American as Cherry Pie

Another week, another shooting.  It’s like background noise by now. 

In New York City, a disgruntled former employee shot and killed his boss this morning.  Several news reports indicate that the NYPD wounded several bystanders firing at the gunman as he tried to make his escape.  Collateral damage, I suppose.  The main thing is they got their man, right?

Just part of the zeitgeist, it seems…         

Tall Poppies

This has been a banner week for civil liberties.

Julian Assange continues to sit in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, fending off extradition to Sweden to face manufactured sexual assault charges so that he can be extradited in turn to the United States to stand trial for embarrassing its leaders.

Meanwhile, in Russia, the three members of the anarcho-punk feminist collective Pussy Riot have been sentenced to two years in prison for running afoul of the Russian Orthodox Church and Vladimir Putin.  The church has forgiven them.  Mr. Putin has not.   

A case of tall poppies being cut down?

So Many Yahoos, So Few Houyhnhnms

More tragedy this week.

This time it was a gunman shooting and wounding a security guard at the Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C.  The fact that the target was a right wing organization and that the assailant briefly argued with the guard over the FRC’s homophobic politics has brought out trolls of all stripes on the Yahoo! News website.

I probably shouldn’t pay attention to readers’ comments on online news items.  Too much time on my hands, I suppose, though the impending start of the fall semester will surely take care of that.  Meanwhile, I’ve uncovered a malignant trove of comments on the FRC shooting story.  A typical gem reads, “Thanks, Obama, for emboldening gays.”  Many others are simply unrepeatable. 

Several threads ask if the shooter is going to face hate crime charges, with a few comments making the risible claim that liberals are violent and should not be trusted with guns.  I also had a good laugh at the posts linking the incident with Occupy Wall Street.   True to their penchant for reductionist thinking, the wingnuts on Yahoo! have conveniently lumped their sundry liberal and progressive bugbears into a single, inchoate target for their bile.   

Rather than make a keening plea for greater civility on the Interweb, I will dig in my heels and answer back. 

A number of Yahoo! posters complained that liberal tolerance is a double standard.  It’s clear that these people equate the desire for tolerance with moral weakness or, worse, a willingness to passively suffer abuse.  (This is not a baseless claim—Jonathan Rieders’ sociological study of working class, conservative whites in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Canarsie during the 1970s found that many of them associated liberalism with masochism.)  In other words, gays and lesbians and their sympathizers should be glad to take any maltreatment their stronger, more masculine brethren dish out.  This is a dangerous assumption.  The truth is that if a particular group of people are singled out and pushed around long enough, a few of them are going to push back.  Not every member of a marginalized minority is going to subscribe to the ethos of Gandhi or King.

There is also the very strong possibility that maybe, just perhaps, the gunman wasn’t so much making a political statement as he was answering his inner demons.  I won’t speculate on what troubled the FRC assailant.  It may well be the same pathology that infected the movie theater and Sikh temple murderers.  Or, it could be something even more inscrutable.  Not every violent act has to have meaning. 

Finally, the political right has no one to blame for the erosion of civility but itself.  The so-called class war that conservative pundits accuse their opponents of waging was begun not by liberals or progressives (two distinct political species conservatives frequently conflate) but by this country’s moneyed elites.  It’s a simple matter of divide and conquer: Divert attention from substantive issues such as corporate fraud and political manipulation by scaring workers into believing that what little ground they still hold is being lost.  

The unwashed foot soldiers for the 1% are an ideologically reliable mass, unswayed by the evidence around them that the system is riddled with rot.  Instead, they worry about taxes on wealthy “job creators” who in fact export jobs and secret their wealth in the Caymans, about nonexistent plots to take their guns or drive God out of their lives, and about “illegals” and “welfare queens” receiving unearned “handouts” from government programs. 

