Is it really so bad to have your tail yanked or to be given a bath? No. One growls and bites because it's scary; and what does this have to do with our relationship anyway? Well, if it's kin inflicting it, then it can't be lethal, and those treats are my favorite. We've got a deal.
Look at the face and listen to the testimonial of somebody who has just been subjected to water-boarding by friends at his own instruction: Begins at the 5:00 minute mark of the November 6 broadcast of Democracy Now!
If the Jena Six affair is about anything national, it seems like it's at least about harsh sentencing. This column of a year ago by Malcom Gladwell feels relevant. Procedures can and will be racist, but egalitarian principles can be unjust too.
Borat was hilarious. I had never caught much of the Ali G Show, but I understood the concept and knew K-rock and others are big fans. There is talk of how it is mean or offensive, or what have you, but all I have to say for it for now is that it makes a pretty funny statement about, if nothing else, people's true feelings. For example, at the rodeo, when Borat tells the man that in his country they string gays up, and the man replies that "we're trying to get that done here too" it's funny because there are a million people like that man, which is not funny.
In the future maybe I'll blog about why I think movies like "Best in Show," in which it's just actors in character who we scorn and laugh at, are "mean." Basically, I think they pander to and encourage a base tendency we ought to learn to resist (seeing people as irredeemable ).
- Murky Thoughts said...
...it's funny because there are a million people like that man,
And what is that like? Willing to go along to get along (to a fault)? The scenario you describe is entrapment, but worse, because the "perpetrator" is actually convicted of thinking whatever the audience chooses to infer from the button-pushing clips BC specially picks to win customers. What harm does it do to reply "I hate niggers too" to a klansman filming a show for his lodge? Very probably none, even if sincere. The rodeo guy was very probably being wry, or at the very least he was being figurative, because to literally hang gays nation-wide in this country, even extra-legally, is a patently unrealistic goal that only a crazed zealot could believe was really in the works. Maybe it looks like documentary, but it could as well be libel. And since the incentive to commit libel is to make a popular comedy, we're complicit in the crime just by being amused and telling our friends.
- Stroll said...
Wait, how is it libel if the man said it himself? No one is saying "he thinks X", *he's* saying "I think X". He wasn't "entrapped" in the sense that he accepted a temptation placed before him, he was the one who in fact brought homosexuality up in the first place (when Borat went to kiss him on the cheeks). Plus, whether or not he believed it could really come to be the law of the land, or whether the logistics could be figured out as to going about doing it, he was sincere in his belief that that's the way things should be.
- Murky Thoughts said...
It's seeing that's believing, and I didn't see this guy saying what he did. Maybe BC picked a real "winner" with this guy, and maybe if you talked to him for an hour yourself you'd feel obliged to reformulate your opinion. Don't you believe that a quote out of context can mislead? A video depiction out of context is richer, but it can mislead too, and the "being there" illusion that TV and film deliver makes us feel especially confident about what we infer. But eye witnesses often are wrong about what they saw, and they get wronger over time, even while remaining confident as ever that they know what they saw. To the extent BC exercised good judgment, his subjects are getting "what they deserve" in the court of public opinion, but it's vigilantism, and maybe BC's judgment isn't so good. Hard to know, since he refuses to give interviews. Maybe the rodeo guy was only "partly entrapped," but I think of it as an all-or-nothing taint, because we only convict the people we catch fair-and-square, no matter what the crime. "His belief that that's the way things should be" is just a sentiment. We're freer to sentiment than to speech, and we enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy to them. Maybe you moan and make funny faces during sex and you weren't "entrapped" in that you did the seducing, but still you might not want to have it posted to YouTube with your real name attached. In this country, you're not supposed to publish so much as a passport photo without the subjects' permission. Depending what kind of release BC got that rodeo guy to sign and under what misrepresentations and whether BC could convince a court that this is journalism or art, BC might be liable for buttloads in damages.
- Stroll said...
Murky! Is there a difference between setting someone up to pay for a prostitute's services and setting someone up to admit their *sincere* belief that they hate X? The latter is not a crime by the way (the admitting, not the setting up) but I'm beginning to see I think what you're saying about libel.
However, I know its true that one does not always recall correctly, and that things can be taken out of context to show something that wasn't really there. Here though, I have been in and lived in that man's part of the country and I'm pretty convinced that he's not too fond of fags. Though I could be wrong.
