walking with the comrades

this book's really upsetting because i think pacifism's the way to be, and this book's an argument for violence in the wilderness, because what else can you do. the argument goes thus: if a pacifist dies in the wilderness in an illegitimate state with a collaborationist press, should they have had a gun? also, double down by saying that that wilderness is sacred to them, and that living in it is the only way they know and want to live.

i had no idea india was such a rotten place. i mean, i'd heard there were a lot of wretched people, but i didn't realize the government was so corporatist and murderous.

still, doesn't violence necessarily destroy democracy? doesn't this rebellion consign the people in these regions to total militarization? roy's pretty romantic about the guns slung over people's shoulders and the nightly thousand star jungle hotel, but i'm dubious. at best, if they win, isn't that doubtless going to lead to a lot of horror a la khmer rouge? violent revolutions are the pits.

from my rich white western perch: surrender the weapons and fight with unmoving bodies. cede the bauxite flat tops for a couple years, go to the cities, overwhelm them with the horror of your lives, start the peaceful revolution in the Public World. can't win a popular revolution in the jungle.

somebody wrote somewhere about haute liberals preferring people'd commit suicide than fight against genocidal armies, and it's uncomfortable close to home for me. i think it has more convulsive, revolutionary power. pacifism's a way humbler, more difficult thing to follow. what could be easier, more feel-good, than fighting back? but when you phrase it like suicide, what a hideous self-abnegation to ask of people. but just get yourself jailed! there's that delightful idea that if 2% of everybody drafted refused to go, all the jails in the world couldn't hold them.

but it's convincing that, yes, they'll lose the land, lose the way of life if they protest without guns. different story in a city square than in a jungle. is it worth fighting for? does fighting derail, or complicate, the broader potential for mass, peaceful revolution?

if the alienation, the utter immiseration is so massive, they've gotta be this close to a mass movement. also, roy spends much time enumerating the weaponry of the indian army, and the out and out dedication of the government to its violent ends. the rebels literally cannot beat the violence.

but would the state just kill all of them? it could dump millions in the wilderness, just like that imagined pacifist. but who's doing the killing? chiefly people an awful lot like the people they're killing. they couldn't do it to a mass, peaceful movement. at least not that much. humans are human!

the balkans and pacifism

what do i want to say about the balkans regarding pacifism? one huge shitty thing in the region was the expansionist ideas, the irredentism. everybody wanted to get in on macedonia, for example. croatia and serbia feuded over bosnia hercegovina. bulgaria was all over thrace. greece had its megali idea. serbia always had its hooks in kosovo, an overwhelmingly ethnic albanian territory. etc. etc. 

where's this itch come from? more territory makes a state more powerful, sure, but why did it capture public imagination so much? the biggest issue was the power vacuums, topped off by the demographical scrum. when the ottoman empire got booted out of macedonia, etc., there was all this territory and all sorts of people and no government and no single country to swallow it up. and so there's war. simple enough. 

irredentism also comes about from without the country. bulgaria, for example, got its itch for southward expansion in large part from its refugees fleeing northward, who then agitated to return south under the flag, and arms, of their adoptive nation. so that, too. 

there're also racist, nationalist movements that spring up among benighted people and threaten minorities. the idea of "greater serbia" gained tremendous currency during the ustase regime during world war two. serbs WERE cleansed, terrible things DID happen, and the resultant fixation on having every serb be in a state together, and never a minority, ultimately lead to terrible things. 

reading The Balkans, by Misha Glenny, has made me think these things. it's also reaffirmed in my mind that all this stuff happens in states full of poor, ignorant people. investments in a country's infrastructure, and education, and industry, is the best and simplest way to stop wars from happening. 

as far as arguing that Violence Always Makes Things Worse, there's a lot of individual things to point at, but putting together a grand argument is way beyond me. there were the yugoslav partisans launching deliberately quixotic attacks on nazi positions solely to provoke retaliation against the locals who would then often join up the fight against the nazis. 

i originally started with all this because i wanted to know what the world should've done in the face of milosevic's bad behavior. did the world have to stop Greater Serb violence with violence? 

a calculation that's super taken for granted these days but which i'd like to undermine is that it's better for a thousand people to die in a war to stop the ignoble, peace time political murder of a single person. warrior-on-warrior casualties are infinitely easier to stomach than civilian deaths. that thinking leads to a lot more heinous (but noble!) death and misery than there'd otherwise be, i think. 

on marriage

had an afternoon of arguing with my cousin about a number of things. one of them started when she talked about all the shopping she had to do for bridesmaids dresses, ended up being about marriage as an institution (nothing to do with k or anything personal). i said i don't believe in marriage and we argued about it.

interesting things that she and my mom argued were that the vow of traditional marriage, this frankly outrageous promise, help smooth over the inevitably difficulties of being with somebody. it helps give one the endurance to deal with petty things to then have the bounty of a long term relationship because IT'S IN THE CONTRACT, whereas if you didn't have that "forever after" you'd be less tolerant and more liable to traumatically split up because you wouldnt have that obligation, so they say. logically following from this (though they didnt say this) would be that divorce should be harder, because that'd force people to work harder to work things out and reap the ultimate payoff of staying together. i'm not sure about that.

