On the blog for April 15 there is an index posted for entries up to that time. An index for entries posted since then follows:
April 16, "Conventional Lies II"
April 19, "This is not about Don Imus"
May 28, "Myths about Immigration" (in 3 parts)
Aug. 8, "Speech After Long Silence"
Sept. 19, Laura Green on "The Canon Wars" (two parts)
Nov. 8, "No More Politics"
Nov. 8, "So what did you think?--Fear and Loathing at the Movies"--an essay on movies and pleasure in five parts (possibly posted in reverse order).
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Thursday, November 8, 2007
"So What Did You Think?--The Answer"
So in the end, how does all this exposition relate to my original excuse for writing this essay? It seems to suggest that the task of making a mutual enjoyment out of communal movie-going is hopeless. Maybe so, but to conclude I will suggest that essentially there are three ways to go. You’ve just come out of let’s say The Interpreter; what do you do?
1) You may take a leaf from the professionals and when your friend says, “So, what did you think?,” you reply without any intimation of irony (best to have rehearsed this beforehand), “Well, it wasn’t the best Sydney Pollack, Three Days of the Condor and The Firm were better thrillers, but if you like suspense he really knows how to do it. Doesn’t he?” (That last is the sting in the scorpion’s tail.) Or, 2) you seize pleasure by the...whatever, and say: “The truth? I could cheerfully pay good money to watch Nicole Kidman shredding a phone book for two hours.” Or 3), let’s face it, there’s only one way to go, really. You set just one foot out that theater’s door
and you turn to your friends and you say, “So, what did you think?”
1) You may take a leaf from the professionals and when your friend says, “So, what did you think?,” you reply without any intimation of irony (best to have rehearsed this beforehand), “Well, it wasn’t the best Sydney Pollack, Three Days of the Condor and The Firm were better thrillers, but if you like suspense he really knows how to do it. Doesn’t he?” (That last is the sting in the scorpion’s tail.) Or, 2) you seize pleasure by the...whatever, and say: “The truth? I could cheerfully pay good money to watch Nicole Kidman shredding a phone book for two hours.” Or 3), let’s face it, there’s only one way to go, really. You set just one foot out that theater’s door
and you turn to your friends and you say, “So, what did you think?”
Movies and Pleasure II
Continuing right along, then, with:
6) Intellectual pleasure–and I don’t mean a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky. There are at least three quite distinct types of movies that can be described here. First, there are those movies that provide the pleasures of mimesis–that imitate what we think we know about “the real world” so vividly, so grittily, that after seeing them we feel “reality” has been exposed to us in a way it never had been before. Post-World War II neo-Realism is considered the great exemplar of this kind of film-making: not just the Italian version, as de Sica’s Shoeshine and Umberto D., but also Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, or Clouzot’s Wages of Fear; or in a somewhat different vein, Bresson’s Un Condamne a Mort est Echappe (A Condemned Man Escaped).
There’s also a special kind of pleasure we can get from movies that astonish us and expand our consciousness with their presentation of a world previously unknown to us. Of course documentaries sometimes tell us what we didn’t quite know before (e.g., Frederick Wiseman’s Welfare or High School), but there’s also a kind of fiction film that unfolds primarily like a sociological or anthropological treatise, to greater or lesser effect, as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Nicholas Ray’s exploration of Eskimo life in Savage Innocents, or Herzog’s Stroszek or Truffaut’s The Wild Child.
At this time in cinema history, there is for me a third, more exciting form of cinematic pleasure. This is cinema that focuses so intensely on a person, a community, a slice of life, a moment of time, that at some point in watching the film we realize that we don’t know what kind of film we’re watching or if we’re even watching what we usually think of as a film. In some of the films I’m thinking of it’s unclear whether what is unfolding before us is fiction or a sociological or anthropological documentary or some hard-to-grasp combination of both. In the magnificent Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (it earned all of $60,000 in the U.S.), a bored ambulance driver whose shift should be over tries with stubborn and finally desperate commitment to get her failing charge into a hospital emergency room in Bucharest, all of them being filled with victims of a terrible mass highway accident, and none of their personnel having any interest in what they assume to be just another self-destructive alcoholic. Halfway through the movie my companion (as Ed Koch would say) turned to me and said, “I don’t remember–is this a documentary?” We know the driver is an actress, and the victim is probably an actor, but who are all these doctors and nurses and patients, and are all these hospitals just parading their impenetrability before us or are they participating in a fiction that looks as “real” as St. Vincent’s on a bad Saturday night?
In the same way, though to quite different emotional effect, Ulrike Ottinger’s Joan of Arc of Mongolia, takes us aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, on which a film crew headed by star Delphine Seyrig–who seems to function as an intellectual and producer as much as an actress on the trip–heads to Mongolia to make a film; and after encountering various angry, threatening, or merely interested groups of Siberian peoples along the way, winds up in the midst of a tribe of hard-riding Mongolians led by a scimitar-waving Princess who, it turns out, wants to be an actress herself–or maybe she already is one, or had become on by the time the shooting finished? We can’t say, but the fascination of the trip, and its strange climactic confrontation, is endless.
I speak also of Charles Burnett’s two mesmerizing films of black life in South Central L.A., Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding. It took 30 years for him to get a commercial distributor for them, and yet, amateurish as the acting sometimes is, they take us more intensely into the lives of the people we see–actors? neighborhood hangers-on?–than almost any other American movies of this period. We can accept that they are after all fictions, and yet it’s impossible not to believe in their absolute truth.
Above all, it’s some of the products of recent Iranian cinema that I think of in this context. What unites these masterworks is the willingness of their directors to give us no easy clues as to what we are seeing. In Abbas Kiarostomi’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards (made at the age of 21), and Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot, it seems that professional actors and filmmakers are intervening in the daily lives of some isolated group of indigenous people; but how can this be? How can “real people” (or are they?) whose lives are wholly defined by their isolation, be allowing these alien city folks to move them around like chessmen on a board? The potentially devastating effect of this kind of intervention is precisely the subject of Kiarostomi’s film, which is, I believe, the greatest cinematic reflection ever on the ethical dilemmas involved in making a documentary movie about “the Other;” just as Makhmalbaf’s movie is an unparalleled account of culture clash, and Payami’s of the birth, a la Rousseau’s social contract, of political democracy.
In other, more urban and less anthropological-seeming films–Kiarostomi’s Ten or A Taste of Cherry, Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold--the director seems to have turned the camera on a person who is just a person instead of an actor (in fact the most difficult of impersonations for an actor to carry off), and filmed the passing interactions of that person with...whom, exactly? Actors? Passersby?
In any event, the great pleasure of these films is that at the obvious risk of seeming either slow or boring or alienating, they maintain an unyielding concentration on protagonists who do not exist merely to intersect with the next exciting turn of the plot screw, but who steadfastly go on doing what they are doing regardless of whether anything of fictive invention happens to them while they are doing it–or not, as is usually the case in reality. I would say that all these films must absolutely be seen, but the length of this discourse perhaps merely demonstrates my own peculiar version of “pleasure.” Considering (see below) that I once incorrectly assumed that no one could possibly be bored by Children of Paradise, there’s obviously a lot about enjoyment that I don’t know. What I do know, though, is the fascinating plurality of it.
7) Kinetic pleasure–some great examples are The Naked Spur, The French Connection, The Warriors, each of them eternally memorable, and capable of being enjoyed through many viewings. In one way this, the opposite as we might say of the kind I’ve just been describing, is obviously the cinematic pleasure, since cinematic art is specifically the art of moving pictures. And audible pictures as well. The sound of rushing water, the clink of spurs on rock, the rack of the slide in a rifle: all these sonic experiences and more make The Naked Spur a doubly wonderful 90 minutes of intense external pleasure. And the musical scores of, e.g., The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Once Upon a Time in the West, Viva Zapata!, Abel Gance's Napoleon, The Informer, The Dead Poets Society, Chariots of Fire, are almost worth the price of admission in their own right.
Yet in another way this is also the most limiting type of pleasure, not because it’s inferior in any way, but because if it gets out of hand--the very worst aspect by far of contemporary Hollywood films--it tends to overwhelm everything else in a film and so eliminate or attenuate the quite distinct pleasures of emotional connection, aesthetic contemplation, etc. That is, a movie that’s too totally plunged into the experience of kinesis--defined as fast or violent action--is poorly placed to take advantage of the many other opportunities offered by cinema as a pleasure-giving narrative form.
For a cautionary example, see the recent The Invasion. A second remake of the original and gripping Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about half-way through it turns into an extended chase film full of implausibly smashing cars, narrow escapes from foot-races that surely should have been lost, and so on and on. All the intense anxiety and fear of the original and its first remake disappear into the framework of a standard woman-in-peril movie, even more so because Nicole Kidman is far too charismatic, too iconic, to stand in for the endangered human species--compare the relatively mundane personae of Kevin McCarthy or Donald Sutherland. In the same way, as I remarked earlier, the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma is woefully inferior to its prototype, washing away in an unending wave of pointlessly frenetic activity the areas of quietude and plaisanterie that made the original so enjoyable.
8) Literary pleasure. I am not referring here only to movies that seem like visualized books-- The Age of Innocence, Sense and Sensibility, the entire Merchant/Ivory corpus, The Past Recaptured, successful or unsuccessful adaptations of Shakespeare. As well or even more so, we experience in what I am calling a literary sense any film in which the primary source of pleasure is not only visually but verbally and narratively imaginative to a heightened degree–e.g., thoughtful explorations of the way things are such as Renoir’s Grand Illusion; or satires such as his The Rules of the Game or Paddy Chayevsky’s The Americanization of Emily and Hospital (no one remembers the names of the directors of those Chayevskian films); or vividly realized explorations of other worlds such as Blade Runner, or explorations of others’ lives such as Joan Scott’s Strangers in Good Company; or cinematic operas such as Antonio das Mortes, or faithfully filmed dramas such as A Streetcar Named Desire (which I sat through twice at its world premiere, unable to tear myself away from the intensity of its desperation); or even the blank verse dialogue of Polonsky’s film noir, Force of Evil. In fact, oddly enough given his own fondness for the films of Samuel Fuller and his New Wave commitment to the non-dramatic, Jean-Luc Godard has probably been the pre-eminent cinematic provider of literary pleasure, as in Masculine-Feminine, Contempt, the first half of Weekend, Two or Three Things I Know About Her.
But above all, and more generally, the idea of literary pleasure also encompasses movies, such as, e.g., Children of Paradise, The Earrings of Madame De..., Ran (Kurosawa’s version of Lear), that convey cinematically the sweep and scope of the novel as pre-eminent narrative form. That I have often called the first of these “the best movie of all time” (as distinguished from “my favorite movie of all time,” Viva Zapata!), proves nothing about anything, not even myself, since it has so many other magnificently aesthetic and iconic (Arletty and Barrault) elements that raise it to the stars. But then a middle American colleague and her husband once asked what movie they should see when they visited New York City, and noting that Children... was being revived that week I incautiously said, “you mustn’t miss this, one of the great movies of all time.” Their comment: “we were bored to tears.” Ah well, de gustibus...
9) Finally, last but maybe not least–visceral pleasure: Basic Instinct, Halloween, Psycho, hardcore porn, the Marx Brothers. Horror, sex, slapstick comedy, sex, violence, sex. In one form or another, the most felt and the least admitted of all the pleasures: not serious. But you are a strange person indeed if you get no kind of visceral pleasure at all out of movies–what else can I say?
And now, on to my final posting here, to answer the question with which I began.
6) Intellectual pleasure–and I don’t mean a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky. There are at least three quite distinct types of movies that can be described here. First, there are those movies that provide the pleasures of mimesis–that imitate what we think we know about “the real world” so vividly, so grittily, that after seeing them we feel “reality” has been exposed to us in a way it never had been before. Post-World War II neo-Realism is considered the great exemplar of this kind of film-making: not just the Italian version, as de Sica’s Shoeshine and Umberto D., but also Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, or Clouzot’s Wages of Fear; or in a somewhat different vein, Bresson’s Un Condamne a Mort est Echappe (A Condemned Man Escaped).
There’s also a special kind of pleasure we can get from movies that astonish us and expand our consciousness with their presentation of a world previously unknown to us. Of course documentaries sometimes tell us what we didn’t quite know before (e.g., Frederick Wiseman’s Welfare or High School), but there’s also a kind of fiction film that unfolds primarily like a sociological or anthropological treatise, to greater or lesser effect, as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Nicholas Ray’s exploration of Eskimo life in Savage Innocents, or Herzog’s Stroszek or Truffaut’s The Wild Child.
At this time in cinema history, there is for me a third, more exciting form of cinematic pleasure. This is cinema that focuses so intensely on a person, a community, a slice of life, a moment of time, that at some point in watching the film we realize that we don’t know what kind of film we’re watching or if we’re even watching what we usually think of as a film. In some of the films I’m thinking of it’s unclear whether what is unfolding before us is fiction or a sociological or anthropological documentary or some hard-to-grasp combination of both. In the magnificent Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (it earned all of $60,000 in the U.S.), a bored ambulance driver whose shift should be over tries with stubborn and finally desperate commitment to get her failing charge into a hospital emergency room in Bucharest, all of them being filled with victims of a terrible mass highway accident, and none of their personnel having any interest in what they assume to be just another self-destructive alcoholic. Halfway through the movie my companion (as Ed Koch would say) turned to me and said, “I don’t remember–is this a documentary?” We know the driver is an actress, and the victim is probably an actor, but who are all these doctors and nurses and patients, and are all these hospitals just parading their impenetrability before us or are they participating in a fiction that looks as “real” as St. Vincent’s on a bad Saturday night?
In the same way, though to quite different emotional effect, Ulrike Ottinger’s Joan of Arc of Mongolia, takes us aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, on which a film crew headed by star Delphine Seyrig–who seems to function as an intellectual and producer as much as an actress on the trip–heads to Mongolia to make a film; and after encountering various angry, threatening, or merely interested groups of Siberian peoples along the way, winds up in the midst of a tribe of hard-riding Mongolians led by a scimitar-waving Princess who, it turns out, wants to be an actress herself–or maybe she already is one, or had become on by the time the shooting finished? We can’t say, but the fascination of the trip, and its strange climactic confrontation, is endless.
I speak also of Charles Burnett’s two mesmerizing films of black life in South Central L.A., Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding. It took 30 years for him to get a commercial distributor for them, and yet, amateurish as the acting sometimes is, they take us more intensely into the lives of the people we see–actors? neighborhood hangers-on?–than almost any other American movies of this period. We can accept that they are after all fictions, and yet it’s impossible not to believe in their absolute truth.
Above all, it’s some of the products of recent Iranian cinema that I think of in this context. What unites these masterworks is the willingness of their directors to give us no easy clues as to what we are seeing. In Abbas Kiarostomi’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards (made at the age of 21), and Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot, it seems that professional actors and filmmakers are intervening in the daily lives of some isolated group of indigenous people; but how can this be? How can “real people” (or are they?) whose lives are wholly defined by their isolation, be allowing these alien city folks to move them around like chessmen on a board? The potentially devastating effect of this kind of intervention is precisely the subject of Kiarostomi’s film, which is, I believe, the greatest cinematic reflection ever on the ethical dilemmas involved in making a documentary movie about “the Other;” just as Makhmalbaf’s movie is an unparalleled account of culture clash, and Payami’s of the birth, a la Rousseau’s social contract, of political democracy.
In other, more urban and less anthropological-seeming films–Kiarostomi’s Ten or A Taste of Cherry, Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold--the director seems to have turned the camera on a person who is just a person instead of an actor (in fact the most difficult of impersonations for an actor to carry off), and filmed the passing interactions of that person with...whom, exactly? Actors? Passersby?
In any event, the great pleasure of these films is that at the obvious risk of seeming either slow or boring or alienating, they maintain an unyielding concentration on protagonists who do not exist merely to intersect with the next exciting turn of the plot screw, but who steadfastly go on doing what they are doing regardless of whether anything of fictive invention happens to them while they are doing it–or not, as is usually the case in reality. I would say that all these films must absolutely be seen, but the length of this discourse perhaps merely demonstrates my own peculiar version of “pleasure.” Considering (see below) that I once incorrectly assumed that no one could possibly be bored by Children of Paradise, there’s obviously a lot about enjoyment that I don’t know. What I do know, though, is the fascinating plurality of it.
7) Kinetic pleasure–some great examples are The Naked Spur, The French Connection, The Warriors, each of them eternally memorable, and capable of being enjoyed through many viewings. In one way this, the opposite as we might say of the kind I’ve just been describing, is obviously the cinematic pleasure, since cinematic art is specifically the art of moving pictures. And audible pictures as well. The sound of rushing water, the clink of spurs on rock, the rack of the slide in a rifle: all these sonic experiences and more make The Naked Spur a doubly wonderful 90 minutes of intense external pleasure. And the musical scores of, e.g., The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Once Upon a Time in the West, Viva Zapata!, Abel Gance's Napoleon, The Informer, The Dead Poets Society, Chariots of Fire, are almost worth the price of admission in their own right.
Yet in another way this is also the most limiting type of pleasure, not because it’s inferior in any way, but because if it gets out of hand--the very worst aspect by far of contemporary Hollywood films--it tends to overwhelm everything else in a film and so eliminate or attenuate the quite distinct pleasures of emotional connection, aesthetic contemplation, etc. That is, a movie that’s too totally plunged into the experience of kinesis--defined as fast or violent action--is poorly placed to take advantage of the many other opportunities offered by cinema as a pleasure-giving narrative form.
For a cautionary example, see the recent The Invasion. A second remake of the original and gripping Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about half-way through it turns into an extended chase film full of implausibly smashing cars, narrow escapes from foot-races that surely should have been lost, and so on and on. All the intense anxiety and fear of the original and its first remake disappear into the framework of a standard woman-in-peril movie, even more so because Nicole Kidman is far too charismatic, too iconic, to stand in for the endangered human species--compare the relatively mundane personae of Kevin McCarthy or Donald Sutherland. In the same way, as I remarked earlier, the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma is woefully inferior to its prototype, washing away in an unending wave of pointlessly frenetic activity the areas of quietude and plaisanterie that made the original so enjoyable.
