Comments on: Ignatieff

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Sun, 23 May 2004 20:44:25 +0000

pepi- “Belongs to” the way the child belongs to its parents. Or a slave to her master. Or the present to the past. I’m not severing the connection. I’m pointing toward an ideal that was pointed toward by people who came before me. Too much pragmatism is a solvent. What I hear from Bob is not so much the sex as the packaging of the sex, and I think it’s an urgently pertinent observation. By fixing the hedonism against the Puritanical repression the freedom of the one looks healthy. But neither is, and they both come out of a similar scam. Social control by attaching control-structure feeding mechanisms to essential human needs. The Catholics did this super-successfully, by creating artificial sexual guilt, and then providing a release for that guilt that involved subservient postures toward the church. Attaching that guilt to children who have no coherent sexual feelings just before the onset of adolescent hormone tsunamis, along with providing the basic gifts of early education, means you have a self-perpetuating and reinforcing lock on the majority, and a fairly easily maintained filter for the rebellious. This has counterparts in other religions and groups, and works for any inevitable human need, sex, food, status, etc. Want to feed your kids? Get down in the mine. Hunger in this example replacing artificial guilt. What I heard Bob saying is the mediated confirmation of identity creates kind of the opposite of that scam, though it’s parallel. Kid needs image-confirmation to be, life becomes reality TV, which isn’t real, so there’s a hole, a vacuum at the heart of being, and feeding the hole with evidence of identity that’s media-formatted just amps the cycle. Bob said it was “deep” or “pseudo” but I think it’s pertinent as all get out. Badger-baiters are my favorite template for the past as bad place. Or the guys who originally threw Staffordshire terriers into the pits with bulls. All those death-sport contest guys. That’s real old, but I think it’s a mistake to generalize it out to omni-presence in the human cultural genome. One of the more egregious scams that’s been run on the thinking public is the idea that all humans are essentially made up of the same qualities and drives, the same characteristics in all of us. The human-as-integer thing. I think, based on a certain amount of experience, that there are profound differences among us, and not mutable ones. I think the badger-baiters are an example of one kind of human. I think repugnance toward activities like that and worse marks another kind. And yes the outward marks can be induced, just as plastic surgery can mask racial display. What’s that mean? Maybe that things are not the same and never have been, that the threads that are common are not essential, but current. That nothing is core to the human presence, it’s a continuum like the primate dissolve from that early pre-hominidish figure into the rhesus and the chimpanzee, and Lynndie England. The illusion we were given is that what it is to be human will be the same in whatever humans are around. This bleeds urgency from the preservation of certain kinds of humans, even as they disappear. Integers are replaceable with other integers. The mediation of human experience, especially when the media itself is under the control of an invisible minority, makes that integer-like illusion even more dangerous. People feel even less real than they once did, even though if you go back far enough I think the experience of individuality is subsumed by group-membership, social participation as internal even more than external belonging. In between is all this freedom and Enlightenment. Again I agree with you, but like the flag, these ideals are all we have. The military guys I’ve heard address this have an inarguable point, that we are not alone here, that without power we’re prey. Without ideals we’re brutes. There are no ideals in the mediated arena but blind hedonism and completely obscured direction and control. There’s outrage about Abu Ghraib, but there’s fascination and sexual thrill right there too. In a regressive loop of commercial supply and demand, where desire is the only sacred thing, you would expect people to begin to see themselves as more or less marketable, as products. The illusion is this is a stable dynamic. The illusion is it isn’t going somewhere unexpected, at least by the participants. Slavery again. First it was, then it wasn’t. The change was the result of emotion more than reason. Reason founders against biological assertion. Emotion doesn’t.

By: pepi

pepi — Sun, 23 May 2004 11:47:44 +0000

Lance: look, I’m not saying there’s no need for ideals at all. Ideals relate to ethics and ethics are the basis of laws and laws are the basis of any organised society. So yes of course the ideals and values do play a big part in improving a society and its mentalities and laws, as in the slavery example. What I’m saying is something else – in the image a nation has of itself, image incorporating its past history and its projection on the future, in the image that lies at the basis of public-political discourse, it’s healthier for it to be honest and grounded in reality rather than in a myth. It’s healthier to accept bad things as part of human nature rather than trying to wash them away as something un-American, ie. not just something that doesn’t conform to those ideals and values a nation has – and shares with others (and not just in terms of Geneva conventions and declarations of human rights but in cultural terms too) – , that’s obvious and normal to see it like that, but something that is inherently alien to that image of America. Like ‘sins’ that should not even be conceivable in the promised land. It probably boils down to a secular vs. Puritan mentality, or influence on mentality. A pragmatic idealism vs. impossible manicheism that inevitably leads to hypocrisy. I don’t know if that’s clearer, but I thought I had explained it clearly already with the bit about the ambiguity of that “un-American” definition. America didn’t just pop out of nowhere, creationism-style. It’s not a new world. It belongs to the one and only human world there is.

