I've let almost two weeks lapse since making the first in what was supposed to be a series of posts throughout the month related to the topic of horror. I really need to start getting into the Halloween spirit now.
I am continuing my way through 2008’s Fear Itself television series, and most recently watched the episode “Skin and Bones,” which is by far the best of those that I have now watched. It’s strength rested largely on the makeup effects, as applied to creating an antagonist that was frightful in initially subtle ways. The story is a familiar one, and apparently an increasingly popular one. It is essentially the same as the charmingly bizarre 1999 film, Ravenous, though “Skin and Bones” is executed in a quite different way.
I believe that a part of the latter’s appeal may be attributable to the earnestness of its director, Larry Fessenden. Each episode of Fear Itself has a special feature consisting of interviews with that episode’s director and actors. While several directors thus far have had something interesting to say about horror, its role, and its appeal, Fessenden’s initial commentary is far and away the most striking to me. He says:
“I love horror because it really is just part of my psyche. I think it’s the way my brain in wired. When I walk down the street and I see a fence post, I imagine someone impaled on it. I see life through this filter of real despair and have always had an awareness of death and of the fragility of life. I really think horror is a psychological genre, and people who are drawn to it, I think, have some sort of existential experience with life.”
That notion of imagining horror in mundane contexts is powerfully familiar to me, but I had never really connected it to an affinity for horror as a genre of film or literature. I have, however, considered how it may relate to my strong sense of empathy, my philosophical and spiritual tendencies towards stoicism and asceticism, and my experiential curiosity.
The wiring of my brain may be a bit different from that of Fessenden’s. I don’t have a particularly common tendency to imagine horrible outcomes from a third-person perspective. Rather, there are situations in which I cannot suppress thoughts about the terrible things that could happen to me, and what that would be like. It’s usually associated with the perils of the modern world, though the sight of wild animals may prompt me to imagine, and almost fantasize about being mauled or maimed by them. If I see a hydraulic lift, I immediately and vividly imagine having an arm trapped in it as it lowers. Many such things primarily impress me with the damage they can do, and their practical use is only an afterthought.
Often, my psychological focus almost rises to the level of impulse. I visited my former employer recently, and he showed me a bowl cutter that he had recently gotten running. It is an extremely old item and has no safety catch, so the blades can be turned when the lid is raised and they are completely exposed. He gleefully demonstrated its operation, and I stared at the whirring blades and felt as though I was willfully denying the impulse to reach out towards them. I actually have a certain sense of fear when I use dangerous hardware, because I worry that I might injure myself intentionally should my conscious mind forget to safeguard me against my id, or whatever it is that acts against the basic instinct for self-preservation.
I’m not sure why my mind works this way. I know I am not alone in it, given Fessenden’s comments and given the fact that my ex-girlfriend, for one, attested to the same tendencies. But I’m equally certain that it is not common enough to be called ordinary. But maybe those who do have such vividly dark imaginations have other things in common as well. Maybe an appreciation of the artistic depiction of such unsavory fantasies is one of them.
Something that actually frustrates me about modern horror fandom is that audiences seem to have a distinct lack of empathy. So much of the most popular horror is better identified as “torture porn,” and the people who love it seem to be indulging in pure, base voyeurism. I worry that a lot of theater-goers are more prone to put themselves in the position of the perpetrator or horror, rather than the victim. I may be misjudging them, though. It may be that they still find the things on screen to be genuinely disturbing, but that that registers and is expressed differently.
Ultimately, I can only speak for myself, and what I’d say to defend my interest in material that is shocking or just psychologically or thematically dark is that I want to be disturbed by what I’m seeing. I want to vicariously put myself in the place of someone who is fleeing for his life, suffering torments, going insane, and so on. The fact is that horrible things really do happen every day. And I hate the feeling of being insulated from them, of being trapped in my personal fantasy world of relative comfort and pleasure.
When the real world as I experience it is such a fantasy, I compensate by seeking out the fantasies that stretch to the opposite extreme and depict extraordinary fear and hardship. In one case that may be watching a scary movie, and in another it may be simply imagining what it would be like if my hand got caught in the meat grinder. And in other cases, it might be having a long conversation with a person suffering from multiple personality disorder, or pausing to give a little money to a homeless person, or volunteering, or fasting. There is real horror in the world, and I believe that by keeping myself distant from it, I would be keeping myself distant from a vast segment of reality, as well as from an awareness of the suffering that maybe, someday I will be able to alleviate.
That last consideration raises what could be an interesting question: I wonder if anybody has every analyzed the political leanings of movie-going audiences. It seems like there could be some basis for believing that people who are more interested in observing horror, or reading about it, might also be more inclined to be politically liberal. A basic difference between liberalism and conservatism, as I see it, is that liberalism focuses on the improvements that are still needed in the world, while conservatism sees only the improvements that are already behind us, and disregards the possibility of negative consequences or ongoing mistakes. Put more simply, liberalism is acutely aware of the horror in the world, and conservatism denies it. It would make sense if people who have a psychological impulse to observe or imagine personal horrors also have a social interest in collective horrors.
Although, that would make more sense if it weren’t for the fact that so much of the horror that I consider to be the best has such decidedly conservative themes. And I think that may make a good topic for my next post on the general subject of horror.
