An Answer for Fiona

Fiona just posted a question to me that deserved a little detail for its answer. So, here goes.

I don't think love, sex, child-bearing or child-rearing is any different here than anywhere else. Life is all about finding a place where you can be yourself.

This is a decidedly modern viewpoint, one that I have to disagree with. Tradition is very inflexible. Child-rearing and child-bearing are markedly different from place to place.

The rules genuinely matter. Indeed, they are all that matters.

Finding a place where you can be yourself is a thing that has only very recently become possible for human beings. This is one of the gifts of capitalism.

If you can find someone to share it with, so much the better. It's a lot easier for me in that regard, and I'm not just talking about the red-necked homophobic tendencies here. I found love before I got here. Makes it a little easier than trying to find someone from scratch.

But you have a choice. This is a novel and precious thing, quite remarkable, and still not common in much of the world. Most of my cousins have had arranged marriages. I don’t think that anyone in my father’s family has been forced to marry someone they generally did not like, but this is nothing like finding someone and falling in love.

OK, I have to ask: What's wrong with dating Arabs? I ask out of pure ignorance, having never had the pleasure myself.

Not Arabs per se, as much as any male from a deeply traditional society. Traditional masculinity is a cumbersome and, yet, fragile façade. For a man to be powerful, so much rests on a woman’s obedience. Indeed, no one can emasculate a man as well and so easily, as the façade rests so entirely on a woman’s cooperation.

There’s a great movie in Arabic and Hebrew called A Wedding in Galilee. A Druze Palestinian family living under the occupation want to have a wedding for their son `Adil and his fiancé, Samiyya. Of course, free assembly is strictly governed by the Israelis and the family must apply to the local military governor for permission to host so large an event. `Adil’s father is the village mukhtar, a traditional mayoral title antedating the San Remo settlement in 1920. Being called mukhtar is still a token of respect. Anyway, Abu `Adil (Arab men are given a name after their eldest son, Abu `Adil means “Father of Adil”) goes to the military governor to ask for permission.

The Israeli governor thinks he’s going to be clever, and decides to tell Abu `Adil that they can hold the wedding if the Israeli military governor can attend. Abu `Adil is in a complete bind. The military governor is clearly his enemy, however, Abu `Adil is a traditional Arab. No true Arab refuses a request for hospitality. He naturally replies, “Please stay with me until the very end of the wedding.”

The Israeli military commander and his entourage attending this wedding is of course the central conflict in the very complicated plot. It’s a great movie (crappy production values, but great characters and plot). But `Adil, an ardent Palestinian nationalist, is outraged by his father’s decision to show hospitality to Israeli soldiers occupying their land. But he wants to get married (it’s not like you get any before marriage in the Arab world), so it’s a catch-22.

Well apparently, the Druze have a custom where the bride and groom consummate on the wedding night and the sheet with the blood stain from the woman’s hymen is displayed for all to see. No Muslim or Christian Arabs I’ve ever heard of have this custom, so I found it novel. At any rate, Abu `Adil needs to display the sheet. But `Adil is so choked up that he goes impotent. Dad is going berserk and cousin Khalid, the sensible one, tells his uncle, “Look. We’ll get a sheet, make a small cut on the cow, get a blood stain and show the people. Then tomorrow, we take `Adil to the doctor.” Dad will have none of this, so `Adil and Samiyya are stuck in the room and the people are beginning to talk. Samiyya says, “Look, clearly this isn’t happening tonight.” `Adil won’t come out, but, on the other hand, he’s not getting it up either.

Samiyya realizes that something has to be done to save male honor, so pressing the sheet into her vagina, she says, “I take my virginity with my own hand.” `Adil throws his face into her lap sobbing.

Masculinity, that kind of masculinity, is so fragile. It’s not just the Arabs. There’s a great gay movie called Wedding Banquet about a gay man from Hong Kong named Wai-Tung who is an immigrant success story in Manhattan. The catch is that he’s gay and has an American partner named Simon. His parents don’t know and are determined that he will marry. Wai-Tung and Simon have a mainland Chinese tenant, a starving artist named Wei-Wei. Wei-Wei is about to be deported. So they concoct the perfect solution. Wai-Tung marries Wei-Wei enabling her to stay in the country and allowing him to get his parents off his back. The comedy of errors begins.

But in both movies, the women make sacrifices for the men’s honor. Except in Wedding Banquet, Simon gets to be one of the women. I saw the movie early in the process of coming out and decided that I was not Simon. Hence, I never dated Arab men, not that there are that many to meet at your average gay bar.

Melancholy

Back in 1998, I read this passage at a meeting of the Sheikh Zubayr society:

LATE that night, refreshed and strengthened by a good dinner and much free laughter, Isaac Penn and Peter Lake sat in the small study, staring at the fire. The heat ran around half a dozen logs that had become red cylinders of flame, changing their colors until they looked like six suns in a black universe of firebrick. Their glow was an in­visible wind that irradiated the room and froze the two men in place—like deer in a forest which is burning all around them, who lift their heads to the highest and brightest flames and look into a tunnel of white light.

“The doctors told me,” said Isaac Penn, as if he were talking to himself, “that she would be dead in a few months. That was almost a year ago.” He glanced at an ice-covered window in which the moon had gone all astray, and listened to the wind coming off the Lake of the Coheeries as it could only there, on a midwinter night, like the roaring jet winds of Mars or Saturn. “It’s a mystery to me that she can sleep outside, in that. She wasn’t supposed to. In winter, she’s supposed to come in. But she refuses, even up here. I can never get used to thinking that my daughter is out there in that caldron of ice. And yet, in the mornings, she comes to breakfast revived after twelve hours in cold that would kill a strong healthy man. The wind and snow cover her, attack her. At first, I used to beg her to come in; but then I realized that doing what she does is what keeps her alive.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder,” said Peter Lake, aware that he was in a warm com­fortable place in a vast sea of snow and ice which maneuvered beyond the walls like a wild unopposed army. “I wonder about the others.”

“What others?”

“The thousands, the hundreds of thousands, like Beverly.”

“We’re all like Beverly. She’s early, that’s all.”

“But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“What way? Be clear.”

“The poor should not have to suffer, as they do, in their mil­lions, and die young.”

“The poor? Do you mean everyone? Certainly you mean every­one in New York, for in New York even the rich are poor. But is Beverly poor according to your definition? No. And yet, what’s the difference?”

“The difference,” said Peter Lake, “is that small children, their mothers, and their fathers, live and die like beasts. They don’t have special sleeping porches, a hundred pounds of down and sable, mar­ble baths as big as pools, ranks of doctors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, salvers of roast meat, hot drinks in silver vacuum bottles, and cheerful happy families. I want Beverly to have these things, and would die rather than see her go without them. But there is a differ­ence. The child I once saw in a hallway was barefoot, bareheaded, dressed in filthy rags, starving, blind, abandoned. He had no feather bed. He was near death. And he was standing, because he didn’t have a place to lie down and die.”

“I know this,” Isaac Penn asserted. “I’ve seen such things far more often than you have. You forget that I was a poorer man than you have ever been, for a longer time than you have yet lived. I had a father and a mother, and brothers and sisters, and they all died young, too soon. I know all these things. Do you think I’m a fool? In The Sun we bring injustices to the attention of the public, and suggest sensible means to correct inequities where they serve no pur­pose. I realize that there is too much needless and cruel suffering. But you, you don’t seem to understand that these people whom you profess to champion have, in their struggles, compensations.”