Conservative media act as an echo chamber that amplifies popular resentments.  Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, et al., engage in agitprop to divert their audiences’ ire from its rightful targets.  It is little surprise that they have come to shape and define the political discourse, and we are all the poorer for that.  What we need in our national dialogue are more Houyhmhms and fewer Yahoos.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

More Real Email…

From:  James <birkenstock_ boy@umail.com>

Date:  Friday, August 10, 2012 8:12 AM

To: Unassuming Scholar <scholar@snowflake.edu>

Subject:  burning man

hi unassuming,

my name is james i will be attending your class this upcoming sumester. however my friend has given me a burning man ticket. the dates for the festival are aug 27 to semtember 4. i see that the dates conflict with the start of school. i am wondering if it is imparitve that i attend these first few days?   

please contact me back.

your student james

From:  Unassuming Scholar <scholar@snowflake.edu>

Date:  Friday, August 10, 2012 12:37 PM

To: James <birkenstock_boy@umail.com>

Subject:  Re: burning man

Hi James,

Congratulations on scoring tickets to Burning Man.

Concerning your classroom attendance, it’s not up to me to manage your time.   However, you miss class at your own risk.  All lecture material is testable, and you cannot make up missed work except under extenuating, documented circumstances such as accident or illness.

Cordially,

Unassuming Scholar

From:  James <birkenstock_ boy@umail.com>

Date:  Friday, August 10, 2012 7: 28 PM

To: Unassuming Scholar <scholar@snowflake.edu>

Subject:  RE: Re: burning man

ok, cool!  i ll email you pictures from the playa!

--j

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

It’s a Meaner World

The past several days have brought more bad tidings in the aftermath of the Colorado theater massacre.  This time it was an attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin by a white supremacist.  Meanwhile, Jared Lee Loughner, the Arizona gunman who killed a federal judge and wounded then-congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, as well as killing or injuring several bystanders, has pled guilty in order to escape trial and a possible death sentence.  Atrocity blurs into atrocity as weeks and months drift by, jumbling together in the popular consciousness.

And these are just the big events that get widespread news coverage.  Every community in the country suffers less lurid tragedies on a fairly regular basis.  Even as I write this, a local news station is covering a the story of local man who, for whatever unreason that wormed its way out of a feverish brain, has taken his kids hostage and barricaded himself in his home.

Violence, of course, is a commonplace in our cultural lives, as “American as cherry pie,” as H. Rap Brown memorably put it.  (That Brown is serving a life sentence for murder gives his truism all the more credibility.)  Gratuitous violence is apparently a historical pastime, being part and parcel of such patina-tinged myths as Old West outlaw John Wesley Hardin shooting a man for snoring.  Violence is the language of the rugged individualist who must answer his challengers, of loners who face a hostile environment in the same way America must face a hostile world.  

As with other art forms, film mirrors the culture that produces it.  With its emphasis on visual patterns to tell a story, film is particularly conducive to communicating graphic violence.  Add to this gradual decline of narration in mainstream American film since the 1970s brought on by our growing dependence on sundry electronic media.  The multiplicity of distractions has undermined our ability to follow complex (or multiple) plotlines.  And so the art of American film has come full circle: The narrative conventions established by D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation have given way once more to fleeting images meant to leave emotional impressions rather than tell a story.  

Conventional narrative, then, is becoming a thing of the past, sacrificed to moviegoers’ short attention spans.  To attract paying audiences, most successful mainstream films in the past decade have relied on varying formulae of CGI effects, comic book characters, improbable stunts and pyrotechnics, fart jokes, and teens or twentysomethings hooking up.  Films with actual storylines and fully developed characters are relegated to art houses.  It’s not terribly surprising that the Colorado theater shootings took place at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises; in fact, the one thing that James Holmes and his victims seem to have had in common was execrably bad taste.

While bad taste is common, it’s not universal.  The occasional gem does make its way onto the big screen. The debasement of human relationships—of human decency—in contemporary America is the theme of Bobcat Goldthwait’s dark comedy God Bless America, which melds the sensibilities of Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down with those of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy with shades of Taxi Driver thrown in for good measure.  The middle aged protagonist (a sad-eyed Joel Murray) has had enough of the narcissism and incivility of the people around him and goes on a killing spree against entitled reality TV stars, loudmouthed conservative pundits, would-be pedophiles, and double-parkers.  Our antihero is joined by an equally disaffected teen, a sociopathic Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Tara Lynne Barr) who becomes the Bonnie to his Clyde.  God Bless America climaxes in a hostage standoff on the set of an American Idol-style talent show, with the ill-starred couple falling in a fusillade of police bullets on national television as the screen fades to black.