8) Literary pleasure. I am not referring here only to movies that seem like visualized books-- The Age of Innocence, Sense and Sensibility, the entire Merchant/Ivory corpus, The Past Recaptured, successful or unsuccessful adaptations of Shakespeare. As well or even more so, we experience in what I am calling a literary sense any film in which the primary source of pleasure is not only visually but verbally and narratively imaginative to a heightened degree–e.g., thoughtful explorations of the way things are such as Renoir’s Grand Illusion; or satires such as his The Rules of the Game or Paddy Chayevsky’s The Americanization of Emily and Hospital (no one remembers the names of the directors of those Chayevskian films); or vividly realized explorations of other worlds such as Blade Runner, or explorations of others’ lives such as Joan Scott’s Strangers in Good Company; or cinematic operas such as Antonio das Mortes, or faithfully filmed dramas such as A Streetcar Named Desire (which I sat through twice at its world premiere, unable to tear myself away from the intensity of its desperation); or even the blank verse dialogue of Polonsky’s film noir, Force of Evil. In fact, oddly enough given his own fondness for the films of Samuel Fuller and his New Wave commitment to the non-dramatic, Jean-Luc Godard has probably been the pre-eminent cinematic provider of literary pleasure, as in Masculine-Feminine, Contempt, the first half of Weekend, Two or Three Things I Know About Her.
But above all, and more generally, the idea of literary pleasure also encompasses movies, such as, e.g., Children of Paradise, The Earrings of Madame De..., Ran (Kurosawa’s version of Lear), that convey cinematically the sweep and scope of the novel as pre-eminent narrative form. That I have often called the first of these “the best movie of all time” (as distinguished from “my favorite movie of all time,” Viva Zapata!), proves nothing about anything, not even myself, since it has so many other magnificently aesthetic and iconic (Arletty and Barrault) elements that raise it to the stars. But then a middle American colleague and her husband once asked what movie they should see when they visited New York City, and noting that Children... was being revived that week I incautiously said, “you mustn’t miss this, one of the great movies of all time.” Their comment: “we were bored to tears.” Ah well, de gustibus...
9) Finally, last but maybe not least–visceral pleasure: Basic Instinct, Halloween, Psycho, hardcore porn, the Marx Brothers. Horror, sex, slapstick comedy, sex, violence, sex. In one form or another, the most felt and the least admitted of all the pleasures: not serious. But you are a strange person indeed if you get no kind of visceral pleasure at all out of movies–what else can I say?
And now, on to my final posting here, to answer the question with which I began.
Movies and Pleasure: I
Now to the types of pleasure, with examples, in alphabetical order. To repeat my earlier caveat, the examples are not meant to suggest that a particular movie gives only one type of pleasure; rather, these are movies that are especially powerful at calling up the kind of pleasure I associate them with here, and that I recommend as such to illustrate the concept.
1) Aesthetic pleasure is alphabetically the first. The dictionary defines it alternately as “concerned with the appreciation of beauty” or “artistic.” I begin with “artistic” and will not attempt to refine it any further, since that would just result in confusion or contradiction. Aesthetic: The pleasure to be found in experiencing a work of art.
Many dedicated movie-goers–and readers, and museum-goers, and music-lovers--will insist that the aesthetic is normatively first as well. I will resist that temptation, though only with great difficulty: the ideology of the aesthetic is one of the dominant cultural ideologies of the modern era, and it affects all of us. In any event, think of Red Desert, Russian Ark, Orphee, The Seventh Seal, L’Avventura, Persona. The first four are obvious examples if you’ve seen them, and if you haven’t you should; a skeptic (I am not one) might even claim that they suffer somewhat from aestheticism. But about the last two many movie-goers might well ask: how can a visual experience every moment of which is icy cold, or fraught with pain and despair, or not even especially beautiful by conventional standards, be said to give pleasure of any kind, let alone aesthetic pleasure?
The answer (I have Laura Green to thank for this formulation, as well as several others scattered throughout this commentary) is that there can indeed be pleasure–an aesthetic pleasure--to be experienced in witnessing the rigorous and uncompromising pursuit of an artistic vision, however dark that vision might be. We are aware of this possibility in a museum, say the Met in New York: a little while ago we were looking at a painful Rembrandt self-portrait and were deeply engaged...and now we’re looking at an exuberant Pollock and being equally deeply engaged, though they couldn’t be less like each other both formally and expressively. When this happens we perceive that we are in the presence of “Art”–and it is for this reason that European films, which often provide this kind of experience in a way that Hollywood almost never does, are rightfully called “art films.” As many of them are. So against philistines–of course I don’t know any personally–I will insist that the pleasures of real Art are incomparable; but to my sophisticated intellectual friends I will rather say, when they start the pleasure-ranking game, “Oh, come off it.” But at the same time I have to acknowledge, since this is a very personal essay, that three of the above are on any “10 Best” list I’ve ever made, on paper or in my head.
Now, a note about the “beauty” part. I would argue that the aesthetic needs to be very broadly defined if it’s to have any genuine purchase on our feelings and experiences. I once had a discussion with a friend whose definition of “the aesthetic” revolved wholly around the perception of “beauty.” After a bit of back and forth I said to her, “Fine, I’ll give you Red Desert if you give me Rita Hayworth.” She acceded to my demand (too bad it was all in the head), and so we were finally in cheerful agreement about aesthetic experience. But the larger point is that if we extend “the aesthetic,” as we should, to encompass both versions of the dictionary definition, then “beauty” actually has a much larger scope than “art,” and gives us so much more in movies to appreciate beyond the “art film”: not just Hayworth’s flaming red hair in Gilda, or Liz Taylor’s devastating eyes, but say the chiaroscuro renditions of urban landscapes in such noir films as Where the Sidewalk Ends, While the City Sleeps, Phantom Lady; or the emotionally entangling color-coded symbolism of Fatal Attraction. As may be obvious, I’m still having trouble resisting the temptation to put the aesthetic first.
2) Aesthetically perverse pleasure. This, contrarily, is pleasure found in the spirit that Poe called “The Imp of the Perverse:” the spirit that moves us to do something “merely because we feel we should not.” Or in the case of Art, to do something that we know the audience, or the respectable classes, or the bourgeoisie, will “feel that we should not;” and in that spirit create movies that seem designed to affront those sensibilities. (“Seem,” because we usually have no way of knowing that what was received by the audience is exactly what the artist intended it to receive.) This is the cinema of stylistic excess, of the baroque and the perverse, of camp and deliberate (or uncaring) bad taste, of over the top narrative elements and performances that go beyond the realm of mere badness and so (for some viewers) enter the realm of eccentric or idiosyncratic entertainment and pleasure. This cinema can’t really be defined except through the experience of it. Its avatar is Klaus Kinski as a mad Teutonic conquistador (!) in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: the Wrath of God (not to mention as Dracula in Nosferatu), closely followed by those insouciant serial killers, Charlie Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux and Jean-Louis Barrault in Bizarre Bizarre!. In one way or another it’s found in movies as various as Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Cries and Whispers, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasss Song, the films of John Waters (Pink Flamingos), Andy Warhol (Flesh, Trash, Heat), Alexander Jodorowsky (El Topo), Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), and Pasolini (Salo–The 120 Days of Sodom: ugh); not to mention Todd Haynes’s Poison, or Isabel Huppert in Michael Haneke’s sado-masochistic The Piano Lesson, or that imp of the perverse incarnate Mary Woronov in anything (but try Rock and Roll High School).
Is there in fact such a thing as “bad taste?” Perhaps: but your “bad taste” may be my delight in perversity. –De gustibus non disputandum est, as my father liked to quote. It used to be, when I was a young man, that you could take your cue from the Times movie critic Bosley Crowther. If he sniffed at a movie for being not out of the top drawer, there was a pretty good chance we’d want to go see it with an open mind. But now that the cultural bourgeoisie has taken its lumps, apparently for good, and just about anything goes, so that it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish liberated crap from liberated art, we’re all on our own.
3) Emotional pleasure. Contrastingly to both the aesthetic and the aesthetically perverse, the primary feelings that Hollywood films or non-art films generally call up are those of sympathetic identification, either with an active protagonist (High Noon, The Gauntlet, 16 Blocks, Aliens, The Wizard of Oz), or with victims or would-be victims (To Kill a Mockingbird, Dark Victory, Random Harvest, Boys Don’t Cry, Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy–Robert O. Green Executive Producer)–what we usually call sentimental attachment (or sentimentality when we disapprove of it). Of course non-Americans can do this perfectly well or even better: think of Au Hasard Balthasar, or Pather Panchali, or Ikiru (To Live). Hollywood, however, is more likely to give us what we receive as “happy endings;” the three films I’ve just mentioned are rigorous and uncompromising in the same way that say L’Avventura is aesthetically rigorous and uncompromising.
Of course, sympathy can take many forms. One of them deserves special mention as the perhaps the most immediately compelling variety of pleasurable identification. This is the the deferred gratification that we anxiously await when viewing any movie (or reading any book) that can be categorized under the general heading of “suspense.” The headlong rush into fear of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, The Wrong Man, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, The Birds; or the doom-laden machinery that plunges Edward G. Robinson into nightmare in Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window or Scarlet Street: it might seem strange to speak of these experiences as pleasurable. But like any adrenaline high, pleasure is exactly what they give. Whatever else they may do, virtually all American movies (except porn, to be sure) highlight sympathetic identification as the heart of the movie-going experience.
One need only compare Persona or Day of Wrath or L’Avventura to see that this is not the only possible approach to our pleasure centers. Again, however, I think it does an
injustice to Hollywood to leave it at that: more sentiment, less rigor. For what American cinema is not just good at but great at is not so much movies, with their cumbersome baggage of having to tell a complete story, as scenes, that make us cry or cheer or salivate, or fill us with utopian longings. Hayworth and Taylor, of course (the slow 360 pan around Taylor’s face as she and Montgomery Clift perform their doomed embrace in A Place in the Sun remains in my psyche as the most memorable moment in movie history); sexual longing is one of the things Hollywood does very well.
For me, though, the birth of the outlaw hero is more prototypically American, and my favorite cinematic invention overall. As in Viva Zapata!, Zapata/Brando dragged down the road by a troop of Federalistas, while the village women sound an alarm of clicking stones, and the peasants armed only with machetes scramble down the hillside in groups of three or four (in tableaus from the great murals of Orozco) to form a protective screen around their not-yet leader, engulfing the patrol without violence: and Zapata says “Cut the wire!”, and the Revolution begins, to the swelling of Alex North’s great score (out of Aaron Copland).
Or Bogart/Rick Blaine in Casablanca, giving the nod to the band to strike up the Marseillaise, and so taking us all into the good fight against Naziism. Or the birth of the heroine in Aliens, as Sigourney Weaver/Ripley seizes control of the troop carrier from the ineffectual, paralyzed, commanding officer, and tells the marines, “We’re going in!” to rescue the trapped survivors.
Or all those standing ovation movies that seem to exist only in Hollywood’s wonderland: Gregory Peck/Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird walking slowly up the courtroom aisle, having lost the case as we all knew he must, and the Negroes in the balcony rise one by one, and their minister says to Finch’s daughter, “Stand up child! Your father’s passing!” (Nicole Kidman’s favorite scene.) Or Henry Fonda as Clarence Gideon in Gideon’s Trumpet, just a down-and-out perpetual loser who sent a scribbled hand–written note to the Supreme Court saying he’d been denied a lawyer, and so became one of the great heroes of American constitutional law (god, remember those days?), walking tall and free through the gates to the accompaniment of the assembled inmates cheering and banging their mess kits and utensils on the prison’s fence. Or stewardess Karen Black in Airport 75, stepping out of the cockpit of the doomed airplane that with sheer determination she kept aloft until a real pilot (Charlton Heston) could be dropped aboard (I’m not kidding), to rising applause from the grateful passengers...
It would be nice to think that this romantic sentimentality is as American as our madness and rage; it is certainly a lot less destructive, and endlessly pleasure-giving. Everyone will have his or her own favorite version of it, a litany of scenes that are endlessly replayed in the psyche; I can’t believe that anyone will be entirely bereft of that pleasure.
4) Iconographic pleasure--Casablanca, Gilda, Erin Brockovich. The pleasures of iconography can perhaps best be defined by negation, as in: “I would have enjoyed the story of Erin Brockovich just as much if she’d been played by Tori Spelling.” Right. And Jean Arthur and Joel McCrae would have been perfect in Casablanca. More cinematic pleasure than sophisticated people like to admit stems not from “acting” but from that undefinable source of excitement we call charisma. Yes, Meryl Streep is a “great” actress: that is, she has an amazing range, from slapstick comedy to intense tragedy. She can be anyone, and she almost always gives pleasure (except perhaps when she lets you know too obviously how she’s internalized being “a great actress,” as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, or Sophie’s Choice). Catherine Deneuve, contrarily, can only be Catherine Deneuve: detached, unapproachable, dispassionate in her own embrace of pleasure or pain–oh, did I forget to say, “the most impossibly beautiful actress ever to come out of Western Europe?” That “only” will take you through Repulsion, Belle de Jour, Tristana, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, Mississippi Mermaid, The Last Metro, Scene of the Crime, Indochine, Place Vendome, Le Temps Retrouve, A Talking Picture...and on and on. Do we think Bunuel and Demy and Truffaut and Polanski and Ruiz knew something about her acting ability that we don’t know? No, they knew exactly the same thing that we know–fortunately. A great or even mediocre director knows a great icon when he or she sees one: that’s what it means to be a great icon.
5) Ideological pleasure (Viva Zapata!, The Battle of Algiers, Dead Man Walking, The Question of Silence, Z, Norma Rae, Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses). This category is different from all the others, in that while all values are subjective to some extent in their application, there will generally be widespread agreement on obvious instances. Many viewers may not enjoy Red Desert, but I doubt any would deny that the film is saturated with an intensity of color such as hadn’t been experienced before on the screen. Contrastingly, as my discussion of High Noon and Rio Bravo demonstrates, not just enjoyment but even basic appreciation of an ideologically/politically oriented film often depends on the politics of the viewer.
Men stormed out of the first showing of The Question of Silence in New York, unable to derive any pleasure (to put it mildly) from a movie that justified the slaughter of an “innocent” salesman by four female shoppers, as a reasonable response to the oppression of their lives. A conservative French nationalist will despise The Battle of Algiers (though in contains inter alia a defense of torture far more coherent and compelling than that offered by the Bush Administration and its intellectual fellow-travelers); just as a right-wing Greek will despise Z. Viva Zapata! is a great film for Left romantics; it has always been my favorite film and I’ve seen it about a dozen times, but many of other political persuasions would dissent; just as proponents of capital punishment will think Dead Man Walking is not a powerful critique but liberal sentimental pap.
Conversely, my distaste for the overt misogyny of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and Mike Leigh’s Naked will undoubtedly seem to many of their fans like a personal prejudice that should have nothing to do with movie-going. (Actually, the conflation is unfair to Leigh, in that Allen’s film has nothing to say and thus no redeeming social value once stripped of its misogynistic core, whereas Naked highlights the brilliantly excoriating turn of star David Thewlis, which at least defines him as “an unreasonable man.”) On the other hand, how could movie-going, that is the immersion in pleasure, ever be anything but “personal?”
To be continued.
1) Aesthetic pleasure is alphabetically the first. The dictionary defines it alternately as “concerned with the appreciation of beauty” or “artistic.” I begin with “artistic” and will not attempt to refine it any further, since that would just result in confusion or contradiction. Aesthetic: The pleasure to be found in experiencing a work of art.
Many dedicated movie-goers–and readers, and museum-goers, and music-lovers--will insist that the aesthetic is normatively first as well. I will resist that temptation, though only with great difficulty: the ideology of the aesthetic is one of the dominant cultural ideologies of the modern era, and it affects all of us. In any event, think of Red Desert, Russian Ark, Orphee, The Seventh Seal, L’Avventura, Persona. The first four are obvious examples if you’ve seen them, and if you haven’t you should; a skeptic (I am not one) might even claim that they suffer somewhat from aestheticism. But about the last two many movie-goers might well ask: how can a visual experience every moment of which is icy cold, or fraught with pain and despair, or not even especially beautiful by conventional standards, be said to give pleasure of any kind, let alone aesthetic pleasure?
The answer (I have Laura Green to thank for this formulation, as well as several others scattered throughout this commentary) is that there can indeed be pleasure–an aesthetic pleasure--to be experienced in witnessing the rigorous and uncompromising pursuit of an artistic vision, however dark that vision might be. We are aware of this possibility in a museum, say the Met in New York: a little while ago we were looking at a painful Rembrandt self-portrait and were deeply engaged...and now we’re looking at an exuberant Pollock and being equally deeply engaged, though they couldn’t be less like each other both formally and expressively. When this happens we perceive that we are in the presence of “Art”–and it is for this reason that European films, which often provide this kind of experience in a way that Hollywood almost never does, are rightfully called “art films.” As many of them are. So against philistines–of course I don’t know any personally–I will insist that the pleasures of real Art are incomparable; but to my sophisticated intellectual friends I will rather say, when they start the pleasure-ranking game, “Oh, come off it.” But at the same time I have to acknowledge, since this is a very personal essay, that three of the above are on any “10 Best” list I’ve ever made, on paper or in my head.
Now, a note about the “beauty” part. I would argue that the aesthetic needs to be very broadly defined if it’s to have any genuine purchase on our feelings and experiences. I once had a discussion with a friend whose definition of “the aesthetic” revolved wholly around the perception of “beauty.” After a bit of back and forth I said to her, “Fine, I’ll give you Red Desert if you give me Rita Hayworth.” She acceded to my demand (too bad it was all in the head), and so we were finally in cheerful agreement about aesthetic experience. But the larger point is that if we extend “the aesthetic,” as we should, to encompass both versions of the dictionary definition, then “beauty” actually has a much larger scope than “art,” and gives us so much more in movies to appreciate beyond the “art film”: not just Hayworth’s flaming red hair in Gilda, or Liz Taylor’s devastating eyes, but say the chiaroscuro renditions of urban landscapes in such noir films as Where the Sidewalk Ends, While the City Sleeps, Phantom Lady; or the emotionally entangling color-coded symbolism of Fatal Attraction. As may be obvious, I’m still having trouble resisting the temptation to put the aesthetic first.