“What compensations?”

“Their movements, passions, emotions; their captured bodies and captured senses are directed with no less certainty than the mi­croscopic details of the seasons, or the infinitesimal components of the city’s great and single motion. They are, in their seemingly ran­dom actions, part of a plan. Don’t you know that?”

“I see no justice in that plan.”

“Who said,” lashed out Isaac Penn, “that you, a man, can al­ways perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to un­derstand—until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The de­sign of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.

“No choreographer, no architect, engineer, or painter could plan more thoroughly and subtly. Every action and every scene has its purpose. And the less power one has, the closer he is to the great waves that sweep through all things, patiently preparing them for the approach of a future signified not by simple human equity (a child could think of that), but by luminous and surprising connections that we have not imagined, by illustrations terrifying and benevolent—a golden age that will show not what we wish, but some bare awkward truth upon which rests everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery. We try to bring it about without knowing exactly what it is, and only touch upon it. No matter, for all the flames and sparks of justice throughout all time reach to invigorate unseen epochs—like engines whose power glides on hidden lines to upwell against the dark in distant cities unaware.”

“I don’t know,” said Peter Lake, confused. “I think of Beverly, and I’m not sure about the golden age of which you speak, which is beyond our lives, and which we will never see. Think of Beverly. How could it be?”

Isaac Penn got up from his chair to leave the room. At the door, he turned to Peter Lake, who felt cold and alone. Isaac Penn was an old man, and sometimes he became dreadfully grave, as if he were in the presence of a thousand tormenting spirits. His eyes reflected the fire. They seemed unnatural, like tunnels of flame into a soul grown so deep that it must soon leave life. “Have you not yet realized that Beverly has seen the golden age—not one that was, nor one that will be, but one that is here? Though I am an old man, I have not yet seen it. And she has. That is what has broken my heart.”

I have two friends who are sickeningly well read. One is Peter Hovde and the other is Garner Gollatz. It was Garner who pointed out that the writer, Mark Helprin, was a neo-con. I was embarrassed, because the text could be given a flat, vapid reading as some sort of support for laissez-faire capitalism, which certainly was not the interpretation I had made of the text. Moreover, I don’t know Helprin’s work well enough to really venture what his specific agenda in writing the piece was. I will interpret the text only to extricate a certain meaning that I find useful. Anything else, he may keep.

One of OED’s nicer definitions for melancholy is: tender, sentimental, or reflective sadness; sadness giving rise to or considered as a subject for poetry, sentimental reflection, etc., or as a source of aesthetic pleasure. This feeling is one that I am first conscious of having felt early in the summer of 1996 and it has been my frequent companion since then.

It was the very end of my Fulbright year in Jordan. A few days before I left the country, I had a small get-together at my Aunt Zakiyeh’s house. She lives on the top floor of a three story building in the village of Safut. Her small apartment does not take up the whole floor, so she has a very large open-air patio. In the evening, one can entertain under the stars quite splendidly. That night was an evening of extraordinary blessing in my life. It is hard to get everyone to get together in Jordan—the Arabs are a very spontaneous people and event planning is quite the challenge in Jordan. But everyone made it that night: Kholude, Norma, Maysa, Firas and even my Jesuit friend, Paul Heck. Later in the evening, Charlie and Elaine stopped by just before they were about to emigrate to Canada. We all talked and talked: politics, theology, you name it. We drank whiskey and `araq and had a royal meza. At the end of the evening, a shooting star streaked across the sky. The evening was perfect. If I’d had MS at the time, I’d have undoubtedly shed a tear. I never cried, back then. But it was beautiful. And I knew that we’d all be scattered to the wind, that I couldn’t hold the moment. That was sad, but it made the moment real. I was able to enjoy living in the moment fully, without the need to hold on. My heart was open, as were the heavens.

Melancholy is a powerful and strange emotion, so different from depression. Depression takes away your desire to live. Melancholy makes you sublimely aware of just how alive you are, of how exquisite life is. In the same breath, it reminds you that you are mortal, that you cannot capture the moment, that it will pass and, eventually, that you will die. Melancholy makes you especially present. This for me is a good thing. Like all those plagued by their imaginations, my soul’s chief passion has always been to become. Melancholy teaches me to be, to relish being, to be grateful for being, to be grateful for life.

The experience of melancholy teaches us to release irritation at the world’s persistent inability to meet up to our highest ideals and to replace this irritation with gratitude. It teaches us the importance of seeing the moment and living in it, of seeing what is good in every moment, in finding a way to let go of irritation. When I am clear-sighted (sadly, it isn’t often), I see that this is God’s plan for me. My life is an exercise in learning to understand the melancholy. If there is purpose in my life, I think it must be that.

God help me, for I’m not much good at it. But I want to be. I want to be. Help me, Lord.

Thinking About Ethical Neutrality in Teaching, Part I

Teaching went fairly well this term. The class design isn’t really where I want it to be quite yet, but it’s getting close. When you start applying for jobs, the vogue thing is to have a teaching philosophy. At some point I have to develop one of my own. It’s a while before I go on the market (there’ that nasty bit called the dissertation to finish first). But I’ve been pretty focused this term and so, I thought I would reward myself by allowing some philosophical musing. I’ve really scaled back on indulgences (like this blog) and I need to get cracking on cleaning the house and writing my oft-referred-to-seldom-seen research proposal. But some fun first.

The excerpt is from a play called History Boys, by Alan Bennett, the playwright who brought us, among other texts, The Madness of King George. Unlike most teacher stories, the teachers are very human. The play is a marvelously constructed study in different types of conflict The excerpt we’re going to read is the central intellectual conflict between the two leading characters, Mr. Hector and Mr. Irwin. Strangely, from my perspective, both are queer. Today, I'll do the exegesis and next time, I'll do the proper discussion.

HECTOR:	A romantic idealist who is obsessed with the ostensible purpose of education—that it help you live a good life. He is meaning, fleeing from the violence of being represented in a form. His self-image is that of a rebel who protects his students from, well, “mechanized petrification.” When Hector hits the boys, it’s typically with a rolled up paper and symbolic and not painful. The boys ham it up in response. They have a tender and deeply humorous relationship. Hector has a good deal of trouble with the problem that life cannot be lived entirely on the level of grand meaning. He has a reprehensible penchant for feeling up his male students’ crotches while taking them for rides on his motorcycle. His wife doesn’t know and apparently doesn’t care enough to find out. Hector is now stuck team teaching with Irwin because he got caught.
IRWIN:	A tremendously gifted rhetorician with an all-consuming obsession with controlling his image in the eyes of others, he nonetheless comes across as engaging, affable and charming. He is a very able teacher. While he lacks a moral compass, his need to control his image prevents him from falling into the sorts of difficulties that have essentially done Hector in. In the play, the character’s fate is to be bound to a wheelchair and to become deeply corrupt. In the movie, he’s on crutches for a few weeks and he becomes less corrupt.
DAKIN:	The best-looking boy in class and among the most clever in an exceptionally brainy class. He is already sleeping with the headmaster’s secretary. He is very aware of the queer characters’ sexual attraction to him. My guess is that he’s a Kinsey 2. Destined to be a lawyer, he is enormously attracted to Irwin, as Irwin offers him the power of becoming a player in the game. He has issues with Hector, although it doesn’t seem that getting felt up on a motorcycle is prominent among them. Ironically, he is the character who has the clearest view of Irwin’s immorality. Strangely, while I don’t think he shares that immorality, he does not seem disturbed by it.
POSNER:	The youngest boy, probably a Kinsey 6, he has a deep crush on Dakin, who, while not encouraging Posner, is not at all upset by the fact. Posner is the only student that Hector will not feel up. My gut instinct is that the reason this is the case is that Posner is the only one of the boys who might really want to feel back. I doubt Hector is really up to something like that. Posner is Hector’s best student, although not his favorite. Posner does, however, care very deeply for the ideals of truth and beauty. He is the sort of boy who is wounded by his education. This is the type of wound that never fully heals. In the play, he winds up isolated and a little insane. In the movie, he becomes a teacher with a deep understanding of melancholy.

