Modern Society Archives - Page 12 of 21

A Black Hole

“If there were any doubts left about the graphic novel as a serious medium, Black Hole should dispel them.” Independent

“Visually, it’s one of the most stunning graphic novels yet published….Black Hole may be the most Freudian graphic novel you will ever read.” TIME

“The Best Graphic Novel of the Year…One of the Most Stunning Graphic Novels Yet Published.” TIME (again)

“Black Hole is Burns’ masterwork.” The New York Times Book Review

“Surreal and Unnerving…A Remarkable Work” Chicago Sun-Times

I could go on listing the accolades. This book won the Eisner Award, the Harvey Award, and the Ignatz Award—all awards for Best Graphic Novel. Indeed, Black Hole regularly shows up on lists of Best Graphic Novels (aka comic books, more about that anon). It even showed up in the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

I finally read it.

It is…Terrible. Awful. Puerile. Pathetic. Boring. Silly. Pretentious. Nonsense.

I didn’t like it very much.

Black Hole shows that we can nicely divide the reading world. On the one side, there are people who read comic books (sorry, Graphic Novels) who are very embarrassed that their friends look down on them for reading Comic Books and so are desperately looking for something they can point to and exclaim, “See it is as Great as Shakespeare…or at least Dickens…or as good as whatever recent book is getting hailed by the literati!” Alas, there are not many comic books that fit that bill. (Not many is not the same thing as none.) So, if there is something that feels more literary than the normal fare, it instantly gets overhyped. Renaming “comic books” as “graphic novels” happens for exactly this reason. “It’s not a comic book! It is a graphic novel! Novels are intellectually respectable! Graphic Novels are just a type of novel!” (Insert foot stamping.)

On the other side there are people who actually read books without pictures and can tell the difference between Jane Austen and Stephanie Meyers. Black Hole is the Twilight of comic books. An incredibly bad book that the people who read this sort of thing desperately want to pretend is an amazing work of literature.

Don’t get me wrong. The problem with Black Hole is not that it is a comic book. Much to the chagrin of many of the readers of this here blog, I actually like comic books. Art and words can indeed go together nicely. You can tell some interesting stories that way. You can also tell some fun, lightweight tales that way. Superhero comic books, even the schlocky kind, are an amusing manner of whiling away a few minutes.

So why is Black Hole so incredibly bad? It is a pure adolescent sex romp. Ooh look! Teenagers having sex in the woods! Oh, but if they have sex with an infected person they get…The Bug. (Deep metaphorical insight: The Bug is like AIDS! Insert sophisticated knowing nod.) What is The Bug? It is a sexually transmitted disease that causes you to…well, it depends. One person grows a tail. Another gets a second mouth at the bottom of his neck. Another starts shedding her skin like a snake. Some start getting bumps on their bodies. One gets finger webbing. One guy just looks ugly.

Yep, there is your dramatic tension. If you sleep with the girl with the tail, then you will start getting crazy growths on your abdomen. If you sleep with the guy who has two mouths, you’ll end up shedding your skin. Big Moral Dilemma here—what should you do? One might think the lesson is: “Don’t sleep with the girl with tail or the guy with two mouths.” But, no. Teenagers apparently can’t control themselves.

So, all these weird things happen to teenagers and what is anybody doing about it? Well, nothing. Because you see, the teenagers just run off to the woods and hide so no adults know about this problem. Even when one of the diseased guys starts murdering other people, nobody seems to, you know, alert an adult. Even when this happens at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yeah…

How did this book become popular? Well, imagine you are an awkward teenage boy who reads comic books. Suddenly along comes this comic book and it is (insert hushed tones) an alternative comic. “Alternative” is the comic book code word for “There are drawings of naked people in it.” Hehehe. Edgy. Now let’s call it a “graphic novel” and then it is OK if I read this book with drawings of naked people!

Don’t believe me that this is the draw? Here is the start of one of those overwhelming positive reviews (at SyFy):

OK, I’ll admit it: Sometimes, I like my comics sexy. I mean, if you can look at beautiful illustrated naked forms drawn by the most talented of illustrators, why wouldn’t you enrich your eyes? Which is probably why I originally picked up Charles Burns’ semi-sordid-yet-seemingly-seminal Eisner- and Harvey Award-winning graphic novel Black Hole in the first place. The pictures say a thousand sexy words. Albeit strangely, and at times, horrifically.
Or maybe I was drawn to Black Hole … because I never quite grew out of that adolescent stage, as the prior paragraph likely attests….I’m sorry, I grew up watching unmonitored HBO in the ‘80s and that has forever skewed my worldview toward the inappropriate. Not to say Black Hole is inappropriate, per se, but it’s most certainly edgy, and filled with bored teens acting with reckless abandon in the face of a pitiless world.

Now imagine these comic book obsessed teenage boys ten years later reading a comic book that is complete wish fulfillment for their teenage self. Edgy teenage sex with gorgeous girls. And lots of marijuana. Imagine that the nerdy high school boys have grown up and are in their late 20s or early 30s; now they write reviews of comic books and give out awards for Best Graphic Novel. After all, who else would review a comic book? I mean, what self-respecting person would condescend to review these things?

And suddenly it all makes sense. This trashy faux-philosophical story gets rave reviews and wins awards despite the fact that there is not a moment in it that rises above the inane. The best that can be said for the thing is that the story is not told in a linear fashion, so you have to spend at least 10 seconds every now and then realizing that Event A happened after Event B. Then again, in the ten years (yes that is right 10 years!) Burns spent writing this book, he didn’t spend any time on the people (all the characters look and act almost identically) or the writing (yawn), so he had some time to think, “Hey I’ll put these two events in non-chronological order! Sophisticated of me, isn’t it?”

This is the sort of comic book that gives comic books a bad name. People assume that lame superhero comic books are the problem, but they are not. Everyone knows that an unremarkable issue of The Flash will involve nothing more than a guy in a red suit running really fast and punching bad guys. No harm, no foul. The real problem with comic books is that tripe like Black Hole gets praised as a major literary achievement.

Yes, I Really Did Read Twilight

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
thou shalt not eat of it:
for in the day that thou eatest thereof
thou shalt surely die.

As everyone knows, that quotation is the epigraph in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. You might have also heard that the author of Genesis used it.

Yes, I recently read Twilight. The whole thing. Every single word.

I know you are eagerly awaiting my evaluation (what could it be?), but first a word of explanation. Why did I read this book?

I had a reading group last semester. Five students, all amazing. It was supposed to be a reading group funded with money from the Koch Foundation; I had been running reading groups with money from that Foundation for years, and so put together this set of students for the year, but then, alas, the Koch Foundation changed their funding priorities to large projects only and thus funding for small reading groups like mine went by the wayside. Sigh.

But, we decided to go ahead anyway, because, well, reading and talking about books is fun. One of the students, the clever snarky one (well…come to think of it, they were all clever and snarky…) decided the group needed a name and came up with the Dead Koch Society. The name stuck. They have had a group chat all year to which I was not invited, presumably because they spend much of their time mocking me.

There we were merrily reading and arguing all year when Coronavirus came along. But, fear not! The virus could not kill the Dead Koch Society. It moved to Slack. We finished the semester. Then the students decided it would be fun to keep going since nobody has a job anyway. So, they came up with a book. Yep. Twilight. I suspect they picked this book because they knew I would never agree to read it and then they could mock me for refusing to read a book. I called their bluff. I read it. Every word.

The quick evaluation: other than the prose, the plot and the characters, it was OK. The paper was really good quality. Very sturdy paper.

The book is really awful. It’s not just that it makes no sense, is written horribly, and has massive plot holes. It is a very trashy pre-teen romance novel. There is a scene in a glade with our Heroine Bella and the Super Hot Vampire Edward that may well be the most cringe-inducing pseudo-sex scene in literature. The ending of the novel is extraordinarily disturbing: an Evil Vampire traps Bella in her childhood ballet studio (yeah…), ties her to a chair, turns on a video recorder, and starts explaining how he is going to make a snuff film. Kids read this? Fortunately the Hot Vampire shows up in time to save the day.

I thought about quoting a few random passages to demonstrate the prose, but I will spare you. You may thank me, Dear Reader.

What I learned in the discussion we all had about the book:

1. To say this book and its sequels are popular among pre-teen/early-teen girls is an understatement. Why is it so popular? After talking with my former students, I think I get it. According to them, the book was really only popular with girls. That makes sense.

Bella (the heroine and narrator) is smart and likes to read. Bella is also, alas, incredibly awkward, both physically (she falls a lot) and socially. She is slightly older than the readers of the book, so this is exactly how a 12 year old girl who reads would see herself.

As the novel begins, Bella has just moved to a new town to live with her father. She shows up at school, knowing nobody. And suddenly, within a day, this awkward, smart, bookish girl has three different boys madly in love with her because she is so amazing. You can begin to see why this book is so popular with awkward, smart, bookish girls—and “bookish” is the key; they are the ones who read, you know, books.

But wait, there is more. There is also an ultra-hot, sexy, gorgeous, cool, sophisticated, aloof boy at the school. Oh, Edward. Be still my beating heart. Bella is instantly attracted to Edward. (Did I mention he is really good looking? Meyers point this out on just about every other page.) But, Edward sometimes acts like he can’t stand Bella and sometimes acts like he likes Bella. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me…

Rest assured. Edward does love Bella with an intensity rivaled only by Bella’s intense love for Edward. There has never been a love in all of the history of literature as intense as the love between Edward and Bella. But, there is a problem! Edward is a Vampire! (Ooh! Shocking!) So Edward is torn between his love for Bella and his natural desire to consume all the blood in Bella’s circulatory system. This puts a damper on the relationship…but fear not, Edward is Strong! Strong enough to resist his desire to drink all her blood! So he can kiss her. Hooray! Sex is out, however. If they tried that, Edward might lose control and eat her.

Why is this book popular? It’s really obvious when you think about it. The awkward bookish girl has every boy in the school wanting to date her, but she is able to attract the mysterious hot boy with whom she falls madly in love and finds herself willing to give up her very soul to be with him forever. The hero saves her at the end. This is the perfect fantasy for pre-teen girls who like to read.

It even has an edge. Because Edward is a vampire, there is a very dangerous edge to this relationship. Edward is a modern day James Dean.

2. In the discussion with my former students, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out if Vampires had Human Rights and needed to follow Human Moral Codes. (Did I mention these former students are really nerdy?) It turned out to be a difficult question to answer because (surprise) Meyer is a bit vague and inconsistent on the details of vampires. They evolve differently than humans, but they cannot reproduce naturally, so you get more vampires by biting humans to poison them but then refraining from drinking all their blood. So, vampires are separately evolved creatures who cannot reproduce, leaving one to wonder about how they evolved, because they sure seem to be just undead humans.

Ah, but while a male vampire and a female vampire cannot have children, we learn in later books (so the students told me—I have not read the rest of these books) male vampires can impregnate female humans, but (alas) when the female human gives birth, she will die. Fear not, when this experiment is tried and Bella is about to die, Edward decides it is OK after all to turn her into a vampire. She lives! (Sorry, I have no idea which in volume of this series this exciting tale can be found.)

As a result, it is really not clear whether vampires have human rights or not. Do they have to follow human moral codes? Is it morally wrong for a vampire to eat a human? Here again, Meyer’s work is lacking a consistent narrative. We applaud Edward for not eating Bella (if he had, there would not have been any sequels!). But it is in the nature of vampires to feast on human blood. They can survive on animal blood, but that is like humans surviving on tofu or something. (My suggestion that vampires could enjoy the Impossible Burger was met with disdain—apparently it is not exactly the same thing as beef.)

But, since Edward is in love with Bella, is it wrong to turn her into a vampire? Bella wants to be a vampire—that way she can also always be young and hot like Edward! But Edward says it is wrong to do so. Why? Not clear. One would think vampires would not object to reproduction. It turns out only Evil vampires do not object to reproduction, well except when good vampires decide to take dying humans and make vampires, but promise to teach them how to be good vampires. What is a good vampire? Good vampires don’t eat people…except obviously the people they turn into good vampires. Or something like that.

If a group of seven vampires moves into town and five of them start attending the local high school because, well, it’s fun to go to high school or something, are humans supposed to welcome them into town?

It is really not clear how to sort out these ethical issues in Meyer’s book. After discussing these sorts of things at length, I am afraid I have to conclude that the Philosophy of Vampires is not well-explained in Twilight. Have to look elsewhere to answer such questions.

3. And finally the epigraph. I’ll admit, when I picked up the book I had low expectations. Then I saw the epigraph and wondered if maybe there would be something here after all. Nope.

Why this epigraph? Best guess: Bella is faced with a choice of whether to love a vampire. Edward is the forbidden fruit. Bella can taste the forbidden fruit and if she does, she will then know both good (being human) and evil (being a vampire). But, when she does that, she will die. Well, she will sort of die, she will become an immortal vampire. And vampires aren’t all evil, right? Isn’t the whole point? But it is definitely wrong to fall in love with a vampire, right? Well, except the book argues that it isn’t wrong to fall in love with a Really Hot Vampire if he is Mostly Good and promises not to suck out all of your blood.

