Yesterday, I saw a picture of Kabul, taken in what must have been the late 70s or early 80s. It was either in or near a university- I recall there being a stone courtyard with tall, shady trees and an ornate water fountain. There were also a couple of young women, wearing short sleeves and pants, carrying their books. The comment section for this picture was awash with sighs about “how beautiful Afghanistan had been” once upon a time and “what a shame it was that religion had come along and messed it all up!”
I was, needless to say, a little ticked off by the responses to the picture. While there were a few people who managed to point out that Islam didn’t one day appear in Afghanistan and wipe out every last vestige of modernism (and that a major Soviet invasion may have played a part as well), for the most part it was all comments on the terrible threat to civilization religion plays. Continue reading →
Earlier today there was a fight outside my apartment.
I say “fight” in the loosest sense of the word. From what I could gather, a woman had given the wrong address to a pizza delivery man, and the gentleman who the pizza had been accidentally delivered to had been sleeping at the time and was more than a little annoyed at being woken up and compelled to give the delivery man directions to the right place. It essentially boiled down to this man and this lady shouting at each other while the poor delivery guy stood awkwardly in between them with no clue as to how to proceed. Apparently the whole ordeal of having to deal with a mix-up between apartment block 2 and apartment block 20 is on par with genocide. Needless to say, seeing two people break down into three-year olds over something so trivial didn’t exactly reinforce any hope for the future of humanity.
But that sad incident isn’t what I’d like to talk about today- at least, not entirely. What first caught my attention when the whole hissy-fit was going down was the shrill screech of the lady that “‘He’ had better not lay a finger on her or he’d be going to jail”.
Now naturally, I don’t know the whole story, but from where I was standing, the gentleman in question hadn’t given any indication of violence- from all I could see, he was just annoyed at being woken up and having to help this delivery guy find the right apartment. It did grab my attention, though- and that’s what I want to address today.
Violence- we have a long standing love affair with it in this country.
We view it as the be-all-end-all solution to our problems. When all else fails, there’s no problem that can’t be solved with a good, old-fashioned butt-kicking. From the cowboys to the noir detectives to comic book superheroes, violence is the answer. For all our advocacy of non-violence, tolerance, empathy, and understanding, we do get a rush out of seeing “justice” dispensed by means of a vicious haymaker.
Just take a look at this video that’s exploded on the internet over the past 48 hours.
Now chances are, your only complaint after watching that is that the video doesn’t go long enough for you to hear the derisive laughter of all the onlookers as this jerk slinks off with his tail between his legs. Certainly that’ my only issue with it.
Now this one isn’t quite so clear cut. Yes, the smaller kid is clearly harassing the chubbier one- even getting violent, but nevertheless the beat-down that ensues is so visceral that I defy you not to feel a little twinge of guilt with your (probable) satisfaction in seeing the bullied kid defend himself.
There are, of course, more clear-cut fights. The video below offers a prime example.
For anyone who might be unclear- the guy with the tray is simply standing there, minding his own business when the other guy walks past and for no apparent reason simply decides to flip the first guy’s tray. No (knowable) provocation, no reason- just sheer, unadulterated spite.I don’t know about you, but I thought the guy falling flat was (1) hilarious and (2) a pretty strong argument for the existence of karma.
When is it ok to hit someone?
“When it’s in self-defense!”, I can hear most of you shouting, and do you know what? They’re right. All but the most hardcore pacifist would probably assert that when someone’s shoving you around, there’s really nothing you can be expected to do other than swing back. Of course, it’s never that’ clear cut.
Did the man in the first video deserve to be hit? He wasn’t presenting a clear and present threat to anyone around, unless you count wet willies as a instrument of destruction. That being understood, did you cry out in indignation when the street performer knocked him down?
Again, probably not.
The street performer was very clearly being harassed by a guy who wrongly thought the street performer would just sit there and take it. But what if it wasn’t the street performer who had punched the guy? In the video, you can pretty clearly hear other people shouting “Leave him alone!”- what if one of them laid some smackdown? Would we be ok with that?Probably.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’d all still applaud this guy getting punched, though the fact that justice is dispensed by some outsider rather than by the victim may potentially diminish the poeticism of it.
So what do we have so far?
Violence is acceptable in self-defense, acceptable (in some degree) when being harassed, acceptable when someone else is being harassed- where does it end?
