Sorta political: likeable?

I have a  question for you.

First some background. One of the things that really stands out about Obama is how hesitant people are to criticize him. All the other presidents of my lifetime have been brutally criticized. LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2 were all subjected to scathing attacks. Reagan, who is the prime example people give of a president who was elected because he was likeable was regularly called a Nazi. Bush 2, another likeable guy, was also called a Nazi and had not one but two movies fantasizing about his assassination appear during his tenure.

Obama has been spared this. Yeah, there are some nutcases out there in the fever swamps, but he hasn't had the sorts of mainstream attacks others have had.

And people keep telling pollsters they like the guy even though his approval ratings are abysmal. People also kept telling pollsters they liked Reagan but Reagan's approval ratings were good.

So here is the question, do people not criticize Obama because they really like him or are they hesitant to do so because he is black?

I know, I know, how dare I ask such a question? I see that even Mickey Kaus, who normally doesn't shy away from touchy issues, shies away from this one. But, you know, this question is sensitive because ultimately it's not about racism. When people pretend to like someone more than they really do, what motivates them is not racism but the fear of seeming racist.

And it's incredibly important to ask this question. Currently the intelligent assessment is that the November election is close. If his seeming likeability, however, is an illusion, then Obama's chances at re-election are far worse than they appear.

PS: Bonus point: are undecideds really uniformed? Kaus also says,

... the race won’t necessarily be decided by relatively uninformed undecideds who only pay attention at the end

And that is true in one sense. If you quiz undecideds about current politics, they score poorly compared to committed voters for either side. But that is only significant if you think caring about politics all the time is a good thing. I don't.

I think it is far more "informed" to tune politics out most of the time and wonder sometimes if the last minute undecideds aren't a lot smarter than we give them credit for.

Red Letter Day: Unity and diversity

It's a holiday and a feast day, so I'll be out in the garden.

It's the Feast of the Transfiguration for Catholics. That may not interest you much if your not Catholic but there is one aspect of it that is fascinating. You see Jesus and three disciples go up on a mountain top and there he is transfigured in glory. But what is interesting—and what the bible story emphasizes—is not what happens but rather what doesn't happen.

If something like that happened to you, you would think it would be a life-changing event. If it happened to you, you would think that you see things differently and act differently after that. But the point the story makes is that even at the height of the experience, the disciples just aren't going to do that.

And that is so true of life in general. We all have experiences like that where it feels like this moment will change everything but it never does. How many couples have thought, "We're so in love, so happy right now," and thought that will make their lives different from every other couple? Just about every couple I would think. No experience, no decision matters that much. Born again experience? So what, says the Bible.

Unity
If you read secular biblical scholarship one of the themes you come across again and again is the diversity of early Christianity. A lot of secular scholars argue that early Christianity was diverse and that orthodox unity was something imposed at a later date. As near as I can tell this is the dominate strain in current scholarship. A lot of the claim seems over-stretched to me.

Gnosticism, for example, sometimes given as an example of early diversity, is clearly of a later date and it suggests not that Christianity began diverse and later became orthodox but rather that the chances of sectarianism grew as the number of Christians did.

But the whole diversity issue needs, it seems to me, to be set into a larger context which is Jewish diversity. The central fact about Jewish religious practice and belief of Christ's time is that it was incredibly diverse. There was, in fact, a constant danger of the whole thing splintering apart and this fear is what drives many of the key players. 

That fear was well-founded because the Jews awareness of their own history was haunted by a fear of disunity. Except perhaps for short periods, they lived surrounded by others who did not share their faith. Worse, they lived surrounded by others whose diverse faiths closely resembled their own.

[By the way the resonance of having Moses and Elijah present on the mountain top for the Transfiguration cuts two ways. Yes, these were glorious prophets but neither achieved lasting unity even during their own lifetime. Moses' has his own mountaintop experience but it has no effect at all on what happens at the base of the mountain.]

