More stooges

So. . .

Dozens of torch-wielding white supremacists show up in Virginia, and folks wonder why I'm worried?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/15/emboldened-white-supremacists-charlottesville

The Prophetic Vandal: Thoughts on THX 1138

I have a weakness for science fiction films from the seventies, come what may. Which brought me to THX 1138. I don’t think anyone will dispute me when I say the film itself is less interesting than the fact that George Lucas made it.

By which I don’t mean that the film doesn’t have its own interesting bits (though nothing here that hasn’t been covered in Every Dystopia Story Ever), but the fact that a film this slow, cerebral and technophobic could come from Mr. Star Wars is just mind-boggling. This is the man who thought nothing of having droids deliver babies. It’s not so much that a film director in his youth could stitch together an art film just before writing the book on popcorn-cinema – there’s room in the human imagination for both. It’s just hard to fathom how someone who made his fortune via sheer consumerism could have once tried so hard to skewer consumerism, and sad to think that an impassioned defender of the human soul would one day banish it from his movies.    

The contrast, from both a thematic and aesthetic level, is just weird. In contrast to the traditional – nay, archetypal – plotting of Star Wars, THX largely just sort of happens. Most of the “dialogue” is just the background noise of machine operators giving instructions to each other over intercoms. Conversation, in terms of human beings talking to each other, is either hurried or whispered. Sex is repressed (of course) as is every other emotion, people live in subterranean cells, and deviants are stuck into vacuous white voids. Like most dystopias, it’s clearly not intended to be prophetic, but cautionary – I can see it happening.

After all, in the Star Wars universe, droids deliver babies. . .

Perhaps THX was intended as a Utopia? No one would accuse the Star Wars prequels of an excess of humanity. What isn’t generated by a computer is altered to look like it was. What human beings are present are made to act like robots, as if Samuel L. Jackson and Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman and a host of actors who spend their lives channelling different kids people had had their brains cut out and replaced with computers.  Even the old films, which so captured people’s imaginations, have been destroyed and replaced with hideous computer mash-ups, in a Stalinistic rewriting of history.

Even the current edition of THX is full of this after-the fact tampering, modern CGI spliced into 70’s era film stock. Again, the effect is jarring and distracting, like modern pastels worked into old oil paintings. Sometimes it seems to blatantly contradict the story; the “shell people” of the outside world were clearly intended to be and said to be midget humans – the shell people. Now they’re feral monkeys. What the hell was Lucas thinking? A glimpse of the original pops up in the original trailors, which Lucas forgot to alter. Robert Duval is briefly seen being attacked by a stuffed doll. It looks pretty dumb, but at least matches its’ surroundings, unlike the CGI chimp that replaced it, which looks no better.

I suppose that’s what puzzles me the most about these alterations. None of them actually improve anything. But they do alter the product unrecognizably. The original prints have been withdrawn from circulation-they no longer exist. We can no longer experience the films as their original audience did. For THX, it’s no great loss – a curiosity and a noble effort, but hardly earth shattering. Star Wars is another matter. For those of us of a certain generation, who were exposed to Star Wars at birth, who recite every word of dialogue and hum every note of music before we could spell or even write our own names, Star Wars was part of the scenery – the environment in which we grew up. And it’s gone now, bulldozed by the man who built it in the first place. I can’t shake the feeling that an incredible vandalism has taken place.

To think the vandal saw it all coming. . .

Pi in the Sky: thoughts on Life of Pi

My God, look what he’s doing now. . .

Nevermind. Lest I begin to sound like a one-trick pony, I’m taking a break from politics. Let’s talk about books. Oh don’t worry, I’m still going to complain – you wouldn’t want me to go all kum-bai-ya on you, would you? But it will be complaining of a far less earth shattering variety.

Thinking I needed to make some tentative outreach to the modern world (and finding it readily available on my school’s shelf), I went for a book from 2001 – practically this morning by my standards. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi was one everyone went ga ga over back in the day, winning slavering critical reviews, a Man Booker prize, and becoming a major motion picture directed by Ang Lee (who got a bleedin’ best Director Oscar for it. . .). So, people really freakin’ loved this book.

What can I say? The Mob Rules.

I suppose it’s all a very cute adventure story and survival tale, and I particularly liked the mysterious island chapter (I’ve always been a sucker for Mystery Island stories).  True, the whole first thirty six chapters felt kind of superfluous - more like abandoned plot threads then rich background detail - and the italicized narrator switch rather half-baked (what was the point exactly?). But I like adventure stories and survival tales, and I’ve always been a sucker for Mystery Island stories, and Martel’s got a friendly prose style, so I was happy to go along for the ride and had would have had a gay ol’ time.  . .

If only. . . .

If only it didn’t read so much like a dopey New Age apologia. Granted, the narrator is highly unreliable – how seriously are we supposed to take the rantings of some delirious kid with an admitted penchant for mysticism? – but I am still stuck in the proverbial elevator with him, and don’t have the luxury of shouting back at him. Authors make choices. Martel might have had his narrator simply tell his tale, and   

left it a lost-at-sea adventure story with bits of fantasy and sf thrown in (or “magic realism” as the snotty literati like to call it). Which would have been fine by me. But this narrator, “Pissing” Pi Patel, isn’t content to tell his tale – he insists that we believe it.

On several occasions he attacks skeptical thinking with arguments only a delirious teenager would find compelling, yet Martel allows for no rebuttal; only idiots get to challenge his narrative. When these idiots tell Piscine that they “believe what we see”, his response is textbook new age/pseudo science/crypto zoologist:  “So did Columbus. What do you do when you’re in the dark?”

Well, I certainly don’t let my faith guide me Piscine. And unlike you Mr. Patel, Columbus could point to his “new land” on a chart, and send other people to look for themselves. But of course, the idiots aren’t allowed to say that – they just stumble and mutter.  When they tell him that his island is “botanically impossible”, his response is pure teenaged smart ass:

“Said the fly just before landing in the Venus Flytrap.” 

Of course the idiots don’t patiently but politely point out this is what we call a “false analogy”; that Venus flytraps and bonsai trees have been extensively documented and independently verified and explained by scientists, unlike his island of bloodsucking seaweed. Bringing me to the kicker:

“ No scientist would believe you.”

“Those would be the same who dismissed Copernicus and Darwin.”

Woh, how many fallacies can we fit into one line? Kind of like his Columbus statement, this is the classic cry of pseudo-crytpo-claimant: “crazy things have been discovered before, therefore my crazy thing must be true”.  Or: “they laughed at Galileo, and they’re laughing at me, therefore, I must be Galileo”. Piscine forgets (and the idiots neglect to remind him) that Copernicus and Darwin had to prove their findings with empirical evidence. They weren’t accepted on faith.  

I suspect that many botanists would be quite intrigued by Piscine’s story,  for the same reason they read science fiction. They’d be tickled by the possibility, and speculate how it might work. That does not mean they would accept it blindly; not without physical evidence, which he has neglected to provide. The scientist does not have the luxury of the religious mystic; he or she cannot believe something just because it makes a “better story” (unlike Piscine, who pretty much admits later that’s the entire basis of his cherry-picked faith – kinda like Trump’s politics).

Let’s put it this way: maybe I tiger could hide undetected in the Mexican wilderness. But if we find some delirious kid adrift in a life boat, ranting about talking tigers and flesh eating trees, are we supposed to take his word for it?

One of the main responsibilities of any author is to the consistency of his/her characters, and I suppose Martel is doing no more than putting words in Piscine’s mouth which Piscine would actually say. In a first-person narrative which the narrator spends almost entirely in isolation, it is entirely reasonable to provide only that narrator’s perspective – indeed, isn’t that rather the point? To be fair, Martel does throw a bit of a bone to skeptics like me: Piscine admits the use of a “dream rag”, a saltwater-soaked rag he suffocates himself with. Deprived of oxygen, he “would be visited by the most extraordinary dreams, trances, visions, thoughts, sensations and remembrances”. A couple pages later the tiger starts talking to him. I think it’s an entirely to interpret the whole novel as a product of the dream rag.

Martel allows for this interpretation, but I bet dollars to donuts most readers (and viewers of the Lee film) will miss that detail completely and go for mysticism, taking from the novel Piscine’s false analogies and nonsensical aphorisms. I suppose they make for a “better story”. But I refuse to be drawn in by this kind of thinking. And if I have to sit in a boat with this quack for three hundred and fifty four pages, you’re damn right I’m going to yell back at him.  Especially when confronted with this howler:

“It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. . .to choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

Bullshit! Seriously. Not all of us need a dream rag to make sense of life. On the contrary, I would argue that the here and now, the solid, the tangible, the actual, slowly and painfully revealed by science, offers a much richer life experience than Patel’s fever dreams. Why is reasonable doubt – the simple act of admitting what we don’t know – a less viable philosophy than making it all up? Pretending you have special insight into the mind of the (necessarily invisible) creator? On this point, Pissing should piss off.   