2) Aesthetically perverse pleasure. This, contrarily, is pleasure found in the spirit that Poe called “The Imp of the Perverse:” the spirit that moves us to do something “merely because we feel we should not.” Or in the case of Art, to do something that we know the audience, or the respectable classes, or the bourgeoisie, will “feel that we should not;” and in that spirit create movies that seem designed to affront those sensibilities. (“Seem,” because we usually have no way of knowing that what was received by the audience is exactly what the artist intended it to receive.) This is the cinema of stylistic excess, of the baroque and the perverse, of camp and deliberate (or uncaring) bad taste, of over the top narrative elements and performances that go beyond the realm of mere badness and so (for some viewers) enter the realm of eccentric or idiosyncratic entertainment and pleasure. This cinema can’t really be defined except through the experience of it. Its avatar is Klaus Kinski as a mad Teutonic conquistador (!) in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: the Wrath of God (not to mention as Dracula in Nosferatu), closely followed by those insouciant serial killers, Charlie Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux and Jean-Louis Barrault in Bizarre Bizarre!. In one way or another it’s found in movies as various as Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Cries and Whispers, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasss Song, the films of John Waters (Pink Flamingos), Andy Warhol (Flesh, Trash, Heat), Alexander Jodorowsky (El Topo), Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), and Pasolini (Salo–The 120 Days of Sodom: ugh); not to mention Todd Haynes’s Poison, or Isabel Huppert in Michael Haneke’s sado-masochistic The Piano Lesson, or that imp of the perverse incarnate Mary Woronov in anything (but try Rock and Roll High School).
Is there in fact such a thing as “bad taste?” Perhaps: but your “bad taste” may be my delight in perversity. –De gustibus non disputandum est, as my father liked to quote. It used to be, when I was a young man, that you could take your cue from the Times movie critic Bosley Crowther. If he sniffed at a movie for being not out of the top drawer, there was a pretty good chance we’d want to go see it with an open mind. But now that the cultural bourgeoisie has taken its lumps, apparently for good, and just about anything goes, so that it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish liberated crap from liberated art, we’re all on our own.
3) Emotional pleasure. Contrastingly to both the aesthetic and the aesthetically perverse, the primary feelings that Hollywood films or non-art films generally call up are those of sympathetic identification, either with an active protagonist (High Noon, The Gauntlet, 16 Blocks, Aliens, The Wizard of Oz), or with victims or would-be victims (To Kill a Mockingbird, Dark Victory, Random Harvest, Boys Don’t Cry, Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy–Robert O. Green Executive Producer)–what we usually call sentimental attachment (or sentimentality when we disapprove of it). Of course non-Americans can do this perfectly well or even better: think of Au Hasard Balthasar, or Pather Panchali, or Ikiru (To Live). Hollywood, however, is more likely to give us what we receive as “happy endings;” the three films I’ve just mentioned are rigorous and uncompromising in the same way that say L’Avventura is aesthetically rigorous and uncompromising.
Of course, sympathy can take many forms. One of them deserves special mention as the perhaps the most immediately compelling variety of pleasurable identification. This is the the deferred gratification that we anxiously await when viewing any movie (or reading any book) that can be categorized under the general heading of “suspense.” The headlong rush into fear of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, The Wrong Man, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, The Birds; or the doom-laden machinery that plunges Edward G. Robinson into nightmare in Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window or Scarlet Street: it might seem strange to speak of these experiences as pleasurable. But like any adrenaline high, pleasure is exactly what they give. Whatever else they may do, virtually all American movies (except porn, to be sure) highlight sympathetic identification as the heart of the movie-going experience.
One need only compare Persona or Day of Wrath or L’Avventura to see that this is not the only possible approach to our pleasure centers. Again, however, I think it does an
injustice to Hollywood to leave it at that: more sentiment, less rigor. For what American cinema is not just good at but great at is not so much movies, with their cumbersome baggage of having to tell a complete story, as scenes, that make us cry or cheer or salivate, or fill us with utopian longings. Hayworth and Taylor, of course (the slow 360 pan around Taylor’s face as she and Montgomery Clift perform their doomed embrace in A Place in the Sun remains in my psyche as the most memorable moment in movie history); sexual longing is one of the things Hollywood does very well.
For me, though, the birth of the outlaw hero is more prototypically American, and my favorite cinematic invention overall. As in Viva Zapata!, Zapata/Brando dragged down the road by a troop of Federalistas, while the village women sound an alarm of clicking stones, and the peasants armed only with machetes scramble down the hillside in groups of three or four (in tableaus from the great murals of Orozco) to form a protective screen around their not-yet leader, engulfing the patrol without violence: and Zapata says “Cut the wire!”, and the Revolution begins, to the swelling of Alex North’s great score (out of Aaron Copland).
Or Bogart/Rick Blaine in Casablanca, giving the nod to the band to strike up the Marseillaise, and so taking us all into the good fight against Naziism. Or the birth of the heroine in Aliens, as Sigourney Weaver/Ripley seizes control of the troop carrier from the ineffectual, paralyzed, commanding officer, and tells the marines, “We’re going in!” to rescue the trapped survivors.
Or all those standing ovation movies that seem to exist only in Hollywood’s wonderland: Gregory Peck/Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird walking slowly up the courtroom aisle, having lost the case as we all knew he must, and the Negroes in the balcony rise one by one, and their minister says to Finch’s daughter, “Stand up child! Your father’s passing!” (Nicole Kidman’s favorite scene.) Or Henry Fonda as Clarence Gideon in Gideon’s Trumpet, just a down-and-out perpetual loser who sent a scribbled hand–written note to the Supreme Court saying he’d been denied a lawyer, and so became one of the great heroes of American constitutional law (god, remember those days?), walking tall and free through the gates to the accompaniment of the assembled inmates cheering and banging their mess kits and utensils on the prison’s fence. Or stewardess Karen Black in Airport 75, stepping out of the cockpit of the doomed airplane that with sheer determination she kept aloft until a real pilot (Charlton Heston) could be dropped aboard (I’m not kidding), to rising applause from the grateful passengers...
It would be nice to think that this romantic sentimentality is as American as our madness and rage; it is certainly a lot less destructive, and endlessly pleasure-giving. Everyone will have his or her own favorite version of it, a litany of scenes that are endlessly replayed in the psyche; I can’t believe that anyone will be entirely bereft of that pleasure.
4) Iconographic pleasure--Casablanca, Gilda, Erin Brockovich. The pleasures of iconography can perhaps best be defined by negation, as in: “I would have enjoyed the story of Erin Brockovich just as much if she’d been played by Tori Spelling.” Right. And Jean Arthur and Joel McCrae would have been perfect in Casablanca. More cinematic pleasure than sophisticated people like to admit stems not from “acting” but from that undefinable source of excitement we call charisma. Yes, Meryl Streep is a “great” actress: that is, she has an amazing range, from slapstick comedy to intense tragedy. She can be anyone, and she almost always gives pleasure (except perhaps when she lets you know too obviously how she’s internalized being “a great actress,” as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, or Sophie’s Choice). Catherine Deneuve, contrarily, can only be Catherine Deneuve: detached, unapproachable, dispassionate in her own embrace of pleasure or pain–oh, did I forget to say, “the most impossibly beautiful actress ever to come out of Western Europe?” That “only” will take you through Repulsion, Belle de Jour, Tristana, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, Mississippi Mermaid, The Last Metro, Scene of the Crime, Indochine, Place Vendome, Le Temps Retrouve, A Talking Picture...and on and on. Do we think Bunuel and Demy and Truffaut and Polanski and Ruiz knew something about her acting ability that we don’t know? No, they knew exactly the same thing that we know–fortunately. A great or even mediocre director knows a great icon when he or she sees one: that’s what it means to be a great icon.
5) Ideological pleasure (Viva Zapata!, The Battle of Algiers, Dead Man Walking, The Question of Silence, Z, Norma Rae, Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses). This category is different from all the others, in that while all values are subjective to some extent in their application, there will generally be widespread agreement on obvious instances. Many viewers may not enjoy Red Desert, but I doubt any would deny that the film is saturated with an intensity of color such as hadn’t been experienced before on the screen. Contrastingly, as my discussion of High Noon and Rio Bravo demonstrates, not just enjoyment but even basic appreciation of an ideologically/politically oriented film often depends on the politics of the viewer.
Men stormed out of the first showing of The Question of Silence in New York, unable to derive any pleasure (to put it mildly) from a movie that justified the slaughter of an “innocent” salesman by four female shoppers, as a reasonable response to the oppression of their lives. A conservative French nationalist will despise The Battle of Algiers (though in contains inter alia a defense of torture far more coherent and compelling than that offered by the Bush Administration and its intellectual fellow-travelers); just as a right-wing Greek will despise Z. Viva Zapata! is a great film for Left romantics; it has always been my favorite film and I’ve seen it about a dozen times, but many of other political persuasions would dissent; just as proponents of capital punishment will think Dead Man Walking is not a powerful critique but liberal sentimental pap.
Conversely, my distaste for the overt misogyny of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and Mike Leigh’s Naked will undoubtedly seem to many of their fans like a personal prejudice that should have nothing to do with movie-going. (Actually, the conflation is unfair to Leigh, in that Allen’s film has nothing to say and thus no redeeming social value once stripped of its misogynistic core, whereas Naked highlights the brilliantly excoriating turn of star David Thewlis, which at least defines him as “an unreasonable man.”) On the other hand, how could movie-going, that is the immersion in pleasure, ever be anything but “personal?”
To be continued.
A Prefatory Note: High Noon and Rio Bravo
A prefatory note: to say that pleasures can’t be ranked hierarchically is not to say that there are no standards. There are bad movies and good movies, and really good movies and really bad movies, and movies that would bore anyone in their right minds, and movies that have been botched in the making, and movies that get everything just right, and movies that appeal very deeply to our senses and movies that hardly try. All that is obvious and I’m not going to bother with it: it’s just that knowing there are standards often doesn’t get you anywhere. Applying them is the problem. The task of convincing you that the movie I like is “better” than the movie you like is an impossible waste of time. We can convey what might be useful information and observations to each other that might have been missed, since only the most intense professionals see everything that’s in a movie, but that’s about all.
E.g., High Noon and Rio Bravo, two classic Westerns, are both “about” the same theme, but with profound differences: not for nothing did John Wayne, the star of the latter, call High Noon the “most un-American” movie he’d ever seen. What they have in common is that through the telling of a story, rather than by giving propagandistic lectures, each has something significant to say about the relationship between individuals and the American version of community; about the Cold War, McCarthyism, liberal individualism. Each also has a style appropriate to its narrative, and that is a point worth making to a lover of one who denigrates the other (though again, that’s an aesthetic standard not everyone will agree to or even understand). That is, the real-time editing of High Noon painfully tightens the screws on the lonely hero deserted by the conformist herd; the much more leisurely pace of Rio Bravo tracks the difficulty of welding an heroic community together out of a collection of misfits and loners. I never get tired of seeing High Noon, but as for Rio Bravo I found the fake-folksy acting (except for Dean Martin and Angie Dickinson) and John Wayne’s know-it-all air of superiority redolent of a stupid populism, and the movie generally tedious and boring. This possibly tells you more about me than about the films (the Martin/Wayne contrast seems pure Blue State/Red State on further reflection). As Andrew Sarris said, retracting his earlier dismissal of High Noon, it is a superior movie from the standpoint of a Marxist seeker after social justice; Rio Bravo is a superior movie, he added, from the standpoint of a Christian believer in individual redemption. (Any such who are reading this please weigh in.) I still don’t like the movie, but I can now appreciate what Sarris sees in it.
Or, to take a more recent, and more frustrating, comparison: Dorothy and I recently went to see a revival of the original 3:10 to Yuma, a few weeks after seeing the remake. Here, we thought at the end, is a clear instance where standards are applicable and comparisons possible. The original is a lovely movie and a joy to watch–even for the fourth time, as in my case. The rhythm and pacing of it, from quietude or even silence to outbursts of violent action and then back again, the alternation between romantic nostalgia and cynical realism, produce pleasure in one of the best possible ways: by creating expectations, thwarting them, and then realizing them, and thwarting them again, and finally realizing them. The remake, contrastingly, has no rhythm and no pacing, but is merely an extended visual presentation of often incomprehensible violence and action. It is 35 minutes longer than the original and every one of those minutes is wasted in what appear to be pointless attempts to explain “motivation.” The original did all that’s necessary in two sentences: Dan Evans to his wife: “The town drunk gave his life so people could live in peace and decency; how can I do less?” Ben Wade to Dan Evans: “You saved my life back there; I don’t like to be under an obligation.” Not exactly Hemingway, but getting the job done with perfect economy. The difference between low-key accomplishment and expensive junk could not be clearer.
And yet as we were about to leave the theater, the man sitting in front of us said to his companion, “Yeah, I liked the remake more.”
So, to return, what’s the best Western of all time, then? High Noon, Rio Bravo, My Darling Clementine, Red River, The Naked Spur, The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Magnificent Seven? Who can possibly say; the question is pointless. All that can be said is, see them all (as well as 3:10 to Yuma); they’re all magnificent (except Rio Bravo!). Leave such questions to the star-givers and list-makers. I’ve been the latter myself, with a list of “10 Best Movies of All Time” published once upon a time in American Book Review. Silly, really. “100 Best” would barely encompass the possibilities, and as for ranking them we might as well throw numbers in the air and see which come down first.
I will add one more word on standards, though. It’s obviously quite possible to take pleasure in the obscene or the pornographic; as versions of visceral pleasure (see the postings below) are they therefore on the same plane as any other form of pleasure? My first temptation is to say, Yes, you pays your money and you takes your chances. Feminist film theorist Carol Clover, for example, is able to appreciate The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre as an accomplishment in the realm of the horror movie, despite the ease with which it wallows in the aesthetics of pain and torture. But there’s something more to be said. ...Massacre wallows in misogyny, but does not validate it. The man who enjoys torturing women is presented as the lowest of the low.
Suppose, though, we were to see a German movie, made say in 1939 (don’t worry, I’m making this up), in which a bunch of good Nazis torture and murder a Jewish woman who’s been accused of engaging in ritual child abuse; and afterwards give each other high fives amid cries of “that shows the bitch who’s boss,” and “we’re gonna take care of all those bitches,” and then trot off happily to begin a reign of terror over the Jews who deserve it. Is that an appeal to pleasure like any other?
What I have just described, as it happens, is a rewritten but faithful version of the climax of that “great American film,” Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation, that is, is an obscene movie, and should be judged as such (along with many others, of course, but the others don’t raise the question of cinematic values so dramatically). Taking pleasure in lynching is obscene; lying about history and using the most loathsome of stereotypes in order to degrade an entire race of people and justify violence against them is obscene. Not “wrong,” or “immoral,” but obscene. So what, then, if Griffith invented a new form of editing, a new version of montage? Would Lynddie England’s photographs from Abu Ghraib be any the less obscene if she’d posed her victims with the attention to composition of Robert Capa? I don’t think so. There’s a limit to the possibility of detaching aesthetic contemplation from the human beings who engage in it, and Birth of a Nation surpasses that limit. In my opinion, it’s a version of false consciousness for humane persons not to see that. This is a standard that can be applied to films, without transgression on some realm of “formal accomplishment” that’s meaningless unless attached to a core of human-ness. It’s a very stringent standard, not to be invoked lightly just to show that you’re a good liberal or anti-Fascist–but it can be invoked. Something to think about when seeing, e.g., American Gangster–which I refuse to see.
Next up: on to the types of pleasure
E.g., High Noon and Rio Bravo, two classic Westerns, are both “about” the same theme, but with profound differences: not for nothing did John Wayne, the star of the latter, call High Noon the “most un-American” movie he’d ever seen. What they have in common is that through the telling of a story, rather than by giving propagandistic lectures, each has something significant to say about the relationship between individuals and the American version of community; about the Cold War, McCarthyism, liberal individualism. Each also has a style appropriate to its narrative, and that is a point worth making to a lover of one who denigrates the other (though again, that’s an aesthetic standard not everyone will agree to or even understand). That is, the real-time editing of High Noon painfully tightens the screws on the lonely hero deserted by the conformist herd; the much more leisurely pace of Rio Bravo tracks the difficulty of welding an heroic community together out of a collection of misfits and loners. I never get tired of seeing High Noon, but as for Rio Bravo I found the fake-folksy acting (except for Dean Martin and Angie Dickinson) and John Wayne’s know-it-all air of superiority redolent of a stupid populism, and the movie generally tedious and boring. This possibly tells you more about me than about the films (the Martin/Wayne contrast seems pure Blue State/Red State on further reflection). As Andrew Sarris said, retracting his earlier dismissal of High Noon, it is a superior movie from the standpoint of a Marxist seeker after social justice; Rio Bravo is a superior movie, he added, from the standpoint of a Christian believer in individual redemption. (Any such who are reading this please weigh in.) I still don’t like the movie, but I can now appreciate what Sarris sees in it.
Or, to take a more recent, and more frustrating, comparison: Dorothy and I recently went to see a revival of the original 3:10 to Yuma, a few weeks after seeing the remake. Here, we thought at the end, is a clear instance where standards are applicable and comparisons possible. The original is a lovely movie and a joy to watch–even for the fourth time, as in my case. The rhythm and pacing of it, from quietude or even silence to outbursts of violent action and then back again, the alternation between romantic nostalgia and cynical realism, produce pleasure in one of the best possible ways: by creating expectations, thwarting them, and then realizing them, and thwarting them again, and finally realizing them. The remake, contrastingly, has no rhythm and no pacing, but is merely an extended visual presentation of often incomprehensible violence and action. It is 35 minutes longer than the original and every one of those minutes is wasted in what appear to be pointless attempts to explain “motivation.” The original did all that’s necessary in two sentences: Dan Evans to his wife: “The town drunk gave his life so people could live in peace and decency; how can I do less?” Ben Wade to Dan Evans: “You saved my life back there; I don’t like to be under an obligation.” Not exactly Hemingway, but getting the job done with perfect economy. The difference between low-key accomplishment and expensive junk could not be clearer.
And yet as we were about to leave the theater, the man sitting in front of us said to his companion, “Yeah, I liked the remake more.”
So, to return, what’s the best Western of all time, then? High Noon, Rio Bravo, My Darling Clementine, Red River, The Naked Spur, The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Magnificent Seven? Who can possibly say; the question is pointless. All that can be said is, see them all (as well as 3:10 to Yuma); they’re all magnificent (except Rio Bravo!). Leave such questions to the star-givers and list-makers. I’ve been the latter myself, with a list of “10 Best Movies of All Time” published once upon a time in American Book Review. Silly, really. “100 Best” would barely encompass the possibilities, and as for ranking them we might as well throw numbers in the air and see which come down first.