Also, I think SBC got all the releases needed to cover his tail...and more importantly no one is too-too clear on which parts are "real" people and which parts are kind of scripted/staged. The frat boy scene (if you see the movie you'll know what I mean) for example strikes me as not at all "authentic".
I've seen SBC give interviews...search YouTube for examples...though he's not necessarily addressing anything we're talking about in any of them. :)
At any rate, I'm all for people's right to the privacy of their sentiments and I surely have some that I wouldn't put on You Tube (not to mention some faces that I've made) but I don't think anyone's rights were violates (with or without releases) in this movie.
But maybe I'd feel different if it were me. :)- Murky Thoughts said...
Don't mind me going on and on about this. I don't think I'm arguing at odds to you, but maybe my point is just so subtle that you can't tell how true, fascinating and worth every word it is yet. So consider this: If I go to Kazakhstan and show a clip of Gloria Steinem talking about how upsetting late- term abortions are to her and how she wishes not one more late term abortion would be committed ever again in this country, might I be misleading them? Doing a disservice to Gloria Steinem? (e.g. in that she might wish abortion rights in Kazakhstan expanded rather than kept the same or reduced). What if I had interviewed her under the pretense that I am a museum curator seeking her advice on exhibit art that depicts aborted fetuses in my conservative community. Like entrapment? It's not so tendentious or libelous to capture somebody raging against the Yankees and slandering its pitcher, because there's no looming policy to ban the yankees and no history of player lynchings, slavery or systematic extermination, and because the context--to a typical American--is very clear implicitly. Sincere bigotry deserves scorn, but on a hot-button issue I think you're liable to get more than is really deserved (shout "nigger" in the wrong place and you might get beaten by a mob). Some places you're liable to get yourself or family members assassinated just for advocating an economic policy. So I think it's wrong to broadcast fighting words a person believed him or herself to be narrow-casting; or to broadcast just a provocative excerpt without a humanizing context.
- Stroll said...
I don't mind you going on and on about anything, and I do in fact see how subtle yet true, fascinating, and full of worth your comments are as I do everything else that you've ever posted or will ever post in the future.
I understand the hypothetical examples you've made, and I know this is not a logical argument, but: This movie is just *different* than that. He is just not being set up the *way* that your hypothetical Gloria is being set up and sadly I can't explain why I think that. For one thing I don't think the guy is getting too-much scorn, if he's getting any at all.
And in the setting of a rodeo, for example, I think there is definatly a humanizing context. At any rate I'm not so much defending SBC or the movie...just saying I thought it was funny. Which maybe tells something about me, as the rodeo guy seems to tell something about himself.
Now I'm just rambling. Here is a link to some comments on the release controversy and scripting questions...- Murky Thoughts said...
I don't mind you going on and on about anything, and I do in fact see how subtle yet true, fascinating, and full of worth your comments are as I do everything else that you've ever posted or will ever post in the future.
Well that's a point that deserves as wide an audience as possible, so I think I'll port our exchange over to my undernourished blog. Thanks for spurring me to make up and express my mind.
In a post over at All Intensive Purposes, blogmeister T.S. talks about a woman who takes to "training" her husband like the experts train zoo animals--by positive reinforcement. In a comment I replied with such pith that I'll just copy and paste it right here:
I think it's more about the wife becoming humane than about her husband being an animal. Oddly, we seem to talk about humane treatment for non-human animals mostly. But what's humane and "civilized" often is to treat people like the animals we are. Angry dogs and angry people aren't so different. Instead of answering anger with anger--barking back or stabbing with a knife--you address the fear and suspicion with words or gestures (handshake, gift of a cracker). We really aren't foremostly rational beings. I suspect that the idea that we are is largely the fault of the Bible. "God" giving us "the word" and so on. Like having just a hammer is supposed to make every problem look like a nail, I think the apotheosis of verbiage makes every issue look intellectual--that is, conscious and rational. Har de har har.For awhile I've thought that becoming a dog person (spouse and I have two) had made me a better people person, and I've wondered how much it's like the lessons so many say they learn in caring for infants and toddlers (spouse and I have none, but our friends have many). Obviously the same training tools apply to both dogs and human infants: Reward and rebuke (or punishment) are all you have as an aspiring teacher, and reasoned discourse isn't an option. So I think therein lies the lesson for the would-be people person: How to influence others without explanations.
