Some Thoughts on Reading “Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist,” Part 1

“Normal Dan” Dan Liechty

Sociologist Peter L. Berger recently published a memoir, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist (2011) which I have been enjoying these last few days as if talking with an old friend. To be sure, I only know Berger through his books and other writings. I have never met the man personally. Yet in many ways (and maybe you have to be a bibliophile to understand this) I do feel like he is an old friend, one with whom I have had a troubled, on-again off-again relationship!

If my recollection is correct, I first encountered PLB as a senior in high school, which would have been the 1971-1972 school year. That is when I first read the book for which he is probably best know, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), co-authored with Thomas Luckmann. At the time, I had no strong background in sociology or really any field of scholarship, and so that was really hard reading for me. It angered me and confused me, and numerous times I set it down and said “That’s enough of that!” But I kept coming back to it, and when I finally did finish it, I immediately sat down and read the whole thing again, cover to cover. Over the years, I have returned to that book many times, but one thing I remember clearly from that first reading is how the whole religiously and socially conservative Mennonite world in which I had been raised suddenly started to make sense to me in ways that it never really had before. I went to the school library (my Mennonite high school was on a college campus, so we had unusually good library access) and there I found Berger’s book, The Sacred Canopy (1967), and I devoured that one as well. By the time I had finished college, I think I read all of Berger’s books published up to that date.

The thing that struck me most about Berger’s perspective was his way of looking at “solid” social institutions as “precarious,” that is, wholly dependent on the willingness of each generation to uphold, obey and conform to the social norms and values of these institutions. The mental image I got (I am one of those who tends to think in mental models and pictures) was that of boys playing hockey on “firm” lake ice that in fact was not nearly as thick as they thought it was. In other words, society went on its merry way, largely unaware that it was always skating over relatively “thin ice” that separated it from chaos and anarchy.

That image I had gained from Berger was an integral part of my intellectual outlook as I went off to seminary school in 1976. As I combined it with other sources and also the zeitgeist of those years, I had come to think that at least dipping a toe into anarchy once in a while was probably a good thing. Embracing a bit of “creative chaos” was how I thought of it. It was in my first semester of seminary that I was introduced to Ernest Becker’s book, The Denial of Death (1973) and I quickly came to understand that this “lake of chaos/anarchy” was fundamentally an image of individual and social anxiety, more specifically the anxiety of human mortality. Although Ernest Becker soon became my main intellectual passion, I can see in retrospect that I may well have understood Becker very differently, or perhaps not at all, had I not come to his writings with an already firm acquaintance with Berger’s work. When I graduated seminary in Spring of 1978 and went off to study philosophy in Hungary (an Eastern-Bloc communist country at the time) it was Becker’s Denial of Death (1973) and Escape from Evil (1975) that I packed away in my suitcase, but also Berger’s books Social Construction (1966), The Homeless Mind (1974) and Pyramids of Sacrifice (1975). At the time, political Détente was strongly in the air, Jimmy Carter was still a very popular President, and the steady path toward social democracy in America, it appeared to me, was objected to only by kooky folks at the far-right, irrelevant fringes of our society.

Obviously, I was soon myself to have a stark lesson in just how thin that ice can be, as well as to experience many troubling doubts in my “relationship” with Peter L. Berger. But that is for the next installment.

A Call for Readings

“Svaardvaard” Bill Bornschein

One of the best things about working with Becker in the classroom is that it provides such a great resource for continually seeing him anew through the eyes of students. They bring a fresh world of experience to the eternal dilemma Becker raises. My own teaching practice has gradually shifted away from explaining Becker  toward  allowing the students to respond to their initial exposure to Becker. Actually engaging a discrete,  distinct component of Becker’s thought in a direct and powerful way can open the door for student to follow up, not just intellectually, but existentially. This post is concerned with using Becker in the classroom and will conclude with a request that you suggest readings from the Becker canon that can be used effectively. Socratic method is the vehicle I am experimenting with and a brief word about the technique is in order. I am new to the formal technique myself and realize many colleagues may be more experienced, and so I welcome input on that front  as well.

Socratic method has as its goal the exercise of the mind in the pursuit of understanding. The purpose is not to come up with a final correct answer, but rather to engage a multi-layered idea, one open to interpretation and resistant to pat answers. How perfect. The entire sweep of Becker’s illuminating work is to ask the next question and avoid the easy out, and therefore it is genuinely compatible with the Socratic goal. For those of you familiar with Robert Pirsig’s Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, this is approaching Becker in pursuit of The Good, rather than The True. Dialogue, rather than debate, is the vehicle for in-class conversation and this allows the idea in question to be held like a jewel to the light, the different facets on display. The endorphin rush of a great conversation or moment of insight can “set the hook” for further work with Becker in the classroom; “Hey class, remember that conversation we had a while back?”