Goldthwait’s satire is unnervingly spot-on, to the point where I visibly winced at the sight of Murray’s character gunning down a bunch of teens chattering on cell phones in a movie theater screening, of all things, a documentary on the My Lai massacre.  Fiction mimics fact mimics fiction, seemingly ad infinitum.  The verisimilitude of film is intensified by the emotional impact of real life events.

It also gives new life to the chicken-and-egg riddle of whether mass media images trigger violence or are merely reflect an already violent society.  Movie violence has been accused of inspiring copycats for decades.  The 1974 “Hi-Fi murders” in Ogden, Utah were inspired by a scene in the Clint Eastwood movie Magnum Force in which a pimp exacts revenge on a wayward hooker by forcing her to drink a bottle of Drano.  John Hinckley was driven to shoot President Reagan by the exploits of Travis Bickle, Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver.  Occasionally movies are influenced in turn by real events, as in the case of Sidney Lumet’s Network evoking the actual on-air suicide of Florida TV newswoman Christine Chubbuck. 

The 1990s saw a surge in movie and TV copycats.  Natural Born Killers has been cited as the model for several teen spree murders, including the Columbine massacre.   The subway tollbooth arson scene in Money Train is said to have prompted an actual firebombing of a New York City tollbooth.  Even MTV’s cartoon series Beavis and Butthead was implicated in the case of a small child who set a fire in imitation of one of its characters. 

Arguably, media violence is catalyst rather than cause; folks predisposed to violence merely need an excuse to do wrong.  However, this and similar theories, such as the purported link between pornography and sexual violence, suffer from weak causality.  Although I’m loath to draw a parallel with the claim, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” the motive to harm comes from within.  When violence becomes an internalized social norm, it is bound to inspire individuals to employ it as a first and last resort.  It’s still a mean world, regardless of whether it’s on celluloid, in digital, or in the flesh.  Expect it to remain so until our values change for the better.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

No Consequences

It's just come out that the U.S. Department of Justice has declined to bring charges against Goldman Sachs or its employees for their role in the financial meltdown.

As if we needed another reminder that we have the best government money can buy…

Chicken

This week, politics and consumerism converged to produce another culture war spectacle.

It happened after Dan Cathy, the CEO of fast food chain Chick-fil-A, publicly announced his opposition to same-sex marriage and his financial support of the Family Research Council (an organization designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) came to light.  This should not have come as surprise to anyone familiar with the Cathy family’s reactionary politics.  The resulting uproar, however, is bound to leave ears ringing for weeks to come.    

No sooner did activists call for a boycott of the chain than a group of Christian wingnuts declared a day in support of Chick-fil-A.  (“C’mon Amanda!  C’mon Billy an’ Tammy Sue!  We’re havin’ dinner at Chick-fil-A, ‘cause that’s what Jesus wants us to do!) 

The sight of long lines of SUVs idling in drive thru lanes competed with scenes of gay and lesbian couples staging “kiss ins” outside Chick-fil-A franchises on the cable news networks.  The absurdity reached its nadir a couple of days ago when a man in Tucson berated a hapless Chick-fil-A employee for Dan Cathy’s sins, then posted a video of the incident on YouTube.  (Which promptly went viral, causing the gasbags on Fox News to gleefully accuse the guy of bullying.) 

What fun.  Forty-three years after Stonewall and nearly thirty-four years since the martyrdom of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, we are nowhere close to common acceptance of LGBT civil rights.  The most frustrating problem for progressives is the waffling of Democratic leaders, which too often borders on moral cowardice. 