It’s strange that Bennett should change the Irwin and Posner’s fate so dramatically for the film. Whether this is pandering to Hollywood or relenting mercy for his characters, I cannot tell. The other boys don’t need too much description to understand the scene.

Boys come in, followed by Hector. They sit glumly at their desks.

IRWIN	Would you like to start?
HECTOR	I don’t mind.
IRWIN	How do you normally start? It is your lesson. General Studies.
HECTOR	The boys decide. Ask them.
IRWIN	Anybody?

The boys don’t respond.

HECTOR	Come along, boys. Don’t sulk.
DAKIN	We don’t know who we are, sir. Your class or Mr Irwin’s.
IRWIN	Does it matter?
TIMMS	Oh yes, sir. It depends if you want us thoughtful. Or smart.

The first criticism of teaching, if you will. Students are aware of their instructors’ expectations and clearly put on a performance. An inevitable part of any relationship of power, yet I imagine one that is not consonant with Hector’s self-image. Hector wants to break through the scene to a moment that is “real.” Timms is the class smart aleck. His suggestion that all the world, including Mr. Hector’s class, is a play, doesn’t go over very well with Hector.

HECTOR	He wants you civil, you rancid little turd. (Hits him.)
TIMMS	Look, sir. You’re a witness. Hitting us, sir. He could be sacked.
IRWIN	Settle down. Settle down. I thought we might talk about the Holocaust.
HECTOR	Good gracious. Is that on the syllabus?

The opening of the rift begins here. A statement like “Good gracious. Is that on the syllabus?” is almost completely bizarre for Hector, a teacher who routinely ignores syllabi. For him to ask a question like “Is that on the syllabus?” is a clear admission of discomfort.

IRWIN	It has to be. The syllabus includes the Second World War.
HECTOR	I suppose it does.
IRWIN	Though in any case the scholarship questions aren’t limited to a particular curriculum.

Irwin has been hired by the headmaster to prepare the boys for scholarship examination to get into Oxford and Cambridge. A subject is a subject to him. He’s there to teach a technique.

HECTOR

But how can you teach the Holocaust?

An ethical question directed at Irwin. To Hector, a subject’s not just a subject. Moreover, the question is not asking for the proper technique. Hector clearly means that one cannot teach the Holocaust.

IRWIN

Well, that would do as a question. Can you ... should you ... teach the Holocaust? Anybody?

The question is neatly deflected. Presumably, from Hector’s perspective, this is a dilemma that is to be resolved by the instructor before class begins. But it’s always good form for a teacher to throw a hard question out to the room. Irwin is a master of form.

AKTHAR	It has origins. It has consequences. It’s a subject like any other.
SCRIPPS	Not like any other, surely. Not like any other at all.
AKTHAR	No, but it’s a topic.

Akhtar speaks in the voice of the scientist. Our methods do not change because of how we feel about the subject. If they do, we have clearly not practiced ethical neutrality.

HECTOR	They go on school trips nowadays, don’t they? Auschwitz. Dachau. What has always concerned me is where do they eat their sandwiches? Drink their Coke?
CROWTHER	The visitors’ centre. It’s like anywhere else.
HECTOR	Do they take pictures of each other there? Are they smiling? Do they hold hands? Nothing is appropriate. Just as questions on an examination paper are inappropriate. How can the boys scribble down an answer however well put that doesn’t demean the suffering involved? And putting it well demeans it as much as putting it badly.

Hector’s concern, then, is one of reverence—our reverence for the dead, for these dead who experienced and suffered “unspeakable” horror. To give a thing a name, to speak that name, makes the thing an object. It makes it subject to our power. The emotional impact of an object must, perforce, be less than that of an unfathomable source of awe. Objects are objects because they can be manipulated. Much like the name of God, Hector would not speak of the horror, for in his view we should not become desensitized to it. Such an awful thing should not lose its awe.

IRWIN	It’s a question of tone, surely. Tact.
HECTOR	Not tact. Decorum.

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

TACT:	Ready and delicate sense of what is fitting and proper in dealing with others, so as to avoid giving offence, or win good will; skill or judgement in dealing with men or negotiating difficult or delicate situations; the faculty of saying or doing the right thing at the right time.
DECORUM:	That which is proper, suitable, seemly, befitting, becoming; fitness, propriety, congruity, especially in dramatic, literary, or artistic composition: That which is proper to a personage, place, time, or subject in question, or to the nature, unity, or harmony of the composition; fitness, congruity, keeping.

Decorum refers to that which is appropriate to the object about which a person speaks. For Hector, to speak of this must be an act of reverence. Tact refers to what one says to win over the listener. To Irwin, what is central is understanding how to avoid the emotions that would prevent his point from being made. An object is an object. The key to dealing with objects is knowing how to use them. Whether the object is the subject of discussion or the subject who listens, an object is an object.

LOCKWOOD	What if you were to write that this was so far beyond one’s experience silence is the only proper response?
DAKIN	That would be your answer to lots of questions, though, wouldn’t it, sir?
HECTOR	Yes. Yes, Dakin, it would.
DAKIN	‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.’

Hector groans and puts his head in his hands.

That's right, isn't it, sir? Wittgenstein.

I have some pity here for Hector, although I feel Bennett is so good to him that I ought to be made of sterner stuff for the sake of justice. The hardest thing for a teacher to hear is that the point of his or her teaching, the point over which he or she has labored to persuade the student, has not sunk in at all. We try so hard to guide their attention to what we profess to be valuable. When we no longer occupy the stage of their mind however, it is shocking to see what they have instead taken from what we said. They’ve listened, but they have not taken the point. These moments of futility are the hardest ones for me to bear.

IRWIN	Yes. That's good.
HECTOR	No, it's not good. It's ... flip. It's ... glib. It's journalism.

OED tells us that, a journal is, among other things, “A record of public events or of a series of public transactions, noted down as they occur day by day or at successive dates, without historical discussion.” The word “journalism” is, of course, a round condemnation in this particular text. I can’t help thinking that the distinction of recording events without historical discussion is the reason why. Although, clearly, this attack is made on the historical discussion itself. I think the essence of the insult is that the historical discussion is not real and is, in some sense, a sensationalist fraud.

DAKIN	But it's you that taught us it.
HECTOR	I didn't teach you and Wittgenstein didn't screw it out of his very guts in order for you to turn it into a dinky formula. I thought that you of all people were bright enough to see that.
DAKIN	I do see it, sir. Only I don't agree with it. Not . . not any more.

Dakin, who perhaps for a time has been under Hector’s spell, is disenchanted. I don’t know if that disenchantment is with Hector’s ideals, with Hector himself, or both.