Whatever the divergences existed in early Christianity, and the there had to be some, it wasn't an easy going diversity. You didn't have a number of options that everyone was free to pick and choose from. The central fact for the early believers had to be the importance of a united community. Early leaders would have had little tolerance for diversity. (The very use of the words "diverse" and  "diversity" tells you that this is a lot more about what academics want to believe than it is about serious scholarship.)

That Christianity survived tells you that there was a strong movement for unity right from the beginning. That it continued to survive as various disputes broke out tells you that the unity movement thrived. And that should not surprise us for, as diverse and prone to splintering as Judaism of the time was, it was nothing compared to what tended to happen with Pagan beliefs.

Of course, not all early leaders would have agreed but any disagreements would have been sharp and well-defined because they would have been argued. Any Gnostic who wandered into an early Christian community and started spouting Gnostic nostrums would have been surrounded by others telling him how wrong he was very quickly.

In a world where everyone saw the need for unity but where most failed to achieve it, the success of Christianity shows that it must have had—from the very beginning—some core practices and beliefs that people could and did unite around successfully. Yes, there was disagreement but diversity would not have been seen as a virtue by anyone at the time. If you want to study early Christianity in any serious way, that early unity and following how it grew is the real object of study.

And what made it possible was a doctrine. The early Christians knew full well that some no intense experience would do it.

Final thought: "Easy-going diversity"
When I got to college at the age of seventeen, I encountered serious Protestants for the first time.  I remember being astounded at their willingness to argue dogma and their awareness of it. Their entire lives they had been taught how they differed not only from Catholics but also from other Protestants. They would quickly zero in on some aspect of Catholic belief and argue it with me. They'd come up to me and say, "You Catholics believe X but can't you see there are obvious problems with that?"

More often than not, my first thought was to think, "Why do you care so much about this?" I remember realizing with a jolt that I had not been taught detailed arguments against Protestantism. In fact, I was not taught anything about other faiths at all. I had been taught from an early age that Protestants were good people to be prayed for not because they were wrong but because there was hope for them. We were taught that Luther had good points about corruption in the church but that going out on his own, he had fallen prey to the same vanities that evey person struggles with.

To my great surprise, I found that I had considerably more freedom in the easy-going unity of the Catholic church than my new friends had in the beliefs they had supposedly arrived at in freedom. And they soon became much more concerned with the supposed orthodoxy than I was.

I've seen this over and over again as life went on. As I've said before, atheists have vehemently told me that in order to be a Christian I must sell all my belongings and give everything to the poor. Imposing a rigid orthodoxy on me is very important to them not because they have any intention of doing such a thing  themselves but because they want me to be exactly the sort of Christian they have the idea of so they don't have to be that. It bothers them a whole lot to see me sitting at a table in a Café with my brandy and coffee cheerfully checking out the hot girls in their summer dresses. "How dare you do that?"

Academics praise diversity in religion and culture because they think diversity in these areas gives ease. They think an easy-going diversity is better than a rigid orthodoxy. But my experience growing up as Catholic and later meeting non-Catholics has been the exact opposite of that. It still is. I see my Anglican and Protestant friends and the diversity their faith offers them is a constant stress in their lives.

I see the same in the larger culture. Everywhere "diversity" is promoted, there is a stress and rigid demands on the life of the individual. Yes, any culture or religion is going to impose things on you. What's harder to see is that "diversity" is much more stressful than unity.

Smooth song of the week: Trains and boats and planes

Yeah, I fell off the wagon on this. It doesn't draw a lot of readers to tell you the truth. But I like it.

Anyway, this is the greatest Bacharach/David of them all. It doesn't take any explanation, so here it is:

That Montaigne guy ...

... knew a thing or two. This comes courtesy of Ann Althouse:

Don’t be like those people who, in order to extend life, never actually live it. Life is not just about avoiding death; it’s about the active use of our powers while we are alive. To live like a human being, you must do all the things that human beings are capable of doing and should do; you must learn to suffer like a human being, and, finally, to die like a human being: “We must meekly suffer the laws of our condition. We are born to grow old, to grow weak, to be sick, in spite of all medicine. . . . We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid.”

