May 04, 2005
A Rocky sense of freedom
Last night was the first time in a while that I had watched some TV. A friend has TiVO, so we skipped around between the Sox game and various recorded goodies. If I ever do become a TV-watcher (please no) it seems like TiVO would be the way to do it. Commercial-free, finds the shows you want, when you want, etc…
I got the crib-notes version of Rocky IV, skimming to the best scenes here and there (training scene with 80s music, Rocky’s mourning scene, the fight). I don’t remember the Cold War much other than reading about the collapse of the USSR on a family vacation in the southwest and my dad telling me that I should remember this moment. So Rocky IV makes me think about that older different culture of fear and and the national enemy of the 1980s (back when bin Laden was on our side, kind of). Rocky’s good ol’ American rhetoric is “I’m doing this for myself and my family”. And Ivan Drago, the Soviet muscle machine prototype, calls out in his final moments “I fight for myself” (or something along those lines), a revolt against his fatherland trainers who have been engineering him towards human perfection. To top it off, Rocky tells the hostile-turned-friendly Soviet crowd that he felt them change toward him during the fight and that he knows they are capable of more change.
It’s a fresh reminder of the historical context to current political debates. It sounds obvious, but to people (like me) born late enough that the Cold War was really over by the time young-adult consciousness set in, a lot of the lessons and dynamics of this conflict are not ingrained. For example, Rocky IV reminds me why people have a bad impression of communism (cold, bald men breeding blond-haired human machines for the state) when I think of it as an innocuous localized ideology espoused by my hippy friends. But it’s also a reminder that the freedom that we enjoy here in the US comes from an intellectual and practical tradition of individualist values and self-reliance.
It’s where that individualism turns to self-interest and in turn empire that I start to fall out of love with the ideals of this country.
Posted by nick at 09:26 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 10, 2005
F%!@ing war
I ran across this great Boston Globe op-ed piece from November that spins a nice perspective on the kerfluffle about the censoring of a for-TV version of “Saving Public Ryan”. The issue was not its graphic depiction of war (aren’t we already desensitized from network news?) but its profane language:
Speaking of television, is it an accident that the nation finds itself most intensely at war in the season when the Viagra theme song has become a kind of anthem? Male impotence, or fears of it, are openly referred to, but the problem has its effect far more broadly than in bedrooms. Beware a heavily armed nation that acts like a man with something to prove.
Because of the puritanical way in which “moral values” are defined in contemporary America, the connection between killing and sex is not regarded as fit for public discussion any more than the connection, say, between fears of impotence and gun ownership would be. But as suggested by an election in which Iraq was not an issue but homosexuality was, it is not sex we cannot openly contemplate but the actualities of violence. In war, human beings hand over ethical decision-making to a chain of command. Private soldiers do this, but so do the populations of war-making nations. This is the ultimate in impotence. We Americans watched the unfolding story of Fallujah as if we were not responsible for it.
There’s a dated reference here to the post-election frustration (although remembering that pain and anger probably is not a bad thing). More importantly, there is a timeless reminder to focus on the important problems (war, sexual repression) and stop squabbling over the “bad” words that we all hear everyday.
What could possibly be driving our nation to this “leveling” of Iraq? We don’t know, and we don’t want to know. We are ordering our young people to leap into a volcano. Our warplanes spew fire on the heads of old men, women, and children. We are turning cities into ashes. Meanwhile, what offends us is the Anglo-Saxon word for what people do when they are lonely or in love.
Posted by nick at 10:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 02, 2005
I blinked
Last night, biking home along the Charles, just after passing underneath the BU Bridge, a obese white woman was standing next to the embankment and her stopped car (tail lights on) was right there along the Storrow 500.
Things happen quickly. A few speed walkers pass me going the opposite direction as I approach, I pull on my brakes a bit, she asks “Can I use your light to look for my phone I just dropped it down the embankment?”, I see a large-ish man get out of the car to my left and start to lumber towards me across the bike path. “No, sorry, I’m running late getting back,” I call out over my shoulder as I lean into my pedals again and distance myself.