Showing posts with label conservatism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservatism. Show all posts
Friday, October 14, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
OWS and My Place on the Sidelines
I need to turn this blog back to a stricter focus on the concept of breaking points, and I need to see that my voice curves around the theme. Primarily, that means being less shy about my righteous indignation. The best of my opinions tend to come of situations wherein I have roughly equivalent ire for both sides of an issue. So it is with the Occupy Wall Street protests. In being essentially asked to choose between the two camps, I feel I’m expected to align myself either with a population of self-righteous assholes who hold to the counter-intuitive view than anyone under the age of thirty-five who has a college degree shouldn’t be taken seriously or with a massive cluster fuck of activists who have no organizational skills or sense of proportion. If absolutely compelled to take a side with one or the other, of course I’ll take the cluster fuck, but as with so many of these things, I really wish there was another option. That is, I wish there was another position to take aside from on either team or on the sidelines.
The majority of the criticism I have been seeing levied against the Occupy Wall Street movement has been predictably cynical and obnoxious. It generally follows the line of reasoning advanced on the national political stage by Hermann Cain: that many thousands of disaffected, disenfranchised people protesting in lower Manhattan and across the country are unfairly targeting their anger at financial institutions and the status quo when they should be blaming themselves for problems such as poverty and joblessness. I encountered one passive-aggressive commentator who identified the movement as being “pro-sloth” and expecting compensation for laziness.
I am increasingly finding myself drawn toward the uncomfortable belief that some people simply cannot be reasoned with. More than that, I may find myself trending towards the worse assumption that people in general can’t be reasoned with when they are being challenged to understand the motivations of ideological opponents. Why is it that otherwise intelligent people take up the most simplistic, intellectually deficient explanations when people they disagree with become highly visible? Hermann Cain aside, I don’t imagine that most conservative observers of the Occupy Wall Street protests are stupid, and yet they are prone to the most foolishly arrogant characterizations of an entire movement. It appears to me that instead of putting forth the effort to observe the participants closely, such people compensate for the discomfort of not understanding them in the slightest by claiming that they understand them perfectly, and that their movement is so simple a thing to understand that there is no reason at all to take it seriously.
That, of course, is bullshit. And yet at the same time there are good reasons not to take it seriously. Much of the media has focused attention on the obvious flaw in the movement that is its lack of a coherent narrative. That is a profoundly serious problem, and though it should be sufficient grounds for criticism on its own, a secondary consequence of that fact is that it makes the movement easier to criticize on irrational, irrelevant, hyperbolic grounds. The fact is that the movement’s opponents will undercut its significance without a second though no matter what, but a lot more is gained if the fight is over the actual message, and not over the personal character of all of the disorganized individuals jostling to express a message that is unique to them and their friends.
I did enough protesting in college that I know that this is just exactly what liberal activism in the twenty-first century looks like. I think it was because I already had a decent mind for branding that it pissed me off when I was twenty and within it as it does now, when I’m twenty-six and watching from the outside. I attended rallies that I thought were in opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq, but as I wandered the crowd I found that they were apparently also about Israel and abortion and gay rights and socialism and drug policy and 9-11 conspiracy theory. And every secondary cause that was represented at every such rally distracted attention from the one thing that everyone had supposedly come together for. It is impossible to take a movement seriously if it is little more than a breeding ground for diverse, disconnected ideas that just happen to originate from the same side of the political spectrum.
Since I’ve already entertained one or two uncomfortable notions in this post, here’s another: Liberalism, precisely by virtue of being liberal, is a weak political cause. We are receptive to other views, and despite the fiery passion of very many liberal activists, most of the ostensibly liberal elements of the political establishment are deferent and eager to compromise. And why shouldn’t they be if their constituency can’t commit to one clear, unequivocal demand without cluttering their advocacy with a chorus of secondary considerations? Why, if the firebrands on the ground are willing to give voice to any ideas that are broadly termed liberal, shouldn’t those in power, who must necessarily be more moderate, be willing to give voice to any ideas that are broadly termed rational?
Unity is one thing at which conservatism, ideological monstrosity that it often is, beats liberalism hands-down. It’s a vulgar kind of unity – the kind that’s achieved by excluding certain opinions, sometimes the most reasonable ones – but it certainly is effective. Down on Wall Street, there’s a protest going on about a million different things, even according to its own participants, but those who are ideologically invested in disregarding it can all agree, even though it’s insanely idiotic to do so, that the noise is coming from a bunch of entitled slackers who would simply rather shout than work. Unfortunately, I anticipate the unified party gaining more ground in this contest.
Don’t get me wrong, if I could so much as afford a bus ticket I would be down there with the Wall Street protesters without a moment’s hesitation. But I know that I would be as angry at the crowd as I would be at the invisible enemy I’d be there to combat. It would be like college all over again, except the cause is far greater, so the lost opportunity is much worse. I’m sort of glad that I’m too poor to protest about how poor I am. I don’t want to be in that ambivalent position again. I’m sure that history would repeat itself exactly and one moment I’d be fantasizing about using his own black handkerchief to suffocate one of the anarchists who crashed a reasonable protest, and then the next I’d want to tear the furs off of the old lady berating us for our indigent, youthful naiveté, hold them up in front of her face and try to convince her that she’s a caricature of herself. Within a crowd of thousands, I would be as lonely as ever, pining as I have done before for a group that does not exist, which would disavow itself of poisonous or plainly irrelevant ideas, and yet engage its opponents intelligently and with self-respect.
