Inglourious Basterds

                I just saw this movie today, and I can't remember when I had a better time in a theatre for 2½ hours.  The movie was absolutely wonderful, especially for all of us who know WWII lore, and who have spent hours rewriting it to end sooner, and better, in our dreams.  Those who would have liked to see the Nazi regime succeed, including all those American neo-Nazi losers in prison or in militias, should not pay the price of admission for a lot of reasons.  Here are some.

                First, the American hero-warrior of this movie, Lieutenant Aldo Raines, was played by the very excellent Brad Pitt, and surely named for the intrepid film warrior, Aldo Ray.  Tarantino never misses an opportunity like that.  Also Raines was from Tennessee, was part Indian, occasionally sold moonshine back in the hills, and he and his team were the very scourge of the Nazis from 1941 to 1944.  For all you white losers, scourge means a plague—you know, like your mama's head lice, only worse, like an Old Testament plague.  Ain't nothin' our hero enjoys more than killin' Nazis!  He sounds just like you do, and he wants to kill people just like you!

                Second, the dirty dozen to Brad's Lee Marvin were all Jews, except for one who was an ethnic German who just hated Nazis and had killed more than a dozen officers by the time Brad rescued him from prison and recruited him.  These Jews weren't bookish Jews, or old Hassid's with ear-dreads.  No, these Jews were Bugsy Siegel and Murder Incorporated, and they took scalps!  They said little, but they shot, stabbed, and dynamited their way into our hearts.  Oops, your screed about little hook-nosed thieves, swindlers, and child molesters is all wrong.  Wanna see those types?  Look in the mirror, CONVICT, because that's what you're in jail for!

                Third, the evil Nazi SS Colonel who seemed undefeatable, and was always ahead of the political curve until the very end, got his comeuppance.  He was in charge of rounding up all the Jews in France (and almost rounded up our fleeing heroine in the beginning), had supporters in the highest Nazi circles, and was such a canny bargainer that he ends up making a deal with Aldo's OSS General that was going to earn him U.S. citizenship, a colonel's retirement pay, and a house in Nantucket.  (Should I bother to explain "canny" or where Nantucket is to you sorry-ass jailbirds?  Nah, open a reference book that doesn't talk about converting a gun to full auto for a change.)

                I say that this great and entertaining film was a revenge fantasy of the highest order, replete with villains we have grown up to despise, unlikely heroes in these Jews led by a part-Apache hillbilly moonshiner, and a clever young woman and her black copain who provide the hot-as-hell ending for Adolf and a couple hundred of his closest generals. 

                I laughed, I clapped, and I somehow knew that every Obamacrat in America would see this movie as an example of the difference between standing for Obama and standing for the smarmy Conservatives who are backed by the fringe elements you identify with the enemy in this film.

                This movie ends the Nazi movie genre forever; nothing else, no matter how "true" or well-intentioned will mean anything from this point forward.  Quentin Tarantino has made the one Nazi movie that was never made, but was always on our minds.  Bravo, QT (and I loved that down-tempo version of that Bowie song you used.  What better song for shouting fire in a crowded theatre than one that talks about putting out a fire with gasoline?)  Thank you for this great gift!

Free Speech and the Health Care Debate

                We Americans tend to be confused by concepts—things that are complex and tacit by nature.  Instead, we prefer the black and white.  An example of a concept is Free Speech; another is the Separation of Church and State.  When we combine free speech with complex policies like health care reform, things get difficult for the black and white segments of American society, or maybe they don't precisely because they see in black and white.

                Just as we hear the President and his supporters talk about the morality of providing affordable health care to all Americans, we hear others talk about the immorality of Hitler's Nuremberg Laws.  Since both arguments address morality, some believe that they are equivalent.  That's the conceptual problem in the American national character.  Mr. Obama is no more Hitlerian than the Queen of England, but the LaRouche faction shows up at these local town hall meetings with no compunction about penciling in little Hitler-like mustaches in the President's mug shot.  Free speech!

                Free political speech is a Constitutional right in the United States.  Rep. Barney Frank agreed, even as he asked one participant at a town hall meeting what planet she was from.  She posed the Nuremberg argument as though she had, herself, studied those laws and come to a scholarly personal conclusion that Obama's health care policy—itself no more than a proposal to the Legislative Branch and a call to action for those lawmakers—was somehow equivalent to the Nazi health care "policy" of the 1930's and '40's.  Maybe she is an expert on WWII Nazi history, but I think I'd bet against it... and give odds.