i mean, sure, down with traditional marriage, but i end up feeling kind of silly railing again marriage as a thing because, well, i'm down with long term relationships, and marriage is just a way of codifying them. i suppose the thing in my mind is when there're children. rather than a couple pledging to sort out their pettiness for decades on end and have somebody to fall back on, marriage or something like it should be all about kids. having kids, if you want to, should be this crazy serious undertaking occasioning all the preparation that weddings currently get. a commitment to not fuck up the life of a life you're creating is a far more substantive and important pledge than Let's Love Each Other Forever. THAT should be the big moment.

i dunno. why codify longterm romantic relationships? is there any harm to it? i mean, imagining a marriage excised of all the hideous bridesmaids-ing and gift registries etc, is there some evil cost associated with pledging formally to be with someone for a long time? one does it anyway telling someone they love them, love them forever. why not a plain old contract? perhaps i'm not thinking radically about this. i'm not questioning long term relationships, or monogamy or something. people in long term relationships breaking up sucks a lot, but that's all divorce rates are; nothing to freak out about maybe. this is super messy and dumb, disappointingly lacking in bold prescriptions. a reformed marriage'd probably be fine, i guess.

erin brockovitch and the prestige

erin's a simple feel good movie that's also got nice stuff about stay at home dads that i appreciated. there's just that the crux of the whole thing rests on this number, 335 million. there's a huge celebration over it. but it's actually a super pathetic number before you even count the 40 number that lawyers take out of it. it's a triumphant "true story" about the system working, but one wonders how much actors had to ham up that ecstasy at the end. i hope they did, anyway. the system is fucked, however blindingly julia roberts smiles.

i just watched the prestige which is neat. gotta give this plot a lot of leeway. if you don't think too much the metaphors are killer, but it rests an awful lot on an outrageous premise. but it's a spooky, enthralling premise. i also appreciate all the ugliness—dead birds, broken hands, drowning—the big ugly stakes. life's so much more interesting when things go wrong; i'm thinking again of people being blind in Unforgiven. and the image of all those hats in the field? that's haunting. if only the electricity didn't already look so dated. i was super ready to hate a christopher nolan movie, but this was pretty great.

heat

the master criminal versus the master cop! one super funny thing in "high tech" movies is the nearly constant gibberish as dialogue. no time is actually going to be taken to explain some intricate stock trading deal, so instead there's this nonsense chatter spoken with great solemnity. it reminds me of this game we played in drama class in which one pretended to be an Expert on wine or insoles or whatever the fuck.

the movie's super beautiful, and the final scene with the light going nuts bcause of the planes landing (is that really what happens in airports? stunning) and so the shadows shifting and mucking up their positions as they edge around, i mean, what a gorgeously tense set up. 

there's basically one good idea in this movie and it knows it so it repeats it like 8 times, and that is that if you're a master criminal you gotta be ready to drop anything and everything in 30 seconds. the corollary's that the cops chasing them gotta have a similar willingness, and so there's this lonely kinship between them. there's lots of 3rd rate poetic moping about lost love because mr. super cop is too wrapped up with the wicked people and the dead. the action sequences are thrillingly intricate; it's beautiful watching people do things perfectly. anyway. not much.

blade

my landlord's wanted me to see this movie. he thinks it's the real shit. i'm kind of amazed how normalized torture is in action movies. blade straight up tortures at least two people in this movie, and, in the movie, it's a necessary, even hilariously righteous thing. he burns one guy's entire body, and when he later refers to him as mr. crispy, it's super funny. and the guy's a vampire, so it's cool. but that's incredibly insidious.

the bedrock of legitimating torture, of improbably making it funny, is the assurance that it's happening to a truly evil person. (there are some radically terrible people who love concocting hypothetical situations to try to argue that it could be cool to torture people, but that's some next-level appalling shit)
so long as you're fighting vampires (or soviets, muslims, nazis etc.) there's no other side to the argument because it's certain they'd do the same to you, and that their moral-vacuum-ass has no right to rights. this kind of thinking leeches into the real world, however, and before long you've got enhanced interrogation and everything is terrible.

blade hasn't aged so well because CGI blood-glooping has really come a long way since 1998. the opening scene with the club in the meat club is a fantastic idea, and it's just like slaktuset (sp?) in stockholm, where everything smells a little like sausage, so that touch made me really happy. the idea of vampires as nighttime clubbing leches is great, though there is one truly bizarre scene in a bar with lots of asian businessmen and asian women singing like little school girls that i guess just tried to hammer that point home. it's great that it stars a black people; there's lots of sci-fi racial tensions; talk of "half bloods;" the villain calls blade an uncle tom because he says he's not a vampire. all the interracial relationships get violently axed. meh

amadeus!

what a fucking good movie! it's the best argument for atheism i've come across in years. the shots of him using the pool table as a desk, rolling the ball around the sides of the table as the rhythm for his work is MARVELOUSLY PROFANE. so fucking good. and watching the agony of god's most faithful servant.

mozart himself is kind of a simple character, but i guess that's what the movie asks of him. be a "bawdy imp," as the summary on the back puts it, and god's mouthpiece—just a thing to most perfectly enrage saliere, or whatever his name is. moz's wife's actually kind of a good character; her voice is so weirdly familiar somehow.