The majority of the criticism I have been seeing levied against the Occupy Wall Street movement has been predictably cynical and obnoxious. It generally follows the line of reasoning advanced on the national political stage by Hermann Cain: that many thousands of disaffected, disenfranchised people protesting in lower Manhattan and across the country are unfairly targeting their anger at financial institutions and the status quo when they should be blaming themselves for problems such as poverty and joblessness. I encountered one passive-aggressive commentator who identified the movement as being “pro-sloth” and expecting compensation for laziness.
I am increasingly finding myself drawn toward the uncomfortable belief that some people simply cannot be reasoned with. More than that, I may find myself trending towards the worse assumption that people in general can’t be reasoned with when they are being challenged to understand the motivations of ideological opponents. Why is it that otherwise intelligent people take up the most simplistic, intellectually deficient explanations when people they disagree with become highly visible? Hermann Cain aside, I don’t imagine that most conservative observers of the Occupy Wall Street protests are stupid, and yet they are prone to the most foolishly arrogant characterizations of an entire movement. It appears to me that instead of putting forth the effort to observe the participants closely, such people compensate for the discomfort of not understanding them in the slightest by claiming that they understand them perfectly, and that their movement is so simple a thing to understand that there is no reason at all to take it seriously.
That, of course, is bullshit. And yet at the same time there are good reasons not to take it seriously. Much of the media has focused attention on the obvious flaw in the movement that is its lack of a coherent narrative. That is a profoundly serious problem, and though it should be sufficient grounds for criticism on its own, a secondary consequence of that fact is that it makes the movement easier to criticize on irrational, irrelevant, hyperbolic grounds. The fact is that the movement’s opponents will undercut its significance without a second though no matter what, but a lot more is gained if the fight is over the actual message, and not over the personal character of all of the disorganized individuals jostling to express a message that is unique to them and their friends.
I did enough protesting in college that I know that this is just exactly what liberal activism in the twenty-first century looks like. I think it was because I already had a decent mind for branding that it pissed me off when I was twenty and within it as it does now, when I’m twenty-six and watching from the outside. I attended rallies that I thought were in opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq, but as I wandered the crowd I found that they were apparently also about Israel and abortion and gay rights and socialism and drug policy and 9-11 conspiracy theory. And every secondary cause that was represented at every such rally distracted attention from the one thing that everyone had supposedly come together for. It is impossible to take a movement seriously if it is little more than a breeding ground for diverse, disconnected ideas that just happen to originate from the same side of the political spectrum.
Since I’ve already entertained one or two uncomfortable notions in this post, here’s another: Liberalism, precisely by virtue of being liberal, is a weak political cause. We are receptive to other views, and despite the fiery passion of very many liberal activists, most of the ostensibly liberal elements of the political establishment are deferent and eager to compromise. And why shouldn’t they be if their constituency can’t commit to one clear, unequivocal demand without cluttering their advocacy with a chorus of secondary considerations? Why, if the firebrands on the ground are willing to give voice to any ideas that are broadly termed liberal, shouldn’t those in power, who must necessarily be more moderate, be willing to give voice to any ideas that are broadly termed rational?
Unity is one thing at which conservatism, ideological monstrosity that it often is, beats liberalism hands-down. It’s a vulgar kind of unity – the kind that’s achieved by excluding certain opinions, sometimes the most reasonable ones – but it certainly is effective. Down on Wall Street, there’s a protest going on about a million different things, even according to its own participants, but those who are ideologically invested in disregarding it can all agree, even though it’s insanely idiotic to do so, that the noise is coming from a bunch of entitled slackers who would simply rather shout than work. Unfortunately, I anticipate the unified party gaining more ground in this contest.
Don’t get me wrong, if I could so much as afford a bus ticket I would be down there with the Wall Street protesters without a moment’s hesitation. But I know that I would be as angry at the crowd as I would be at the invisible enemy I’d be there to combat. It would be like college all over again, except the cause is far greater, so the lost opportunity is much worse. I’m sort of glad that I’m too poor to protest about how poor I am. I don’t want to be in that ambivalent position again. I’m sure that history would repeat itself exactly and one moment I’d be fantasizing about using his own black handkerchief to suffocate one of the anarchists who crashed a reasonable protest, and then the next I’d want to tear the furs off of the old lady berating us for our indigent, youthful naiveté, hold them up in front of her face and try to convince her that she’s a caricature of herself. Within a crowd of thousands, I would be as lonely as ever, pining as I have done before for a group that does not exist, which would disavow itself of poisonous or plainly irrelevant ideas, and yet engage its opponents intelligently and with self-respect.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
"Stop Helping, Son"
I was having a meal this afternoon at a diner (okay, it was a Denny’s – I live in Buffalo, NY and travel solely by bicycle), when a couple of people at a nearby table caught my attention. A middle-aged woman and someone I assume was her son of about fifteen years old had finished their meal and we’re about to get up to leave. The young man had his back to me, while I could see the woman in profile. The kid’s hands moved on the table in front of him as he wiped crumbs from the surface or stacked the plates, or something along those lines. I know this from his mother’s reaction, which was to reach across the table, snatch something from the young man’s hands and command him to stop cleaning up after himself. From what I could see, she appeared to actually be taking things that he had gathered together neatly and scattering them back into their prior positions.