TIMMS	Sir.
HECTOR	(head in his hands) Yes?
TIMMS	You told us once. . . it was to do with the trenches, sir ... that one person's death tells you more than a thousand. When people are dying like flies, you said, that is what they are dying like.

For once, Timms isn’t making a wise crack. He’s beginning to make intuitive leaps between new material and other things he’s learned. He’s beginning to think. He’s not there yet, but he’s gaining on it.

POSNER

Except that these weren't just dying. They were being processed. What is different is the process.

There it is. The moment of insight.

IRWIN	Good.
HECTOR	No, not good. Posner is not making a point. He is speaking from the heart.

Irwin is praising Posner’s insight. What Hector objects to is not the praise, but the reason for the praise. Irwin is praising the technical performance, not the meaning of the statement. What offends Hector is the divorce of rationality from sacred meaning and its grafting onto a purely instrumental process in which the outcome is a simple and mundane victory or loss. He would not see sacred meaning fall into Irwin’s hands. The tools of the temple were never meant to be used for Irwin’s kind of work.

DAKIN	So? Supposing we get a question on Hitler and the Second War and we take your line, sir, that this is not a crazed lunatic but a statesman.
HECTOR	A statesman?
IRWIN	Not a statesman, Dakin, a politician. I wouldn't say statesman.
DAKIN	Politician, then, and one erratically perhaps, but still discernibly operating within the framework of traditional German foreign policy ...
IRWIN	Yes?
DAKIN	... and we go on to say, in accordance with this line, that the death camps have to be seen in the context of this policy.

Pause.

IRWIN	I think that would be ... inexpedient.
HECTOR	Inexpedient? Inexpedient?

Dakin is exulting in new-found power and using it to make a swipe at Hector. Irwin is focused on the work and probably doesn’t notice. Hector is outraged by the fact that Irwin is completely senseless to the meaning of what Dakin has just said.

IRWIN

I don't think it's true, for a start ...

This is Irwin’s genius. The argument isn’t tactful, so he calls it untrue. Don’t be the Devil’s Advocate unless you can win the case. The win-loss record is what makes the reputation.

SCRIPPS	But what has truth got to do with it? I thought that we'd already decided that for the purposes of this examination truth is, if not an irrelevance, then so relative as just to amount to another point of view.
HECTOR	Why can you not simply condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?

The obvious, moral answer. Hector is upset because coming to this conclusion should not, in his view, take so much work. Notice that because of the timing of Hector's outburst, Irwin is freed from answering Scripps' very poignant question.

There is slight embarrassment.

LOCKWOOD	No point, sir. Everybody will do that. That's the stock answer, sir ... the camps an event unlike any other, the evil unprecedented, etc., etc.
HECTOR	No. Can't you see that even to say etcetera is monstrous? Etcetera is what the Nazis would have said, the dead reduced to a mere verbal abbreviation. What have we learned about language? Orwell. Orwell.

This is a link to Orwell’s essay, if you’re interested. Hector has lost the room. His attempt to sacrilize the method of reason and link it solely to the good has failed to win the class over. He has failed, like Plato before him. Unlike Plato, however, he was in the room to hear his students reject his teaching.

LOCKWOOD	All right, not etcetera. But given that the death camps are generally thought of as unique, wouldn't another approach be to show what precedents there were and put them ... well ... in proportion?
SCRIPPS	Proportion!
DAKIN	Not proportion then, but putting them in context.

Tact. Dakin’s getting the hang of it now.

POSNER

But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained then it can be explained away.

Posner sees Hector’s point more clearly than anyone else in the room. Indeed, we discover, a few lines later, the reason that he might be more inclined to. He alone in this room is living the argument. Recall that Hector’s argument is pedagogical. It is an argument about the proper values for teaching to follow, a protest of the tactical process that Irwin is teaching.

RUDGE

‘Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.’

Hector groans.

To understand all is to forgive all. What Hector is trying to say about why the Holocaust shouldn’t be taught has just become fodder for the process Irwin is teaching. This happened because Posner has learned that point by taking part in the debate sincerely. What Hector has tried to teach as a supreme value has become one more clever position, despite the fact that Posner is utterly sincere and not trying to be clever for the sake of cleverness. Irwin’s winning the game, the game that Hector refuses to let be a game. "He shoots, he scores!" Leave it to Rudge, the class jock, to see the puck slide in most clearly.

IRWIN	That’s good, Posner.
POSNER	It isn’t ‘good’. I mean it, sir.

And Posner did mean it, too. The irony, however, is that without the process that Irwin is championing, Posner would never had faced the dilemma and never formulated the position. Remember that Hector would never have let the dialogue happen, had he been given a choice.

DAKIN

But when we talk about putting them in context it’s only the same as the Dissolution of the Monasteries. After all, monasteries had been dissolved before Henry VIII, dozens of them.

Dakin is intoxicated. A world in which nothing is sacred is a world where everything is a potential object of power. What's whiskey compared to that?

POSNER	Yes, but the difference is, I didn’t lose any relatives in the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
IRWIN	Good point.
SCRIPPS	You keep saying, ‘Good point.’ Not good point, sir. True. To you the Holocaust is just another topic on which we may get a question.
IRWIN	No. But this is history. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don’t see it and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past and one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be ... even on the Holocaust.

The bell goes.

What’s sad here, is Irwin comes off really well. He comes off as a scientist should. I think the play shows us in other scenes that this isn’t what he truly believes. Yet, whatever Irwin's intentions, the awakening of Posner in the dialogue shows the power of the process.

IRWIN	I thought that went rather well.
HECTOR	Parrots. I thought I was lining their minds with some sort of literary insulation, proof against the primacy of fact. Instead back come my words like a Speak Your Weight Machine. ‘Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.’ Ugh.
IRWIN	I was rather encouraged. They’re getting the idea.
HECTOR	Do you know what the worst thing is? I wanted them to show off, to come up with the short answer, the handy quote. I wanted them to compete. It’s time I went.
IRWIN	Went where?
HECTOR	Oh, home. Home.

In a sense, Hector really isn’t alive to Irwin. Hector’s just a helpful object. Irwin scares me.

I’m Really Sick of Miikka Kiprusoff. And Dominik Hasek

Ted Kulfan of the Detroit News, opens this morning’s Wings article by saying, “Oh no, it can't be happening to the Red Wings again, can it?” He reports: “‘Unfortunately I didn’t keep my composure,’ Hasek said. ‘It was sort of stupid. They had a power play and we didn’t kill it. It’s my fault.’” Sort of stupid? Donna Spencer of CBC Sports notes, “Calgary netminder Miikka Kiprusoff had to make tougher saves than Detroit counterpart Dominik Hasek and stopped 33 of 35 shots. Hasek turned away 18 of 21 shots.” All of this is the perfect irritant for a Friday morning. Or how about this excerpt from the Kulfan piece:

Angry Hasek

Goalie Dominik Hasek was called for a costly penalty in the first period with the Wings already down a man.

Hasek threw out his stick in a slashing gesture toward Flames forward Jarome Iginla and was called for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Two men down, the Wings gave up a Daymond Langkow goal, giving Calgary a 1-0 lead.

“Unfortunately I didn’t keep my composure,” Hasek said. “It was sort of stupid. They had a power play and we didn’t kill it. It’s my fault.”

Babcock felt both Hasek and Iginla should have been penalized.

“He (Hasek) wasn’t trying to send a message, he was just reacting,” Babcock said. “Do I like what happened? No. Could he have have handled it differently? For sure. Yet I think there should have been a call on that play.”

