Marta's Mathoms

As usual, Mr. Pitts hits it out of the park:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/15/3003136/terrorism-outburts-in-middle-east.html

Specifically:

Not to trivialize a deadly situation, but in considering these would-be defenders of Islam, one is struck above all else by their childishness. I am thinking of a specific scenario familiar to any parent of two children or more.

The kids are in the back seat, and suddenly you hear the dreaded words: "He's touching me!" It is whined at a pitch of such fevered urgency that if you didn't know better, you'd swear one child was killing the other. But no, it's only that child number two has discovered she can, with little effort, drive child number one into spasms of apoplexy. So she keeps doing it till you hear yourself yelling, "Don't make me turn this car around!"

Yes, the second child has gone out of her way to needlessly provoke her sibling. But you are also irked at the sibling for being so easily provoked, for not understanding that if he simply stopped giving his sister the reaction she craves, she'd stop doing the stupid thing.

It is that dynamic we see play out repeatedly among Muslim extremists. We saw it in 2005 when riots erupted over a cartoon depicting Mohammed. ("He's touching me!") We saw it in 2011 when riots erupted after a Florida "preacher" burned a Koran. ("He's looking at me!") Now we see it in the uproar over this stupid film. ("Don't make me turn this planet around!")

I think this is what many people find so frustrating about the culture wars, both globally and the American version that usually go by that name. They're just so thoroughly, idiotically stupid. Obviously people have died, including a diplomat who if the editorials are to be believed was a true patriot working very hard to fix things in this corner of the world. And that tragedy isn't stupid, but the event itself... it's tragic but also pointless beyond belief. I guess all tragedy is, but man.

Here's where I disagree with Mr. Pitts, though. Toward the end he writes:

Children, at least, have the excuse of being children when they fail to understand how an over-the-top reaction only ensures further provocation. The hotbloods of Islamic fundamentalism are old enough to know better. They ought to grow up.

Like with the fundamentalists of all stripes - you find them in most religions as well as non-religious movements like secularism, and groups that have nothing to do with religion as well, political groups and the like. And simply stressed out individuals. Children lack certain psychological capacities to deal with stress which most adults have, but when those groups feel pushed down for prolonged periods of time, denigrated and infantilized and denied what they expect or think is rightfully theirs.

I used the phrase culture wars advisedly above, because I think there really is a psychological connection between what we in Americans call culture wars and Muslim extremists throwing a first-class hissy-fit. I'm thinking of incidents like the annual "war on Christmas" outraged that stores might say happy holidays rather than merry Christmas. Or the way groups on all sides battle over such minor points when it comes to "issues" like abortion access and contraception coverage and someone praying at an event where politicians happen to be present and gun rights and ... the list gets depressingly long these days. These flashpoints occur around different things in different cultures, but they aren't limited to the Middle East or America, for that matter. The common factor, as far as I can tell, is that the people involved all feel put-upon for some reason or another. They either used to have a certain privilege that is being denied to them now (or is no longer uniquely theirs), or nearly as often they are hearing from their various quarters that they deserve some right, that everyone --or at least everyone that isn't an ignorant fob-- agrees with them, yet they still don't have this right they think they deserve. That can sap the emotional wherewithal any adult has to treat minor irritations as just that.

None of this excuses violence, or makes those deaths America's fault. And none of that changes whether a certain position is objectively good. Let me say this unequivocally: I really and truly am glad that stores say happy holidays rather than merry Christmas. But just because I like the happy holidays approach, that doesn't mean I can't feel sympathy for people who were used to thinking everyone was like them. I don't think they were ever entitled to that impression, and it's good that they're adjusting to a more accurate view of reality. But that adjustment is still draining and disorienting. It doesn't excuse the histrionics, but it does explain them a bit.

So think about the situation in the Middle East. European colonization and all that meant economically and culturally. The blame for 9/11. Drone attacks. The way terrorism has become seen as brown-skinned and Muslim, so white supremacists, when they kill groups of brown-skinned people you hardly hear the name. To say nothing of the inevitable collateral damage of conventional war. If I was a Muslim living in the Middle East, this would wear on me. Doubly so if I had been promised a brighter future, put my life on the line by protesting... and found change to be too slow or somehow insufficient. (It always is.)

I guess I can just get why people would get stressed and overreact in juvenile ways like this over and over again, without necessarily having to grow up. When I had a massively bad day last Thursday, by the end of it any little thing had me angry beyond belief. If that had gone on for a week, I can see myself getting angry enough to throw a stapler across the room. If we were talking years or even generations, in a much more volatile situation with much worse injustices and indignities, a stupid amateurish film might even be enough to make me storm an embassy or two.

I wouldn't be right to do that. In fact, I'd be incredibly in the wrong. But I can see myself getting that upset, without the need to grow up. There's just a limit to what humans can stand, and I think part of helping life from crossing that critical point is recognizing when you're pushing people too far.

Enough heavy. As a celebration of simple pleasures and happiness that I think are the best antidote to this kind of frustration, have a clip from the "Cosby Show."

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Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.3

My FaceBook feed has been hopping quite a bit discussing political issues. I guess it always is, but for some reason I'm more aware of it than I usually am. Between the Chick-Fil-A blow-up and the Colorado shootings (and really, the only thing these things have in common is that they've been talked about a lot lately!), my more liberal friends have been passing around a lot of pictures with pithy quotes or sarcastic one-liners. Some of it is clever (the thought of one I saw a few days saying that Kermit and Miss Piggy had been supporting non-traditional marriage since 1974 or whenever still cracks me up).

But much of it isn't nearly so light-hearted. It makes it seem like "the other guys" (whoever they are) are completely unreasonable, either by taking a thoroughly reasonable point and making it seem like no atheist/Christian/liberal/conservative/whatever could ever agree with it... or by simply creating a straw man of what the other side actually says. And here's the thing. Sharing these things just takes a click of the mouse, and I know a lot of people share what they think is "neat" without necessarily thinking about how it will come across to others. It can create a world-class echo chamber - often from both sides at once!

Sometimes these memes start good conversations. If it's a friend who seems genuinely interesting in discussing these issues, I'll a lot of times comment and explain how and why I reacted. But with some people I get the impression that they're sharing this stuff to create a sense that *everyone* agrees with them (certainly every reasonable person). And it goes beyond that. Just in the last week I've seen three separate "friends" (the label works pretty much the same way on FB and LJ) say that if "you don't agree with me on _______, maybe we shouldn't be friends any more. Where _______ is usually a cause of some kind or a cherished belief, like the idea that gun control was important or that homophobia shouldn't be tolerated.

I've always been bothered by the way FB and LJ use the word friends to mean someone following my blog or updates. I love interacting with people on that level but that isn't what friendship is about. I mean no disrespect to people who choose to end an acquaintance because the person disagrees with you on some issue. That's certainly your right and I don't have any particular bone to pick with people who choose to do that. But when you call people in this relationship friends, I think that just muddles things up in the worst kind of way.

Lots of philosophers discussed friendship, but I think one of my favorite depictions has to be Aristotle's. For the non-philosophers in the house, Harald Thorsrud provides a decent introduction to Aristotle on friendship using Harry Potter examples. The gist is that Aristotle recognizes three kinds of friendships, from friends of convenience up through true friendships built around virtue. The true friendship is one that lasts, but more than that it's one that's built on improvement. I love you and want to become more like you so those virtues that you have and I lack, I try to develop. And vice versa.

When you say a friendship can and should be ended over an "issue," what I hear is that you think I can be dismissed over an issue. That's a pretty pale version of friendship, to my mind. And I realize that on the internet "friend" doesn't mean what it does off the internet, but that's sad to me. I've known lots of people online longer than I have hear in New York. We've probably seen each other through more situations and spent more time chatting, too. Fandom does that, but I think the internet in general does it, too. These are true friendships in the Aristotelian sense, or at least as close as us moderns ever get. I know I can count on them not to run for cover when the going gets rough.

All of which makes me sad to see such an awesome concept and reality used in such a casual way. Because I am much, much more than my stance on gun control, and if our friendship is anywhere close to the authentic ideal Aristotle requires, I need my friends to see that about me. Is this just semantics, a convenient name? Maybe. But even that seems wrong somehow. Because I think that when many people think of and use that word "friends" they really do just mean people whose blogs they follow. I try not to say that, because the word is worth holding on to. Doubly so for the truth behind the word.

Btw, this whole thing reminded me of an old Seinfeld clip; hilarious, but also a nice take on just what's bothering me so much about this use of friendship.

I've been working my way through M*A*S*H. Of course I'd seen several episodes (probably a third or so of the show), but it's good seeing it all in order.

The episode "Yankee Doodle Doctor" encapsulates so much about what is great about this show. An army film-maker wants to make a "documentary" about the 4077th, starring Hawkeye. Only after the thing is shot do they realize it's actually propaganda with little relation to the truth of their situation. So Hawkeye and Trapper ruin the film and the director leaves in a huff. The gang decide to remake the film, and this is what they produce. (The voiceover is from the original "straight" version of the documentary.) There's slapstick, of course, but then there's an almost seamless transition into the dramatic monologue. It's all just so thoroughly human, with all the richness of life.

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Here is the monologue at the end, which is my third quote for the 100things challenge:

Three hours ago, this man was in a battle. Two hours ago, we operated on him. He's got a 50-50 chance. We win some, we lose some. That's what it's all about. No promises. No guaranteed survival. No saints in surgical garb. Our willingness, our experience, our technique are not enough. Guns, and bombs, and anti-personnel mines have more power to take life than we have to preserve it. Not a very happy ending for a movie. But then, no war is a movie.

I think if more talk about war, honoring soldiers and all the rest kept this in mind, we'd all be better for it. And I'd probably be a bit less pacifistic. Hearing that monologue for the first time last night was like a breath of fresh air. Coming right after all the hilarious slapstick just made it work that much the better.

ETA 6.9: To fix my gaffe of calling Trapper Pierce. I really do know M*A*S*H better than that...

Over at his blog, my friend Dan Fincke posted a link to an editorial by the inimitable Ta-Nehisi Coates. I agree with Dan: the whole editorial is a must-read for people wo like thinking about these things.

Short version of the Coates piece: many people discussing the Civil War consider the war itself a tragedy because of the loss of life; Mr. Coates wonders whether we shouldn't be celebrating it along the same lines of the Revolutionary War or World War II: a lot of suffering that was necessary for some greater good. As Dan frames it in the title of his post, "Should We Celebrate The Civil War With Hot Dogs and Fireworks?"

I feel quite strongly that we shouldn't. Of course, I've always felt pretty strongly that we shouldn't be celebrating any war (and, as Dan's commenter James Sweet rightly points out, we celebrate the Declaration of Independence rather than the Revolutionary War). But I think there's a deeper point to be made here, too. Even if the Civil War was necessary for a greater good, we should still not be celebratory. The thought of thousands dying beneath Antietam's sun should invoke a kind of horror.

Over the holidays I saw a Law and Order: SVU episode, "Harm," for the first time. The reviews online are pretty low, and I'll grant that it has almost nothing to do with sex and at times came off as being propagandish. But the plot did make me think. In it, there's this medical doctor who was engaged as a scientist to devise "torture light" - pressure poses, psychological tactics, and other things that would make people easier to break during interrogation. An ex-detainee had been murdered by a military contractor gone rogue, but said contractor had fled the jurisdiction. The doctor he worked with was left behind, and they wanted to try the doctor for setting in motion the torture that led to a detainee's death.

The doctor was more than a bit mystified by how what she had done could be considered murder, or even immoral. She was saving lives, she wasn't torturing them or even aiding anything as extreme as what the Taliban was probably doing to Americans. And she wasn't the detainees' doctor, she was a consulting scientist. But she was using her knowledge of the human body - gained so she could alleviate suffering - to cause pain and bodily harm. She knew just how much stress a person could go through in a certain position so they wouldn't be able to choose what to say any more, and she taught men with guns how to do it.

By the end of the episode, I was a bit horrified at the good doctor. Not because of what she had done but because she had no remorse. I'm thinking about something David Hume wrote - that reasons guide our emotions but that our emotions are what actually drives us to act or not to act in a certain way. We should be horrified when we have to kill someone or harm them in other ways. Even if that harm ends up being for the greater good. Because without the revulsion we won't think things through and we'll do evil too easily. War should be hard.

I have no problem with people celebrating the Declaration of Independence, or for that matter the emancipation of slavery. But there's something repugnant about thinking someone would want to celebrate Antietam. When that kind of thing happens, I think we've really started lose perspective.

I've been watching "The Simpsons" off an don these last few months, and one thing that's on my mind is how exactly you'd categorize them. Comedy, to be sure, with shades of drama and romance, mythology, and a smattering of other genres as well. Is flirtation with copyright laws a genre?

Of course, any show that's on for so long is bound to experience some drift, but The Simpsons really doesn't fit into any of these categories. And the more I htink about it, the more it seems like they're really theater of the absurd. Case in point:

In "The Bob Next Door" (sn 21, ep 22) we start with a town council meeting about budget problems, complete with a montage of minor criminals who are being set free because the govt can't afford to kee them locked up anymore. (Case in point, a man who tries to eat Apu's fruit without paying for it.) These and other cost-cutting measures lead to the Simpsons' neighbors decamping - in Lisa's words, "Another Springfielder moves to Detroit in search of a better life." Homer, lured by the scent of fresh cookies, attempts to buy a house nextdooro. At the last minute he's outbid by a Walt Warren, and we're treated to a scene of the girls watching Mr. Warren unpack, speculating about his furniture and koi fish.

All of which is a lead-up to the fact that Warren is, in fact, Sideshow Bob. Simpson afficionados can probably guess what inevitably follows.

This is all so random, but hilarious as well. As is the "five corners" motifs (I spotted both TX and NJ accents among the cops...) I don't know why, but somehow it never gets old.