The key to a good Socratic dialogue is the selection of the specific reading, piece of art or music to be worked with. Length can be from a couple lines to a couple paragraphs. The reading should be open to interpretation with layers of meaning to be explored. The topic should be broad and of existential significance, that is, something the students care about. Something that really challenges or moves people is best.  As examples, I’ve used the Edwin Arlington Robinson poem “Richard Cory” and entry  #49 from the James Carse book Finite And Infinite Games. One great way to judge a given reading for its utility is to see if you can ask a really good question of the text. Does the text raise more questions than it answers?  A question that you yourself struggle with would be best of all.

So would you consider reviewing your mental catalogue of favorite Becker passages and sending them to me in the comments section? I’m most familiar with Denial of Death and Escape From Evil, but anything at all is fine— and that includes Kierkegaard, Rank, and Leichty. I am very hopeful that we can generate a decent handful of readings that we can use to introduce Becker to a broader audience. Thanks in advance for your insight and assistance.

You Deserve a Rap(e) Today: Terror, Rampage and the Logic of Attention

“k1f” Kirby Farrell

This title might strike you as a contrived and sensational play on a McDonald’s ad that’s more familiar than the Lord’s Prayer. If so, you’ve armed yourself—another sensational term—to deal with the sinister logic pressuring us these days. In a culture saturated with electronic buzz, how do you cut through the clutter? How do you get people’s attention?

Notice the italics. Notice how obvious the answer is: You shock people.

We know that, yet we tend to screen out the underlying logic. One way to get at it is via a NY Timesreport on the rage for edgy ads that have triggered “loud public outcries” and forced Ford, Reebok, Pepsi, and other bigshots in marketing to issue apologies. Among the cognitive hot-buttons are ads flirting with rape,suicide, black rapists, and lynching (the murder of Emmet Till in 1955). A Mountain Dew video ad (photo) featured a battered white waitress trying to identify her assailant from a lineup that included African-American men and a goat. Reebok’s rap ad winked at date rape drugs. Hyundai UK showed someone failing at suicide because the car’s exhaust was so clean it couldn’t kill him. Ho-ho-ho.

The ads violate taboos to shock you. Their themes of traumatic injury try to coerce vigilance and a little adrenalin out of you. The ads’ use of jokey mischief to excuse in-your-face hostility is what we all know as passive aggression.

The post-traumatic themes are predictable. Rape is hot when unemployment makes men feel impotent, women are thinking about empowerment, and NRA gun hucksters are urging women to pack heat. The failed Hyundai suicide, the battered waitress, and the police lineup are all reminders of the grinding stress that comes with wild west capitalism’s assaults on the working poor. It’s logical that many of the ads invoke bad boy rappers playing at poverty and rebellion. As the target audience, you’re on the hook, between anxiety and a smirk. Be glad you’re not the losers shown in the ads.  But then again, face it. In the back of the mind, pal, you too could face social death.

Gawd, even more italics.

Okay, here’s where it starts to get interesting. Bob Garfield, an advertising critic, says the edgy ad fad has been “aggravated by the Internet culture on which millennials dote, which he described as ‘no holds barred,’ where ‘a sense of permissiveness reigns.’ It ought to come as no surprise, he added, that ‘incredible lapses of judgment’ are taking place regularly at major brands and their marketing agencies.”

Now we’re talking about argument, logic, motivation, inhibition. And “lapses in judgment.” Let’s zero in by asking a taboo question about taboos. Is the edgy ad fad just one expression of a pervasive mentality in everyday life?  What happens if we think of rampage killing and terrorism not as insane rage but as futile efforts to “win” headline attention by force in a world continually distracted by electronic buzz, gagging on cognitive garbage?

Usually mass killers seethe until their grievances become life-or-death, do-or-die problems, with “total” violence “the only way out.” Whether the problem is fanaticism or an organic mental disorder, it demands relief: life or death. If you succeed, you’ll feel reborn here or in heaven. Failure will bring social death or terminal despair, an inner Hell. You succeed by commanding world attention, which proves that you and your cause matter. You’re real, alive: your life has meaning. Even the corpses confirm your power over life and death. The logic emphasizes personal force. You made the herd pay attention to you. You changed minds, not through frustrating persuasion but in an instant, as if by magic. Fame—or infamy—is attention: the miracle drug to boost self-esteem. You become a celebrity like Paris Hilton and Sylvio Berlusconi driving a hatchback in a Ford ad with bound and gagged women in the back.

Most rampages and terrorist attacks have a copycat quality. The killers have to be aware of the competition for attention. Today’s sensational horror is tomorrow’s cliché. The Columbine killers dreamed of Hollywood glory, but after a blaze of infamy they’re dead as brand names in the trash. Most rampages since Columbine have been also-rans. It took the slaughter of school kids in Newtown to re-sensitize—to grab—the public. It follows that one of the best counter-terrorism tactics would be to minimize public attention to such outrages rather than to inflate them with howls of media horror and total Government mobilization. But of course the public is also trying to intensify attention in order to magnify the significance of the outrage and make a memorable, life-defining moment out of it. Everybody’s fighting against insignificance. In that sense we’re all in this together.