I don’t say that in a disparaging tone- I am simply curious as to where that line of logic takes us. Is it ok for the average man to walk around and step in to defend people from being bullied? Do we accept full-on vigilantism?
It’s not as far-fetched an idea as it might sound. If it’s alright (if not straight-up admirable) to go around attempting to defend others, how do we address the laws that (supposedly) govern our society?
Again, we do have an absolute love of violence in this country, but for all our depictions of this:
And this:
Or this:
And even this:
We rarely ever show the dark side with something like this:
The reason we can all get together and applaud the punching of the guy harassing the street performer is because it appeals to our (almost) universal sense of what is and isn’t acceptable in society, and what is and isn’t a measured response. The moment you drift away from clear cut right and wrong, the waters get very murky very quickly.
And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.
Yeah, the idea of every man, woman, and child declaring “I am the law!” is more than a little unsettling…
…but is it really any worse than what we have now? America and her allies (including Canada, which has only just recently withdrawn from Afghanistan) are engaged in the longest war in recent history with- despite repeated reassurances from the president- no clear end in sight. Do I agree with these wars? Absolutely not. I think the bad guys who actually should be deposed (and we’re talking about everyone from the Burmese junta to the executive boards of BP and Coca-Cola) are getting off clean. You could argue that the role of ensuring justice and security belong exclusively to the police, but what has their track record been?
All that’s to simply point out that you can argue that such an anarchic system means little or no accountability, but how exactly does that differ from what we have now?
I know it sounds surreal, but if right and wrong as so arbitrarily dispensed from on high, is it really that psychotic to suggest that the front line for security and human decency is in fact you?
It’s just a thought- I’m hoping we can actually start of something of a debate in the comment section (something I’d like to see brought up is a discussion of whether or not our society might benefit from the distinct possibility of getting stomped for being a jerk- anyone and everyone who’s ever waited tables knows what I’m talking about).
Now seeing as how this post pretty much escalated to a declaration of “blood in the streets!”, here’s a picture of a baby hippo.
Be sure to check in tomorrow for Evan’s Shame-Day (yes, we’re switching up the order again- just roll with it), and understand that not leaving a comment will be taken as silent agreement on your part of everything I’ve written!
If you’ve read even a couple of my posts, you’ll probably be able to guess that yours truly is more than a little bit political.
The problem with having political views pretty divergent from the rest of the country is that I often get stuck between two (supposedly) diametrically opposed worldviews who flood my inbox with conflicting petitions. The group whose legalize gay marriage petition I signed fully expects that I’ll jump at a chance to demand a ban on assault rifles, and vice versa.
Today being both inauguration day and Martin Luther King day, the liberal and progressive groups I’ve signed with have naturally been rejoicing like kids on Christmas morning.
Me?
Not so much.
What ticks me off isn’t that Obama is going to be president for another four years (okay, that does tick me off, but no more than any other proposed candidate), it’s all these people attempting to draw lines between what happened earlier today on the steps of the capitol and what happened half a century ago only a short distance away.
Now this certainly isn’t the first time Obama and MLK have been thrown together, and as simple examples of key figures in African American history, there’s really nothing wrong with that. What gets me- what really gets me- is how the two men are imagined as being part of the same great lineage, and nothing could be further from the truth.
What is so often forgotten is that MLK wasn’t simply an advocate of non-violence for the purpose of advancing the cause of civil rights- he was an advocate of non-violence for the purpose of stopping violence. MLK despised conflict, and was one of the staunchest voices of opposition to the Vietnam war. But hey, don’t take my word for it, hear it from the man himself:
Strong words, eh?
Those sentiments of King don’t exactly overlap with those of Obama on the subject of drone strikes and decade-long military occupations. Heck, at 3:40, King straight up declares his views to be biblical- something that the neo-cons and religious right in this country would definitely take issue with. Can you imagine MLK living today?
Well you don’t have to- Aaron McGruder, creator of The Boondocks, already has.
Again- regardless of feelings about either MLK or Obama, you can’t deny that the two of them were/are integral figures in American history, but it’s there that the similarities need to stop. Guantanamo Bay was not King’s dream for the country. Same goes for drone strikes, indefinite detention, record deportation rates, and the White House’s inaction on the wrongful execution of Troy Davis.
I’m just speculating, but I imagine King’s reaction would look a bit more like this.
