The Two Subversive Turns in Ringer

The only television show that started this past fall that I continue to watch is Ringer, a thriller starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. The show has many flaws, but I like the touching way it subverts its own subversive noir sensibilities.

Ringer is about Bridget, a recovering drug addict and ex-stripper who witnessed a mafia hit. Afraid for her life, she ditches police protection and reaches out to her twin sister Siobhan. Siobhan appears to live a charmed existence, but then she disappears, apparently committing suicide. Bridget takes her sister’s place only to find out that Siobhan's life wasn’t so great after all. She was barely on speaking terms with her husband, her daughter is in a rebellious phase that includes late nights of booze and drugs, she was sleeping with her best friend’s husband, and someone was trying to kill her.

The show’s creators, Eric Charmelo and Nicole Snyder have envisioned a noir drama with all the intrigue:  mysterious deaths, extramarital liaisons, secret identities, double-dealings, police inquiries and abductions. It reminds me of the sort of thing Orson Welles would have loved, like The Third Man or Mr. Arkadin. What I have always liked about noir is the way it subverts the view that society is innocent and orderly in favor of the sordid acts and dark desires that are always there beneath the surface.

Ringer does more than that, however, by subverting its own subversion. No sooner does Bridget step into her sister’s life than she begins to set it right, ending Siobhan's affair and becoming a loving wife and mother. Meanwhile, the only one who knows she is really Bridget is her old sponsor from Narcotics Anonymous. Monogamous love. Familial harmony. Responsible parenting. Self-improvement. At times the script is like a moral manual to the dominant modern American values.

But this is where Ringer is at its best. The characters grow, which gives the show the potential to go somewhere when most television shows are populated with static characters who are doomed to be the same week after week, just in different situations.

Ringer’s execution is uneven, but its vision of light and dark so tumultuous that it's hard to tell where it comes down, on the spic-n-span world we are supposed to believe in or the world eating it from underneath--the superego or the id--is intriguing.

Politics and the English Language: In Favor of More Arguing and Less Name-calling

In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell decries the poor use of language in the political writings of his day, calling for a less obfuscatory style and presenting examples of bad writing. No doubt political discourse has degenerated even further in the years since 1946, when Orwell’s essay first appeared. This may be a characteristic of political rhetoric common to all times and places about which little can be done, but there is one practice we really do need to put a damper on, and that is calling opponents “idiots.”

In recent years, I’ve been surprised to see how frequently people use the word “idiot” or an equivalent to describe anyone with whom they disagree. Perhaps this has always been true in the vulgar idiom of the street, but it is certainly new in higher spheres of discourse, such as public debate, from which one would expect more. It is hard to imagine past newsmen like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite or even more recent figures such as Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw calling public figures “idiots” on the air, but it has become quite common in recent years.

Fox news commentator Bill O’Reilly has his “pinheads,” and most other well-known news anchors have followed his lead in having a regular segment just for insulting someone. Politicians do it as well, such as when former Utah governor Jon Huntsman called Baptist pastor Robert Jeffrees a “moron” recently (previous blog), or when former Speaker of the House Newt Gringrich in a recent Republican presidential debate offered open insult to a lot of people:

“What is amazing to me is the inability of much of our academic world, much of our news media and most of the people on Occupy Wall Street to have a clue about history.”

He just called a lot of people idiots, just without using that exact word. The political and economic pundits are even worse about it, and even academic scholars, when debating contentious issues like evolution or religion, increasingly resort to insult.

Surely public figures, often educated at the nation’s best institutions of learning, know that calling someone an idiot is not an argument. Of course, the object of their ire may very well be an idiot, but what needs to be said is why that person’s view is so wrong--or why that person is an idiot. The summary insult is a shortcut that spares one the effort of formulating and expressing real arguments. The insult is superfluous and unconstructive.

I suspect that this tendency is at least in part a social phenomenon caused by information overload. Our lives are increasingly dominated by media that present us with a cacophony of contrary opinions all backed voluminously with facts and argumentation. The brain tires of the argument and wants to put it all to rest in one fell swoop. Calling someone an idiot accomplishes this nicely, at least in the mind of the one doing the name-calling, by obviating consideration of anything that person says.