Waves of Truth: murder in a Quebec Mosque

When last we met, this letter had appeared in the Hamilton Spectator.

“ You better worry, because that wave of truth and anger will come, and you, other so called progressives, and your immigrant neighbours will be the first to be washed away.”

            - F. Stevens, Hamilton

            Several days ago, some deranged maniac walked into a Quebec mosque and shot six people.

            Do I really need to spell this out? 

            Those who care don’t need to be told, and those who don’t, never will, so it might be a superfluous effort. But I’m going to try anyway. I live next to a Mosque, you see, where many of my neighbours worship, play basket ball, and hold used clothing bazaars. I also live near a gun store, which advertises Bushmasters (rifle of choice for Adam Lanza) in its front window.  I know there is at least one individual in this town who wants to “wash away” immigrants and progressives. So excuse me for being a little tense.

            The White House has already tried to cash in on the blood, citing it as justification for Trump’s immigration bans:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-white-house-quebec-mosque-cites-attack-justify-anti-immigration-ban-muslims-a7554491.html

I suppose the logic here being that if those immigrants had stayed home, a white man might not have shot them.

            Even those disingenuous enough to see no connection at all with Fearless Leader’s purges down south might want to note the irony: six Muslims dead at the hands of a local, even as the President insists Muslims are dangerous and need to be kept out of the country. What are we to make of the home-grown terrorist? What, no hysteria? No nervous hand-wringing over the sick ideologies that poisoned his mind? No collective punishment for his community?

            Are we expected to believe he acted in isolation?

            I suppose we are, and to some extent we must: the many cannot be held responsible for the one. Those predisposed toward violence will inflict it under any pretense, be it religion or politics. But we don’t have to provide these weeds with such fertile soil. I for one am not keen to let religion or politics off the hook, finding in both as many calls to quash the moral impulse as to listen to it. I think we should pay attention to the ideologies in which such twisted individuals found inspiration. What reality did they choose to reside in? What truth – which alternative facts – did they choose to believe? What words gave shape to their thoughts and what thoughts gave way to actions?

            It seems trite to look for lessons, but there are reminders and warnings aplenty: of what can happen when a majority turns on a minority, when the powerful target the vulnerable, when certain segments of society are singled out for a greater share of the blame. When we are divided and further subdivided into ever more rigidly defined Uses and Thems, blood and tears always follow. 

L-R: Azzedine Soufiane, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Aboubaker Thabti,
Thabti Ibrahima Barry, Abdelkrim Hassane (CBC)

Dishers and Takers: what do Trumpeters expect?

            “ You better worry, because that wave of truth and anger will come, and you, other so called progressives, and your immigrant neighbours will be the first to be washed away.”

            - F. Stevens, Hamilton

Letter to the Editor,

Hamilton Spectator,

November 11, 2016

            And people wonder why I’m depressed by a Trump victory?

            Like termites, these bigots have come swarming out of the rotten woodwork, into the letters pages, the radio-call in shows, and the Facebook echo chambers. They’re feeling vindicated now, as if their hatred of Mexicans, Muslims and scientists was somehow right all along. They’re feeling emboldened – their prejudices are official policy now. They’re excited by the purges to come. They’ve been baying for blood for months now, and yet wonder why “mainstream media” won’t respect them.

            What do they want? A gold star for their insight? A pat on the head for the deep understanding of issues?  

            Distain from the “liberal elites” was a common refrain among the Trumpeters’ many grievances. It struck me as a little thin-skinned coming from a group that supposedly admires toughness so much.  But then it’s always struck me how those who reserve the right to hold ridiculous ideas also feel entitled to immunity from scrutiny.

            To be sure, human beings deserve respect. But ideas are open to both criticism and ridicule When a politician offers up a program that’s unrealistic, unworkable, and downright dangerous, how much respect is it entitled to?  Just as when I’m confronted by a creationist, a 9-11 or an anti-vaxer, I’m not going to pretend that Donald Trump is a beacon of enlightenment. His policies aren’t just unworkable, but downright dangerous, and if that results in a little disdain for the people that empowered him, well. . . life sucks.

