Justice and Neutrality

Over the years, I realized, I’ve become what people would dub ‘politically neutral’. It’s not that I have no ideas; it’s that the ideas are on an entirely different ball field; I’m not playing on the presuppositions of the culture; I don’t accept the first premise of it’s debate, so I have no position on it’s opposing teams. Far from being a moderate or a true neutral, I hold ideas that threaten it’s very existence. But relative to its presuppositions, I’m neutral, because for me, within broad strokes, it’s morally arbitrary who is in power. I used to think one group or another was destroying America and the World. I’m still certain of that; it’s just that now I think that *all* the groups are doing it. Not because they’re groups, but because they’re what they are. This arena is one of competing evils. Nor do I find it a morally defensible framework to ‘choose between the lesser of evils’, as though supporting Mussolini is somehow acceptible because I didn’t support Hitler. These are the cowardly ‘moral stands’ of those who have admitted personal defeat but don’t have the courage to admit the true depth of the problem, because – unlike defeat – it would underscore rather than rob them of their responsibility. I cannot say, “I am not responsible, because I voted for Mussolini not Hitler.” I cannot divide life into categories and say, “I did the best I can do, because I supported Communist Guerillas over a Fascist Dictator (or vice versa). America’s hemispheric policies are so illustrative in these areas. No, I understand that either the next Mao or the next Amin or the next Pol Pot may take power, and they are all criminals against man and against the Kingdom of God, and I won’t help any of them take what they are pleased to call power which, if you have to take it, is not power but only violence, or if you must win it, it is not power but a trophy. Do I support anarchy? Only in the sense that I do not accept the false dilemma of the forms of leadership, government, and political debate currently offered, but consider them all perverse and false – illusory forms of politics – themselves therefore anarchistic. In this age, one has to be an anarchist just to have independent thought. But I’m not ready to don a black beret and retreat into coffee house intellectualism. On the contrary, I have no argument, unless I take responsibility. So currently I am with whoever is being killed by those who are doing the killing, whoever is being invaded, not those doing the invading, whoever is being forced into submission, by those doing the forcing. I am not their political ally, but I am with them in this one thing: I reject the claims of others to dominate them, for whatever reason. Even when it is said they must be brought to justice, I am with them in this: I do not recognize the justice to which they are brought as justice. Justice is what we will have when all of these governments are overturned by the one that bears the government upon his shoulders.

Safe for Democracy

“Make the world safe for democracy” – I find it interesting to break down slogans like that, to see what we’re really saying. How about “Make it safe for my view” or “Make it safe for my way” or “Protect my own ideas” or “Wipe out opposition to my own ideas, so they can survive, because they can’t survive if they’re opposed.” Etc.

While we’re at it, let’s sing the national anthem. It pretty much goes like this: “We we we we we we, us us us us us us, we we we we we…” (to the tune of The Star-Spangled Banner). And while we’re lauding ourselves and applauding ourselves, let’s make the world “safe from everything but us”.

If you could prevent one historical event, what would it be?

I’ve been thinking about this for some time. This week, I bought Orson Scott Card’s book Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. It asks similar questions.

Of course the various holocausts come to mind, but it feels like plugging any one hole in a crumbling dike. Nor do I know what event might overturn the universal barbarity of man, unless it be the Fall. What built the West, or allowed it to live as it is? That much I can look at. And I think it wasn’t Columbus. I think it was lies, to which all Western thinkers from Aquinas to Hegel are footnotes, religious desecration and depravity – the ritual violation of its mother, and the loss of a great barrier reef that held the promise of something else.

I think I would focus on one of three events:

• St. Augustine’s De Trinitate, and other key elements of his work.
• The Sack of Constantinople
• The Fall of Constantinople

Putting in the proofing team’s changes, now. Working in the office. Listening to music:

Current Playlist.

A close friend of mine once confessed being “a sucker for romance” flicks, even if they are corny, full of stereotypes, and canned plots. As with many of the things she says, I sometimes feel as if I’m the one speaking them; they come from a shared place. She has a name for this phenomenon, but for me it’s nameless.

In any case, I finally saw Before Sunset w. Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. I always secretly liked Before Sunrise (1995 – not the 2004 film of the same name), to which this latest film is the sequel. In the first film, two young people meet on a train, and decide to get off in Vienna and spend the evening walking around the city. They agree to meet at the train station again in six months. In the second film, it has been twenty years, and they never kept that appointment, though the original meeting was the defining point in their lives. They meet at his book signing in Paris, and spend what’s left of the day walking around Paris. I’ll leave the rest to your own predilection for romance, cynicism, or uncertainty.

I will say, though, that I absolutely love this film. I feel a bit like it’s coming from a shared place, as though it were describing my own life. It’s a nameless feeling.

Speaking of which, I’m watching Goodwill Hunting for the umpteenth time. The response Matt Damon’s character gives to the NSA – I just love it. I’m not the same type of genius that his character is, but I sometimes feel that I’m where he is, struggling throughout the story.

I think, in our culture of self-consciousness, we’ve lost some prize abilities. One of these is the ability to chant. I mean chant the way sailors used to when rowing or washing a deck, or the way railroad workers would when hammering spikes. I found myself today (repeatedly) chanting “three-foot closet with a twenty-inch depth” as I rearranged heavy furniture to move a heavy wardrobe. It was a measurement I’d taken and wanted to remember, and it was catchy and rhythmic. I caught myself chanting faster and louder as I strained against the wardrobe. “Three-foot closet with a twenty-inch depth.” “Three-foot closet with a twenty-inch depth!” I realized the work had, somehow, gone easier. So now, I think I’ll take a measurement or other important part of the next project, and do the same thing. It’s not “swing low, sweet chariot”, but it works.