As understandable as that is, we must take the time to form our opinions deliberately and express them eloquently. We must take the time to argue or we risk forfeiting the realm of public discourse to those least worthy of engaging in it--the least thoughtful and least well-spoken.

Forgetting the History We All Know

Many recent public debates have shown that certain lessons from high school American History have either been forgotten or are being willfully ignored by our elected representatives, bestselling authors, experts and large swathes of the American people. We should, of course, be wary of simplistic applications of history to the present, but surely some lessons are beyond controversy and we should suspect that anyone who suggests otherwise is trying to lead us in the wrong direction.

In high school, I remember learning how the economic excesses of the Roaring Twenties resulted in Black Tuesday and the Great Depression. My instructor described FDR’s New Deal policies as a series of efforts to right the economy, some of which were more successful than others. The depression did not fully end, we were told, until the war economy of World War II, which was followed by the affluent society epitomized by the Leave It to Beaver world of the 1950s. One would think then that we would be wary of economic conditions such as those prevalent in the 1920s and view prudent government programs as a possible solution.

Yet, while economic disparities are as bad now as they were before Black Tuesday and unregulated markets continue to periodically crash the economy, big business and conservative politicians remain untouched and therefore unfazed. They continue to call for decreased regulation, lower taxes for the rich, dismantlement of welfare programs, and smaller government, this last to the point where the current Republican presidential candidates bicker over how many government departments they would abolish. These policies would roll back history, put us further behind the rest of the developed world, and quite possibly turn the Great Recession into something much worse, something that might even reach the 1% in their gated communities.

Another history lesson every American knows is that, while some balk at saying we lost the Vietnam War, we most certainly did not win it, nor was our waging of it always honorable. Think of the My Lai Massacre. One would think then that we would be wary of protracted military engagements and, when they’re necessary, carry them out with some humility.

Yet the armed forces remain a national fetish. Rarely does one hear a voice unconvinced of our military omnipotence or of the good-ol’-boyness of our troops. Indeed, to suggest otherwise is viewed as unpatriotic. The campaigns of the Republican presidential candidates in 2008 were based almost solely on an unseemly blend of military worship and jingoism. And dissent among their constituents and the media is uncommon. I think this is because many Americans prefer to ignore the experience of Vietnam in favor of the Good War, when the world really did need saving and we played a decisive, although hardly lone, role in saving it. Nonetheless, all wars and other military interventions since have been much messier affairs, with attainment of victory and our moral high ground more open to question.

I should add that I do have a great deal of respect for some members of the military and do support some of our overseas engagements, but I am less excited about the unquestioning adulation we are asked to lavish upon all members of the military and every operation they are called upon to perform.

Also disturbing are challenges to racial equality. American history is fraught with racial issues from slavery to Jim Crow, but I always believed that while some individuals may still practice discrimination and prejudice, our institutions and leaders had overcome the shameful practices of our past through struggles such as the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. I thought that we had all learned the lesson that racism is bad and any view to the contrary is unspeakable.

Yet many in the public light, again mostly conservatives, are attempting to stage a comeback for institutional discrimination against select non-white groups. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, among others, has suggested that private businesses should have the right to reject service on the basis of race, and recent tough immigration laws like Arizona Senate Bill 1070 have been drafted to target Hispanics, albeit in a sort of code language that thinly covers, but not very successfully, their vile core. Surely we are not still fighting this battle are we?

Unfortunately, the question to that answer is “Yes, we are.” Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” I do not know if the trends in forgetfulness I have mentioned above will lead to a second or third occurrence of past calamities, but there is surely much tragedy in the suffering that could result if we fail to learn even the most basic lessons from our past.

Thawrat al-Karāmah: Dignity Revolution

“Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.”
     --Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

In the summer of 2010, my wife and I took a trip to Tunisia. I knew very little about Tunisia at the time, as was true, I suspect, for many Americans. Now, I would guess that if not most, at least many more Americans are familiar with Tunisia, especially as the birthplace of the Arab Spring.