By: pepi

pepi — Sun, 23 May 2004 11:24:30 +0000

Ah, and blogs, eh, I missed that… I don’t know, Bob, you seem to me to be making a mess of many things. Blogs are not just the personal kind. But what if personal blogs are exhibitionist in some ways? Didn’t people publish journals even before the advent of blogs? Isn’t there still a quality screening there, or are all personal blogs like trash tv too? And again, how does that even remotely relate to Abu Ghraib? How does reading about someone’s baby or dating or shopping relate to seeing people getting tortured by military personnel in a prison during a war? Come on, Bob. Take a step back, cheer up a little, and think about what you’re saying there.

By: pepi

pepi — Sun, 23 May 2004 11:14:51 +0000

bob macmanus: you know, it’s always very easy to start seeing decadence all around and forget what it was like oh, only fifty or hundred years ago. What were the dominant cultural mentalities back then? Was it all good? A ‘better’ culture to live in than today overall? For who? for rich white straight men, or for everybody else? Think about it before you condemn the present as a one big bag of filth. Yeah, today there’s reality tv. People watch tv to be easily and cheaply entertained, it’s not a crime. Some of those shows are funny, some are crap and may influence people to think and do crap things. Yeah, tv and technology encourage exhibitionism. Big news. Big deal. You’re talking mass entertainment there. That’s not exactly identical with culture at large. There’s a lot of things that belong to the cultural domain, and also make it to mass entertainment, that have nothing to do with trash tv and can be good quality. Lots of people in America still write good books, make good works of art, good music, and good films. Just because they may not always be the blockbusters, doesn’t mean they’re not there. There’s not just Jackass, you know. If you don’t notice that or are not interested, you can’t blame that on reality tv, can you? Regarding porn, pro or amateur – it always existed. Just because the representation of pornography used to be more artistic – temples in India, paintings in ancient spas – doesn’t mean that kind of thing wasn’t going on. Have some historical perspective, and you see there’s nothing new in those tendencies, what’s new is only the ways in which they get expressed. And what is most important is this: no one is forcing anyone to be filmed on tv, or spill their personal stories in front of a camera. Ditto for porn. No one is forcing people to watch those things either. In Abu Ghraib, prisoners were forced, abused, tortured. I’m sure you already understand that huge difference. So no need to downplay it or go all doomsday-preacher on unrelated things. Also, those who took the photos in Abu Ghraib were not doing that for sheer exhibitionism – they were doing so to show their superiors, those who ordered them to roughen up inmates for interrogation, how good they were at those roughening up techniques. Those photos and videos had that precise aim. So it seems that has very little to with Paris Hilton. Or the state of contemporary culture and mass entertainment in America.

By: Zak Catem

Zak Catem — Sun, 23 May 2004 07:39:47 +0000

I think we may be slightly at cross purposes here, and I think it’s possible that I’ve confused what you’ve said with some of what Bob said further up. My point isn’t that the world is getting better geopolitically or environmentally or in any other larger sense. What I am saying is that people have always been much as they are now. There have always been plenty of jerks, people have always had kinky sex, high school kids have always beaten up on the class nerd, and most of them never bothered to read Proust. And so on. If it’s more apparent today, it’s because we are given less opportunity to ignore it. As a pointless aside, I call foul on comparing Vietnam era outrage to Iraq war outrage. There was a draft on then, and that affected peoples attitudes towards the war immensely. Anyway, this conversation has gone on for too long already. I hereby concede and withdraw all the points I’ve made, and admit that things jest ain’t what they was, and there used to be more trees ‘round here, what’s more. Besides, it’s getting on to evening where I am, and that’s when all the good shows come on.