I will add one more word on standards, though. It’s obviously quite possible to take pleasure in the obscene or the pornographic; as versions of visceral pleasure (see the postings below) are they therefore on the same plane as any other form of pleasure? My first temptation is to say, Yes, you pays your money and you takes your chances. Feminist film theorist Carol Clover, for example, is able to appreciate The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre as an accomplishment in the realm of the horror movie, despite the ease with which it wallows in the aesthetics of pain and torture. But there’s something more to be said. ...Massacre wallows in misogyny, but does not validate it. The man who enjoys torturing women is presented as the lowest of the low.
Suppose, though, we were to see a German movie, made say in 1939 (don’t worry, I’m making this up), in which a bunch of good Nazis torture and murder a Jewish woman who’s been accused of engaging in ritual child abuse; and afterwards give each other high fives amid cries of “that shows the bitch who’s boss,” and “we’re gonna take care of all those bitches,” and then trot off happily to begin a reign of terror over the Jews who deserve it. Is that an appeal to pleasure like any other?
What I have just described, as it happens, is a rewritten but faithful version of the climax of that “great American film,” Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation, that is, is an obscene movie, and should be judged as such (along with many others, of course, but the others don’t raise the question of cinematic values so dramatically). Taking pleasure in lynching is obscene; lying about history and using the most loathsome of stereotypes in order to degrade an entire race of people and justify violence against them is obscene. Not “wrong,” or “immoral,” but obscene. So what, then, if Griffith invented a new form of editing, a new version of montage? Would Lynddie England’s photographs from Abu Ghraib be any the less obscene if she’d posed her victims with the attention to composition of Robert Capa? I don’t think so. There’s a limit to the possibility of detaching aesthetic contemplation from the human beings who engage in it, and Birth of a Nation surpasses that limit. In my opinion, it’s a version of false consciousness for humane persons not to see that. This is a standard that can be applied to films, without transgression on some realm of “formal accomplishment” that’s meaningless unless attached to a core of human-ness. It’s a very stringent standard, not to be invoked lightly just to show that you’re a good liberal or anti-Fascist–but it can be invoked. Something to think about when seeing, e.g., American Gangster–which I refuse to see.
Next up: on to the types of pleasure
"So What Did You Think?"--Fear and Loathing at the Movies
It’s the most dreaded conversational beginning in the English-speaking world. No one cares what you thought of Exit Ghost, or whether you liked Will and Grace. But movies...that’s different. Going with friends, or rather exiting with friends, can be an ordeal. Being a mild-mannered sort you begin by prattling meaninglessly about what restaurant to go to next, but one of your not so mild-mannered friends is not having any: “So what did you think?”
Of course the problem may have begun much earlier. You and some friends wanted to go to a movie together, but he loves car chases, she can’t stand the sight of blood, your partner thinks anything made in Europe is “obscure,” you will see anything with Nicole Kidman, whom he hates...and so on. And the worst position to be in is to be the one who has made the final suggestion, since that person will then have assumed the awesome responsibility of engaging in a communal activity which we can be certain not everyone is going to enjoy equally. If that was you, that only makes it worse when the moment of truth comes.
To be sure, there are strategies for temporary avoidance. One tack, for example, is to try to beat everybody to the punch with your own avoidance maneuver, a tentative left jab such as “she was really something, wasn’t she?” That sort of empty comment has the virtue of sounding firm while actually being doubly non-committal: “she” probably refers to Nicole Kidman, but just in case, you might have been speaking about Catherine Keener in a minor role, who everyone knows is a great actress. And furthermore you said “something,” not “great,” which still leaves a lot of room for further maneuver: maybe “something” is short for “the worst acting you’ve ever seen?”
But these are all evasions of having to deal with what will sooner or later be upon you: “So, what did you think?” I can’t tell us how to avoid this event horizon, but perhaps I can give some useful advice on how to deal with it when it appears.
This is where to begin: The purpose of going to a movie is to experience pleasure. If you want information, there are libraries and lecture halls (or perhaps documentaries, but we’re talking about fiction films–the “what did you think?” problem rarely arises with documentaries). But there are many different kinds of pleasure, and to imagine that your preferred version of it is the only real thing is to be narcissistic. What is necessary is to be (self)-aware of one’s own preferences in the world of pleasure, and aware also that your companions may have entirely different ones: or even, so open-ended is the scope of cinematic narrative, an entirely different experience. So in subsequent postings I will be annotating a helpful (I hope) though undoubtedly incomplete list, with examples, of the types of pleasure that a movie can give. Of course no movie is created to give us only a single type of pleasure (with the exception of the one genre that no male–and this means yours truly--will admit paying any attention to); the examples therefore are of films that especially incarnate or forefront a particular type of pleasure.
However, any discussion of pleasure in movie-watching has to be preceded by an important caveat. There is finally a kind of cinematic pleasure not accessible to most people, and that is the pleasure of being an expert on cinema, an insider who knows the vocabulary and standards generally accepted by other insiders. (The rules that constitute the field, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase). The expert in film studies or film criticism derives pleasure from engaging in the knowledgeable activities of formal or comparative or historical analysis (auteur theory, e.g.), so that a film can always be viewed in the light of other films. Such informed viewing is itself a considerable source of pleasure, a kind of meta-pleasure in the activity of movie-watching taken as a whole.
In other words, the expert knows something that the rest of us don’t know. Sometimes this can help us in our dilemma, if we’ve gone to a movie with an expert, and the expert is the kind who takes over a stalled conversation right away without any false modesty: “Yes, that was minor Techine, but Emanuelle Beart was luminous as always, and Julien Hirsch’s cinematography once again framed the narrative perfectly.” Comments like that can be very useful, in that one can go either way with them. Maybe you thought it was a terrific movie, but that’s ok because from the sound of it even minor Techine might be “terrific.” Or conversely, you can simply say “I guess Techine isn’t my cup of tea” with a faint air of populist superiority. Of course you don’t want to utter a sentence like that in a group of cinephiles; but you probably don’t want to go to a movie with them either.
This is because the main problem in discussing movies with experts, if you’re not one yourself, is that you may tend to feel put down or excluded by their special knowledge. This feeling may be enhanced by their ability to relate every movie they’ve seen to every other movie they’ve seen, in such a way that we are all supposed to derive some kind of insight from noting the relationships. You didn’t even know there was major Techine, and all of a sudden it turns out you can be a Techine feinschmecker. The occasion of this ability is that part of the experts’ life’s work is to rank every movie in an informal but real hierarchy that is based on terms like “complexity,” “ambiguity,” formal accomplishment,” “depth,” etc. Reader alert: I implicitly do myself all the time, as when, e.g. apologizing for my immense enjoyment of say The French Connection compared to...oh, 8 1/2. Most of all, cinema professional usually, if only by implication, adopt a dualistic ranking of the types of pleasure themselves: the cerebral in at least its highest forms over the bodily in all its forms. Even Pauline Kael did that.
This is the temptation that must be resisted if we really want to enjoy movies first of all, and think about how “good” they are later; which is probably what most of us want to do if left to our own devices. So if you read (I hope) the discussions of different types of cinematic pleasure, I suggest we all try to remember that in the long run, which for some of us draws closer every minute, all cinema amounts to in life is another source of pleasure. Well, better than that: another source of immense pleasure.
Of course the problem may have begun much earlier. You and some friends wanted to go to a movie together, but he loves car chases, she can’t stand the sight of blood, your partner thinks anything made in Europe is “obscure,” you will see anything with Nicole Kidman, whom he hates...and so on. And the worst position to be in is to be the one who has made the final suggestion, since that person will then have assumed the awesome responsibility of engaging in a communal activity which we can be certain not everyone is going to enjoy equally. If that was you, that only makes it worse when the moment of truth comes.
To be sure, there are strategies for temporary avoidance. One tack, for example, is to try to beat everybody to the punch with your own avoidance maneuver, a tentative left jab such as “she was really something, wasn’t she?” That sort of empty comment has the virtue of sounding firm while actually being doubly non-committal: “she” probably refers to Nicole Kidman, but just in case, you might have been speaking about Catherine Keener in a minor role, who everyone knows is a great actress. And furthermore you said “something,” not “great,” which still leaves a lot of room for further maneuver: maybe “something” is short for “the worst acting you’ve ever seen?”
But these are all evasions of having to deal with what will sooner or later be upon you: “So, what did you think?” I can’t tell us how to avoid this event horizon, but perhaps I can give some useful advice on how to deal with it when it appears.
This is where to begin: The purpose of going to a movie is to experience pleasure. If you want information, there are libraries and lecture halls (or perhaps documentaries, but we’re talking about fiction films–the “what did you think?” problem rarely arises with documentaries). But there are many different kinds of pleasure, and to imagine that your preferred version of it is the only real thing is to be narcissistic. What is necessary is to be (self)-aware of one’s own preferences in the world of pleasure, and aware also that your companions may have entirely different ones: or even, so open-ended is the scope of cinematic narrative, an entirely different experience. So in subsequent postings I will be annotating a helpful (I hope) though undoubtedly incomplete list, with examples, of the types of pleasure that a movie can give. Of course no movie is created to give us only a single type of pleasure (with the exception of the one genre that no male–and this means yours truly--will admit paying any attention to); the examples therefore are of films that especially incarnate or forefront a particular type of pleasure.
However, any discussion of pleasure in movie-watching has to be preceded by an important caveat. There is finally a kind of cinematic pleasure not accessible to most people, and that is the pleasure of being an expert on cinema, an insider who knows the vocabulary and standards generally accepted by other insiders. (The rules that constitute the field, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase). The expert in film studies or film criticism derives pleasure from engaging in the knowledgeable activities of formal or comparative or historical analysis (auteur theory, e.g.), so that a film can always be viewed in the light of other films. Such informed viewing is itself a considerable source of pleasure, a kind of meta-pleasure in the activity of movie-watching taken as a whole.
In other words, the expert knows something that the rest of us don’t know. Sometimes this can help us in our dilemma, if we’ve gone to a movie with an expert, and the expert is the kind who takes over a stalled conversation right away without any false modesty: “Yes, that was minor Techine, but Emanuelle Beart was luminous as always, and Julien Hirsch’s cinematography once again framed the narrative perfectly.” Comments like that can be very useful, in that one can go either way with them. Maybe you thought it was a terrific movie, but that’s ok because from the sound of it even minor Techine might be “terrific.” Or conversely, you can simply say “I guess Techine isn’t my cup of tea” with a faint air of populist superiority. Of course you don’t want to utter a sentence like that in a group of cinephiles; but you probably don’t want to go to a movie with them either.
This is because the main problem in discussing movies with experts, if you’re not one yourself, is that you may tend to feel put down or excluded by their special knowledge. This feeling may be enhanced by their ability to relate every movie they’ve seen to every other movie they’ve seen, in such a way that we are all supposed to derive some kind of insight from noting the relationships. You didn’t even know there was major Techine, and all of a sudden it turns out you can be a Techine feinschmecker. The occasion of this ability is that part of the experts’ life’s work is to rank every movie in an informal but real hierarchy that is based on terms like “complexity,” “ambiguity,” formal accomplishment,” “depth,” etc. Reader alert: I implicitly do myself all the time, as when, e.g. apologizing for my immense enjoyment of say The French Connection compared to...oh, 8 1/2. Most of all, cinema professional usually, if only by implication, adopt a dualistic ranking of the types of pleasure themselves: the cerebral in at least its highest forms over the bodily in all its forms. Even Pauline Kael did that.
This is the temptation that must be resisted if we really want to enjoy movies first of all, and think about how “good” they are later; which is probably what most of us want to do if left to our own devices. So if you read (I hope) the discussions of different types of cinematic pleasure, I suggest we all try to remember that in the long run, which for some of us draws closer every minute, all cinema amounts to in life is another source of pleasure. Well, better than that: another source of immense pleasure.
No More Politics: On To Movies!
I am about to post a five-part blog (short parts!) on movie-going, and pleasure, and what to do about that annoying friend who asks you, “So, what did you think of it?,” before you’re halfway up the aisle.
But first, I've had few entries on my blog in the past several months, and I feel that an explanation is due to the all the friends and relatives and colleagues who aren’t reading it. I thought I’d be writing mostly about politics–what else should a political scientist/theorist do? At the present moment, however, this seems to me to be just about impossible, at least for a paid-up inhabitant of the United States of America.
This is a stupid society and very often a lunatic society. The opening words of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground–“I am a sick man; I am a spiteful man; I think my liver is diseased”–could easily be adapted to describe an entire nation of 300 million people: not all the people, but the nation as a whole. Nothing intelligent or sane can get done, only stupid or insane projects can go forth. This may change in 2009, though I strongly counsel against optimism on that score, for the institutional and social roots of national stupidity and insanity run too deep by now to be easily uprooted: not to mention that for the first time in American history, a genuine Fascist has a 50-50 chance of becoming president. Real political debate or discussion cannot take place, in that there is really nothing to debate, and nowhere to debate it if there were anything resembling serious ideas.
There is one seriously asserted idea, which consists of one part outright lies and one part ideological madness, and the mere fact of my saying that demonstrates the point, if you agree with me. You can’t debate with liars and lunatics, and when they own or control so much of the institutional spectrum where talk is permitted--but not encouraged, never encouraged–and have established such institutional hegemony that no practicing politician is allowed to tell the simple truth about their duplicitous imbecility or madness, what is left to be done or said? So I’ve stopped writing about politics. Anyone who might be reading this already knows all there is to know about the Occupation, or the health-care system, or the destruction of the welfare state, or or or... No one needs another run-through from me. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about–well, I would have nothing to say to you anyway.
Before getting to movies, though, I do have a story to tell that might be interesting both to old and more recent friends, and family, just as a matter of historical record.
My mother hired Norman Podhoretz as Editor of Commentary, and set him on the path to becoming who he is: the leading advocate of neo-totalitarianism in the United States. Of course he would furiously deny the appellation and insist that he’s the one great opponent of totalitarianism (“Islamofascism”), but that’s like Hitler saying he was the one real anti-Stalinist.
Though she later castigated herself for, as she put it, knowing Podhoretz was an opportunist and yet going ahead anyway, and though she was expressing despairing regret almost on her deathbed, it was really a no-brainer at the time. As the founding editor of Commentary, Elliot Cohen, declined into deep depression, there were only 3 serious candidates to replace him: Podhoretz, Clement Greenberg, and a lightweight New York intellectual named Marty Greenberg. Greenbergs had the numbers but not the weight. Marty was the kind of editor who belongs at a publishing house, not an intellectual journal, and Clement had settled into the role of High Priest of Abstract Expressionism; there was little reason to believe that he could take the kind of generalized intellectual approach to other subject matters that the job required. Norman seemed at least like a somebody with generalized interests and a dedication to keeping the magazine on the same path that Cohen had charted. To be sure, technically it was up to the American Jewish Committee’s supervising Editorial Board to make the decision, but as the AJC’s representative on the magazine, General Manager of it, and de facto CEO, it was my mother’s recommendation that would govern. And so it was.
Years later we would discuss–to the extent that years later she could still engage in linear discussions–what happened to turn the Pod into a monstrous Pod Person. With Irving Kristol the explanation was simple, or so she thought–he was a corrupt social climber who fell in with the ruling-class types who could make him money, lots of it, and never looked back. The Pod was not so easy to explain, though you could always go with the malevolent force of his Svengali, Midge Decter. Still, Norman was no Trilby; he had always been full of some inexplicable rage of the kind that when I encounter it always leads me to look back with nostalgia at Else Frankel-Brunswick’s classic and (wrongly) much maligned study of The Authoritarian Personality.
I know the anti-Right conclusion of that study is out of keeping with the kind of shoddy intellectual relativism that these days posits “Left” and “Right” as “extremes” within whose boundaries moderate liberal realism falls, but that’s the way it is. For a long time genuine rage has had almost nowhere to go on the American Left, except the convulsive violence of late SDS and its Maoist successors: and these are simply not in the American grain, nor do they promise anything but total exclusion from American life (and maybe a prison sentence). The rage of race, or of thwarted power, including sexual power and the power of patriarchy, is entirely of the Right, and indeed explains the persistence of the Right even as it descends into genuine madness. It is also, sadly, very much in the American grain.
To see not the psychological (who knows?) but the chronological origins specifically of the Pod’s rage, you have to look back at the essay everyone looks back at (most recently Ian Buruma, in reviewing his book on “World War IV” in the New York Review of Books), “My Negro Problem and Ours.” “Ours” indeed–unless “we” consists of the Pod and that other Norman, the postal clerk, who had a similar problem. The “problem” was this: Negroes were tough, and nice Jewish boys weren’t, and Negroes were scary and nice Jewish boys were scared, and we were all supposed to be together in one big happy liberal family, and under such circumstances that just couldn’t work. My own tough-guy problem was with Italians, but that didn’t call one’s whole liberal pluralist upbringing into account (especially if it was founded in anti-Catholicism, to which I still cheerfully plead guilty).
The Pod has usually been acquitted of racism in that article, on the grounds that he advocated racial intermarriage (miscegenation) as a solution to American racism: perhaps following the notorious Hannah Arendt article on Little Rock that Commentary had been going to publish until my mother vetoed it, on the grounds that its opposition to school integration would lead to a fracturing of the Jewish/Negro coalition. (I won’t even mention all the historical ironies there.) But in his seeming recognition of the virtues of blackness, chief among them physical prowess, he was exactly like the kind of anti-Semite who insists on having a Jewish lawyer when big money or long prison terms are involved. More revealing, perhaps, this is the man, after all, who once said that the decline of Western civilization was due to the prevalence of homosexuals. Just substitute the word “Jews” in there and we know exactly where we’re at.
In the end it’s the same syndrome: the thwarting of “masculinity,” or rather of the wistful expectations of masculinity, and the rage that being thwarted–read “the real world”–produces. In women too, it must be said, since the pleasures of patriarchy are promised to male and female alike; more to the former, but who am I to say why people should believe or not believe, or what price they pay or compensation receive for their beliefs? In any event, you can find this kind of out-of-control masculinism everywhere in the world, of course: but in the so-called West, it is strong enough to exert real power, sometimes even hegemony, only in America. Yes, Harry Golden, Only In America. Why, who knows? but what and how, is at the present moment all too clear. Read Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream.