It made me think of a number of women I knew growing up who lived their lives in denial. They were Catholic-school girls and the also hated, as one of them put it, being fetish objects for the men who looked at them in their school uniforms. Outside school, they resented men and the way men looked at them and resisted all efforts to dress and present themselves in a feminine fashion.

But one day, when they got older, some sort of switch flipped and they suddenly started rushing to get the very experiences they had denied themselves for so long. 

Neo noir: Mythic

Taking off from yesterday, there are a couple of interesting points about mythic stories I wanted to dwell on. One of my claims was that noir isn't mythic and that  was why it was impossible for a western to be noir. I want to walk back a little on that today.

One of the really interesting things about The Man of the West is that it challenges the standard western mythology. We have this legendary bandit named  Doc Tobin (for once using the word legendary correctly for there really are legends about this guy). And not only is he the subject of legends, he tells them. His power over his followers depends to a large extent on his ability to enthrall them with these legends. It is because he can keep them excited by the possibility that they too can do legendary things that keeps some of his gang members following him.

And then the movie challenges these legends. How far does it challenge them? Well, that's a good question. There are two possibilities. The first is that once upon a time there was an era of the outlaws, just as there really was a an era of the Shogun in Japanese history, and now that period is over. There are dozens of classic westerns that say that. But this movie opens another possibility which is that it's turtles all the way down—meaning that the legends were built on legends, which were built on legends ... such that the whole way of life was inevitably going to collapse as soon as a more viable alternative was available.

The movie doesn't force you to take either view. The easiest option is the first one but the second is logically possible. And that is a very subversive possibility.

The thing to pay attention to is this: once upon a time Gary Cooper's character rode with the legendary bandit and then he stopped and rode away from him. Why? What was it that made him seek a life elsewhere? The movie never gives a clear answer to this question but rather leaves it up to you to decide. Whatever the answer is, it has something to do with sex because the thing that makes his character different from the rest of the gang is his attitude towards women and sex.

The Noble Lie
The noble lie is an argument we find one form of in Plato. We also find a version in westerns.

The western version goes like this. In the beginning was the wide open frontier, a lawless region populated by mythical figures called cowboys. This lawless region is going to be replaced by civilization. But how do you make the mythical figures go away?

And the problem here is not just that these guys are larger than life but also that they are inside of us.  The raging, revenge seeking, rapist that each of us would be if there weren't civilization.

Okay, you can make an argument that civilization is better than this lawless land but, as Hobbes asked in Leviathan, who goes first? "I'll put my gun down as soon as you put yours down." And with that goes it's corollary, "Well, why should I put my guns down first when you might just shoot me?"

At the end of Shane, made just five years before The Man of the West the following dialogue takes place between Shane, the hero, and Ryker, the chief cattleman and voice of the old cowboy era at the very end of the movie.

Shane: Yeah, you've lived too long. Your kinda days are over.
Ryker: My days? What about yours gunfighter?
Shane: The difference is I know it.
Ryker: Alright, so we'll all turn our six guns into the bartender and we'll all start our own spots. Is that it?
Shane: Not quite yet. We haven't heard from your friend here.

Rykers "friend here" is his hired gunfighter Wilson. Shane blows Wilson away in a gunfight and kills Ryker and then he rides away. He tells little Joey, who is the only one to see the events (that matters) that he has to go away.

It matters that the kid is the one who sees it, that we see it through his eyes, because the story is mythical. As adults, all we have is civilization. This sort of mythic story is the kind of thing a little boy would see—the movie is like seeing Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals acted out in front of us. This is supposed to be the cauldron where the moral basis of society is cooked up and it requires a trick, a noble lie. It requires the cold-blooded killer who, for some reason, decides to make civilization possible and then rides away leaving it to go on without him.

