel Animal Farm by George Orwell, the farm animals look from their revolutionary leaders, the pigs, to their former oppressors, the farmers, and begin to see that they are both essentially alike. Orwell’s point was eloquently made: under the enticing delusion of liberation, the animals replaced one set of thugs with another.

Orwell has been widely interpreted as inferring that capitalism is okay, because he so obviously illustrates how communism betrayed humanity. Most people miss a very important point: the farmers (capitalists) are as bad as the pigs.

George Orwell died in 1950. The CIA’s Howard Hunt (who later helped burgle the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee on behalf of Richard Nixon’s Re-election Committee) dispatched some agents to Britain to buy the film rights of the book from Orwell’s widow. In the subsequent animated version of the movie, the farmer-capitalists in the conclusion were deleted.

And here, of course, the wonderful incidence of enemies ending up behaving like each other.  The U.S. government lied to encourage Americans to believe that the Communists are liars.

[When you think about it, that’s quite an admission. It’s as if the CIA was admitting that the “good” capitalists it was defending were intent upon slaughtering and eating the “workers”. But that was okay, because the Communists were going to do the same thing anyway. 2011-03-04]

The Animal Farm revisionism was only part of a concerted campaign by the CIA to try to discredit communism by sponsoring a steady stream of propaganda against it through cultural agencies, exhibitions, writers, and academics.

Obviously, the very means by which the CIA tried to prove that the capitalist west was “free” powerfully undermined the very notion that the U.S. and it’s allies were substantively more honest, truthful, or ethical than their communist enemies.

Among those who were compromised by this campaign: Nicholas Nabokov (the writer’s cousin), Stephen Spender, Isaiah Berlin, Encounter Magazine, James Mitchener, and Mary McCarthy.

I recall a piece in Reader’s Digest by James Mitchener in which he essentially argued that the students at Kent State deserved to be shot by the National Guard because some of the female protestors used obscenities, and this was an extreme provocation to the National Guardsmen who were largely effete southern gentlemen who were shocked that ladies would use obscenities. I wonder if that particular piece was subsidized. Perhaps it should have been.

These and other gems are recounted in a book by British writer Frances Stonor Saunders, in “The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters”

Trust no one.

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Cherry Pie in the Face

Hockey Night in Canada should fire Don Cherry.  The man is a complete fraud.

Don Cherry is a former NHL coach.  I emphasize the word “former”.  After short tours with the Boston Bruins and Colorado Flames, nobody wanted him anymore.  He was offered a post on Hockey Night in Canada.  He’s been there ever since, telling everyone else how to run their hockey teams.

His one virtue is he speaks his mind without thinking– if you can call that a virtue.  It is entertainment, but I wouldn’t call it a virtue.  For some reason (well, the reason is obvious– it wins viewers), Don Cherry is allowed to speak his mind on HNIC when nobody else is.  Remember Dave Hodge was fired for flipping a pencil when HNIC declined to switch to the last few minutes of an important game in Montreal instead of going to advertising.

Cherry lambastes coaches, referees, and players– especially European or Russian players–during the intermissions of hockey games.  You get the impression that if only Don Cherry were in charge of the Leafs or the Flyers or the Canadiens, the Stanley Cup would be a sure thing.

But wait a minute!  Don Cherry is in charge.  Don Cherry owns an Ontario Junior “A” hockey team called the Mississauga Ice Dogs.  Wow.  This team must be doing really great, right?

The Mississauga Ice Dogs are currently on pace to set a record all right.  It has about 8 wins.  It is about to set a record for the fewest points ever for a Junior “A” franchise.   The Ice Dogs have one of the top positions in next year’s OHL Junior “A” draft sown up.  But the most talented eligible players don’t want to play for Don Cherry’s team.

One of the biggest problems with the team is that many of the employees are members of Don Cherry’s family.  Another problem is that Don Cherry hires a coach, puts him in charge of the team’s performance, and then second-guesses all of his decisions.

And, of course, Cherry doesn’t want any Russian or European players on his team.

The result of these policies is that the Ice Dogs are the worst team in junior hockey.  Cherry should admit he doesn’t know anything about hockey.  He just mouths off at every opportunity.

It’s time for Hockey Night in Canada to bring in an expert analyst instead.

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Time Magazine’s Big Lie

Time Magazine recently released an issue devoted to movers and shakers of the 20th century. I found an interesting little item on Bill Gates:

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This is a lie.  It’s not a difference of opinion held by the editors of a popular news magazine: it is a lie, plain and simple.

Interesting, isn’t it? “..together they designed the breakthrough software to run the first microcomputers…”

A few points:

1. Gates was kicked out of Harvard for stealing computer time– he didn’t “drop out”.

2. Gary Kildall designed “DOS”, or CP/M as it was then known. Bill Gates and Paul Allen did NOT. When Kildall and IBM were unable to reach an agreement on the use of CP/M for the new IBM PC, IBM went to Bill Gates. Gates realized that a version of Kildall’s CP/M– called “QDOS” from Seattle Computer Products could do the trick, so Paul Allen licensed it and he and Gates turned around and licensed it to IBM. Kildall later discovered that QDOS was a virtual copy of CP/M, sued, and then settled out of court with IBM.

IBM does not settle out of court if they are right.  They settle out of court to mitigate their losses against the likelihood of losing in court.