So terrorism draws on everyday culture. But it works both ways. You can see this process at work when shock jock media hosts grab attention by attacking “enemies,” trying to build to a climactic rant. National Rifle Association speakers such as Wayne LaPierre escalate their attacks to a do-or-die pitch. They aren’t trying to discover or convey information. They’re trying to “win” an argument or “score” in a contest. The goal of the “debate,” the money shot, is to humiliate and rout an opponent in order to compel attention like a terrorist or a victorious gladiator dispatching a fallen rival to thrill the crowd.

The behavior may be “just entertainment,” but it’s also morale-management, relieving boredom, anxiety, and depression by pumping up the nervous system’s fight response. In this way the practice is a form of self-medication, with the drawback that like caffeine or cocaine, it takes ever-larger doses of stimulant to work—as in addiction.  And like addiction, it needs lies to make it respectable. Everyday attention grabbing has to use equivocation, euphemisms, and other techniques in order to manage an escalating violent grab so it can feel like real taboo violence without triggering a crackdown by sponsors and police.

You can see this manipulation in the language of celebrity rebels such as Glenn Beck. At the NRA convention in Houston his keynote address paid lip service to “tolerance” of gun control proponents while pumping up his listeners to “fight.” As in jihad, he whipped up the NRA faithful to grab victory or death, quoting Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death!” and teasing the faithful with crusader fanaticism: “We fight against those who deny the Creator.” Like a mullah, he repeated cosmic abstractions such as “freedom” and “God” that are emotionally hot but fuzzily vacuous. Meanwhile an “Iraq war veteran and Internet talk showhost is trying to gather thousands of protesters to march into [Washington DC] on Independence Day with loaded rifles on their backs.” This is rude animal threat display, but it’s also a desperate trick to get bigshot attention. Like Glenn Beck’s equivocation, it’s a fantasy on the edge of heroic violence, like toy guns that look so real that a frightened cop might shoot the kid brandishing it in his face.

The radical right’s capture of much mainstream media revives the death-anxiety and paranoid rage of the Cold War, with “godless Communism” threatening “Better Dead than Red” and justifying the tragic militarization of the American economy and mindset. After all, postwar America never really demobilized. It’s been constantly at war: real wars with overworked morgues and guilt, but also fantasy wars against drugs, “big government,” welfare cheats, one bugle call after another. Propaganda uses advertising culture to magnify official lies (Saddam’s “WMD’s”) with “smart weapons,” “surgical strikes,” and drones supposedly doing the dirty work. When each little war fails or runs out of gas, the paramilitary mentality has to find new enemies: illegal immigrants, say, or Mexican drug gang beheadings. The corporate military or the gun manufacturers inflame and then assuage your fears, and you pay for it in diminished health care, education, retirement, public infrastructure—i.e., quality of life.

The danger is that play is enchanting. We get enchanted, carried away. We enjoy it.  When impassioned preachers foster enchantment, it’s a conversion experience. Getting pumped up, terrorists and rampage killers routinely work toward  self-intoxication via “inflammatory” language. Media rant is popular exactly because “disenchanted” people would rather be high again.

So we find ourselves now hearing sly demagogues invoking grievances of the Confederacy, and the openly political NRA shooting from the lip at minorities and other scapegoats. In turn, the fragmented, corporate US government attacks health care and food stamps while splurging on “homeland security.” The nation’s secret intelligence forces now employ almost as many people as the US Army to spy on citizens it insists can’t be trusted, which could include all of us.

The militaristic mentality is evident in the addiction to righteous thrills. The NRA not only scorned the parents of the slaughtered Newtown kids, it entrenched its power by thwarting background checks and legitimizing military-style weapons and magazine for civilians. Even as the gun lobby subdues Washington, Glenn Beck is mustering faux Minutemen to fight the “tyrannical” government. And every victory whets the appetite for more conflict, more “enemies,” more thrilling do-or-die self-esteem. Big money manipulates the “populist” gun issue to keep government weak, prosecuting the battle against our “big government” to prevent taxation of the rich and regulation of a financial sector that’s “too big to fail” and beggars the working poor with impunity. When they reach extremes, ideas begin to blur into mirage.

“The center cannot hold,” growled Yeats. That fear is not new. What needs attention now is not just the center, but the logic that grounds everyday culture in paranoid and addictive thrills, and keeps threat display slouching toward real rage.

We’re social animals, problem-solvers with plenty of juvenile playfulness and curiosity. It’s how we’re built. Information glut maybe distracting and fatally intoxicating for some of us, but we swim in that cognitive soup. We’re not likely to give up that stimulation. Meanwhile we’re evolving strategies of coping with overload that may or may not head off murderous predatory grabs for attention. Tune out the buzz and stay tuned.