“It’s called waitressing, or busing,” I heard her hiss with genuine derision. “They get paid to do that.”
The young man protested delicately: “I’m just cleaning up my own mess.”
The mother began to get up from the table, aggressively pitching a used napkin into its center and gesturing for her son to follow her out. “Don’t do their jobs for them,” she insisted, repeating that “people get paid for that.”
So focused was she on willfully leaving a mess behind that she didn’t ever seem to notice me, off at her side, glaring at her openly, with fury in my eyes. Her son got up as she began moving past him, still being scolded and thus compelled to defend himself against what I think was the single most irrational verbal attack I have ever heard a parent levy against her child. “I like to clean up after myself,” he reiterated.
Here was this adolescent child taking it upon himself to demonstrate a bit of personal responsibility, and his parent was actively chastising him for it, endeavoring to instruct him that it’s wrong to make something easy for another person if they’re getting paid for it and you’re not. Never mind that in this case they’re presumably getting paid less than minimum wage and relying on tips that, given the neighborhood, the establishment, and the arrogant disregard on display among certain customers, probably just aren’t there. And never mind that all that you need to do to improve their shift working at such a shitty job is run a napkin over a table and move a few pieces of dinnerware six inches or so. They’re getting paid to do that shit that takes absolutely no effort on the part of the customer, but quite a bit when you’ve been doing it every ten minutes for ten fucking hours.
I have encountered this sort of attitude many times throughout my life, in numerous circumstances. I still vividly recall arguing with a good friend in high school who routinely tossed his trash onto the floors of the hallways after school, insisting that it was okay because there were janitors that got paid to clean it up for him. As a matter of fact, he argued that he was providing them with job security by being lazy and filthy. He was a smart kid otherwise, so I give him the benefit of the doubt by figuring that that was probably just an ironic way of justifying his own self-centeredness. Then again, he also self-identified as a Marxist, which added a whole further level of necessarily unintentional irony. Being the principal’s son, the kid was from a decidedly upper-middle class background, and his adolescence created in him an identity that thoroughly grasped the theoretical concepts of equality and social justice, but failed at the task of connecting that to the very simple idea of people actively helping one another.
To this day, there is a special loathing in my heart reserved for these kinds of people – people who applaud themselves when it comes to the vague pursuit of social and political causes, and can speak loudly about them, and build their self-perception around them, but are perfectly willing to leave all the work to others when it suits them, or blame the victim when confronted with individual instances of disenfranchisement and inequality, or drive past a person who’s being attacked on the street.
Of course, in the case of the woman at Denny’s, I have no idea what her social views are. She might just plain not like poor people. She may just think that whatever pittance they’re making to clean up her shit, it’s too much, so fuck them and make sure their job is as hard as it can be. She may be that lovely kind of conservative who thinks that “personal responsibility” is just a phrase that’s used to criticize people at the bottom of society. In that case, here’s hoping that her son’s act of teenage rebellion in embracing liberalism and actually behaving with personal responsibility is not just a phase.
“It’s called waitressing, or busing,” I heard her hiss with genuine derision. “They get paid to do that.”
The young man protested delicately: “I’m just cleaning up my own mess.”
The mother began to get up from the table, aggressively pitching a used napkin into its center and gesturing for her son to follow her out. “Don’t do their jobs for them,” she insisted, repeating that “people get paid for that.”
So focused was she on willfully leaving a mess behind that she didn’t ever seem to notice me, off at her side, glaring at her openly, with fury in my eyes. Her son got up as she began moving past him, still being scolded and thus compelled to defend himself against what I think was the single most irrational verbal attack I have ever heard a parent levy against her child. “I like to clean up after myself,” he reiterated.
Here was this adolescent child taking it upon himself to demonstrate a bit of personal responsibility, and his parent was actively chastising him for it, endeavoring to instruct him that it’s wrong to make something easy for another person if they’re getting paid for it and you’re not. Never mind that in this case they’re presumably getting paid less than minimum wage and relying on tips that, given the neighborhood, the establishment, and the arrogant disregard on display among certain customers, probably just aren’t there. And never mind that all that you need to do to improve their shift working at such a shitty job is run a napkin over a table and move a few pieces of dinnerware six inches or so. They’re getting paid to do that shit that takes absolutely no effort on the part of the customer, but quite a bit when you’ve been doing it every ten minutes for ten fucking hours.
I have encountered this sort of attitude many times throughout my life, in numerous circumstances. I still vividly recall arguing with a good friend in high school who routinely tossed his trash onto the floors of the hallways after school, insisting that it was okay because there were janitors that got paid to clean it up for him. As a matter of fact, he argued that he was providing them with job security by being lazy and filthy. He was a smart kid otherwise, so I give him the benefit of the doubt by figuring that that was probably just an ironic way of justifying his own self-centeredness. Then again, he also self-identified as a Marxist, which added a whole further level of necessarily unintentional irony. Being the principal’s son, the kid was from a decidedly upper-middle class background, and his adolescence created in him an identity that thoroughly grasped the theoretical concepts of equality and social justice, but failed at the task of connecting that to the very simple idea of people actively helping one another.