History is so enamored of material success that it begins to re-write itself. Suddenly, not only is Gates greedily, madly, insanely rich– he must deserve it in some way!

2. The software they didn’t create– DOS– was as much of a “breakthrough” as the Edsel, especially as the years went by and it was solely in Microsoft’s hands.  It was a piece of dated, inadequate code that couldn’t even address memory above 640K for more than 10 years. The “breakthrough” was the Macintosh OS from Apple, which Gates shamelessly pillaged for Windows, and which itself stole from the Xerox lab at Palo Alto. Breakthrough? Geosworks was a breakthrough, and unlike Windows, it worked. Breakthrough? The 80386 chip was a breakthrough. But Windows still runs as if it’s on a 8088– it can’t multi-task or multi-thread. Breakthrough? On the same machine, Linux hums and 0S/2 throbs.

3. Microsoft software “humming”??? “Humming”???? “Humming”????? The person who wrote this little blurb was insane. Was Time soliciting new advertising from Microsoft at the time this little piece of shit was written?

Let us pray that “history” has more regard for the truth than Time Magazine or Bill Gates.

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The Diagnosis

It is so important to give it a label.

You feel tired. You are bored. You are frustrated. Maybe you’re also not very bright or ambitious. You don’t want to tell people you are tired and bored and frustrated and not very ambitious, because that would make it sound like it’s your own fault. So, instead, you have chronic fatigue syndrome.

Maybe your two-year-old is really active. He climbs up everything. He’s loud and noisy and eager and excitable. You find this annoying. But you can’t tell anyone that you find your own kid annoying or that you are too impatient to be a good parent, so, instead, you say that he has attention deficit disorder and pop some drugs into him to slow him down.  Sure, it takes away some of his energy and curiosity, but, hey, you have to get your sleep.

The diagnosis, in our society, is essential. We need that label. We need an identifier. We have to generate public belief in and enthusiasm for conditions that might be nebulous, vague, or invisible.

Why?

Well, almost every time you hear the diagnostic label being propounded, it’s by someone who makes his or her living treating it. This is why the bible of psychotherapy, the DSM III or IV or V or whatever it’s at now, always gets bigger and bigger. It never shrinks. They almost never remove “syndromes” from it. (It caused a bit of nudging and winking when they did finally remove homosexuality from their list of morbidities not all that long ago.)

And that’s why pharmaceutical companies are determined to get your kid into their slimy clutches. They are promoting the idea that a four-year-old who wont go to bed nicely when asked has some kind of mental disorder and needs to be drugged. Once your kid is used to those colorful little pills twelve times a day, they know he’ll never, ever again feel that he can handle life without some kind of narcotic assistance.  His “baseline” is obliterated.  Whatever he feels from now on will be partly due to the drugs and partly due to withdrawal from the drugs.  The perfecta of pharmaceutical self-sufficiency.

The magic of the diagnosis is clear. Some people will deny that feeling tired or frustrated or depressed is an illness. Some people might think its just part of life. You put up with it. You endure it, and get on with the things you have to do.

But it’s easy to convince people otherwise. If you have the proper label for something, people will assume that adequate research and scientific analysis has determined that this condition really exists. We trust doctors. They’ll assume that a doctor made the diagnosis, and everyone knows how smart doctors are. They’ll assume that everyone thinks it is a real condition because it has become part of the language. It becomes shorthand, to a lot of people, for complexities that are too hard to explain quickly.

When I was a lot younger, if I heard someone say something like, “he has attention deficit disorder”, I would just assume that there was such a thing as “attention deficit disorder”, and therefore we better do something about it. Now I’m a lot more skeptical, but I can remember how easy it was to accept sophisticated-sounding terms like that as if they referred to clear, objective realities.

When you look at the “symptoms” of chronic fatigue syndrome, you realize how utterly subjective and arbitrary labels can be. Tiredness. Depression. Loss of appetite. Headaches. Difficult to get up in the morning. And so on. Sounds like just about anyone’s rotten little life. Label it, and we can blame someone or something else. Label it, and we can talk multi-million dollar lawsuits. Label it and we can make a drug that fixes it. Then we are not “doing drugs”. We are doing “therapy”. We are taking the “wonder drugs”, Lithium and Prozac and Paxil, and whatever. It’s okay– we have to take these drugs: we have a condition.

The drugs, of course, don’t really fix anything. They give you a sustained high. It is one of the great myths of our society that drugs like Lithium and Prozac actually treat real conditions. That is utter nonsense. They simply make you feel good. But we have to believe in the myth, or else we would have to admit that we’re really not much better than your average drug addict or alcoholic.

Well, we’re not.

I heard some parents on the radio recently (the CBC) talking about their “hyper-active” child. The parents of this child were at their wits end. They didn’t know what to do. They went to the doctor. He prescribed Ritalin. They tried it. It worked! Hallelujah. However, their child just didn’t seem to be herself anymore. She lost her sense of insatiable curiosity. She lost her spark, her zest for life. They took her off Ritalin and tried different parenting techniques instead. From the details the father gave on the air, it was clear that he and his wife simply got better at parenting. They learned to anticipate when problems might occur. They planned ahead for family outings. They became more flexible and adaptable. Amazingly, the problems seemed to go away.

Was their child ever really “hyper-active”? If you read the definition of hyper-activity from the DSM, it is an amazingly accurate description of just about any two-year-old.