So, no more politics. On to movies, and pleasure.
But first, I've had few entries on my blog in the past several months, and I feel that an explanation is due to the all the friends and relatives and colleagues who aren’t reading it. I thought I’d be writing mostly about politics–what else should a political scientist/theorist do? At the present moment, however, this seems to me to be just about impossible, at least for a paid-up inhabitant of the United States of America.
This is a stupid society and very often a lunatic society. The opening words of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground–“I am a sick man; I am a spiteful man; I think my liver is diseased”–could easily be adapted to describe an entire nation of 300 million people: not all the people, but the nation as a whole. Nothing intelligent or sane can get done, only stupid or insane projects can go forth. This may change in 2009, though I strongly counsel against optimism on that score, for the institutional and social roots of national stupidity and insanity run too deep by now to be easily uprooted: not to mention that for the first time in American history, a genuine Fascist has a 50-50 chance of becoming president. Real political debate or discussion cannot take place, in that there is really nothing to debate, and nowhere to debate it if there were anything resembling serious ideas.
There is one seriously asserted idea, which consists of one part outright lies and one part ideological madness, and the mere fact of my saying that demonstrates the point, if you agree with me. You can’t debate with liars and lunatics, and when they own or control so much of the institutional spectrum where talk is permitted--but not encouraged, never encouraged–and have established such institutional hegemony that no practicing politician is allowed to tell the simple truth about their duplicitous imbecility or madness, what is left to be done or said? So I’ve stopped writing about politics. Anyone who might be reading this already knows all there is to know about the Occupation, or the health-care system, or the destruction of the welfare state, or or or... No one needs another run-through from me. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about–well, I would have nothing to say to you anyway.
Before getting to movies, though, I do have a story to tell that might be interesting both to old and more recent friends, and family, just as a matter of historical record.
My mother hired Norman Podhoretz as Editor of Commentary, and set him on the path to becoming who he is: the leading advocate of neo-totalitarianism in the United States. Of course he would furiously deny the appellation and insist that he’s the one great opponent of totalitarianism (“Islamofascism”), but that’s like Hitler saying he was the one real anti-Stalinist.
Though she later castigated herself for, as she put it, knowing Podhoretz was an opportunist and yet going ahead anyway, and though she was expressing despairing regret almost on her deathbed, it was really a no-brainer at the time. As the founding editor of Commentary, Elliot Cohen, declined into deep depression, there were only 3 serious candidates to replace him: Podhoretz, Clement Greenberg, and a lightweight New York intellectual named Marty Greenberg. Greenbergs had the numbers but not the weight. Marty was the kind of editor who belongs at a publishing house, not an intellectual journal, and Clement had settled into the role of High Priest of Abstract Expressionism; there was little reason to believe that he could take the kind of generalized intellectual approach to other subject matters that the job required. Norman seemed at least like a somebody with generalized interests and a dedication to keeping the magazine on the same path that Cohen had charted. To be sure, technically it was up to the American Jewish Committee’s supervising Editorial Board to make the decision, but as the AJC’s representative on the magazine, General Manager of it, and de facto CEO, it was my mother’s recommendation that would govern. And so it was.
Years later we would discuss–to the extent that years later she could still engage in linear discussions–what happened to turn the Pod into a monstrous Pod Person. With Irving Kristol the explanation was simple, or so she thought–he was a corrupt social climber who fell in with the ruling-class types who could make him money, lots of it, and never looked back. The Pod was not so easy to explain, though you could always go with the malevolent force of his Svengali, Midge Decter. Still, Norman was no Trilby; he had always been full of some inexplicable rage of the kind that when I encounter it always leads me to look back with nostalgia at Else Frankel-Brunswick’s classic and (wrongly) much maligned study of The Authoritarian Personality.
I know the anti-Right conclusion of that study is out of keeping with the kind of shoddy intellectual relativism that these days posits “Left” and “Right” as “extremes” within whose boundaries moderate liberal realism falls, but that’s the way it is. For a long time genuine rage has had almost nowhere to go on the American Left, except the convulsive violence of late SDS and its Maoist successors: and these are simply not in the American grain, nor do they promise anything but total exclusion from American life (and maybe a prison sentence). The rage of race, or of thwarted power, including sexual power and the power of patriarchy, is entirely of the Right, and indeed explains the persistence of the Right even as it descends into genuine madness. It is also, sadly, very much in the American grain.
To see not the psychological (who knows?) but the chronological origins specifically of the Pod’s rage, you have to look back at the essay everyone looks back at (most recently Ian Buruma, in reviewing his book on “World War IV” in the New York Review of Books), “My Negro Problem and Ours.” “Ours” indeed–unless “we” consists of the Pod and that other Norman, the postal clerk, who had a similar problem. The “problem” was this: Negroes were tough, and nice Jewish boys weren’t, and Negroes were scary and nice Jewish boys were scared, and we were all supposed to be together in one big happy liberal family, and under such circumstances that just couldn’t work. My own tough-guy problem was with Italians, but that didn’t call one’s whole liberal pluralist upbringing into account (especially if it was founded in anti-Catholicism, to which I still cheerfully plead guilty).
The Pod has usually been acquitted of racism in that article, on the grounds that he advocated racial intermarriage (miscegenation) as a solution to American racism: perhaps following the notorious Hannah Arendt article on Little Rock that Commentary had been going to publish until my mother vetoed it, on the grounds that its opposition to school integration would lead to a fracturing of the Jewish/Negro coalition. (I won’t even mention all the historical ironies there.) But in his seeming recognition of the virtues of blackness, chief among them physical prowess, he was exactly like the kind of anti-Semite who insists on having a Jewish lawyer when big money or long prison terms are involved. More revealing, perhaps, this is the man, after all, who once said that the decline of Western civilization was due to the prevalence of homosexuals. Just substitute the word “Jews” in there and we know exactly where we’re at.
In the end it’s the same syndrome: the thwarting of “masculinity,” or rather of the wistful expectations of masculinity, and the rage that being thwarted–read “the real world”–produces. In women too, it must be said, since the pleasures of patriarchy are promised to male and female alike; more to the former, but who am I to say why people should believe or not believe, or what price they pay or compensation receive for their beliefs? In any event, you can find this kind of out-of-control masculinism everywhere in the world, of course: but in the so-called West, it is strong enough to exert real power, sometimes even hegemony, only in America. Yes, Harry Golden, Only In America. Why, who knows? but what and how, is at the present moment all too clear. Read Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream.
So, no more politics. On to movies, and pleasure.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Laura Green on "The Canon Wars Again"
Last Sunday--September 16, 2007--the regular "End Paper" by Rachel Donadio in the Times Book Review Section was a revaluation--and rather complete misrepresentation--of Allan Bloom's 20-year-old Closing of the American Mind. (I say misrepresentation because in fact the target of Bloom's often uninformed vitriol was precisely the opening of "the American mind" to, e.g., "Continental" influences; closed-mindedness is precisely what he, like many Straussians, passionately advocates.) The chief idea that she drew from Bloom was the wrongness of "multiculturalism" in the teaching of literature, and this idea was backed up with many quotes (more than those few in defense) from the usual suspects, to the effect that the literary curriculum has been dumbed down, and "classics" replaced by dubiously qualified contemporaries, minority representatives, etc. Much of the criticism, it should be said, consists of a (mis)identification of multiculturalism with identity politics, an identification that unfortunately has been promoted on all sides; the two can indeed be made to seem associated, but in fact neither depends on nor entails the other. Identity politics in most of its forms is conceptually indefensible; "multiculturalism" takes many forms, some of them arguable, but in literary and cultural studies it is an intellectually unavoidable response to a diverse and globalized world.
I asked Laura Green, who is an Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University, to comment on Donadio's article:
"So I read the Donadio essay, and my response is the usual one: I'm just not seeing the fire, even in the account of those who think there's a problem. For example, Donadio says that 'In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and T. S. Eliot,' and 'in 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison.' This hardly seems like a radical shift: Shakespeare and Chaucer holding steady, and am I really supposed to mourn the passing or de-emphasis of Dryden and Pope in undergraduate classes? (Pretty much every English major I know has read or will read "The Wasteland," so I'm pretty sure Eliot is still up there.)
Every year I teach the "Survey of Brit Lit II"; we always read Yeat's "Second Coming," though I myself have come to like it less (and I always make the connection to Achebe's novel, which most of them have, indeed, read). The survey is one of 4--Brit Lit I (where Milton is taught), Brit Lit II, American Lit I, American Lit II.
Indeed, maybe it's just where I've taught, but I'm not seeing the decline of the canon. At Berkeley, I t.a.ed for a similar survey course; at Saint Mary's, I taught a strange thing called "Collegiate Seminar," which was a sort of Western Civ class, as well as an 18th c. Novel class; at Yale I taught for many years 129, a class in Epic from the Odyssey through Joyce's Ulysses. And here at NU, I teach the aforementioned Survey, alongside my fellow survey-teachers, and we have the usual, quite traditional period requirements, including a Shakespeare class, three of the four surveys, a requirement that they take period classes from three different century groups, and a required “Backgrounds in English and American Lit.” And how they grumble about fulfilling that! We offer a "major figures" course in Milton, though when our Miltonist retires, I'm not sure we'll replace him with the same.
It's true that not every institution has those requirements--some don't have any, and some are more interested in things like multimedia textuality--but so what? This is a democracy, after all--where is it written that every one of the 1.6% of students who major in English have to have studied the same thing?
I think Mark Lilla has a point that 'What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition,' and that is indeed a major source of irritation with the way our students read. But he's way off base if he imagines that our students mostly find it in Toni Morrison! Beloved is in fact not an affirming novel--neither is her earlier work, such as Sula, though her later stuff has gotten sappier--and most of the students I've taught it to (I used to teach it in a reading & composition class at Berkeley) find it plenty inaccessible and alienating.
I do agree that humanities scholars and teachers haven't done a very good job of presenting their case, but as the article acknowledges, it has always been 'hard for the liberal arts to make a case for themselves in practical-minded America.' Given that fact, I'm not sure how much better we can do, or even how much it matters.
There also is a genuine challenge for any historically- or chronologically-based discipline: History is getting longer, and people keep writing and events keep happening. My 'Survey of Brit Lit II' generally manages to stagger in fiction as far as Woolf, in poetry as far as Auden, with one Walcott poem because there's a great Yeats/Auden/Walcott sequence to teach. Are we soon going to need a 'Survey of Brit Lit III'?"
I asked Laura Green, who is an Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University, to comment on Donadio's article:
"So I read the Donadio essay, and my response is the usual one: I'm just not seeing the fire, even in the account of those who think there's a problem. For example, Donadio says that 'In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and T. S. Eliot,' and 'in 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison.' This hardly seems like a radical shift: Shakespeare and Chaucer holding steady, and am I really supposed to mourn the passing or de-emphasis of Dryden and Pope in undergraduate classes? (Pretty much every English major I know has read or will read "The Wasteland," so I'm pretty sure Eliot is still up there.)
Every year I teach the "Survey of Brit Lit II"; we always read Yeat's "Second Coming," though I myself have come to like it less (and I always make the connection to Achebe's novel, which most of them have, indeed, read). The survey is one of 4--Brit Lit I (where Milton is taught), Brit Lit II, American Lit I, American Lit II.
Indeed, maybe it's just where I've taught, but I'm not seeing the decline of the canon. At Berkeley, I t.a.ed for a similar survey course; at Saint Mary's, I taught a strange thing called "Collegiate Seminar," which was a sort of Western Civ class, as well as an 18th c. Novel class; at Yale I taught for many years 129, a class in Epic from the Odyssey through Joyce's Ulysses. And here at NU, I teach the aforementioned Survey, alongside my fellow survey-teachers, and we have the usual, quite traditional period requirements, including a Shakespeare class, three of the four surveys, a requirement that they take period classes from three different century groups, and a required “Backgrounds in English and American Lit.” And how they grumble about fulfilling that! We offer a "major figures" course in Milton, though when our Miltonist retires, I'm not sure we'll replace him with the same.
It's true that not every institution has those requirements--some don't have any, and some are more interested in things like multimedia textuality--but so what? This is a democracy, after all--where is it written that every one of the 1.6% of students who major in English have to have studied the same thing?
I think Mark Lilla has a point that 'What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition,' and that is indeed a major source of irritation with the way our students read. But he's way off base if he imagines that our students mostly find it in Toni Morrison! Beloved is in fact not an affirming novel--neither is her earlier work, such as Sula, though her later stuff has gotten sappier--and most of the students I've taught it to (I used to teach it in a reading & composition class at Berkeley) find it plenty inaccessible and alienating.
I do agree that humanities scholars and teachers haven't done a very good job of presenting their case, but as the article acknowledges, it has always been 'hard for the liberal arts to make a case for themselves in practical-minded America.' Given that fact, I'm not sure how much better we can do, or even how much it matters.
There also is a genuine challenge for any historically- or chronologically-based discipline: History is getting longer, and people keep writing and events keep happening. My 'Survey of Brit Lit II' generally manages to stagger in fiction as far as Woolf, in poetry as far as Auden, with one Walcott poem because there's a great Yeats/Auden/Walcott sequence to teach. Are we soon going to need a 'Survey of Brit Lit III'?"
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Speech after Long Silence...
Now that the breast-beating of the disillusioned neo-con fellow travelers has assumed massive proportions, it’s time to take a look at what they’re actually saying, and not saying. The new mantra is that “mistakes were made” (aren’t they always?). The tragic hero of the new revisionists–George Packer, Kenneth Pollack, Tom Friedman, Charles Ferguson, Michael Ignatieff, et al.–is Jay Garner; the black-hatted villain is Paul Bremer along with his commanding Svengali, Donald Rumsfeld.
They still don’t get it, nor do their unrepentant partners in crime–Hitchens, Berman, Geras, etc. What is it they don’t get? That there was no mistake. They would like to think that there could have been a rationally conducted War and a rationally conducted occupation. Only a pacifist can deny this tout court, so let’s leave pacifism aside and tentatively acknowledge that maybe in some hypothetical world they’re right, even; we can never be dogmatic about “what might have been” (“Of all sad words of tongue and pen/The saddest are, “It might have been.”) Perhaps FDR and George Marshall could have done it; or Abraham Lincoln. But the world is what it is, and it was impossible that George W. Bush and his morally deprived crew could have done it; not because they couldn’t know how, but because they didn’t want to. No, let’s go further than that. They were absolutely opposed to creating and implementing a rational or constructive or positive military policy, because that would have contradicted their whole ideological purpose: to weaken and ultimately destroy the state and so enrich themselves and their friends. To drown it or suffocate it or crush it or whatever their metaphor of the moment happens to be. Thus the initial “mistake” was appointing Jay Garner; that mistake was rectified by his firing and replacement with Paul Bremer. Bremer, puppet of the plutocracy, could be and was an instrument of that purpose in Iraq. Garner, the military professional, couldn’t be; he had to go.
Now the one-Party apostles–William Kristol and his ilk–will say condescendingly that we unpatriotic Leftists don’t understand that they do believe in a strong state, an imperial state, a state armed to the teeth, a state that can govern the world. With Randolph Bourne, but from the shore of Imperial madness rather than of anti-Imperialism, the lunatic Right of today believes that “War is the health of the State.” But he was wrong, and so are they.
In truth, it’s a little more complicated than that. War may be one of the activities of a healthy state, but usually it isn’t. Rather, the health of the State is strength. Not military strength–Germany today is a stronger state than it was under Hitler or the Communists; so too is Finland, which as far as we know doesn’t depend on the military-industrial complex for its health. The best exposition of what states are for, in theory if not always or even mostly in actual practice, is given in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “to insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty...” A healthy state is one that works–those who staff it work–to accomplish those ends; that can call on the resources and organizational supports needed to accomplish them; and that will be supported by at least a firm majority of citizens when it makes that call. It is “strong” when it can succeed in doing what needs to be done, and conversely, it can only succeed if it is strong. Therefore, no matter how bloated its military, a State that does not seek, e.g., to establish justice and promote the general welfare cannot be strong, it can only be weak, mal-adapted, irrational: like the American state under the radical Republicans of today. And a weak state cannot conduct a successful war or any other type of policy that must engage its true energies. Above all, only a truly strong, well adapted, well-rationalized state can possibly engage in nation-building, probably the most difficult task any polity can try to engage in (as Machiavelli first pointed out).
Well before the invasion of 2003, the American State under George W. Bush and his neo-totalitarian supporters was dedicated to institutionalizing injustice, subverting the general welfare at every turn, and trampling on the blessings of liberty: and to making certain that those benign purposes can never be resurrected. All departments of government were deliberately corrupted, or if relatively incorruptible (i.e., the State Department) were inundated with lies and relegated to the sidelines. In other words, this was a State devoted to its own self-destruction except as naked Force. That is its leaders’ goal. The power of its military–not “our military”--was no more a sign of strength than the unregulated power of a police force is a sign of the strength of a city. The American state of 2003 existed, and still exists, solely to increase the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful, and to abolish all those parts of itself that might prevent that from happening. Since a great deal of its support comes from Christian sociopaths (and Jewish monomaniacs), it also works to increase the purchase on social life of their particular form of sociopathy: again at the expense of rational thought and action. All of this was perfectly self-evident by 2003. And yet this is the State that the fellow-travelers of the Radical Right called on to bring “democracy” to Iraq: not necessarily an ignoble ideal, yet how could anyone possibly have thought that a group of conspirators dedicated to destroying every vestige of democratic self-government at home could somehow implant it abroad? That disbelievers in effective governance could establish it in the world’s most inhospitable environment?
In God Is Not Great, his recent book attacking organized religion, Christopher Hitchens does a nice (albeit unoriginal) job of discrediting creationists, and demonstrating their sheer irrationality. They refuse to look squarely at the reality of the material world. Yet in March 2003 he (and his cohort) looked the reality of the United States squarely in the eye: and flinched. To flinch in the face of reality: that is the definition of worldly irrationality. Calling what they did a “mistake” bred by “dogmatic”idealism, as Ignatieff does in his New York Times Magazine mea culpa, is to let them all off the hook upon which History has forever impaled them.
