Commenter Nicholas Arkison made an excellent observation on my last post:
Some of us would say language mostly devolves. (Just think how much disgraceful feminist jargon we could have avoided if we hadn’t let the word “wight” fall out of fashion.) Then again, some of us would also say that about African elephants. Basically, whenever the word “evolve” is used with reference to contemporary phenomena, I’d say there’s at least an 80% chance that the speaker’s trying to put an unjustifiably good spin on humanity’s latest bit of thoughtless vandalism.
2. For work-related reasons I ended up reviewing many of Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (yes, I’m serious. No, it’s not as interesting as you’d think). In the process I noticed for the first time (or perhaps I had noticed before and suppressed the memory) that the Jabberwock has a waistcoat. And socks.
Also please get it straight that it’s Jabberwock: ‘Jabberwocky’ is the name of the poem
Felt that needed to be pointed out.
3. One cannot become great out of fear, or in order to rub someone’s nose in it. Greatness cannot spring from petty motives.
4. Begun the first steps in actual work, and I’ve discovered something. In the book Clean Code, Robert Martin (Uncle Bob) describes the ‘vicious cycle’ of software development. A company sets upon a certain stoftware platform. Software advances rapidly, so before long it becomes necessary to upgrade it. But the upgrade has to be able to integrate with the earlier system, since that is where the existing information is being kept. Moreover, upgrading takes a lot of time, since we’re dealing with an extremely complicated and delicate machine, and the system has to be completely functional throughout the process otherwise the company loses business.
So by the time the system is updated, the update is already out of date, the already-complicated system has become immensely more complicated, and probably numerous bugs have been introduced that have to be hunted down and corrected.
5. What all this amounts to is that software creates a lot of bloat: you need people on hand to continually maintain and upgrade the system just to keep things functional. It would be as if a law-firm had to keep a staff of scribes on hand to continually re-write all the law-books and hunt up typos. This doesn’t create value (since the system that results is immediately obsolete and in any case has no application outside the company), it only prevents the loss of value that naturally occurs.
This is a flaw in the digital revolution that I don’t think is noticed enough: it creates a natural instability couple with dependency, resulting in an enormous amount of busywork.
6. By the way, if any of you happen to run a company, I have some advice: open-floor plans are one of those things that sound good on paper and make for great sound bites (“we believe in collaboration and teamwork blah, blah, blah”), but are just infuriating to actually experience. People walking by every minute of every day, hovering around your chair because they have to talk to your neighbor, loud conversations going on two feet away that you have no share or interest in. Endless distractions, disruptions, and anxiety, all for the sake of not having to poke your head around a corner to talk to someone, or send an instant message (which we do most of the time anyway).
Not to mention that, frankly, I’m deeply skeptical that my or any one else’s input is so perfectly and unfailingly valuable that all else should be sacrificed to allow it unimpeded scope for expression. Especially when that input is frazzled and distracted by all of the above.
7. Recently had to change my password on a particular service following an apparent security breach. Thoughts upon creating the new one: “Guess that, you bastards.”
UPDATE: If ‘Jabber-Walk’ isn’t the name of a dance, it should be.
Another post up at The Everyman, here explaining why the diversity, inclusion, tolerance ideology is naturally and inevitably totalitarian.
We moderns have a bad habit of not defining our terms. We like ideas that sound good and tend not to dig in deeper to try to pin down what they are actually saying. So we say things like “everyone should be included.” Except, we very clearly do not mean “everyone”, since we certainly don’t intend to include the criminal, the insane, the drug-addict, or so on. Nor, most of the time, do we mean to include ‘obviously bad people’ like bigots, sexists, fascists, anti-vaxers, and so on.
Some of you, reading the latter list, might think “you’re right, people shouldn’t be excluded just because of their opinions”. But that isn’t my point. The point is that there will always be limits to tolerance, including tolerance of individual opinion, all the way until it crosses the line into simple anarchy (wherein any idea of PTID is eliminated, since anyone can be as ‘intolerant’ as they like in an anarchy so long as they have the muscle to back it up). That is the nature of society: it must have things that simply cannot be accepted or tolerated.
The problem here, as in many other cases, is that the necessary limitations are not built into or defined by the principle, but merely assumed. We say “all are welcome,” but in practical terms what we mean to say is “all are welcome who adhere to our standards.” Only, because it is against PTID to enforce our own standards as if they were true, we don’t mention or define that part and pretend not to notice it.
To put it another way, the common canard, “I don’t care what you believe as long as you’re a good person” is dependent upon what constitutes a ‘good person’ in the speaker’s mind. Which in turn is dependent upon his view of the world—that is, his beliefs. So, what he is really saying is “I don’t care what you believe so long as your behavior more or less matches what I believe.”