What was it that prompted me in the fall of 1969 to begin copying 7,000 pages of highly classified documents — an act that I fully expected would send me to prison for life? (My later charges, indeed, totaled a potential 115 years in prison.) The precipitating event was not Calley's murder trial but a different one. On Sept. 30, I read in the Los Angeles Times that charges brought by Creighton Abrams, the commanding general of U.S. forces in Vietnam, against several Special Forces officers accused of murdering a suspected double agent in their custody had been dismissed by the secretary of the Army.Elsberg hopes Iraq War insiders will draw the same conclusion soon.
The article, by Washington reporters Ted Sell and Robert Donovan, made clear that the reasons alleged by Secretary Stanley Resor for this dismissal were false (and that the order to dismiss the charges had most likely come directly from the White House). As I read on, it became increasingly clear that the whole chain of command, civilian and military, was participating in a coverup.
As I finished the article, it hit me: This is the system I have been part of, giving my unquestioning loyalty to for 15 years, as a Marine, a Pentagon official and a State Department officer in Vietnam. It's a system that lies reflexively, at every level from sergeant to commander in chief, about murder. And I had, sitting in my safe at Rand, 7,000 pages of documentary evidence to prove it.
See the PBS documentary on Alfred Kinsey.
It's been awhile since any acquaintance or subject of a biographical portrayal has seemed to me truly worthy of lionizing, but after seeing the PBS documentary above I feel that way about Kinsey. While Liam Neeson's Kinsey in the recent "Hollywood" film almost got me there, by the movie's end I couldn't simply admire the man. That may be the rule for thoughtful films about controversial subjects. I appreciate that documentaries, like biographies in general, are liable to downplay or eliminate the negative (that is, if they don't do the reverse), but I'm allowing myself to conclude that the PBS documentary offers a truer or at least more pertinent view of Kinsey than the dramatization.
Note that's not because I doubt the dramatizers' intentions or efforts to portray Kinsey accurately. A drama offers only a theory of a person, and whereever an offense by that person hinges on the mens rea (state of mind) of everybody involved, a dramatization casts shadows of doubt. The almost inevitable mistakes matter a lot, because we sympathize or even identify with the victims in a drama.
This happened to me with Neeson's Kinsey. The movie made me think that I would not want to be Kinsey's wife. But is that true? If you listen to close associates of both of them talk about Kinsey in the documentary, you'll see a lot of love and awe for the man, despite it all. It would not be surprising if Kinsey's missteps hurt people profoundly, even were he treading lightly and with care. He was exploring sex and love. The documentary could have systematically excluded every unsympathetic voice or word, but that would be such a corrupt documentation that I highly doubt it did. My conclusion is that Kinsey was a mensch.
The documentary also caused me a new reaction to the "scientific controversy" (that is, as opposed to the cultural and political one) that attached early on to Kinsey's findings. The scientific criticisms didn't come off as untrue, but as a scientist I now appreciate them as beside the point.
Kinsey's funders sent a statistical SWAT team to review his report, with the result that they found fault with his numbers. The numbers sketched a map of the contours and peak of the true statistical distribution of sexual behaviors across society, and they were unreliable, because Kinsey's sampling techniques were unsuited to that task. He should have known, and he did know. But the norm and normalcy are obsessions of staticians and a conservative society. Kinsey's mission and method were natural history: Documenting, characterizing and sorting what exists in nature. By such an approach, Darwin refuted the Bible. By all accounts Kinsey was a master of the craft: Skeptical, thorough, careful.
Over long days and tens of thousands of hours, Kinsey and his team produced an empirical foundation from which to speak truths not heard in mainstream Western culture since the rise of Christianity--some of them for the first time ever. He stemmed a pandemic of terror and oppression that we were inflicting on ourselves and especially on those who dared pursue happiness. He may have stemmed a holocaust. How would American society have responded to AIDS, were it not for Kinsey? Would there even have been an Act Up to chop down, I wonder. Would a large enough movement have arisen to end the war in Vietnam were it not for free love? Kinsey showed us that beneath our noses--despite democratic governance and an ethos of individual liberty--we were consumed fanatically with convention and its enforcement. Not even statistical scientists were immune.
Kinsey's martyrdom was disgrace, incapacity and death by a broken heart. Let's remember him.