They still don’t get it, nor do their unrepentant partners in crime–Hitchens, Berman, Geras, etc. What is it they don’t get? That there was no mistake. They would like to think that there could have been a rationally conducted War and a rationally conducted occupation. Only a pacifist can deny this tout court, so let’s leave pacifism aside and tentatively acknowledge that maybe in some hypothetical world they’re right, even; we can never be dogmatic about “what might have been” (“Of all sad words of tongue and pen/The saddest are, “It might have been.”) Perhaps FDR and George Marshall could have done it; or Abraham Lincoln. But the world is what it is, and it was impossible that George W. Bush and his morally deprived crew could have done it; not because they couldn’t know how, but because they didn’t want to. No, let’s go further than that. They were absolutely opposed to creating and implementing a rational or constructive or positive military policy, because that would have contradicted their whole ideological purpose: to weaken and ultimately destroy the state and so enrich themselves and their friends. To drown it or suffocate it or crush it or whatever their metaphor of the moment happens to be. Thus the initial “mistake” was appointing Jay Garner; that mistake was rectified by his firing and replacement with Paul Bremer. Bremer, puppet of the plutocracy, could be and was an instrument of that purpose in Iraq. Garner, the military professional, couldn’t be; he had to go.
Now the one-Party apostles–William Kristol and his ilk–will say condescendingly that we unpatriotic Leftists don’t understand that they do believe in a strong state, an imperial state, a state armed to the teeth, a state that can govern the world. With Randolph Bourne, but from the shore of Imperial madness rather than of anti-Imperialism, the lunatic Right of today believes that “War is the health of the State.” But he was wrong, and so are they.
In truth, it’s a little more complicated than that. War may be one of the activities of a healthy state, but usually it isn’t. Rather, the health of the State is strength. Not military strength–Germany today is a stronger state than it was under Hitler or the Communists; so too is Finland, which as far as we know doesn’t depend on the military-industrial complex for its health. The best exposition of what states are for, in theory if not always or even mostly in actual practice, is given in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “to insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty...” A healthy state is one that works–those who staff it work–to accomplish those ends; that can call on the resources and organizational supports needed to accomplish them; and that will be supported by at least a firm majority of citizens when it makes that call. It is “strong” when it can succeed in doing what needs to be done, and conversely, it can only succeed if it is strong. Therefore, no matter how bloated its military, a State that does not seek, e.g., to establish justice and promote the general welfare cannot be strong, it can only be weak, mal-adapted, irrational: like the American state under the radical Republicans of today. And a weak state cannot conduct a successful war or any other type of policy that must engage its true energies. Above all, only a truly strong, well adapted, well-rationalized state can possibly engage in nation-building, probably the most difficult task any polity can try to engage in (as Machiavelli first pointed out).
Well before the invasion of 2003, the American State under George W. Bush and his neo-totalitarian supporters was dedicated to institutionalizing injustice, subverting the general welfare at every turn, and trampling on the blessings of liberty: and to making certain that those benign purposes can never be resurrected. All departments of government were deliberately corrupted, or if relatively incorruptible (i.e., the State Department) were inundated with lies and relegated to the sidelines. In other words, this was a State devoted to its own self-destruction except as naked Force. That is its leaders’ goal. The power of its military–not “our military”--was no more a sign of strength than the unregulated power of a police force is a sign of the strength of a city. The American state of 2003 existed, and still exists, solely to increase the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful, and to abolish all those parts of itself that might prevent that from happening. Since a great deal of its support comes from Christian sociopaths (and Jewish monomaniacs), it also works to increase the purchase on social life of their particular form of sociopathy: again at the expense of rational thought and action. All of this was perfectly self-evident by 2003. And yet this is the State that the fellow-travelers of the Radical Right called on to bring “democracy” to Iraq: not necessarily an ignoble ideal, yet how could anyone possibly have thought that a group of conspirators dedicated to destroying every vestige of democratic self-government at home could somehow implant it abroad? That disbelievers in effective governance could establish it in the world’s most inhospitable environment?
In God Is Not Great, his recent book attacking organized religion, Christopher Hitchens does a nice (albeit unoriginal) job of discrediting creationists, and demonstrating their sheer irrationality. They refuse to look squarely at the reality of the material world. Yet in March 2003 he (and his cohort) looked the reality of the United States squarely in the eye: and flinched. To flinch in the face of reality: that is the definition of worldly irrationality. Calling what they did a “mistake” bred by “dogmatic”idealism, as Ignatieff does in his New York Times Magazine mea culpa, is to let them all off the hook upon which History has forever impaled them.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Myths about Immigration: Part 1
The following essay, published here in three parts, appeared whole in http://www.logosjournal.com/Winter-Spring 2007 Issue
I have neither the capability for nor even the intention of influencing the contemporary debate on immigration. The boundaries of that debate lie so far outside the realm of what I consider to be incontrovertible ethical principles that I wouldn’t no how to go about participating in it. Still, I can’t refrain from attempting to state those principles, for whomever might be listening.
Principles can’t dictate policies, but ought at least to inform them. So ought facts. The contemporary mass migration of peoples is an irreversible fact, and so it’s not only undesirable but impossible to discuss policy without both acknowledging the facts and entering the realm of principle.
Superficially the policy issues seem to be diverse, as varying concrete socioeconomic conditions push different needs and desires to the forefront of national discourse. In the United States, for example, the potential impact of increased immigration on the condition of domestic labor and an allegedly consequent worsening of an already gross state of economic inequality draws the most attention. In Sweden, it’s the potential impact of immigration on the maintenance of a generous welfare state that is the most salient issue; in France, the creation of a new, alienated, underclass; in Britain, fears of terror and crime; in Canada, pressure on an underpopulated society with a tight labor market; in The Netherlands, a threat to the ideal of multi-cultural balance.
These varying situations produce the roster of what men of affairs call “practical possibilities,” but discussion of them usually proceeds without approaching the underlying realities: ethical or material. Yet at the same time, one over-arching and inescapable rubric describes what is happening in all the nations that play host to or provide the new form of mass population movements. This is the world-wide existence of two kinds of societies: one, a thriving core of advanced capitalist economies and white-dominated social structures; the other, the less-productive economies and often weak or predatory states of the mostly non-white periphery. (The wealthy nations of Asia are neither givers nor receivers of mass migrations.)
Just as there is in the international economy a global market for capital, and commodities, and cultural products, in which the law of supply and demand is an underlying law of motion, so there is and has to be a global market for labor–for a new proletariat, though not perhaps as Marx envisioned it. Of course like capitalist employers everywhere, the political and economic elites of the wealthy states want to eliminate any potential bargaining power of this international proletariat, and totally to control the terms of exchange for its labor: to eliminate one side of the supply/demand equation. At the level of popular politics, though, elites have to proffer one or another variant of nationalism as a way to negotiate the enormous gap between their power and the demands of domestic classes. However, viewed from either perspective this longing for control is clearly chimerical in the long run. The idea that the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work can be contained by the arbitrary obstacle course of national boundaries–often nothing but lines drawn in the sand (as between the U.S. and Mexico)–is absurd on its face.
To sustain general ignorance of the obvious, it is always necessary to have recourse to the realm of generally accepted myths. Of course even when a useful belief has come to be generally accepted, the elites whose position it supports still need to spend millions or billions of dollars and control major institutions of communication to continue propagating it, or its hold on the electorate will weaken. We should never lose sight of this central feature of political life, in the midst of decrying the apparent power of myths. At any rate, in this context stating governing principles means not so much setting out a controlling ethic of discourse, but rather uncovering and exposing the conventional myths that prevent serious ethical discussion from ever taking place. Three myths in particular dominate the nationalistic discourse on immigration, and the beginning of serious discussion requires that their rhetorical sway be dispelled. That’s what I hope to accomplish here.
I have neither the capability for nor even the intention of influencing the contemporary debate on immigration. The boundaries of that debate lie so far outside the realm of what I consider to be incontrovertible ethical principles that I wouldn’t no how to go about participating in it. Still, I can’t refrain from attempting to state those principles, for whomever might be listening.
Principles can’t dictate policies, but ought at least to inform them. So ought facts. The contemporary mass migration of peoples is an irreversible fact, and so it’s not only undesirable but impossible to discuss policy without both acknowledging the facts and entering the realm of principle.
Superficially the policy issues seem to be diverse, as varying concrete socioeconomic conditions push different needs and desires to the forefront of national discourse. In the United States, for example, the potential impact of increased immigration on the condition of domestic labor and an allegedly consequent worsening of an already gross state of economic inequality draws the most attention. In Sweden, it’s the potential impact of immigration on the maintenance of a generous welfare state that is the most salient issue; in France, the creation of a new, alienated, underclass; in Britain, fears of terror and crime; in Canada, pressure on an underpopulated society with a tight labor market; in The Netherlands, a threat to the ideal of multi-cultural balance.
These varying situations produce the roster of what men of affairs call “practical possibilities,” but discussion of them usually proceeds without approaching the underlying realities: ethical or material. Yet at the same time, one over-arching and inescapable rubric describes what is happening in all the nations that play host to or provide the new form of mass population movements. This is the world-wide existence of two kinds of societies: one, a thriving core of advanced capitalist economies and white-dominated social structures; the other, the less-productive economies and often weak or predatory states of the mostly non-white periphery. (The wealthy nations of Asia are neither givers nor receivers of mass migrations.)
Just as there is in the international economy a global market for capital, and commodities, and cultural products, in which the law of supply and demand is an underlying law of motion, so there is and has to be a global market for labor–for a new proletariat, though not perhaps as Marx envisioned it. Of course like capitalist employers everywhere, the political and economic elites of the wealthy states want to eliminate any potential bargaining power of this international proletariat, and totally to control the terms of exchange for its labor: to eliminate one side of the supply/demand equation. At the level of popular politics, though, elites have to proffer one or another variant of nationalism as a way to negotiate the enormous gap between their power and the demands of domestic classes. However, viewed from either perspective this longing for control is clearly chimerical in the long run. The idea that the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work can be contained by the arbitrary obstacle course of national boundaries–often nothing but lines drawn in the sand (as between the U.S. and Mexico)–is absurd on its face.
To sustain general ignorance of the obvious, it is always necessary to have recourse to the realm of generally accepted myths. Of course even when a useful belief has come to be generally accepted, the elites whose position it supports still need to spend millions or billions of dollars and control major institutions of communication to continue propagating it, or its hold on the electorate will weaken. We should never lose sight of this central feature of political life, in the midst of decrying the apparent power of myths. At any rate, in this context stating governing principles means not so much setting out a controlling ethic of discourse, but rather uncovering and exposing the conventional myths that prevent serious ethical discussion from ever taking place. Three myths in particular dominate the nationalistic discourse on immigration, and the beginning of serious discussion requires that their rhetorical sway be dispelled. That’s what I hope to accomplish here.
Myths about Immigration: Part 2
The myth of culture is closely allied with a second myth, the myth of the democratic people. Who exactly are these “people” for whom a given set of appropriately realized laws etc. is supposedly authoritative? The standard answer to that question makes “democracy” into an off-shoot of the modern nation-state, but other than as reference to an historical past that may already be outmoded, there’s no obvious reason why that answer is appropriate. Most readers of this blog, for example, are probably American citizens. According to the standard version, therefore, we should all feel at one with all the other persons who meet that description, both juridically and--to some ill-defined extent--emotionally. All together and equally, we make up “the American democracy.” But many of us (myself included) do not in fact feel that way. There are legitimately authorized laws, policies, and decisions that we accede to only out of fear of the costs we might incur if we did not accede; or because our connection to the polity and its economic base is so attenuated that we have no meaningful way of registering our opposition, so why bother? (Our dissent is easy and usually meaningless to register, but not our profound opposition). At the same time, there are millions of our fellow citizens whom we think of much more as enemies than as fellows, and there are residents of other polities with whom we have (or feel we have) much more in common. And of course there are many Americans who feel that way about us: that we are traitors, “socialists,” doers of Satanic works, etc. What, other than sheer force makes this collection of persons a “people” let alone a “democratic people,” is opaque.
Conversely, those of us who belong to the professional class and live in a large, “first-world” city, sometimes directly employ and regularly (as when eating out) make indirect use of, the labor of persons who are legal outcasts in our society, or are treated as juridical inferiors. These differentiations are essentially arbitrary by any standard of judgment or value we can imagine. Furthermore, these persons, such as the Latina nannies who are a constant presence in my New York City neighborhood, often serve our interests considerably better, and with infinitely less harm to the common weal, than do, say, some CEO’s of global or national corporations. Yet the received version of democracy moves on with its grand narrative of human agency, all the while unable to give a coherent account of who the agents of this narrative are or ought to be; of why they can only be one class of persons rather than another.
Mass immigration, in other words, is not primarily a story of “peoples,” though it can be read that way for purposes of sociological analysis and the writing of discriminatory laws. Primarily–the mobility of trained professionals aside--it is a story of poor persons from poor countries looking for work in rich countries: persons who are marked fundamentally by their diversity (as are those who are willing to employ them as well). In the end, the only truthful, non-ideological, generalization that can be uttered about immigrants in this or any other context is that they will bring change to their host nation: always have, and always will. But fear of change is not an ethic. It’s more properly described as a neurosis, and in the case of the verbal bomb-throwers of today’s Right, a pathology: the same pathology that disfigured so much of the 20th Century. The words of hate uttered by John Kyl, Ann Coulter, and the rest of the Right-wing enrages, have more in common with the vocabulary of Adolph Hitler than with that of Franklin D. Roosevelt; just as for a great many white Americans of European descent, the inspiriting Latin- and Asian-inflected demonstrations of April 10 were certainly more in their “national” tradition than the loathsome manifestations of the K.K.K. Who in these pairs best represents the “American culture?”
The question is unanswerable, because it implies an objective factual account of a concept that is wholly and controversially normative. When the demagogues of the United States, or even the somewhat more ethnically homogeneous France or The Netherlands, start conjuring up the terrors of linguistic or religious or ethnic diversity, we have to take note that they are in every case obliterating large quantities of the “national” past. In all these cases, that national past includes the obliteration of actual peoples, and thousands or millions of persons, as well: including especially the forebears of the people they are now perceiving as a “cultural” problem.
The third great myth of the immigration debate is the master myth, to which the myths of national culture and the democratic people are subsidiary. This is the uninterrogated notion of the sovereign national state as an ethical entity, legitimately constituted by “rights” of exclusion as well as by sovereign powers over those whom it includes.
That it can be conceived of as a criminal offense, that a law-abiding, hard-working, person can be the object of authorized violence for wanting to work or live in one place rather than another, is actually an astonishing proposition. Nothing in the realm of ethics or right or duty can possibly uphold it. Hidden from view, but apparent on close inspection, the awareness of that truth will be evident to any dispassionate observe. Consider, for example, the following statements from the decision in the case of Edwards v. California (314 U.S. 160) enshrined in American constitutional law since 1941:
...[T]his does not mean to imply that there are no boundaries to the permissible area of State legislative activity. There are. And none is more certain than the prohibition against attempts on the part of any single State to isolate itself from difficulties common to all of them by restraining the transportation of person and property across its borders.” (From the opinion of the Court by Justice Byrnes, perhaps the most conservative member of the “Roosevelt Court”).
“...I am of the opinion that the right of persons to move freely from State to State occupies a more protected position in our constitutional system than does the movement of cattle, fruit, steel and coal across state lines.” (Justice Douglas, concurring).
“Thus it is plain that the right of free ingress and egress rises to a higher constitutional dignity than that afforded by state citizenship.” (Ibid.)
These statements all rest, as they had to, on the peculiarly American Constitutional distinction between states and nation. The State is sovereign; the states are not. Yet none of those statements would have to be changed by so much as a word if the distinction were instead being made between one nation-state and a world of nation-states. It would still be the case that as Chief Justice Fuller held in the earlier case of Williams v. Fears (179 U.S. 270, 274; quoted by Justice Jackson in his concurring opinion in Edwards): “Undoubtedly the right of locomotion, the right to remove from one place to another according to inclination, is an attribute of personal liberty...” To this he of course added that “...the right, ordinarily, of free transit from or through the territory of any State is a right secured by the Fourteenth Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution.” However, it is crystal clear from Fuller’s wording that the right, the attribute, is “secured” by the Constitution–not created by it. It is surely, if there be any such at all, a natural right–as much so as any could be, with the exception of the right of self-defense. Or if we prefer to avoid the anachronistic language of natural rights, we can simply make use of the latter part of Fuller’s holding: we are speaking of a basic attribute of being a free human being.
The Edwards case held, in fact, that Americans were free to travel from any state in the Union to any other without being prevented entry, or deported, on the grounds that they were “indigent,” one of the hobgoblins that used to be periodically trotted out to keep Okies, or Arkies, or African–Americans, or Puerto Ricans, from being treated as equal citizens wherever in the U.S. they might wind up. This freedom was to be upheld regardless of whatever “drain” a person or group of persons might be alleged to constitute on available resources or public funds; or however “inferior” their “culture” might be. For the U.S., it rested on the relatively generous Constitutional notion of American citizenship. We have to remember however that citizenship is strictly a legal and not at all an ethical condition. Constitutionally or legislatively, it is granted on arbitrary grounds by sovereign states, and that is all. Moreover, the unitary conception of citizenship implicit in the American Constitutional system (and most others) is fast disappearing from the international social order. Viewed in this light the principle of Williams and Edwards is quite clearly not merely a constitutional principle, but is also a general principle about human society.
How then did this basic right of free movement come to be so constrained? How did the laisser passer, the original passport that promised citizens protection while abroad, come to be reconstituted as a weapon against unofficial border crossing in either direction? That is a recent innovation, and it came about not as part of the flowering of individual rights attendant on the rise of the democratic state, but as part of the assertion of powers attendant on its aggressive development. In historical fact, all the rhetoric about the right of states “to control their own borders” obscures the truth that finally this is yet another instance of the strong exercising a “right” against the weak; it is not a right in any sense of the word but is instead a privilege of the ones who have the power to do it. Mexico can’t prevent the entrance of Americans and their capital to own portions of its economy--this would be known as autarchy, or worse yet socialism, and condemned to history’s graveyard.
States do not have rights, they just have powers; only persons have rights. Particular states may protect those rights–sometimes. The US has the power to keep troops in various nations which do not have troops stationed in the US. In this respect the whole discourse about immigration has implicitly assumed the coincidence of law and justice, but they could only conceivably be coincident if the entire world were covered by one universally agreed-on law. As it is, the arrest and imprisonment or deportation of harmless persons for being in one place rather than another is slightly more lawful and sometimes less harmful, but no more just, than torturing them. Guantanamo and one of the horrendous Corrections Corporation “detention centers” are the same kind of facility–a facility in which naked state power, unsupported by anything but its own public opinion (if that), is exercised.