Take, for example, President Obama’s recent statement in support of same-sex marriage, a reversal of his position during the 2008 election campaign.  Obama didn’t come right out with an unambiguous declaration of support.  Instead, he relied on Vice President Joe Biden as a stalking horse.  Given Biden’s habit of verbal missteps, it would have been easy for the White House to distance itself from him had his pro-same-sex-marriage remarks, offhandedly dropped during a TV interview, provoked a media backlash.  When the response seemed favorable, Obama, surely needing LGBT votes in November, revealed his apparent change of heart. 

With friends like these, the equal rights movement stands to make scant progress.  The truth is that Obama’s reversal and the proposal to add a plank in support of same-sex marriage to the Democratic Party platform are merely symbolic gestures.  Should the Republicans keep their House majority after the election, they will probably be even less than that.  As long as the Defense of Marriage Act remains law, individual states will retain the prerogative to deny same-sex couples marriage and other family rights.  At present perhaps the best hope lies in the Supreme Court granting certiorari in the Perry case and subsequently overturning California’s Proposition 8.  However, there are far too many “ifs” in this scenario to raise anyone’s hopes. 

There are occasional sign of progress, such as the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.  But outside the major urban areas, out where the “real Americans” live, it might as well be 1955.  LGBT activism is mostly concentrated in cities with significant gay and lesbian populations, making it a matter of preaching to the choir.  Thus, it is incumbent on those working within the political process to effect change.  And as long as the party that claims dedication to equal rights fails to take a stand against the benighted mores of a past era, we will all in some way remain in darkness.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Promises to Keep

Mitt Romney’s overseas tour this past week has provided glimpses at how he might perform as diplomat-in-chief if elected.

Some of the stories are merely interesting anecdotes, such as Romney’s complaint that Britain was too crowded or his amicable meeting with former Polish president Lech Walesa.  The most telling highlight of the trip, however, was his fundraising speech in Tel Aviv concerning Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

Romney’s address was a cringe-inducing string of verbal missteps.  In short order, he endorsed a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran, supported Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as its national capital, and strongly implied that the reason the Palestinians were poor compared to the Israelis was due to Arab cultural inferiority.  While the speech undoubtedly played well for certain audiences, on the balance it was an embarrassment.  Its most grating element was Romney’s use of the pronouns “we” and “us” for the United States, as if he had already won the election and had the right to speak on behalf of the American people.  Most irksome of all, however, was the underlying assumption that the U.S. will unconditionally support Israeli foreign policy regardless of Israel’s actions.  Coming on the heels of the Obama administration’s $3.1 billion military aid guarantee for the coming year, Romney’s latest foot-in-mouth episode merely points up a long-running syndrome in U.S. foreign policy.

The alliance with Israel has proven an expensive and counterproductive one for the United States.  Simply put, many of Israel’s hostile Muslim neighbors supply us with oil.  However negatively Arabs, Persians, and other Muslim peoples are perceived in this country, a negativity which taps into the American view that certain cultures are superior or inferior, we are heavily dependent upon the strategic natural resource they control.  One cause of this state of affairs is that American policy toward Israel is formed by the confluence of powerful lobbying groups such as AIPAC, the political preferences of frightfully ignorant red state Evangelicals who believe Israel’s reestablishment fulfills biblical prophecies of the Second Coming, and neoconservative policymakers who still believe the U.S. can remake the Middle East in its own image.  An added dimension is the mirroring of Israeli and Americans' respective self-images.  Israeli exceptionalism is a first cousin to American exceptionalism, at least in practice.  When you are building a city on a hill, you don’t concern yourself with the rights of people who get in your way. 

It's not hard to see, then, why the story of Israel resonates with American conservatives.  European settlers, fleeing religious persecution, convinced they are on a divine mission, land on a foreign shore believing they have arrived in the promised land.  Driving out the indigenous population, sometimes by guile, more often by force, the settlers come to consider any real or perceived opposition as further justification of the righteousness of their cause.  The new nation’s self-identity becomes an ideology, any criticism of which, no matter how justified, brands the critic as disloyal or worse.

