elfs | Entries tagged with society

There was an outbreak on Twitter this morning of quotes around the classic, classic film, Heavy Metal, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. But the outbreak had me thinking about an important issue, which is writing comedy.

Almost all comedy emerges from a disputation of power. In the classic man vs. man or man vs. nature, for example, comedy emerges when a man tries and fails to overcome a problem because of overreach fueled by arrogance and ignorance. A classic example is, to use television, fromSeinfeld when Kramer tried to adapt his bathtub for better waterflow in defiance of his landlord’s requirement to reduce water use; he lacked understanding of the problem and arrogantly assumed he knew how to fix it; the resulting flood of his entire apartment was consequently funny. Other classic sources of comedy come from the Upstairs/Downstairs mould of television, where the powerful are never torn down, but are routinely shown up as incompetent and undeserving of their status by their cleverer underlings. Even The Argument Sketch from Monty Python is all about the two characters attempting to powerplay each other, each cleverly looking for a way to either needle or deflect the other’s jibe, to put the other man “under.”

Which is why there’s a moment in Heavy Metal‘s “Lincoln F. Sternn” segment that once seemed funny, but now dies like a landed fish. The scene is supposed to be comic. Sternn is on trial for being a very bad man, and his list of achievements is impressive. ”Lincoln Sternn, you stand here accused of 12 counts of murder in the first degree, 14 counts of armed theft of Federation property, 22 counts of piracy in high space, 18 counts of fraud, 37 counts of rape, and one moving violation.” The prosecutor pauses after every count to let it sink in. The “camera” (Heavy Metal is animated) looks over the bored judge, the restless jury, the steely-eyed prosecutor. When the prosecutor reads the rape charge, the camera focuses on Sternn… whose smile broadens knowingly.

That used to be considered humor. It’s funy, because, see, we all know that, while, legally, rape is, like, a bad thing, Sternn is such a manly man that, well, he was just putting women in their proper place in the power structure, and it’s not like he killed them or anything, he was just doing what a man does.

The women in that scene aren’t human beings; they’re merely pawns.

Once you live in a world where men and women are equals, it stops being funny. Instead, it comes across as horrifying, and Sternn’s consequential escape from justice (as well as the murder of his henchman) loses all comic impetus. Then again, so does getting away with murder.

There's a certain irony to the website named Big Tent Review, with its photograph of a big top as its masthead. Orginially envisioned as a group blog for second-tier "less crazy" conservatives, the group slowly dwindled as it became progressively clear that the ongoing madness gripping conservatism was metastasizing into a somewhat permanent Southern-fried state of conscience. There was no big tent, there was only a circus.

"Ironic" because every time I see it, I'm reminded of David Frum's observation that conservatives like capitalism because it keeps people afraid. Fear of losing employer-provided health care, fear of losing one's home and one's family, or as Frum puts it: "Risk disciplines and teachs self control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top." Frum wrings his hands at people willing to leave the nest and strike out on their own as artists and innovators. That's conservatism, of a sort.

Sander's essay today is about the "red social model" and "blue social model" for success. He talks about the blue social model as being essentially the Chinese fascist model: the government set prices and conditions for core industries (transportation, agriculture, data infrastructure, heavy manufacturing), and the industries in response guaranteed lifelong employement, retirement pensions, and health care coverage.

Sanders goes on to say that Japan and Europe started to degrade this model by introducing technological innovations the US had to match to keep up. In some ways reading Sanders's version of history is a lot like reading Spuffords Red Plenty (brilliant, brilliant book, BTW) set in the time of polyester and disco instead of wool and bebop.

Sanders ignores a key element of the story: it was those Americans with the strongest oligarchal impulses that brought down the post-WWII blue social model. Japanese automotive and electronic imports were allowed because the people with the most money leveraged the US Chamber of Commerce and related institutions into a lobbying effort to make more money, the US's own manufacturing base be damned. To be sure, there was envy from average citizens eager to get their hands on a sexy European import and the latest Sony Walkman, but without relaxation of tarrifs they US could have remained a Soviet-style walled garden, and the wealthy could have kept those tarrifs in place if they wished.

Sanders points out that there's a push now to create a new "red social model," but that it's going to be years before it becomes established, and that the base is really, really not going to like it. For one thing, it has to take into account that minority business owners, especially Latinos and Asians, actually understand that government-purchased infrastructure supplies roads, supplies power and water, as well as healthy and educated labor capable of doing the job, and the Southern Strategy will have to be truly dead to sell that to the base.

In the meantime, there's already a New Blue Social Model rolling out. It looks a lot like the New Red Social Model but with a twist: the New Blue Social Model actually cares about the social part, about society. The current blue social model is messy and individualistic: it lets people be people. It says that to be successful, we must be capable of operating the levers of power. We must have full educations; we must not have those educations terminated early by parental responsibilities; we will take on parental responsibilities when we are fully capable of doing so; we see all responsibile people of all sexes as full partners in making these decisions. We must be free from fear, especially the fears at which the David Frums of the right rub their hands in eager pleasure. This is one of the reasons why birth control was such a big deal in the past election; for every Phyllis Schafly wringing her hands over the burdens women "were forced to accept without being asked" there were hundreds of women who wanted to keep their responsibilities and the rights that came with them.

Until and unless the New Red Social Model encompasses the reality that a low-skilled man cannot through pluck and determination make his way in a post-Internet world, it's doomed to failure.

I'm genuinely happy to see that Frum, at least, is starting to see the inherent cruelty in the Republican vision. In a conversation on Fox News with other talking heads, he said, sounding a lot like Andrew Sullivan: "All of us who are allowed to participate in this conversation, we all have health insurance. And the fact that millions of Americans don't have health insurance, they don't get to be on television. And it is maybe a symptom of a broader problem, not just the Republican problem, that the economic anxieties of so many Americans are just not part of the national discussion at all."

We're down once again to two competing visions: one that is boring because it uses cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment and aversion, a very technocratic vision. It's the Blue Social Model. The Red Social Model is about feeling: "The safety net makes people too happy, too free, too easy with their lives. Whatever happened to hardscrabble, can-do Americanism? How do we force Americans back into that mould, and the rest into the closet?"

What the Red Social Modellers haven't demonstrated, here in the most innovative time in American history yet, is that it has disappeared. Yet the New Red Social Model is being built around the feeling that it has. And that's why it's doomed.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: TATU, Null and Void
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1529040.html

The reason why privileged classes are more hypocritical than underprivileged ones is that special privilege can be defended in terms of the rational ideal of equal justice only by proving that it contributes something to the good of the whole. Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.

The most common form of hypocrisy among the privileged classes is to assume that their privileges are the just payments with which society rewards specially useful or meritorious functions. ... The educational advantages which privilege buys, and the opportunities for the exercise of authority which come with privileged social position, develop capacities which are easily attributed to innate endowment.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, pg. 79.

Current Mood: thoughtful

You know you're in trouble when someone starts an essay with this:

One of the occupational hazards of Christian thinkers is the tendency to see Satan behind every sociological phenomenon with which they personally struggle. One of the secret pleasures of this habit, however, is that occasionally, you really do find him... Hugh Hefner...

Now I will confess, as a secularist, to having a secret vice as well. I too can spot Satan. He's alive and well in Mercer Schuchardt's fantasy life, as the essay, The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner illustrates all too well.

The author gives away too much while engaging in the usual Hefner-bashing that the right adores. The usual bashing is all about Hefner's evil genius, conflating beautiful naked women with success by using the advertising not only as a way of paying for the magazine, but by associating objets de bon vivant with beautiful naked women, and thus "legitimizing" pornography by bringing it out of the basement and into the living room.

He objects to the "feminization" of men, saying that once upon a time they never knew what a "duvet" was (quoting Fight Club in the process) and enumerates what the "feminized," "domesticated" man has been taught to enjoy: literature, a good pipe, a cashmere pullover, a beautiful lady.

Makes ya wonder if Schuchardt's taste in women is anything like Neal Horsley's, the anti-abortion activist who recently and shamelessly admitted that his first girlfriend "was a mule."

The rest of the article is just as silly: somehow, despite all of this rampant "feminization," it's women who've really lost out, that "unisex" styles are all masculine and men don't wear the frilly things that girls like. Quick, someone call the Queer Eye guys. There's also a strange undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, the accusation that introspection, criticism, and the hard work of thinking are also "feminine," and that men belong "in the field and stream," rather than in the library or the lab.

He also makes the weird accusation that rock stars have to be "porn star beautiful" to get on stage. Someone tell that to Alanais Morissette or Queen Latifah.

There are some things I actually agree with: I've stopped reading Playboy precisely because the modern bunny does look like "a lean, mean sex machine," and not much more; I much prefer the bunnies of the pre-silicone age. But that's a matter of taste, and Playboy competes with lots of other outlets where unlean, unmean women cavort in the popular imagination.