In the wake of the Aurora Shooting, the Sikh Temple Massacre, and a recent spate of gun violence across the country, the debate of the violence in media has once again reared its head. On one side, those who cite the saturation of film, music, and video games with violence and the glorification of violence as responsible for creating these monsters, or at the very least, pushing them over the edge. On the other side, the ranks of apologists, who declare that it’s ridiculous to blame movies and music for mass-murder. I’m not here to analyze the claims of either point, or to make an argument for one side or the other- that’s already been done better by The Escapist’s Robert Chipman (check it out here).
No, I’m here to address the subject of violence and its possible contributing factors outside of film and music.
When I touched on a complaints I had with movies like Brideshead Revisited and I Love You Man a few weeks ago, I briefly mentioned goth-rock-star Marilyn Manson, whose music was accused by many of being responsible for having influenced the Columbine shooters in committing the massacre. Interviewed by Michael Moore in his documentary Bowling for Columbine, Manson had this to say regarding violent influences:
And therein really lies the crux of the issue- when tragedies like this happen, the scope of our outrage is usually so small that we fail to take into account all the other possible factors. We can cite GTA or rock or rap or cartoons as being responsible and maybe- just maybe- there’s something to that. But what about everything else? If violence in media causes violence, surely violence itself should be cited here!
You remember this?
That’s Marine Corps veteran Scott Olsen, moments after he was shot in the head with a gas canister from close range. Part of the brutal crackdown by police on the Occupy Oakland protests last year- back when Mayor Jean Quan decided the best way to deal with a peaceful protest was by turning her town into a war zone.
But why talk about Oakland and countless other cities being turned into war zones when we can just talk about actual war?
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this is the single longest war in American history. Year after year after year, it goes on, and with no end in sight. That’s got to be the single largest and publicized campaign advocating violence, yet where is the outrage against it?
And what about hunting? That’s all about guns and the glorification of killing things…
What about Civil War Reenactors?
What about the national anthem? That thing is full of references to bombs. What about the 4th of July? A day when we celebrate our victory in a war by setting off explosives!
What about the very way we talk about violence? Should the Mob Museum here in Las Vegas be shut down? Should we do away with anything related to pirates? Should we stop teaching about the war of 1812 in schools?
And so on…
You get the idea. Ours is a culture and history built on violence. It’s in everything– not just our media. While I’ve got my own views on what does and doesn’t cause or promote violence, my purpose here isn’t to take a side. I’m simply trying to demonstrate that if you do want to try to get into the causes of violence, you don’t get to be selective about who you put on trial.You want to find out if there was something in our world beyond the killer’s diseased mind responsible for death and destruction, you have to look at everything- anything less is just a witch hunt, pure and simple.
Let’s face it, half the time, tragedies like these are the platform from which we get to lynch things we didn’t like to begin with…
…I wonder if that kind of vicious and petty mentality might contribute to violence at all…
When I was watching the bad acid trip that the Brits were passing off as the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, I saw an ad for an upcoming NBC reality show called Stars Earn Stripes.
For those of you too lazy to watch the YouTube video, Stars Earn Stripes is essentially a collection of B and C level celebrities (and Terry Crews) who are put through elements of basic military training and then tasked with carrying out “missions” (i.e. blow stuff up).
Naturally, the reaction of both myself and everyone I was watching with went a little something like this:
Ironically, this is one of the “missions”…
Despite the ad touting that “In the end, it’s all about understanding one thing… true bravery… It’s about honoring our veterans and our law enforcement officers…”.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a show where a bunch of people are given a couple months of watered down military training in an environment more or less free from danger and label it as comparable to the pain, sacrifices, stress, and general hardship of the actual military is about as far as you can get from honoring them. One of the guys I saw the commercial with had been in the military himself, stationed in Afghanistan, and he asserted that the idea of the show was offensive (as did everyone else in the room). Indeed, restoring some faith in humanity, the reaction of pretty much everyone to Stars Earn Stripes has been more or less this:
Marking the first time comments on a YouTube Video have been mostly intelligent and well-reasoned…
Let’s break it down here. Stars Earn Stripes is presenting:
A Sanitized View of War
A Glamorized View of War
An Insult to Anyone who is or ever has Been Involved in War
First, let’s address the sanitizing or “white-washing”, as some critics are calling it. Stars Earn Stripes still has ten days to air, however, I think it’s safe to say that the actual decisions and consequences on the show are nothing like what they are in reality. The ad boasts that they will use “Real Explosions” and “Live Ammo”, as if this somehow adds weight or danger to the show. You what other shows have been using live ammo and real explosions for years?