To this day, there is a special loathing in my heart reserved for these kinds of people – people who applaud themselves when it comes to the vague pursuit of social and political causes, and can speak loudly about them, and build their self-perception around them, but are perfectly willing to leave all the work to others when it suits them, or blame the victim when confronted with individual instances of disenfranchisement and inequality, or drive past a person who’s being attacked on the street.
Of course, in the case of the woman at Denny’s, I have no idea what her social views are. She might just plain not like poor people. She may just think that whatever pittance they’re making to clean up her shit, it’s too much, so fuck them and make sure their job is as hard as it can be. She may be that lovely kind of conservative who thinks that “personal responsibility” is just a phrase that’s used to criticize people at the bottom of society. In that case, here’s hoping that her son’s act of teenage rebellion in embracing liberalism and actually behaving with personal responsibility is not just a phase.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Fact-Free Ideology
There was some highly recommended reading from Steve Kornacki at Salon today:
When Rush bet $2 million that Clinton would ruin the economy.
Put very simply, it refers to recent conservative remarks that taxing the wealthy in times of economic difficultly makes recover virtually impossible, and sets those claims against identical commentary from the early nineties, when the Clinton administration was making just such a tax increase. Kornacki quotes Rush Limbaugh in 1993 as saying: “Tax rate increases slow down economic activity. It is not a theory. It's not an opinion. It is fact. It is true.” Limbaugh went on to predict that if any tax increase went forward, the economy would worsen, with a higher deficit, lower employment, and higher inflation. Well, the Clinton plan did go forward, and none of Limbaugh’s predictions came true, as anyone who lived through the Clinton administration should remember.
Yet, amazingly, Limbaugh and the entire conservative establishment continues to repeat the same talking point to this day: that tax increases of any kind hurt the economy. Taxing the wealthiest two percent is now “the Obama way,” and according to Limbaugh, “The Obama way has been tried… But it doesn’t work.”
This is the nature of entrenched ideology. It does not bend to reality. I find it hard to believe that these kinds of people actually believe the things that they identify as indisputable facts. If they do, it is an heroic kind of personal delusion, to be able to say something, watch your claims be conclusively proved false, and then say those things again, over and over for years.
No matter what the issue, and no matter what the ideology, this kind of rhetoric should never appear in serious public discourse. If you don’t want to give up your personal wealth, fine, stand up and say that that’s your position. But can’t we all have enough self-respect to not invent facts to support false claims that help us get our way?
Then again, it’s pretty hard to get your way if you have to say to ninety-eight percent of the population: “Yes, my money could help you to get through these difficult times, but I just don’t wanna part with any of it.” Acknowledging that taxing the wealthy actually is effective, but arguing against it anyway would probably prove rather self-defeating, so those who stand to lose a measure of what they can afford to lose must instead resort to lies and willful ignorance of the clear lessons of history. The truth just doesn’t support their interests, and that’s all there is to it.
So I’m looking for either of two breaking points: for conservatives to stand up for their greed and actively resist giving up their fair share, or for the rest of us to stand up for truth and make it plainly and commonly known when they are lying.
When Rush bet $2 million that Clinton would ruin the economy.
Put very simply, it refers to recent conservative remarks that taxing the wealthy in times of economic difficultly makes recover virtually impossible, and sets those claims against identical commentary from the early nineties, when the Clinton administration was making just such a tax increase. Kornacki quotes Rush Limbaugh in 1993 as saying: “Tax rate increases slow down economic activity. It is not a theory. It's not an opinion. It is fact. It is true.” Limbaugh went on to predict that if any tax increase went forward, the economy would worsen, with a higher deficit, lower employment, and higher inflation. Well, the Clinton plan did go forward, and none of Limbaugh’s predictions came true, as anyone who lived through the Clinton administration should remember.
Yet, amazingly, Limbaugh and the entire conservative establishment continues to repeat the same talking point to this day: that tax increases of any kind hurt the economy. Taxing the wealthiest two percent is now “the Obama way,” and according to Limbaugh, “The Obama way has been tried… But it doesn’t work.”
This is the nature of entrenched ideology. It does not bend to reality. I find it hard to believe that these kinds of people actually believe the things that they identify as indisputable facts. If they do, it is an heroic kind of personal delusion, to be able to say something, watch your claims be conclusively proved false, and then say those things again, over and over for years.
No matter what the issue, and no matter what the ideology, this kind of rhetoric should never appear in serious public discourse. If you don’t want to give up your personal wealth, fine, stand up and say that that’s your position. But can’t we all have enough self-respect to not invent facts to support false claims that help us get our way?
Then again, it’s pretty hard to get your way if you have to say to ninety-eight percent of the population: “Yes, my money could help you to get through these difficult times, but I just don’t wanna part with any of it.” Acknowledging that taxing the wealthy actually is effective, but arguing against it anyway would probably prove rather self-defeating, so those who stand to lose a measure of what they can afford to lose must instead resort to lies and willful ignorance of the clear lessons of history. The truth just doesn’t support their interests, and that’s all there is to it.