And it's not enough for some cowboy to outdraw the bad guy, kill him and then announce, "Okay we're going to have civilization now." No, the sort of hero who does these things has to be pushed off stage so civilized people can take over. He isn't a credible player in civilization. He is too much of a threat to keep around. And we see that theme in classic westerns such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Shane. We also see it in the latest Batman movie.

And the noble lie here is that it takes an uncivilized man to make civilization possible. These guys have to make the giant move that defeats the forces opposed to civilization and then voluntarily withdraw.

If you want to believe that, one of the questions you have to ask yourself is, "How often does this have to happen?" Does it happen only once to get civilization rolling? Or does it have to happen again every time their is a rift in society?

It's no accident that a lot of people are heavily invested in super hero movies now. There is a huge divide in our society and no one trusts anyone. The different sides of the red-blue debate speak incommensurable moral languages. There are no moral facts outside those two world views powerful enough to resolve the division that that anyone can appeal to that each holds as authoritative. So how do you get out of it?

One answer is Batman. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but that is a childish, simple-minded solution. Some, but not all, of the people who voted for Obama in 2008 were swept up by that kind of thinking. "The One" would change things. There is nothing wrong with liking Batman so long as you realize it's a children's story. But if you start writing essays arguing that Batman teaches us something about how society ought to be, then you're crazy.

Sustainable civilization
The Man of the West presents a different option. It tells a story about how the mythology simply collapses under its own weight. What the legendary bandit does is always crazy and it gets a little crazier every year until it collapses. In this view, civilization is sustainable and the legend is not.

And this is nothing new or revolutionary. Both the red side and the blue side of the current debate both sometimes argue that their side is simply more sustainable. Of course, they also keep trying to use government to fix the race for their side at the same time, suggesting that their faith in the sustainability of their side is not as solid as they like to make it appear.

On this view, no magical moment needs to take place to transfer from the world of the cowboys to the world of civilization. The cowboys came first, the small farmer and civilization came second, both co-existed for a while but the cowboys ultimately died out.

Now is probably the time for me to tell you that the name of Gary Cooper's character is "Link". Anyone think that is accidental? He is a guy who has lived in both worlds. He has been the bandit and now he is the civilized guy. Nothing he does makes civilization possible. It was coming anyway. The bandits' time was coming to an end anyway and would have done so had Link Jones never ridden into town. He makes the story interesting because he can and has lived on both sides. He is the link that connects the two stories so we can have them both in the same movie.

And that, I think, is interesting. I'll come back to this.



BTW: I know I'm always on about the sex but it really is a big part of the equation here. If you watch Shane, about as iconic a western as you will ever find, there is a very telling moment at the end when little Joey is running after Shane trying to convince him to stay. He shouts after him,

Pa got things for you to do.
And mother wants you,
I know she does.

We, of course, are aware of what little Joey doesn't know about how his mother might want Shane. Out of the mouths of babes.

PPS: Isn't it fascinating that Shane has an Irish name?

Neo noir Thursday: Dusters

There is a lot of overlap between film noir and neo noir and other genres. A big part of the reason that the list of supposed noir at Wikipedia is so ridiculously long is that just about any action film, crime film or suspense film with dark overtones gets labelled noir.

But what about westerns? The thing about them is that the genre is so easy to identify as what it is that we  never have to wonder is this a western or is it something else. We do the opposite sometimes; we wonder, for example, whether the first Star Wars movie isn't really a disguised western becauser it isn't very credible as science fiction.

Anyway, The Man of the West is a western with a very noirish feel about it. Look at the opening credit above and you can see Gary Cooper! appearing very pointedly in a back hat. Just read the teaser at IMDb and you can feel it:

A reformed outlaw becomes stranded after an aborted train robbery with two other passengers and is forced to rejoin his old outlaw band. 

All the elements I have been discussing are there.