Now, most of us, I think would admit all this. We know that there must be standards and that when we say “all are welcome” we don’t literally mean ‘all’. We mean ‘all within reason.’ That is, we assume that we can ground our PTID in a kind of lowest common denominator of agreed truths, things that no reasonable person would dispute. ‘Mere Reality’, to co-opt a term.
Experience has shown that this doesn’t work, and a very little consideration should have told us that it wouldn’t. When you take tolerance as one of your chief virtues and fill people’s heads with tales of heroic acceptance, they will naturally seek opportunities to practice it (because what people want most of all is to think well of themselves). And since, as noted, any commonly agreed ‘ground’ of truth will exclude someone, they will always find a new cause to champion and new oppressors to condemn in order to demonstrate their virtue.
Thus the logic of tolerance itself causes the lowest common denominator to shift ever lower. Just as young Medieval knights, lacking wars at home, would go off to seek battles in foreign lands to prove their virtue, so young people brought up on paeans to PTID will seek new abominations to tolerate so as to prove their own enlightenment.
And since we’ve now reached the point where even acknowledging basic human biology can be regarded as shockingly intolerant, it should be clear that there is no bottom of ‘basic’ reality that everyone can safely assume.
But all this is by way of an introduction. There’s a much worse problem on top of it.
Find out what that worse problem is by reading the rest here.
1. I’m beginning to settle in at last as the final few necessary tasks and purchases are being wrapped up. Having a new apartment is like having a giant toy; there are all sorts of things you can do with it and you can’t wait to get the chance to play with it.
2. Internet is up at last, though I have it on a kill switch (via the simple expedient of plugging the router into a power strip) so I can turn it off it becomes too much of a distraction.
On that note, I’m working out a schedule for myself to hopefully improve my (frankly appallingly slow) output. So far setting up has kept on interrupting, but even so I’ve found an uptick in production. Amazing what sitting down and just doing the damn work can accomplish.
3. Part of my schedule is anticipated to include Saturday movie nights (don’t like watching movies during the week, since they eat up so much time), and last night it was Megamind. I’ve probably mentioned it before, but that’s another film I’ve been meaning to do an essay on, since it ranks high on my list of underappreciated gems. It’s an example of the best kind of satire: the kind that provides the genuine thrills and particular joys of the genre it’s spoofing, even as it uses the material for comedy (The Princess Bride and Galaxy Quest are other examples of this sort of thing). In this case it pokes fun at comic book superhero tropes while also providing some excellent comic-book-style action / adventure heroics.
It’s also almost infinitely quotable: “Warming up? The Sun is ‘warming up‘?!”
4. The voice cast was announced for the upcoming ‘Super Mario Brothers’ animated movie (entrusted to Blue Sky of all people), and no one seems particularly happy about it. I like Chris Pratt, but him as Mario? I don’t know about that. And last time I checked, Charles Martinet was alive and well. Granted you might not want the high-pitched Mario voice for a whole film, but I happen to know that Mr. Martinet can do many voices (e.g. he was one of the dragons in Skyrim): all he has to do is tone it down a bit.
I really don’t understand why studios do this (it also bugged me when Roger Craig Smith was replaced by Ben Schwartz for Sonic. Schwartz was fine in the role, but it’s annoying nonetheless). Or rather, I understand, but it makes no sense from a fans’ perspective. Studios figure that mainstream audiences will want to see familiar names in the credits, not the relatively obscure voice actors of the games. Filmmakers, and especially studio people, are notoriously out of touch and so don’t realize that the days of star-driven films are largely in the past. No one is going to go see Super Mario Brothers to hear Chris Pratt and Jack Black: they’re going to go see it to see the Mario Brothers (assuming it looks tolerable from the trailers). Keeping Charles Martinet in the title roles would have been a surefire way to garner immediate fan support, which I think is frankly a lot more valuable these days than star power, especially for an animated film.
I still hope the film is good, and I’m not judging it yet, but this isn’t a good sign. Please, please at least be better than the live action film. That should not be a challenge.
(Though for my part, all will be forgiven if they give John Leguizamo and Samantha Mathis cameos. Or if they bring Lance Hendrikson back as the king / chancellor of the Mushroom Kingdom. Come on, people: he never turns down a paycheck!).
5. By the way, I suspect the above is the reason why My Little Pony: The Movie jettisoned most of that show’s fantastic supporting cast in favor of a bunch of new characters with celebrity voice actors. They probably would have re-cast the Mane Six if they thought they could get away with it (“Starring Scarlett Johanson as Twilight Sparkle”).
6. Also, regarding the Mario movie: Dwayne Johnson should have been Donkey Kong. How does one fail to see that?
Finally got my internet back today, and just in time to find that one of my essays has gone up at The Everyman! It’s one where I get to talk about classic Disney and apply it to the decline of civilization, so…pretty much pure me. Enjoy!
