Category Archives: Americana

Identifying with the Cliff Swallows

Americana, Psychological Musings

Kachina Bridge, Natural Bridges National MonumentKachina Bridge, Natural Bridges National Monument

A week ago, or so, I saw a post on Ta-Nehisi’s blog that I keep thinking about. He is reading Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder and the book prompted him to make a series of posts, one of them – I think – is about accepting Evil. The post, Grappling With History’s Greatest Gangsters , is well worth reading (uh…if you are into thinking about good and evil):

How can men commit such acts? The question is not answered by empty invocations of “evil” or vague invocations of “sociopathy.” The question is not answered by memorializing victims (though this has its place) or the construction of national oaths (though that too might have its place.) On the contrary the question might best be answered, not by identifying with history greatest victims, but by identifying with its killers. This is in fact, as Snyder argues, the moral position: It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.

I remember walking with Michele late in the afternoon, we were somewhere in the Colorado Plateau – probably in Escalante, but I am not sure – and we were walking up canyon, wandering is more accurate, soaking in the afternoon. Just below the rim of the canyon – about where you might put a picture rail if this was a hall rather than a 200 feet deep canyon – there was a line of mini caves, sort of like the mini-caves in the picture above.1 We watched a Raven flying along the edge of the rim and every once in a while the Raven would circle back to a mini-cave to check it out. It was warm with a slight breeze and the Raven was effortlessly, silently, gliding up canyon.

Ravens don’t get the credit they should, they lack the style of hawks, but they are graceful flyers when they want. This guy was beautiful and then we realized it he was checking out the Cliff Swallow nests in the mini-caves and eating their eggs when he found them. Both Michele and I instantly started feeling sorry for the Cliff Swallows. The eggs were their babies, their future and the Raven was just cruising along, like walking a buffet, eating their eggs.

Walking up canyon, we started talking about how easy it is to identify with the victims rather than the Raven. I think our country, and I suspect alot more countries, are like that. We remember the Alamo – well, the Texans do anyway – we celebrate Pearl Harbor not our victory at Midway. I know I feel that way when I read about pre-civil war slavery or the holocaust. Reading about what the Germans did, I retreat into How could those people do something so inhuman? it is incomprehensible, they are monsters.

It is hard to get past that – often very hard – but they are not monsters, they are people like us. I don’t say that lightly.

Our national narrative is that we are the good guys and we would never do anything like kill people wholesale, especially innocent people. But, we would and we have. During World war II, on 9–10 March 1945, we killed an estimated 88,000 to 100,000 civilians – and wounded another 40,000-125,000, depending on who is counting. We did this on purpose during a raid by 334 B-29s on Tokyo.The purpose of  this raid was not to bomb airfields or munitions factories, it was to kill people. Because we were not doing enough damage to the Japanese homeland with conventional bombing, we had changed tactics to create more damage. First, we bombed Tokyo with high explosive bombs and then came back with incendiary bombs to create a firestorm. According to Robert McNamara, in The Fog of War, after the raid, General Curtis LaMay said It’s a good thing we are winning this war or we would be tried as war criminals.

In his book, War Time: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, Paul Fussell writes about an American platoon killing a group of unarmed Germans who were trying to surrender.  But that wasn’t the part that shocked him later, what shocked him how much everybody enjoyed it and how it became a platoon joke to be used when they need cheering up.

Yes, these are wartime stories and war brutalizes everybody and it is easy to tell ourselves that our acts of inhumanity are different from, say, Amon Goeth the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. That is the point, it is easy to make Goeth the other, incomprehensible, like Goeth made the Jewish people he killed the other. It is not a direction that makes us more human. I want to end with a poem – I remember it from a LP record of poetry my mother often played – that we have probably all heard and forgotten, it is by John Dunn: No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend’s Or of thine own were: Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

A holiday of Muslim movies

Americana, Politics, Religion

The SiegeFor no particular reason, except that this is the way the Universe works some times, we saw three movies about Muslims over the weekend.

The first one was The Siege, made before 9-11, about a fictional Iraqi terrorist group and the countries over-reaction to the carnage they cause. Denzel Washington plays a New York based FBI agent and Tony Shalhoub is his Arab- American partner. In the movie – and, I believe, in real life – the terrorist are reacting to what we are doing in the Middle East. In this case, we think the chain of events started when a a secrete American “extraction team” kidnapped a Shiite cleric. Annette Bening – the very same, overwhelmingly attractive, Annette Bening that charmed President Andrew Shepherd – plays a CIA agent who set up a Shiite terrorist operation to oppose Saddam Hussein’s regime that set-up the kidnapping. It wasn’t a great movie.

The second movie was much better. It was the The Reluctant Fundamentalist by the Indian director, Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding).  The Reluctant Fundamentalist bridges 9-11 and is about a very smart, very secular, Pakistani who is living in New York as a successful management consultant. When 9-11 hits, he goes from being “king of the world” to pariah. Not so much in terms of his friends but in terms of the America he loves.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The last movie was The Past by Asghar Farhadi – the Iranian who directed A Separation, nominated for an Academy Award – and is playing now. It is directed by an Iranian and stars Ali Mosaffa, another Iranian, who has come back to Paris to be divorced by his French wife, played by Bérénice Bejo,  but it is not about Muslims, it is about people and it is superb.
The Past

A couple of weeks ago, I got in a conversation with a friend about religion. That is not a big surprise, two of my favorite conversation topics are religion and politics and it is two of my friend’s favorites as well. He is – if not a baptised, at least a confirmed – atheist. I knew my friend found all religions troubling, but he surprised me by saying that Islam is the worst by far. That those qualities that make it the worst religion, are built it. As an aside, I would classify myself as pro-religion. I believe in The Wonder, A Divine, Love, but I find it very hard to understand, let alone believe in, an anthropomorphic god.  I find it borderline insane that anybody thinks there is a god who created the Universe with its billions of galaxies, of which we are in a tiny corner of one, and then cares about how we have sex; but I also think religion can comfort and can be a force for compassion and good. If pushed, I would say I am an agnostic with Buddhist leanings. End aside.