                She was doing what she was told to do, and that was to raise this issue at a public forum.  That she may believe it's true makes no difference to its hollowness as an argument.  Many people in America believe that black people are inferior to whites, but belief does not make it so, and neither do the numbers of people who adhere to such an idea make it so.

                Free speech means that we all have the right to criticize our government, and I rise to uphold that woman's right to proclaim her ignorance in public.  Why would I want to stop her?  If my position is different, and she seems like she's from another planet to me, wouldn't I want her to keep talking?  I'd ask her about everything just so she could lay out all her oddly held opinions for me and whoever chose to listen. 

                Joe the Plumber may very well be an expert on plumbing, so what he says about the slope of a run of pipe might be worth listening to if I want to plumb a waste-water line correctly.  What he says about fiscal policy may be a bit less reliable, yet there are those, including a former presidential candidate, who think that J-the-P's opinion adds value to the public policy debate.  Perhaps the choice of advisors is why former presidential candidates remain former candidates rather than Presidents.

                Two speakers who lay claim to different sides of an issue do not necessarily have equivalent opinions, as in the case where Joe argues the value of PVC piping in a high-rise apartment complex and I, who know next to nothing about the efficacy of PVC piping, simply argue emotionally for bamboo piping because it's "green."  Experts can be wrong, and any two experts may disagree, but they are still experts and their opinions carry more weight than mine or yours.  They have no more right to free speech than you and I, but when they speak they are basing their arguments on having learned, read and synthesized the issues they speak about.

                We also hear a lot of free speech about how England's and Canada's health care systems are not the be-all and end-all of public health care systems.  Brits and Canadians are hauled in front of American TV camera crews complaining about their respective health care systems because they were asked to speak only about what problems they had, not whether they would ever give them up or replace them with America's system.  The response from Americans under the control of lobbyists and political fringe crackpots say, "See!  We don't want what they have.  They hate it!"

                The fact remains that we Americans, who are among the least self-reflective people I have met, never stop to think that people all around the world are griping about their institutions and services just like we are.  Objectively, their national health care systems are better than ours, even if they complain about them.

                Free speech is a gift that accrues to Americans simply because they were privileged to be born here.  Babies who can't speak or understand the world around them still live under the protection of the Constitution.  And if they grow into adulthood and still have nothing intelligent to say, the protections still exist.  Every knucklehead can be a public fool in America, but that doesn't mean they have to be.

Scabs and Health Care Reform

                In America's trade union movement, workers with grievances would go out on strike as a weapon of last resort.  Nobody wanted to be out of work, but when management simply would not listen to or accommodate workers' needs, the union membership sat down and had a vote on whether or not to strike and walk off the shop floor, out of the mine, or out the front doors of their respective office buildings.  Strikes were not impulsive.  They came after long weeks and months of deliberation and negotiation.

                Dennis Lehane, the Boston-based fiction writer, wrote a marvelous book about the events leading up to, during, and following the Boston Police Strike during the 1919-1920 period.  While "The Given Day" is a work of fiction, Lehane transports us to a time in America when there were strong "nativist" influences exacerbated by a terrible influenza epidemic, when Jim Crow was alive and well, and when the ruling elites ignored the needs of workers, including the police, who could barely make ends meet.

                Then, as today, there are people who act in their own best interests and others who do not.  The health care establishment is certainly acting in its own best interest by pressuring Congress to gut any future reform legislation of provisions that provide a benchmark against which they must compete.  For Conservatives, competition is a good word until it's not.  What the Conservatives mean by competition is what others might call unfettered and unregulated free trade.  A successful business isn't run without rules, processes, and practices in place, so where's the model for successful unfettered, unregulated free trade?  Bernie Madoff?

                It's easy to understand business, which is essentially amoral.  A business does not have a mother or father in a nursing home.  A business does not have children going to college.  A business can neither laugh nor cry, cannot feel hungry, and cannot feel compassion.  Only people can feel these things.  But at some level there is a person or cadre making decisions in a business and they can steer the business in certain general directions.  They are, however, never alone or identifiable as the single culpable human entity to blame for pillaging the financial resources of so-called "customers."

                While there are surely responsible health care companies out there, they are not out in front taking the reform movement's side in public and vocal ways.  The ones using lobbyists, gun nuts, and right wing political thugs to crowd local-level congressional meetings and shout down the advocates of reform are the ones we see.  Even if they are the same minority that loved Bush and hate Obama—that certain white 30%—they are noisy and nasty.  (What's up with that creepy Lyndon LaRouche, anyway?)

                They're exactly what people abroad believe all Americans are, but they've never seen one on their own shore in the flesh because those people don't travel to places where they can't take their guns, where they can't get to by car, and where they have to order odd food from a menu written in a weird language, like bangers and mash.  We, on the other hand, see them all the time, and most of us don't find anything to envy in them.

                So, when the Apathetic Union of American Citizens is out on strike, like 60% of us are all the time, the 30% of righties of the remaining 40% of activists gets shipped, by bus, to congressional health care fora claiming to represent the "regular American people."  Crunch the numbers!  30% of 40% is 12%, and that's who's doing the noise making!  They are paid to be there, or are transported because they are "true believers."

                What they really are is scab labor—people who are brought in to replace others who are out on strike.  Pick that scab and what you get is an infection, but when you overcome the infection, you're well.  America always deserves what it gets because we're apathetic about our union. We enable cranks, fools, sycophants, haters, and the anti-progressive born-again ignorant to stand at the front of the line and shout the rest of us down.

Status and the Status Quo

                When I studied sociology in college, I remember learning that there were two general types of status: ascribed and achieved.  Ascribed status is the one conveyed by birth, and achieved status is conveyed by merit (or demerit).  The latter is generally more fluid than the former, and many modern people around the world are more concerned about the latter than the former. 

                Ascribed status does carry weight and meaning in given situations.  Since ascribed status would appear to be the oldest, it stands to reason that it runs deepest, embodied in rites and rituals.  Ascribed status is the status of kings, of religions, and of castes.  It tells us that we are connected to our parents and to our family-community.

                Achieved status is the status earned in the combat of modern life.  You may have been born poor or working class, and have gotten into Harvard on a combination of hard work, sheer desire, and social programs designed to help students like you.  When you graduate from Harvard, you have a high achieved status.  In some communities, just going to college gets you a leg up on the status chart.      Likewise, the daughters and sons of high achievers have a high ascribed status, but if they fail to perform like the parents they drop a notch or two on the achieved scale.  Life is like that in modern times.

                In Old Testament writings, when young Jacob was sold into slavery by his brothers out of jealousy.  Once Pharaoh was made to recognize this slave's abilities, Jacob prospered.  This is a case where the son of a noble line, and one favored by God—definitely high ascribed status—was given his due by Pharaoh based on a demonstrated set of skills—achieved status.  One might describe this as a moral lesson about God's will, or a modern lesson about overcoming adversity.  It works both ways.

                What happens when we live in two worlds like immigrants and minority communities often do?  One might say that one form of status works on the weekends and during community events, and another works during business hours.  Maybe so, but that doesn't approach the complexity.  Both are important. 

                Recently, Sonia Sotomayor was nominated, confirmed, and appointed to the United States Supreme Court.  Her ascribed status is off the chart as an Associate Justice, but to some she is simply an uppity Puerto Rican woman who has overstepped her boundaries.  How many African-Americans have heard the same words about themselves?  How many times have we heard President Obama spoken about as though he were an affirmative action president, somehow not as deserving of respect as people like George W. Bush, a man whose accomplishments define the term "average"?

                As it turns out, perhaps the only thing we can say about ascribed and achieved status is that they are more or less important given the circumstances.  On a professional sports team, who your parents were means almost nothing.  It might get you a pass to Training Camp, but it won't make you part of the team.  Only your talent—your achieved status—will do that, and your failure to demonstrate that talent for a sufficient period of time may cause you to lose the opportunity you were given.

                Likewise, Britain's princes are princes, and all the wrong they could possibly do won't undo their birthright.  Their ascribed status is simply beyond question, and there's no way they can lose it.  That does not imply that they will be respected if they choose to live in ways that the British people resent or are embarrassed by, but rather that they will always be their mother's sons.

                If you can imagine a graph with the X-axis labeled "Ascribed Status" and the Y-Axis labeled "Achieved Status", with values rising positively from the "0,0" coordinates, you could plot where people you associate with fall on the scale as a scattergram of your acquaintances.  Knowing where you think they are on the scale may tell you a few things about where you are.  If you're heavily linked to high ascribed status individuals, you may want to find a more diverse community of friends, and the same applies if you're linked to high achievers.  I encourage you to learn from the graph.

                Be realistic.  While many of my Punjabi Khatri friends are garrulous and high-born members of the larger Hindu community, a Tamil Iyengar has it all over a Punjabi Khatri in terms of ascribed status.  Leave the ethnocentricity off the graph and the scoring will be more accurate.  Just because people are doctors doesn't mean that Surgeons aren't higher status than GPs, and that Ambulance Chasers aren't lower than M&A lawyers in legal circles.  Maybe you should also plot where you would like to be and then decide what you can do to get there.

                One final caveat: don't confuse "being respectful" of someone with "having respect" for him or her.  A person who is respected is someone whose advice and counsel is sought by others, or one who is listened to by others who then act on those words.  One who is older, but otherwise no different than others, is treated respectfully, and some people confuse the two "respects".  You are respectful of a King whether you have respect for him or not.

                Now that you're yawning, I'll tell you why this stuff matters to me.

                We in the West believe in the rational and the objective.  There is room for the non-rational and the subjective in our lives—as in religion, and in personal emotional responses to situations and circumstances, but we are still committed objective rationalists.  When an objective rationalist world view collides with a subjective non-rationalist world view, there are bound to be deep gaps in perception.  This is the case between Jihadists and nationalists, no matter where these two groups interact.

                Our "War on Terrorism", a war that President Obama is now in the process of renaming and reconstructing to reduce the non-rational and subjective components of the Crusader Bush, is being fought by we, the objective rationalists, against they, the subjective non-rationalists.  We objectively believe that we were unjustly attacked on 9/11 because we hadn't attacked anyone, but our attackers subjectively believe that the attack was absolutely just because the West was responsible for dicing their world into indigestible pieces and who is more "West" than America.  We rationally state that attacks on non-military targets are morally wrong, and they non-rationally state that we are a collective in service to evil and that there is no practical distinction between a soldier and a civilian.  We are serving the world by stopping terrorism and imparting democratic institutions, and they are serving the world by bringing Islam and godliness. Quite a gap, I'd say, not that you have to address every gap, but it's probably good to at least understand this one.

                Osama bin Laden comes from a wealthy and well-connected family in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.  His number two in al-Qaeda, Ayman Zawahiri, is an Egyptian medical doctor.  These are both men of high status in their own environments.  Their fight for Islam, against oppressive governments in the Arab world, and against the Americans and their Israeli client state, has increased their ascribed status immeasurably among Jihad-oriented Muslims around the world, particularly the young.  Osama would have been powerful as a merchant, and Ayman as a doctor, but neither would have been charismatic leaders in the Weberian sense of that phrase.

                When we Americans consider ourselves targets of this movement, we sit befuddled, posing questions about why "they" don't like us, and making comments about what we should be doing to get "them" straightened out.  Neither the peaceniks nor the hawks sufficiently understand the issues that confront us.  The truth is that we, as a people, will never quite grasp what they, as a people, want of us.  It doesn't matter a bit whether we are sympathetic to the plight of Israeli Arabs, and of Palestinians in exile or in refugee camps.  Hamas is a political entity, like Fatah.  They can be reasoned with because their objective is not to bring the world to Islam, but to bring about a Palestine with proper borders.  These are not Jihadists, despite their comingling in the rather ignorant press.  So, it's difficult to address these issues by applying one framework or another, and it's even more difficult to separate the various teams of "them."

                The current Iranian government is a perfect case study of the difficulties.  It shares two important attributes of the jihadists: (1) it does not believe in the nation-state as an organizing principle, seeing it as an un-Islamic and Western construction; and, (2) it believes that its mission in the world is to lead the world to Islam.  At the same time and in the same physical space, Iranians know that they have a piece of turf with fixed borders whether they like it or not, and they know that they are unlikely to lead the worldwide Muslim community (ummah) when they represent a heretical minority in the eyes of many of the majority Sunnis.

                This may all be moot anyway when one considers that Iranians historically have seen themselves as separate and distinct from Arabs, cling strongly to Persian and Turkish Sufi poetry rather than to any of the (to them) incomprehensible language arts of the Arabs, and identify with a Persian past that predates Islam by a millennium or more.  To be sure, Iranians are Muslim, but they are also Persian, and that legacy is unlikely to change much after 25 centuries.  Persians won't even name their sons Omar or Othman, two early Caliphs of Islam, because they were part of the "conspiracy" that stole the birthright of Hassan and Hussein, direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad via his daughter and only child, Fatima (who the Iranians will name daughters after).

                There's also the problem that Iran has a lot of people who don't like the clerics as a group, and there are large numbers of powerful clerics who, themselves, do not believe that religion and government mix well, and do believe that clerics should stay out of the business of governance—not advice, just political office.  So, Iran is in the middle, sharing jihadist elements with stateless jihadists like bin Laden, but being populated by Persians, rather than by jihadists who simply find themselves on Persian soil.

                In all these things is status, both ascribed and achieved.  In a community like Islam, which is very flatly organized, leadership is inextricably linked to Islam.  No popular movement will gain any real traction until Islam is embraced and built into the structure.  Muslims understand this—just like Americans understand our powerful symbols of the flag and constitution—so every new leader will tie his (or her, in those rare cases) movement to Islam.

                Muslim scholars have an uphill battle when trying to wrest control of the faithful from people like bin Laden.  His ascribed and achieved status is high, as is Zawahiri's, and trying to identify al-Qaeda as a heresy is a herculean task, particularly in a flat organization.  Without a real clerical hierarchy, it's very difficult for rules to get made for the billion faithful adherents.  It's the status of the leader that communicants relate to as much as the message, and youth everywhere are attracted to hot blood and guns rather than to sanguine intellectual discourse.  Maybe we all are, I don't know.

                I can only say that I would not like to be in Obama's shoes today because the world is a complex and peculiar place to live.  Have the courage to open your eyes and take a long look, and then read a book or two to find out what experts (Americans HATE experts) are saying.  If you don't want to do that, do what you have always done: defer your responsibilities to your elected officials and gripe about the costs rather than the policy!  As you do that, consider that your continued ignorance is the recipe for disaster that is sure to keep the jihadists in bullets and kabobs throughout your lifetime.

Here He Goes Again!

I don't write for my blog nearly as much as I used to. I still enjoy writing, but I seem to have lost the zest for it that sent me there with a reasonably lengthy think-piece every few days.

Those of you who read my blog know that I have a hard-on over matters of religion and conservative politics, and that I have lived in the Middle East a couple of times for a total of about four years, but never in Israel. Some woman who warned me that, "If we let 'them' get away with 'this', soon we would be living in a world where all women would be in purdah," had also lived three years in the Middle East, but nowhere besides Israel. I understand her paranoia as an American Jew. She is loyal to the symbols of her culture, ignorant of the fact that others are as deeply sincere about just the opposite, and almost totally without coherent information about world affairs.

I've almost finished Reza Arslan's latest book on Cosmic Wars. (I forgot the full name of the book; just google his name and when you see the book with Cosmic Wars in the title, you're there.) He describes a statement made by Osama bin Laden—supreme leader, along with Ayman Zawahiri, of Afghanistan-Pakistan border-limited terrorism, which is pretty much a niche market I'd say. Anyway, Osama said that al-Qaeda recruits its martyrs (read suicide bombers) from Muslim youth between 15 and 25 years old. Why ask why… the answer's so obvious!

That's the age group that has no social power, little personal influence, is generally unmarried, is generally early in a career or bored by being a student or working in someone's shop, and is in the process of personal psychological and social formation—an unfinished work! It was those same kids who took flight lessons in Florida and ran their hijacked planes into American hearts and minds. It's the same kids who blew up a bus in London (known as the 7/7 bombing, similar to our 9/11). That's why the old farts—bin Laden and Zawahiri—are alive and living in a well appointed cavern. You don't think a grown man or woman would consciously blow himself up for an abstraction, do you?

Here, the grown men and women kill others, like they're supposed to, not themselves. No abortion doctor is safe, but the shooters of abortion doctors are! Nope, here no self-sacrifice accompanies the sacrifice. When Abraham was told by God—God, mind you, not some dude with a misguided sense of justice (although I wouldn't want to be God's lawyer on this one)—to sacrifice his son, God didn't tell him to grab his kid and jump into a house fire holding on!

God, in a tremendous gesture of punch-line deftness, actually "punked" old Abraham by replacing Jacob with an animal before Abraham could kill him. After breathing a huge sigh of relief and sacrificing that fucking goat, I can imagine the laughter that Abraham and Jacob had! "Oh, that Yah---! He's something else, man. All that time I thought I was going to have to kill you, Jacob!" "Yeah, Pops, me too!" God was harder on his own kid, but that's only right, I guess.

Maybe what we need to do is blanket the internet with Pink Floyd and the Who. Maybe if we saturate the world's youth with lyrics like, "Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!" or "Meet the new boss; same as the old boss," we can develop enough skepticism so that they end up believing in nothing! It worked for me!