Where’s Dom?

Did someone leave Hasek at the team hotel?

Hasek, who rarely misses a morning skate, was absent Thursday, hours before the Wings played the Flames in Game 4 of their Western Conference quarterfinal.

The reason?

"He chose not to (skate)," Babcock said.

Hasek took part in the optional practice Wednesday. Only eight players took part.

"When we talked to Dom yesterday, he wanted to go (practice) yesterday, and we felt we needed an optional (practice)," Babcock said. "Sometimes the individual's criteria doesn't work with the team's and that's the way it goes."

Goaltender coach Jim Bedard took Hasek's place during the morning skate, with Chris Osgood in the other net.

"You might find this hard to believe, but it wasn't my plan to have Jim Bedard (take Hasek's place), although he fits into (our team) age-wise," Babcock said.

I had to listen to the game on the radio again. I needed to upload my student’s exam question so they could prepare over the course of the weekend. It took me a while to draft the question. I only sort of like the result. I didn’t have time to call around and see if there was a sports bar that had Versus, the only channel carrying the Wings game. Even CBC wasn’t carrying it this time. Plus, it was a night game, so I’d have to go to a loud bar to watch it. Frankly, MS has turned me into an old man and I just can’t take the noise anymore. I hate saying that, but it’s the truth. So I settled.

Fog, Part II

It’s embarrassing how long it takes me to get back to things sometimes. I wrote “Fog, Part I” back in January. Part of it is just being slammed with work. But part of it is that often the first part of a piece comes quickly, but I can’t solve the problems in the second half. That’s been a problem here too. Who knows if I’ll ever get back to those Gilligan’s island pieces on Marx? That pisses me off. I had fun with Gilligan’s Island and Marx. I was going to talk about the meta-object field. I’m going to put that off one more time. Writing about my problems sorting and suppressing selected emotion really sets that up well. As always, figuring out the ideal order to attack a list is my central problem… Sigh.

Sorting

Sorting is a task that relies entirely on short-term memory. Say you have a list of things to do. Perhaps you can remember them without writing them down. I certainly cannot. Well, so what, you ask, lots of people are like that. But, if you are looking at that written list, most people, especially those with a gift for organization, can sort that list of tasks in their mind. They hold the items suspended in their memory and shift them around until they find a satisfactory order. I used to do this all the time and just assign numbers to each item on the list. I can’t do that anymore. I have to physically re-order the list, look at it, and decide how well it meets the sorting criteria. I now try to avoid making lists on paper. Re-writing the list takes forever by hand. I can cut and paste on computer. Still, even then, this is a difficult process. My lists have to be very specially crafted. If there are too many items on the list, I won’t be able to order them. It takes too much time—far more time than I did before. But the process is further impeded.

Suppressing selected emotion

We make all our decisions based on emotion. For those among us who like to view themselves as fundamentally rational (and until this illness I was most assuredly of their number), this assertion can provoke resistance. That resistance is utterly unfounded. If a human being experiences damage to their amygdyla, the part of their brain that provides emotion, they begin to make disastrous decisions, because decisions are made on the basis of emotion. The portions of their brain that dealing with reason can be completely untouched and they will still make disastrous decisions. Reason is not at stake in decision making.

Those of us who are fond of being “rational” use reason as a discipline. We take our problem and how we feel about it and we interrogate that problem and those emotions using reason. That critical process can indeed serve as a foundation for making decisions. That said, what the process actually does is change how we look at a situation and, hence, how we feel about it. That said, I’m sure most of us can recall times in which our rational process tells us we should do something, but our emotions overpower that process and we instead do something that, while it feels good at the moment, we know at some cognitive level is the wrong answer. This is because the process of rational inquiry is not a reflex, a fundamental part of our nature. It is a discipline. Discipline is a pattern of behavior that we internalize. The point of that process of internalization is in a sense to reprogram ourselves to feel some way that we would not naturally. That effort can fail.

The principal technique of discipline is the suppression of selected emotion. We use reason to “rationalize” the process in which we are engaged. We analyze the situation decide which of the emotions we feel are the “correct” ones that should be privileged in making our decision, and then we suppress the others. It is this last process that has been severely impaired.

For example, I cry at movies now. I rarely cried at movies before the year 2000. Now I cry all the time. But what is truly embarrassing is that I cry at sappy movies. It’s not that I don’t think the movies are sappy. On the contrary, I know they are sappy and simultaneously feel revulsion for that sappiness, and distress that I am crying over such an obviously sappy movie! However, emotions tend to be reflexive. This is most evident with shame. Shame is a reflex that is triggered when others confront us with having exceeded our proper bounds. It is a shrinking, a desire to disappear. A frequent male response to an individual implying that a person should feel shame is violent anger. This response, however, is not made in place of shame. Rather, it occurs because the individual feels shame as a reflex, thinks about it and realizes they have been forced to feel something they do not want to, or worse, something that they ought not to feel because they have not actually exceeded their bounds. It is this experience that converts the shame into anger and so often leads to violence. When a film “tugs at my heartstrings” now, I have no defense against this. When I was younger, I cried occasionally, but it took something genuinely moving to override my strong will to suppress emotions that I did not wish to feel. Now, I feel it all, all of the time.

Emotions in the organization of a regular object-field

When making and dealing with organization, this is an enormous liability. Let’s begin with one of the most ludicrous situations that I have dealt with since the onset of illness. Imagine it’s 9 am. I’ve woken up. I’m groggy, owing to the medicine I take that deepens my sleep so that it is actually restful and benefits me (the disease makes me sleep very lightly and without the drug, my fatigue is far, far worse). I’m hungry. The floor is cold and I’m only wearing socks. My hands and feet have always grown cold very quickly, ever since I was a child. I’m hungry. The sink is full of dishes. Everything is filthy (I suffer from chronic fatigue and am a graduate student. Dishes are a very low priority in my life). There is a proper response. That response is (1) go find and put on your slippers, (2) wash a bowl, a spoon, a mug and the dirty parts of the espresso machine, (3) take your morning meds, (4) make a cup of coffee, (5) pour yourself a bowl of cereal and eat a banana so that you have some fuel in you and (6) do the dishes. I can tell you this with very little cognitive work, even now.

Now, if you read “Fog, Part I” you know that I often forget what I am doing while I am doing it. Add morning grogginess and you really have a disorganized twit. Say I look for my slippers and can’t find them. I go back, but the floor is sucking all the heat out of my feet and they’re freezing. So maybe I impulsively forget that I can’t find them and search again. I eventually get the picture that I’m not going to find them while the house is a mess and I’m groggy and hungry. I need to take some of the emotions off the table. But I can’t suppress any of them. So I start washing the necessary dishes to get caffeine into my system to counteract the grogginess and eat to dispel the hunger. But the dishes are revolting, so maybe I can’t stop doing them. So I do half the dishes before my feet have gotten so cold that I can’t stand it and impulsively break away to search for my slippers again. I’ve spent a lot of energy without eating and I don’t have much energy, so maybe I then sit down. I rest a little and maybe cry (like a girl) because I’m frustrated and don’t know what to do. Well, I still desperately need fuel. Did I wish the proper elements in that big (yet still incomplete) washing of dishes so I can actually do this? If I’m lucky, I did. Maybe I didn’t, so I have to put off eating and drinking coffee yet again to wash them. And God help me if I wind up out of milk, coffee or cereal. By that point I may go down to Starbucks for coffee and a scone. That is, if I’m not also out of money.