Run for Your Life

“k1f” Kirby Farrell

Understanding the fascination of the marathon terror

Why do terrorism and rampage killing exert such hypnotic fascination?

Attacks on schoolchildren and marathon fans arouse “horror.” But the actual carnage (5 deaths, many injuries) is eclipsed by Massachusetts’ 334 routine auto deaths (California and ten-gallon Texas rack up an annual 3,000+ each). The news doesn’t even try to report them all, and they certainly don’t hold viewers spellbound for hours of monotonous, inconclusive TV reporting.

Some answers are in plain sight. Terrorism is spectacle. The attacks are designed to catch maximum attention. Many rampage murders are copycat crimes. The killers are in theory “berserk” and out of control, yet often evidence shows they’re aware of, and competing with, previous sensations.[1] This was true of the Columbine killers, and even Adam Lanza, the Newtown killer, compiled data on past rampage slaughter as you might collect baseball statistics. Terrorists deliberately design displays of spectacular death. How excited bin Laden must have been to know that on US TV “his” airliners were still regularly exploding into the twin towers weeks and months after the event. For the terrorist, that film clip powered an ad campaign that changed mental landscapes like the famous Macdonald’s jingles that toddlers recite by heart.

In this respect the Tsarnaev brothers were drawn into the creative mania that brought Barnum and Bailey to your town, or planned the Roman amphitheater’s gala gladiatorial combats, criminal executions, battle reenactments, and “hunts” that slaughtered hundreds of wild animals. We regard those Roman crowds as bloodthirsty primitives, yet terrorist spectacle appeals to the same motives. There’s pity and terror galore, spiced by the insinuation that the danger in front of your eyes is unique, unprecedented, possibly out of control. It could happen to me. The violence challenges police, insurance, doctors, criminal justice: all the technologies that we use to protect ourselves from the reality that we too can—in fact definitely will someday—die. In our imaginative participation, the story onscreen is about “trying out” death or playing dead and being rescued back to life. In the safety of your living room the events onscreen are vicarious and only half-real. But the emotions are doing real work in reframing what’s possible in life and reassuring you that you’re safe.

As the drama onscreen unfolds, our daily grind gives way to vicarious shock at the possibility that we too can die in a freakish moment. But the coverage is staged to allow us to participate vicariously in  heroic rescue from death by hunting down the criminal. The hope is that “one of the biggest manhunts in American history” gives our lives memorable significance. State Rep. John Scibak claimed that the attack “was a different act of terrorism than we’ve seen before,” and “literally and legitimately” shut down Boston. Note that “legitimately”: the word tells us that emergency reactions can be routine false alarms.

But the spellbound spectators aren’t “shut down” at all. “We” form a vicarious posse invited to contribute information, but also caught up in the hunt for an enemy who is now our quarry. Pictures of armed paramilitary police fill every screen. “Suspects” come into focus; overnight they’re pursued into a firefight, killing one enemy and one cop and wounding another officer. There’s vindictive satisfaction in this hunt. [2] We want to believe that death and terror make sense: that an evil someone has violated the sense of “what is right” on which we’ve grounded our personalities since infancy. The killers’ outraged uncle tells the media that his nephew “deserved to die.” Vengeance promises to restore “what is right” even as death has injured it. It’s how we’re built. We demand, and get, “reasons” to reinforce our account of reality.

Finally “we” have the surviving criminal holed up in a boat, wounded, and then in custody. The news reports that he was a sociable college kid, perhaps under the influence of a more hostile older brother. He was also apparently flunking out of school, so the fear of failure and social death may have been a cause of, and/or result of, the lure of terrorist ambitions. All told, a pitiful as well as cruel character.

Media carry our curiosity about criminal motives to Chechnya and, gingerly, to the “war on terror.” Op-eds suggest that the torment of Chechen refugees may have resonated with the Tsarnaev brothers. Whatever the motives, we have on our hands now a pathetic kid whose life is over, even if the we don’t kill him. He enters the poisonous cloud of self-justification and loathing that surrounds infamy.

So the logic of maiming and death ripples outward into the absurd mysteries of denial. In one direction the absurdity of the Marathon as hunt connects to the Euro-American quest for access to the world’s oil riches implicated in so much 20^th century bloodshed and still raising havoc in the middle east and the Caucasus. About the time the young Tsarnaev was born in Kazakhstan, I was there doing some work for the Peace Corps and overhearing US officials discussing Kazakh sour crude oil. It was just the beginning.

A recent investigative commission reminds us that the Bush-Cheney “war on terror”not only terrorized Iraq on false pretenses, but also took us into the criminal practice of torture. We know that for many in those anguished regions of the world, Americans have a reputation for viciousness, even if we don’t yet know how that reputation may have affected the Tsarnaev brothers.[3]

But there’s another dimension to this absurdity. Pathetic young men ambitious for heroic self-esteem place ridiculous pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line of a race built around the human need to test the ability of our bodies to outrun death. Paleontologists speculate that early humans found evolutionary advantage in walking upright and the ability to run long distances as effective hunters. Warrior-hunters have long identified with jaguars and tigers. In this context, the marathon is a survival contest, and wittingly or not, the terrorists were joining in, and exploiting, this atavistic hunt.

