Frozen Toothpaste

Lake of Fire is filmed in black of white. It’s worth noting that like all films we term “black and white,” its actually rendered in various shades of grey. And Tony Kaye’s documentary about abortion in America is careful to show that the issue’s history and moral questions are not black and white.

Lake of Fire is also an epic. At over two and a half hours and packed with the grizzly extremes of both basic positions on the issues, it’s probably not for everyone. Views of aborted fetuses, especially those of around three months, are hard to see. So too is it difficult to see some of the most cold-blooded and calculated doctor-killers to emerge from the context of the religious right. But at no time does Mr. Kaye’s long-in-development documentary judge either of these troubling extremes.

Kaye’s style is a form of extreme naturalism that, wisely I believe, eschews narration and other forms to impute meaning on the events that it unfurls before the audience. Where Kaye stands on the issue is completely and mercifully unclear. It thus goes without saying that those looking for a defense of their position on the issue will find the film grating.

Everyone from the most extreme perspectives on the right and left are seen. Noam Chomsky, the famous leftist, mostly stands to raise questions. The always-difficult Peter Singer is there assert that yes, a fetus is a person, but a lesser one because it has no expressed desire to live. (Regardless of the logic of the statement, when first heard Singer’s cold rationalism is jarring.)

From the right, there’s Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry. And the coldness and certitude of the convicted doctor-killer Paul Hill can’t be missed. Perhaps most surprising to me was that Norma McCreevey — the “Roe” of Roe v. Wade — was there. And she’d become a card-carrying member of the pro-life movement. Maybe I was two young or inattentive when such a thing was news, but I was rather shocked.

Much of the film was shot around the peak of the turmoil of the early Clinton years. Were I to fault the film, which is truly artful and tender in it’s handling of a difficult issue, it’s that footage from different eras tends to run together. It can be hard to tell what events and interview are from the 1993-1996 era and which were shot when the film was resurrected around 2005. It’s minor problem that does little damage on an issue known for dead-lock and stasis, but it can be a distraction.

On the whole, it’s a great film and a difficult one. If there’s a central thesis, it may be that no stance on this issue is unassailable, no position safe from reasonable and difficult questions. The issue is fraught with moral dilemmas for all people and all positions on the issue, and Lake of Fire makes that point abundantly clear. The film’s comfort with the ambiguity of the issue can be hard to take, but it’s also just what the issue requires.

And now, the immortal words that began two of the five books in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quintilogy. In case you were wondering they’re The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever.

Ken Woolridge (AND)

Criticism, like cancer, grows rather naturally and is fully dependent on its host. It’s growth is predicated upon a relatively healthy host and a benign environment in which it can grow unimpeded.

Lest we spend too long developing that story, the important way that criticism is like cancer is that it comes in two varieties: benign and malignant. Like cancer, both types of criticism can cause mental pain and anguish, but the benign form is not harmful. Malignant forms, on the other hand, are an undesired scourge which is never helpful and hard to live with.

For the purposes of this analogy, we will leave completely positive criticism aside. Like a false positive, it offers nothing worthy of either concern or time of the creator, but it may, at times, distract from the task. A kind word from a friend or stranger about your creation gives little or no insight into the success or failure of your effort.

Malignant criticism, to be clear, seems to have proliferated recently with ever more outlets available for nearly everyone to become a critic. A few years ago, I kept a blog full of quotidian concerns and grand ambitions. It was a very minor affair that was notable to myself and probably three other people. Yet some stranger found it and offered some decidedly malignant criticism. And it hurt. And that was all it did. I tell this story in part because I like to talk about myself, but mostly because it’s a good window into malignant criticism.

Malignant criticism, in short, negates all possible positives of a work and instead aims solely to eviscerate both the creator and the creation. It asserts that the creation is not only flawed, but completely without merit. It says “This is stupid, deluded, foolish, and naive. It’s only purpose is for me to ridicule it.” (That by the way, is about the content of the strangers “review” of my old site.)

This kind of criticism is tantamount to bullying. And just as your parents probably told you, bullies have to tear someone down to make themselves feel good. Malignant criticism is, in general, nothing more than an ego trip.

Benign criticism is almost never that simple. Though it doesn’t shirk acknowledgment of the flaws of the creation, it tends to recognize that a flawed work is not a valueless one. The words “constructive criticism” are often used to encourage this benign form.

Benign criticism tells the creator (and the audience at large) what the creator set out to do, how far she got toward accomplishing that goal, and how she failed to live up to the potential that the work had. This sounds straightforward, but most amateur reviewer (like myself) often fail to do this.