            Perhaps I should ask of the Trumpeters directly: what do you expect?

            Don’t like liberal condescension? Your guy is a climate change denier, and made a young earth creationist his running mate. What do you expect?

            Resent charges of racism? Your guy is openly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan! His signature issue is attacking ethnic and religious minorities. What do you expect?

            Resent accusations of callousness? Well, you seem quite ready to abandon a million Syrian refugees to their fate. You do know a lot of those people are going to die, don’t you? Just making sure.

            Resent charges of sexism? Your guy groped and openly bragged about groping women. What do you expect? Besides, have you seen some of the folks showing up to your rallies? The T-shirts and signs? What do you want, the Gruber Prize?

            Think Hillary was out of touch? And Donald Trump, with his penthouses and private jets and mansions was just a regular good ol’ boy wasn’t he?

              Think Hillary was a war monger? And Donald “bomb the shit out of them and take their oil” is just such a dove!

            Think Hillary was mean? Oh come on! Like Donald was a model of civility at the podium!

            Think liberal commentators were mean? Like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are such paragons of decorum!

            Think I’m being hysterical? Well, you’ve read the letter above. When your fellow travellers write letters like that, what do you expect? 

Talking Heads and Pen Pushers: Nobody knows anything.

How the fuck did this happen?

            No, I’m not asking how Donald Trump got elected President of the United States – that’s bloody obvious. A pile of people went to the voting booths and put a little “x” beside his name on the ballot, or pressed a button or pulled a lever or whatever-the-fuck it is they do down there.

            Nor am I asking why they did that, which is also obvious: they think the magic-man will wave his fairy dust and make them all rich and powerful, without any of Hillary’s blah blah blahing. (When are the politicians going to get that “blah blah blah” doesn’t cut it anymore?)

            No, what I’m asking is how all those alleged experts, self-assured commentators, talking heads, pundits, pollsters and pin-headed pen pushers could have kept reassuring me that it couldn’t happen. From each and every one of ‘em, the line was the same: “Trump’s done, Amen”. I’m looking at you Scott Gilmore of Macleans, who wrote October 31 (page 32) “Without some cataclysmic surprise, Donald Trump has lost”. Cataclysmic surprise indeed! And you Jonathon Gatehouse, writing in the same issue of the same magazine that Trump’s presidential hopes were “plummeting”. And you Nick Taylor-Vaisey, telling me just a few pages later his “campaign may be melting down”.  That’s just one lousy magazine! [i]

            Everywhere you looked, even the conservative ones were doing their “thank God that’s over” victory lapses before the race was even over. By what evidence, data or logic did they come to this complacent conclusion? Apparently just ‘cause all the other ones said so. “He’s so ridiculous, he couldn’t possibly  make it. The People couldn’t be that stupid”.

            Well, they can and they were. But these egg-headed experts were just as clueless.

Was it naivete? Wistful thinking or wilful blindness? Only Michael Moore, who actually talks to working class people, saw it coming. He tried to sound the alarm, but they didn’t listen to him either.

            I remember after the first debate having a sinking, stinking feeling that Trump had it in the bag. “My money’s on Trump” I wrote in my journal. Everyone went on about how much more presidential, more professional, more eloquent, more logical, more factual, more inclusive, more policy specific, more graceful under pressure Hillary was, which was absolutely true. And it didn’t matter a bucket of dog spit! If any of that mattered, Trump wouldn’t have gotten that far.

            Do you think a Trump supporter cares that he groped women? Hates Mexicans? Had no political experience? No fucking clue what he was talking about? If they cared, they wouldn’t have been Donald Trump supporters. So it didn’t matter how much more qualified Hilary proved herself to be, she couldn’t dent his narrative and didn’t really try. What she needed to do was try to undermine Trump on his own terms, demonstrating, somehow, that he couldn’t actually do what he promised, while she, somehow, could. How could she, or indeed anyone, have done that? Well. . .not by doing what she did. Not with all that blah blah blahing. . .

Trump had won, I felt it, I smelt it. But everyone, I say everyone, went on about how wonderful Hilary had been and how ridiculous Trump was and how it was as good as done. So of course I think to myself that I’m just imagining things because, after all, what do I know? I’m just a lousy peanut-gallerist, they’re the experts, they’re supposed to know this shit, not me.    