Beware of labels.

Update 2022-04-26

And I will concede that this will not a popular post.  I am regularly astounded at how many people I know are taking psychotropic drugs, and obviously I am very skeptical of their use.  I am wary of hurting people’s feelings.  But there is good reason to voice my dissent no matter how small a minority I represent.  We in danger, as a society, of building a world in which we continually anesthetize ourselves against our deepest anxieties.  We have good reason to be anxious: we are melting the ice caps.  We are promoting intolerance and bigotry.  We are more divided than ever before.  We should be anxious and the worst solution is to address our anxiety with palliatives.

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Robin Sharpe and the Supreme Court of Canada

The Supreme Court Handles a Tough One

Is it possible to consider this issue, soberly, and intelligently?

You are probably familiar now with the Robin Sharpe case that is now before the Supreme Court of Canada.

Nobody is saying that Robin Sharpe is a nice man. Sharpe was arrested by the police in Vancouver for possession of child pornography, an offense punishable under the Criminal Code of Canada– Federal Law. Newspaper accounts are rather sketchy about the details of the arrest, but we know what it is that the law said was illegal: he had, in his possession, images and texts describing sexual acts involving children.

Sharpe did not argue that people should be allowed to create child pornography and sell and distribute it. Most people don’t care about the distinction, but I do. He did argue, in court, that the law as worded was too broad. He argued that the law appeared to make it a criminal offense to even think about having sex with children. The law certainly made it a criminal offense to record such thoughts on paper, even if nobody else ever reads them, or sees them. Robin Sharpe, and his lawyers, and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Union, believe that this part of the law restricts his freedom to think and imagine. It infringes on an individual’s right to have an unfettered imagination. It opens a Pandora’s box of interpretation and analysis that cannot possibly result in just actions by the police. It is not the business of the government, or anyone, to make thoughts illegal.

You have to think carefully about what the law is trying to prohibit here. It prohibits the expression, in any form, of specific imaginary experiences (as well as real experiences). In this case, we are talking about a man who likes to fantasize about having sex with very young boys. But the law is never specific. It doesn’t tell you in advance what kind of person to arrest. Conceivably, a girl having dreams about being molested by a teacher could be arrested for writing them down. Well, we know that we would never arrest such a person, would we? For one thing, in practice, we always assume that the girl, in this instance, is the victim, even if they are her fantasies.

The law, however, should never make assumptions. And the law doesn’t help us make the kind of distinctions that might be required: what is imagination? Who is the victim? What is a dream? What is poetry? What is documentation? What is fiction? What if the girl imagined herself as the teacher that was molesting her? There is a raft of issues that could complicate the process of deciding if possession of this particular document or image is a crime. Is there a way to ensure that all of these issues are addressed in a consistent, convincing manner, to ensure that the right person is always punished? In a society that can’t even agree on what the rules are for political secession?

Two lower British Columbia courts have ruled in favor of Sharpe. They have ruled that the law goes too far. They have argued that if the principle is allowed to stand, then it will also be legal to arrest people for thinking and writing other things. It is a bedrock principle of our legal system that all of our citizens have the right to hold personal opinions no matter how unpopular they are. You cannot disobey most laws, but you can criticize them all you want, and advocate for changes to them.

The problem with discussing the issue with anyone is that people find the very idea of child pornography so repugnant that they react very emotionally to the issue and quickly pronounce themselves in favor of any law, no matter how ill-considered, that makes child pornography illegal. The courts, of course, cannot afford to be so cavalier.

Ironically, some of the groups most enthusiastic about keeping the law are the ones who also constantly rant about getting the government off our backs. They claim the government plays an excessive role in our society, when they advocate for the poor, or homosexuals, or other minorities. In this instance, however, they want to give the government extraordinary latitude in dealing with a particular type of activity.

You may recall the hysteria surrounding allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the 1980’s. Similar emotions were at play. The result was a massive “witch-hunt” of mind-boggling proportions, in which dozens of innocent men and women were imprisoned, and hundreds of innocent lives were destroyed. After a few years of sober, second thoughts, and a re-analysis of the way the investigations were conducted, almost all of these cases were tossed out of court. Just a few months ago, charges against Bob Kelly, who was at the centre of one of the most infamous of these cases (the Edenton “Little Rascals” case) were finally dropped. (In spite of the fact that superior courts consistently ruled that these investigations were almost criminally sloppy and ill-conceived, no one, to my knowledge, has apologized for destroying the lives of the innocent men and women caught up in these events.)

Why did these cases go forward in the first place? For the same reason many people wish to see the Supreme Court uphold the child pornography laws: because they hate child pornography and they are willing to make compromises in order to believe that we are actually doing something about it. These people, including the Reform Party, believe that if the Supreme Court upholds the lower court appeal decisions, then Parliament should invoke the “notwithstanding” clause of the Bill of Rights and enforce the law anyway.

But if the Supreme Court rules that it can be made illegal to possess images and texts that describe illegal acts, it will have established that, in principle, the government can arrest people for what they think and say, instead of only for what they do.

In fact, that principle is already at play in Canada in our hate laws. A person can be arrested for publishing documents that promote hatred or contempt for people based on their race, nationality, religious beliefs, or ethnic origin. Many people think that these are good laws too. I don’t. I despise racism, but I believe that freedom of expression is the very foundation of freedom and democracy and should never be compromised for any other principle. Without freedom of expression, we cannot even guarantee that discussions about the law, including the pornography laws, will be allowed to take place.