So, what is the epigraph doing at the outset of the book? It is almost like Meyer wanted to add some literacy cache to a really trashy book so she tossed in that epigraph assuming nobody would actually spend any time thinking about it.

I really want to say something nice about Twilight. But, honestly, this book is worse than Jane Eyre.

Remembering to the Ending of the World

From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Admiral William McRaven was not a-bed. Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations tells the story of his rise from child daredevil though Navy SEAL training through his career ending as a four-star Admiral in charge of the US Special Operations Force. He was there, to put it mildly, at a busy time for Special Operations. The units he oversaw captured Saddam Hussein, killed Osama bin Laden, and captured or killed over 2000 other threats per year. That is 5-6 successful operations per day, year after year.

McRaven is a natural story teller; the whole book reads like hearing a guy telling stories over a couple of beers at a canteen. It is only when you pause to think about the story he just told that you are literally stunned. The tales of SEAL training, rumored to the hardest physical training in the military, are the sort of thing that leaves us mortals slack-jawed. Don’t believe me? McRaven’s training class started with 155 people. This is not a random cross-section of humanity. Imagine the toughest people in the world. Out of the 155 people who started the program, 122 quit. Yeah. That is not easy.

Want another tale? McRaven jumped out of an airplane on some training mission one day. While falling, he got tangled up in his parachute. He survived hitting the ground, but his pelvis was completely separated from his back. Five inches away. Obviously, he needed surgery. And after that, he went right on serving as a Navy SEAL. Yeah.

It is literally impossible not to hold your manhood cheap when reading this book.

As terrible as it sounds, every SEAL longs for a worthy fight, a battle of convictions, and an honorable war. War challenges your manhood. It reaffirms your courage. It sets you apart from the timid souls and the bench sitters. It builds unbreakable bonds among your fellow warriors. It gives your life meaning. Over time, I would get more than my fair share of war. Men would be lost. Innocents would be killed. Families would be forever changed. But somehow, inexplicably, war would never lose its allure. To the warrior, peace has no memories, no milestones, no adventures, no heroic deaths, no gut-wrenching sorrow, no jubilation, no remorse, no repentance, and no salvation. Peace was meant for some people, but probably not for me.

Then there are the tales, one after another, of extraordinary men doing extraordinary things all around the world. In my world, you get called “brave” for saying something unpopular at a meeting of the faculty. In their world, you get called “brave” for leaping out of a helicopter that just crashed and immediately rushing into a building containing armed men waiting to shoot you and then proceeding to systematically eliminate all the threats in the building as you go floor to floor and then you go back to get into another helicopter to take you out of the war zone deep in enemy territory.

After he retired from the Navy, McRaven became the chancellor of the University of Texas. I would have loved to see him talking with an angry faculty member.

I look back on the hundreds of men and women I visited in the hospitals. Every single one of them—every single one of them—asked me the same basic question: When can I return to my unit? When can I be back with my fellow soldiers? When can I get back in the fight? No matter how battered their bodies, all they could think about were their friends, their colleagues, their comrades, still in harm’s way. Never once—never once—did I hear a soldier complain about their lot in life. Soldiers with missing legs, blinded soldiers, paralyzed soldiers, soldiers who would never lead a normal life again, and yet not one of them felt sorry for themselves.

How do they do it? One step at a time

One evolution at a time. One evolution at a time. These words would stick with me for the rest of my career. They summed up a philosophy for dealing with difficult times. Most BUD/S [Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL] trainees dropped out because their event horizon was too far in the distance. They struggled not with the problem of the moment, but with what they perceived would be an endless series of problems, which they believed they couldn’t overcome. When you tackled just one problem, one event, or, in the vernacular of the BUD/S training, one evolution at a time, then the difficult became manageable. Like many things in life, success in BUD/S didn’t always go to the strongest, the fastest, or the smartest. It went to the man who faltered, who failed, who stumbled, but who persevered, who got up and kept moving. Always moving forward, one evolution at a time.

Why do they do it? As someone says to McRaven (echoing a line often misattributed to Orwell):

“It’s what I like best about this job,” Copeland said. “Every day you get to do some good. Someone is alive today because the guys did their job. Someone will have a lot more Easters because rough men stood ready to do violence on their behalf.”

And us?

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

So, today, whenever you are reading this, pause a moment to remember these heroes who guard you while you sleep. I have no words better than those used by Kipling to explain why this should be so.

“Tommy”

I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.”
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but ‘adn’t none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-’alls,
But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! they’ll shove me in the stalls!
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, wait outside”;
But it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide,
The troopship’s on the tide, my boys, the troopship’s on the tide,
O it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.

We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints;
While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, fall be’ind”,
But it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind,
There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind,
O it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind.

You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all:
We’ll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow’s Uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace.
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!

Is It OK to Laugh?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is unquestionably a Masterpiece.

One measure of how great it is: Neil Gaiman wrote an issue of Sandman that took the play, morphed it into something that worked seamlessly into the world of Dream, and then that issue of a comic book won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story of the year.

(After this happened, the organization that gives out the award immediately changed the rules of the award to prohibit comic books from ever winning again. It is apparently embarrassing that a comic book can win a Best Short Story of the Year Award.)

Gaiman had the advantage here of being able to start with one of Shakespeare’s finest plays. (He did the same thing with The Tempest later on in Sandman, by the way. Quite clever. But that is a digression.) I suspect it would be hard to find anyone who would doubt the greatness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But, is it funny? Be careful before you answer.

Consider the lion. As you will recall, within the play a bunch of rustic workmen decide to put on a play for the wedding celebration of the Duke of Athens. In the play, one of the characters, Snug, will play a lion. Snug is a joiner, a job which involves joining (hence the name!) pieces of wood together to make furniture. He isn’t terribly bright, but he can roar. Bottum (a weaver) thinks he would be better at roaring:

Snug: Have you the lion’s part written? Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.
Quince: You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.
Bottum: Let me play the lion too. I will roar that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me. I will roar that I will make the Duke say “Let him roar again. Let him roar again!”
Quince: An you should do it too terribly, you would fright the Duchess and the ladies that they would shriek, and that were enough to hang us all.
All: That would hang us, every mother’s son.

They obviously need to ensure a mild roaring. Later on, the workmen are still a bit concerned about frightening the ladies.

Snout: Will not the ladies be afeard of the lion?
Starveling: I fear it, I promise you.
Bottum: Masters, you ought to consider with yourself, to bring in (God shield us!) a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing. For there is not a more fearful wildfowl than your lion living, and we ought to look to ’t.
Snout: Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion.
Bottum: Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck, and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect: “Ladies,” or “Fair ladies, I would wish you,” or “I would request you,” or “I would entreat you not to fear, not to tremble! My life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing. I am a man as other men are.” And there indeed let him name his name and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner.
Quince: Well, it shall be so.

And then when they finally put on the play, Snug does indeed make sure nobody is frightened.

You ladies, you whose gentle hearts do fear
The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,
May now perchance both quake and tremble here,
When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.
Then know that I, as Snug the joiner, am
A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam;
For if I should as lion come in strife
Into this place, ’twere pity on my life

After which the nobility provide commentary mocking the whole enterprise.

Now, think about this particular thread of the play. Did you find it amusing? Shakespeare clearly wanted you to find it amusing. In the past, people laughed heartily at the joke. But did you find it amusing?

It is not hard to start listing the sins of that passage if you use the criteria beloved by the modern Campus Scolds. First, it is misogynistic and perpetuates gender stereotypes. Then it reinforces classism and the distinctions between the upper and lower classes. Third, it reinforces the idea that the lower classes serve only to amuse the upper classes. Fourth it demonstrates the inequality of wealth. Fifth, it roundly mocks the less educated. Need I go on?

So, is it funny?

While discussing this play with a couple of students, we got to talking about exactly this question. All three of us thought the whole lion thread was funny. Very funny. But, where is that line between being funny and being offensive?

Consider the following situation. Mount Holyoke has a couple of annual events where students give brief presentations on “What I did for my summer internship” and “What I did for my senior thesis.” The college spends a lot of energy in promoting these events. You can spend all day listening to undergraduates give 10 minutes spiels on their work. Nice idea I suppose, but truth be told, the day is pure torture. Don’t get me wrong. I love Mount Holyoke students. But, very few of them actually give riveting 10 minute talks on their senior thesis or their summer job.

Now, consider an event where the presentations at these events are mocked. Imagine a skit called “Senior Symposium” which was a full ten minutes of a really bad presentation in which every stereotypical feature of a bad presentation is featured. Could that be funny?

Then imagine that the presentation is not just a generic bad presentation, but actually specifically the kinds of things that students actually do at Senior Symposium? It cuts a bit closer to home. Is it still funny?

Then, imagine mocking a particular presentation. One of the students with whom I was talking wrote a senior thesis on the how the American Communist Party’s views on women changed over the course if its existence. Imagine mocking a presentation on that particular thesis at length. Is it still funny?

Somewhere along that spectrum, you probably drew a line. But, where? And does everyone draw the line at the same place? Of course not.

A sticky problem. Is it Ok to laugh at something if you know someone somewhere might take offense? One answer is “No.” That answer kills comedy. Try coming up with a joke that has no chance of ever offending anyone. Not just people you know, but anyone anywhere. Not just people you think are “reasonable” who “can take a joke” but even “unreasonable” people. Not just people you like, but even people you don’t like. Not just people today, but people in the future too. Good luck.

The problem is that it is literally impossible to draw the line here. So, either we have zero humor in the world or…what? If we don’t rule out the whole idea of humor, then what do we do? Shakespeare, ever the clever one, has an answer at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The mischievous Puck walks out, looks at the audience and says:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;

There is an intriguing option. If you are offended, just pretend it was all a dream. Pardon others. It is not a perfectly satisfying answer, obviously. But, it does point us in the right direction. Have a little grace with others. The alternative is the death of laughter.

P.S. The thesis mentioned above about Communists and women is actually really good. It deservedly won all three major college awards for which it was eligible. It is also quite honestly without a doubt the best work ever written on the relationship between women and the American Communist Party. (That is a low bar, to be sure.) The conclusion I drew from the thesis is that Communists are really pathetic, have no deep principles, and just make up their views on an issue in order to constantly sound hip and avant-garde. The student didn’t particularly like the conclusion I drew, however, so maybe there is another possible conclusion which can be drawn from the thesis. If anyone wants to read the thesis, let me know. Of course, I expect precisely zero people to ask me for a copy. This is a thesis, after all, about Communist women in the mid-20^th century, a topic which interests precisely nobody. Don’t pretend you think it is interesting—remember—you won’t even ask me for a copy! I will get a mock-angry e-mail from this student now. I will laugh.

Feeling Vulnerable

“We live in a vulnerable society.”

That is a recurring refrain in Henning Mankell’s Firewall. Mankell is a Swedish writer of mystery novels, most of which feature Detective Kurt Wallander. You know Wallander is cool because in the BBC version he is played by Kenneth Branagh.

The 10 or so (depending on how you count them) Wallander novels are really good books in the Police Procedural type of mystery story. (These are not the whodunit novels perfected by Agatha Christie. Instead, you watch the police going through methodical steps trying to figure out what is going on and who is behind the troubles.) Firewall, I am sorry to say, is the weakest of the Wallander novels I have read. The reason why tells a tale.

The novel was originally published in 1998, which is fairly recent when compared to the history of the universe, but eons ago in computer age. Computers were common by the late 1990s, but the internet was just barely out of infancy. As a result, the world was neatly divided between people who knew how to use a computer and those who were helpless in front of a computer.

Firewall gets most of its tension from the fact that poor Kurt Wallander has absolutely no idea how computers work. None. He is afraid to even turn one on. It isn’t really clear that Mankell knows how computers work either, but he gets to mask his ignorance by having Wallander constantly tell people to skip all the technical details because he has no idea how computers work.

The lack of explanation about what is actually going on in the book when it comes to the computer stuff is a minor annoyance. Mankell writes well and Wallander is an interesting guy, so the book still works despite the goofy computer stuff. Well, it works until the last chapter when all the main mysteries are cleared up, but then the detectives riffle through a whole bunch of unexplained things from their investigations. I can’t remember a mystery novel with so many “clues” which are not only totally unexplained but actually inexplicable at the end of the book.

So much for the book. But, the line at the outset of this rumination, “We live in a vulnerable society,” is interesting. Why do the characters keep saying that? They are concerned about the fact that the world is becoming one giant interconnected computer web. A teenager in Sweden can hack into the Pentagon. A computer expert in the middle of nowhere can access every single large and important entity in the world. All you need is a computer and an internet connection and you can bring the whole world crumbling down.

Two decades later, we hear the same thing all the time. We are constantly under the threat of the entire internet, cell phones, satellites, electrical systems, missile defense systems, and financial systems, all of that going down at the same time leaving us in the Stone Age rubbing sticks together to make fire. (Have you ever tried to do that by the way? It is harder than it looks. Better start practicing.)

People feel vulnerable to cyberattacks. It worries them. A lot. So they say things like “We live in a vulnerable society.”

But do we? If the statement is mean simply to mean we do not live in a world with zero risk and thus are vulnerable to something, then obviously the answer is yes. But, that isn’t what the statement means. People are saying that we are more vulnerable now than we ever have been before. People are saying that because everything is connected to everything else, if you pull out just one small piece of wood, the whole thing collapses.

Are we now more vulnerable that we ever were before? Are we more threatened with disaster than at any time before?

Ages ago, imagine a human meeting a bear. Who wins? Yeah, humans have always been really vulnerable to wild animals…until we built better weapons. Then we became less vulnerable to them.

Famine? Drought? Locusts? Once upon a time, such things destroyed everything. Think of the Irish Potato Famine or the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. People were really vulnerable.

What about Blizzards and Hurricanes and Tornadoes and Floods? Again, once upon a time, such things were deadly to everyone in their path. People were really vulnerable.

Disease? The Black Death killed somewhere between 25% and 60% of the population of Europe. The Spanish Flu killed between 25 million and 100 million people (1.5% to 5% of the world’s population). Yeah, people used to be really vulnerable to plagues.

What is interesting about the modern world is how little vulnerability we have. Yes, I know that saying that right now in the midst of the “Greatest crisis of our lifetimes” seems like fighting words, but really it is not meant to be polemical at all. We actually are safer now, less vulnerable now to natural disasters and devastating catastrophes than ever before. As was noted in the recently reviewed Extreme Economies, a city can get absolutely leveled by a natural disaster in Indonesia, and a few years later a prosperous new city sits in exactly the same place. It is extraordinary when you think about it.

So, why do the characters in Firewall and people today constantly feel they are more vulnerable than in the past? I suspect it has to do with two things.

First, people understand Famines and Locusts; people do not understand Computers. So, if a giant swarm of locusts descends on your field and destroys your food supply, at least you can see the locusts munching away on what you planned to eat in winter. But a computer taking down the distribution network for food is mysterious, you don’t see it, and it can come from anywhere. That feels scarier even if it is not.

Second, because we are safer, every loss of safety, even a small one, feels very threatening. If every day you are looking up hoping there will not be too much or too little rain, then you know you are vulnerable. You never escape the feeling of vulnerability. But, now we live in an age where food is always plentiful at the grocery store, life spans are really long and medical care is jaw-droppingly amazing, and we are constantly in virtual contact with everyone. So any loss of that security, even a small loss of that security, ignites instant panic.

It’s a matter of perspective. Part of the problem with even talking about this is that the statement “We are less vulnerable today than ever before” is met with the retort (often angry) “We are still vulnerable!” Of course we are still vulnerable. Less vulnerable does not mean invulnerable.

So, if you want to feel a bit better about life today, just look around at everything you have and be really glad you are not living in the 14^th century or even the early 20^th century.

Can Social Conservatives and Libertarians Still Be Friends?

On May 4th, American Compass was launched with “A Note of Introduction” declaring, “Our mission is to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.” What followed was a remarkably anodyne discussion of the desire to be a flagship, “creating and nurturing connections between people, facilitating communication among them, and shaping a common identity understandable to the outside world.”

There is very little in the introductory note that would signal that American Compass has an agenda. But, a couple of months back, American Compass announced itself over at National Review in an essay by Oren Cass with the curious title “The Return of Conservative Economics.” I’ll admit my first thought in seeing the title was to wonder if supply and demand curves are different in the world of conservative economics. But, of course that is not what the title meant. Instead, the project is “helping American conservatism recover from its chronic case of market fundamentalism.”

The enemy, it seems, is not “liberal economics” or “socialist economics,” but rather libertarians. Now I am not a libertarian, but I must admit that I have heretofore thought of the libertarians I know as broadly reasonable people with policy preferences slightly different from mine. Reading American Compass’s views of the libertarians was thus, to put it mildly, a bit jarring. Fusionism, the melding of social conservatives, libertarians, and Cold Warriors that, as George Nash has so well documented, created the modern American Conservative movement, is now passé, especially among younger conservatives.

Read the rest at Public Discourse