i mean, apart from that, it's got pretty good tunes. i didn't realize opera used to be a good time. i saw the magic flute once and it was an unspeakably boring experience.

bel-ami

i think it actually depressed me. it made feelings feel fake and made me afraid i was like duroy. it's a book about all the good things that happen to this super evil fellow. not even evil; he's like felix krull, the protagonist of the thomas mann book. he made me remember a quote from that book: "happiness is sated pride." that's all duroy is. not evil as much as empty of anything beyond callow desires for "wealth" "power" "fame." evil doesn't exist, anyway, there's just ambition without thought. aha! that's it!

notable in this book: passion for a woman is tantamount to rape. there are like a dozen scenes in this book where he straight up sexually assaults people, but it's okay because the women are only TRYING TO FIGHT HIM OFF because of their modesty and desperate self restraint. the book's super relevant for the modern world on that front—she wants it, she just doesn't know it, is holding herself back, etc.

apart from that, there's insider trading, newspapers as mouthpieces for financial interests, journalism as sex stories sprinkled with politics.

it's also that same thing that's in every story about the world from that time: spicy feudalism. everything's inherited, and people are what they're born, but "the prostitutes are the way to the top" and a night looking good in some rented evening dress and being able to drop the name tiberius and you can be a king. also, debts. always have so many debts. also having a fantastic mustache; 100% of the sensuality in this book centers on duroy's upper lip hair.

more on the fucking bridge on the river kwai

so i've realized that the part at the beginning when they allude cryptically, conspiratorially, to the brits's surrender, is the point on which the whole movie's founded. watching kwai is a 3 hour argument for the ludicrousness that the little fools depicted with japanese people could ever have captured the stoic, infinitely noble british soldiers. but there they are, POWs.

the drama of the movie, then, rests on the gradual role reversal. the brits can't help helping their pathetic captors to a point where their colonialist zeal, their compulsive need to bring civilization to the "natives," is tantamount to treason against their own soldiering.  but it doesn't matter in the end. the ultimate fact of western power crashes the schizophrenic party, and everyone's rightful position is restored.

it's a brilliantly assembled movie, remarkably taut for something so big and sprawling, and it's beautifully shot. it's also, you know, abominable.

the bridge on the river kwai

rage built in me bodily watching this movie. it's a celebration of colonialism, racism, and following orders. it's a soaring story of gentlemanliness and RULES in war. this movie takes place in world war two, by the way.

it's difficult for me to imagine anything more evil. the premise is that british POWs are put to work to build a bridge. the japs can't get them to do it properly, however. the movie succeeds outlandishly in making the ineffective administration of a POW camp, of failing to get people to work well on projects that would facilitate the murder of their compatriots, a mark of dishonor and failure.

i can't remember the last time something disgusted me so completely. the fundamental dishonesty of it, the lionization of british colonialism (think of all the bridges they built for india! what beautiful contributions!) makes me want to turn off my head. the british commander muses at one point, atop the beautiful bridge he's erected, "i love india." oh my god i need to go for a walk. this movie came out in 1957. maybe the world's different now. i don't think so.

in reading reviews of it people argue it's really about the lunacy of following orders, of the mania for discipline. but the fact is that the colonel comes within a hair of having everything go perfectly. in the end, it's really that he's gone more than a little bit crazy when he stops a fellow british soldier from doing his duty. if he did everything EXCEPT that, literally everything would've been perfect within the cinematic logic of colonialism and triumphant british power. hey, whether it's good for the fatherland or not, the brits just can't help saving the world. the contradictions ultimately dissolve themselves thanks to military might, anyway.

not like those japs every coulda won. the basis of the movie is japanese incompetence so outrageous that brits can't help getting into moral quandaries trying to help them out of their pathetic state, except it doesn't even matter because it's not like britain'd ever lose this war anyway—note the story at the beginning of how they became POWs: some obscure, bizarre insistence from their higher-ups  that they surrender, not their own failure. as if.

fuck, i mean, i thought a lot of these issues got resolved in La Grande Illusion like 20 years earlier. THERE'S a fucking war movie. there's your gentlemanliness in wartime.

at the beginning i was rooting desperately for the japanese to machine gun every last whistling white man.

scenes from a marriage

well! that was fun! i honestly have nothing to say about this movie. i don't really know what i just witnessed. i think i'm too young, too straightforward, too unburdened to get a grip on this movie. i literally have no idea what they're talking about in that last scene or two, but it sounded bad. the key question i've got coming out've it is how much is it about the two of them together in particular? are they recreating this shit more or less everywhere and this movie's just about THEIR relationship? i mean, is it a stupendously terrible coincidence that they're together and that they mighta done okay with somebody else? i'm struck by the idea that one could get endlessly stuck in ONE PARTICULAR terrible relationship because it's somehow irresistible. yo, why do people do shitty things for years on end? that's the question. are they sane people who just happened upon another sane person with whom they fit together diabolically perfectly, or could this only happen to people predisposed to lunatic behavior? whatever. it's not what i'm like, at any rate. i'm easy breezy and easily bored and virtually devoid of nostalgia. healthy!