We have a man with a past who drifts into town. He is mysterious. He is carrying a lot of money. He lies. He gives different people different names and different hometowns when they ask where he is from. He is seeking a new life.

There is a moll, played by the very yummy Julie London and they get as much of her magnificent breasts as was allowable in 1958 on the screen for us to see. There is also an threat of sexual assault that runs through the movie. Gary and Julie also sleep together every single night but the movie never so much as lets us wonder what might or might not happen. They bond but we don't know if sex is adding its hardening and lubricating qualities to the union.

And that is a limitation. The temptation is to say they always handled sex better "back then" when the code forced film makers to imply rather than portray. Well, not always and neo noir is, I think a good example. An updated version of this story, with more explicit sex, could well be not just a better movie but a much better movie.

The moral aspects of the story are also right. There is a complication that upsets our protagonist and forces him into a situation where his past may lead him to fail in the way he has failed before. There is a distinct lack of moral clarity. The decision between right and wrong is never clear to us our to our protagonist.

There is conscious nostalgia. A way of life that is just disappearing is shown. One nice touch is when our protagonist flinches and cowers when the train comes in the station. He has never seen one before.

Related to that nostalgia,  there is a fabulous plot twist, a "something" about the old life and those who lead it that gets revealed very powerfully part way through.

In the end, though, it's Gary Cooper and it ends the way a Gary Cooper movie has to end and that isn't noir; although there is a certain vagueness about it that you could just imagine events after the closing credits that aren't quite 100 percent Gary Cooper if you wanted to do so.

Mythic reality
The primary reason it can't be noir—and the primary reason no western could—is that the story told here is mythic. We often think of a myth as a story that isn't true and it can even be pejorative to call something "a myth". But it is more accurate to say that a myth is a story where truth conditions don't apply.

It's easy to grasp if you think of its opposite. Testimony in court is a kind of story where truth conditions are paramount. If I say I saw the accused at the mall and it is later shown that that was impossible, my story is now worthless (except perhaps to prove perjury against me).

But there are other stories that aren't like that. If Mary tells an erotic fantasy to her husband to get him excited, for example, it is, paradoxically important that it feel like it could be true and equally important that it not be true.

Myths are something like that. It is important that they feel like they could be true but it is not particularly important that we check the facts. For a simple example of this, look at the opening picture at the top of this post. That is familiar western scenery and most of us might imagine that the old west looked like that. It didn't. By the time westerns were filmed, the frontier was long gone. The only open spaces big enough to give the feeling of the frontier were badlands and deserts. And so that is the image that goes with the west. We see cattle drives across country where cattle couldn't survive in real life.

Look at this still for example. It comes in the middle of a fantastic scene shot in a claustrophobic interior. The old outlaw appears, reveals the protagonist's murky past, walks out of the scene and towards the camera and then proceeds to deliver a soliloquy about the old, legendary life he and the protagonist led. It's very much like noir. There are similar encounters in Key Largo and we could imagine this guy as Edward G Robinson's character Rico and Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart's character soldier. But no noir could handle the scene in this way. It would all break down if we asked ourselves where exactly this guy is supposed to be standing. He has walked through the fourth wall; he couldn't have walked as far from the other guys as he has and still be in the cabin anymore.

I'll have more on this tomorrow. For now, suffice to say that new noir can't do anything like. It has to seem real.

Man bashing alert

Here is a question that appeared in the New York Times advice column Social Q's on Sunday, July 29. It was the featured letter for that day and appeared under the heading "A Final Divorce Decree".

My ex-wife phoned to tell me she was sending a food basket to an old friend in sympathy for the death of her husband. She urged me to send a gift too, because it would mean a lot. But my relationship with the widow is attenuated. So I suggested that that if a gift from me would provide comfort, my ex-wfe was welcome to add my name to the gift card attached to her food basket. She refused. Was this appropriate?

Now think about that for a while. I want you to have your reaction firmly established before you see what Mr. Philip Galanes had to say, which is after the break.