The first two of these movies touch on what it is to live in a world in which good people, smart people, even compassionate people, think your religion is one of hate and terror. To live with people’s assumption that you are not the same as them at a very basic level. All three movies deal with the deeper question of not completely belonging. Not belonging in the sense of not being accepted. Not because of anything the characters have done, but of not being accepted because of who they are.

At one point in The Past, a friend of Ahmad’s – the Iranian who came back to Paris to be divorced – says You were not made for this place, you do not belong here. And he doesn’t which is why he left his wife and her two kids to go back to Iran. Changez Khan, the reluctant fundamentalist, wants to stay, he is very good at getting rich the American way, but he is driven out by full body searches at airports, stares in restaurants, and the burden of being the other. Agent Frank Haddad in The Siege, wants to quit the FBI when his son is jailed in a round-up of young Muslim men.

These three movies tell the collective story of Muslims between worlds. In a way, it is the classic immigrant story but it is also the story of a minority that has been identified with the enemy. When I read about Bernie Madoff ripping off investors, my first reaction is Oh shit! not another Jew. I am sure that when most Muslims read about some asshole blowing people up at the Boston Marathon, they say something like, Oh shit! not another Muslim, why can’t it be another Timothy McVeigh?  In their case, in 2014, the consequences can be much more serious and that makes me feel sad.

 

American Hustle

Americana, Film

“Inside Llewyn Davis” and “Nebraska” are the current standards of what a serious Hollywood movie looks like. “American Hustle” offers so many easy pleasures that people may not think of it as a work of art, but it is. David Denby The New Yorker

american-hustle (1)I want to get the bad news out first, I was disappointed in American Hustle; it was not the greatest movie in the history of mankind. Even walking into the theater, I knew that nothing could match my internalized amping of the critical acclaim I had been reading. All that said, it was masterfully directed and had the best acting I have seen in a long time.

From stage left to right, Jennifer Lawrence was so sexy and looney, it was impossible to take my eyes off of her. Anytime she was on-screen, she stole the show. There was no relation to Katnis Everdeen or Ree. Christian Bale plays Irving Rosenfeld – who, I assume, is cast as Jewish but doesn’t come across as Jewish to my Jewdar – and is so distinctive in the role that, on leaving the theater, I told Michele I couldn’t think of a movie in which I had seen him before. When Michele mentioned the brooding Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises, I thought she must be mistaken.

Jeremy Renner is the mayor just trying to do good and he bears no resemblance to any part I have seen him play and certainly not Sergeant James, in the Hurt Locker. To me, he was the most sympathetic character, the one I like the most, but the genius of the film is that they are all likable. Of all the actors, Bradley Cooper’s FBI Agent DiMaso is the closest to his previous characters but he brings a sense of going off the rails that carries much of the film.

And Amy Adams is terrific as a woman trying to fight her way out of going nowhere, when we meet her, in a voice over, she mulls over being a stripper, There’s a boldness to it. But where would that boldness take me? In a way, that sums up the whole movie. For me, a major character – although uncredited – was Miss Adams’ dress. In any world with gravity and/or centrifugal force, her boobs would have popped out in almost every scene.

I want to say that this is a David O. Russell movie because I like him as a director – it started with Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings is still one of my favorite movies – but this is really a star movie like Ocean’s Eleven and it has a similar, light, inconsequential vibe. It got me wondering, What is a Star?  My first thought is that part of it is coming out of nowhere, very fast, very young. But, in American Hustle, Jennifer Lawrence is the only really young actor (although they are all pretty young from my age). But the Stars do come out of nowhere. They have a bit part, maybe a couple, and then get a lucky break in a Winter’s Bone, or Hangover, or Hurt Locker, and we all know them. We probably all over-looked them when they played a bit, deep in a movie, like Robin the Luggage Boy in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V or a minor part like Sack Lodge in Wedding Crashers.

I am not sure that an actor has always had to be a great actor to be a Star, but today, Stars all seem to be great actors. I think that, for an actor to make that jump to Star, they must have something more. They have to attract us, make us fall in love, at least for a couple of hours, even if it is only in the dark. What I like most about Hollywood, is what so many people like the least, the alleged superficiality.

To make it in Hollywood, people have to be attractive – often confused with good-looking, but not really the same, think Danny DeVito – but they also have to be hardworking and talented. It doesn’t matter where somebody is from – from stage left to right –  Louisville, Kentucky; Haverfordwest, Wales;  Modesto, California;  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;   Castle Rock, Colorado. It doesn’t matter who your parents were, children’s camp manager,  a circus performer, bowling alley manager, a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, a semi-professional bodybuilder. It is that meritocracy, the democracy of it all that I like.

In this movie, full of Stars – who weren’t born Stars, who had to hustle to become Stars – playing hustlers, it comes full circle.  It is fun to watch.

Well, this is embarrassing continued

Americana

Yesterday – in a change of pace, for him – or maybe the day before, Obama granted clemency to 21 people. He issued commutations – which I think means he reduced their sentences – for eight of them and pardoned 13 more. It is a start.

Two or three days before, according to Wired,  U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in the District of Columbia declared that NSA’s wholesale collection of  data is illegal, saying, I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systemic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval…Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to be aware ‘the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,’ would be aghast.

Maybe the pendulum is starting to swing back.  I can even imagine a country where Edward Snowden is given amnesty because of the public service he did for all of us.