All of that and I can still teach you the Arab-Israeli conflict, how to interpret motherfucking hard texts by German theorists, or how to speak Arabic. The humiliation can be unreal.

Since I can’t suppress emotions, I have to balance them against other emotions. Say you’re a student who wants a letter of recommendation. I can promise until the cows come home, but I can’t suppress the urge to procrastinate very well, and I’m forgetful as hell. Procrastinate once, I’m likely not to remember that I need to write a student a letter again for a week, especially if I’m busy. I now try to get the student to meet me and write the letter with them. Since they are physically there and spending their time with me, my feeling of obligation to them will then outweigh the desire to procrastinate. It sucks for the student that he or she has to sit there while I write in order to get his or her letter. But what I do is interview them for good fodder for the letter while I write. Then I let them see the letter and also explain my strategy is writing it. They not only get to know what they’re getting, they get to be asked questions that frequently ferret out thing about themselves they wouldn’t have written in their personal statement, but then realize is gold. They also get taught how to write a letter of recommendation. The students love it. But I’m still humiliated by not being able to keep my word. Instead, I have to learn not to give it and say, “No, I can’t write this letter unless you work with me on it. I’ll blow it and you off without meaning to and you’ll be screwed.” Admitting that I am not capable of being responsible humiliates me more than I can say. It sure makes a mockery of being that noble Nietzschean creature with the right to make promises.

Shame

As far as everyone who met me here in Seattle is concerned, I’ve always been a space cadet. Dealing with the shame associated with being unable to control the image people have of me with respect to my competence has been deeply humiliating. I was diagnosed in 2000 and I’m only beginning to come to terms with it this year. I choke far less often now, but I still have issues with it. Imagine taking a summer job with a variable schedule, forgetting to come in for a shift (welcome to short-term recall hell) and put off calling your boss for three days to explain because you are so ashamed that you can’t force yourself to face her. You must understand that I was the soul of responsibility before MS. The shame of fucking up is unreal. Moreover, I can’t suppress the shame. And shame makes you retreat from a situation. So I hide like a fucking ostrich with its goddamned head in the sand. People who do this are usually too stupid to realize that they will have to face it eventually. I know that I have to face it, but am powerless to suppress the emotion. It rules me. I am the slave of my fucking emotions. My only hope is to get really zen and okay with everything. Anyone who knows my personality realizes how difficult that is for me. I'm a pretty passionate guy. Detachment is not my strong suit.

Next time, the damned meta-object field. And music. I can’t handle music anymore either.

I Was So Wrong About Lucas

Chris Davis just dropped me a line (old friends are working their way out of the woodwork, these days) and reminded me of this letter that established my ultimate geek credentials. Sadly, I was totally wrong about Lucas. I like my letter better than his new trilogy. But it belongs with that old Brett Favre post as an identity-confirming document.

September 2, 1999

Dear Charles,

Thank you so much for your letter! It was so nice to get one so soon after arrival. The trip to Ohio was largely uneventful and Cincinnati was far better than I expected. It turns out to be a rather artificial upper-class suburb with good customer service. The soy sauce is on the supermarket aisle marked "Mexican," but on the whole I can make do. As you predicted, there do seem to be a few used bookstores that look promising from the outside. Columbus truly mortified me, but I can make do with Cincinnati. We will see what temp salaries are available in the coming week.

I am drinking a creamy pint of Guinness. I love Guinness.

Okay, Star Wars. Well, I guess that I have to warn you that I am an unabashed Star Wars fan. Charles, on this topic, I am shamelessly partisan. I'm a little younger than you, so for me, Star Wars has been a formative experience. Star Wars was quite literally the first movie I ever saw. So, there will never likely be a Star Wars movie bad enough for me to dislike it. The saga is just too close to my core for it to happen. Not to say that it's impossible for it to get bad enough. Rather, it's just unlikely.

That aside, it surely wasn't the best of the bunch. But it did have some redeeming value for a die-hard Star Wars fan. To appreciate the better points of the movie, you have to see it in context. Like Star Wars, it's a first movie. But unlike Star Wars, Lucas knew that he would be able to make the sequels to The Phantom Menace. This makes a lot of difference in the comparative quality of the two films. You see, Lucas wrote the whole episode IV-VI storyline in a single sitting, realized that he had too much and then raided all three to make a single condensed story. In my own opinion, that is why there is a Death Star in both Star Wars and in The Return of the Jedi — when he was able to go on, he probably went on with a lot of his original script.

The Phantom Menace was written under very different circumstances. Lucas knew that there would be sequels, so he didn't replicate his original formula for Star Wars, which works well as a stand-alone movie (in my opinion). Rather, he fused a sort of James Clavell writing technique with a lot of glitz. I think you told me once that you had read some Clavell. Well, Clavell, while definitely fitting into the category that I think you once labeled as "throw away" can be a fascinating storyteller. But it takes him time to get warmed up. The first hundred pages are always hideously dry. But once he gets started, he can twist and plot with the best of them. Well, Phantom Menace is written in much the same vein. Lucas spends the time setting up very clever clues that will come in handy in the next two. I personally find the clues fascinating. What he doesn't do is give the first story the ability to stand independently. It will depend on its sequels. He tries to make it a saleable movie by going all Hollywood all over it: great action scenes, special effects and tremendous fight choreography. And it worked, to a certain extent. For those who were not bitter that this movie was going to make millions no matter what simply because it was a Star Wars movie, it was a good summer flick.

But it was a veritable mine of plot clues for the die-hard fan, which is where I had great fun. There's a lot going on beneath the surface of this movie. First, there is the issue of the Clone Wars, which are coming up. Remember Leia's holographic line in Star Wars, "General Kenobi, you served my father in the Clone Wars, now help me..."? Well, one can't help but notice that Queen Amidala is cloned. She doesn't refer to the girl who looks like her as her twin sister, so it seems likely that the woman who looks just like her is a clone.

This brings about some interesting possibilities. First, the ability to manipulate the Force has been made genetic. Now, at first, I balked at this because it tended to undermine the mystical nature of the world. It fits under Schiller's old rubric of disenchanting the world — there is nothing that science cannot explain. I've never been fond of that in life or in fiction. However, the possibilities of cloning, if the Clone Wars are done well (which, I admit is still an "if") are irresistible. Anakin is the galaxy's highest concentration of mitocholians. This means that he has become the ultimate weapon. Imagine churning out armies of Anakins trained in your very own ideology... To Palpatine, our megalomaniacal soon-to-be-Emperor, the possibilities are irresistible. He who controls Anakin (or at least his only good tissue sample) controls the galaxy. Assuming of course, that you can control Anakin. But, this is Palpatine we're dealing with. You know how well he thinks he controls people. In all fairness, later events do seem to bear his assumptions out.

Which brings us to Palpatine's motivations. What exactly is it that he wants? After all, it's rather odd that the Senator from Naboo would want the Trade Federation to swallow his homeworld. That's treachery par excellence, and okay, it's par for the course for the character we know to be the Emperor, but what does he hope to gain from the liquidation of his political power base? What does the Trade Federation have that would tempt him to sell the constituency that keeps him in power? Knowing Palpatine's overweening ambition, we know this isn't a simple Trade Federation bribe to a corrupt official to betray his people for short-term gain. Moreover, the Trade Federation Viceroy and his adjutant tell us that Darth Sidious cut a deal with them, not vice versa. Palpatine has something waiting in the wings.