The events of the past decade have only served to further muddle the issue of human rights in Palestine.  American politicians of all but the most progressive stripe accept without question the premise that the U.S.-Israeli alliance is a bulwark against Islamist militancy in the Middle East.  Support for Israel has transposed the culture wars at home on the Middle East.  One argument used by cultural conservatives to bolster their advocacy of stronger U.S.-Israeli ties is that Israel is essentially a European nation, an outpost of a culture much like ours sited in hostile territory.  In other words, the courageous Israelis are holding back the barbarians at the gates.

Arguments centered on cultural essentialism are risky at best.  And by no means is U.S. support for Israel the sole reason for anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.  American backing of corrupt, oppressive regimes in the the Arab states, Iran, and Central Asia during the Cold War contributed heavily to Islamist militancy, along with decades of Western exploitation of Middle Eastern petroleum resources.  The rest of the world does not share America’s historical amnesia, least of all in this most contentious of the world’s regions.  When Romney accuses Iran of testing America’s “moral defenses” (whatever that means), he is pandering as much to the prejudices of Republican voters at home as he is trying to rally Israeli sentiment for a new Mideast war in furtherance of corporate interests. 

The past record of the more extreme elements of the Palestinian independence movement often overshadow legitimate discourse over how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.  While American memories are short, we can always count upon Israel and its advocates to refresh them.  The decision last week to not include a commemoration of the 1972 Munich massacre in the opening of the London Olympic games stirred up a welter of controversy over whether we have forgotten this and sundry other anti-Israeli atrocities at Palestinian hands.  However, history is used to further subjective, collective ends.  Consequently, in the West Palestinian history is ignored while the heroic Zionists are lauded.  Valorization of the Israeli experiment pushes aside fundamental questions concerning the nature of the experiment.   

Israel faces an existential dilemma.  It can be any two of the following but not all three: A Jewish state, a democracy, and Eretz Israel (a Greater Israel encompassing all of the Levant as defined in Israel’s declaration of independence).  A solely Jewish democracy excludes non-Jews by definition.  Likewise, so does a solely Jewish Eretz Israel.  A democratic Ertez Israel would have to extend equal rights to its Arab majority, thereby obviating its Jewish character.  The frequent claims of Israeli leaders that Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy fully equal social and political rights fail on the premise that Israel is the Jewish homeland.  By definition, a non-Jew must be a second class citizen in a Jewish state. 

Bearing in mind this last premise, of the numerous solutions proposed for the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the least-worst outcome is the two-state solution.  Even this course of action has multiple variants depending upon the political proclivities of the advocate.  The one that would provide a rough approximation of fairness is an Israel within its pre-1967 borders, a Palestine consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, and Jerusalem as a neutral corpus separatum as originally set out in the 1947 UN partition plan.  A rough approximation of fairness, however, in no way translates into justice for displaced Palestinians after more than sixty years of being deprived a national homeland.

In any case, prospects for a fully sovereign Palestine are chancy if not unlikely.  Any two-state plan accepted by Israel and the U.S. would surely place restrictions on the Palestinian entity’s ability to trade freely and provide for its self defense, essentially rendering it an Israeli dependency.  Furthermore, it’s not as if the Israelis haven’t considered the two-state solution on their own.  According to Tom Segev in his history of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Israeli leadership at one point considered a preemptive declaration of a Palestinian state led by hand-picked Arab notables.  Under the right conditions, the United States and Israel could achieve a significant propaganda coup while preserving the status quo via creation of a dependent, co-opted Palestinian state.

It is unlikely any kind of equitable solution is viable in Palestine because, frankly, the two most influential players don’t want one.  The long-term undercurrent of Israeli policy, particularly that of Netanyahu’s and of previous Likud governments, has been to marginalize and remove any vestige of Arab self-determination in the remaining Palestinian territories.  This is a process that has been supported, albeit incrementally, by successive U.S. presidential administrations.  Israel has been a third-rail issue in American politics for decades and any politician on the national stage must step carefully so as to avoid causing offense to the constellation of interest groups which advocate for Israel.  It’s important for a non-incumbent presidential candidate to establish his or her positions early on while avoiding the appearance of policymaking from the rostrum.  With this in mind, Mitt should keep any further promises to foreign leaders to himself until after he’s won the election. 

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar