There’s No Justice Like Mob Justice

I was on the road in Richmond last week for court, which meant I spent more time watching cable news than I normally do. That was when I started to hear all about Trayvon Martin, the 17-year old kid shot in his own neighborhood by self-selected “neighborhood watchman” George Zimmerman. Once I knew the names, I noticed the blog posts and Facebook requests for outrage at the fact that Zimmerman had not been charged with any crime. Arrest, trial, and conviction was the only answer, it seemed.

Given my line of work, I didn’t sign up for any of those petitions. I will admit that the whole situation seems messed up beyond belief. It’s hard to believe that somebody who shoots and kills an unarmed kid doesn’t get immediately arrested, although release on bond might make sense. But two things keep me from grabbing a pitchfork and joining the growing crowds calling for an arrest.

First, it just goes against my constitutional makeup (although not the Constitution, of course) to demand someone go to prison based on news reports. I’m not sure whether that’s a result of my years as a criminal defense lawyer or if it was there beforehand and supports the work. Either way, it’s just not in my nature. Second, I’m a skeptic and more than anything else, skeptics want to hold out for all possible information before coming to a conclusion.

Now, we’re starting to see a counter narrative, as the local police release reports about the incident (via):

In Mr. Zimmerman’s account to the police, he returned to his S.U.V. after he was unable to find him. Trayvon then approached Mr. Zimmerman from behind and they exchanged words. Then, Mr. Zimmerman said, Trayvon hit him hard enough that he fell to the ground — which would explain what Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyer, Craig Sonner, has said was a broken nose — and began slamming his head into the sidewalk.

Of course, one needs to be skeptical of this account as well – Zimmerman, after all, is hardly a disinterested party and, given the outcry about their handling the shooting, the police department might not be, either. What it shows, however, is that there might really be two sides to this story.* The only way to make the incident cut and dried either way is to choose sides ahead of time and then cherry pick the alleged facts in a way that supports that side.

Which is, of course, what a trial would all be about, providing it gets that far. Florida’s self defense law is one of the most defendant friendly in the country, so the state has high hurdles to clear to even bring the case that far. And if it does, is any potential jury pool contaminated beyond repair?

If Zimmerman is indicted by state authorities for homicide, or for a federal hate crime, where in the world will the judiciary find an impartial jury? So many people have already convicted Zimmerman; so much prejudicial evidence and speculation have been so widely disseminated.

You can listen to the enhanced audio tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call, including an arguably audible racial slur. You can read about Zimmerman’s ‘long, lonely war against black people doing things.’ You can hear politicians and pundits ranging from Rick Santorum to Al Sharpton discrediting Zimmerman’s ‘stand your ground’ defense and demanding his arrest, and hear President Obama suggesting that Martin could have been his son. Or, you can join the nearly 2 million people who have signed a petition posted at change.org by Martin’s parents calling for George Zimmerman’s murder prosecution. Who doesn't harbor preconceptions about this case?

As Wendy Kaminer points out, that’s the danger inherent in populist cries for justice in high profiles cases like this. Not only might it prompt a prosecution to satisfy political pressure, but it might make a truly fair trial nearly impossible. Having said that, impartial jurors have been found in other high profile cases (as OJ or Casey Anthony), and I’m not sure that, at the end of the day, this case will linger in memory any more than those. In addition, sometimes the popular groundswell gets it right and forces the state to actually do the right thing.

It’s a problem worth pondering and one to which there are probably no good solutions (as is usually the case). But at the very least, people should actively remind themselves to try and avoid coming to conclusions before all, or at least most, of the facts are in. We should be particularly eager to seek out facts from the “other” side of the issue, if only to wind up discarding them as false, misleading, or just irrelevant.

In the end, I think Jeralyn at TalkLeft summed it up best in response to a commenter who asked if she had formed an opinion about the case:

I am an advocate. With the possible exception of a few police and military misconduct cases, I view criminal cases through the lens of the Constitution and in a way that promotes the rights of those accused of crime.

I wasn’t there, no evidence has been introduced in court and my concern in cases like this is more with the fairness of the process. If Zimmerman is to be convicted of anything, it should be based on evidence admitted in court, not what one side or the other is telling the media. Trials should take place in courtrooms, not living rooms

On that last bit, at least, we should all agree.

* Old Vorlon proverb: there are three sides to every story – your side, their side, and the truth.

Friday Review: Senna

For my first two years of college, I lived in dorms. Back in those dark days, kids (we called them the 1990s), dorms weren’t wired up and hooked in the way they are now. TV viewing, such as it was, happened in common rooms. That was the only place there were cable hookups. There was no Internet to speak of, certainly no Youtube or streaming services. It was truly like the dark ages.

Which is why on May 1, 1994, a Sunday, I woke up earlier than any reasonable person should, threw on some clothes, and headed downstairs to one of the Stalnaker Hall common rooms, flipped on the TV, and flopped down on a couch. It was a Formula 1 morning. The Grand Prix of San Marino, particularly, in Imola. This was my only opportunity to watch it. It was either that or wait for the race report in the late lamented On Track a few weeks later. Some people get up early on Sundays for Jesus, I do it for Formula 1. That Sunday, I wish I’d slept in.

Imola that year was already in a bad way when Sunday morning rolled around. In Friday practice, Jordan’s Rubens Barrichello (recently moved to IndyCar) walked away from a horrific crash that saw his car launched over the tire barrier. Saturday was even worse, as Austrian Roland Ratzenberger, driving for Simtek, was killed in a crash during qualifying. The race start on Sunday was auspicious, too, when Pedro Lamy slammed into the stalled car of J.J. Lehto when the green flag fell.

Ayrton Senna was on pole position at Imola. His third race with a new team, Williams, after several years, and three World Championships, with McLaren. Stripped of the electronic aids that made it so dominant the past two years, the Williams was an unruly beast that had failed to finish the first two races of the season. Senna had yet to tame it, but he at least wrangled it well enough to be fast. That was what he did, after all.

On lap seven, after a restart following the Lamy/Lehto crash at the start, Senna was leading Michael Schumacher. In a corner called Tamburello, a lightning fast left hander, something on the Williams broke. Senna and the car slammed into the outside wall. A suspension piece broke free from the car and struck Senna in the head. The greatest racing talent of his generation, and one of the all time greats, was dead, the final casualty of that weekend at Imola.

As you might expect, any documentary about Senna leads to that bloody weekend at Imola. It’s a credit to director Asif Kapadia that Senna still manages to be emotionally riveting and compelling even when you know how the film must end. That’s particularly true if, like me, you saw it all happen on TV. He does it by keeping things focused on archival footage, mostly of Senna on track and around it, but also with some old home movies (young Senna in a kart is a thing to behold). There are no cutaways for talking head interviews (although they are used as voice overs), nor any fresh footage of any place or person relevant to the film.

That rawness and immediacy is the flim’s best feature (it’s kind of amusing to read reviews by critics amazed by the all the in-car footage). It’s also its biggest downfall. Because Kapadia is focused so much on what happens on track and plumbing the F1 film archives, we learn very little about Senna the man outside of the car. Via some interviews we learn that he was deeply religious (Tim Tebow’s got nothing on him) and there are a couple references to his charity work, but not much else. To be honest, there might not be much there. Senna came from a privileged background, broke through to the top levels of the sport pretty quickly, and never really suffered through any kind of slump or personal turmoil. Still, I wonder if the lack of depth would keep non-race fans from really being sucked in to the film.

What takes center stage is Senna’s rivalry with Alain Prost, the calculating French driver who would win four World Championships. Their time together at McLaren is the stuff of legend. The film makes a good case that Senna couldn’t cope with the sport’s political currents, while Prost navigated them with aplomb. In a wise move, Kapadia doesn’t get bogged down in the blame setting details of their confrontations (nor does he dwell particularly on what exactly happened to cause Senna’s fatal crash). It’s not important who was right, but simply that they were at odds. Whatever their animosity, however, we learn just before the closing credits that Prost is now one of the trustee’s of Senna’s charitable organization.

I’ll be honest – I was never a Senna fan. When I started following Formula 1 he was one at the top of the heap, the kind of guy I generally tend to root against. Had he moved to Ferrari instead of Williams, all would have been forgiven, however (Ferarri was an underdog back then, so I gravitated that direction). But I never questioned his talent or his dedication. In his final season with McLaren (embarrassing his teammate Michael Andretti most of the time), he won the European Grand Prix at Donnington in a driving rain. He was untouchable (as he had always been in the rain), driving a car that was not really that good.

That’s what comes through the most in Senna.  A supreme talent, gone much too soon. If you are any kind of race fan, it’s a must see. If you’re not, odds are you’ll still get wrapped up in it.

The Details
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Senna
Released 2011
Directed by Asif Kapadia

Give Him Credit, He’s Really Selling It

For the past several years, soccer fans and officials alike have been on a crusade against diving, or, as the upper crust call it, “simulation.” And with good reason. It doesn’t do the sport any good to be seen as a place where cheats and good actors make a big impact on games. There is such a thing as taking it too far, however.

Although I was never a particularly gifted player, I have played more than my fair share of soccer games. I know what happens on the field and the weird ways that two players can come together around the ball. Are there divers? Absolutely and I have no problem showing them a card.. Is it a dive every time somebody goes down and instant replay shows he wasn’t fouled? No. Contact happens, even if it doesn’t rise to the level of a foul. More to the point, sometimes a player with the ball is off balance or what have you and naturally will go to ground more easily that you might suspect. Again, no foul, but that doesn’t mean it’s a dive. There is some middle ground.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the pendulum has swung so far towards punishing diving that refs sometimes get carried away. Take this example (via):

That’s right, a player gets knocked unconscious in the box and is taken away on a stretcher, during which the ref shows him a red card (does the card still count of the player was unconscious and unable to appreciate the punishment?). I can completely understand how the ref may have, from the angle he had on the incident, initially thought it was a dive. But, really, once the guy’s being wheeled away by paramedics, is there any doubt about whether he’s faking?

I don’t want to see divers rewarded in soccer. But neither do I want to see every contact that results in somebody on the ground get sorted into the “foul” or “dive” boxes. It’s a contact sport. Sometimes shit happens.

The World Scoffs at Simple Solutions

I may be the one person on the Web who hasn’t watched the “Kony 2012” video, probably because I already knew who Jospeh Kony is and what his brutal (Christian – that gets left out a lot) militia has been up to over the decades. I’m not surprised that the video’s basic message – that Kony is a bad dude and something needs to be done with him – is resonating around the Web, given the horrible things he has done.

I’m also interested in the slowly building voices that are taking aim at the Kony 2012 project and the group that produced it, Invisible Children. A main critique is that the video distills what is a long-raging conflict with a complex history and distills it into a simple “good versus evil” narrative, complete with the heartstring plucking use of IC’s 5-year old son as a prop, which suggests a simple solution to the problem. Mark Kersten, writing in Salon, explains:

Many have said it is manipulative and patronizing. But the most problematic and potentially dangerous aspect of the film is what it doesn’t do, which is give an adequate understanding of the dilemmas and situation facing those who live in LRA-affected areas. Invisible Children’s smooth message brutally obfuscates key realities about the conflict and other real and less costly solutions, in both human life and monetary terms.

* * *

As many critics have pointed out, the crisis facing LRA-affected areas, which include northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Sudan and South Sudan, is far more complex than the ‘KONY2012’ filmmakers portray. It is a conflict that reaches as far back as 1986, and one in which atrocities have been committed not only by the LRA but by the government of Uganda.

Or, as Alex Dewaal of the World Peace Foundation puts it:

In elevating Kony to a global celebrity, the embodiment of evil, and advocating a military solution, the campaign isn’t just simplifying, it is irresponsibly naive. ‘Big man’ style rulers – of which [Ugandan] President Yoweri Museveni [who is no saint himself] is one – prefer to dismiss their opponents as disturbed individuals, and like to short-cut civil politics by military action. The ‘let’s get the bad guy’ script is a problem, not a solution.

That’s important, given that the main action urged by IC is some kind of military intervention. But that’s been tried before, with bad results:

In 2002, following the U.S. declaration that the LRA was a terrorist organization, the Ugandan People’s Defence Force won the reluctant cooperation of Sudan and launched ‘Operation Iron Fist’ on both sides of the Uganda-Sudan border. It didn’t succeed. In 2008, after the LRA had relocated to north-eastern Congo and the adjoining areas of southern Sudan, a joint offensive by the armies of Uganda, Congo and South Sudan also failed. Another episode was a 2006 operation by special forces attached to the UN mission in Congo. Experts in jungle warfare, Guatemalan commandos were dispatched to the Garamba national park with the objective of executing the recently-unveiled ICC arrest warrant against Joseph Kony and senior commanders. The operation ended in disaster with the UN soldiers fatally shooting each other.

I’m very sympathetic to those criticisms. The world seldom breaks down into simple Manichean struggles of good guys versus bad guys. Simpleminded solutions often tend to make things worse, not better, or at least prolong the suffering. But I’m also sympathetic to IC and its desire to make Kony public enemy number one. He’s a religious nutcase who kills and enslaves people. There is no good there. That doesn’t make the situation in which he exists simple, however, nor does it point to a simple solution.

I’m less sympathetic to criticism like these (again, from Kersten’s Salon article):

While much of the criticism has taken a vitriolic character, some have tapped into larger debates about human rights activism in Africa and ‘[t]he White Man’s Burden.’ The Nigerian-American novelist and photographer Teju Cole, for example, argues that ‘[f]rom Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the U.S. is the White Savior Industrial Complex.’ Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Semha Araia, founder of the Diaspora African Women’s Network, noted that Invisible Children ‘must be willing to use their media to amplify African voices, not simply their own. This isn’t about them.’

Don’t get me wrong – I’m hip to the problems of culture imperialism. It’s just that I seem to remember decades of pleas for the West to do something in response to various crises in Africa, from Ethiopia to Rwanda to Sudan. Often the pleas are literally that – do something, anything – without any real specifics attached. So which is it – hands off and let the locals hash things out? Or swoop in and provide some assistance?

There must be a happy medium. I think Araia is perfectly right that, in the end, problems like Kony “isn’t about” the would-be saviors who come in from the outside. They’re about the locals who have lived (and died) with the problem for decades and will be there long after the spotlight shifts to a juicier atrocity. There’s a world of difference between providing valuable assistance to the locals that empowers them to find long-term solutions and just sending Steven Segal in to jump out of a C-130 and kill Kony with his bare hands while grateful locals grovel in thanks, after all.

Which, when it comes right down to it, is just another reason why simplicity really shouldn’t be the guide star for solving problems like this. History is messy. Local rivalries are complex and long standing. Viable solutions have to take all of that into account. They don’t always make for such compelling viewing or the most effective sound bites, unfortunately.

Friday Review: Le voyage dans la lune

If you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (which is pretty damned good, by the way), then you know of Le Voyage Dans La Lune. Produced in 1902, it’s generally regarded as the first science fiction film ever made. It’s floated around for decades in grainy black and white, admired nonetheless for its groundbreaking effects and whimsy.

But grainy black and white wasn’t the way Georges Méliès intended Le Voyage . . . to be seen. In what must have been a truly pain in the ass process, Méliès and his collaborators colorized the original black and white print – painting it by hand. In 1993, a full-length version of the color print was found, but it was in terrible shape. It took nearly 20 years for it to be restored to the point where it could be shown again in public.

The premier took place at the Cannes Film Festival last year. To mark the occasion, the French electronic duo Air was commissioned to do a soundtrack (Le Voyage . . . is a silent film, after all). When I heard that, it was like a perfect storm of geekiness – a classic old film refurbished, a landmark piece of sci-fi, and a new electronic soundtrack? Sign me up! I figured I’d wait a few years before Criterion or Kino made the whole thing available on DVD.

So imagine my surprise when I discover a new album by Air called Le Voyage Dans La Lune, which takes the soundtrack for the 16-minute film and stretches it out to about twice that length (still pretty short for a modern day album). And, oh by the way, it comes with a bonus DVD that contains the film, in all its restored glory. Needless to say, I jumped on it, with more interested in the DVD than the album itself.

Needless to say, Le Voyage . . . is almost a completely different beast from movies being made 110 years after its debut. There’s no real narrative flow, just a series of connected scenes. The original film has no credits whatsoever (the restoration crew and the band get some added on). And, what’s most striking to me, is that there are no interstitial bits with written dialogue or explanation, as later silent films would have. It really is a completely visual experience.

Having said that, it’s really a hoot. The color palette has a lot more in common with animation than the real world (or even Technicolor), which would give the whole thing an otherworldly vibe, if it wasn’t already there thanks to, you know, it being about a trip to the moon. It’s easy to see why it caused such a sensation and stirred such wonder in the people who saw it on the screen. It’s also easy to imagine that with the first sci-fi film no doubt came for the first sci-fi fan nitpicker, who would deride the scene in which the massive cannon fires the “craft” towards the moon with no recoil whatsoever.

But this, technically, is a review of the album, not the movie, so what of the music? It’s good. As a soundtrack, it doesn’t mesh particularly well with the film until the first scene is over, which is a little off putting. Otherwise, it works quite well. The score itself is all instrumental, but the extra material on the album includes a couple of vocal tracks and some spoken word bits. They sustain the mood and feel of the film in fine fashion (the music on the album is not sequenced in the same way as the film). I’ve found Air’s output to be a little hit and miss, and while this is no masterpiece, it certainly qualifies as a “hit” in my book.

Bottom line – this is a pretty cheap way of owning a part of cinema history. And you get a pretty good album in the bargain, too.


Details
------------
Le voyage dans la lune, by Air
Released 2012

Tracks:
1. Astronomic Club (3:12)
2. Seven Stars (4:22)
3. Retour sur terre (Back on Earth) (0:45)
4. Parade (2:31)
5. Moon Fever (3:50)
6. Sonic Armada (5:06)
7. Who Am I Now? (3:03)
8. Décollage (Takeoff) (1:39)
9. Cosmic Trip (4:10)
10. Homme lune (Moon Man) (0:27)
11. Lava (3:03)

Players:
Jean-Benoit Dunckel (vocals, Mellotron, Wurlitzer, piano, synthesizer, organ bass, Solina, vibraphone, drums)
Nicolas Godin (guitar, harpsichord, synthesizer, timpani, bass, vocals, piano, Mellotron, electric sitar, percussion, drums, banjo, electric guitar)

with
Au Revoir Simone (vocals)
Victoria Legrand (vocals)
Vincent Taeger (drums)
Alex Thomas (drums)
Isabelle Vuarnesson (cello)

Orwellian Nightmare? There’s an App for That!

Oh, joy, just what my state needs – easier electronic snoopery, courtesy of your fellow citizens (via) :

In less time than it takes to play a turn in Words With Friends, smartphone users can report a ‘suspicious person’ to the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security.

The domestic counterterrorism agency’s West Virginia branch, in association with the West Virginia governor’s office, unveiled a new mobile app called the Suspicious Activity Reporting Application this week. ‘With the assistance of our citizens, important information can quickly get into the hands of our law enforcement community allowing them to provide better protection,’ Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said in a statement. The app is available in the Apple App Store and the Android Market.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with harnessing current technology to make real emergency reporting easier. After all, first responders of any stripe can’t be everywhere at once, but there are regular folks damned near anywhere. Still, it just sounds creepy. It doesn’t help that there’s no really well explained quality control, thus:

On its face, there’s nothing about the app that protects either the civil liberties of citizens or the busy schedules of West Virginia homeland security operatives. You don’t have to affirm that you have evidence of a crime, or even a suspected crime, to send information to the Fusion Center.

* * *

In other words, there’s nothing in the app to stop you from snapping a picture of your annoying neighbor and sending it to the attention of federal and state counterterrorism agents in West Virginia, who can keep information on your neighbor’s face, body and perhaps his vehicle for an unspecified period of time.

The potential for abuse is even more of a concern when you consider that West Virginia is hardly a hotbed of terrorist activity (or criminal activity in general). So why, of all things to be in the lead on, have we decided to focus on improving the ability of average citizens to snoop and report on each other? Forget Mountain Mama – bring on Big Brother!

On Respect

When religious believers talk about nonbelievers, and vice versa, often a word that gets thrown around a lot is “respect.” I think we all agree on what respect sounds and looks like. Where we disagree is on what is deserving of respect. The question was thrown into sharp relief recently in, of all places, a discussion of progressive rocker Steven Wilson.

In a recent discussion at Innerviews* Wilson (of Porcupine Tree, No-Man, and now a solo career fame) was discussing motivations, which lead into this exchange (paragraph breaks added):

Are you an atheist?

Yes. I guess I am in some ways your archetypal atheist. I think the whole myth of religion is absolutely absurd. I say this with the caveat that I understand it brings happiness to people who would otherwise be unhappy. There is comfort in it for people who would otherwise be tortured by their own existence and all that stuff. I appreciate those reasons and arguments, but at the end of the day, I’m afraid it’s just a silly fairy tale that mankind has dreamed up because of our fear of death. It’s as simple as that. It seems so obvious to me that’s why we created this myth.

Religion, lest we forget, is a relatively new thing. You can go back as far as the Stone Age to see that man has always worshiped something, such as the sun. But the contemporary idea of religion has been around for less than 2,000 years. I’m speaking as someone that grew up with the idea that if you’re going to be religious, you’re going to be Christian. Well, the Bible was written 200-300 years after the events it supposedly depicts. That’s certainly true for the New Testament and The Gospels. People were employed by politicians and leaders of the church to write it and that says it all to me.

I’ve done a lot of reading and research about religion, because it’s something that fascinates me. What fascinates me is the compulsion or need for many to believe in this nonsense. A great deal of us seem to have this need to fall back on this crutch of faith and belief. People say to me ‘Well, it’s all a matter of faith. You don’t need proof.’ Well, faith for me in that sense becomes a synonym for believing a lie and that’s no explanation at all.

The interview, which touched on lots of interesting musical things, naturally prompted a thread over at Progressive Ears, naturally enough. In the course of that discussion, someone said (bad spelling in original):

I thought the interview was well done with the line of questioning, but once again I am dissapointed with the answers. Steve shares that he is an athiest, and being a Christian, I find that a little dissapointing. But what really dissapoints me is his condescending view of religion. Everyone has the right to believe what they want to believe. I do think you should show a certain amount of respect to others belief system. Ian Anderson is an athiest but is respectful to those who have chosen to believe. Steve gives his pseudo intelectual nonsense as his explanation of why religion is silly. I'm not as dissapointed in his religious beliefs as I am his lack of respect to others.

I’m not sure why “belief systems” themselves are deserving of respect. I’m not sure the author of that post really does, either, hence the reference to Wilson’s “pseudo intelectual [sic] nonsense.” Seems more of a emotional reaction to somebody calling his particular belief system “absurd” and “silly.” I doubt most religious believers respect the belief that the Holocaust never happened or that the moon landing was a hoax (Buzz Aldrin certainly doesn’t!). Or that Xenu brought people here in spaceships that looked just like DC-8s before killing them with nuclear weapons. Or how about this one:

‘God has always been discriminatory’ when it comes to whom he grants the authority of the priesthood, says [religion professor Randy] Bott, the BYU theologian. He quotes Mormon scripture that states that the Lord gives to people ‘all that he seeth fit.’ Bott compares blacks with a young child prematurely asking for the keys to her father’s car, and explains that similarly until 1978, the Lord determined that blacks were not yet ready for the priesthood.

‘What is discrimination?’ Bott asks. ‘I think that is keeping something from somebody that would be a benefit for them, right? But what if it wouldn’t have been a benefit to them?’ Bott says that the denial of the priesthood to blacks on Earth — although not in the afterlife — protected them from the lowest rungs of hell reserved for people who abuse their priesthood powers. ‘You couldn’t fall off the top of the ladder, because you weren’t on the top of the ladder. So, in reality the blacks not having the priesthood was the greatest blessing God could give them.’

And that’s fine – I don’t respect any of those beliefs, either. Why should any other set of beliefs be off limits?

I suppose there is an argument that religious beliefs are so integral to someone’s identity – people often identify themselves first as Catholic or Baptist or Hindu – that is should be off limits to criticism. That would put religious belief on the same level as race and gender, immutable characteristics that aren’t chosen by the individual. But religion doesn’t work that way. People change their religious beliefs all the time. If you look at the “Why I Am An Atheist” series at Pharyngula, you’ll see that many, if not most, atheists come from religious backgrounds.

Or take my own family. My parents were both raised as church goers. Baptists, even. My mother’s told tales of being scared to death by the hellfire and brimstone to which she was subjected on Sundays. But in spite of that, neither of my parents now are religious. They didn’t take me or my two older brothers to church when we were young. Yet, in spite of that, my brothers have both become regular church goers in their adulthood. Who knows where their children will end up? That doesn’t sound like an immutable characteristic to me.

So if religious beliefs (or lack thereof) aren’t immutable, then what other basis is there for giving them special treatment, shielded from the rough and tumble marketplace of ideas? It is important to people, sure, but that doesn’t make it special. Animal welfare is important to a lot of people. Celebration of good music is important to others. That something is important to one person doesn’t mean anyone else has to respect it.

Since there’s no reason to treat beliefs themselves with respect, then what exactly is deserving respect? On a meta level, there’s respect that’s due the right of others to believe whatever the hell they want. Not only is it OK for people to disagree with you, it’s OK for other people to be wrong about all kinds of stuff. They think you’re wrong about all kinds of stuff, too. As long as we’re not trying to force any particular belief down each other’s throats, it’s all good.

There’s also no reason why a lack of respect for a person’s beliefs on the big issues – religion, politics, music – requires a lack of respect for that person as a whole. I respect a whole lot of people who I think are wrong about that kind of stuff. That’s because I know them as people, not walking ciphers for an idea. We are more than the sum of our philosophical beliefs, after all.

In the end, when people complain that others don’t “respect” their beliefs, I think what they mean is that they’re hurt that someone else could be so dismissive of something so important to them. After all, why is it worse for someone to call your belief “silly” rather than “wrong” or simply “I don’t believe that?” It’s an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. It’s an understandable one, too, and you’ve got a right to it. What you don’t have a right to is a life free from offense or hurt because of what others think of your beliefs.

UPDATE: John Scalzi addresses a similar point with regards to Kirk Cameron, who has a sad because people tend to tell him what they think of his ideas. As John points out:

To put it another way: The First Amendment guarantees a right to speech. It does not guarantee a right to respect. As I am fond of saying, if you want people to respect your ideas, get better ideas. Likewise, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence. If you’re going to parade around on television engaging in hateful bastardry, then, strangely enough, people will often call you out on it.

* If you’ve never been to Innerviews and you’re interesting in off the radar kind of music, by all means get yourself over there now. Anil has a great track record of getting interesting musicians to say interesting things.

Nobody Tell Nancy Grace About This

There are times when the whole media circus that surrounds the criminal justice system in this country, particularly in high-profile death penalty cases, makes me want to puke (to borrow a phrase from Rick Santorum). It is worth it, however, to remember that however deprave we may be when we come to this kind of thing, it’s worse elsewhere.

Consider one of China’s most popular Sunday night TV programs (via). It’s called Interviews Before Execution. Give it credit for one thing – it’s not false advertising:

The glamorous Ms Ding conducts face-to-face interviews with the prisoners, who have often committed especially gruesome crimes. Her subjects sit in handcuffs and leg chains, guarded by warders. She warms up with anodyne questions about favourite films or music, but then hectors the prisoners about the violent details of their crimes and eventually wrings apologies out of them.

She promises to relay final messages to family members, who are usually not allowed to visit them on death row. The cameras keep rolling as the condemned say a farewell message and are led away to be killed by firing squad or lethal injection.

China executes more people than any other place on the planet, even Texas. Interviews Before Execution regularly garners 40 million viewers, a number that most American networks would kill for. Of course, this isn’t just the free market at work:

Officials in the ruling Communist Party regard the series as a propaganda tool to warn citizens of the consequences of crime.

Inmates are selected for Ms Ding by judiciary officials who pick out what they consider suitable cases to ‘educate the public’.

As popular, and useful, as the show may be, it has it limits, apparently. It is coming to light thanks to a BBC documentary, which may have gotten a little too close for comfort, according to one Chinese TV official:

It’s fair to say the BBC programme has created a problem for us. Officials here do not want the foreign media saying there are no human rights in China, particularly at this sensitive time politically.

According to the story, only five inmates who have been offered a chance to be on the show have refused. That shouldn’t come as a great shock. Given how cut off they are from the outside world, unable in some instances to even see their family members, it makes sense that they might jump at any chance to talk with someone. I do wonder how many of them actually know what they’re signing up for. Maybe they do – self-righteous twits still do interviews with The Daily Show, for some reason – although I have my doubts.

Which is why, if some enterprising producer in this country decided to import the Interviews Before Execution Format – we’re famous for not being swift enough to come up with our own cheap trashy reality shows, of course – I could see it happening. So, please, I beg of you, keep this post away from Nancy Grace! Although, if she heard about it, the mere idea might drive her mad with ecstasy. And I’m sure that’d get on TV, too.

A Simple Equation

 

+

=

and also . . .

Friday Review: Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion

One of the hazards of any series – of books, movies, or even a TV series – is that the various installments invariably get compared against one another. If you’re lucky, things get better as the series progresses. More likely, things tail off a little bit as the series moves on, but it remains interesting and compelling. Spare a thought for Dan Simmons, then, who knocked it out of the park so hard with the first novel in his Hyperion Cantos that even a very good follow up pales by comparison.

Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are, in essence, two halves the same book that tell a unified story. In fact, Hyperion ends rather abruptly in the way that really infuriates me when it comes to individual books in a series. Having read both books now, I can see why such an abrupt transition was necessary. Each novel is so different from the other in terms of structure that it would have been impossible to tell the story in the way Simmons did in one continuous narrative.

The Hyperion Cantos (there are two other novels, plus some short stories that make up all this) take place in a far future where the Earth is gone (victim of the Great Mistake) and humanity has spread amongst the stars. Along with the humans are a super advanced network of artificial intelligences that help bind the human race together via interstellar communication and travel. Most important are the farcasters, portals through which people and material transfer from one spot to another. Think of Star Trek’s transporter system fused with the Internet and you kind of get the picture. Planets linked to the farcaster network are part of the WorldWeb, in fact. There’s an existential threat to the WorldWeb, the Ousters, who live outside the reach of the network and its AI managers.

One of the interesting things Simmons does with the farcasters is that he takes a completely fantastic technology and makes it utterly commonplace. They aren’t only used for quick transit between distant planets, they’re used for quick transit from one room of a home to another. The truly wealthy, in fact, have homes with so many farcaster portals that each room is on a different planet. Makes any gold-plated mansion Trump comes up with look like an outhouse.

Against that background, Hyperion adopts the structure of The Canterbury Tales to set in motion a catastrophic change in the universe. It tells the story of seven pilgrims on their journey to Hyperion, a planet that lies outside the WorldWeb and sort of off on its own. Hyperion is home to the Shrike, a demon/god/monster that impales people on its metal tree of thorns near a clutch of artifacts called the Time Tombs. A church or cult has sprung up around the Shrike throughout the WorldWeb. An odd number of pilgrims, it is said, seek out the Skrike. All but one is killed. That one may have his or her request heard.

But Hyperion is less about all that than it is about the pilgrims making the journey. The Canterbury Tales frame format allows Simmons to essentially tell six separate short stories (one of the pilgrims disappears before we hear his tale), in varying styles, about these characters. As it turns out, all have been touched by the Shrike in some way, from the poet who thinks the beast was his bloody muse to the father whose daughter, upon encountering the Shrike during a research expedition to the Time Tombs, is now aging backwards. Each story works on its own merit and serves to make you care deeply about these people.

In the background of all that is an impending invasion of Hyperion by the Ousters and what that might mean for the WorldWeb. And that’s where the big shift happens between the two books. In Hyperion, the galaxy spanning war and intrigue plays a back seat to the character stories of the pilgrims. In The Fall of Hyperion, things get flipped. Via a couple of new main characters (including a AI simulacrum of John Keats – no kidding!), the focus shifts from the personal to the epic.

That transition isn’t completely successful. Simmons has enough interesting ideas to keep things afloat in the second book, although it becomes increasingly messianic as things go along. Unfortunately, all those people we grew so attach to in the first book aren’t left with much to do. They all deal with the Shrike, in their own ways, and so there is a sort of closure. However, they all essentially end up for the good at the end of things, which diminishes some of the horror and dread surrounding the Shrike built up in the first book.

In the end, The Fall of Hyperion fails mostly because it is inextricably entwined with Hyperion, which is a masterpiece. Had the tables been turned, had the merely good come before the great, it would have made perfect sense. As it is, The Fall of Hyperion comes off more as a wasted opportunity than a grand sequel.

The Details
-----------------
The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
First published 1989
Hugo and Locus award winner – best novel

The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
First published 1990
Locus and British Science Fiction award winner – best novel

Lies, Damned Lies, and Free Speech (Coda)

A couple of weeks ago I talked about US v. Alvarez, in which the Supreme Court is going to determine whether the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to falsely claim to have been awarded various military honors, violates the First Amendment. The Court heard oral argument in the case last week and I think it really highlights the principle/practical distinction I was discussing in those posts.

In particular, the Court hammers Alvarez’s counsel pretty hard looking for a principled reason why the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech provides protection to knowing false statements of fact. To be honest, I don’t think he came up with a satisfactory answer. Instead, the biggest problem with the Act appears to be its scope and how it is applied. So, hey, maybe I was right about emphasizing the practical after all.

I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It makes my skin crawl when a prosecutor says, with regards to some broadly worded law impacting speech, “don’t worry, we won’t interpret it to reach that kind of speech.” The Government’s tried that line in other First Amendment cases and it was rightly rejected. Hopefully, they’ll rejected this time, too.

Is There a Death Star Gap?!

In these ever perilous days of the War on Terra, we are constantly seeking ever more effective weapons to employ against the enemy. Is it enough to be able to blow up any large chunk of the planet on a whim? No, friends, I say unto you it is not. We’ve got to be able to blow up the entire fucking planet.

Thankfully, the technology to do that is more cost effective than you might imagine. That’s what Kevin Drum would have you believe, at any rate, as he breaks down the economics of building the Death Star (via).

He begins with a conclusion reached by students at Lehigh University that the steel needed to construct the Death Star by itself would cost 13,000 times the world’s current GDP. And Drum says that’s too low – it’s more like 1.3 million times current GDP. A problem? Not so much, due to the increase in GDP in the centuries leading up to the Old Republic, as well as the massive expansion of the tax base over thousands of worlds. In the end:

In other words, not only is the Death Star affordable, it's not even a big deal. Palpatine could embezzle that kind of money without so much as waving his midichlorian-infused little pinkie. If it weren’t for the unfortunate breakdown in anti-Bothan security and the shoddy workmanship on the thermal exhaust ports, it would have been a pretty good investment, too. In other words, yes: totally worth it.

So that takes care of the cost, but what about labor? After all, what do Stormtroopers know about installing plumbing?

Thankfully, we’ve got a while to sort all this out.

A Raging Wall of Black Water

Forty years ago yesterday, a roaring black hell was unleashed in the hills of West Virginia. A coal slurry dam in Buffalo Creek, swollen by days of heavy rains, gave way, unleashing 132 million gallons of black waste water roaring down through the hollow below. In the words of a book about the disaster, it swept away “everything in its path.” 125 people were killed. More than 1100 were injured. Of the 5000 people who lived in the hollow, 4000 were left homeless.

Buffalo Creek was more than just another disaster in the West Virginia coal fields. For one thing, the book I referenced, Everything In Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood, by Kai Erikson, was one of the first case studies dealing with the emergence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For another, the resulting legal action (Pittston Coal, owner of the faulty dam, claimed the disaster was an “act of God”) produced a book by the lead attorney, The Buffalo Creek Disaster (by Jerry Stern) that is used in lots of civil procedure classes across the country as a case study. It’s a horrible way to have an impact, but at least something came out of the disaster.

I was going to write something about the disaster, about how in the 40 years since it happened things have improved somewhat in the coal fields, but lack of concern shown by the coal company for the people who lived around its operation is sadly still in evidence. I should have know that Ken Ward, the crack coal writer for the Charleston Gazette, would have beaten me to it. Go read his thoughts instead.

For more info on Buffalo Creek, see this lengthy series by the Gazette on the 25th anniversary of the disaster.

Friday Review: Mad Men (Season One)

Yes, yes, I know. I’m late to the Mad Men party. A booze drenched party conducted in a haze of cigarette smoke, from the look of it. Consider me properly scolded. So, have I missed out on the greatest TV thing since sliced bread?

It’s hard to tell. The show is brilliantly put together, in terms of writing, acting, and visuals. But is that enough? The last time I came this late to a critically praised TV series it was with The Wire. By the end of its first season, I was hooked. Partly, I figure, it was due to the subject matter. The futility of the war on drugs, police corruption, and the like is right up my alley, after all.

I haven’t had the same reaction to Mad Men. For one thing, other than anthropological curiosity, I don’t really care that much about the ad business in the 1960s. The tricks of the trade are interesting, yes, but they’re largely the same today. As a result, I think what I really need is a deep hook into the characters to be completely pulled in to the show. That didn’t happen. With a couple of exceptions, I find the characters interesting to observe (in their natural habitats, so to speak), but I don’t really care about them. Yes, Don Draper is a suave motherfucker with a dark side (he looks so good with a smoke I nearly went out to find a pack of Lucky Strikes), but I don’t really have any interest in where he’s going as a character.

The only character who I really cared about, in the sense that I wanted to see her succeed in some way during the first season, was Peggy, perhaps because she is the character most at odds with the world she inhabits. I’ll go ahead and I admit I “care” about Pete Campbell, to the extent that I enjoyed seeing him getting smacked around by Don. I particularly enjoyed when Pete, who I call “Conner” (because, to me, Vincent Kartheiser will always been Angel’s douchebag son once Hotlz brings him back from hell) tries to undermine Don to the boss about Don’s shady past, only to be told that nobody gives a fuck about that kind of thing.

What is more fascinating to me about Mad Men is the world these characters live in. When people talk about “world building” they usually are talking about sci-fi or fantasy writers, who build new universes and worlds from the ground up. But the truth is, every writer of fiction (whether on the page or screen) has to pay attention to world building. Thus, just because Mad Men is set in a real time and place from our recent past doesn’t mean the creators can shirk on the details that lend the world depth and credibility.

And boy, do they ever paint a vivid picture. It’s not pretty, mind you, but it really does draw you in. Keeping in mind that I was born a decade after the period depicted in Mad Men, most of it is as foreign to me as a world as anything out of Asimov or George R.R. Martin books. Seriously, in this recent past alcohol flowed freely in the workplace. Everybody smoked pretty much all the time (except for Conner, bless him). Sexual harassment didn’t just exist in the workplace, it was a way of life. Home life wasn’t much better (especially if you’re a divorced woman who dares to move into the neighborhood). Don’t forget the casual racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism. Speaking of Martin, the world of Mad Men isn’t a whole lot better from an equity standpoint than Westeros!

And yet, it’s a very compelling world to observe (just like Westeros, as it happens). Which is why, for all I said about the characters above, I’m pretty much on the Mad Men train. I’ll definitely queue up season two. I do have a nagging fear that after the whole thing is over I’ll feel a bit more like this, but time will tell.

The Details
-------------------
Mad Men (Season One)
Released 2007
Created by Mathew Weiner
Starring Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, Christina Hendricks, et. al.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Free Speech (Part 2)

So the Stolen Valor Act makes it a crime to lie about being awarded various military honors, including (in the case of Xavier Alvarez) the Congressional Medal of Honor. This strikes me as generally a bad idea – criminal punishment of speech which doesn’t really do any harm. But why? Why should I give any kind of shit whether a serial fabricator like Alvarez is convicted of a crime?

One of my regular blog reads is Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Ed Brayton is every bit the free speech hawk that I am. He spends a good deal of time discussing cases from around the world involving suppression of speech, some more serious than others. Some of Ed’s regular commenters, however, aren’t always on board with his outrage. Many of those folks tend to come from places in Europe or Canada that have a different conception of free speech and the impact speech has on the community.

A while back, some discussion over at Dispatches (I wish I could remember which one and provide a link – bad blogger, I know) about free speech made me start thinking that the Euros were making some good points. What struck me as I read the discussion was that I kept coming back to the same reason for thinking they were wrong – I don’t trust the government to sift the good speech from the bad. I think this was in the context of Holocaust denial, which is a crime in several places in Europe. Yes, I thought, Holocaust deniers are idiots (at best) and raving bigots (at worst), but do we really want the state stepping in and locking people like that up? I couldn’t come up with a good principled reason why not.

I mean, often times when we think of First Amendment issues we have images of Orwellian thought police (or the Zappa equivalent) and the horror of the state prying inside your mind. But speech is an outward act, of course, almost by definition. For it to have any meaning someone has to hear it. More to the point, for somebody to get pissed off about it, it must have an impact. Let’s face it – the state is all about making sure people don’t do certain harmful things to each other. Why should speech be off limits?

There’s a more utilitarian side to the argument, although I’m not sure I’d call it “principled.” That’s the argument that runs through neatly a century of First Amendment cases from the Supreme Court about the “marketplace of ideas.” The idea being that when the state stays out of things and everybody is free to chip in with ideas and arguments about ideas, the market will sort everything out. To go back to the Holocaust denier example, you could argue that such folks are regarded as buffoons and not worth of serious attention here in the United States, because their ideas have been so thoroughly debunked in the popular culture. By contrast, the very fact that their ideas are illegal in Europe lends them the credence of the outcast and put upon (i.e., “we must be on to something, look how desperate they are to suppress it!”).

But, again, why leave free speech to the whims of the market? We don’t do it with anything else. If anything, we’ve got mounting evidence that the market doesn’t do a good job of filtering out false or misleading speech. Just look at political campaigns and any news coverage having to do with them. Or lay discussions of Supreme Court decisions that show no solid grasp of what the case actually says.

So what else is there to support the hawkish position on free speech? Seems to me it comes down to a very practical concern – that even if we can identify speech that is harmful, we can’t trust the state to actually implement any scheme that would accurately punish wrongdoers. Whether it’s because the line between good speech and bad speech is so squishy to begin with or that unscrupulous enforcers will use their power to protect their friends and go after their enemies. After all, wouldn’t it be wonderful of politicians – those in power as well as those seeking it – could be punished for flat out bullshit? Probably, but do you trust a Democrat to fact-check a Republican or vice-versa? Even theoretically isolated bureaucrats would potentially have some axe to grind and an ability to wield it.

I think, in the end when it comes to brass tacks, that’s what it comes down to. I think a society could get together and pretty confidently identify speech that is so vile and harmful in and of itself that it should be banned (or otherwise heavily regulated). Where the real dispute comes in is whether the enforcement mechanism would be accurate enough to avoid the risk of squelching other speech that really poses no threat to anyone.

So, to circle back to the question I asked in the first post – is my general hawkishness on free speech issues something born of some bedrock principle? Or is it simply a practical recognition that any speech regulation regime is so fraught with enforcement issues that we should avoid such regulation if at all possible? I think it’s the latter.*

But that’s all right, because the end result in the real world is the same. Whether it’s because of some well rooted principle or simple practical expediency, I champion the cause of free speech. Just because I can hypothesize a perfect world where I might change my mind doesn’t mean I waver in the here and now. Which means I throw in on the side of Xavier Alvarez and his lies, not because I think he should spout them, but because I don’t trust the government not to come after me next.


* I should make perfectly clear that I am only talking about speech that causes some real harm. Harmless speech should always be protected.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Free Speech (Part 1)

I have always prided myself on being a defender of free speech. At times I’ve referred to myself as a “First Amendment hawk,” because I rarely find a situation in which clamping down on speech is justifiable. All of the recent Supreme Court pronouncements on free speech that have been so controversial – striking down limitations on political speech (Citizen’s United), hateful funeral speech (Snyder), “crush” videos (Stevens), and violent video games (Brown) – are cases I think the Court got right. Hell, I don’t think the Supremes go far enough when it comes to something like obscenity. The answer to bad speech is more speech, not regulation.

But lately I’ve been wondering why I subscribe to that viewpoint. More to the point, is my position on free speech issues really a principled one? Or is it more based on the practical concerns of whomever was doing the censoring not getting it right? I’ll talk more about that in the next post. But first, I want to talk about an upcoming Supreme Court case that brings the principle/practical issue into sharp focus.

Next week the Court will hear oral arguments in US v. Alvarez, a criminal case out of the Ninth Circuit. Here’s how Alvarez’s counsel – defense counsel (and a federal defender colleague of mine), keep in mind – starts his brief:

Xavier Alvarez lied. He lied when he claimed to have played professional hockey for the Detroit Red Wings. He lied when he claimed to be married to a Mexican starlet whose appearance in public caused paparazzi to swoon. He lied when he claimed to be an engineer. He lied when he claimed to have rescued the American ambassador during the Iranian hostage crisis, and when he said that he was shot going back to grab the American flag. A colleague was being charitable when he said, ‘I think after anyone meets Mr. Alvarez for the first time, one questions the
veracity of his statements.’

It was another lie that got Alvarez in trouble, when he stood up at a meeting of a local water board (of which he was a member) and claimed to be a Marine who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1987. As a result, he was charged with violating the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to:

falsely represent . . . verbally or in writing, to have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States.

Alvarez got nothing out of his lie. It didn’t provide him any kind of financial benefit. He didn’t get a better parking place because of it. He just puffed up his own self image (one which those around him knew was inflated anyway). Should that be a crime?

The Ninth Circuit said no. The Stolen Valor Act is a content-based restriction on speech and must therefore satisfy strict scrutiny, the highest level of review when fundamental constitutional rights are involved. False statements in general weren’t excluded from First Amendment protection historically (aside from fraud, libel, and slander, which all lead to tangible harms) and the Act itself wasn’t narrowly tailored to address the problem at which it was directed.

That was the initial opinion of the court, which did prompt a dissent. The Government sought a rehearing en banc.* It was denied, but the denial itself prompted several interesting opinions. In and amongst those opinions was a concurrence (in the denial of the rehearing petition) from Chief Judge Kozinski, who mounted a spirited defense of lying:

So what, exactly, does the dissenters’ ever truthful utopia look like? In a word: terrifying.
If false factual statements are unprotected, then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit. Phrases such as ‘I’m working late tonight, hunny,’ ‘I got stuck in traffic’ and ‘I didn’t inhale’ could all be made into crimes. Without the robust protections of the First Amendment, the white lies, exaggerations and deceptions that are an integral part of human intercourse would become targets of censorship, subject only to the rubber stamp known as ‘rational basis review.’

* * *

Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying.

All right, “defense of lying” isn’t quite right. He makes good points, though. A world without any of the polite bullshit we toss at each other would be pretty horrible. Although I think there are deep flaws with the thought experiment that was The Invention of Lying,** its portrayal of a world where everyone is brutally honest with each other, and therefore pretty miserable, seems spot on.

What does that have to do with a principled versus practical view of free speech? Because the arguments on both sides of the Stolen Valor Act issue (though not exactly the ones made by the parties) breakdown along those lines. On the one side, the argument is that knowing false statements have no value and therefore should be regulated because of the harm done. On the other side, the argument is not only do those statements have some value, but regulating them would bring the power of the state into play in ways that will be abused. In other words, it’s a mixture of principle and practicality.

Which objection to things like the Stolen Valor Act gets us the farthest? Does it really make a difference in the end? And if so, what is it? I’ll pick up those questions in the next post.

* “En banc” means review by the entire court, as opposed to the usual three-judge panel. However, the Ninth Circuit is so large that en banc review is really just review by a larger panel (upon which the Chief Judge always sits).

** Funny movie, with lots of great bits, but I question the underlying conclusion that a world without lying means a world without fiction. Fiction, by definition, is not an attempt to accurately depict actual events. Everyone knows going in that the story is not (to cop a phrase from hearsay law) “presented for the truth of the matter asserted.” On the other hand, the idea that religion is spawned only after lying is discovered seems completely on target.

Friday Review: Biutiful

Is it possible to make a movie that is technically perfect in terms of film making and anchored by a superb lead performance that is, nonetheless, hollow and pointless? I wouldn't have thought so, but Biutiful makes a pretty good case.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Biutiful is built around a brilliant performance by Javier Bardem as Uxbal, who receives news that he's suffering from advanced prostate cancer and has, at beast, a few months to live. To call Uxbal's life “complicated” is to undersell the bad hand Iñárritu deals him. For a living, Uxbal plays some kind of middleman role in a criminal enterprise that exploits (presumably illegal) immigrants in Barcelona for both the supply (Chinese) and distribution (African) of counterfeit goods. The closest thing to a legitimate job Uxbal has is when he takes money from those who have recently had a loved one die in order to see if they are at peace.

That's right. Uxbal talks to the dead. Given the rest of his criminal life, one would think that would be a scam. But Iñárritu makes it clear that Uxbal really does talk to dead people. So much for realism.

Uxbal has two children, the younger of whom apparently likes to start fires. Their mother, his estranged wife, is nuts, an addict of some persuasion, and a prostitute. Did I mention that she hooks up with Uxbal's brother (who is also part of the illegal immigrant business)?

Into such difficult circumstances, Uxbal's diagnosis makes barely a ripple, except to provide the film's ticking clock. Honestly, aside from one scene of chemo and the general deterioration of Uxbal's health (multiple scenes of Bardem pissing blood!), the cancer thing is hardly the life altering event it would be to most people.

So, the cancer diagnosis becomes just one of the many bad things that happen to Uxbal over the nearly two-and-a-half hour running time. There's a botched reconciliation with the crazy hooker wife. Two dozen of his Chinese immigrants are killed (due to his cheapness, essentially). And, of course, he dies.

Even Biutiful’s admirers admit to its bleakness and the misery that seems to infuse every scene. So what, then exactly, is Iñárritu trying to say? What does he bring to the conversation about the world that others haven’t? Damned if I can tell.

I’ve seen some commenters argue that those who dislike the film simply just can’t handle the reality of it, can’t deal with the fact that it shows the ugly side of life. I don’t think that’s true. For one thing, as I mentioned above, Uxbal talks to dead people. That ain’t real life, people, OK? Any film that aims for gritty realism probably should leave the magical touches for others. For another thing, if you need to watch a fictional movie to be reminded of how much the world sucks for vast swaths of people out there, you’re the one who’s being willfully ignorant. I don’t blame Iñárritu for showing me misery – it confirms what I see in my daily life (certainly in my daily work) – I blame him for not saying anything interesting about it.

In his positive review, Roger Ebert claims that Uxbal is a “good man” trying to come to terms with all this. I don’t see it. Yes, Uxbal loves his kids, but he doesn’t do very well by them.* He never actually tells them about his impending death and his way of securing their future is to give each some mystical doodad that’s supposed to “protect” them. By the end of the film, the kids are left to a world without a father, with a mother who is at best neglectful and at worst destructive, and in the care of an immigrant woman who, while she appears to be a good loving person, is not exactly in a secure situation herself. If that’s what love gets you, that’s not saying much. I fail to see anything else Uxbal does that demonstrates a “good” man trapped in a bad situation. And there are two dozen dead Chinese who probably can’t see it, either.

Given all that, I’m a bit puzzled at Ebert’s reference to Ikiru, the Kurosawa masterpiece. Aside from both being about dying men, those men couldn’t be more different. Uxbal is a criminal who preys on others to make a living. Ikiru’s Kanji is a midlevel bureaucrat who is unsure if his work has any meaning. Not only does Kanji take obvious steps to do good, we see (via a brilliant 45-minute coda) how the world appreciates the work he did once he is dead. No dead people talking in Ikiru either, which has to count for something.

In the end, the closest Iñárritu appears to wander near a point is to give in to some nondescript woo-based kind of “hope.” As A.O Scott in the New York Times so devastatingly put it:

Mr. González Iñárritu does not have the stomach for the stringent moral and spiritual vision of authentically (or even experimentally) religious filmmakers like Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson or the Dardenne brothers. Instead he traffics in a vague theology of uplift, wherein the road to an entirely abstract heaven is paved with noble instincts.

The tension between this director’s methods and his intentions — between his exacting, sometimes amazing craft and his resolutely banal ideas — may ultimately be a problem of audience and genre. ‘Biutiful,’ like ‘Babel,’ looks more daring and more difficult than it is. But if Mr. González Iñárritu were, let’s say, to adapt a novel by Nicholas Sparks, whose views on love and morality are not ultimately all that different from his, the result might be a satisfying and surprising synthesis of styles: a feel-bad art film with an uplifting message for everyone. ‘Biutiful,’ come to think of it, is almost that, but not entirely in a good way.

Ouch. Now that is biutiful.

* Not to go all Godwin, but Goebbels loved his children in Downfall, too, but you can see where that led.

The Details
-------------------
Biutiful
Released 2010
Written by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Armando Bo, Nicolás Giacobone
Starring Javier Bardem, Maricel Álvarez, Hanaa Bouchaib, et. al.

Theft, Homage, or Just Business?

Sometimes, a piece of genre fiction is just so damned good, it forces the snobs in the wider world to take notice. 2001 is recognized as not just a great piece of science fiction, but as a great film. Likewise, Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is such a landmark in that genre that it gets props from those who would never otherwise dare to talk of superheroes and comic books.

Which doesn’t mean it exists outside the demands of commerce. Earlier this month, DC Comics announced it would release a series of “prequel” issues, several for each of some of Watchmen’s main characters – Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan ,and Rorschach, for instance – none of them written by Moore or with art by Gibbons. The artist, at least, is on board:

The company has also enlisted the blessing of Gibbons, a move that should mollify many fans. ‘The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC's reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire,’ he said in his statement.

As for the writer, Moore? Yeah, well, not so much:

Mr. Moore, who has disassociated himself from DC Comics and the industry at large, called the new venture ‘completely shameless.’

Speaking by telephone from his home in Northampton, England, Mr. Moore said, ‘I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.’

He went on to explain that he didn’t want money, what he wanted was for the prequels not to happen.

I can understand Moore’s position. After all, when you create something and see it as a whole work, and later on somebody comes along and adds to it, it must chafe a little bit. Still, does Moore really have any basis upon which to get pissy about it?

One of the writers involved in the prequels is J. Michael Straczynski, of Babylon 5 fame. He makes a very good point about Moore:

it should be pointed out that Alan has spent most of the last decade writing very good stories about characters created by other writers, including Alice (from Alice in Wonderland), Dorothy (from Wizard of Oz), Wendy (from Peter Pan), as well as Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Jekyll and Hyde, and Professor Moriarty (used in the successful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). I think one loses a little of the moral high ground to say, ‘I can write characters created by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Frank Baum, but it’s wrong for anyone else to write my characters.’

Indeed, the characters of Watchmen itself did not spring from Moore’s brain fully formed. They were based on characters DC had acquired when it purchased a defunct competitor, Charlton Comics. Moore took them and twisted them beyond recognition, but still, he wasn’t exactly writing on a completely blank slate.

Moore has an answer for Straczynski:

In literature, I would say that it’s different. I would say, and it might be splitting hairs, but I’m not adapting these characters. I’m not doing an adaptation of Dracula or King Solomon’s Mines. What I am doing is stealing them. There is a difference between doing an adaptation, which is evil, and actually stealing the characters, which, as long as everybody’s dead or you don’t mention the names, is perfectly alright by me. I’m not trying to be glib here, I genuinely do feel that in literature you’ve got a tradition that goes back to Jason And The Argonauts of combining literary characters [...] It’s just irresistible to do these fictional mash-ups. They’ve been going on for hundreds of years and I feel I’m a part of a proud literary tradition in doing that. With taking comic characters that have been created by cheated old men, I feel that that is different.

On the one hand, I see Moore’s point. Writers, and other artists, have pilfered past works for their own creations since the beginning of time (well, right after the beginning of time), after all. And, as a writer myself, I like the idea of other people keeping their hands off until I croak. On the other hand, that sounds more like a rule of etiquette than a hard ethical precept. Let’s face it, once the original creator is dead, he or she is much less likely to complain about appropriation.