My heart was racing, I felt like I had probably just spoiled these people’s night by running away from an innocent situation. People stuck on the side of the road, innocent enough. They need help. I’m the nice biker who goes by and I stick it to them. But I saw something there that I didn’t like. Within moments, the good little disciple of the culture of fear that I am, I was generating headlines about the biker mugged or worse on his evening ride. I started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Blink” the other day. Within the first thiry pages or so, he makes an interesting case for how people are remarkably adept at making split second decisions with just a glance’s worth of visual information. He cites archaeologists and art historians who spot fakes in seconds after curators and their hired teams of validators spend months doing chemical sampling and stylistic evaluation, and describes the example of a researcher who looks at videos of a married couple and can predict with statistically significant accuracy whether the couple will divorce.
Gladwell is good. He’s a New Yorker writer, author of “The Tipping Point” which is being read by all kinds of businessmen, entrepreneurs and network-theory academicians now because it talks about how trends and fads catch on. But, as my dad pointed out, he suffers from an “acutely American disease” — he sees too much the rosy side of things, dwells on the shiny, happy, innocuous examples. In “The Tipping Point” he talks about how the trend of penny-loafers catches on in the Village in NYC, how social revolutions get started. To be fair, he does talk about suicides and smoking as social trends a bit, but briefly. And he doesn’t talk about the sticking power of hatred or anger, and how that can become a trend, despite a wealth of historical examples. I haven’t finished “Blink”, but I wonder if he gets into the negative sides of split-second decisions, instead of dwelling on these leading aristocratic examples of divorce and art.
I chose to speed away from these two people who didn’t look like me, likely screwing them over, and missing an opportunity to spread some good smaritanism because I had fear. This seems to be a definite underbelly to split-second decision making. Do I decide which of my new classmates I am going to befriend in the first five minutes of the first class? As if to caution me away from this reasoning, my rear tire went flat in the next half mile after I passed the couple. Karma?
Posted by nick at 09:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 30, 2005
I'm big in Japan
I just finished Haruki Murakami’s latest, Kafka at the Shore. I had always found it easy to disappear into one of his books and not emerge for a week or so. If you have never sampled Murakami’s narrative nectar, he has one protagonist whose personality manifests in a new character in each novel. You know this guy, he is the soul-searching, sex-hungry, sensitive and self-aware male (sound familiar yet?) and he is usually accompanied by between one and three mysterious and sensual women with supple ear-lobes. The books read on the one hand like a good Clancy page-turner, complete with murders and lots of sex but then, oh yeah, there’s also nuanced Japanese folk-religious and philosophical undertones.
Specifically, I like the humbleness of the characters, the way that they are in gentle awe of the very tangible spiritual forces that course through their lives. My little book on Shinto has a few little nuggets that give a good description of this folk-religion:
Kami are the object of worship in Shinto…the term is an honorific of noble, sacred spirits, which implies a sense of adoration for their virtues and nobility. All beings have such spirits so in a sense all beings can be called kami or be regarded as potential kami…
Among the objects or phenomena designated from ancient times as kami are the qualities of growth, fertility, and production; natural phenomena, such as wind and thunder; natural objects, such as the sun, mountains, rivers, trees and rocks; some animals; and ancestral spirits.
The direct worship and appreciation of the natural world stands out to me from these descriptions. I think of the thunder and rain in Rashomon, the deep dark woods in My Neighbor Totoro. Shinto is more than a religion, it’s a several-millenia-old way of life, a set of values. But when I think of the original values of American life that relate to the environment it’s a frontier ethic, that of conquering the wilderness. U.S. culture is a culture of selfishness, right? And the effect of that selfishness on me is these phrases: “I want good food to eat” or “I need to live in the country and work in the city or escape out to the wilderness in my car” or even “I want to reproduce”. I am guilty of all three of these sentiments. Even though I’m far from religious, could that selfish sensibility in my culture and (dominant societal) religion be forcing me to think this way. God (is He out there?) cares about me and my sins, he will listen to me and forgive me. I don’t like the external validation process implicit here, the judgement of my actions by someone else’s code of morality. But three core values in Shinto took root as I read Murakami: reverence (for nature), equity (there’s no central diety) and tolerance (“to those who worship kami, ‘Shinto’ is a collective noun denoting all faiths.”)
So I think my point is that cultures form around religions. Japan’s population is getting older, a sure sign of a population that doesn’t procreate enough. Or isn’t selfish enough to want to. It’s us selfish ones we need to worry about, although as Taus points out in his recent post, educated people�(is this some measure of social awareness? if so, i’m a little wary.) aren’t reproducing fast enough to replace themselves, just like the Japanese.
Posted by nick at 09:41 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack