Death Denial, Death Drive

Content warning: suicide, depression

If you’re at all aware of my online presence, you’ll know that I have great respect for Richard Beck’s work at his blog Experimental Theology and in his books known sometimes as the Death Trilogy. (You may be more aware of this than you'd like to be, since I doubt a month goes by before bringing his work up in some comment thread or another.) In particular I appreciate his work on Terror Management Theory and how it pertains to religious authenticity, hospitality, and the creation of culture. He gets the bare-bones of his theory from Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, but adds to it using experimental psychology that was unavailable to Tillich. I’ll give a summary.

Humans fear death. We fear particular threats of death, but we also experience anxiety from the knowledge that we will necessarily die one day. In order to manage the terror of death, we create systems of meaning which promise us some kind of immortality. This might be a promise of an afterlife, but it might simply be the idea that our lives had meaning—we were remembered, or we descendants, or our actions contributed to the creation of some great cultural work (like the progress of science or what have you). However, these cultural projects, or worldviews, can only eliminate our fear of death if we believe in them fully. Therefore we react to anything which threatens our belief in these worldviews in the exact same way that we would react to the possibility of death, because the loss of our worldviews is identical to the loss of immortality. And the mere existence of other plausible worldviews might constitute a threat to one’s own worldview. This is why most people defend their worldviews and reject other people’s worldviews so violently; violent defense of worldviews makes things like hospitality, charity, and justice difficult or impossible. Even a religion like Christianity, which is founded on the idea that we should side with the oppressed, became and in some cases remains violently oppressive because of these forces. Some people, however, do not use their worldview and cultural projects to shield themselves from the reality of death. These people, instead, face their fears of death directly; they also face their doubts about their own worldviews directly (these are, after all, the same thing). These people are in the minority, but they exist. Thus there are two things a person must do in order to prevent themselves from violently defending their worldviews: they must be willing to face the possibility of their own death (which means they must be willing to face doubt, the possibility that their worldview is false and their actions meaningless), and they must try to adopt a worldview that is not easily threatened by competing worldviews (which doesn’t necessarily mean relativism, but at the least worldviews should be easy on people who don’t adopt them).

I find this theory very compelling, not just because Beck marshals a lot of evidence for it in his work but also because I can use it to explain so many things. In particular, it seems to explain why so many religious people can be so hostile, and why their hostility seems to come from their religion, but at the same time religion motivates others to be hospitable instead. The theory can’t explain why people choose one religion over others, but that’s OK: other theories can do that. Beck’s work simply explains why people need to choose a worldview of some kind (even if that’s not a religion) and why they behave the way they do in relation to their own worldview and in relation to other people’s worldviews. And it is powerful when it does this.

However, I think there might be a problem with it. It presupposes that all people fear death.*

Now, I readily admit that most people fear death, and that complaints that certainly cultures do not fear death simply confuse the effects of a highly successful worldview with the lack of a natural fear of death. But I do not admit for a second that all people fear death. Some people actively desire death (that is, they exhibit marked suicidiality), but others simply have neither fear nor desire for death. When my depression is at its worst, this is me: I am generally unperturbed by possibly dangerous situations (unsafe driving, for instance). Moreover, however my mental health looks, I feel no anxiety at all about the fact that I will inevitably die. This does not scare me; it relieves me. There is little that gives me more comfort that the thought that I will one day die. I cannot state this emphatically enough: the only emotion I feel when contemplating my eventual death is relief. Of course I realize this might be pathological, but it means I fit into neither of Beck’s populations: I am not a person who denies death and my fear of it, and I am not a person who faces my fear of death. I face death and simply have no fear. I am surely not the only one, either.

Perhaps you object that I do not fear death because I have a fairly successful meaning-making worldview. And I do think my life probably has meaning. But, if that were true, my response to doubt would be fear of death. Contemplating the possibility that my life might be meaningless should, if Beck is right, cause me to grasp for life more readily. But the opposite happens: when I contemplate the possibility that my life has no meaning, I am even less interested in living out the full allotment of my life. If I came to believe that my life was meaningless, I would probably tip over into actively wanting to die. That’s opposite the prediction you would make if what Beck said applied to me. And I’m in good company as far as that goes; Camus felt the same.

Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus as follows: 

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Notice that the question of life and death is contingent on the question of meaning and meaninglessness; if life is meaningless, there is no reason to live. If life has meaning, there is a reason to live. This exhibits causality reverse to Beck’s. Camus’s answer was peculiar to him, a last-minute dodge from nihilism: suicide is the refusal to face the meaninglessness of life, and we must face the meaninglessness of life. This smuggles meaning back into absurdism, however, and creates a contradiction.** Camus’s answer doesn’t interest me, however; what interests me is the fact that the absurdists and existentialists seemed to have experiences parallel to mine, which suggests that Beck’s theory cannot describe all people. That is, it does not apply to the admittedly small population of people who simply don’t fear death in the first place.

Of course, it doesn’t have to address those people (us). As a theory of religion and culture in general, its failure to describe a small subset of the population, one which has not had much hand in shaping either religion or culture, is hardly a fatal error. In fact, this disjoint explains the general hostility most cultures and religions have shown towards suicide (as distinct self-sacrifice): suicide, as a repudiation of the meaningfulness of life, threatens the culture’s worldview and thereby exposes people to the fear of death. And since worldviews are designed to assure people that death isn’t real, they don’t have much to offer people who mostly fear that life is worthless and all meaning is uncertain, except to simply insist on their own validity in a louder and angrier voice. Maybe this is why it is difficult to find resources in Christianity which are at all effective at dissuading people from suicide or ameliorating their depression without making things so much worse (fear of damnation, sense of shame, etc.).

It is worth noting that I do have a fear of death, but it’s a different one: I fear other people’s deaths. I fear the deaths of those who matter to me. Perhaps Beck’s theory can be applied to that? The attempt to understand another person’s life as meaningful, in order to deny their death? Or the attempt to honestly face another person’s death or our fear of it?

So my complaint is not that Beck’s theory is wrong because it omits the population of which I am a part; my complaint is simply that I find it difficult to use Beck’s theory to determine what I should do, in regards to my own worldview, or to predict or understand my own anxieties regarding the meaningfulness of my actions, the role of doubt in hospitality, and how to face my particular anxieties (of meaninglessness, but also of the deaths of people who matter to me) without harming others.

For more on my depression and assorted philosophy I've worked through in response to it, see this index post.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, please contact a local suicide hotline. In BC, call 1-800-784-2433, or 1-800-SUICIDE. If you are feeling depression generally, get therapy. I am serious about this: it helps so much.

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*There are other problems I can think of: for instance, Beck does not seem to account for a desire to believe that which is true. However, I won’t deal with it here; it’s possible that we do have a reality principle in our psychological make-up which competes with the meaning-creating and death-fearing components, but I’m not entirely sure that we do; if we do value truth for its own sake, that value is likely nonetheless a product and component or our worldview and appears after we choose a worldview to manage our fear of death. Beck, however, found some inspiration for his work from the American pragmatists, whose sense of truth is different from the intuitive one: a proposition which works, which bears fruit, which makes you the person you think you should be, is true and is true precisely for those reasons. Truth is not about correspondence between a proposition and an external reality or about coherence within a system of propositions. While Beck might not sign off on American pragmatist epistemology, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Beck’s work focuses on whether beliefs make you a hospitable or inhospitable person rather than on whether beliefs meet some other benchmark of truth.

**This paradox may be resolvable, in the sense that it may be cognitively impossible for us to truly acknowledge meaninglessness. Any attempt to do so might smuggle meaninglessness in somehow; an absurdist might therefore say that absurdism is simply the philosophical system which gets closest to acknowledging meaninglessness, even though it smuggles in the imperative “You must authentically acknowledge meaninglessness.” As it stands, I prefer existentialism to absurdism, since it acknowledges that meaning can be created and only asks that you acknowledge that you created that meaning yourself; it still contains the paradox (you did not yourself create the imperative “You must acknowledge that you created all meaning yourself”), but it contains a more hospitable version of that paradox.

I'm Not Who You Make Me Out to Be

Reading about misogynist extremist Elliot Rodger's killing spree, I found a lot of people who wanted to attribute his violence to assorted things: wide-spread misogyny, sexual frustration, insanity, poor home life, etc. Some people, of course, blamed women in general because women in general would not sleep with him--and of course what they really mean is women-Elliot-Rodger-found-attractive in general; in response to this deranged attribution, others have rightly critiqued the construction of masculinity which requires men to have sex with women in order to become/remain men. While I think there were a number of factors, this last one strikes me as highly relevant to this particular case but also to a whole plethora of misogynistic violence.

For instance, Noah Berlatsky in The Atlantic writes, "To [Rodger], women aren't people; they're markers of who is and who is not a man." The choice women make between men defines which men succeed at musculinity and which fail. Berlatsky argues that this construction of masculinity "creates a version of male identity that is bifurcated, or split in two. There is the man you should be, and then there is the failed, non-man thing you are." So the rejection of the latter, the non-man thing, is central to masculine identity, and at its apotheosis this rejection involves the violence against women, gay people, and "failed" men.

Now, I have no interest in supporting any construction of masculinity whatsoever, but insofar as there is masculinity, this sort of masculinity which is dependent on the attraction of women is always going to be toxic. If men are dependent on women in order to gain the identity they desire, then there is a high incentive to manipulate women's choices. After all, it is certainly possible that women will not make the choice you desire; in order to prevent this threat to identity, some men will try to avoid giving women any choice after all. This might come in the form of manipulative pick-up artist tactics or it might com in the form of rape. Finally, it will involve the sort of violence that Elliot Rodger committed.

I have been using very determinist language. Of course many men will succeed because enough women will make the decisions which give them the identity they want; these men probably won't see any problem with the system as it is. And many others will simply be miserable and conflicted, caught between respecting women's agency and not getting the identity they want from those women. But for those who do not succeed at the masculinity to contest, the incentives are very high to disregard women's agency altogether, and so it is almost inevitable that some men--probably many men--will do so. Those men are certainly culpable for their actions, but the entire system which incentivizes those actions is also culpable.

So there seems to be, for the individual man, three choices: the first is to reject the entire construction of masculinity; the second is to remain trapped in it; and the third is to attempt to override women's agency. Of course I advocate for the first, but I at least suggest we support men who choose the second, even as we try to tear down the whole thing.

Three parting notes:

First, I haven't mentioned other issues which do bear on Rodger's killings and on misogyny in general. For instance, entitlement seems to play a large role in Rodger's video and manifesto: he not only needs women to choose him, but he deserves women to choose to him. It is easy to flip the whole dynamic along gender lines: women, too, need men to choose them in order to really be women, but they do not generally have the same sense of entitlement, which might be one of the reasons women are far less likely to use violence against men. And there are certainly other reasons women are less likely to be violent, too, and I'm sure all of those reasons are due to some cultural construction or another; not one of those reasons is biological or is intrinsic to their biological sex. And I'm sure there are particular psychological factors involved, too; after all, only some men follow through on the incentives I've been talking about. All that is worth talking about, too.

Second, I think this issue might be generalizable in certain ways: any identity which depends on the choice of other people (or another person) will be in constant peril. As a consequence, anyone who constructs their identity in this way will either live with the risk that they might lose or fail to achieve their identity, or must find some means by which to coerce the choice of those other people. If they take the first route and succeed, then they will probably not see that anything is wrong with this way of constructing identity, but if they take the first and fail, they will probably have a destructively low sense of self-worth. If they take the second route and succeed, they will violate another person's agency, possibly with violence. If they take the second route and fail, they will not only violate another person's agency, but they will even more radically jeopardize their whole endeavour. Depending on the context failure or success is probably random, not merited, so this cannot possibly be construed as a fair system, but even if it were fair, it would still incentivize the second route and obscure that fact to those who succeed at the first. Here are some examples I can think of: a parent who depends on their children for their identity as a parent, an employee who depends on their bosses for promotion, a blogger who relies on public acclaim for their sense of self-worth.

Third, this is not a call for independence. Of course we are, and must be, dependent on other people. I am arguing not for isolation but simply for a construction of identity which is not dependent on others. I am not denying the very real sense in which we are emotionally, politically, and materially dependent on other people.

Kinds of Abandon in The Golem and the Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker.

Helene Wecker's debut novel The Golem and the Jinni is a lovely novel, even if it does read a little like the first novel it is (there's too much coincidence). As the back of the book explains, it is about Chava, a golem, and Ahmad, a jinni, arriving in New York City in 1899. Chava's master-husband wakes her for the first time minutes before his unsuspected death; when Chava arrives in New York, she is masterless. Ahmad has been trapped in a flask for centuries, and when he is released by a Syrian tinsmith in Manhattan he is still trapped in the human form given to him by the same Bedouin wizard who put him in the bottle. Assorted plotlines unfurl and characters develop, including members of both the Syrian and Jewish immigrant communities and including Yehudah Schaalman, a deadly Kabbalist sorcerer. In a sense it is a book about immigrants in America (Wecker says so explicitly), as the Golem and the Jinni are immigrants in immigrant communities, but the eponymous protagonists are also immigrants to a parody humanity, both trying to act human despite the ways in which their natures rebel against human constraints.

Chava and Ahmad become friends of a sort (though their first meeting is late in the novel, more than a third of the way through), bound by the fact that each of them is a mythical creature pretending to be human for fear that the humans around them, compared to whom both Chava and Ahmad are incredibly powerful, would quickly destroy them in fear and distrust. But they make poor, quarrelsome friends most of the time, because as much as both of their natures resist the humanity they are forced to take on, they resist in very different ways. Chava is a golem, a creature made to serve; without a master, she is aimless, and a quirk of the magic which bound her to her master now allows her (compels her) to feel the desires of everyone she encounters, and when she feels those desires she has an impulse to serve them. (With one exception: she was made to be sexually faithful to her husband.) Chava also fears running amok; whenever a golem gets a taste for violence, it is said, that golem will never stop. Ahmad, on the other hand, is a powerful jinni, a fire spirit once able to enter dreams, fly, and change his shape at will. He roamed the deserts and acted on his whims and desires without thought to consequence. While he retains some of his power, he is bound to human form and certain human vulnerabilities (and worse). And so while both struggle with being human, their desires are radically different: Chava hates the freedom of being human, while Ahmad hates the constraints of being human. Let me excerpt a passage for you (I admit it's a little long):

She shook her head. "You misunderstand me. Each golem is built to serve a master. When I woke, I was already bound to mine. To his will. I heard every thing, and I obeyed with no hesitation."
"That's terrible," the Jinni said.
"To you, perhaps. To me it felt like the way things were meant to be. And when he died--when that connection left me--I no longer had a clear purpose. Now I'm bound to everyone, if only a little. I have to fight against it, I can't be solving everyone's wishes. But sometimes, at the bakery where I work, I'll give someone a loaf of bread--and it answers a need. For a moment, that person is my master. And in that moment, I'm content. If I were as independent as you wish you were, I'd feel I had no purpose at all"
He frowned. "Were you so happy, to be ruled by another."
"Happy is not the word," she said. "It felt right."
"All right, then let me ask you this. If by some chance or magic you could have your master back again, would you wish it?"
It was an obvious question, but one that she had never quite asked herself. But then, couldn't she guess? What sort of man would take a golem for a wife, the way a delivery man might purchase a new cart?
But oh, to be returned to that certainty! The memory of it rose up, sharp and beguiling. And she wouldn't feel as though she was being used. One choice, one decision--and then, nothing.
"I don't know," she said at last. "Maybe I would. Though in a way, I think it would be like dying. But perhaps it would be for the best. I make so many mistakes, on my own."
...
She'd half decided to turn back toward Broadway; but then he said, "Do you remember what I told you before? That I was captured, but have no memory of it?"
"Yes, of course I remember."
"I have no idea," he said, "how long I was that man's servant. His slave. I don't know what he made me do. I might have killed my own kind." There was a tight edge in his voice, painful to hear. "But even worse would be if I did it all gladly. If he robbed me of my will, and turned me against myself. Given a choice, I'd sooner extinguish myself in the ocean."
"But if all those terrible things did happen, then it was the wizard's fault, not yours," she said.
Again, that not-quite laugh. "Do you have colleagues at this bakery where you work?"
"Of course," she said. "Moe and Thea Radzin, and Anna Blumberg."
He said, "Imagine that your precious master returns to you, and you give yourself to him, as you said you perhaps would. Because you make so many mistakes. And he says, 'Please, my dear golem, kill those good people at the bakery, the Radzins and Anna Blumberg. Rip them limb from limb."
"But why--"
"Oh, for whatever reason! They insult him, or make threats against him, or he simply develops a whim. Imagine it. And then tell me what comfort it gives to think it wasn't your own fault."
This was a possibility she'd never considered. And now she couldn't help but picture it: grabbing Moe Radzin by the wrist and pulling until his arm came free. She had the strength. She could do it. And all the while, that peace and certainty.

To be honest, I am more sympathetic to Chava's plight than to Ahmad's. Ahmad's desire is freedom, and his growth as a character is to move from moral nihilism to greater responsibility; his attendant fear is simply that he will lose his freedom. Chava's desire is to be servant to a master which will grant her certainty in her decisions, but her fear is more than just that she'll remain aimless; her fear becomes the dark parody of what she desires, that she will be servant to someone who would cause her to hurt others. And, indeed, this is precisely what the threat of running amok is to her: she would be servant to her own darkest impulse, the golem's buried but ever-present taste for violence. It's not just that I recognize both Chava's fears and her desires more than I recognize Ahmad's; I find the fact that what she fears is the logical extension of what she desires to be more interesting than Ahmad's simplicity.

But what interests me most is how both of them desire a kind of abandonment. Ahmad wants to abandon himself to his own desires, be they good or bad; he wants to abandon himself to freedom. Chava wants to abandon herself to her master's desires; she wants to abandon herself to service. If each of them got what they wished, they would lose themselves. Chava explicitly acknowledges this--"I think it would be like dying"--but even Ahmad would dissolve into a sort of formlessness, being a shape-shifter and perpetual wanderer. He would not be recongizable. (To an extent this is a writer's trick; he would probably have a continued sense of identity, but his jinni name is kept from us because it's supposedly inarticulable by humans, and in the flashbacks to his time as a free jinni he did not appear, at least to me, to be quite as fully developed a character as when he was human; at any rate, it wasn't until he starts following humans and investigating them that he starts to differentiate from other jinn. I think this was deliberate on Wecker's part.) As much as Chava's nature and Ahmad's nature rebel against their current human condition, it is exactly that condition--not free of conscience or consequence, but free to make decisions nonetheless--which makes them characters. They gain identity by their humanity.

While The Golem and the Jinni is no allegory, the point is pretty plain. Chava and Ahmad are different in origin and different in ability than humans, but otherwise they are hardly different at all. This sense that being human is horribly uncomfortable, either because we rebel against the limitations our humanity gives us or because we rebel against the freedom our humanity gives us. Some people prefer one rebellion to another, but each fails. From what I can tell Wecker is not particularly religious, but I think that between Chava and Ahmad (but more Chava) some of the particular struggles and griefs of religious life are well represented. I saw much of my own fears and concerns in Chava, and while I do not feel that The Golem and the Jinni provided much way forward as far as those struggles go, I nonetheless found it an enormously satisfying read, not least because character-driven fantasy novels are so hard to come by.

This Exploitation Might Not Be the Kind You're Thinking of

National Identity and a Pageantry of Stereotypes

When discussing his motivation for making the movie Desperado (2010), director Robert Rodriguez said he was interested in giving people a similar experience to one he had watching John Woo's The Killer:

Rodriguez says that when he got to Hollywood to make Desperado he wasn't trying to make a Latin film but a film that was entertaining just like when he saw John Woo's, The Killer and he thought, "Damn I want to be Chinese." With Desperado he liked the idea of people watching it, who would say, "Wow I want to be Mexican." [sic] (source)

Recently I've been thinking about the relationship between identity/community and the sort of quilt of stereotypes that define exploitation flicks like Rodriguez's later Mexploitation flick Machete (2010), as Rodriguez's quote exemplifies.

(I'm drawing my knowledge of exploitation flicks from these sources: Wikipedia's page on the genre; TVTropes's page on the genre; my own viewings of Coffy (1973), Undercover Brother (2002) (which is really am affectionate parody of Blaxploitation rather than an example of it, despite the fact that Blaxploitation was self-parodying from the outset), Kill Bill I & II (2003, 2004), the Grindhouse movies Planet Terror and Deathproof (2007), and Machete; and conversations with friends on these and other exploitation flicks. Take my interpretations with the grain of salt designed for opinions based on insufficient evidence.)

Exploitation flicks are often described as containing some kind of exploitation (a gimmick to draw in audiences) rather than high-quality plot, acting, or cinematography, but since things like action sequences, romance, horror, and comedy count as exploitation, this definition reduces the term to something as vague and unhelpful as "genre movie." Sometimes definitions insist that two particular exploitations--graphic violence and nudity--must be present, which does narrow the definition considerably but still includes everything shown on HBO (Game of Thrones, I'm looking at you). To narrow the definition so that it actually approaches common use, I would say that an exploitation flick must 1. use at least one of graphic violence and nudity/explicit sex to draw audiences; 2. promise some other material that will play on specific conventions and/or stereotypes and violates a contemporary taboo, such as religion/sacrilege, racism/racial identity, Nazism, or cannibalism; and 3. be notably or seemingly low-budget (though not necessarily poor quality). Often the element in the second qualification places the film in a particular subgenre: among the subgenres, Blaxploitation (which draws heavily on stereotypes of and societal problems for black Americans), nunsploitation (which often shows nuns exhibiting sexual behaviour we don't expect of nuns), and kung-fu movies are perhaps the most well known.

Exploitation flicks tend to incorporate as many stereotypes and associations connected with their chosen theme as they possibly can. For instance, Machete, which I will use as my example throughout, is mainly about illegally-immigrated Mexican Americans ("We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us!") and it has redneck border patrols, cockroaches, taco stands, semi-mythical revolutionaries, high Catholicism, street fighting rings, chop-shops and pimped-out cars, corrupt Federales, bandannas, and people brandishing rickshaws, hoes, and shovels. Plot devices include Mexican immigrants using publicly subsidized health care, Mexican characters getting construction work, Mexican characters infiltrating houses by doing yard work ("You ever notice how you let a Mexican into your house just because he's got gardening tools?"), and American-raised Mexican-Americans struggling to balance American and Mexican identities. It is almost as though the script writers made a list of all possible stereotypes that Americans have of Mexicans, strung them into some kind of order, and wrote a plot around that. Most of these stereotypes are presented as blatantly as possible. Subtlety is not highly valued.

Given the genre's focus, exploitation flicks usually privilege a pageantry of associations over the linear logic of tight plot. There is something carnivalesque and anti-systematic about them (though, of course, it is not necessarily the case that they don't have some kind of deep order). Part of this might come from the fact that the exploitation flick's very name implies an emphasis on immediate experience--pleasure, outrage, shock, tittilation, excitement--over a more considered or analytic engagement. It assumes that an exuberant display of taboo topics will be pleasurable to its intended audience, perhaps in part because of the imagined or documented outrage of a putatively unintended audience of social censors (but of course this unintended audience is really intended if their outrage is a real source of pleasure). However, there's something more to this than just the pageantry and the pleasure of taboo. These films use the play of stereotype and the overabundance of flavour to explore, if not always articulate, a certain kind of collective identity. In my flagship example, Machete, this is especially obvious; Rodriguez has said that he wanted to make his national/ethnic identity attractive, so Machete must display something that is recognizably Mexican, even if Mexican-ness is not clearly articulated in the film. (Of course it couldn't be; it, like any national identity, is imaginary.)

This leaves me with five directions for further questioning.

1. There must be a considerable difference between an emic (insider's perspective) and an etic (outsider's perspective) exploitation flick. Were Machete an etic film rather than an emic film, we would be quite right to consider it an act of appropriation at best, derogatory patronizing at worst. As much as I'm tempted to subscribe to the death of the author, it is clear that an author-figure (or author function) of some kind is still hugely important to an interpretation of a text. If an exploitation flick plays with the identity of a community, how much changes depending on whose community it is?

2. Exploitation flicks play on a confusion of identity or affiliation as well as an exuberant expression of one. I am not Mexican; it is unclear what affiliation I am supposed to have with this film (or it would be if Rodriguez hadn't helpfully told us that we're supposed to want to be Mexican). In etic exploitation films, we're often encouraged not to affiliate with the thematic group; from what I can tell, hixploitation films do not want you to want to be a hick. But more often than not it's unclear: what does Coffy think of race in America? The associative rather than linear focus makes it hard to pin down.

3. Identity must be somehow related to association. I might want to say that my identity as an academic, for instance, is based on a set of values or a set of practices, but if you were to make a gradsploitation flick the salient features would be much less logically coherent ones: all-nighters, useless erudition, endless arguments, grading papers, probably some seductive co-eds (which have nothing to do with my life as a grad student but would be conventional in such a film), etc. Is this a good way of imagining identity, "good" meaning either "accurate" or "admirable"? What does this tell us about how to strengthen our communities? Or does it say something very bad about the communities in question? Is it just a clumsy genre? Of course we should remember that in the case of things like Blaxploitation and Mexploitation, which focus on minority communities, there's a jocular reclaiming element to the stereotyping. The pleasure may come from claiming certain identifiers that were thrust upon them. These films might be excellent examples of the post-modern sense of irony, in that they balance self-conscious parody with sincerity.

4. If an exploitation film is the vehicle for making Mexican identity desirable, this might suggest that violence and nudity make identities desirable, which I find disconcerting. There's a lot in our culture to suggest this is true, but it's worth thinking about why. There are some obvious answers: violence implies that the protagonists are strong and capable while sexuality implies that the protagonists are desired by those who are desirable and desire those who are desirable (and thus have ideal normative sexualities). I'm sure this has something to do with masculinity et al., which makes me suspicious. But I'm also suspicious of those who would ban exploitation flicks as a prudish reaction to violence and nudity/sex; I suspect that filmmakers can use both exploitations to make intelligent and valuable commentaries, even if they have not ordinarily done so.

5. This is probably a coincidence, but to what extent does the term exploitation, which as an industry term does not refer to oppressive practices, relate to exploitation in the sense of oppressive practices? Exploitation in the latter sense has played a role in the history of black Americans, Mexican Americans, etc.; it might be argued that the nudity in these films is an exploitation of women; the violence in these films might reflect the violence needed to enforce the exploitation of oppressed populations. It is probably a coincidence, but it does seem a terrible irony that the method by which filmmakers "exploit" an audience entails or reflects the presumed audience's own exploitative practices. (It also gives a certain linguistic legitimacy to the Marxploitation flick, a genre I made up.)

Envy for Sisyphus

I do not often write emotionally; as I've said before, I rarely feel the need to express my emotions to other people. But today my soul cries that its anguish be spoken and my soul's anguish happens to be on topic. I apologize in advance if this emotional display is unseemly.

Eve Tushnet suggests that I seriously underestimate the dangers of paralysis in the face of making a decision. Her concern with critical thinking is that it will keep you in the anteroom when you hate being in the anteroom. (Seriouly, go read the post.) This is a fair but false accusation. It is fair because, based on anything I've written, you wouldn't know how familiar I am with the agony of uncertainty. But the trouble is that, for me, it does not matter whether I've accepted or not, whatever that means; the doubts, as Eve notes, never go away. There are many many times that I would give anything--ANYTHING--for certainty. I feel lost, perpetually. I sometimes feel as though I have no purpose; this may come from the fact that I no longer know what career I want to pursue. I want a quest, you know? I want some sort of project that will give meaning to my decisions: I don't care whether I find a career or write a novel or take up a cause or fall in love or whatever. I am jealous of those children who stumbled upon Narnia, yes, but I am jealous even of Camus's Sisyphus; he may be faced with a meaningless task, but it is his meaningless task, and he knows he must do it and how it is to be done.

I know that my depression is making this worse right now. Stephen Greenblatt writes in "Invisible Bullets" that Shakespeare's Prince Hal is a reverse Midas, that everything he touches turns to dross. That is how I feel right now; any project to which I turn my hand appears worthless soon after I begin. But it's not just a recent thing. I've always felt this way, to an extent. In my undergraduate I met many people who believed that God had a special plan for them and they had some access to this plan; they claimed to feel the voice of God within the stillness of their souls. Try as I might, I could never hear this voice, but I wanted a special plan so badly (even though, really, I suspected that they were all fooling themselves). I convinced myself that my special plan was to develop a spirituality for those whose only experience of God was as a terrible and ringing silence, because such a task could only be completed by someone who had no personal experience of God but nonetheless believed (ie. me). In the end, though, I couldn't even believe that sorry sort of plan: if God has a plan for me, I do not presume to know what it is.

So if my reaction to what pretty much anyone else is saying on this seems, I don't know, bitter, it's because I am a little bitter. Not toward God, who I don't think has an obligation to explain himself to me or anyone else, but toward anyone who has made me feel like I need to be certain of things (or, to anyone who has acted like I have an obligation to explain myself to them). Maybe there is something in our culture which reprimands people who are overly certain, I don't know, but our culture isn't homogenous and there absolutely is something in our culture which has no sympathy whatsoever for those in the anteroom or, for that matter, those like me who presume to be in the main chamber without having a clue what they're doing there or whether they are even in the right building. It's not just that that's an uncomfortable position to be in; quite a lot of people make it an uncomfortable position to be in. I don't begrudge anyone their certainty, but I have seen so many people use their certainty to shame others, or at least justify the shaming, that I fear certainty makes it easy to weaponize beliefs. So the thing behind my tentativism, maybe, is terror. Terror that I will be excommunicated for my heresy, terror that I will be steamrolled by someone else's special plan, terror that I might be the one trodding on another as I pursue my own glorious purpose, terror that someone might hallucinate the voice of God demanding my sacrifice. And horror too that many people are experiencing these things even when I am not. And maybe I'm wrong, but I cannot imagine that any of these things would happen if the perpetrators were just a little less sure of themselves.

So I say I would give anything for certainty, for a purpose, for a quest, but this is not true. If there is something I am certain of, it is that I cannot tell anyone else's story, that I have an obligation to do no harm (or at least as little as possible), that I have an obligation to empathy. I will take on whatever agony I must to maintain these principles, and so if this means that I suffer uncertainty--for there is suffering in uncertainty--so be it.

This is what I say when I feel brave. The other side of the coin is that uncertainty seems to be part of my disposition. It is not a thing I chose in the first place. Do I think I am a better person for my uncertainty? Yes: the less certain I am, the less of a jerk I am. (Though I take Eve Tushnet's point that uncertainty doesn't combat oppression very effectively, and it should be noted that I am certain about some things, especially w/r to feminism and environmentalism and other causes that don't have handy names.) Do I think the world would be a better place if pretty much everybody was more willing to concede that they might be wrong? Yes, I do. But I will not pretend to have chosen this for myself; all I have done is accepted it, or owned it as they say. And I really cannot blame people for abandoning an openness to truth as they grasp for certainty, because I know as well as anyone how miserable uncertainty can make you.

But I know I have also celebrated uncertainty and postmodernism and so forth in the past, and while I have trouble celebrating it at this moment I still know that it is worth celebrating. In a way I've written about it a bit already when writing about fantasy novels. There is a joy not just in discovery, but in knowing that there is more to find than can ever be found. And instability can be just plain fun; when things are open to change, you can play with them, you can create, you can experiment. There is suffering, and today my soul screams for the kind of certainty others have and I do not, but if the possibility for certainty was extended to me, I would be tempted to take it and I would still turn it down. And I shall try to remain the joy it can give to keep me through until I am better able to experience that joy again.

Now, look, other people can write all they want about this, but for the time being I'm utterly sick of the topic so unless I've already told you personally that I'll answer your questions, I reserve the right to ignore your question. I'm not saying I will ignore it, just that I reserve the right.

Note: When I say "certainty," I mean more than just certainty about particular facts. I mean something closer to "metanarrative," or "certainty in a worldview," or "an idea that you know how to live a good life." I don't mean "feeling like you know all of the answers," but I do mean more than the sense of certainty in saying, "I am certain that there is such a thing as gravity." So I acknowledge that I'm not even sure myself exactly what it is I'm objecting to, and I promise I'll think about it, but I don't promise that I'll come back with answers. I can't promise that at all.

Other People's Mystery Novels

In a previous post I lamented that people did not write very many epics any more (though there are some if you can find them). I like finding out how an author uses the constraints of the epic's conventions to express their worldview. But there are other highly conventional genres, too, ones well designed to express particular worldviews. Two in particular come to mind: the mystery novel and the exploitation flick. In this post I'll talk about mystery novels.

The mystery novel tends to follow a particular pattern: the social order is intact, but then that order is violated by a crime; the criminal's identity remains secret, and until the criminal is identified the social order is threatened; a protagonist, perhaps a member of the police or perhaps a private investigator or perhaps a civilian, uses investigative methods to discover who the criminal is and, usually, what motivated their crime; this information is made public and the criminal is identified; the criminal is apprehended/killed/redeemed and the social order is safely restored. Off the top of my head I can identify three ways an author would make their worldview apparent in this form. First, the community: what is the social order which is imperiled? Second, the criminal: how would a person become a criminal--what constitutes a crime and what would motivate a person to commit it? Third, the investigator: what method should a person use to discover a criminal's identity, and who could use that method? If I imagine another person's mystery novel, I am forced to think about how they imagine the social order and how they imagine epistemology/knowledge.

I don't feel like I need to elaborate this or walk through examples as much as I did in the epic post; I figure you can probably do it yourself. More people will have read mystery novels than epics. For a brief example, Carl Hiaasen's mysteries are environmentalist and anti-corporate (and usually very accepting of sex workers); in his novels, the official police channels are involved in crime-fighting but civilian investigators are also involved, often breaking laws--even to the point of eco-terrorism--to catch the bad guys. In Agatha Christie's novels, it would be unthinkable to break the law in the pursuit of justice, since they're synonymous. Crime for Christie is personal, spontaneous, emotional; crime for Hiaasen is those things, but it's also systemic. So for Christie, the law prevents and punishes crime, and all of the elements of her stories reflect this. For Hiaasen, the law sometimes enables crime, and corporations demand it. For Christie, the society which crime threatens is antithetical to crime; for Hiaasen, the society which crime threatens is complicit in crime. (Also, for Hiaasen, the threatened society includes the vegetative and geological environment, too, specifically the Everglades.) I've written already about G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much, which often removes the punishment/rejection part of the standard narrative. In that novel, the social order is so complicit in the crimes that to expose those crimes and reject the criminal would be more threatening to the social order than the crime itself is.

Thus, like the epic, the mystery is well-suited to expressing particular worldviews. It is less grand than the epic; it perhaps contains less. But its highly tightened focus has other certain advantages, because what it communicates, it communicates clearly. And thus, like the epic, it's also fun to imagine what another person's mystery novel would look like. It is fun to figure out what different mystery authors think the social order is. What would a feminist mystery story look like? What would a communist mystery story look like? What would a Nietzschean mystery story look like?

But, again, I must repeat that in the end such easy labels don't apply. What's really interesting is to see how different elements of worldviews match up. How does a person's sense of social order relate to their epistemology? How does a person's feminism match up with their environmentalism? (Or does it? How do the different parts of their ideas snarl, strip gears, get mired?)

Does Communism Need a Better Aesthetics?

In talking with a friend of mine who identifies as Marxist, I realized that my position on communism is fairly muddled. While I generally consider myself a socialist rather than a communist, I realized that I had no particular reason to choose socialism over communism besides complacency. Part of my preference for socialism is probably quite unlike most people's criticisms of communism: I grudgingly endorse strong state control as a means of enforcing environmental and anti-discrimination initiatives (largely because I'm cynical about the efficacy of grassroots activism to make any difference), and socialism requires a centralized state in ways that communism does not (or, at least, I tend to associate socialism with a centralized state and communism with communes and collectives). However, I do not think that that really explains why I dislike communism.

The real reason I dislike communism is that I find it ugly.

For me, the communist aesthetic is founded entirely in the realm of labour. Of course this makes sense, since communist thought has historically been a critique of capitalism and the particular labour relations within capitalist economics. It is perfectly logical that communism would return repeatedly to labour, and given Marx's historical position, that labour tends to be imagined as industrial. The images of communism are of factory-work and by extension of automation. At times, the images might be agricultural, but they are not particularly pastoral. Thanks perhaps to Soviet Russian propaganda but almost certainly to the reality of farm work as well, agricultural work in communist aesthetics appears mechanized and labour-intensive. Not only is none of this pretty, it is also undesirable. In truth, I dislike both the idea of difficult manual labour and the idea of work in a factory setting. (As Northrop Frye explicitly puts it, the world of labour is not the worst of all worlds, but it is closer to the world we reject than the world we desire. I don't think I need to lean on Frye for such a claim, though. Among other things, I am only making claims about my imagining of these economic systems; I am not making claims about a universal imagination.)

Of course it is the case that unpleasant working conditions are even more characteristic of capitalism than of communism; uncovering that fact is one of communism's chief critiques. But because communism makes the reality of hard work, industrialization, and mechanization apparent, it is communism that I associate with those realities. Capitalism, meanwhile, promotes an appealing fiction as its aesthetic, one of hygienic consumption, choice, and leisure. Of course, all of these are fictions: we work more, destroy more, have fewer meaningful options under capitalism. However, capitalism appears pleasant, especially to those of us in the middle class.

Let's look at that word “pleasant,” because it's also important. The primary emotions promoted by capitalism (or, I should say, capitalist advertising, because I'm reifying capitalism and I shouldn't do that) is pleasure, satisfaction, and admiration. The emotions that I associate with communism are much different. In fact, I don't associate many emotions at all with communism, since I think of it as largely dehumanized and mechanized. But when I think of communism I also think of revolution, and I associate revolution with anger or some similar passion. And I also think of union meetings, and I associate union meetings with frustration and discomfort.

Of course I know that advertising is a lie and I am at times able to return to capitalism the aesthetics of labour, alienation, struggle, anger, and destruction, but it is ordinarily free-market capitalism that I think of in those senses. Socialism, or the kind of socialism practised in Canada, at any rate, is really capitalism with sort-of-communist aspirations, and it ought to be subject to many of the same critiques as free-market capitalism. However, since socialism is certainly less subject to some of those critiques, I associate socialism with other, more attractive aesthetics: trees and clean water (ie. environmentalism), the redemption of criminals (ie. rehabilitative programs), the rescue of the downtrodden (ie. welfare, public health care), the inculcation of culture (ie. public education), the connections that connect and thereby produce a nation (ie. postal system, roads). Socialism obviously looks better than capitalism (as it should!), but somehow it manages to dodge the trap that caught communism by not directly critiquing capitalism itself, instead appearing as an improved form of capitalism.

A political position's aesthetics is a very silly basis on which to judge it, but I think I'm right in attributing my preference to aesthetics, and I suspect I'm not the only one to do so. The problem isn't just understanding that advertisers, and others invested in a capitalist economy, have produced an aesthetic of capitalism that is fictitious. The problem is with the aesthetics I associate with communism: perhaps communism needs a better PR job, but perhaps it is also true that I need to re-think my own conception of communism's aesthetics.

I am not stating that I now am a communist; rather, I am noting that in order to think through economic systems I need to first address how concerns about aesthetics are impeding the clarity of my thought. It also occurs to me that in other countries, or even other parts of this country, or even other demographics in this part of Canada, such aesthetics might differ.

Disguising Subversion with Love Stories

Romantic Subplot in The Hunger Games

Note: This is not part of my meta-ethics series. I just decided that I did not want to postpone publishing it until that series is done.

As I indicated before, I have recently seen The Hunger Games (movie, not book). One of the things that I found very surprising about this movie was just how subversive it is. Most supposedly subversive movies are either not very subversive at all (Avatar) or do a terrible, muddled job of subversion (V for Vendetta, oh my goodness). At least on the first viewing, The Hunger Games is much smarter than most of Hollywood's supposedly subversive movies, and it even takes a few potshots at conventional Hollywood storytelling--after all, it is about the use of media to suppress underprivileged populations. One of the most impressive instances was the movie's deliberate indication that the romantic subplot distracts from more important political questions.

(Here be spoilers.)

Combatants in the Hunger Games desperately need sponsors to help outfit them as the event proceeds, so the characters must be very deliberate about their public appearances. During the interviews before the Games themselves, Peeta says that he has a crush on Katniss. Katniss is angry that he would use her to further his own publicity, but their trainer Abernathy tells her that it has helped her publicity as well: it has made her desirable. Besides being a shout-out to Girard, this episode indicates that romantic feelings, whether or not they are genuine, are part of the proceedings. Instead of somehow transcending time and place, like we have pretended since Petrarch, love is subject to the society, culture, and ideology the lovers inhabit. Peeta's admission of love, even if it's true, is also an attempt at survival that is endorsed by the media spectacle and becomes part of the narrative that Flickerman, the interviewer and master of ceremonies, helps create. (Of course, he is probably working from a script, too.)

Abernathy latches onto this narrative device. What I find interesting is that another narrative device--Katniss' voluntary substitution of herself for her younger sister--is eclipsed by the romance narrative, at least as far as the publicity is concerned. I say publicity rather than public for a reason: Katniss' adoption of Rue as a surrogate sister certainly get the attention of Rue's district. What Abernathy knows--and likely what the Capital's propogandists rely on--is the fact that the romance narrative will provide explanations for potentially subversive behaviour, explanations that mitigate the subversiveness of it. So when Katniss and Peeta defy the authorities by attempting double-suicide rather than monomachy (and thereby trying to answer Peeta's question about dying in a way that shows the authorities that they do not own him), Abernathy is quick to use the romantic subplot to explain away this behaviour. He says that the pair "showed them up" and that there would be consequences: "This is serious. And not just for you. They don't take these things lightly." So Katniss and Peeta must act as though their behaviour was not about the power or authority, was not in fact directed at the Capital or about anything that might also concern the people of the poor Districts. In order to prevent the Capital from reinforcing that power with violence, they must act (cynically) like their actions are born of the sort of love that transcends time and place. Frankly, I was not sure whether to be impressed by this realization, or disappointed that Katniss decided to play along with the love narrative which disguised her more subversive motives. How much complicity should characters accept in order to survive long enough to fight that power?

One of the interesting things about seeing this as a movie but not reading the book is that I had no way of gauging the not-especially-expressive Katniss's emotions. I could not tell whether she actually reciprocated Peeta's attraction or romantic feelings. (I understand that in the book it is clear she does reciprocate somewhat, but that's second-hand). In this state of ignorance, the romantic subplot seemed even more surreal, even more a ploy to survive the Capital. Certainly her sacrifices for Peeta were not much different from her sacrifices for Rue, for whom she would feel no romantic love. How the other movies treat her relationship with Peeta is now of almost no consequence: the idea that romantic subplot distract from real political subversion in the Hunger Games, and also The Hunger Games, and also, by extension, if you're willing to think it, most popular culture, is already in place. I cannot be sure how strong this effect would be in first person narration.

I want to clarify a few things: I don't think that genuine, non-cynical romantic subplots (or main plots) are necessarily bad. But I would, for a lot of reasons, like to see much more fiction that treat such relationships with more sophistication and more awareness of the problems they can produce, and I would like to see more fiction that does not treat romantic subplots as particularly important. I think The Hunger Games does a good job of showing some of those problems.

Who is a Moral Agent (in Gun Control Debates)?

One of the things that interests me about the debate surrounding gun control in the United States right now (recalling, of course, that this debate also appears in Canada whenever election time shows up) is that one of the most coherent oppositions to gun control is focused on the citizen's moral agency. Shouldn't the government focus on preventing actually destructive behaviour (murder) rather than preventing the conditions of that behaviour (gun control)? The role of the government is to produce an environment in which citizens are capable of virtuous action, not incapable of destructive action, though destructive action will be addressed, of course, in the criminal justice system.

I am immediately sympathetic to this kind of argument on two counts. The first is that I do really like moral agency; I get excited when people talk about taking responsibility for their actions. The second is that I like the idea of a state which is focused on helping citizens become virtuous agents rather than forcing them to be obedient agents. Lawful behaviour is much nicer when citizens are lawful for the right reasons rather than out of fear of reprisal. So the ways these particular opponents to gun control articulate their position is attractive to me.