knicks

dear god i hope the new york knicks win tonight. if they win i feel happy and it's so nice to feel happy. they're playing the indiana pacers in indiana. the chief concern is scoring. the knicks haven't scored much against the pacers because there's this enormous guy named roy hibbert who's masterful at simply putting his body between a new york knick with a basketball and the hoop. he moves his feet, sticks up his arms, and makes everything horrible.

pacifism

was just listening to an infuriating this american life episode that ran in the run up to the war in iraq. they were debating the reasons for and against. the scariest best argument for the war was that saddam hussein'd eventually get a nuke, and with that nuke he'd be able to take over the world. he'd bully other countries to bow to his will with the threat that he was crazy enough to nuke them if they didn't, damn the consequences. therefore, we had  to depose him before he'd have the craziness AND the nukes to deter us from intervening with his shit.

this is a powerful argument.

how much does it cost to produce a nuclear weapon from scratch and ignorance?

how many people would die in the war to overthrow him and its aftermath? (one interesting thing whenever one talks about nukes and war is that nuclear weapons are an instant, certain, horrifying calculation whereas a war can be the siege of stalingrad or a "cake walk")

the guy making the Crazy Saddam With Nukes argument invoked intelligence saying that saddam imagined himself filling the vacuum left by the soviet union, counterbalancing US power. this seems a strong argument for saddam being crazy, but a hilarious for US policy makers to freak out about, no? iraq in the run up to the war was a poor country with 30 million people and a pretty broken down army.

following the CSWN logic, saddam's not plausibly going to occupy these other countries with military might because he's got his own restive population to deal with—he's a dictator. rather, it posits a kind of bank hold-up scenario, no? "gimme this oil field and that port etc or i'll nuke you!" a la hitler with the czech republic, except very disproportionate and asymmetrical and trading almost entirely on craziness because apart from nuking somebody, or threatening to, there's oddly little he'd be able to do as pretty much every country in that region's got a respectable military, and even if they didn't, iraq just didn't have the resources to occupy its neighbors.

and i'd argue that if a country with evil ambitions DID have the resources that they're being provoked, a la japan and germany in world war two.

if the war was a "cake walk" and iraqis settled into beautiful democracy then there'd really be no argument. "freedom" and peaceable prosperity's clearly better for everybody than an evil dictator. but any halfway decent dictator has, by definition, totally messed up their country's prospects for returning to easy breezy liberty. dictatorships rely on empowering and thereby implicating a minority or two at the expense of everybody else, and then keeping everything else together with violence and terror. this is difficult to unravel, to bring back to liberated normalcy. think of the alawites in syria.

the dictatorships of poor countries devoting outrageous sums to military expenditures, or nuke development, are doing so to make it dangerous to topple them and to have a chip in negotiations for aid and the lifting of sanctions that've inevitably been imposed.

working at this call center

it's a physically horrible place full of ugly people wearing ugly clothes eating food that smells horrible  sitting in uncomfortable chairs.

the polls on approval ratings and such, by the way, are courtesy of minimum wage "data collection specialists" reading verbatim endlessly redundant and insultingly simplified questionnaires to people over the phone, tirelessly clarifying whether someone really "approves" or "disapproves" of "public schools." one can't talk to the person in any meaningful way outside of the words listed on the screen so as not to risk subtly biasing them. it's a job crying out for automation—if only we could celebrate the coming of the robots and not mourn for the loss of all manner of shitty work for wretched people because we've got a market economy in which people have to punch themselves in the face for a wage.

the surveying is kind of interesting though.  my first night's was about political issues for wisconsinites. their age, religion, means, stance on gun rights/control, immigration, borrowing, tax cuts, public schools, charter schools, etc. people's opinions on this stuff is remarkably piecemeal. i mean, i just talked to 5 people for about 20 minutes each. but the sheer lack of "ideology" in 'em, as in, some kind of coherent world view, was kind of amazing. the people i surveyed to seemed to see the world through the prism of What They Need In Their Little Life. something was either helping or hurting their household budget IN THE MOST IMMEDIATE SENSE, and that was the singular grounds for judging it. it was like government programs were an extension of their shopping list.

this was cheering and also kind of horrifying. cheering because people aren't ossified in some duped conception of the world, dogmatic about what something is. they just judge it on how it affects them. everybody was stoked on tax cuts. people laughed out loud when asked about tax cuts. i mean, fucking of course! that means my taxes are lower and that i personally have more money. i'd be curious to know how that reflexive response has changed, or not, over the years—whether everybody's always been so coarsely self interested. a big part of that, doubtless, is poor people who simply need more money, and the desperate obviousness of a tax cut cannot but appeal to them. can't fault them.

but there's often no ideology, no big picture, no vision. there's the simple insistence that government be the big version of your small life, something to pay for things you need and nothing else. the biggest abstraction i imagine somebody'd stand for, a thing deeply apart from their own life, is a good ol' war, and even that is probably connected up with their kids or their family history, is good jobs in the community and so forth. this leads to a lot of inconsistencies and silliness. there are a lot of minds to be won in this country, and they don't put up much of a fight.

this all reminds me of sarah describing campaigning for obama in iowa. she said people there basically said "make me an offer." they wanted something for themselves, for their state, for their support. this seems reasonable enough, what with pork and winning federal dollars for your state, and so forth. but it's a pretty insane idea in the end, and a very small minded one.

other notes: everybody's gotta swab down the keyboards and phones with rubbing alcohol before the shift. people are often yelling "pass the alcohol" which is funny but i guess it's happened too much now. people are treated like children, told to sit in their seats, told how to sit in their seats, told when they can go on break. you can go to the bathroom whenever you like, but if you take your cell phone it's cause for immediate dismissal. no cell phones in the bathroom. the computer times how long you've been away from your desk. the job pays $7.50 an hour. ALSO—how, statistically, do pollsters account for survey respondents being people who'll spend at least 15 minutes on the phone going through a survey? how does that not hopelessly skew the results toward the politics of people who are losers? is the loser demographic representative of this nation as a whole?