You really have to wonder about a man who reads Annabell Chong and accuses Hefner of "not having the balls to put his name on the first issue" [sic] but proclaims himself a culture warrior on the side of Christ.

Finally, Schuhardt asks the question he wants to ask: "Bring it out in the open, Hefner said, and you'll feel better... Do you feel better?"

And I have to say yeah, yeah I do. It's not perfect yet. There are still technological barriers to truly consequence-free fucking, which is not a bad thing to wish for. But they're merely technological barriers; sex ought to be about the wanted risks taken by the human heart, not the roulette wheel of the human body. Social critics like Schuhardt are still wringing their hands because antibiotics and birth control methods have lessened many of the consequences, and we can only hope that those techniques will get better with time.

Schuhardt's wrong about depicting the current age as "a mess." It's not. No more so than the year before Playboy was published. Society will clank on, succesfully; every generation think it gets to own the eschaton, and so far every generation has been wrong. Schuhardt's generation, my generation, will be as well.

Current Mood: amused

Humbert Humbert would have absolutely starved to death in our culture.

The other day I had cause to drop by Yamaarashi-chan's school in the middle of the day. She had forgotten her raincoat and, as she would visiting with her mother that evening she would need the coat before she returned home. As I stood in the office waiting for the appropriate clearance to wander the halls, I spotted a line of third-graders being prepared to lemming into their classrooms, and there in the middle of the line stood an awkward, gangly, worried-eyed tart. She wore an open V-necked pirate blouse shirt, a stiffly starched miniskirt with ruffles, and child-sized boots that when worn by her more mature counterparts are usually worn with the purpose of eliciting the reaction, "Nice boots" and all that entails.

Her parents are blithering fools.

Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Lolita, once described his conceit: Among the universe of ordinary little girls between the ages of nine and fourteen there exists a cadre of their peers, perhaps numbering no more than one in thirty, each of whom were aware of what her puberty meant to a dangerous degree. Enmeshed as she was in her innocent schoolgirl clothes, she knew she was or soon would be devastating to men of all ages. Humbert's fatal flaw was his attraction to such girls.

But today, with Gap for Kids and its ilk there's just no such thing as the protection of "innocent schoolgirl clothes." There is no lesson in public modestly being delivered with public approval. Maybe the school that deals with pre-pubescents does not believe it needs a dress code. I have trouble believing kids have an interest in dressing in such a way unless they feel compelled by some outside forces.

There is always the possibility of a trap, as well. After all, if a teacher were to point out that this young victim-in-training was inappropriately dressed, the parents today might react with both horror at the questioning of their sartorial choices-- it is, after all, a free country-- and suspicion that the teacher made the accusation precisely because he or she found the child's dress disconcerting in inappropriate ways.

Humbert would have starved to death in our modern world not because there are no more nymphets, as he labeled them, but because their presence, if they exist at all, is masked by a barbarous vulgarity impressed upon all the plain, ordinary girls who inhabit our culture.

I sometimes wonder if I want too much: I want adults to have the freedom to be adult, to enjoy the pleasures and privileges (and yes, the responsibilities) of adulthood, and I want children to have the power to be children, to lack those responsibilities, and I want the transition from one to another to be gradual, a flowering of awareness as kids grope blindly and painfully for that maturity they need. I am horrified by the fact that some parents believe that menarche or even earlier is to be conjoined with a showering of "gifts" upon the child such as an unlocked cell phone, the password to the household's NetNanny and a thousand-dollar shopping spree at Abercrombie & Fitch.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Carpark North, Berlin

I took Kouryou-chan to a pizza joint and then over to Kidopolis. It was short notice, but we had just dropped Omaha off at her coven meeting and were on that side of Tukwila. Instead of taking the freeway we drove through Renton hoping to find a traditional pizza place. None were to be found. Desperate, we stopped at a Pizza Hut. Bleah.

While I was in Kidopolis and Kouryou-chan was running around with another pretty girl her age and I was dealing with the girl's anxious-to-talk father, I noticed a video game called Police 911, very high resolution police game, and as I watched someone play it, I saw that the perp's faces were all pixellated.

I think it bothered me because, y'know that whole bit about "faceless criminals?" About how we're not supposed to be bothered if a cop takes a shot at a perp because he's a nobody? In this video game, you're literally shooting at a nobody. Someone with no face, no identity. Completely clothed, you can't even tell the race of the perp.

Really, really weird.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Celine Dion, When I Need You