As for the demagogic cry that there should be “no amnesty for lawbreakers,” its reasoning is as tortured as the treatment of persons that it so often justifies. The only “law” broken by illegal immigrants is the law that they shouldn’t be illegal immigrants! There is no moral rule or reasonable behavioral constraint that they have violated. To the contrary, the only thing most of them have ever done is work hard. That’s what immigrants, legal or illegal, male or female, come to other countries to do. (The status of refugees from persecution and violence raises different issues.) If they commit crimes, here or there, they can be treated as criminals–but that is true of all persons wherever they live or come from. Geography conveys positive legal rights, but not rights of exclusion–or if it does, they can’t be defended morally.
In this respect, one last word about the contemporary American debate is in order. Given elites’ constant resort to the “work ethic” to criticize the behavior of lesser breeds among the domestic population, one of the most ironic spectacles of the early 21st Century is the sight of white politicians and journalists, not to mention the gun-loving, Armageddon-welcoming white residents of states such as Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, stepping forward to defend the job security of low-wage black workers in the underbelly of the American economy. As it stands, about the only “help” offered to low-wage workers of any kind by the governing elites and majority population of those states is building more prisons, thus keeping those wages up by getting a few hundred thousand more black men, many “guilty” of nothing worse than drug abuse or drug peddling, out of the job market.
Of course it can be argued in defense of restrictions on immigration that the free market for labor is the most anti-human of all free markets. That, however, would be an inversion of Marx, from whom such a notion derives. His critique of the free market for labor is that it prevents people from protecting themselves against exploitation, hazard, insecurity, obsolescence, etc., as well as against organized strikebreaking. And as he argued and history has borne out, only the collective action of workers themselves can establish those protections. As for immigrants, if welcomed into existing workers’ movements anywhere, and possessing both the power to organize and the right to vote, they would provide more impetus to that action, and more bodies for its manifestations.
Using the critique of the free market to protect jobs against other people who want them at lower wages (i.e, who are willing to endure a higher rate of exploitation) is thus a mis-use. If this is a genuine concern, then the obvious course of action is to raise minimum wages, preserve the right to strike, and increase the scope and depth of public welfare services via the solidarity of workers, and thus to reduce the general rate of exploitation; not to set workers against each other. The myths of nation, culture, and “the people,” however, have always been and still are intended to do exactly that.
Fin.
Conversely, those of us who belong to the professional class and live in a large, “first-world” city, sometimes directly employ and regularly (as when eating out) make indirect use of, the labor of persons who are legal outcasts in our society, or are treated as juridical inferiors. These differentiations are essentially arbitrary by any standard of judgment or value we can imagine. Furthermore, these persons, such as the Latina nannies who are a constant presence in my New York City neighborhood, often serve our interests considerably better, and with infinitely less harm to the common weal, than do, say, some CEO’s of global or national corporations. Yet the received version of democracy moves on with its grand narrative of human agency, all the while unable to give a coherent account of who the agents of this narrative are or ought to be; of why they can only be one class of persons rather than another.
Mass immigration, in other words, is not primarily a story of “peoples,” though it can be read that way for purposes of sociological analysis and the writing of discriminatory laws. Primarily–the mobility of trained professionals aside--it is a story of poor persons from poor countries looking for work in rich countries: persons who are marked fundamentally by their diversity (as are those who are willing to employ them as well). In the end, the only truthful, non-ideological, generalization that can be uttered about immigrants in this or any other context is that they will bring change to their host nation: always have, and always will. But fear of change is not an ethic. It’s more properly described as a neurosis, and in the case of the verbal bomb-throwers of today’s Right, a pathology: the same pathology that disfigured so much of the 20th Century. The words of hate uttered by John Kyl, Ann Coulter, and the rest of the Right-wing enrages, have more in common with the vocabulary of Adolph Hitler than with that of Franklin D. Roosevelt; just as for a great many white Americans of European descent, the inspiriting Latin- and Asian-inflected demonstrations of April 10 were certainly more in their “national” tradition than the loathsome manifestations of the K.K.K. Who in these pairs best represents the “American culture?”
The question is unanswerable, because it implies an objective factual account of a concept that is wholly and controversially normative. When the demagogues of the United States, or even the somewhat more ethnically homogeneous France or The Netherlands, start conjuring up the terrors of linguistic or religious or ethnic diversity, we have to take note that they are in every case obliterating large quantities of the “national” past. In all these cases, that national past includes the obliteration of actual peoples, and thousands or millions of persons, as well: including especially the forebears of the people they are now perceiving as a “cultural” problem.
The third great myth of the immigration debate is the master myth, to which the myths of national culture and the democratic people are subsidiary. This is the uninterrogated notion of the sovereign national state as an ethical entity, legitimately constituted by “rights” of exclusion as well as by sovereign powers over those whom it includes.
That it can be conceived of as a criminal offense, that a law-abiding, hard-working, person can be the object of authorized violence for wanting to work or live in one place rather than another, is actually an astonishing proposition. Nothing in the realm of ethics or right or duty can possibly uphold it. Hidden from view, but apparent on close inspection, the awareness of that truth will be evident to any dispassionate observe. Consider, for example, the following statements from the decision in the case of Edwards v. California (314 U.S. 160) enshrined in American constitutional law since 1941:
...[T]his does not mean to imply that there are no boundaries to the permissible area of State legislative activity. There are. And none is more certain than the prohibition against attempts on the part of any single State to isolate itself from difficulties common to all of them by restraining the transportation of person and property across its borders.” (From the opinion of the Court by Justice Byrnes, perhaps the most conservative member of the “Roosevelt Court”).
“...I am of the opinion that the right of persons to move freely from State to State occupies a more protected position in our constitutional system than does the movement of cattle, fruit, steel and coal across state lines.” (Justice Douglas, concurring).
“Thus it is plain that the right of free ingress and egress rises to a higher constitutional dignity than that afforded by state citizenship.” (Ibid.)
These statements all rest, as they had to, on the peculiarly American Constitutional distinction between states and nation. The State is sovereign; the states are not. Yet none of those statements would have to be changed by so much as a word if the distinction were instead being made between one nation-state and a world of nation-states. It would still be the case that as Chief Justice Fuller held in the earlier case of Williams v. Fears (179 U.S. 270, 274; quoted by Justice Jackson in his concurring opinion in Edwards): “Undoubtedly the right of locomotion, the right to remove from one place to another according to inclination, is an attribute of personal liberty...” To this he of course added that “...the right, ordinarily, of free transit from or through the territory of any State is a right secured by the Fourteenth Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution.” However, it is crystal clear from Fuller’s wording that the right, the attribute, is “secured” by the Constitution–not created by it. It is surely, if there be any such at all, a natural right–as much so as any could be, with the exception of the right of self-defense. Or if we prefer to avoid the anachronistic language of natural rights, we can simply make use of the latter part of Fuller’s holding: we are speaking of a basic attribute of being a free human being.
The Edwards case held, in fact, that Americans were free to travel from any state in the Union to any other without being prevented entry, or deported, on the grounds that they were “indigent,” one of the hobgoblins that used to be periodically trotted out to keep Okies, or Arkies, or African–Americans, or Puerto Ricans, from being treated as equal citizens wherever in the U.S. they might wind up. This freedom was to be upheld regardless of whatever “drain” a person or group of persons might be alleged to constitute on available resources or public funds; or however “inferior” their “culture” might be. For the U.S., it rested on the relatively generous Constitutional notion of American citizenship. We have to remember however that citizenship is strictly a legal and not at all an ethical condition. Constitutionally or legislatively, it is granted on arbitrary grounds by sovereign states, and that is all. Moreover, the unitary conception of citizenship implicit in the American Constitutional system (and most others) is fast disappearing from the international social order. Viewed in this light the principle of Williams and Edwards is quite clearly not merely a constitutional principle, but is also a general principle about human society.
How then did this basic right of free movement come to be so constrained? How did the laisser passer, the original passport that promised citizens protection while abroad, come to be reconstituted as a weapon against unofficial border crossing in either direction? That is a recent innovation, and it came about not as part of the flowering of individual rights attendant on the rise of the democratic state, but as part of the assertion of powers attendant on its aggressive development. In historical fact, all the rhetoric about the right of states “to control their own borders” obscures the truth that finally this is yet another instance of the strong exercising a “right” against the weak; it is not a right in any sense of the word but is instead a privilege of the ones who have the power to do it. Mexico can’t prevent the entrance of Americans and their capital to own portions of its economy--this would be known as autarchy, or worse yet socialism, and condemned to history’s graveyard.
States do not have rights, they just have powers; only persons have rights. Particular states may protect those rights–sometimes. The US has the power to keep troops in various nations which do not have troops stationed in the US. In this respect the whole discourse about immigration has implicitly assumed the coincidence of law and justice, but they could only conceivably be coincident if the entire world were covered by one universally agreed-on law. As it is, the arrest and imprisonment or deportation of harmless persons for being in one place rather than another is slightly more lawful and sometimes less harmful, but no more just, than torturing them. Guantanamo and one of the horrendous Corrections Corporation “detention centers” are the same kind of facility–a facility in which naked state power, unsupported by anything but its own public opinion (if that), is exercised.
As for the demagogic cry that there should be “no amnesty for lawbreakers,” its reasoning is as tortured as the treatment of persons that it so often justifies. The only “law” broken by illegal immigrants is the law that they shouldn’t be illegal immigrants! There is no moral rule or reasonable behavioral constraint that they have violated. To the contrary, the only thing most of them have ever done is work hard. That’s what immigrants, legal or illegal, male or female, come to other countries to do. (The status of refugees from persecution and violence raises different issues.) If they commit crimes, here or there, they can be treated as criminals–but that is true of all persons wherever they live or come from. Geography conveys positive legal rights, but not rights of exclusion–or if it does, they can’t be defended morally.
In this respect, one last word about the contemporary American debate is in order. Given elites’ constant resort to the “work ethic” to criticize the behavior of lesser breeds among the domestic population, one of the most ironic spectacles of the early 21st Century is the sight of white politicians and journalists, not to mention the gun-loving, Armageddon-welcoming white residents of states such as Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, stepping forward to defend the job security of low-wage black workers in the underbelly of the American economy. As it stands, about the only “help” offered to low-wage workers of any kind by the governing elites and majority population of those states is building more prisons, thus keeping those wages up by getting a few hundred thousand more black men, many “guilty” of nothing worse than drug abuse or drug peddling, out of the job market.
Of course it can be argued in defense of restrictions on immigration that the free market for labor is the most anti-human of all free markets. That, however, would be an inversion of Marx, from whom such a notion derives. His critique of the free market for labor is that it prevents people from protecting themselves against exploitation, hazard, insecurity, obsolescence, etc., as well as against organized strikebreaking. And as he argued and history has borne out, only the collective action of workers themselves can establish those protections. As for immigrants, if welcomed into existing workers’ movements anywhere, and possessing both the power to organize and the right to vote, they would provide more impetus to that action, and more bodies for its manifestations.
Using the critique of the free market to protect jobs against other people who want them at lower wages (i.e, who are willing to endure a higher rate of exploitation) is thus a mis-use. If this is a genuine concern, then the obvious course of action is to raise minimum wages, preserve the right to strike, and increase the scope and depth of public welfare services via the solidarity of workers, and thus to reduce the general rate of exploitation; not to set workers against each other. The myths of nation, culture, and “the people,” however, have always been and still are intended to do exactly that.
Fin.
Myths about Immigration: Part 3
The myth of culture is closely allied with a second myth, the myth of the democratic people. Who exactly are these “people” for whom a given set of appropriately realized laws etc. is supposedly authoritative? The standard answer to that question makes “democracy” into an off-shoot of the modern nation-state, but other than as reference to an historical past that may already be outmoded, there’s no obvious reason why that answer is appropriate. Most readers of this blog, for example, are probably American citizens. According to the standard version, therefore, we should all feel at one with all the other persons who meet that description, both juridically and--to some ill-defined extent--emotionally. All together and equally, we make up “the American democracy.” But many of us (myself included) do not in fact feel that way. There are legitimately authorized laws, policies, and decisions that we accede to only out of fear of the costs we might incur if we did not accede; or because our connection to the polity and its economic base is so attenuated that we have no meaningful way of registering our opposition, so why bother? (Our dissent is easy and usually meaningless to register, but not our profound opposition). At the same time, there are millions of our fellow citizens whom we think of much more as enemies than as fellows, and there are residents of other polities with whom we have (or feel we have) much more in common. And of course there are many Americans who feel that way about us: that we are traitors, “socialists,” doers of Satanic works, etc. What, other than sheer force makes this collection of persons a “people” let alone a “democratic people,” is opaque.
Conversely, those of us who belong to the professional class and live in a large, “first-world” city, sometimes directly employ and regularly (as when eating out) make indirect use of, the labor of persons who are legal outcasts in our society, or are treated as juridical inferiors. These differentiations are essentially arbitrary by any standard of judgment or value we can imagine. Furthermore, these persons, such as the Latina nannies who are a constant presence in my New York City neighborhood, often serve our interests considerably better, and with infinitely less harm to the common weal, than do, say, some CEO’s of global or national corporations. Yet the received version of democracy moves on with its grand narrative of human agency, all the while unable to give a coherent account of who the agents of this narrative are or ought to be; of why they can only be one class of persons rather than another.
Mass immigration, in other words, is not primarily a story of “peoples,” though it can be read that way for purposes of sociological analysis and the writing of discriminatory laws. Primarily–the mobility of trained professionals aside--it is a story of poor persons from poor countries looking for work in rich countries: persons who are marked fundamentally by their diversity (as are those who are willing to employ them as well). In the end, the only truthful, non-ideological, generalization that can be uttered about immigrants in this or any other context is that they will bring change to their host nation: always have, and always will. But fear of change is not an ethic. It’s more properly described as a neurosis, and in the case of the verbal bomb-throwers of today’s Right, a pathology: the same pathology that disfigured so much of the 20th Century. The words of hate uttered by John Kyl, Ann Coulter, and the rest of the Right-wing enrages, have more in common with the vocabulary of Adolph Hitler than with that of Franklin D. Roosevelt; just as for a great many white Americans of European descent, the inspiriting Latin- and Asian-inflected demonstrations of April 10 were certainly more in their “national” tradition than the loathsome manifestations of the K.K.K. Who in these pairs best represents the “American culture?”
The question is unanswerable, because it implies an objective factual account of a concept that is wholly and controversially normative. When the demagogues of the United States, or even the somewhat more ethnically homogeneous France or The Netherlands, start conjuring up the terrors of linguistic or religious or ethnic diversity, we have to take note that they are in every case obliterating large quantities of the “national” past. In all these cases, that national past includes the obliteration of actual peoples, and thousands or millions of persons, as well: including especially the forebears of the people they are now perceiving as a “cultural” problem.
The third great myth of the immigration debate is the master myth, to which the myths of national culture and the democratic people are subsidiary. This is the uninterrogated notion of the sovereign national state as an ethical entity, legitimately constituted by “rights” of exclusion as well as by sovereign powers over those whom it includes.
That it can be conceived of as a criminal offense, that a law-abiding, hard-working, person can be the object of authorized violence for wanting to work or live in one place rather than another, is actually an astonishing proposition. Nothing in the realm of ethics or right or duty can possibly uphold it. Hidden from view, but apparent on close inspection, the awareness of that truth will be evident to any dispassionate observe. Consider, for example, the following statements from the decision in the case of Edwards v. California (314 U.S. 160) enshrined in American constitutional law since 1941:
...[T]his does not mean to imply that there are no boundaries to the permissible area of State legislative activity. There are. And none is more certain than the prohibition against attempts on the part of any single State to isolate itself from difficulties common to all of them by restraining the transportation of person and property across its borders.” (From the opinion of the Court by Justice Byrnes, perhaps the most conservative member of the “Roosevelt Court”).
“...I am of the opinion that the right of persons to move freely from State to State occupies a more protected position in our constitutional system than does the movement of cattle, fruit, steel and coal across state lines.” (Justice Douglas, concurring).
“Thus it is plain that the right of free ingress and egress rises to a higher constitutional dignity than that afforded by state citizenship.” (Ibid.)
These statements all rest, as they had to, on the peculiarly American Constitutional distinction between states and nation. The State is sovereign; the states are not. Yet none of those statements would have to be changed by so much as a word if the distinction were instead being made between one nation-state and a world of nation-states. It would still be the case that as Chief Justice Fuller held in the earlier case of Williams v. Fears (179 U.S. 270, 274; quoted by Justice Jackson in his concurring opinion in Edwards): “Undoubtedly the right of locomotion, the right to remove from one place to another according to inclination, is an attribute of personal liberty...” To this he of course added that “...the right, ordinarily, of free transit from or through the territory of any State is a right secured by the Fourteenth Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution.” However, it is crystal clear from Fuller’s wording that the right, the attribute, is “secured” by the Constitution–not created by it. It is surely, if there be any such at all, a natural right–as much so as any could be, with the exception of the right of self-defense. Or if we prefer to avoid the anachronistic language of natural rights, we can simply make use of the latter part of Fuller’s holding: we are speaking of a basic attribute of being a free human being.
The Edwards case held, in fact, that Americans were free to travel from any state in the Union to any other without being prevented entry, or deported, on the grounds that they were “indigent,” one of the hobgoblins that used to be periodically trotted out to keep Okies, or Arkies, or African–Americans, or Puerto Ricans, from being treated as equal citizens wherever in the U.S. they might wind up. This freedom was to be upheld regardless of whatever “drain” a person or group of persons might be alleged to constitute on available resources or public funds; or however “inferior” their “culture” might be. For the U.S., it rested on the relatively generous Constitutional notion of American citizenship. We have to remember however that citizenship is strictly a legal and not at all an ethical condition. Constitutionally or legislatively, it is granted on arbitrary grounds by sovereign states, and that is all. Moreover, the unitary conception of citizenship implicit in the American Constitutional system (and most others) is fast disappearing from the international social order. Viewed in this light the principle of Williams and Edwards is quite clearly not merely a constitutional principle, but is also a general principle about human society.