For the same reason, I abhor the language laws in Quebec. Yes, it would be a tragedy to see the French language in North America die. But it is a greater tragedy that people can be arrested for saying something in the wrong words. It is absurd. If French deserves to survive, it will survive for the right reasons. If not, we should mourn it’s passing.

Right now, most of us think we have a reasonably fair and just government. But if we didn’t, the government could use this case as a precedent to justify arresting people who disagree with them on other things.

It is always a challenge to persuade people that it is important to fight for the rights of people we don’t like. We’d rather, often, just bash them in the teeth. We are short-sighted and stupid sometimes. We forget that every time we chisel away at these rights even a little, we establish the conditions under which our own freedoms can eventually be suppressed.

The Supreme Court should uphold the appeals courts and invalidate the child pornography laws. Then Parliament should enact a new law that omits the offending portions. It’s really no big deal. The law can continue to make it illegal to create or sell or distribute child pornography. The police can still arrest molesters and abusers. No stores will be allowed to display, for sale, the forbidden items. We will still be able to read the Bible (which, under certain circumstances, could fit the definition of “pornography” that some would like to see enacted into law).

I don’t know if people imagine that this one particular part of the child pornography law goes very far in terms of prevention anyway. It doesn’t.

It merely allows the police to arrest people for thought crimes.

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Attica

I just read that about 400 of the 800 victims of the ultra-violent repression of inmates at Attica State Prison in New York in 1971 will receive an $8 million settlement.

Well…. maybe $4 million.

I am not kidding: lawyers will take the other $4 million.

Bastards.

This is the American way of justice, circa 1970. A disproportionate number of blacks are sent to jail. They are allowed one shower a week and one roll of toilet paper a month. The prison is vastly over-crowded because the governor, Nelson Rockefeller, believes it would be unpopular, politically, to raise taxes to pay for more prisons (sound familiar?). The prisoners, driven to frustration, seize hostages and start a riot. The police, fortified with state troopers, attempt to regain control, killing 45 of the prisoners and seriously wounding 89.

Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave the orders. Mr. Rockefeller, who ignored all the demands that the deep corruption among the prison guards and administration of Attica be addressed. For years, he did nothing. He sat on his hands. Then the prison exploded and he approved aggressive counter-measures.

After the tear gas had cleared, the police reported to the complicit media that the prisoners had killed 10 hostages by slitting their throats, and that they had even castrated a man. The public was outraged. Of course the police are right to use the most brutal methods available. Of course the police were right to kill 30 prisoners.

Then the autopsies and the coroner’s reports came back. None of the victims had their throats slit. No one was castrated. All of the victims, including the hostages, died from bullets fired by State Troopers.

Yes, every single one of them.

Did you read this at the time it happened, if you can remember that long ago? I remember that long ago. I don’t remember reading about the coroner’s report back then. It was not something the media thought the public wanted to read.

The inmates were forced to strip and crawl, naked, through fields filled with broken glass. They were assaulted, beaten, abused, and terrorized by the angry police and guards. Why were the police angry? Possibly because they knew that their assault had been badly managed and messy and brutal. Because they had been shown to be incompetent and stupid.

It took 30 years— 30 years!– for the real victims of this outrage, the prisoners, to get compensation. And then what happens? Their lawyers walk off with half of the settlement.

I know a few lawyers. They get upset when they hear lawyer jokes. They say it’s not fair to tar everyone with the same brush. I suppose you could argue that not all professional athletes are greedy and not all television evangelists are liars and not all Amway distributors are suckers. In each case, though, it seems like the exception proves the rule.

On the other hand, you could simply argue that there are serious structural flaws in a legal system that essentially provides two version of “justice”: one for those with money, and quite another for those without. Why do lawyers always seem to walk away with the money in lawsuits like the Attica case? Because the only way the poor can afford a good lawyer is to sign an outrageous “contingency” agreement that gives most of the settlement money to the lawyers. Why? Because lawyers cost too much. The system needs to be drastically changed.

The police brutally violate the civil rights of 800 prisoners in Attica State Prison– who were protesting the inhumane living conditions in the prison– and the slug-like legal system takes 30 years to make a judgment, and then the lawyers jump in and grab all the money. The victims get almost nothing. The police pay no penalty. Nobody is fired. Nobody goes to jail. Just hand the money over to the lawyers.

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Norman Rockwell

I never liked Norman Rockwell paintings. They had this kind of smug middle-American arrogance to them. Every one of them seemed to shout at the viewer: “Why would anyone in the world live other than we as Americans live? We’re so great!” They are the most purely American of artifacts. They idealize conservative American values: church, boy scouts, the military. In a portrait of a citizen speaking out at a city hall meeting, Rockwell seems to say, yes, in America, the average citizen has a say in the way things are run around here. Right. The average citizen and the Fortune 500 and the military industrial complex and Rush Limbaugh. But I’ll bet that guy speaking up at that meeting got his parking ticket reversed.