Our tour flew into Tunis and then described a big loop passing through Roman ruins at Dougga, Kairouan, Roman ruins at Sbeitla, the salt pan of Chott el Jerid,  the Berber village of Matmata, the dunes of the Sahara, the Roman amphitheater of El Jem, the popular tourist area of Sousse, and Carthaginian ruins in Carthage, eventually returning to Tunis. While there was much of interest, I have to say the highlight for me was the area around Chott el Jerid and Matmata, where some scenes set on Tatooine were filmed for Star Wars.

Our tour guide made much of how Tunisia was a secular democracy without any of the aspects of radical Islam so disturbing to the West. The impression we received was of a progressive and stable country, and very little we saw challenged that. Indeed, in Sousse, where European tourists were numerous, I purchased a nifty Crusaders-vs.-Muslims chessboard at an upscale shopping center staffed mainly by young women who apparently felt no need to even wear a scarf to cover their hair.

Looking back, however, I can see signs of the political and economic dysfunction that would soon inspire the Jasmine Revolution. Pictures of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had kept a tight hold on power since 1987, could be seen hanging in places of business and one of the reasons we went to Tunisia in the first place was that the poor economy made it one of the cheapest tours available for seeing ancient ruins .

Six months later, in the town of Sidi Bouzid, a 26-year-old vegetable vendor by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi walked to a police station and immolated himself after incidents in which the police had confiscated his goods and insulted him. This set off protests. The Tunisian people had had enough and revolted--no longer would they allow the few with political, economic and brute power to grind them into the dust. Events escalated and Ben Ali eventually resigned. The country recently held an election in which about 60% of eligible voters participated, electing representatives from a handful of parties to a constitutional assembly. The party to win the most seats is the Islamist party Nahda, but at the moment, the party shows no signs of departing from democracy for theocracy.

Meanwhile, the revolution has bloomed, with regimes in Egypt and Libya falling and others in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain under pressure.  No one saw the Arab Spring coming and it is changing an entire region of the world on a scale so large that in future years we are likely to remember it as an era-defining event like the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is too soon, however, to say whether any of these countries will go on to become liberal democracies or, after the manner of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, lapse into regimes no better than what they have replaced. This reminds me of something I read a couple months back in Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes:

“Recall how Arendt describes, in Badiouian terms, the suspension of temporality as the defining ontological characteristic of ontic political action: acting, as man’s capacity to begin something new, “out of nothing,” not reducible to a calculated strategic reaction to a given situation, takes place in the non-temporal gap between past and future, in the hiatus between the end of the old order and the beginning of the new which in history is precisely the moment of revolution.”

While one might say that the events shaking the Middle East are the result of the past--long years of repressive regimes who humiliated their peoples--and that the Middle East is racing toward a new future born of that past, we might also say, after Zizek’s summary of Hannah Arendt above, that they are in a timeless moment that refuses the past but has yet to embrace a future. They are at a tipping point, only no one can say which direction they will fall.

I like to think that Occupy Wall Street is a part of the movement sweeping the Arab world. Like the brave people who gathered in Tahrir Square to demand that then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak step down or the Libyan dentist I saw on the news who had turned into a machinegun-toting rebel and was trading fire with Muammar Gaddafi’s thugs, the 99% in America have had enough of working too hard for too little while the 1% has gone from rich to super-rich and contemplates what comes next. While anything deserving the description “revolution” appears to be a ways off yet, and may never come, I hope Occupy Wall Street will continue and that its methods will remain peaceful but increasingly effective.

A greater worldwide movement against oligarchy would require a different name than “Arab Spring,” but its courageous origins needn’t be abandoned. The Tunisians called their revolution Thawrat al-Karāmah in Arabic. This is a name that could be used by the downtrodden anywhere because it means Dignity Revolution.