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Sun, 23 May 2004 07:16:17 +0000

Zak- 20 years no TV at all. 10 with maybe 40 or 50 hours annum. Childhood of the usual, though we didn’t have a television at home until I was 7. Neither did a lot of kids I knew, I’m not young and we were poor. – In order to say something as banal as “…[the world] isn’t getting much worse than it’s always been…” you’d have to have a deep and wide understanding of the world and its histories. In order to get me to take that statement as true on your say-so you’d have to demonstrate a little of that understanding. No go. I’m not complaining about the Abu Ghraib images. I’m not complaining about anything, what I was doing was riffing along at the margins of pepi and bob’s discourse. What I’m doing now is tucking you in. I’ve seen “the world” as it is in America for a while now – the changes I’ve tracked have increased in depravity, cynicism, and inhuman callousness exponentially. In the public Zac, in the public. There have been good changes as well, certainly, but I’m talking generally, overall. The lion and the elephant are at the brink of extinction. That this is seen as a kind of thwarting of a particular segment of the consumer population, an aesthetic scarcity, like Ben and Jerry’s running out of Cherry Garcia©, proves my point. There’s less outrage now about the slaughter of civilians in Iraq, though it’s better-documented, than there was at the exposure of My Lai, and there’s a lot more My Lai going on in Iraq. It’s hard to quantify something like that but I’m not guessing about it, it’s visible. You keep offering me advice about things I need to change that I don’t even feel to begin with, which makes it hard to respond to you. I read Alma Guillermo-Prieta’s dispatches from the killing ground at El Mozote, in the New Yorker when they came out. This kind of distant horror isn’t news to me. Where you’re dangerously, as opposed to irritatingly, wrong is in your blithe assurance that things have always been like this. They haven’t. And if you draw a line between how they were, through how they are, and carry it out a little further, it goes to a very bad place. It’s a critical moment. There’s a lot of unfocused energy around. I understand people who want to pretend to themselves that everything’s basically ok, I support that really, as a private response. But as a public posture it’s weak, and it gets in the way.

By: Zak Catem

Zak Catem — Sun, 23 May 2004 05:57:18 +0000

Lance, I’m not saying the world is a perfect place. I’m just saying it isn’t getting much worse than it’s always been, although it is discovering new ways to be unpleasant. People have been doing appalling things to each other for millenia. What you see as a decline in sexual morality is more likely just an increase in openness about this sort of thing. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. And if you think the US discovered torture just this year, you must be mad. The only thing new here is that people are recording it with cameras. There’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t have done this in Vietnam if there’d been a digital camera craze on at the time. Be grateful for it. Would you rather we’d never found out? By the way, the preferred phrasing is, “I don’t own a TV and I don’t even miss it.”

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Sun, 23 May 2004 04:49:48 +0000

Zak- Thanks for the mature guidance. Maybe you should hop over to Gaza and clue some of those folks in as to how bright and cheerful life can be for responsible adults with jobs and obligations. Looks like they need a good stern word or two from someone who knows what’s up. Especially those unemployed teenagers. – I bet my TV-hour watching per annum’s about 1/100th of yours, though the last year’s been a little higher than normal. I know about these shows, I don’t watch them, haven’t seen more than a few minutes of any of them, except for Third Watch. I don’t need to. Just like I don’t need a biography to know from a few smug phrases when someone’s a twit. Maybe you’re from Australia, but in the US that hillbilly crack’s no different than saying “…that’s what comes of recruiting niggers”, or wogs, or abos, or whatever derogatory term your particular geography provides you with. But then you knew that already, didn’t you? – That irrepressible joi de vivre though, that’s irreplaceable. You should mass-produce that, then drive down the highway and throw it out the window. Lke flowers. And when you’re back at home, and things like those GI Jane bondage-and-discipline pictures show up, just close your eyes until they go away. They will. Everything will if you wait long enough.

By: Zak Catem

Zak Catem — Sun, 23 May 2004 02:58:08 +0000

What can have provoked this torrent of world-weariness, Lance? Things aren’t quite as awful as you think, it just seems that way if you watch telly. What actually happens to people is that they grow up, get jobs and families, and don’t have much time for TV except on the weekends. Some of us watch sport for two days straight. Some rent movies. Some take the time to have sex the old fashioned way, without cameras. Some of us actually go out and do things. In any case, most of us aren’t slowly sinking into a morass of amateur smut and mindless dreck. Cheer up: reality TV, like cheesy seventies game shows, is a fad that is already beginning to lose its appeal. Even at the height of its popularity, the majority of Americans found better things to do than to watch it. People will always watch cop shows, though. They’re easier to write than lawyer shows and hospital shows, and they’re exciting. Every now and then, someone even tries to make a good one. If you’re lucky enough to be in Australia, you could find worse things to do than stay up late on Monday nights to catch the Wildside re-runs. As for depravity in the ranks, I can only suggest that this is what comes of recruiting hillbillies.