Later in life, however, he began to turn out works that actually alluded to real problems in the real world: “The Problem We all Live With” shows a black girl about to enter a segregated school, surrounded by marshals, whose faces we cannot see. Very moving. Politically correct, of course. But artists are supposed to be visionaries. They’re supposed to be true to a powerful inner voice tell them that this is the way things are no matter what anybody else says. Rockwell was not exactly ahead of the curve here: he did his painting in 1964. Even the U.S. Federal Government was on-board by then.

Norman Rockwell died in 1978 at 84.

There have always been those who argue that Rockwell was a GREAT artist who belongs in the company of Picasso, Millet, Miro, Pollock, or maybe even Andy Warhol (ha ha). Why, they ask, should an artist be held in contempt, just because he is popular? We need to revise our opinion of Rockwell. We need to put his “Fixing a Flat” right up there on display next to Bacon’s “Man in a Box” and Monet’s “Lily pads #4,378”. .

Well, people can revise their opinions of anything they want. Sometimes, when the obvious has been with us for so long, and for good reason, it becomes fashionable to assert that the obvious was never true. William F. Buckley Jr. decides that “Tail-Gunner” Joseph McCarthy was a hero after all. William Goldman decides that John Lennon was a jerk. Everyone is supposed to go: oh! How brilliant! He saw what everyone else missed! Rockwell really is a brilliant artist!

The thing is, sometimes things are obviously true because they are, well, obviously true. Anyone who has seen the video tape of McCarthy holding a hand over a microphone and smirking while whispering to his aide, Roy Cohn, surely suspects that the man was an idiot. And anyone who has tape of John Lennon talking to reporters from his “bed-in for peace” knows that he was a lovable idealist who wished harm to no one and was far less foolish than he appeared.

But Rockwell a great artist?

No, he isn’t. He is a great illustrator. But you can’t be a great artist if you are constantly pandering to your audience. Rockwell clearly selected subjects and meanings that he knew his audience would accept, adore, and admire, and he presented these subjects and meanings in an idiom that was utterly conventional. Here you are: you imagine that Americans, in the late 20th century, still go down to the fishing hole, or stop at the side of the road to skinny dip on a hot day, or glance with awed respect at little old ladies who pray before they eat their meals in a restaurant. Dream on. These are popular images because they appeal to people’s illusions about themselves. That’s not art. That is propaganda.

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It somehow doesn’t surprise that Rockwell did also did advertisements for Crest and Jell-O and other companies. I don’t think Rockwell was embarrassed. Why should he be? He was an illustrator.

Rockwell himself certainly believed he was an important artist. He did a painting of a man standing in an art gallery staring at a Jackson Pollock splatter

rockwell2.jpg (23179 bytes) painting.

 

You can’t see the face but you can picture the quizzical expression from the body language. The man is fair: he’s giving the painting a chance. He’s staring at it, trying to understand it. But you know and I know that the painting makes no sense to him. And that, to Rockwell, is all that there is to modern art.

Rockwell seemed proud of the fact that he was able to credibly, he thought, recreate the Pollock painting himself, using the celebrated splatter technique. Nothing to it. I could paint like that if I wanted to.

Well, I kind of agree with him. Abstract art, or non-figurative art, or whatever you want to call it, has followed it’s own course into oblivion and self-parody. It has become an industry of critics, painters, galleries, art teachers, and students, all trying to define the absurd, all attempting to establish themselves as authorities or experts on something that ridicules expertise and authority.

But I’m not ready to say that the public is right either. Rockwell isn’t the only figurative painter in the world. Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Boticelli, Van Eyk, and even Picasso, were all figurative painters at one point or another, but it’s not hard to see that there is a substantial difference between their work and Rockwell’s.

And the public never accepted Van Gogh in his own time. He sold one painting in his entire life. One. So if Rockwell had had any guts– and insight– he would have paired that painting with one of a rumpled Frenchman scratching his head while standing in front of “Starry Night”.  That would have been a far richer, more subtle comment on modern art and the average American consumer.

But that would have made the opposite point that Rockwell intended. It would have shown that the public can be absolutely, totally, completely wrong about what is “good” art. It would have shown that the vast majority of people can be utterly foolish. It would have proven that it was quite possible for a mere illustrator to be the most popular artist in America.

This all begs the question. Is modern, abstract art, and its various derivatives, any good? The public has thrown up their hands. They don’t know and they don’t care.

 

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Numbers Sanctify

One of the biggest problems with movies these days is the fact that so few of them are truly subversive, in any sense of the word. That’s right. Films today are not subversive enough.

We live in a screwy society. Rich criminals get to drive their limousines to the golf course. Poor criminals spend decades in filthy, violent prisons. The Third World sends the First World more cash in debt repayments than we send them in foreign aid. Schools are allowed to shove advertising down the throats of our students. Everyone sues each other over the slightest problem. What we need is something that undermines this state of affairs. We need more subversion, not less.

Oh, many directors like to see themselves as subversive, or at least, “shocking”. But these days, “shocking” refers almost exclusively to special-effects enhanced gore and splatter, or frontal nudity. “Natural Born Killers” comes to mind. For all the pompous strutting about by Oliver Stone, proclaiming, with every jiggly camera angle, with his incoherent script, and abrupt uneven edits, that this film “rocks”, “Natural Born Killers” is an utterly conventional film. The police generally behave like the criminals because our society believes that that’s the only way to deal with criminals, and the media try to exploit both sides. Everyone is trying to get something, and the preferred strategy is confrontation and violence. Instead of challenging the viewer’s assumptions about reality, “Natural Born Killers” merely affirms our most paranoid assumptions. It is an utterly boring film. It is a conformist film. Most people would walk out of the theatre without a single new thought in their heads.

