The Chicago Way Saturday, October 18, 2003

For me, the turning point was "Die Hard II." Remember that one? They hijack the air-traffic control at an airport and keep a bunch of plains circling overhead, running lower and lower on fuel, and won't let them land unless somebody forks over. At one point, somebody pisses off the bad guys and they decide to show they mean business. So they blow up one of the circling planes.

I remember watching this and thinking, wait. We're supposed to accept that we just saw three hundred-odd people die. And now we're supposed to move on to the next plot point. The director had to show that the bad guys were ruthless--so there. Three hundred made-up people, poof. To advance the story.

There comes a point, even in a story, where you have to say, enough is enough. You can't do something that big and not blink at it. Three hundred people dead? The world of "Die Hard II" should have stopped and taken notice. But even worse than that is the fact that we didn't take notice, there in the theater.

It wasn't graphic violence, it wasn't anything that would make you wince or pull a sour face. It was a datum. The bad guys are bad. So we kept watching. Nobody wrecks the theater over stuff like that anymore; the days of Alfred Jarry are long gone.

I was thinking of those three hundred ciphers while watching "Kill Bill" this afternoon. It's gory and soulless, and feels like a two-hour facial. (Yes, the bad kind.) I don't know what's worse: The fact that Tarantino's imagination is so relentlessly aestheticized that he can glory in people getting brutalized; or that this is the most popular movie in the country right now. Not to mention that a certain segment of the Internet commentariat is exulting in the fact that this is the most violent American movie ever made and Tarantino slipped it past the ratings board, hee-hee.

It makes me think of Sherman, who was accused of bloodthirstiness or even lunacy. He spoke openly in apocalyptic terms, about crushing the enemy and destroying his home, and so forth. But in practice his marchers took pains not to kill civilians--Sherman's reputation was enough to send the people in his path into disarray. In other words: He talked big so he wouldn't have to act big. And in the end this big talker proved more merciful than the diplomatic generals who sent thousands into the grinder of trench warfare. When he used violence, it was for supremely moral ends.

He didn't love violence; but he knew what it meant and he knew how to use it to avoid even greater horrors. Watching "Kill Bill," it's obvious Tarantino has no idea what violence means, and because of that he loves it utterly; the way you'd fall in love with somebody you see at the bus stop every day but never work up the nerve to talk to.

At any rate, I came home after the movie and found "The Untouchables" on television. Directed by a guy who aestheticized violence as appallingly as Tarantino ever did; but just this once he was on a mission from God. Most of the time I'd like to be a writer, sometimes during the day I'm glad I'm an editor, but every time I watch that movie I wish I could've been a T-Man.

@ 11:50:00 PM, ,

The Theological Implications Are Staggering Friday, October 17, 2003

Headlines on AOL:

IS FAITH FADING FROM YOUR LIFE?
As millions honor prolific pope,
Many ask: Is religion relevant?

PART OF ROY'S SKULL REMOVED

No comment. I won't even put a "sic" after "prolific."

Yanks win. The only team I'll ever love was out of it around April this year; but I'm glad New York's got a dog in the fight. Give 'em hell.

@ 12:31:00 AM, ,

Fightin' Words Thursday, October 16, 2003

Hi again. A quote at length from Hanson, on Uncle Billy Sherman.

It is a hard thing for contemporary liberalism to envision war as not always evil, but as sometimes very necessary--and very necessarily brutal if great evil is to disappear. ... The real dilemma of Sherman, it seems to me, is rather to understand a man who wrote of the need to slaughter hundreds of thousands but killed very few, and with real reluctance. Sherman, also like Patton, professed his distrust of racial equality; yet, he was especially kind to blacks, and very unkind to Southern plantation racists. He wrote of the need to destoy the confederacy root and branch, yet he sought to extend the most generous peace and help to a defeated South. As blacks themselves acknowledged, Sherman did more to "cut them loose" than any abolitionist. The man had contradictions aplenty, but the divide between what he said and did reflects mostly positively, not negatively, on his character. Moderns especially fail to appreciate that the visionaries of a conservative society sometimes profess racism to justify their own moderation; they often claim to be hardened war-makers to make their own clemency palatable to self and similarly dour others.