So I’m looking for either of two breaking points: for conservatives to stand up for their greed and actively resist giving up their fair share, or for the rest of us to stand up for truth and make it plainly and commonly known when they are lying.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Common Thoughts
I don’t think people give enough respect to the thin, weak boundaries of their ideological convictions. I actually take notice of, and am alarmed by, the ideas that I entertain, which have the potential to push me in either of two directions – towards a more extreme, less rational extension of the political views I already hold, or towards an eventual reversal of my closely held beliefs. If we don’t live our lives in a self-imposed vacuum, our ideas certainly are capable of dramatic, almost inconceivable change. Just look at Arianna Huffington for a prime example. It just happens that most of us don’t notice the turnaround until it’s already happened. As romantic as the notion of epiphany is, it’s not the way things usually go. Most of the things we come to believe are grounded in a gradual accumulation of evidence and, hopefully, logical analysis.
I remember being twenty years old, working in a gas station over my summer break from college, and finding myself deep in thought while stocking the walk-in cooler one night, actually praying to God to not let me become an anarchist. My own political engagement, my own earnest considerations of where I stood seemed to be pushing me that way, even though I knew that anarchism, however well-intentioned, is stupid. My genuine concern was therefore grounded in the threat that if I didn’t go on reminding myself of the glaring flaws of that view, of its neglect for the numerous salutary effects of living in a civilized society, the appeal that stood beside that foolishness could overtake my mind.
On quite the other hand, I’ve worried about the potential for getting conservative as I get old ever since I heard the famous, now clichéd, Winston Churchill quote about a young man who isn’t liberal having no heart and an old man who isn’t conservative having no head. But the threat of late-onset conservativism really took on a dimension of terror after I read Rabbit Redux, and saw that John Updike’s character, in whom I had seen so much of myself, for good or ill, had become belligerently conservative as he emerged from his twenties.
The effect of fiction is bad enough, but would not resonate at length if I did not observe warning signs portending wrong thinking in my own mind, as well. Sometimes I’ll entertain what I think is a typically conservative thought, and then I’ll consider that really what is in my mind is not an ideological statement, it’s an observation. But it’s the sort of observation that it is easy to imagine dominates the senses of a right-wing person. It is the groundwork of an objectionable ideology, but the presence of that actual ideology depends on building an interpretation onto that foundation of observation.
Rational assessment of observable facts and arguable solutions is the thing that has held extremist liberal mindsets at bay, and if I retain an active mind, that will be what keeps me from conservativism, as well. Thinking about this has led me to a very interesting thought: Liberals and conservatives may very often have the very same idea about a particular subject. The thing that differentiates the two is the way each interprets his own observational thought, or even his own emotion. From my liberal standpoint, I would venture to guess that it’s often a matter of degree, with the liberal giving a greater amount of consideration to the topic, as opposed to, say, stopping short with an easy answer.
It worries me when I find myself thinking, “I can’t stand seeing all these recent immigrants in all these same positions of employment.” The thought passes through me as if it was not my own, and then my mind reels, and the first thought to follow upon it is, “holy shit, I’m betraying everything that I respect in myself.” And then I have to wonder why that is, when it seemed to me for a moment that I was just observing an obviously true state of affairs. Then I realize that I had imposed emotional content onto that observation, and that it reflected badly on me. But in the next second, I start to relax as I reassure myself that I hadn’t directed my despisal at the working class immigrants themselves, but at the circumstances surrounding them and me in kind. My comment hadn’t dislodged any of the beliefs that I hold and consider laudable – such as that everyone, regardless of race or national origin, deserves an opportunity to work.
But the fact remains that I think it’s terrible that I sometimes see white-owned, corporate chain establishments staffed entirely by very recent Indian immigrants. I don’t like that virtually all of my produce is picked and packaged by Mexican migrant workers. I know that conservatives object to these things, too. But they take the easy route of blaming the individuals who had the audacity to try to better their lives. They acknowledge what’s happening, and they acknowledge their own frustrations that things are bad, and that perhaps they themselves are out of work, but they stop there, and don’t give a deeper consideration of what’s wrong.
Every time I buy a cup of coffee from an Asian immigrant laboring for a Western company, I think about the fact that there had no doubt been dozens of applicants for that persons job from white, native Buffalonians, and that the job went to the immigrant. In several places, the job went to the immigrant in every god damn case. And it’s not because they’re coming here to take our jobs. It’s not because they’re invading us in droves and robbing the white man of what should be his. It’s because of the white men who set the hiring policy at these places, knowing that they can comfortably pay a substantially lower wage to a recent immigrant. I look at these things and I experience what I think must be a conservative’s anger. But thank God that I have a liberal’s mind, because I have no right to be angry at another person who is as lowly as I. My anger is for the system that disregards one group in order to thoroughly exploit another.
I don’t think we partisans recognize often enough that we’re living in the same world. We’re facing the same problems. And if my experiences are not anomalous, we are even having some of the same thoughts. We just need to do a better job of understanding what we’re all thinking, what we’re all feeling. And if we focus on that common ground, those of us who have thought through the facts, observations, and theoretical solutions can better explain that the issue is deeper than you realize – deeper than the conservative notion at which it’s easier to arrive.