Critics frequently toss around adjectives like “bold” and “shocking” when some new film reaches for new heights of explicit violence or sex. What is bold or shocking about that? It has been almost 30 years since “Bonnie and Clyde”, with its celebrated slow-motion machine-gunning of Beatty and Dunaway in that elegiac last scene. Since then, it’s been largely more and more of the same, to the point where explicitness can no longer be said to be subversive at all. Even drug movies, like “Trainspotting”, really don’t tread any ground that hasn’t already been stampeded through by “Midnight Cowboy”, “H”, “Drugstore Cowboy”, “Sid and Nancy”, or even “Days of Wine and Roses”. Been there, done that. What else can you show me?

There are a few, of course. Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”. Todd Solondz’ “Happiness”. Maybe “Bulworth”. But “Brazil”, as imaginative and original as it is, still ends up telling us something we already know: mindless bureaucracies suppress individual freedoms. “Happiness” is more interested in personal emotional fulfillment than society. “Bulworth” suggests that the fundamental institutions of our society need merely be reformed.

You might be surprised to learn that one of the most subversive films ever made in the United States is almost 50 years old. It is Charlie Chaplin’s “Monseiur Verdoux”.

“Monseiur Verdoux” is based on the life of the infamous Henri Desire Landru, the French serial killer. Landru seduced over 400 women and murdered 10 of them. He was executed by guillotine in 1922.

Orson Welles thought it would be interesting to make a film of his life and suggested the idea to Chaplin. Chaplin fictionalized the story somewhat, to suit his own purposes (he wanted explicit links to the depression and World War II). But the most sensational aspect of the case remains intact: a supposedly rational, ordinary man makes a business out of marrying wealthy spinsters and widows so he can murder them and keep their money. The real Landru disposed of the bodies, sometimes, in an outdoor stove. So does Chaplin’s Verdoux. Neighbors in both accounts noticed the smoke for days but thought that nothing was amiss.

In Chaplin’s version, Monsieur Henri Verdoux is a former petty clerk at a bank with a charming wife (Chaplin, in one of his rare misjudgments, put her in a wheel chair—are we supposed to feel more warmly towards him now?) and young child. He lived a honorable, petty little life in the South of France until the faceless administrators at the bank decided to restructure and he was tossed out of his job. Until this point in his life, he resembled T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who “measured out” his life “in coffee spoons”.

Facing dire poverty, Verdoux picks himself up and goes into a different business. He travels around France seeking and seducing wealthy married women. After a time, he murders them and takes their property. He invests most of the money into land and the stock market, and supports himself and his family on a modest scale. He clearly sees this activity as nothing more than an extension of business to its’ logical conclusion, the way, as Chaplin described it, Clemenceau saw war as an extension of diplomacy. His family thinks he is a traveling salesman.

At one point, Verdoux, experimenting with a new poison, picks up a waif from the street. The script called for a prostitute, but the studio opposed that idea (this was the post-Fatty Arbuckle era of the Hayes Office and Hollywood’s voluntary repression of vice in the movies), so Chaplin had to make due with subtle suggestion. As he prepares a meal for the girl, with a poisoned glass of wine, Verdoux questions her about her life, expecting to find her hopelessly pessimistic. Instead, she is happy. She thinks life is wonderful. And she is optimistic. She is convinced that life is going to get better for her. Verdoux changes his mind, gives her a few francs, and sends her on her way.

It wouldn’t be Chaplin without the physical comedy. His attempts to murder one wife (played by the inimitable Martha Raye before she became a parody of herself and started doing Bounty ads on tv) are constantly interrupted. He takes her out into a lake (she can’t swim) and is about to toss her overboard when a group of yodelers appears. He mixes her some poison, but the maid thinks it’s peroxide and uses it on her hair. Finally, he smothers or strangles her (off camera) and cheerfully takes her money, sells her house, and moves on to his next conquest. It is his urbane self-possession here that viewers find most offensive. He is no madman, no self-loathing sexual pervert. Merely a businessman conducting his “business” with the same ruthlessness with which his superiors at the bank liquidated him.

There is a charming scene of Verdoux checking with a flower girl about some bouquets he’s been sending to a prospective victim. He phones the woman from the shop and rhapsodically proclaims his complete and passionate devotion to her. The flower girl, over-hearing, becomes breathless and can hardly tell him his change.

But Verdoux’s luck eventually changes. The stock market crashes and he is wiped out. His wife and child die—we aren’t told exactly why, but can presume he couldn’t afford medical care or adequate food or housing anymore.

Years later, we see an embittered Verdoux on the street. His face is a mask of dark sorrow and cynicism. A beautiful woman in a limousine recognizes him and calls his name. It is the prostitute. She is now married to a rich and successful munitions manufacturer. Grateful for his earlier kindness to her, she takes him out for lunch at an exclusive restaurant. Unfortunately, he is also recognized by another guest, the brother of one of his victims. The police are called and Verdoux is arrested.