Malcolm X; A Life of Reinvention

So i just finished this fat biography of malcolm x. the acknowledgements at the end explain how this book got made because dozens of people catalogued literally every scrap of paper with x's name on it. for the last 2 years of his life they typically had more than one entry for almost every day. winning a pulitzer for this kind of thing is assembling the most intricate timeline the world has ever seen. marable doesn't make this look easy. the book's not at all elegant. but it is god damn thorough. and when your thesis is Malcolm X Changed A Lot, it gets to feeling awfully definitive.

but malcolm x! what a guy! something that it makes me think about is that if you were an mlk follower, an integrationist, an espouser of colorblindness, that that had to be kind of a downer. you turned the other cheek, and got shat on (apparently racists back then would actually chuck water balloons full of piss at people) all in order to say you were just the same as everybody else. african americans were heinously oppressed and everything was fucking terrible, and all non violence said was LET US BE NORMAL! BE EQUAL! but to what? the innumerable scumbag white people who've kept you down? it takes saintliness, maybe, to stop yourself at equal, at the same level, when you've been drowning for centuries. black nationalism, and some of the ludicrous myths like yacub's history about the evil black scientist who accidentally created all the white devils gave african americans a distinct origin and so a distinct pride, not one they'd have to share with all these fucking oppressive racists. where's the pride in being black with mlk? it's dissolved in universal humanity. maybe that's for the best, that nobody should have any stake, any emotional or intellectual investment in the color of their skin, but when that color's cost you so much, won you so much misery, it'd make sense for it to be worth being proud of. maybe, broadly, imprecisely speaking, preaching black nationalism's legit in the way solanas' SCUM manifesto is. but taken too literally, taken on a practical level, it means you end up negotiating with the klan. it means having the lowest expectations and demanding the worst of people, so that your expectations'll be fulfilled and your violence and separatism legitimated.

non violence is always kind of for the benefit of the violent, oppressive ones. not literally that the oppressors will benefit, but that you're taking the high ground, being so obviously better and more good and reasonable than them that they'll be forced to stop doing that. they're your target audience, the one's you're doing your non violence for. when you espouse self defense you're tangibly, obviously doing it for the people doing the self defense. the purpose is to nullify whatever's forcing you to defend yourself, not engaging with it. god, violence and self defense, etc, is SO MUCH EASIER than non violence. what an easy thing to buy a gun. non violence is like fucking public relations, it's convincing people how preposterously reasonable you are so that things will be different in a different realm of argument, of civics, politics. it's christ-like as hell. PR note: be a martyr, die for the oppressor's sins. look how popular christ is!

it's harder for mlk to appeal to "ghetto" african americans" because abjecting yourself by letting yourself be beaten or killed is a lot harder when your life, psychologically and physically, is already that without any of the ideological glory and purpose of a non violent movement for civil rights. it's a lot more complicated, a lot more to think about, than picking up a gun. non violence is a thing done for other people, not for oneself.

anyway. malcolm x had a tremendous idea trying to haul the US in front of a UN committee for human rights violations. wonderful. his life is a crazy good argument for travel: so long's he was in the US he could actually empirically believe that all white people were the devil. the book describes his prison inculcation by the NOI and how he was initially skeptical, but then thought of all the white people he knew and was like, yup, all white people are devils. then he went to africa and the middle east and that pretty much went out the window. stereotypes can be grounded in so much reality. but they're just diagnosing the symptoms of evil, not truth. stereotypes make stereotypes true.

barton fink

jesus christ i hate shit like this. i just read through the fucking wikipedia and got so incredibly bored. i hate how this stuff circles back in on itself, how self referential and small. it's a weird-ass movie about a playwright who goes to hollywood and lives at a creepy hotel with a fellow who turns out to be a homicidal maniac. it's about the creative process and world war ii and postmodernism and flannery o'connor and sex too and nothing at all, especially when people talk about how it's about all these things. it's a sprawling, surreal story littered with oddities that demand exhaustively petty and breathtakingly esoteric analysis.  OH GOD! it REFERENCES something! FUCK THAT!

retributive justice

i was talking to sarah about the bomb at the boston marathon and she came right out with this how's-the-weather declaration about how whoever did it has just got to die. they killed these people, made the world a worse place, and so forfeited their right to be alive. she allowed, alternatively, that they could be banished, if that was still a thing that happened. this was kind of staggering to me because i've always taken it for granted that the idea of justice as punishment was medieval, savage, bonkers. capital punishment, without even the pretense of rehabilitation and reform, was beyond fucking crazy. i don't know how to argue against something as radically primitive as An Eye For An Eye. I thought we were past this shit.