Bottom as the Most Human Character in A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Commentary on Baltar in Battlestar Galactica

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
     --Oberon in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
 
A few years ago, lying in bed reading Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I had a flash of insight: Bottom, one of the Clowns, is the most human character. Ever since, I have believed that my insight came from a comment in the introduction to my copy of Shakespeare’s drama, but pulling the book out recently to see if I could explore this line of thought further, I found that no such comment exists. It must have been a genuine insight of my own. So, in order to pull off this blog, I embarked on a review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
 
Nick Bottom is one of the hapless Joes who have undertaken to perform a play before Theseus and Hippolyta, duke and duchess of Athens. Bottom approaches the task with gusto, desiring to play multiple parts himself so that he can show off his thespian skills. When the actors meet in the forest at night to practice, the mischievous fairy Puck transforms him so that he has the head of a donkey. Under the influence of love juice, Titania, Queen of the Fairies, falls in love with him, but he is more interested in eating oats than in her affection. Later, he awakens back in human form, remembering what has happened as a lovely vision. A Midsummer Night’s Dream ends with the nobility of Athens poking fun at, and touched by, Bottom and his ridiculous troupe as they perform their play.
 
It is Bottom’s humanity as Clown that originally interested me, although he is the most fully human character in the play in other ways too numerous and complex to go into here. All his lofty aspirations are thwarted and he ends up looking the fool. There is much of the human situation in this. We would do great works, but we are imperfect creatures and all too often our fine intentions end up an embarrassing shambles. 
 
For all his clownishness, however, Bottom holds an exalted place in Shakespeare’s play. Not only is he the only character to cross the line between the mundane world and the Faerie Realm, there to share the queen’s bed, but upon returning to the world of Bottom the Weaver, he has an epiphany that he expresses in a celebrated passage:
 
“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—But man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.”
 
The footnotes tell me that the last sentence is a corruption of Corinthians 2:9-10, but what strikes me most is how Bottom touches upon what he is—an ass and a fool. And yet, when he returns to Athens and runs into his buddies, he refuses to expound upon his dream, thereby refusing to play the fool. His experience in the Faerie World turning from human to ass has actuated a change from ass to something higher in the real world. This capacity to span worlds both mundane and numinous, and to rise by reflection, is it not distinctly human?
 
The other characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are more archetypal, each one a narrower representation of the human spirit. Theseus is a wise, benevolent, yet firm ruler, whereas Hippolyta is more given to emotion and romantic fancy. These two are mirrored by Oberon and Titania in the Faerie Realm. Puck is pure playfulness, and the other characters are generally nondescript, although their antics are quite amusing. Bottom alone shows that he has more dimensions than one.
 
Around the same time as my insight regarding Bottom, I realized that the character of Gaius Baltar in the new Battlestar Galactica television series is also a clown, and he too is the richest character in the series.
 
Baltar is a famous scientist and inveterate playboy on planet Caprica. He becomes infatuated with a Cylon—a type of robot who looks human—and gives her defense codes, which the Cylons then use to launch a nuclear strike that nearly sends the human race into extinction. He joins a ragtag fleet of survivors under the protection of the battlestar Galactica that then flees across space in search of a new home on planet Earth. Along the way, he is continually thrust to positions of responsibility even as he bears the secret of his guilt.
 
That may not sound very funny—and indeed Baltar’s comedy is mixed with much tragedy—but Battlestar Galactica reserves what little outright humor it has for scenes involving Baltar. A great deal of this humor involves him talking to, sometimes making out with, a vision of his now deceased Cylon lover that appears only to him, thus making him look crazy to others. Perhaps the funniest scene of the whole series is when a Cylon who looks exactly like his dead lover, but isn't, appears. He can't understand why she is acting like she isn't who he thinks she is and angrily pursues her into the latrine. Of course, someone walks in as he is standing before a closed stall door, shaking his fist and shouting, “No more Mr. Nice Gaius!”
 
That is all slapstick, but like Bottom, Baltar’s clownishness strikes a truly human figure. His lofty goals fall to ruin, he expresses a manic range of human emotions, crosses boundaries between worlds spiritual and profane, and experiences epiphanies only to fall victim to fate or lapse into his old bad habits. Battlestar Galactica is not short on rich characters, but none display this richness of human character and experience, except perhaps Starbuck. And none is a Clown whose sticky situations, funny to everyone but himself, are so representative of the human condition.
 
Like Bottom at his art or Baltar in his constant turmoil, we would do something great, but our efforts too often end in disarray and ridicule. Yet there is majesty in our striving and richness in the breadth of our souls.