At his trial, Verdoux is described by the prosecutor as a monster, a savage beast of relentless fury and remorseless cunning. Verdoux thanks the prosecutor for his compliments but claims he is not worthy of them. He catalogues the atrocities of recent and imminent wars and notes that Generals are awarded medals and described as heroes for murdering millions. In comparison, he is a mere “amateur”. He says, “numbers sanctify”. He smiles at the judge and jury and tells them, with horrifying prescience, that they will all be joining him very soon. For my money, it’s one of the great moments in film.

“Monsieur Verdoux” was pulled from the theatres after two weeks of savage criticism from the church, the public, and the media. Chaplin himself was driven out of the country and had his visa revoked a few years later (he had never become an American citizen) and lived the rest of his life in exile in Switzerland. Ironically, one of the issues raised was his support of the Soviet Union. This support was given during speeches he made in support of the war effort at a time when the Soviet Union was an official ally of the United States in the war with Germany! This was of a piece with the outrages that prompted Joseph Welch’s famous, “at long last, have you no shame?”

Why did Chaplin make such an offensive film? Why would anyone want to dramatize the life of a blue beard and scoundrel?

Chaplin saw, in Verdoux, the personification of the ruthless practices of big business corporations in the U.S. and Europe. Things haven’t changed much. Read through any Time Magazine or any newspaper and you will see that rich, successful businessmen like Bill Gates and Donald Trump—no matter how ruthless or greedy they are—are routinely worshipped and admired. Furthermore, it is very clear that when the rich swindle stockholders or investors out of millions of dollars, they never serve a day in jail—in fact, they never even give up their limousines and four-star hotels, even if they owe millions–whereas the poor are locked up and brutalized without a second thought.

Chaplin, having grown up in poverty himself, was acutely aware of these injustices. “Monseiur Verdoux” is simply a dramatization of the same ethics that drove Bill Gates to a fortune of billions applied on a more personal, immediate level, without the layers of lawyers and bureaucrats and advertising agencies that cushion today’s executives from the consequences of their policies.

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With bimbo cheerleaders like Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal waving their pom-poms from the sidelines, we have all come to accept that it is appropriate and right for businesses to operate in a cut-throat fashion, in order to ensure that the stock markets rise and profits increase and men like Bill Gates become fabulously wealthy—wealthy beyond the means of any sane man to ever possibly indulge. What happens to all those workers who are down-sized? How many families are disrupted? How many divorces? How many suicides? What about the damage to the environment? Why are governments using tax dollars to clean up the toxic wastes generated by profitable private corporations? Why are people being cut off from welfare while the government awards billions in tax subsidies to the wealthy shareholders of corporations like Boeing, or major league baseball teams?

Numbers sanctify. It is probably the most subversive film ever made in America.

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Bernita: What’s Wrong with Hicksville?

When I went to college, I met a beautiful, very bright girl named Bernita*. She was from a small town, Hicksville, in Southwestern Ontario and came from a very conservative, bible-believing family. She and her room-mate wandered around campus together, laughing, teasing, and having a good time.

I never got to know Bernita real well, but we did have a late night chat or two, and I found out that she didn’t believe in God. She didn’t think the idea of God made any sense. But she didn’t tell this to anyone else and she went on with her theology, sociology, history, and introductory psychology courses at this Christian College as if she was a believer.

Bernita had a boyfriend back home. You know what usually happens with those relationships, of course. The girl goes off to college, broadens her horizons, meets a lot of new, bright men, and, before you know, it’s “Dear Ralph…”.

Well, that didn’t happen this time. Not exactly. Bernita was interested in this one guy with long hair but it didn’t work out. She went home at the end of the second semester unattached. By the end of the summer, Bernita was pregnant. She ran off to British Columbia. Then she returned to Hicksville to face the music. Standard procedure in conservative Christian communities? She married the guy. She never went back to college.

You don’t often meet these people again in life.  I did.

It’s twenty years later: she still lives in the same small town, with her five children. She is a stay-at-home mother. She is involved in the PTA and stuff like that. Her oldest child is already in college himself. I don’t know if she believes in God now or not, but she goes to church and she sends her children to the Christian school.

So you’re eighteen and you’re beautiful and you’re smart and you’re 500 miles away from home, living in one of the great cities of North America, with it’s blues bars and great restaurants, and the fabulous Art Institute, and Wrigley Field, and the Sears tower. The whole wild and crazy world and a future of untold experiences and insights opens up before you. You’re frightened and thrilled. But you go home one weekend for some stupid reason you give in this one time (that part’s a mystery to me: why?) And you end up spending your entire life in some wretched little hick town in the middle of Ontario’s own Green Acres. My wife says I’m too harsh, and that there’s nothing wrong with living your entire life in a small rural community. I thought she was right for a while. What’s wrong with Hicksville?

We lived in Hicksville ourselves for about 15 years. The trouble with Hicksville is that after a while you really do forget that there is a broader horizon out there beyond the dusty cornfields and windmills. You forget that people have different experiences of different lives. You think you have made a reasonable judgment about things when you reject certain possible alternatives, and forget that there are possibilities that you haven’t even imagined.

Hicksville allowed malls to be built on the edge of town, and then, when stores in the downtown area started to lose money and go out of business, demolished the only building with architectural distinction and built another mall right downtown. That finished it off. Now the mall itself is half-empty. That’s Hicksville: yesterday’s solutions for the problems we will create tomorrow. The whole debate about this building, the former city hall, featured a lot of ridicule about “preservationists” and their granola-crunching ilk. Meanwhile, towns like Stratford and Oakville were thriving by preserving their old buildings and renewing their city cores. How much do you want to bet that in ten years, when that trend has run it’s course, Hicksville will just be embarking on it?