Maybe the best way of approaching it is in complicating the idea of a person's guilt. someone like sarah comes out swinging saying THEY DID IT! THEY HAD A CHOICE TO DO IT OR NOT DO IT AND THEY DID IT! THEY GOTTA PAY! Punishment as Justice rationales often seem to rest on the final, ultimate act, the bad, bad thing, and forget the typically complicating lead up. They make it just a person and their crime

punishment as a deterrent: savage and wrong and straightforwardly ineffective. sometimes it ends up looking effective because all the people who might've ended up committing crimes are jailed so eagerly that you end up depopulating whole neighborhoods. and who is this "example"? who is this individual to whom justice is by definition denied?

punishment as a response to the complex circumstances that lead someone to that hideous criminal moment: simplifying; it's forgetful that the people who commit crimes are (generally, i think) in a low-ass spot. crime is the fruit of a conspiracy of shitty circumstances in a life, a flailing, usually thoughtless and sometimes flat out insane response. punishment means plucking that low hanging fruit and forgetting the barren earth and toxic rain and blighted orchard from whence it came.

punishment as reparation, as revenge for the victim: shades of blood feuding. also, just dubiously personal and subjective. maim a famous person and it's a universal tragedy; maim a homeless person (MURDER a homeless person!) and who cares—can that not but unjustly, evilly color a judicial proceeding?

crime is either a rational (however crude) reaction to one's circumstances, or insanity. that insanity can either be a fleeting passion or desperation, or a long term stupor because of an insular life, an ignorant mind.

this country loves stories of incredibly stupid criminals, but lost in that is that crime IS an incredibly stupid thing. virtually fucking everybody gets caught and dumped in a horrifically poorly run prison system in which tens of thousands of rapes happen yearly. people who commit crimes are generally enterprising morons. think of this when thinking of punishing these people. do you punish the mentally disabled? ignorance, drug-addled desperation, the banal, unending misery of being a poor, oppressed person in this country, all inhibit people's ability to think clearly enough about how incredibly stupid it is to commit crimes. these are the people you want to punish?

then, inevitably, there are The Evil Ones, the psychopaths or whatever. those whose evil is intrinsic and essential. punishing such people has got nothing to do with them. it can only be for the victims, can only be vengeful reparations. punishing the incurables is mean, small, sentimental, pointless.

book

i sat down just now to write about stuff i've read of recent. i don't want to just forget this stuff, because while i like reading just to do it, i despair to think how little i retain afterwards. k just had to remind me that i spent like a month trudging through the fountainhead. it's incredibly didactic and repetitive. it's like words as corporal punishment for bad students, with all the finesse of bart simpson writing his sins on a blackboard. 

i wanted to read the damn thing to see what right wingers dream of. howard roark's the dreamboat. he's an architect. he is completely unaffected by literally everything. he's going to be an architect so he does it, and that is all. he grew up dirt poor, like all the noble doers in this story, unsullied by inheritance. i mean, rand's pretty down with getting rich and rich people, but she's keen on saying that people who're worth it will triumph NO MATTER WHAT. nothing external matters, so just get out of the way. people rise and fall or fall perpetually in wretched gutters because of the completely transcendent fact of what they are. 

the fountainhead's super atheistic and condemning of anything that isn't of a single person. everything from communism to corporations is damned because it lacks the infinite glory of the individual, responsible for their actions and pure of vision. kind of dubious about democracy, implicitly, but it doesn't go there. virtually everyone is just "the mob" and that is all, led arbitrarily by trashy newspapers. 

she writes beautifully about architecture and excellently about the self abasement, shame, and guilt religion demands. her notions about individualism are staggeringly simple and stupid. she thinks The Market is the best way to suss out what's worthy; it'll serve up a sufficient number of very rich people who can stand alone to select the next worthy crop that'll make life worth living. turgid sermons on the evils of altruism, glory of egotism. 

atame!

watching a lot of almodovar's stuff i feel like i'm seeing a soap opera, a fabulous universe, that don't have a shred of anything real. the sets and the wardrobes and the feelings all have the same outrageous hue. atame! is a strange one to resonate, but it does. it's about a guy who kidnaps a woman to make her get to know him. it's confusing emotionally because he's played by antonio banderas who looks great in those jeans and is very nice, but also threatens to slit her throat if she tries to escape. it's the inverse of nick ray's In A Lonely Place, i think. In that movie, bogart plays this entrancing person suspected of murder, who one gradually realizes is such a terrible and abusive person that it doesn't matter whether he actually killed someone. such exquisite discordance here! and then it's got the sublime bitchiness and signature lechery. wonderful, wonderful, wonderful movie.

love,
frank

the grapes of wrath

It's a bible for a world built by people—people in pursuit of profit—and the perverse evil they wreak. It's a book about people's alienation from land and food, about the enraging paradoxes of the market, about rotting cornucopias, about hunger. 

The book gets you on an especially basic, brutal level because the Joads are farmers. To survive, they really just want a piece of land out of which things can grow, and they can pretty much take it from there. They won't starve to death, at any rate. But after they get kicked off their patch, stuff gets heartbreakingly absurd.