Benign criticism is much harder to compile than the malignant variety. Consider “snark,” the internet created shorthand for “snide remark” that is, at base, the height of malignant criticism. One can, with a single line of “snark,” express all that is generally seen to be wrong about criticism. A dismissive “Look how bad this story is” or “See how pretentious this guy is” often passes for criticism on the internet. And though it may be criticism, it’s hardly something anyone wants to — or should have to — spend time with.

I guess that brings us back to the top. Like cancer, criticism is often confused with its malignant form. But it’s a mistake to think that all criticism is malignant, benign criticism is one of the most important features of a vibrant culture and when it’s available can not and should not be dismissed out of hand.

NYTimes.com

A character like William Kristol is often caricatured by America’s left. Since he joined the New York Times’s Op-Ed staff, he’s provoked even more ire for both invading what’s usually seen as “home court” as well as being, well, not spectacular (even if no columnist is). His huge factual error of last week deserved the criticism it got.

And even as I’d like to take pity on such a magnet for criticism, I’m about to tell you how this week’s column is wrong. Though he was far more measured than some of the conservative ideologues he’s often confused with, the one problem — and conclusion — Mr. Kristol had about Barack Obama’s infamous speech on race was absurd:

With respect to having a national conversation on race, my recommendation is: Let’s not, and say we did.

To be fair, Mr. Kristol makes the valuable and accurate point that endless accusations of racism traded across massive chasms are useless. There’s no denying that. He also suggests correctly that,

What we need instead are sober, results-oriented debates about economics, social mobility, education, family policy and the like — focused especially on how to help those who are struggling. Such policy debates can lead to real change — even “change we can believe in.”

But Mr. Kristol’s failing, the reason his conclusion strikes such a dissonant note, is that he’s misunderstanding “a nationwide conversation about race” to mean “a televised shouting match that does nothing but increase grievance.” I share his opinion that the latter is a bad and useless thing, but I also know that the former isn’t alway code for the latter.

One salient example of how we can really learn and teach something about race was taught to the crew on MSNBC’s Morning Joe by Mike Huckabee, who said:

As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!” I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Mike Huckabee — to the apparent shock of much of America’s left — shows us, in the surprise of the Morning Joe crew, what an honest conversation about race can look like, and teach us.

To his immense credit, Barack Obama has long stood by the fact that a conversation is neither support for the person with whom you are talking (as would be the case if he were to talk to Iran or Cuba), nor is a forum for people to shout grievances at each other and walk away unchanged. A conversation hold implicit within it a finding of some common ground of some, however subtle or unnoticed, new awareness of the commonality between the participants.

Perhaps Mr. Kristol simply missed the point that Jon Stewart made so cogently, while doing his best Walter Cronkite, “And so, at 11 o’clock a.m. on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race as though they were adults.”

Daquella manera

I’ve been thinking recently about conspiracy theories, and I have a theory about them. A couple in fact. I should also note that I’ve done no research, so these theories about the theories may be either well-known and verified or obscure and unlikely.

It seems to me that there are two primary reasons that people would believe that the US government was behind 9/11, that Elvis isn’t dead, or that there were really extra-terrestrials at Roswell. They are about groups and fantasy.

The first theory is the most obvious: people want to believe the fantastic is possible. You have to excuse the slightly awkward use of “fantastic.” In common parlance the word has become a synonym for “great” or “super.” Here I intend the making real of fantasy.

Surely it’s a tragedy that nearly 3000 people were killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center, but it’s hard to deny that the idea that government knew in advance and carried out the bombing of the towers is rather fantastic. To believe that such a powerful, secretive, and ultimately inhuman force exists takes at least a small jump out of reality and into the fantastic.

Some people, like myself, don’t take in fiction from the pages of books we’re too lazy to read. And these instances of the fantastic are an easy time to take the flight of fancy that one may not otherwise experience.

Another related possibility is that people can’t bare to come face to face with reality. They can’t believe that Elvis really did die, or that there really are people from countries we’ve never heard of that want to, and are able to, kill us. Because those realities can be hard to swallow, what’s substituted is the belief that that reality must be untrue. That instead some fantasy is chosen and substituted to create a more comfortable “reality.”

The other possibility works on group psychology. There is, in many ways, nothing more uncomfortable than being alone. One way out of solitude is to join in the community of conspiracy theorists.

Many believe — I think correctly — that one of the primary reasons (other than belief) that people attend a church the feeling of community and belonging. Belief in the fantastics of conspiracy theories offers a similar belonging. Belief in a theory is enough to offer the feeling of being in a selective “in” group. A group that then understands those that doubt the conspiracy as too ignorant to belong.

It’s an interesting thing, the persistence of conspiracy theories. Though the theories about September 11, 2001 are relatively young, people still seem to believe the half-decade old Roswell theory with an uncomfortable level of sincerity. And though neither of these explanations strikes me as sufficient to fully explain that fervor, it does make their persistence a little easier for me to grasp.