Kingdom of Heaven

Saw Kingdom of Heaven at 10pm. I liked being nearly alone.

There was a running sense of valor and honor, tainted in naturalist fashion by a sizeable dose of universal guilt, though that taint is quickly buried and attention distracted to the faults of all the flat villains. The fight scenes were tough, and interesting, but relied too much on clever camera-work, and lacked the inherent heroism one saw in 13^th Warrior.

An anti-ecclesiastical drum kept constant beat and became confused with the trumpeting anticlericalism. In the world of this film there is no example at all of genuine ecclesiastical piety. The void created by the generalization of religion as nonsense (replete with mediaeval superstitions) and the relegation of piety to empty repetition, with noisy gonging on the point that both sides mouthed the same words, was filled with a sort of democratic Protestant social ethos. All religion, in this film, is meaningless and gives way before a vaguely religious socio-political ethics. The politics of the film hinted that, in the crusades, everyone was guilty, the West more so of course, and that modern Middle Eastern conflict is somehow based on the same fundamental issues. Whether one shares the social and political ideas, the former flatten the film, and the latter dissolve it into cliché.

Still, there were interesting characters (the antiheroes and good guys), though the potential for the lead female role is ruined. Her gestures toward presence are dissipated by clichéd and uninteresting love scenes and exaggerated weaknesses that leave her insignificant except as concubine to the male lead – a demographically necessary film statistic.

I’ll see it again, but with no illusions that it’s a sweeping ethic with amazing battle scenes, or what have you.

Sin City

To speak against violence in film is bound to earn me the status ‘unenlightened’ or ‘moralistic’. Nonetheless, it is not violence that is the target of my criticism, but rather the glorification of violence for its own sake. For example, the violence in Fight Club, while sometimes intense, is explored as a means of finding release. The gore in Luc Besson’s The Messenger is actually discussed in the film, critiqued as part of the brutality of war.

In Sin City, however, gore and brutality become an end in themselves. The film offers up a nihilistic world in which desensitized youth living a vicarious viciousness through comics and videogames can legitimize their perversions in the name of fidelity to the original. A few key points in the film serve to illustrate:

• In one scene a woman explains, as she holds up the grisly, sewn-up stump where a serial killer has severed her hand, that he made her watch as he ate it.

• In another, the antihero Marv has sawn off the arms and legs of the bound serial killer, and lures a wild dog to tear at his flesh and eat him alive. This is one of several scenese of torture that Marv says he enjoys.

• In still another scene, which could have been right out of Kill Bill, the focus is on how much brutality the prostitutes could inflict. The pretense is to talk of skill at swordplay, but this only underscores how much the visual emphasis was on the damage being inflicted.

• In a later scene, the hero Hartigan beats in the face of a psychopath until it is a liquid pulp.

One can pretend the morality of torture, terrorism, killing sprees, and savagery by claiming the victims deserved it, or harp on the fact that the film mirrors the comic book, but those are certainly non sequiturs. Even it’s more perceptive fans see it, though they may choose to call it “terrifically violent” or “ultraviolent”

“Sin City has more severed heads, dismemberments and acts of cannibalism than The Silence of the Lambs and Freddy vs. Jason put together. I loved it!” — Staci Layne Wilson, HORROR.COM

The film caters to the most heartless inclinations of its audience. As an interaction between art, artist, and audience, we can see the animator spending more camera time and dialogue on the gore and the nihilism justifying it than anything else, while the audience oohs, ahs, cheers, and laughs at precisely the calculated moments.

The film is a commentary on the ethical state of the West, as much as on Frank Miller’s original work. The people that can justify terror in the name of terror, bombing villages and hospitals out of revenge, has created a generation that doesn’t flinch at amputation, but sees human suffering as on a par with baiting a hook. It is a culture that is broken, that lacks some fundamental elements of mercy, compassion, and empathy that would otherwise typify humanity.

True, the film is fiction. But fiction mirrors life. Art offers us possible worlds that we can envision as real, and our reactions to those worlds are less predicated on the fact that they are fictional than on the actual values of the audience. If not, we must ask why the audience is actually cheering and clapping so enthusiastically.

In the end, the ethos of the film is the ethos of the audience, and the posturing about brilliant cinematography is a confession that there is actually something of which normal people should be ashamed.

Just as The Passion reflects the West’s obsession with the cruelty inflicted on Christ, so Sin City is an example of its passion for precisely that cruelty. It has become trite to say that we are the culture of the Roman Arena, the spectacle of suffering, the carnival of gore. Trite, not because it isn’t true, but precisely because it is – because the fact of it is even more commonplace than the observation.

I saw “Closer” tonight. There was a great line contrasting the allure of a woman with the sexuality of a girl: “She has the moronic beauty of youth.” This film ripped me. It’s so close to life. I don’t want it to feel real, but it does.

Purchased several books this evening: a Gibran anthology to go w. my collection of Gribran. LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darnkness. Meditations on Middle Earth (because I want to listen to the writers), Fukayama’s new book, a book teaching ancient Greek, and a book on writing which has already proved valuable. More on that possibly later.

Stewardesses waiting to use the hotel pc. So I’m off.

I’ve realized that I write with the twin vices of the writer: the intention to change the world and the desire to be known.