...

The late twentieth century has increasingly come to declare all war evil. Since peace is considered the natural state of relations, we live in an era of "conflict resolution" and "peace studies" in which some degree of moral guilt is freely assessed equally, both to those who kill to advance evil and those who kill to end it, to those who are aggressive and to those who resist aggrandizement. Regardless of cause or circumstances, we all in the end must become "victims" of those who have the greater power, which transcends national boundaries--politicians, corporations, the military. Indeed, "evil" itself is to be seen as a relative idea--the very thought would have terrified Sherman--a construct whose "truth" is determined by those who hold power for the moment and thus set up courts of inquiry, write our histories, teach our classes, and maintain postwar armies of occupation.

Yet there is always a timeless, absolute difference between slavery and freedom, and those who battle for abolition and those who kill to defend slavery are qualitatively different and can be recognized as such.

In those lines is the best of us, and the worst of us. Which is which? As usual, I will elide...

@ 9:56:00 PM, ,

Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys

The last time I wrote about William T. Sherman I was thirteen years old. As a final history project, we were assigned to write essays on the Civil War; I took the March and ran with it. I grabbed the first book I could find from the Jackson Heights Public, cribbed a few anecdotes and wrote a short story about one of the soldiers marching under Uncle Billy. Anticipating my essay about the a-bomb six years later, I wrote a real weepie about how awful it was the country was being torn and how lousy the whole business of war was. Sherman helped my case by coining "War is hell."

I never read the context of that quote, or anything else the general or his men had to say about his effort. Victor Hanson, in the book I mentioned below, fills in the gaps. And once again, I'm astonished at the depths of my ignorance--not to mention arrogance. Sherman, as Hanson paints him, knew full well that by destroying property and hauling off swag he was raising war to a whole other level--this wasn't two armies grinding each others up, it was one army destroying the very heart of the opposition's homeland. But he also knew that it was necessary to do this, to inflict on the South the horror they had inflicted on countless Africans and make them see the hollowness of their mannered society. He transmitted this idea and his fervor to his men, who came to see themselves on a crusade.

But hey. What did Sherman have to teach me? I'd seen "MASH." The only heroes in a war were the ones who subverted the kooky generals who wanted Hill 765, for no particular reason. Commies, precious bodily fluids, etc. Guys who want to put men into the meat grinder--bad. Guys who want to talk problems through--good.

The thing is, there's a point where talk breaks down. Peace is a parenthesis, one of the epigrammists said; ultimately, even the best causes sometimes have to be driven home with force. There was nothing nobler than abolitionism. But the Ashleys and Scarletts weren't about to slap their foreheads and say, "I declare! That gentleman from Lexington, Mass., may just have a point!" Sherman (a Gen Xer, as a certain friend of mine would want me to point out) took the rhetoric and turned it into action. The abolitionists harangued the South to remember Heaven; Sherman showed them Hell. Which one worked?

As I said below, it was a Hanson essay that helped scotch a friendship for me. I knew the friend for over ten years, and we'd been through a lot. I thought we'd weather our disagreements. But by the time he read the Hanson piece things had deteriorated to the point that he said it reminded him of Nazi propaganda; and then he compared me to Josef Goebbels. That's when you know you have to reach for your hat.

I've wished a lot of things since then. I was stupid and strident and didn't stick up for my side well enough. Now I wish I had read these Hanson books when we had those fights. There's no way you can read Hanson's sheer exuberance at the force of a democratic army to liberate a slave state--or free the Spartan's vassals--and call him a fascist. There's no way you can feel his disgust for elitism, and pomp, and gentility, pouring out of every line of prose, and think he's a blinkered elitist. It's impossible to read his accounts of heroism and the ideals that inspired it without feeling a tremble just behind your eyes.