There are descriptions of farmers secretly cultivating little patches of land hidden amidst the weeds of someone's fallow property. These people want to sink their teeth into the planet in the most basic, productive way. To "pray and curse" over a little patch of land, to have a livelihood as a literal livelihood! And they can't. 

In Of Mice and Men it's Lenny and George's little fantasy: self sufficiency, living off "the fatta the lan'." There's never a prayer of working up a "stake" in Grapes; fantasies of private ownership give way to collectivist longings, and tragic personal idiosyncrasies (looking at you, Lenny) to a vision of structural injustice. In the government camp there's aborted talk of a glorious field they could all share in. 

What does it say about a book if it makes you cry? Steinbeck was trying to, the intro quotes him as wanting to "tear the reader's nerves to rags" or something. but is that reasonable? does that betray some sloppy, melodramatic falsity about it? probably a bit, but then you'd be taking the little picture. no, i wouldn't have wept hanging out with the joads. but does their situation, the real plight of all these migrants, not make you sad as shit? it ought to. 

tom jr and ma are unreasonably perfect people. but that's only fair; it's a way of disappearing them so that one can better examine the forces acting on them. people that immaculate are less complicated, have less of an interior life to obfuscate that which is done to them. and this book is about that which is done to them. 

need

it just occurred to me to start asking people what they need that money can buy. sweet idea. it reminded me of talking to kevin, a homeless man in my parents' neighborhood, who when i asked him something like that told me that he wanted, needed life insurance. if he died, he was going to pottter's field, man. it's a concern with a lot of dignity in it. i mean, this guy is wretched on such a basic level, and yet he's super concerned with forever after. when i was younger and a big time piece of shit i used to often wonder why homeless people didn't kill themselves. not in a mean way, exactly, i just figured that they were hungry and cold and miserable constantly and unendingly and that that must make you not want to feel that way anymore.

trainspotting

cheap little movie. heroin gags, which is an odd term. are a couple nice little parts: the sketch of tommy's death by kitten. that was hilariously great. aside from that, not much. i mean, the idea of not CHOOSING LIFE, of being self destructive because that's a kind of right, is an interesting one. i mean, that's the whole engine behind The Beats, for example. but this isn't anything like that. this is some silly nonsense. ewan macgregor is one fine man. looks fantastic in those pants and converse. even the single earring's forgivable on him. even nice. god.

This is how you lose her

How do you read a book narrated by a misogynistic tool, but written by a man who says things like "What is the role of a male artist in the feminist struggle? We can’t be feminists, I think. Our privilege prevents us. We can be feminist-aligned in some way. And so the women kept saying to us dudes, the best thing you can do is draw maps of masculine privilege. You can go places we can’t. Draw maps so when we drop the bombs, they land accurate.”

Yunior is Junot Diaz's literary avatar. He's swaggered through three of his books now, through Dominican barrios, New Jersey ghettos, New England academia, and in This Is How You Lose Her, what Yunior might call the fierce terrain of the female body. Lose Her's mostly about Yunior's relationships with women, all of which end, and most of which end badly because of Yunior. This is how YOU lose her, after all. He's an indelible character, amazingly articulate, poetic even, astride the ramparts of male chauvinism. Most men like him would call a woman a bitch and call it a day. But Yunior's sexism has verve and beauty. Diaz's drawn a "map of masculine privilege," but it's gorgeous!

Alright, Yunior gets really really sad at the very end of the book because he's been a shithead for so long. His body straight up falls apart on him, like some biblical plague. THIS IS A MAN SUFFERING FOR HIS SINS! NOT A TRIUMPHANT MALE CHAUVINIST!

But why'd we get Yunior in the first place? The thing is, he's a super interesting person except for the way he relates to women. This guy's spectacularly stereotypical behavior (cheats with 50 women in 6 years!) leave no room for female agency and depth, for anything but flat, stereotypical female hysteria. Women are too busy REACINTG to his epically manly exploits to be people themselves. I mean, why a guy who wrote: "Only a bitch of color comes to Harvard to get pregnant. White women don't do that. Asian women don't do that. Only fucking black and Latina women. Why go to all the trouble to get into Harvard just to get knocked up? You could have stayed on the block and done that shit." (198) Why the ivory tower of surpassing machismo and bigotry?

It's super important to explore in depth the embodiments of hegemonic shittiness. They're human too, and one needs to diagnose them to change things. But this book is glorious! You laugh out loud reading it and you don't want it to end. You want to live in Yunior's profoundly fucked head a little longer. And that's a problem! The same way Marlon Brando was too magnetic to play Stanley Kowalski, Diaz is just too fabulously great to voice Yunior.