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Sun, 23 May 2004 02:06:06 +0000

The funny part is there’s probably more agreement behind the scrim than there appears. How about a prosthetic deity, that this is all headed toward a full-consciousness Old Testament god, only made out of human minds linked by machine. Oprah-mind. It’s all merging. I think Bob’s right as rain. But it isn’t just Reality TV it’s Reality TV and make-over shows and glamour-cop shows and the seamless blur into Reality News, it’s all headed toward the same place. An entirely prosthetic mind with absolutely nowhere to go and nothing to do but be. And then not. Meanwhile there’s Elima-Date. Or, if you want hopeful signs of human presence in the midst of soulless seduction, there’s Third Watch. – The highest compliment most people can give a musician is that her music is marketable. “You could make money at it.” It wasn’t always like that. The actual recording and replaying of musical moments isn’t the point so much as the mediated retail experience of that. And the weird and unholy relationship between an 11 year old’s index finger and the London Philharmonic. The Brandenberg Concerto(recorded live) gets shut off with one stab at a button. That makes one party tremendously more powerful than the other(s). Whereas that same 11 year old at a live performance of that same event would be overawed and intimidated by the power of the orchestra. And have only a cowed exit as a way of escaping the sound. And remember weliveinpublic.com, back when it was still unnerving? That shift in the dynamic toward the presence of the mediated thing trumping the thing itself, while the consumer/mediator trumps both, coupled with retail commodification of pretty much everything and dogmatic official insistence that consumer choice is all that matters, eventually results in self-commodification. Which results in soullessness and a bereft existence. Which results in soldiers who are indistinguishable from the demonic. Bush is highly symbolic in this, and needs to be purged, but the things and forces that put him in the White House are what’s to blame, and they won’t be as easy to remove. And they aren’t American. They aren’t coming from the American people. We’re displaying the symptoms, we have the disease and it’s contagious as hell, but we aren’t the pathogen. – Pepi- I agree with you mostly entirely, but isn’t or wasn’t slavery a “practical economic condition”? Didn’t it take lofty appeals and idealist fervor to excise it? And weren’t there volumes of pragmatic rebuttal based on realistic assessments of current conditions? You could argue the Civil War was a tragically unnecessary result of John Brown’s rhetoric but I think you’d get some resistance. This isn’t Manichaean duality, not quite; but if this all goes where it seems to be headed it will be. Because non-existence is the black to existence’s white. There were good things in the principles of the early patriots, if not in their practice. All nations aren’t equal, and the only reason we can have this discussion now is the placing of ideals before and above, and ahead of, pragmatic men. “Go that way. It’s possible.” Any promise is a dream. A world-view that’s only comprised of present reality and bits of the past will stink. We need promise, dreams, ideals, the almost between us and the possible. Nostalgia’s not the same as an invalid yearning for a healthier life.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Sun, 23 May 2004 00:42:19 +0000

“And there’s no need to make brutal generalisations about what supposedly represents a whole culture.” Pepi, read the Sontag. And look around. What does the growth of “Reality TV” mean? Could it be that the audience identifies, or fantasizes about having their own courtships recorded and broadcast? The “Professional Porn industry” is facing some very strong competition from amateurs and semi-pros. How many web-cams are out there? Maybe they are not all in bedrooms and bathrooms, but there is a significant percentage of Americans who don’t mind watching TV and eating popcorn and talking with their boyfriends…and having it sent out over the internet. And blogs. With no offense, I know a whole lot about John and Belle I would not have known thirty years ago. And they are a fairly restrained blog compared to some. But blogs are just another kind of constant exhibitionism. Something big is going on, and I think you are vastly underestimating it. To get deep, or psuedo, Lynddie England filmed her atrocities in a kind of doublethink or dissociation. Life isn’t real unless it is on TV, yet if it is on TV it really isn’t quite real.