I remember being twenty years old, working in a gas station over my summer break from college, and finding myself deep in thought while stocking the walk-in cooler one night, actually praying to God to not let me become an anarchist. My own political engagement, my own earnest considerations of where I stood seemed to be pushing me that way, even though I knew that anarchism, however well-intentioned, is stupid. My genuine concern was therefore grounded in the threat that if I didn’t go on reminding myself of the glaring flaws of that view, of its neglect for the numerous salutary effects of living in a civilized society, the appeal that stood beside that foolishness could overtake my mind.
On quite the other hand, I’ve worried about the potential for getting conservative as I get old ever since I heard the famous, now clichéd, Winston Churchill quote about a young man who isn’t liberal having no heart and an old man who isn’t conservative having no head. But the threat of late-onset conservativism really took on a dimension of terror after I read Rabbit Redux, and saw that John Updike’s character, in whom I had seen so much of myself, for good or ill, had become belligerently conservative as he emerged from his twenties.
The effect of fiction is bad enough, but would not resonate at length if I did not observe warning signs portending wrong thinking in my own mind, as well. Sometimes I’ll entertain what I think is a typically conservative thought, and then I’ll consider that really what is in my mind is not an ideological statement, it’s an observation. But it’s the sort of observation that it is easy to imagine dominates the senses of a right-wing person. It is the groundwork of an objectionable ideology, but the presence of that actual ideology depends on building an interpretation onto that foundation of observation.
Rational assessment of observable facts and arguable solutions is the thing that has held extremist liberal mindsets at bay, and if I retain an active mind, that will be what keeps me from conservativism, as well. Thinking about this has led me to a very interesting thought: Liberals and conservatives may very often have the very same idea about a particular subject. The thing that differentiates the two is the way each interprets his own observational thought, or even his own emotion. From my liberal standpoint, I would venture to guess that it’s often a matter of degree, with the liberal giving a greater amount of consideration to the topic, as opposed to, say, stopping short with an easy answer.
It worries me when I find myself thinking, “I can’t stand seeing all these recent immigrants in all these same positions of employment.” The thought passes through me as if it was not my own, and then my mind reels, and the first thought to follow upon it is, “holy shit, I’m betraying everything that I respect in myself.” And then I have to wonder why that is, when it seemed to me for a moment that I was just observing an obviously true state of affairs. Then I realize that I had imposed emotional content onto that observation, and that it reflected badly on me. But in the next second, I start to relax as I reassure myself that I hadn’t directed my despisal at the working class immigrants themselves, but at the circumstances surrounding them and me in kind. My comment hadn’t dislodged any of the beliefs that I hold and consider laudable – such as that everyone, regardless of race or national origin, deserves an opportunity to work.
But the fact remains that I think it’s terrible that I sometimes see white-owned, corporate chain establishments staffed entirely by very recent Indian immigrants. I don’t like that virtually all of my produce is picked and packaged by Mexican migrant workers. I know that conservatives object to these things, too. But they take the easy route of blaming the individuals who had the audacity to try to better their lives. They acknowledge what’s happening, and they acknowledge their own frustrations that things are bad, and that perhaps they themselves are out of work, but they stop there, and don’t give a deeper consideration of what’s wrong.
Every time I buy a cup of coffee from an Asian immigrant laboring for a Western company, I think about the fact that there had no doubt been dozens of applicants for that persons job from white, native Buffalonians, and that the job went to the immigrant. In several places, the job went to the immigrant in every god damn case. And it’s not because they’re coming here to take our jobs. It’s not because they’re invading us in droves and robbing the white man of what should be his. It’s because of the white men who set the hiring policy at these places, knowing that they can comfortably pay a substantially lower wage to a recent immigrant. I look at these things and I experience what I think must be a conservative’s anger. But thank God that I have a liberal’s mind, because I have no right to be angry at another person who is as lowly as I. My anger is for the system that disregards one group in order to thoroughly exploit another.
I don’t think we partisans recognize often enough that we’re living in the same world. We’re facing the same problems. And if my experiences are not anomalous, we are even having some of the same thoughts. We just need to do a better job of understanding what we’re all thinking, what we’re all feeling. And if we focus on that common ground, those of us who have thought through the facts, observations, and theoretical solutions can better explain that the issue is deeper than you realize – deeper than the conservative notion at which it’s easier to arrive.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Mainstreaming Conservatism
Kristina Loew at the Revealer has recently made an interesting comment about pop culture. She says:
“From movies to music, conservative voices have cornered the tween scene, that 12 – 13 year old demographic which often looks to their favorite stars for moral guidance (and ways to spend their parents’ paychecks). “
Loew calls this “the mainstreaming of conservatism,” and wonders if it is time for parents to ask if it has gone too far. Of course, for those of us in opposition to the worldview upheld by Twilight, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Justin Bieber, the answer is clear. But the vast majority of parents of tweens are likely in support of the evidently uniform worldview of their cultural role models.
For me, the basic observation raises a different question: Who’s to blame?
Just why is it that the only persons put forward in the popular tween market are ones who have been instilled with thoroughly conservative perspectives on sex, religion, and other potentially divisive social topics? Are these just the sorts of people of whom tweens demand more, or are tweens simply swallowing whatever they are being fed? If a roomful of record executives and casting agents are determining the moral content of the stars they introduce to the public, are we to lay blame on them for pulling the strings, or on the young consumers for applauding the puppet show? And what motivation is there for that manipulation in the first place? Do the men in power strive to control the culture of the emergent generation, or is it something less conspiratorial – that they simply fear outcry from parents if their kids are introduced to threatening, progressive ideas too early in life?