How then did this basic right of free movement come to be so constrained? How did the laisser passer, the original passport that promised citizens protection while abroad, come to be reconstituted as a weapon against unofficial border crossing in either direction? That is a recent innovation, and it came about not as part of the flowering of individual rights attendant on the rise of the democratic state, but as part of the assertion of powers attendant on its aggressive development. In historical fact, all the rhetoric about the right of states “to control their own borders” obscures the truth that finally this is yet another instance of the strong exercising a “right” against the weak; it is not a right in any sense of the word but is instead a privilege of the ones who have the power to do it. Mexico can’t prevent the entrance of Americans and their capital to own portions of its economy--this would be known as autarchy, or worse yet socialism, and condemned to history’s graveyard.
States do not have rights, they just have powers; only persons have rights. Particular states may protect those rights–sometimes. The US has the power to keep troops in various nations which do not have troops stationed in the US. In this respect the whole discourse about immigration has implicitly assumed the coincidence of law and justice, but they could only conceivably be coincident if the entire world were covered by one universally agreed-on law. As it is, the arrest and imprisonment or deportation of harmless persons for being in one place rather than another is slightly more lawful and sometimes less harmful, but no more just, than torturing them. Guantanamo and one of the horrendous Corrections Corporation “detention centers” are the same kind of facility–a facility in which naked state power, unsupported by anything but its own public opinion (if that), is exercised.
As for the demagogic cry that there should be “no amnesty for lawbreakers,” its reasoning is as tortured as the treatment of persons that it so often justifies. The only “law” broken by illegal immigrants is the law that they shouldn’t be illegal immigrants! There is no moral rule or reasonable behavioral constraint that they have violated. To the contrary, the only thing most of them have ever done is work hard. That’s what immigrants, legal or illegal, male or female, come to other countries to do. (The status of refugees from persecution and violence raises different issues.) If they commit crimes, here or there, they can be treated as criminals–but that is true of all persons wherever they live or come from. Geography conveys positive legal rights, but not rights of exclusion–or if it does, they can’t be defended morally.
In this respect, one last word about the contemporary American debate is in order. Given elites’ constant resort to the “work ethic” to criticize the behavior of lesser breeds among the domestic population, one of the most ironic spectacles of the early 21st Century is the sight of white politicians and journalists, not to mention the gun-loving, Armageddon-welcoming white residents of states such as Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, stepping forward to defend the job security of low-wage black workers in the underbelly of the American economy. As it stands, about the only “help” offered to low-wage workers of any kind by the governing elites and majority population of those states is building more prisons, thus keeping those wages up by getting a few hundred thousand more black men, many “guilty” of nothing worse than drug abuse or drug peddling, out of the job market.
Of course it can be argued in defense of restrictions on immigration that the free market for labor is the most anti-human of all free markets. That, however, would be an inversion of Marx, from whom such a notion derives. His critique of the free market for labor is that it prevents people from protecting themselves against exploitation, hazard, insecurity, obsolescence, etc., as well as against organized strikebreaking. And as he argued and history has borne out, only the collective action of workers themselves can establish those protections. As for immigrants, if welcomed into existing workers’ movements anywhere, and possessing both the power to organize and the right to vote, they would provide more impetus to that action, and more bodies for its manifestations.
Using the critique of the free market to protect jobs against other people who want them at lower wages (i.e, who are willing to endure a higher rate of exploitation) is thus a mis-use. If this is a genuine concern, then the obvious course of action is to raise minimum wages, preserve the right to strike, and increase the scope and depth of public welfare services via the solidarity of workers, and thus to reduce the general rate of exploitation; not to set workers against each other. The myths of nation, culture, and “the people,” however, have always been and still are intended to do exactly that.
Fin.
Conversely, those of us who belong to the professional class and live in a large, “first-world” city, sometimes directly employ and regularly (as when eating out) make indirect use of, the labor of persons who are legal outcasts in our society, or are treated as juridical inferiors. These differentiations are essentially arbitrary by any standard of judgment or value we can imagine. Furthermore, these persons, such as the Latina nannies who are a constant presence in my New York City neighborhood, often serve our interests considerably better, and with infinitely less harm to the common weal, than do, say, some CEO’s of global or national corporations. Yet the received version of democracy moves on with its grand narrative of human agency, all the while unable to give a coherent account of who the agents of this narrative are or ought to be; of why they can only be one class of persons rather than another.
Mass immigration, in other words, is not primarily a story of “peoples,” though it can be read that way for purposes of sociological analysis and the writing of discriminatory laws. Primarily–the mobility of trained professionals aside--it is a story of poor persons from poor countries looking for work in rich countries: persons who are marked fundamentally by their diversity (as are those who are willing to employ them as well). In the end, the only truthful, non-ideological, generalization that can be uttered about immigrants in this or any other context is that they will bring change to their host nation: always have, and always will. But fear of change is not an ethic. It’s more properly described as a neurosis, and in the case of the verbal bomb-throwers of today’s Right, a pathology: the same pathology that disfigured so much of the 20th Century. The words of hate uttered by John Kyl, Ann Coulter, and the rest of the Right-wing enrages, have more in common with the vocabulary of Adolph Hitler than with that of Franklin D. Roosevelt; just as for a great many white Americans of European descent, the inspiriting Latin- and Asian-inflected demonstrations of April 10 were certainly more in their “national” tradition than the loathsome manifestations of the K.K.K. Who in these pairs best represents the “American culture?”
The question is unanswerable, because it implies an objective factual account of a concept that is wholly and controversially normative. When the demagogues of the United States, or even the somewhat more ethnically homogeneous France or The Netherlands, start conjuring up the terrors of linguistic or religious or ethnic diversity, we have to take note that they are in every case obliterating large quantities of the “national” past. In all these cases, that national past includes the obliteration of actual peoples, and thousands or millions of persons, as well: including especially the forebears of the people they are now perceiving as a “cultural” problem.
The third great myth of the immigration debate is the master myth, to which the myths of national culture and the democratic people are subsidiary. This is the uninterrogated notion of the sovereign national state as an ethical entity, legitimately constituted by “rights” of exclusion as well as by sovereign powers over those whom it includes.
That it can be conceived of as a criminal offense, that a law-abiding, hard-working, person can be the object of authorized violence for wanting to work or live in one place rather than another, is actually an astonishing proposition. Nothing in the realm of ethics or right or duty can possibly uphold it. Hidden from view, but apparent on close inspection, the awareness of that truth will be evident to any dispassionate observe. Consider, for example, the following statements from the decision in the case of Edwards v. California (314 U.S. 160) enshrined in American constitutional law since 1941:
...[T]his does not mean to imply that there are no boundaries to the permissible area of State legislative activity. There are. And none is more certain than the prohibition against attempts on the part of any single State to isolate itself from difficulties common to all of them by restraining the transportation of person and property across its borders.” (From the opinion of the Court by Justice Byrnes, perhaps the most conservative member of the “Roosevelt Court”).
“...I am of the opinion that the right of persons to move freely from State to State occupies a more protected position in our constitutional system than does the movement of cattle, fruit, steel and coal across state lines.” (Justice Douglas, concurring).
“Thus it is plain that the right of free ingress and egress rises to a higher constitutional dignity than that afforded by state citizenship.” (Ibid.)
These statements all rest, as they had to, on the peculiarly American Constitutional distinction between states and nation. The State is sovereign; the states are not. Yet none of those statements would have to be changed by so much as a word if the distinction were instead being made between one nation-state and a world of nation-states. It would still be the case that as Chief Justice Fuller held in the earlier case of Williams v. Fears (179 U.S. 270, 274; quoted by Justice Jackson in his concurring opinion in Edwards): “Undoubtedly the right of locomotion, the right to remove from one place to another according to inclination, is an attribute of personal liberty...” To this he of course added that “...the right, ordinarily, of free transit from or through the territory of any State is a right secured by the Fourteenth Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution.” However, it is crystal clear from Fuller’s wording that the right, the attribute, is “secured” by the Constitution–not created by it. It is surely, if there be any such at all, a natural right–as much so as any could be, with the exception of the right of self-defense. Or if we prefer to avoid the anachronistic language of natural rights, we can simply make use of the latter part of Fuller’s holding: we are speaking of a basic attribute of being a free human being.
The Edwards case held, in fact, that Americans were free to travel from any state in the Union to any other without being prevented entry, or deported, on the grounds that they were “indigent,” one of the hobgoblins that used to be periodically trotted out to keep Okies, or Arkies, or African–Americans, or Puerto Ricans, from being treated as equal citizens wherever in the U.S. they might wind up. This freedom was to be upheld regardless of whatever “drain” a person or group of persons might be alleged to constitute on available resources or public funds; or however “inferior” their “culture” might be. For the U.S., it rested on the relatively generous Constitutional notion of American citizenship. We have to remember however that citizenship is strictly a legal and not at all an ethical condition. Constitutionally or legislatively, it is granted on arbitrary grounds by sovereign states, and that is all. Moreover, the unitary conception of citizenship implicit in the American Constitutional system (and most others) is fast disappearing from the international social order. Viewed in this light the principle of Williams and Edwards is quite clearly not merely a constitutional principle, but is also a general principle about human society.
How then did this basic right of free movement come to be so constrained? How did the laisser passer, the original passport that promised citizens protection while abroad, come to be reconstituted as a weapon against unofficial border crossing in either direction? That is a recent innovation, and it came about not as part of the flowering of individual rights attendant on the rise of the democratic state, but as part of the assertion of powers attendant on its aggressive development. In historical fact, all the rhetoric about the right of states “to control their own borders” obscures the truth that finally this is yet another instance of the strong exercising a “right” against the weak; it is not a right in any sense of the word but is instead a privilege of the ones who have the power to do it. Mexico can’t prevent the entrance of Americans and their capital to own portions of its economy--this would be known as autarchy, or worse yet socialism, and condemned to history’s graveyard.
States do not have rights, they just have powers; only persons have rights. Particular states may protect those rights–sometimes. The US has the power to keep troops in various nations which do not have troops stationed in the US. In this respect the whole discourse about immigration has implicitly assumed the coincidence of law and justice, but they could only conceivably be coincident if the entire world were covered by one universally agreed-on law. As it is, the arrest and imprisonment or deportation of harmless persons for being in one place rather than another is slightly more lawful and sometimes less harmful, but no more just, than torturing them. Guantanamo and one of the horrendous Corrections Corporation “detention centers” are the same kind of facility–a facility in which naked state power, unsupported by anything but its own public opinion (if that), is exercised.
As for the demagogic cry that there should be “no amnesty for lawbreakers,” its reasoning is as tortured as the treatment of persons that it so often justifies. The only “law” broken by illegal immigrants is the law that they shouldn’t be illegal immigrants! There is no moral rule or reasonable behavioral constraint that they have violated. To the contrary, the only thing most of them have ever done is work hard. That’s what immigrants, legal or illegal, male or female, come to other countries to do. (The status of refugees from persecution and violence raises different issues.) If they commit crimes, here or there, they can be treated as criminals–but that is true of all persons wherever they live or come from. Geography conveys positive legal rights, but not rights of exclusion–or if it does, they can’t be defended morally.
In this respect, one last word about the contemporary American debate is in order. Given elites’ constant resort to the “work ethic” to criticize the behavior of lesser breeds among the domestic population, one of the most ironic spectacles of the early 21st Century is the sight of white politicians and journalists, not to mention the gun-loving, Armageddon-welcoming white residents of states such as Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, stepping forward to defend the job security of low-wage black workers in the underbelly of the American economy. As it stands, about the only “help” offered to low-wage workers of any kind by the governing elites and majority population of those states is building more prisons, thus keeping those wages up by getting a few hundred thousand more black men, many “guilty” of nothing worse than drug abuse or drug peddling, out of the job market.
Of course it can be argued in defense of restrictions on immigration that the free market for labor is the most anti-human of all free markets. That, however, would be an inversion of Marx, from whom such a notion derives. His critique of the free market for labor is that it prevents people from protecting themselves against exploitation, hazard, insecurity, obsolescence, etc., as well as against organized strikebreaking. And as he argued and history has borne out, only the collective action of workers themselves can establish those protections. As for immigrants, if welcomed into existing workers’ movements anywhere, and possessing both the power to organize and the right to vote, they would provide more impetus to that action, and more bodies for its manifestations.
Using the critique of the free market to protect jobs against other people who want them at lower wages (i.e, who are willing to endure a higher rate of exploitation) is thus a mis-use. If this is a genuine concern, then the obvious course of action is to raise minimum wages, preserve the right to strike, and increase the scope and depth of public welfare services via the solidarity of workers, and thus to reduce the general rate of exploitation; not to set workers against each other. The myths of nation, culture, and “the people,” however, have always been and still are intended to do exactly that.
Fin.
Friday, May 4, 2007
The Falsehood of "Religious Freedom"
Item from The New York Times Metro Section of May 3rd: The Catholic Church strongly resisted and will challenge in court a Connecticut bill, passed overwhelmingly by the state legislature (and voted for by many Catholics), that would require hospitals to provide rape victims with emergency contraception (“Plan B”), even though the legislature compromised by crafting the bill so as to allow “independent third-party health care providers” to administer the drug at hospitals.
Why? Well, the requirement would conflict with Catholic beliefs, “which state that life begins at conception and prohibit abortion.” A lawyer for the Church (Barry Feldman, oy) said that “this is a blow to religious freedom that sets a terrible precedent.”
Actually, it sets a wonderful precedent, though not quite, since several other states have already passed similar legislation. The exemption of institutions claiming “religious beliefs” from the reasonable requirements of civil society, not to mention taxes, is one of the scandals of American political life. We’re not talking about conscientious objection here, since an exemption for believers is provided (see above); just as, e.g., Quakers were allowed to do alternative service rather than be drafted into the military. (And those who refused to compromise with civil society at all, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, cheerfully went to jail instead.) And we’re not talking about that principle of “religious freedom,” since no one is being forbidden to go to their own church, pray to their own god, attend their own indoctrination sessions, and so forth. No, what is at stake–what is often at stake when “religious freedom” is falsely invoked--is the demand by churches and their spokesmen that society organize itself around their principles of behavior and none other. Not only that they be allowed to evade doing what they don’t want to do, but that no one else be allowed to do it either!
Should Sikhs be granted an exemption from legislation requiring motorcycle riders to wear helmets? That’s a tough one–since when is riding motorcycles an important social practice requiring special recognition?–but a case can certainly be made; they’re harming no one but themselves, and not asking anyone else to do or not do anything. If they argued instead that such laws should be revoked because they are an affront to god (which they have never done), the rest of us would pay no attention. Part of religious freedom, after all, is freedom for non-believers; you have a right to pray to your god, and I have an equal right to say that your god–whoever you are–is mean-spirited and sadistic.
You don’t like abortion? Don’t have one. You think contraception kills? Don’t use it–but if you prevent a woman from using it, you’re abusing her, depriving her of her own human rights in the name of your doctrinaire “belief.” I put “belief” in scare quotes, because on the historical record it’s not at all clear whether men subordinate women’s rights because their “beliefs” require it, or whether they choose beliefs that will justify their desire to subordinate women.
In a larger sense, the whole problem with the contemporary doctrine of “multiculturalism” comes down to this: much of the time what’s being asked is not equal respect for other “cultures,” but equal respect for the religious practices that supposedly define the so-called culture. And I have never read a coherent explanation of why one of the “smelly little orthodoxies” and bigotries that after much reflection I despise and reject as hostile to human dignity, should suddenly be respected when cloaked in the mantle of “religious belief;” when justified not by giving reasons but by telling me what some book says, or what a bunch of oppressive priests say; or when expressed not only by some would-be tyrant here at home but as well (or worse) by some virulent homophobe or misogynist in Asia or Africa. But that’s a topic for another essay.
Why? Well, the requirement would conflict with Catholic beliefs, “which state that life begins at conception and prohibit abortion.” A lawyer for the Church (Barry Feldman, oy) said that “this is a blow to religious freedom that sets a terrible precedent.”
Actually, it sets a wonderful precedent, though not quite, since several other states have already passed similar legislation. The exemption of institutions claiming “religious beliefs” from the reasonable requirements of civil society, not to mention taxes, is one of the scandals of American political life. We’re not talking about conscientious objection here, since an exemption for believers is provided (see above); just as, e.g., Quakers were allowed to do alternative service rather than be drafted into the military. (And those who refused to compromise with civil society at all, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, cheerfully went to jail instead.) And we’re not talking about that principle of “religious freedom,” since no one is being forbidden to go to their own church, pray to their own god, attend their own indoctrination sessions, and so forth. No, what is at stake–what is often at stake when “religious freedom” is falsely invoked--is the demand by churches and their spokesmen that society organize itself around their principles of behavior and none other. Not only that they be allowed to evade doing what they don’t want to do, but that no one else be allowed to do it either!
Should Sikhs be granted an exemption from legislation requiring motorcycle riders to wear helmets? That’s a tough one–since when is riding motorcycles an important social practice requiring special recognition?–but a case can certainly be made; they’re harming no one but themselves, and not asking anyone else to do or not do anything. If they argued instead that such laws should be revoked because they are an affront to god (which they have never done), the rest of us would pay no attention. Part of religious freedom, after all, is freedom for non-believers; you have a right to pray to your god, and I have an equal right to say that your god–whoever you are–is mean-spirited and sadistic.
You don’t like abortion? Don’t have one. You think contraception kills? Don’t use it–but if you prevent a woman from using it, you’re abusing her, depriving her of her own human rights in the name of your doctrinaire “belief.” I put “belief” in scare quotes, because on the historical record it’s not at all clear whether men subordinate women’s rights because their “beliefs” require it, or whether they choose beliefs that will justify their desire to subordinate women.
In a larger sense, the whole problem with the contemporary doctrine of “multiculturalism” comes down to this: much of the time what’s being asked is not equal respect for other “cultures,” but equal respect for the religious practices that supposedly define the so-called culture. And I have never read a coherent explanation of why one of the “smelly little orthodoxies” and bigotries that after much reflection I despise and reject as hostile to human dignity, should suddenly be respected when cloaked in the mantle of “religious belief;” when justified not by giving reasons but by telling me what some book says, or what a bunch of oppressive priests say; or when expressed not only by some would-be tyrant here at home but as well (or worse) by some virulent homophobe or misogynist in Asia or Africa. But that’s a topic for another essay.
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