In the end, it’s all moot. Neither Moore nor Gibbons control the legal rights to the work, sadly. Which means that DC is free to do whatever the hell they want to. Given the nature of the comic book industry, with its endless series and countless reboots, getting some other big names to play in that sandbox is hardly a unique move.

So let’s hold off until we see whether they fuck up the legacy of Watchmen. And how badly.

The Definition of Irony

Presented without comment:

Via Reason (which got it via various Twitter Feeds).

Everything Becomes Obsolete

Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1.

In the United States, we tend to think of constitution making as something that happens once every few centuries, if not once every eon. After all, the US Constitution is the oldest written constitution in the world that’s still in effect. For all its flaws, it’s served us pretty well over the 225 years it’s been around. But times change. History moves on. Things evolve.

So it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that, according to a pair of law profs with an article in the works, the influence of our Constitution on the rest of the world is waning. As recently as 1987, a study of 170 countries showed that 160 had constitutions greatly influenced by our own. Today, however:

‘[a]mong the world’s democracies,’ Professors Law and Versteeg concluded, ‘constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.’

‘The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.’

Why? That’s where the quote at the top of this post (from Law) comes in. A constitution written in the 18th century is silent on lots of questions that are important to emerging democracies in the 21st Century. We are still clinging to Win 3.1, while everyone else has moved on. The state of the art (or at least Vista, to keep the Widows analogy going) is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982.

There is a lot of talk of rights in the New York Times article, but our Constitution itself (as opposed to the Bill of Rights) has very little to say about individual rights per se. It’s more focused on structural aspects. And while it’s easy to make an argument about the broad benefits of, say, the separation of powers, other things don’t make as much sense in a smaller modern nation. Federalism is basically a holdover from the Articles of Confederation and the unique conception of the states during the founding. That history just isn’t present in, say, modern day Egypt. Why should they use such an outdated model as a base?

As for rights, there’s a nifty chart that’s part of the article that shows, for the most part, the trend is for modern constitutions to broaden rights compared to ours, not limit them. For example, most of the big rights in the First Amendment – freedom of speech, assembly, and religion – as well as a prohibition against arbitrary arrest and detention appear in between 94% and 97% of world constitutions, as well as our own. Where the world moves on from us is in areas like women’s rights (91%), right to work (82%), and right to education (82%). To be fair, some of the areas labeled as not being part of our Constitution – like judicial review and the presumption of innocence – have been recognized by the Supreme Court.

What’s really fascinating to me are the areas where our Constitution explicitly provides rights that don’t hold a lot of sway in other newer constitutions. The prohibition against double jeopardy, for example, only gets into 50% of modern constitutions, while only 49% percent provide for the right to remain silent. Even more striking are a pair of contentious provisions that most people still feel are critical to our Constitutional system that are almost nonexistent elsewhere – the separation of church and state (only 34%) and the right to bear arms (only 2% - you read that right).

At the end of the day, of course, the words on paper aren’t nearly as important as whether the culture as a whole buys into the ideals they represent:

as Justice Antonin Scalia told the Senate Judiciary Committee in October. ‘Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights,’ he said.

‘The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours,’ he said, adding: ‘We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!’

Of course, it was all meaningless. Unfortunately, I fear that the lesson the United States is most poised to give in the 21st Century is what can happen when the guarantees of the Constitution become just words on paper. When ideals upon which we’ve relied for so long are swept away out of concern for security or because of a misguided war on particular behaviors, that can be the result. I hope we recognize it before our influence on the rest of the world is something to avoid, not something to emulate.

Friday Review: Super 8

This probably shouldn’t be the case, but where you see a movie has a lot to do with how much you like it. If I had seen Super 8 in the theater, sitting in the dark, with a bunch of other people, tub of popcorn propped precariously between myself and K, I’m pretty sure I would have walked out with a big grin on my face. But since I saw it at home on DVD? Meh, not so much.

In Super 8, Lost boy J.J. Abrams transforms Weirton, West Virginia, into a bucolic Ohio town that seems ripped through a time warp from one of Steven Spielberg’s late 1970s/early 1980s movies. That’s no coincidence – Spielberg was a producer of Super 8 – and also not a knock. For about the first hour or so, things hum along in excellent fashion. It’s only when the actual plot needs to unfold do things take a turn for the worse.

The main focus of Super 8 is a bunch of middle school boys (and one older girl who somewhat inexplicably joins them) who are making a zombie movie for a local film festival. The kids are great, the movie making aspect is fun, and we get a good sense of who they are and what this town is like where they live. Then, while shooting late at night at the local train station, a train comes roaring by (“production value!” yells the director, who moves to get the train in the scene). All goes to shit, however, when a pickup truck inexplicably drives onto the tracks and drives head-on into the onrushing train, derailing it in spectacular CGI fashion (also, inexplicably, the driver of said truck is not reduced to a stain on the prairie by the impact – be gone, physics!).

It’s from there that the film starts to go wobbly. Strange things start happening. Unsuspecting townspeople get sucked up by an off-screen baddie. One of them, natch, is the older girl involved with the movie, which gives our main character a damsel to rescue. None of what transpires is really bad, it just doesn’t live up to the what came before. What was once enticing and original becomes formulaic and familiar. The monster turns out to be the fairly standard alien who just wants to go home (unlike ET, he’ll kill any motherfucker who gets in his way, tho’). Maybe I was unjustly thinking, while it was lurking off screen, that it might turn into something like the Shrike, but it didn’t happen.

In the end, all is well, the music swells, and lessons are learned. It’s all very life affirming. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just feels unearned and a little facile. Which is why I think if I had seen Super 8 in the theater I would have walked out a happy man. Two hours of generally good entertainment? Hard to argue with that. But in the cold hard light of my living room . . ..

The Details
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Super 8
Released 2011
Written & directed by J.J. Abrams
Starring Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, et. al.

Sometimes a Walking Naked Rotting Corpse Is Just a Walking Naked Rotting Corpse

Fair warning – I’ve never been the brightest bulb in the box when it comes to deciphering hiding meanings in art. Maybe it’s my lawyer’s argumentativeness or my bent towards skepticism, but I’m wary of concluding that something obvious really means something obscure and “deep.” That being said, I do worry somewhat about the kind of hidden meanings others might dig up out of my own work. There’s a reason the creatures in The Water Road are all shades of blue and green, after all.

Readers of the old blog might remember a series I did called “Mondays With Stanley,” in which I worked my way through a bunch of Kubrick films I had on DVD (due, mostly, to a kind gift from K). One of them was The Shining, which I discussed in an entry cleverly titled “Jack Goes Apeshit.”  I felt then, and still do, that The Shining isn’t up there in the pantheon of Kubrick’s great works, but it’s creepy as hell, filled with iconic images, and benefits from a note-perfect electronic score by Wendy Carlos. Nothing wrong with that.

But, perhaps, I wasn’t looking at it the right way. A documentary that premiered at Sundance, Room 237, surveys the wide variety of thought on what The Shining really is all about:

It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

I’d heard the Native American hypothesis before, which at least has some grounding in the film itself. The Overlook Hotel, for one thing, it built over top of a Native American burial ground (and we’re told that the builders had to repel attacks during construction). But some of the tells – there’s a brand of canned food product that uses an Indian logo visible in some scenes! – seem like the kind of stretching that conspiracy theorists engage in. You know what else is visible in those scenes? Jars of Tang and tins of Sanka. Maybe the real message of The Shining is that drinking decaf can perk up your sex life?

The other theories discussed in the story seem on even shakier ground (It’s a Holocaust metaphor because Wendy swings the bat 42 times at Jack, a reference to 1942? The pattern in the carpet in the Overlook mimics the Apollo launch pad? Really?). Which isn’t to say they’re wrong – who knows, since Kubrick’s dead and never addressed them while he was alive. And it’s always fun to see how weird and twisted you can get with something like that.* There’s no harm in that. But, really, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar, know what I mean?

That being said, in the end, when Room 237 makes its way to DVD, I’ll check it out. If nothing else, how people react to art fascinates me. I wonder what subliminal messages are lurking between the frames of Room 237!

*A lot of the alleged symbolism is broken down in a series of YouTube videos, if you’re curious.