My writing partner, Briggs, thinks that the Trade Federation has the capacity to exploit Naboo's very hidden technology. Naboo is a small, pretty and peaceful world with few weapons. It's clearly not a mover and shaker in the Republic. But they do have this little technology that they developed on the side that keeps the Queen intact — cloning. Well, Palpatine sees that they lack vision and the one think that rankles him more than anything is a lack of vision, because it's the one attribute on which he prides himself the most. Palpatine will show them the true value of this technology.

But Palpatine is a politician. He doesn't know anything about technology. But, the Trade Federation, already interested in creating mass armies, does. But, the Trade Federation is just a bunch of merchants looking to turn a quick profit and have only created these armies for the purpose of extortion. They, too, lack vision. He will show them too the true nature of their resources. In exchange for the paltry payment of Naboo on a silver platter, the Trade Federation will develop this technology for him. The rumor is that there are already carbon copies of Darth Maul that are on ice for Episode II.

The thing to remember is that while Lucas always casts his movies as if they were about the good guy (in this case Anakin and Obi-Wan) the movie is really about the bad guy. Lucas is better at anti-heroes than at heroes. After all, his own philosophy of heroism is "They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally they became heroes." Well, realistically, how appealing is that? Yes, it has sales appeal because you, the viewer, can also be a hero under this logic. But the problem with the approach is that it means the heroes will never be truly extraordinary. Villains, on the other hand, are unique individuals — aberrations. But, since the common man is not supposed to identify with the villains, the villains can have talent. That's why Darth Vader and the Emperor have always been more appealing than Luke and, to some extent, even Han Solo. The extent to which Solo is appealing is that he is, in the world of Princess Leia "a scoundrel." This trilogy is cast as the downfall of Anakin, but, frankly, my bet is that it will come off as the triumph of Palpatine.

All this brings us back to Palpatine, the Phantom Menace hatching out phantom menaces (the word "phantom" also meaning "copy" or "clone" as well as "hidden" or "ghostly"). Palpatine's genius is Roman. He is a short-term opportunist driven to imperial expansion by dreams of personal glory. But Gretchen North was very shrewd to point out that the Republic is very German and Palpatine's rise to power much more mirrors Hitler than it does Caesar or Augustus. Note the fact that the leader of the Republic, referred to as "The President" in Lucas' own novelization of Star Wars (which is worth a read in its own right) is now referred to as "The Supreme Chancellor." I don't know enough about the rise of Nazi Germany and the fall of the Weimar Republic yet (but I'm more interested than ever, now, and I was pretty interested before), but Gretchen tells me that it was achieved through legal maneuver. Palpatine will rise the same way. Remember Darth Sidious' dark response to the Trade Federation Viceroy's question, "Is that legal?"'

"I will make it legal," Sidious responds.

But like all megalomaniacs, Palpatine's virtuoso strengths are countered by powerful weaknesses. As Luke points out, he is overconfident. My choir teacher, Mrs. Herbold, once said that you need ego, or you'll never get the guts to get on stage. But once you're on stage, you have suppress your ego utterly, because it will do nothing but interfere with your good judgment.

"Control, control! You must learn control!" chides Yoda.

You see, Master Yoda will be the first to tell you that the future is murky and hard to predict. But not Palpatine. "I have foreseen it," he whispers, sure of his own clairvoyance. But the Emperor is not particularly clairvoyant. He's dead wrong in Return of the Jedi. You see, Palpatine has the nasty habit of filling in the gaps in his vision with what he wants to see. During the period in which he is on the rise, Palpatine has no equal. That seems rather clear in looking at Lucas' ridiculous Senate. Moreover, the Jedi are refined and elegant. Remember Obi-Wan's line about "a more elegant weapon for a more elegant age." This is the height of the Republic and Couruscant is the bright center of the galaxy — the capital of a more elegant age. The Jedi in their gilded council chamber are no match for Palpatine. This is an age that, because of its refinement, is vulnerable to one thing alone: ruthlessness. There is no good man ruthless enough in all the Republic to counter Senator Palpatine. It's not that Palpatine is so gifted. Rather, it's that there is no one in that era who is able to stop him. His ludicrous Death Star plans to control the galaxy and the lack of security to defend these vital weapons show just how overconfident he can be. A shrewder imperial mind (a mind like Augustus') would have put his faith in a strong governing apparatus and disciplined military. It's cheaper, more effective and less risky.

But megalomaniacal villains need plans with flair and Augustus' approach is just too practical. It may work, but Augustus' genius is too understated to have any appeal to a Palpatine. After all, Julius is the one that we really remember, despite his errors. Think back to Gaul: the province revolted, a revolt that Julius had no other option but put down with brute force. He still didn't garrison the province afterward. What kept it from revolting again? Pure dumb luck that Julius had managed to terrify the Gauls into compliance. The province wasn't properly nailed down until the reign of Augustus. The fact often slips by unnoticed, but Caesar was a showboat. He made mistakes. There were sixty assassins involved in the plot to murder him (that's LX, folks). Yet Caesar never suspected. Imperial Rome was always abuzz with assassination rumors. Given the fact that some knowledge of this had to be out there, how on top of things was Caesar really? All success is a combination of luck and talent. Well, Julius had some talent, but he had very healthy doses of luck. The luck made him a demigod instead of a forgotten consul. Who remembers Crassus, Pompey and Sulla?

Megalomaniacs care more about their fame than anything else. They want their brilliance commemorated. I remember my ex-roomie (now seminarian) Mark showing me a Batman comic where the villain, as always, leaves Batman to die in some complex trap. Batman, who frequently gets caught, manages to wiggle out. The villain, who is then captured, bemoans the fact that he simply didn't shoot Batman dead when he had the chance. "Why do I have to have such flair?" the villain wailed. But the only reason that Batman is alive is that all his opponents are megalomaniacs who make mistakes. I'm not a Batman fan so my facts may be wrong, but the one who actually gets him, Bane, is the only one who isn't a megalomaniac. I'm made to understand that he takes the easy kill. Batman is sloppy and is used to taking advantage of gargantuan mistakes. Bane gets Batman because he doesn't make any.

Well, Palpatine has his overweening overconfidence to contend with. Note that he underestimates Amidala at every turn. Darth Sidious dismisses Amidala as a guileless child who can be easily controlled. She disappoints him. Moreover, there is some question in my mind about whether or not Palpatine's machinations were aimed at rising to the Supreme Chancellorship. Briggs and I contend on this point. Briggs thinks he planned it. I think that it was short-sighted opportunism in the finest Roman style. As George Washington Plunkitt would say, "He saw his opportunities and he took 'em." It would be too cruel if, after all, what he really lacked was vision. He just sees the present and not the future.

My guess is that he was plotting to take control of the Republic by force. To do that, he needed to crush the Jedi, not become Grand Chancellor. If one apprentice dies, he has number two waiting on ice. There can be only two, but Palpatine is prepared and won't let setbacks upset his plan. This much, he planned.