The quote below from Hanson, which I had hoped would be obvious, probably isn't. Hanson is a democrat, both little-d and capital-D, and believes that the best political combination you can have is a radical egalitarian who nonetheless respects the best of tradition. I wish I could have told my friend that: He, like me, was half-right--but we were starting from opposite sides, like the two trains in the story problems.

To paraphrase Dr. Percy, together we might've saved politics. Instead we lost it.

@ 2:22:00 PM, ,

Opa Hoplites! Wednesday, October 15, 2003

More Victor Davis Hanson on the train, under a frosty pumpkin-colored sky. Hanson has marked some milestones for me in the past couple of years. An essay he wrote was one of the last straws between me and a friend who no longer speaks to me. I passed it along in hopes of showing him where I stood on a bunch of issues. It did, apparently too clearly for comfort.

There's a longer post in this, but I can't finesse it right now. More later.

@ 8:06:00 AM, ,

That's the Way She Writes Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Up, 6 am. Work, 7:45. Home, 7:30 pm. Tomorrow we try, once again, to get it right. I am not confident in our chances.

Progress, finally. I rewrote a decent chunk of the intro to the Secret Thing, clarifying a number of ideas and laying out the roadmap for what I have to do next. Which no longer seems so intimidating. Not nearly not, not nearly started, even, but progress.

Thought for the day, from Victor Davis Hanson, whose book "The Soul of Battle" is keeping me sane on my commute. The book is about the ancient Greek general Epaminodas, William Sherman and George Patton--three military leaders who used remarkably similar tactics to accomplish remarkably similiar goals. Which is to say: attacking the economic and social base of an apartheid state in order to show the hollowness of its strength. Epaminodas was a Theban leader who led an army of liberation against Sparta, intent upon freeing the states it held in thrall. And he succeeded wildly, at least as well as Sherman in the South.

Anyhow, the thought:

In those rare moments in history, when conservatives encourage economic egalitarianism, and liberals remain cultural traditionalists, a country like Boeotia can indeed unite, thrive, and field a murderous army of a season.

Two days, and that first clause hasn't left my mind. The conservatives he refers to are the ruling class of Thebes (Boeotia), which had just removed the landpholding qualification for citizenship; the liberals, the radicals who wanted to extend the old democratic spirit of the Greek polis to the rest of the city-states.

A good lesson. The vaunted philosophers of Athens didn't do a goddamn thing to free Sparta's vassals--or to enfranchise their own citizens beyond landowners, for that matter. It took a bunch of uncouth farmers from Thebes (the homeland of Hercules) to knock the Spartan oppressors on their asses.

Draw your own conclusions. I'm going to bed.

@ 10:30:00 PM, ,

I've Heared Some Things You Couldn't Print in Papers Sunday, October 12, 2003

Home again. A swonderful weekend in Boston with my in-laws and their smarvelous kids. I made friends with a pudgy egghead who crawls like a kimodo dragon, and a bruiser who loves Spiderman, karate and throwing apples. Mrs. WTJ made objets d'art with kiddo number three, the eldest, whose birthday we traveled to celebrate. She was dressed as a ghost at her own party. I've been there!

Drunk with fellow-feeling I even started rooting for the Yankees. Or I should say: I stuck up for my neck of the woods. I am from Queens, which seals my baseball loyalties, but I will goddamned if I let a New York team go unrooted-for in a hostile city. And oy vey, what a game to be partisan about! That town hasn't stopped rioting since Crispus Attucks. The game also provided a perfect crotchety bonding moment with my father-in-law, who, as ever, found himself outnumbered in a room pulling for the Red side.

Great singing time in the car with Mrs. WTJ. The faves: "Oklahoma!", maybe the best singalong cast album ever; "Kiss Me, Kate," during a performance of which I proposed to her (she said yes at intermission, after I ran to pee); and "Cabaret," a downer, but Liza still blew the roof off our Saturn. We tried singing along to St. Frank live in Paris, but his phrasing is too goddamn tricky. Besides, we were tearing through a cinnabon the size of a hubcab.

Got home and promptly dropped the iPod from a great height. It never fails.

@ 6:35:00 PM, ,