Would it have made a difference? Probably not, but maybe the Trumpeters might not be so god-damned smug right now.   

---

[i] Gilmore, Scott. “The Morning After Donald Trump” Macleands, October 31, 2016, page 32

Gatehouse, Jonathon “Could This Get Any Worse?” Macleans, October 31, 2016. page 28

(Damn friggin’ right it can!)

Taylor – Vaisey, Nick. “The Perfect Voters”. Macleans, Occtober 31, 2016

Slow Suicide Trumps all. . . (In which the author gives up on his fellow man)

They say most species go extinct eventually, and dogs, given the chance, will eat themselves to death. Why should humans, being apes, behave any differently?

The Easter Islanders chopped down every tree on their island to erect their statues, and erected themselves out of existence. Did not one of them see they were on the march to extinction?

Ronald Wright, in his CBC lecture series, argued that most great civilizations of the past went the same way. The Mesopotamians. The Greeks. The Romans. Each consumed more than their environment could provide. Each went down like a deck of cards.

Now it’s our turn. 

As I write, it is almost impossible that Donald Trump will not be the next President of the United States. The nation that produced Thomas Jefferson and Frederick Douglas is following Bozo the Clown en-masse into his little car to oblivion. Legions of the alienated, the disillusioned, the disenchanted, the disenfranchised, the lost and forgotten have spit up the lies they’ve been force fed for generations. But instead of rolling up their sleeves and taking on the real enemy, they’ve accepted the poisoned kool-aid of the nearest miracle man, following him lemming-like straight to a precipice in search of la-la land.

Democrats are as much to blame as anyone: complacent, self-satisfied, self-serving, tone-deaf dullards all. They saw Trump blow away his rivals like match-sticks, and huge swaths of their own party – the youngest, most energetic, most ready-to-vote dedicated among them - throw themselves behind a self-proclaimed socialist. The people were thirsting for change, salivating for something different, and what did these donkeys offer? More of the same! Here’s Hillary Clinton, Ms. Establishment, best friend of Wall Street, Goldman-Sachs Laureate, and her melba toast running mate. Isn’t that exciting folks?

Trump is our nemesis, sent to punish our hubris and complacency.  He’s the kind of phoney revolutionary folks go for when real revolutionaries can’t get their act together. They promise miracles, blame everything on outsiders and minorities, and hearken back to mythical golden ages. They offer easy answers and quick fixes; they shield delicate minds from pesky realities, and protect them from the burden of thought.

The scariest thing about a Trump Presidency is the thing probably least focussed on; his environmental policy. Whatever his misogyny or his racism or his voodoo economics, there’s little he can do that can’t be undone by the next President (god willing, someone else). But Climate Change is happening in real time. It may be too late already. It will not wait another four years. Trump wants to tear up the Paris Climate treaty, drill for oil wherever it may be found, and go back to burning coal. He apparently wants to take back the title of “World’s Biggest Polluter”.  Without the USA onboard, the rest of the world’s efforts are largely token. There’s no way China or India will do much if America doesn’t do anything. Billions more tons of carbon pumped into the air just when there desperately needs to be less. This decade was our last chance – we may as well give up now.

This is not a trivial issue, and this isn't hyperboyle. This will NOT resolve itself, and it is NOT reversible. This WILL have real, very bad consequences that we will not be able to undue. So sit there and laugh all you want, but the science is in, and as indisputable as heliocentrism: the climate is changing, and Trump and his groupies won't even try to stop it.

Interesting how those most callous about Climate Change are the ones who will never have to live with its consequences. Seventy-year old Trump will be long gone before the caps melt. He will never have to live in that world. Someone else will have to pay his bill. Not only doesn’t he care, I’ll bet Mr. “I don’t pay taxes” is tickled pink. “Makes him smart” I suppose.

Trump has exploited legitimate grievances to satisfy his boundless ego, and raised people’s desperate hopes with promises he knows damn well he can’t keep, emboldening racists and anti-semites and sexists and every kind of bigot along the way. But he was chosen by the people. Every democratic society gets the leader it deserves, and democratic societies have a healthy record of voting democracy away. Meanwhile, we’re fast clearing every tree on the island, and just elected to keep right on going, though the end is clearly in sight. We don’t care that bozo’s car is heading straight for the abyss, so long as we get a turn in the front seat.

Maybe our statues will outlive us.