Mythbusters
Deadliest Warrior (Sorry I couldn’t find a Gif for this)
…Or pretty much any show having anything to do with guns and explosions…
See, the celebrities might be in some danger- but hardly anything that you can’t find on other shows, and nothing on the level of what combat soldiers have to deal with. On top of this, I’m guessing that the celebrities aren’t going to actually kill anyone, or have to grapple with the moral and psychological ramifications of doing so. In fact, the celebrities will never have to worry about any of the basic aspects of military service that soldiers are expected to deal with- constant danger, the possibility of being disabled (if not killed or captured or tortured) for life, the possibility of killing and innocent civilian by accident, or (for the female contestants) the rampant problem of rape. Terry Crews is a tough guy, I’m sure, but I have my doubts as to how he’d react actually witnessing someone (on any side of the conflict) killed. Let’s face the facts, Stars Earn Stripes is not going to show you bodies in all their gory reality. This isn’t war- this is Hollywood.
Second, let’s talk about the glamorization we’re sure to see hear. Of course Stars Earn Stripes will present the celebrities having little breakdowns, or getting dusty or bruised, but even John McClane got pretty trashed in Die Hard.
But the military isn’t just concussion grenades and contusions- there’s plenty of… well- boredom to it. I’m not saying this to put down the armed forces, I’m just trying to offer an accurate picture here. There are toilets to be scrubbed, mess halls to be cleaned, uniformed to be creased and beds to be made. There’s paperwork and basic maintenance. Are we gonna see the Stars Earn Stripes celebrities get chewed out for not having left six inches between their blankets and their sheets? I doubt it.
Thirdly, the combination of the previously mentioned points creates a completely and wholly inaccurate picture of the conditions the men and women of the military find themselves in. Stars Earn Stripes isn’t about the military, it’s about a highly fetishized aspect of war. And make no mistake- we’re not talking about just the military here- we’re talking about war. Without the past decade or so of nonstop conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, it’s highly doubtful that Stars Earn Stripes would even exist, after all, what’s the point of doing a show about the military if you can’t jam it full of explosions? An almost assured side-effect of this lousy and poorly thought-out attempt to “honor” the troops (i.e. make money off of them and their hardships) is the glorification of war. It doesn’t matter if you’re the most dogged pacifist or hard-line advocate of “just cause”- we all know that war itself is not something that should be portrayed this way. Maybe you think war is wrong, maybe you think war is right- you never think war is pretty. As William Tecumseh Sherman, perhaps the most brutal general of the Civil War, put it “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all Hell.”
The guy who burned Atlanta to the ground just by glaring at it would know….
It cheapens war. In the off chance that you want to hear my full rant about this, here’s the link. The simple version is that this drastic level of ignorance when it comes to the bloodshed- you know, the actual war is not only an insult to the military, but to any and all victims of war, and a direct attack upon the basic decency and dignity of humanity at large.
I’d say that NBC’s heart is in the right place, only I don’t think that’s true. I think this show is a calculated plan to manipulate emotions and capitalize off of human suffering. This has nothing to do with honoring anyone- this is about lining wallets.
Once upon a time, a lion was sent to the king of Sweden. After it died, its skin and bones were sent to a taxidermist so that the animal could be stuffed and preserved- the only problem was that this was the eighteenth century, and the taxidermist had never seen a lion before. His resulting work was this:
With only the most cursory knowledge of what a lion was, the work turned-out something that looks like it was pulled straight from a Looney-Tunes episode.
I’d suggest laughing at that picture for as long as you can- the rest of this post is going to be pretty unpleasant.
Most people’s Facebook news feeds are made up of snippets of conservations between friends, invitations to apps you’ll never use, the occasional rant, and baby pictures. Most people, but not so much me- only I do get to see pictures of babies, but more on that in a minute.
See, I grew up in the Middle East, specifically in Syria. For those of you who don’t keep up with the news (at all), my adopted homeland is currently in the grips of a brutal civil war. One of the ways the rebels and dissidents spread news is through social media- especially Facebook, and having “liked” such pages as “Syrian Days of Rage” and “Syrian Revolution 2011”, my news feed is mostly comprised of grainy YouTube videos of soldiers declaring their defection to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), or pictures of mass protests, or of a solitary Republic flag tied to a streetlight. Or a baby.