Step back from the hypnotic anxiety of exploding pressure-cookers, and you begin to sense the pathetic inadequacy of our public chatter to account for the moral daze and tragic suffering of criminals and their blind victims joined in a moment of contemptible folly that cries out for clarity and compassion.

1. For an account of this mentality, have a look at my Berserk Style in American Culture (2011).

2. In Escape from Evil, Ernest Becker argues that human violence springs from our uniquely human death-anxiety. The Ernest Becker Foundation’s website assembles indispensable resources for thinking about violence.  <<www.ernestbecker.org/

2.
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/357-europe/17036-chechen-terrorists-and-the-neocons

Beastly “Beauty”

“k1f” Kirby Farrell

You wouldn’t think that aristocracy would be popular with freedom-loving American individualists. But these extremes are often in bed with each other. Fantasy exaggerates them both too. Advertising and popular entertainment emphasize wealth and heroic individuality in a dream of consumer utopia. What’s peculiar is that these fantasies are also hostile to democracy, which is supposedly the at the heart of “the American dream.”

Take Disney’s grossly popular 1991 update of “Beauty and the Beast,” which has achieved mythic familiarity. The movie looks like the fairy tale model of tenderhearted romance until you realize that Belle is a gal on the make, and the Beast’s palace is a version of Downton Abbey.

The original French “Beauty and the Beast” (1756) had a class theme. Love nobly, and the genteel daughter of a rich merchant may redeem a “beastly” nobleman and make a princely marriage. Disney makes love competitive by inventing a village lout (“Gaston”) whose abusive courtship of Beauty (“Belle”) climaxes when he leads a mob of villagers to storm the Beast’s palace. Though he advertises his hunting prowess, Gaston is actually a sneaky coward, and after nearly killing the Beast, he falls out of the film. The recovering Beast turns into the Prince in a shower of fireworks or sperm, and the film ends with Belle and Prince waltzing before their admiring servants.

The Prince suffered the curse of an aged crone he once rejected, and the curse has turned his servants into appliances such as a candlestick, clock, and teapot. The Disney treatment foregrounds the servants. They’re loyal, eager to please, and as at Downton, they’re sympathetic, even parental toward Belle and Beast. But they’re not the only working stiffs in the tale.

The film shows Belle as a romantic dreamer. She’s sweetly contemptuous of her workaday village neighbors and their grinding drudgery. The film identifies them with the sheep who at one point mindlessly munch on one of Belle’s romance novels. While the palace servants are individualized, the villagers are independent yet faceless nobodies. And here’s where Disney politics fires up the plot. When Belle spurns Gaston’s advances, he turns into a rabble-rousing demagogue who turns the villagers into a vicious mob that invades the palace. The melee caricatures the French Revolution, pitting the Prince’s “good” servants against workaday louts. The good workers rout the bad workers with the usual cleverness of Disney underdogs, including some winking anal jokes (attackers burned and stabbed in the backside). The lowlife villagers and Gaston vanish into oblivion, and in their place aristocracy and its good servants become triumphantly human.

The sublimated class warfare makes it possible to forget that Belle has been striving for superior status and a “dream life” all along. When at last she becomes a princess, the premier woman in the land, it seems her natural reward. In the end she will preside over society as the supreme woman in the kingdom. As Americans say, she’s made it.

Like the Mitt Romney fundraiser that pepped up hostility toward the 47% of working Americans who are supposedly “takers,” the film slyly vilifies the villagers. They’re a mindless mob enraged at the ruling Beast / Prince. But just as Romney’s public lingo blurred the contempt for the 47%, so the film’s happy ending makes the beaten villagers vanish. Instead we find the curse lifted. No longer robotic appliances, the palace servants have become the bosses’ doting, starry-eyed family, with a footstool-become-doggy and a teacup-become-cute-tyke.

For the noble couple, no parent-child struggle for autonomy. No stressful pregnancy and childbirth. No demanding boss. No predatory credit cards. No need to give orders. Instead of the mob’s class warfare and a burlesque of the French and American revolutions, the palace servants’ song has become reality:

“Life is so unnerving / For a servant who’s not serving.”

But wait. How does the palace pay its bills? Ah. Belle’s bumbling dad has invented a machine that chops firewood and eliminates grinding work. Dad has created the promise of industrialism without its cruel complications. No hoarded capital, no deafening assembly line, no pollutants, no strikes, no scabs, no 70 hour work week. But on his way to show the world his machine, Dad is jumped by wolves malicious as the village mob will be. They’re like furious workers losing their jobs to wood-chopping automation. Luckily, Dad finds shelter in the palace, held there until his daughter ransoms him.

So palatial wealth rescues “the new economy” from a mob of wolves sneaking out of the wilderness like unemployed rioters or illegal immigrants. Belle’s village suitor Gaston caricatures these wolvish low-lifes. Paternalistic, bullying, he’d keep a wife in servitude. He is piggishly pink and clumsy, but also a killer. Still, his ridiculous vanity helps the film to disguise Belle’s narcissism. Instead of having to recognize the heroine’s self-aggrandizing capture of the kingdom’s top spot, we can sympathize with her plucky flight from victimization.

Belle acquires not only the supreme husband, but also the supreme house and a literal army of happy servants. She acts out the media fascination with junior British royals. But it’s also an ad man’s dream of corporate America. By overcoming her distaste for the ugly, hostile Beast, the little woman wins a Prince and a palace full of wish-fulfilling appliances. Dad’s firewood-chopping machine turns into a utopia of creature comforts, with all human costs hidden and an attractive feminist gloss added to co-opt an audience certain to include many women and daughters.

The dark side of this gratification is not the blustering, bovine Beast, but Belle’s dream. She gets to the top by rejecting community for a life of decorative superiority. With the working world banished, she will be waited on and applauded by endlessly obliging inferiors. No need for bargaining or contracts. No need for democracy. If there’s conflict, the Praetorian servants will do the fighting. Like Downton Abbey and the US Gilded Age, the palace recreates the pretensions and authority of a mythic past. It shelters innocent, infantile narcissism. The noble couple play at snowball fights and feeding birds. The servants put on a Hollywoodish Busby Berkeley musical. The vast palace library promises that her romance-novel addiction will acquire the dignity of a university degree.

Because the film is so hostile to working people, Belle’s narcissism stands out. You might wonder: Why no fantasies of achievement and the rewards of challenging labor? One answer is that Belle is enticed by the American dream of palace utopia. A deeper answer lies in the fantasy that the supreme couple’s love originates in rescue from death. The Beast saves Belle from the wolves, then she nurses him. But symbolic death haunts them both, from the opening curse of an impoverished hag, to the wolves and the crushing violence of Gaston. The treatment of the villagers is especially disturbing because it insinuates that work kills the soul—unless you’re serving the princely boss.

These themes have been playing out in the US for decades. Unemployment and suppressed wages threaten today’s “villagers” with social death. Upward mobility has stalled. Meanwhile the rich are richer than they’ve ever been, with less obligation to share responsibility for the nation’s well-being. The financial system is now 40% of the economy, sustaining a billionaire aristocracy through sleight-of-hand bubbles and subsidies. Wall Street banks and media monopolies are “too big to fail” or break up. The “banksters” are “too big to jail.” Through its corporate and media lobbying, the palace has captured “big government,” working to kill labor unions, government medical and retirement insurance, food stamps, and other “entitlements.” The result is today’s stagnant economy.

The flip side of this greed is paranoia about Muslims, blacks, immigrants, and the “47%” of Americans who want to improve the village.

 When “Beauty and the Beast” appeared in 1992, riots were convulsing Los Angeles.  At the same time Disney was using fancy bookkeeping to give its chairman-prince just over $197 million in stock options and save the Magic Kingdom roughly $90 million in taxes that might otherwise have gone to rebuild South Los Angeles.

The more moviegoers identify with “Beauty and the Beast’s” magic circle of worshipful servants and waltzing lovers, the more limited their vision of society will be. The film invites viewers, and especially women viewers, to associate the beast not with a spoiled elite but with an enraged and frustrated mob in the poorest streets of America. If they learn to love the Prince and enjoy the righteous rout of Gaston’s loutish male chauvinism, audiences will see a glorious cartoon horizon which fades to a close before anyone can ask what has happened to Belle’s neighbors and how the infantile, cozily ruthless world of the palace can ever relate to those neighbors in the future. And children thrilling to this romance will be innocently preparing for service in the corporate fortress, unaware that they have left the old neighborhood behind.

Guns and “Mental Illness”

“Normal Dan” Dan Liechty

I think it may have started with Wayne LaPierre’s infamous press conference a week after Sandy Hook. In any case, we now here it as a common refrain of the no-holds-barred gun crowd – that the big problem is inadequate enforcement in keeping high-powered weapons out of the hands of the “mentally ill,” since obviously it is the “mentally ill” who perpetrate the mass killings of the type seen in Sandy Hook, Aurora, and dozens of other places around the country. In short, we ought all unite together to make sure no one with “mental illness” has easy access to these high powered weapons, but let them remain freely available for others.

In my view, even apart from the further stigmatization of mental illness this would entail, the policy itself is mind-bogglingly naive.

In the first place, “mental illness” is not a clearly definable condition. Other than a few very rare organic brain disorders, “mental illness” must be diagnosed on the basis of behavior. Therefore, in effect, supporters of this idea are advocating policies that would seek to proscribe allowing high powered weapons getting into the hands of people who have NOT YET behaved in such a way that we would diagnose them as killers.