Maybe it’s not fair, but I shed a little tear inside when I think of Bernita. I wish she’d finished college and taken a job in Toronto or Vancouver and traveled a little before she got married and settled down and had kids. But I bet that if I asked her now if that would have been a good idea, she’d answer, “why?”

Upon Further Reflection…

I had believed that Bernita eventually changed her mind about God and became a believer. Probably she did. But it’s not unlikely she simply submerged her real beliefs for the sake of expediency. When you are a beautiful daughter of a controlling, conservative family, one form of liberation is to run off to college, but another is to get married to a jellyfish whom you can dominate and control because, after all, you’re a lot smarter than he is, and he’ll do anything to have your gorgeous body.

He’s the one who will continue to vote to keep women out of church offices. You’re the one that rules the roost. You are not going to rock the boat too much because your life is pretty good. People have been bought and sold before for far less…

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Exploiting a Tragedy

It might have been a wonderful story. Well, not a “wonderful” story. It’s a horrible story, actually. But part of the story would have been very appealing to a certain constituency: when one of the teenage killers at Columbine High School held a gun to the head of Cassie Bernall and asked her if she believed in God, she courageously said “yes”. Then he blew her away.

Oh wait. What do you mean “might have been a wonderful story”? Didn’t it happen?

The Christian community in the U.S. has seized upon this incident. It has a lot of appealing elements for them. First of all, Cassie was a young, attractive teenage girl. She had gone through a rebellious stage, including, allegedly, some dabbling in witchcraft, but her parents had straightened her out by sending her to a strict “program” at West Bowles Community Church. She wore a “What would Jesus do” bracelet. She carried a bible to school every day and was reading it at the moment the carnage began. She confessed her faith in words loud enough to be heard by her cowering classmates, though she knew it might mean her life.

So the story seems to provide a little of everything. Cassie was courageous because she confessed her sin. When she had rebelled, her parents no-nonsense, “tough love” measures worked. She carried a bible to school, where, of course, thanks to the godless liberals and feminists, prayer and bible study is no longer permitted. She was murdered by two young boys who were heavily immersed in video games, violent Hollywood movies, and rock’n’roll. Most importantly, she was murdered because she was a Christian. Because America turned it’s back on God when it banned prayer in school.

The latest fad among the ultra-right in the U.S. is to assert that they are now a persecuted minority. In a perverse way, this is the rationale they now use to assert their traditional privileged status in society. They claim that they are the only religion not allowed to have prayers in school (ignoring, with twisted logic, the fact that no other religion ever had a large enough constituency to even attempt to assert such a right in the first place, and ignoring the fact no other religion is or ever was allowed to lead classes or assemblies in prayer at any time).

It’s a story that plays into the social and political attitudes and platitudes of the Christian right.

The trouble is, the story is not exactly true. Well, it’s not true at all, essentially.
The report originated with one of the boys who was in the library, and who survived the assault. He was the brother of Rachel Scott who was killed outside of the school. He told the police that he heard the conversation and recognized Cassie’s voice.

The police later tried to verify the story. They took Mr. Scott through the library, as part of the process of meticulously reconstructing the sequence of events at Columbine. When Mr. Scott showed them where Cassie had been during the exchange, the police knew that the voice did not come from Cassie Bernall. Cassie’s body had been found in a different location. In fact, Cassie had been hiding under a table with Emily Wyant, quite some distance away from all of the other students. This is information that is not difficult to confirm.

This much is true. The gunman—most likely Dylan Klebold—asked a girl if she believed in God. The girl was not Cassie Bernall but Valeen Schnurr. Valeen did indeed answer yes, courageously, yes. But the gunman did not shoot her. In fact, he allowed Valeen, who was seriously wounded, to crawl away, without further harm.

What does it mean?

What does it mean?

The Christian community has adopted Cassie Bernall as a symbol of all that is forthright and courageous and virtuous in America, just as they have come to see Klebold and Harris as icons of deviance, immorality, and godlessness. Every hero needs a villain. Even Valeen Schnurr says she doesn’t mind that this spurious story circulates because it might bring someone to Jesus. Meanwhile, she has come under some abuse herself by “Christians” who are upset at her for disabusing them of their congenial myth.

So, she goes along with the silent consensus here among people who should know better: a little lie can be excused if it furthers the greater good.

I have trouble with this. So some minister is going to tell the story of Cassie Bernall at an evangelical service somewhere and fifteen young people, as a result of the story, will come to the front to pledge their lives to Jesus. No harm done? Not if they find out some day that Christian leaders knowingly perpetuated a lie? No harm done when reputable scholars and writers and journalists are aware of the deceit and draw negative conclusions about the integrity and honesty of the Christian community as a result? No harm done when a Christian congressman like Asa Hutchinson stands up in Congress and argues for a bill and some wavering delegate sits and listens and thinks, “Well, this is the guy who still goes around flogging the story of Cassie Bernall even though he should know better….”

If Christianity is true, would it’s adherents willfully lie about a thing like this?  If Christianity means something to its adherents– if it means anything– why does this happen, often?