I warned you before that things were going to become unpleasant- again, if you’re sensitive, stop reading now.
This picture was of a baby who was killed in Gaza during the short-lived but brutal Gaza war in the early weeks of 2009. It was a bombing that killed the child. It was burned so badly the skin still on it had been turned soot-black, and was tight and shiny. You might mistake it for one of those life-sized baby dolls if two broken femurs hadn’t been sticking out where the legs should have been, or if the flesh around the left arm hadn’t melted off the bone.
It was frozen like that. Eyes closed and head rolled back so that against all reason, it looks like her or she could have been sleeping. The body’s held up by a Red Crescent paramedic, and there are no words in any language that will ever describe the look that’s on his face.
There are more of them. A young man on a hospital bed, the right side of his jaw ripped open and hanging against his neck, smiling as best as he still can and gesturing the peace sign. A man killed in a shelling bombardment, held together with white gauze and bedsheets. A little boy, dead on the floor, drenched in blood and the right side of his body blown off.
That last one was from earlier today.
Last week, I mentioned how this generation is living in the longest war in American history, three times as long as WWII. I want to underscore this. I’m twenty one, and more than half of my existence has been during a period of uninterrupted conflict. I was eleven years old when the US went to war in Afghanistan, and today I could join up to fight in that exact same war. In a couple years, we’ll have kids going to high school who have never had a day of peace.
But this isn’t about that. I’m not here to rage against war, or take a stand for it. I’m not going to throw up my hands and declare that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
Though it wouldn’t too far from the truth…
I’m not going to talk about what war does to us so much as I’m going to discuss what we do to war.
Let’s face it, for many of us, the current wars the US (and other nations) are involved in don’t affect us much. We’re not on rations, or ducking into bomb shelters, or being told that if we don’t carpool the Axis wins.
Not in so many words, anyways…
Whether a village in some valley in central Afghanistan is controlled by American or Taliban forces really doesn’t change our plans for the day. A harsh as it sounds, whether or not people are killed in Afghanistan doesn’t have much bearing on anyone but the families of the deceased, and it’s there that the problem lies.
See, we have had a problem in our society for a long time, but with the advent of the internet and similar technologies, it’s becoming worse and worse. Alienation. If you’ve heard it, it was probably in relation to Karl Marx, talking about the separation of workers from the ability to control their lives.
Because we’re dealing with some rough stuff, here’s a picture of Marx smiling…
In a more general sense, it’s simply it’s the separation of things that should naturally go together. Profit shouldn’t be separated from work, and work shouldn’t be separated from profit. Merit shouldn’t be separated from recognition, and recognition shouldn’t be separated from merit. Above all else, actions shouldn’t be separated from consequences- only that’s exactly what we have today.
Most of us are more than willing to wolf down a juicy hamburger, but how many of us would be willing to watch the cow be killed, let alone kill it ourselves? How many of us who wear shirts and shoes made in sweatshops would be willing to stand in the sweatshop hurling profanities and threats at the twelve year-olds hunched over the machinery? How many of us enjoy the advances of the civil rights movement would, back in the 60s and 70s, face off police dogs, hoses, and fire-bombs?
See, we’re a nation that enjoys the hard work of other people. We’re a nation that doesn’t like getting its hands dirty. We’re a nation that has no problem sending kids off to fight, kill, and die on some windswept ridge in Afghanistan because we don’t have anything to do with them afterwards. War is cheap for us. The men and women of our armed forces are expendable to us. Again, I’m not trying to condemn or vindicate the wars we’re in, but what I am saying is that we can’t make reasonable decisions about war until we’re actually confronted with the ugly, bloody, gritty consequences of it. We need pictures of the dead. We need them shoved in our faces on a daily basis. We shouldn’t be able to turn on the news without seeing rubble, the smoke, the wounded, or the dying in graphic detail. For all the outcry against violence in our media, the truth of the matter isn’t that the problem is with violence, but with violence that has been tailored to give us satisfaction and strip away all meaning to it. War, for good or ill, is all for nothing unless we actually understand it. Can we honestly say that we’re acting in the same way now we would be if we actually had to witness the consequences of our actions?
Until then, we’re just the same Swedish taxidermist, making ridiculous travesties out of things we don’t understand. We need graphic violence.
Culture War Reporters 