Oh, but isn’t it true that with just about every person who has perpetrated mass killing people report that the suspect exhibited all sorts of strange and anti-social behavior long before the fact? Of course. But notice that we can only know that all of those behaviors we later recognize as strange and antisocial were actually “leading up to something” AFTER they have led up to something, that is, in retrospect. Thousands upon thousands of people display the same or similar behaviors and remain perfectly harmless.

Are advocates of such policies really saying they want us all to unite prophylactically to keep high powered weapons out of the hands of those many thousands who have been reported to exhibit strange and antisocial behaviors? Given that this would doubtlessly include many hundreds, if not thousands, of NRA members themselves, I rather doubt it.

But, taking them at their word, the complications have only just begun. Let us imagine we have the resources to seriously investigate each case of reportedly strange and antisocial behavior. Whom would we then trust to assess the investigations and decide if that person should be proscribed from gun ownership, and to have weapons in their possession confiscated? Would we trust that kind of power and wisdom to government officials? To mental health experts? To teachers? To police? To judges and lawyers?

Advocates of this approach should ask themselves whom they would trust enough for this assignment, for holding that degree of power over others, potentially including themselves?

I can only conclude that Wayne LaPierre and his followers have not even taken the first step in truly thinking through the implications of what they are advocating. Having it their way, we would very quickly find ourselves defending completely irrational interpretations of “2d Amendment Rights” by totally trampling on 1st Amendment, 4th Amendment and 5th Amendment Rights, creating veritable police state conditions, at best, as our “weapon against weapons.”

A much more reasonable, sensible and workable solution is to cool off a bit and then, with full acknowledgment of the 2d Amendment and the history of its interpretation in our laws and in our courts, begin the process of examining what weapons it make sense for civilians to have in private hands and what weapons it makes absolutely no sense for civilians to have in private hands (though these might still be “owned” by private citizens and accessible in controlled circumstances such as on regulated gun club target ranges.) In the meantime, as I have said in a previous posting, we could impose significant ammunition surcharges and heavy taxation on the weapons manufacturers designated to meaningfully compensate for the undeniable damage to society that all-but-unregulated weapons impose on all the rest of us on a daily basis, similar to tobacco and alcohol taxes designated for cancer care and treatment of victims of drunk drivers.

Competition, Paranoia, and Cannibalism

“k1f” Kirby Farrell

Is that paranoia you hear around you? [1] The airwaves sizzle with suspicion. Crime’s down, gun sales up [2]. Drones are tracking you. Your food will kill you. The president is a closet Muslim, climate change a scientific conspiracy. What gives?

Here’s one piece of the puzzle: American culture prizes competition. And competition and paranoia are incestuously connected.

We like to think of competition as a handy tool for boosting morale and profits. It whips up “team spirit” and “fighting spirit.” You get a bonus for “beating the numbers” and your colleagues.

The catch is that “good” competition is actually a form of cooperation. On the playing field or in the office, the players—even opponents—cooperate for the good of the game. Whether it’s called good sportsmanship or civility, this ethos tries to prevent opponents from becoming paranoid enemies.

In the heat of the action, cooperation easily slides into paranoia. The search for strategic advantage is intoxicating. It summons up extraordinary emergency resources rooted in survival physiology. Under stress, competitors can feel “high” the way soldiers experience battle trance, with diminished fear and sensitivity to pain. In such a state boundaries blur. As you go all-out against opponents, you can be competing with yourself, trying to pump up that winning extra burst of fighting spirit. Next thing you know, competition becomes “do-or-die” and paranoia replaces cooperation.

You can think of culture (“good sportsmanship”) as a technology for managing the connection between competition and paranoia. Rules and referees work to regulate the feedback loops that tap into rage. But violent competition can become a cultural style, with fans deliberately looking for a chance to run amok. On the job, the “loser” passed over or fired “goes postal” and shoots up the office. Thrilled by the sensational headlines, the copycat killer tries to break the record. In the corporate military, your paycheck literally depends on keeping up an arms “race” and the assumption that rival nations are always wannabe “enemies.” In politics nobody blinks at the idea of “competitive battleground states” and “attack” ads.

In a culture that prizes do-or-die ambition and snarls at regulations, it seems natural for violence to be sublimated in competition. You can forget that at bottom, winning and losing are associated with survival and death

In such an atmosphere you may be so used to competition that you may not even realize that you’re caught up in it. You’re just teasing or being idealistic or “going for it.” To “win” a boyfriend, a high school kid posts blue-ribbon nude snapshots of herself that go viral. Lovers compare themselves and their partners to rivals and ideals, and worry about “performance.” Invisible competition can break up relationships, with plenty of opportunity for the love of your life to become a silent adversary or, with the help of a divorce lawyer, your enemy.

The paranoid side of competition helps to explain some bizarre anomalies. California, for example, has over a third of young black males in some phase of the justice system, many imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses. You can point to racism, but racism is in part a paranoid reaction to competition for status, sex, jobs, and not least, self-esteem. The justice system is taking rival males—and their frustrated energy—out of circulation.

Or consider the fight over government debt. If the debt is at crisis levels, as radical conservatives insist, higher taxes could pay it down. But they balk at taxes, demanding spending cuts instead, especially in social safety net programs. In an era of “free market” and Ayn Rand ideology, they believe they’re “producers” competing with the 47% of the nation they label “takers”—parasites and welfare cheats. Supposedly they vote for Obama because he gives them “stuff” such as medical coverage and food stamps.

The underlying theme is Social Darwinism. It assumes that evolution advances through fatal competition, ignoring the reality of interdependence and symbiosis. Only the fittest survive. Winners live, losers die. If you support “takers,” you encourage fatal weakness in the body politic. If you think this way, a little deprivation motivates people, whereas rewards risk spoiling them. You recall the old bumper sticker:

MORE MONEY MAKES THE RICH WORK HARDER

LESS MONEY MAKES THE POOR WORK HARDER

If you have the power to set salaries, you don’t want to endanger the organization’s survival by overpaying weak players. If you have power, you earned your status through sweat and sacrifice. You feel good about it. Why shouldn’t obviously less worthy competitors undergo the same healthy lean and mean trials? Toughen them up. Make them compete.

The 47% theme is paranoid insofar as it imagines half the nation as a threat, exaggerating whatever cheating there is and ignoring actual needs. It views the competition between rich and poor not as class warfare, but as virtuous reform of “entitlements.” The stance is also paranoid inasmuch as conservatives never restrain the bloated corporate military budget, which pays for actual warfare against weak rivals. For good measure, the debt fighters ignore the recent epidemic of corporate crime, which has given us such colorful coinages as “banksters” and “too big to jail.”

It’s tricky, because once you’re a winner, you can bend the rules of good sportsmanship in your favor. Trying to keep up, your opponents will follow suit, raising the contest to a new level that’s likely to beget yet another level, so that competition becomes a funhouse of crazy mirrors.

But that’s not all.

The twist of the knife is this: intense competition kills competition. “Free market” doctrine is absurd, for example, because business drives toward monopoly. It’s the corporation and the boss striving to be “last man standing.” They concentrate wealth at the top, but have kept wages stagnant for decades. Today they’re fighting a rise in the minimum wage that still wouldn’t be enough to live on. For them, it’s a contest. Keeping employees at survival wages in a time of high unemployment is a good gaming strategy. It keeps them locked in, alone, powerless to compete. But whoa. Labor unions can muster enough strength to bargain. Hence the paranoia about unions and the relentless “free market” determination to kill them off.

What can you expect? Even God likes monopoly. He banished the competitive angel Satan to Hell. When Adam and Eve tried to be “as gods,” knowing good and evil, the cosmic Dad punished everybody who will ever exist with death, work, and the small human pelvis that makes childbirth painful for women. As Abel found out, even his brother Cain preferred monopoly.

Still, like individualism and survival of the fittest, monopoly has some drawbacks. The last man standing is the cannibal, who has no rivals left, but also no groceries, and no fun on Saturday night. In today’s version of this, the top 1% have swallowed so much of everybody’s income that consumers can no longer buy enough to keep the economy from stalling.

Trading, by contrast, requires imaginative sympathy. To make a deal you have to be able to imagine what others want and value. Trading has always created rules and rituals, because both parties need to feel satisfied or somebody gets hurt.

Competition is the snake in that Eden. It promises ultimate security and yet it’s inherently unstable. It’s like keeping a gun—the power to kill—in your dresser drawer. It promises mastery and survival, but it’s much more likely to deliver gruesome insurance statistics.

Remember the old saying: You can take the cannibal out of the village, but you can’t take the village out of the cannibal.

1. We think of paranoia as a disorder, even when we use it casually. Here’s The World Health Organization‘s ICD-10 shopping list of symptoms. Three of more of these constitute what WHO calls paranoid personality:

1. excessive sensitivity to setbacks and rebuffs;
2. tendency to bear grudges persistently, i.e. refusal to forgive insults and injuries or slights;
3. suspiciousness and a pervasive tendency to distort experience by misconstruing the neutral or friendly actions of others as hostile or contemptuous;
4. a combative and tenacious sense of personal rights out of keeping with the actual situation;
5. recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding sexual fidelity of spouse or sexual partner;
6. tendency to experience excessive self-importance, manifest in a persistent self-referential attitude;
7. preoccupation with unsubstantiated “conspiratorial”  explanations of events both immediate to the patient and in the world at large.

Includes:

• expansive paranoid, fanatic, querulant and sensitive paranoid personality (disorder)

2.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/0109/US-crime-rate-at-l…