Perhaps that fear is justified. Let us not forget the tear-filled testimonies that fill the media every time the television exposes unprepared audiences to a one-second flash of a nipple or half of a swear word. A culture of sensitivity is no doubt providing at least a partial underpinning to a culture of mainstreaming conservatism, and who is to blame for that? Is the moral make-up of modern parents really so staunchly conservative, or are liberal parents simply not doing enough to make their voices audible? Is that even feasible, or does the media drown them out by privileging one side over another?
But then, why are there any sides on the issue of what values and ideologies we should be introducing our children to through their pop stars? I’m not one to claim that teens or even pre-teens can’t understand issues of social and political import, but I would much prefer that they be given a broad span of time to arrive at their ideas about them independently. I have much respect for some young people. I actually think that I myself was smarter at fifteen than I am now at twenty-five. But in my perhaps glib estimation, the more mature teens and tweens, with more thoroughly formulated ideals, are the least likely to admire the pop stars available to them in the mainstream. If that’s true, then the children whose views are likely to be shaped by the dominant culture are the ones who simply haven’t thought much about the topics about which it’s telling them what to think.
If some kids just want to listen to syrupy pop music and watch vampires proselytize about Mormonism, let them. There is no reason for the makers of that material to be bound up with social views that, as near as I can tell, even they haven’t fully formulated yet. Why do we think they should be role models, rather than just entertainers? Why is there even cause to seek Justin Bieber’s sage counsel on women’s reproductive health? Why not let him sing and earn his six figures, and wait until both he and his audience have grown up enough to develop opinions that they hold with serious conviction?
This post consists of a lot more questions than opinions. All I know is that something’s got to give. There’s got to be a breaking point that keeps us from introducing our least reflective youths to our most conservative ideas, and growing them into the social structure that keeps recycling that dynamic. It may come by unseating the cultural powers-that-be, or just by raising our voices over theirs, or by teaching our children to think for themselves earlier and more often, but whatever the means, let it come.
“From movies to music, conservative voices have cornered the tween scene, that 12 – 13 year old demographic which often looks to their favorite stars for moral guidance (and ways to spend their parents’ paychecks). “
Loew calls this “the mainstreaming of conservatism,” and wonders if it is time for parents to ask if it has gone too far. Of course, for those of us in opposition to the worldview upheld by Twilight, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Justin Bieber, the answer is clear. But the vast majority of parents of tweens are likely in support of the evidently uniform worldview of their cultural role models.
For me, the basic observation raises a different question: Who’s to blame?
Just why is it that the only persons put forward in the popular tween market are ones who have been instilled with thoroughly conservative perspectives on sex, religion, and other potentially divisive social topics? Are these just the sorts of people of whom tweens demand more, or are tweens simply swallowing whatever they are being fed? If a roomful of record executives and casting agents are determining the moral content of the stars they introduce to the public, are we to lay blame on them for pulling the strings, or on the young consumers for applauding the puppet show? And what motivation is there for that manipulation in the first place? Do the men in power strive to control the culture of the emergent generation, or is it something less conspiratorial – that they simply fear outcry from parents if their kids are introduced to threatening, progressive ideas too early in life?
Perhaps that fear is justified. Let us not forget the tear-filled testimonies that fill the media every time the television exposes unprepared audiences to a one-second flash of a nipple or half of a swear word. A culture of sensitivity is no doubt providing at least a partial underpinning to a culture of mainstreaming conservatism, and who is to blame for that? Is the moral make-up of modern parents really so staunchly conservative, or are liberal parents simply not doing enough to make their voices audible? Is that even feasible, or does the media drown them out by privileging one side over another?
But then, why are there any sides on the issue of what values and ideologies we should be introducing our children to through their pop stars? I’m not one to claim that teens or even pre-teens can’t understand issues of social and political import, but I would much prefer that they be given a broad span of time to arrive at their ideas about them independently. I have much respect for some young people. I actually think that I myself was smarter at fifteen than I am now at twenty-five. But in my perhaps glib estimation, the more mature teens and tweens, with more thoroughly formulated ideals, are the least likely to admire the pop stars available to them in the mainstream. If that’s true, then the children whose views are likely to be shaped by the dominant culture are the ones who simply haven’t thought much about the topics about which it’s telling them what to think.
If some kids just want to listen to syrupy pop music and watch vampires proselytize about Mormonism, let them. There is no reason for the makers of that material to be bound up with social views that, as near as I can tell, even they haven’t fully formulated yet. Why do we think they should be role models, rather than just entertainers? Why is there even cause to seek Justin Bieber’s sage counsel on women’s reproductive health? Why not let him sing and earn his six figures, and wait until both he and his audience have grown up enough to develop opinions that they hold with serious conviction?
This post consists of a lot more questions than opinions. All I know is that something’s got to give. There’s got to be a breaking point that keeps us from introducing our least reflective youths to our most conservative ideas, and growing them into the social structure that keeps recycling that dynamic. It may come by unseating the cultural powers-that-be, or just by raising our voices over theirs, or by teaching our children to think for themselves earlier and more often, but whatever the means, let it come.
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