I think Diaz feels bad about all this. The one chapter told by a woman, Yasmin, is fascinating and beautiful and deeply felt. She works in the laundry room at a hospital and the descriptions of the sheets she's got to clean are astoundingly evocative. Tonally, it's nothing whatever like the rest of the book. It's quiet and reactive, it's observant in the parts where Yunior would be telling YOU how it is. It's one perspective on being a woman in a culture of bellowing masculinity, and it's great. Lose Her needed more of that, or less of Yunior. If you meet your third asshole of the day, it's you. And if you meet your fifth raging pillar of monogamy and tradition, a person defined by their relationship to sex, you're the problem. Sexism is a self fulfilling prophecy, and too much of it comes true here.

heeeeere's mali!

so turns out the old malian military is pretty savage! good to know the french president visits to give his benediction to a place where the people who wear the uniforms are doing that whole extra-legal thing. the state monopoly on violence in mali is a little dubious

mali stats

The vast majority of the population of Mali is less than 20 years old. LESS THAN 20! The median age is like 16. The average life expectancy is a little more than 50 years. There're more than 6 babies born for every woman there. 43% of the men and 20% of the women are literate. The most recent estimate on unemployment there, from 2004, put the figure at 30%. 

apparently 30% of mali's trade is with china. what role's china playing there? or is it just handy dandy commerce?

mali!

whenever there's some little terrorist, radical, supremely shitty group of people like those over in mali, there are only ever a few of them. there are apparently 800 or 900 of these monsters who've taken over a region the size of texas. EIGHT OR NINE HUNDRED! this is preposterously few people. what makes it possible for so few people, however marvelously armed and tough and passionate, is some sort of sympathy from the population. if the pop's not into stoning adulterers and all that, then at least getting a paycheck from those who are. there are SO FEW OF THEM. they've gotta have the sympathy of the population. so don't let them get the sympathy of the population. which is to say, instead of expecting a war to be a cakewalk, make cakewalks, not war. for so you'll win the hearts of the locals, and good will reign, LOCALLY!

i mean, there's lots of potential recruits! mali is like 90% muslim. and even if 98% of that 90% is totally unsympathetic, there're liable to be a few people who are, especially if westerners show up and do their terror-fighting, collateral murder thing

just finished twin peaks. terrfic ending, squeezing the tooth paste into the sink, headbutting the mirror, "how's annie?" so so so fucking good. up to that point, less so. big ol' soap. also, super terrible politically. pretty sure annie straight up refers to "indians" as "red men" in her speech about environmental preservation. also, all that miss twin peaks shit is atrocious and pretty completely uncritical. norma is the WORST character. and im glad james got sent away.

lynch is super weird, sure. he has as his subject all this americana gone vile. the black lodge, the pit of all evil, is a nightclub, basically. miss twin peaks becomes a competition to be the devil's wife. but then there's so much love: coffee and cherry pie is the greatest joy in the world, and there's nothing like the relationship between a man and his waitress.

mali!

oh man shit is so interesting over there. apparently the country's got a north and a south. the north's a big desert about the size of france. recently there was an uprising in which this nomadic group called the tuaregs took over the north and claimed it for themselves. this development had something to do with the revolution in libya; gaddafi messed regularly with neighboring countries, using tuaregs as a proxy military of sorts. like right after, though, these islamic militants took over what the tuaregs took over from the tuaregs, so now they're in charge. they've been stoning fornicating couples and amputating hands, and now france has invaded to help out the official malian government. the official malian government, however, is a military dictatorship that's been abducting journalists and beating down civilian prime ministers and not doing a tremendous job of governing. the french had some initial success beating back the islamists but now they're back again. coverage has said like eight or nine hundred heavily armed fellows overran some semi formal boundary between the north and the south and now things are see-sawing. there are like 16 million people in mali all together. western countries are concerned about northern mali ending up like afghanistan, a training ground for terrorists. one does get the impression it's pretty sparsely populated up there, with "tricky desert terrain." but what about these tuaregs?

i've got some questions about all this. how many people in the north are keen on stoning fornicators, or a little sympathetic to it? how many are muslims, at least? what do they think of these "islamic militants?" are they home grown, charismatic fellows, or foreigners with guns who just swept in? whadda people think of the official malian government? does it have any religious aspect to it, or is it ecumenically oppressive? 27% of the men and 12% of the women are literate. is this a situation where everyone's starving and being an islamic militant is reliable work?  the tuaregs, despite being "routed," are still in the north. what to do they have to do with all this going forward? about 90,000 people have apparently already peaced out of the north. what's happening with them? what're the plans for dealing with people still there who want to leave?

i gotta talk to natalie about this. never am much interested in any place until it's a fat disaster.

thinking about pacifism: the goal's to have most everybody be sufficiently free from ignorance and want  because people like that don't go in for wars and oppression so much, at least not personally.

so imagine this agent of oppression in some police state. there's this guy with a big gun making you less free and life less good. he's got a gun because the state operates based on the assumption that the threat of violence is the only thing keeping the state together. it's LUNACY to attack this guy, ESPECIALLY with a gun or something like it, because it plays precisely into the expectations of the state, it's presumption that the state would violently fall apart without that guy. it legitimates, in the perverse logic of this lousy, hypothetical state, a violent response, because what other response could there possibly be.

And the agent of oppression with the big gun is a person too, with lots of people like him, and probably a significant, privileged minority of the population that's very invested in his monopoly on big guns. Using a gun against that person mobilizes all those people to get bigger guns, because it validates their fear. now they, absurdly, have gotta protect themselves!

also, economic sanctions are warfare. they're like a siege. they make people hungrier and more ignorant and so more liable to want to have a war and so become even hungrier and ignorant.