By: pepi

pepi — Sat, 22 May 2004 22:54:07 +0000

Bob: those are called porn films, not “values”. They’re a big US export industry, indeed. Unlike Abu Ghraib, they’re legitimate business. There is a huge difference between consensual, voluntary pornography that doesn’t violate any Geneva conventions and human rights declarations, and videos and pictures of abuses, not consensual acts of pleasure, that you’re inflicting on involuntary subjects. I find it rather sad that that difference should be ignored. So, no it’s not about the sex at all. It is all about the torture and the rape. They belong in very different camps. And there’s no need to make brutal generalisations about what supposedly represents a whole culture. The decadent doom-preaching gets tiresome when it makes a big mess of different things… Lance: I’m afraid I don’t quite follow, because I don’t really share all that romanticised vision of any nation. To me America is a big diverse pulsing mess, that can be fascinating and frightening at the same time, depending on what it is you’re looking at. It’s never one thing. It’s about the people I know and a lot of other things that are more personal and truly cultural than anything to do with politics. A beacon of hope it sure has been for many in the past and even today. But that has more to do with practical economic conditions than anything too lofty. I don’t share that romanticised view of the past either. Abu Ghraib is absolutely nothing compared to some of the things that the US supported in Latin America. Or to institutionalised slavery and racism. Or to how America came about at all. Every country in the world has crimes in their past, and history is full of cruelty and violence too, not just ideals and wonderful things to put in a constitution. I just think, maybe, if that too was simply accepted instead of being covered up in all that glorious idealistic revisionism of past present and future, there would be less of the ideological crap that often verges on jingoism and makes the work of political propagandists and religious fundamentalists so damn easy. Because it so often gets in the way of truth-seeking and accountability, both individual and collective. By putting so much at stake that even the basic notion a government may lie on anything from marital to military affairs has to involve an epic saga of Tolkenian proportions between absolute good and evil in which everything gets either completely lost or completely restored. Reality doesn’t work like that. The larger question of whether there are “American” values at all, or even “human” values, in the sense of innate and common to all is pretty unanswerable I think. Well, I didn’t mean to touch on philosophical issues. I was simply talking of things like human rights which are recognised by most countries with a working legal system. They’re not called universal for nothing.

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Sat, 22 May 2004 22:08:14 +0000

Bob- That’s an inspirational clarification. But there’s a misunderstanding of my post in your clarification of your post. I meant it’s not “our” culture. That thing that produced Paris Hilton is not “us”. That thing stole our childhoods. Literally. It stole us, when we were children. Or worse, rigged everything so the choice was voluntary servitude or suffering and death at the margins. And the sex is just the final commodity, though I guess you could make a case for “Showbiz Moms and Dads” being the final final. “Pimp My Kid” But kids are the outcome of sex aren’t they? So we’re still in the same category there. The commodification of every human need. Artificial stimulation of desire. You like sweet things? Tons of sugar baby! Whatever you want, there’s that thing hovering over your life that will sell it to you. And it’s forbidden to look at the way it’s gotten in between you and what was freely yours until it got there. We’re completely isolated and we’re given the companionship of this thing that knows us better than we know ourselves. The TV was the wolf that ate your grandmother and climbed into her bed. Only no hunter came. And she raised you, telling you stories and baking you cookies and pies. And she gave you Paris Hilton’s reptilian body whether you want it or not. My point is you’re right on until you ask people to take on the burden of guilt for what’s happened here. That’s Stockholm syndrome there. My point is the commodification of sex that those images are the result of came right out of the box Fox News nests in. The guilt is not America’s, or the American people’s; we didn’t do this any more than that Iraqi man on the floor with the dog collar around his neck did that to himself. Let’s not blame the slaves for the plantation.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Sat, 22 May 2004 21:19:58 +0000

And I guess few followed the link, for this was Sontag’s point. Not the torture. But that the torturers wanted it on video, to show their friends.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Sat, 22 May 2004 21:12:43 +0000

Seems to have been three or four misunderstandings of my post. It wasn’t the torture or brutality of Lynndie England that was my point. It was the sex. Maybe it is so taken for granted we don’t even see it. And don’t get me wrong, I am no prude or censor or moral judge. But Bush-voting couples in rural Alabama now make videos of themselves having sex and post it on the internet. This is our culture, where Paris Hilton has no shame, and is not even expected to. These are the values we are exporting. We are utterly shameless. What is shame? At what point in our moral history did it get transmuted to “personal guilt” and nobody’s business but our own? What does it mean that we are a shameless society? And yes, Why do they hate us? Cause they are barbaric? Or because we are? They just might rather die or kill us all before they take for granted that their daughter’s wedding night might be, by her choice, be posted on the internet.