However, I ultimately disagree because I subscribe to what I would call psychological realism. While I do intend to be a strong moral agent and to respect other people's agencies, I am at the same time skeptical that anyone's agency is non-compromised. In other words, I believe that people should take responsibility for their actions when they can but that people often will not and sometimes cannot act the way they should, even when they want to act the way they should. For example, I advise that you read this article entitled "Please Take Away My Right to a Gun" (trigger warning for discussion of suicide and the threat of home invasion), in which the author argues that she does not want to be able to get a gun because during periods of her recurring depression she would be tempted to use it on herself. Many commenters say that the author needs to take responsibility for her actions (and I've read some off-site comments saying that her argument is condescending toward the mentally ill), but I think she's just being realistic: she knows that sometimes she cannot trust her own decision-making processes and she knows that the current system will enable her suicide if she ever attempts it. She is compromised, she wants the state to protect her from herself, and I don't think she's wrong in believing this right trumps the rights of gun ownership.

But this debate has made me re-consider my own position on matters: is what I call "psychological realism" compatible with insisting that people's agencies be respected? One of the reasons I tend to shy away from anything resembling paternalism--particularly colonial paternalism--is that I believe it is intrinsically good to respect other folks' agencies (both to help them develop their characters and as an end-in-itself). But can I realistically continue in this outlook if I ultimately believe that we are all psychologically compromised? If the mentally ill are not full moral agents, how can I be one, either?

7 Quick Takes (77)

1. The folks and I went to Ontario to see my brother graduate. If you are a reader in Ontario and you are wondering why I didn't visit, it's because my schedule was very full. We visited family and friends of the family. We ran some errands. We poked around Stratford, the city where I went to high school.

2. For my birthday, my brother gave me a painting, among other things. You can see it here. It is entitled Calliphoridae Megacephala (I assume). I think you'd have to be in our family or a close friend to fully understand why this is a real present.

3. We also learned about Justin Bieber. You see, The Biebs hails from Stratford, Ontario, my maternal homeland. We even went to the same high school, albiet not at the same time. It was a little odd to see that Stratford has to a small extent been made over with a Bieber geography in my absense: Rheo Thompson Candies (a well-known chocolatier in the Stratford tourist industry) now has a Justin Bieber box, Bieber collector's cards and other paraphenalia are available in most retail locations, and places like his favourite restaurant (Madeliene's) which were previously understood in terms of family and friend's connections to it are now labeled as part of the Bieber landscape. Stratford was already a tourist town due to its theatre and arts scene--and its shops and restaurants--but now it has been remade again. I think I prefered Shakespeare-themed tourism to teen idol-themed tourism.

My brother and I discussed the young man in question and determined that he is not at fault for the silliness that surrounds him (though asking the mayor of Stratford to do something about the fans mobbing him was a bit out of touch with reality). The real issue lies with the obsessed fans--hyperventilating because a mediocre singer is in the same city as you? really?--and with the media outlets that encourage this behaviour, typifying it as a valid developmental stage in young women as opposed to teaching girls to make good choices in who they bestow their affections on and how they do it.

4. On Monday I bid Fort McMurray farewell and flew to Vancouver. That makes three provinces in a handful of days and three flights in just over a week. I've maxed my annual allowable environmental damage right there, I think. The weather, scent, and vegetation that greeted me was wonderful.

5. Wednesday evening some friends and I went to see The Merchant of Venice at Bard on the Beach. Other friends would have gone were it not for Game 7 (see next entry). It was an interesting production. Off the top, I'll say that the costumes, acting, and music were as good as one could want. Shylock was especially wonderful. But as with any production of Merchant, there are some particular problems that are hard to overcome. Portia is racist. In order to mitigate this, I think, they really played the suitors from Carthage and Aragon as ridiculous figures, but with the culturally and racially sensitive dialogue, this verged on being racist in and of itself. Further, Shylock's forced conversion is horrifying, but not as horrifying as the audience's laughter at it. One of the more interesting choices, I think, is to make the homosocial relationship between Antonio and Bossanio an unreciprocated romantic relationship: Antonio clearly loved Bossanio as something other than a son, and his melancholy was "explained" by Bossanio leaving him. However, I like a tinge of sorrow in fictions, so this lingering plot, coupled with other moments of sadness and discomfort in the midst of the comedy (including a really uncomfortable Jessica), gave the play a depth and self-consciousness that I think was necessary. As one of my friends said, you can't really play it as a straight comedy any more.

6. There were riots in Vancouver that night. If you've been following Canadian news or coverage of the Stanley Cup, you may know what I'm talking about. Post-game rioters turned and torched sixteen police vehicles and looted numerous businesses in the Vancouver district. Also in attendance were riot police.

While waiting outside during the intermission, I suddenly noticed and called attention to a plume of smoke rising from the downtown district across the water. I hadn't paid mind to it at first because I was so used to smoke in Fort McMurray. A quick check on assorted Internet-connected gadgetry and my friends had the story. Since we knew people who had been at the game, we were a bit worried. Fortunately, all such friends were safe.

I've been distressed by the coverage of this event. The city officials have been blaming anarchists, which is ridiculous. While the blatant disregard for law shown by the rioters has a surface resemblance to anarchy, it is no more than surface. On Facebook I saw people writing that they were down there and there was no riot, only riot police. This is also ridiculous, considering ample first-person civilian reports of rioting. Beyond which, I don't think the riot police set their own cars on fire. Others are trying to deflect criticism from hockey itself, but of course there are problems with that, too: riots have occured in Vancouver before following big hockey games, but not following much else. What's most concerning, though, is the increase in sexual predation and harassment following hockey games. There are two articles that I found especially helpful. This one explains what happened and what has been said about it; this one looks closer at hockey itself and what gender has to do with it.

7. On Thursday I bought a new camera. I was quite pleased with it in the store, if leery of the touch screen, but now I'm not so sure. I'm not comfortable with its supermacro. I'll play with it a bit, continue trying this supermacro, and if it's not as good as my previous camera's, I'll go exchange it. I have two weeks to exchange, so long as I don't damage it. I'm sure I could live with this camera, but I'd rather have one I'm comfortable with considering that I expect it to last me a few years. It does have some nice features, mind you, including underwater photography and scrolling panoramics.

That is all! Please visit Conversion Diary, host of this blog carnival.