Of course, when a Grand Chancellorship is handed to him on a silver platter, he isn't about to refuse because it wasn't in his master plan. He'll just take credit for dumb luck. Amidala is an inadvertent partner in his glory. She was never supposed to leave Naboo. But when she gets away, she does what Palpatine can't really do himself: vote no confidence in Valorum. After all, he can hardly get the sympathy vote if he gutted his predecessor. But when the noble queen does it, with her rousing performance of desperation, he can easily be the beneficiary. People are no longer voting for Palpatine, scheming Senator. They are voting for the Queen and the small world of Naboo. After this, Amidala is never supposed to leave Couruscant. Well she goes back and is then not killed as Palpatine intends. Instead, she frees the planet from the Trade Federation, who, contrary to the master plan, are now screwed. After all, they don't know that Sidious is Palpatine and admitting to being in league with Sith Lords is not a particularly good legal defense. And the Courts take longer than the Senate. If we know Palpatine, they're probably still tied up in litigation years after the Republic has been restored. So much for them. Now for our Irish wars.

Amidala has thrown quite a wrench into things. But Palpatine would do well in Washington, for he knows how to smile and wave. Rather than being fazed by the fact that his plan has been twisted, he settles on the inadvertent but utterly useful prize of the Grand Chancellorship. Okay, the Trade Federation and their technoskills are lost. Well, Palpatine will find someone new. Amidala has quite inadvertently made him Grand Chancellor. No matter she has been a loose cannon undermining his plans. He can use her to his advantage. Or rather, he can't use her to his advantage, because he can't control her. He simply is skilled enough to use the events in her wake to his advantage. This is short-sighted opportunism. Rather than being ticked off at his plan being foiled, he flies to Naboo to kiss babies and be seen with the daring heroes. Palpatine can now be the elder statesman who, is alliance with the brave young queen, will restore sanity to the Republic. Is there a more perfect hiding place from which to plot the downfall of the Jedi? The point that is most concealed by the triumph of his machinations is that he is unable, so far, to control Amidala. But that fact he has hidden even from himself.

There is a second level to this. Ever notice that Palpatine has a penchant for apprenticing guys who can't steal his limelight? Take Darth Maul. He has a tattooed face. Now, I don't think a guy with tattoos and horns can have much of a life outside being a sith lord. While you're at it, try imagining Darth Vader drinking a beer with his buddies after work. Palpatine, on the other hand, has quite an active secret life. The question is which life is the secret one? Who is the real man? Batman or Bruce Wayne? Superman or Clark Kent? Well, who is real? Darth Sidious or the Emperor?

Note that the name Darth Sidious is all but forgotten by the time of the original trilogy. The Emperor is known by the name Palpatine and referred to as "The Emperor." Darth Vader claims that the name "Anakin Skywalker," has no meaning for Darth Vader by The Return of the Jedi. He is Darth Vader, Lord of Sith. Moreover, while he offers to rule the galaxy with Luke as father and son, he seems more interested in the "father and son" part than he is in the "rule the galaxy" part. Vader sees himself as a Sith Lord and his son is a lifeline to the good, one that he has trouble cutting. But he doesn't seem to have much interest in politics.

Palpatine seems to be a political animal. But he seems to have recruited Darth Maul on the basis of getting revenge on the Jedi. How important is this grudge match to Palpatine personally? Granted, the Jedi are all but extinct at the start of the original trilogy. But is it all a means to getting power? Did he start as a Sith Lord and get seduced by politics or become a Sith Lord to advance in politics? I lean toward saying that Darth Sidious is a cover, whereas Palpatine is so arrogant that he must be himself above all. But what does this mean for the struggle of the Sith?

Moreover, according to Yoda, there can be only two Sith, but how seriously does Palpatine take this? He's apparently cloning Darth Maul. Moreover, there is the curious conversation between the Emperor and Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, where the Emperor wants Luke killed and Vader says if he can be turned, he could be a powerful ally. Well, if there can be only two, that conversation is fraught with danger. If Luke joins the fold, one of them has to be dead (my gut instinct says that Sith Lords don't just celebrate a triumph and retire to the farm). Unless, of course, Palpatine isn't all that committed to the "Sith Lord Code" or whatever it is that makes Yoda think that there can be only two. But, whatever his commitment to the Sith religion and its tenets, Palpatine uses it to control his apprentices. Darth Maul is much more interested in revealing himself to the Jedi and getting revenge than he is in any political machinations. Darth Vader serves his master faithfully, but seems to have little political agenda of his own. There's room for a lot of interesting development in there.

When talking about a different movie, Tricia has told me that what I described to her was a lot more interesting than the movie she saw. I would guess my closeness to the topic in both this and that case might gives me an insight into both movies that less nerdy people might not have. This, in turn, lets me fill in a lot of blanks and make up for the filmmaker's deficiencies. I could be making the movie better than it is. That may well be true. But Star Wars is supposed to be mythology for our times and mythology is supposed to be a basic form from which one draws a multitude of meanings. To that extent, Lucas remains successful.

The other thing I guess I should address is your concern with plot inconsistency in that Obi Wan, Yoda et al. are unable to sense the presence of Palpatine, an evil Jedi, when the other movies are full of Jedi detecting each other's presence. I could try to develop some hole-filling argument like "The Sith have been hiding for a long while and probably know how to disguise themselves, whereas Jedi are more forthright and never do this," or some such rot. But doing so seems superfluous in a number of ways.

First, science fiction is only science fiction. It isn't, after all, the music drama of Richard Wagner. I pretty much think I got my seven bucks worth of stimulation out of the film. The original Star Wars had plot inconsistencies as well, so this is hardly surprising. It is unfortunate that science fiction is so closely tied with realism. Of course, that is the challenge: to create a realistic artificial world. But on the other hand, while much of the form is realistic, the actual endeavor of making Star Wars movies is romantic: telling a great mythological story in an entirely imaginary world.

To a certain extent, I think it is appropriate to judge Star Wars movies by the standards of romanticism, rather than realism. For example, Wagner's Ring remains one of the masterworks of romanticism and has quite a few plot inconsistencies. The thing is that The Ring is still a triumphant work. To sit and pick at plot tangles instead of throwing one's self into the maelstrom of sublime emotional conflict and deep meanings would be, in my opinion, pedantry of the worst sort. You'd be missing the point and, with it, quite an experience. While Star Wars movies are, in sum total, merely works of science fiction and can hardly compare to the music drama of Wagner, I still love science fiction and believe that it need not limit itself to the strictures of realism to be a good and fun story. Lucas created very black and white characters because he believes that film these days strives for too much realism, too much gray in its techniques and morality. Well, damn it, I personally miss the good guys winning and the bad guys losing and fuck realism. Realism has no potential to be grand and larger than life and we all need that now and then. I like a little romanticism. If that means bearing with the occasional plot hole, I'll live with it. That particular plot hole isn't so glaring that it ruins it for me.

I guess while I'll have to confess that this installment isn't nearly as good as the others, I did get a heck of a lot of fun out of it and I really can't wait to see what comes next. The next movies are supposed to get very dark and as I always believed that Empire was the best of the bunch (which makes sense, it's Vader's movie and I've always believed that Lucas does villains better than heroes) so I'm excited about the next two. I'm pretty sure that the James Clavell "first hundred pages" effect will be gone and I think they'll be pretty exciting. But I confess that I grew up on this stuff and am sentimental about it.

Commend me to your wife. While you said you may not get the chance to write again soon, I hope you do, because it was truly stimulating. Take care!

Your pal,

Talal

P.S. September 5, 1999. I forgot to mention that I think Jar-Jar Binx should die quickly at the top of the second movie so that it doesn't really do much to disrupt the flow of subsequent events and that we start the growth of a tragedy in a light-hearted and comic note.