In short, the book presents Alice’s dreams as places of fun and nonsense; the pure, innocent enjoyment of a carefree childhood. The film presents her adventures more as a cautionary tale, wherein Alice wishes for a world of nonsense and gets it, only to realize how uncomfortable and frightening it really is and long to return home. Delightful as the film is to watch, the central theme is that Wonderland is not a nice place to be in. It’s fun to imagine: not fun to experience.
The shift in tone and theme between the two versions is very interesting given the very different state of the real world at the time of each – that is, the world outside the scope of book, film, and dream.
Lewis Carroll wrote his book from the heart of the Victorian age, a time where, despite the rapid changes taking place, the old-world order was still standing strong and British culture and society seemed as solid and secure as Gibraltar itself. It was a time where a girl like Alice from a respectable, well-off family could count on the familiar trappings of home, of sisters and cats, of lazy summer afternoons and quiet winter days to remain always safely as they were. And where Carroll, AKA Charles Dodgson, mathematician, deacon, and schoolteacher, could know exactly what ‘normal’ was when he wished to satirize it.
On the other hand, Walt Disney made his film in a world scarred by two global conflagrations that had largely laid waste to the orderly world that Carroll knew. Disney worked under the shadow of Communism and the atomic bomb, of the questioning, doubting, and deconstruction of everything that had once been valued and assumed in Carroll’s world, and amidst the early rumblings of still more such disruptions to come. That is to say, Lewis Carroll lived in a world where order and stability were the norms. Walt Disney lived in a world where that same order was rapidly disappearing and chaos and nonsense were being seriously advocated to take their place. Small wonder that, consciously or unconsciously, he took a more jaundiced view of Wonderland.
1. Last week I realized a nearly five-year goal and finally moved back out into my own apartment. I’ve been too busy setting up to settle in yet, but already I feel the enormous relief and joy of having my own space once again.
2. The chief downside, at present, is that I don’t have any internet. My provider sent a router and set up instructions, but after wrestling with it a bit I got a connection…and found it directing me to a different provider. Two different tech support conversations later (one on the phone, one over a live chat at a nearby coffee shop) yielded the information that the wiring in the junction box was overriding the signal with the previous occupant’s provider. So now they’ll be sending someone out in the middle of the week to perform the necessary offices. Until then, I’m down to using coffee shops and other people’s homes (with the owners’ permission, of course; I’m almost sure that’s what they’re trying to say behind their gags).
3. I’m actually rather glad to have taken a break from internet. I’d been far too attached to it lately and an enforced fast is a bit of a relief, particularly with so much else to be done.
4. During and before the move, I read through an old favorite: Watership Down, the epic adventure novel about the founding of a rabbit warren. I was struck even more this time by the military imagery and tone often employed: at times you could almost lift passages out, tell someone they’re from a WWII novel, and no one would be the wiser. At one point, Holly, the upright veteran, ends up escorting Clover, a freed pet rabbit, out onto the grass to feed, appearing for all the world like a well-bred British officer taking charge of a nervous refugee (she ends up as his mate).
5. Which, incidentally, points to another clever touch. Mr. Adams knows and reminds the reader that rabbit breeding is not like human romance: survival and propagation is the main point, and males will fight over available females. When Clover becomes ‘ready for mudder’ (as Kehaar the seagull puts it), we’re told that the bucks in the warren are all fighting over her, but at that point the narrative has moved elsewhere and so we don’t actually see it (Hazel, our protagonist, upon learning of it, simply comments “I suppose it’ll work itself out” and moves on).
This is a good way to present something that you know the reader won’t like to see. No one wants to watch these characters that we’ve been traveling with and cheering on for half the book getting into a petty squabble over who gets to breed with their one available female. That’s something humans, or at least civilized, western humans of the sort likely to be reading the book, would find repulsive, even granting that the characters are explicitly not human. It’s a point where our sympathy for these animals, as animals, simply will not go beyond. So Adams tactfully keeps it off stage, letting us know that it is happening, but not rubbing our faces in it. We are thus allowed to pass it over as another element of the ‘rabbitness’ of the story without being forced to emotionally engage with it.
See, some things have to happen in a story that would be tonally at odds with the emotions we want the audience to experience, or which would be so alien to their experience as to rip them right out of sympathy, even they are necessary for the setting. One solution, therefore, is to simply allude to it, but not to show it in any kind of detail or dwell upon it. The audience thus gets the information they need, but aren’t forced to navigate delicate and disturbing emotional territory unrelated to the main thrust of the story.
The fact that rabbits fight over mates is part of the setting and premise, but has no real relevance to the real point of the narrative, which is the courage, devotion, and selfless loyalty of the heroes. Therefore, the fact is passed over with a nod, while scenes and incidents relative to the real narrative are depicted with great emphasis and feeling.
You don’t have to show everything or give everything equal weight. Keeping irrelevant or off-tone notes out of sight and out of mind is as important a skill as any other.
1. Moving on Tuesday, so most my time is taken up in packing. Fortunately, I’ve been doing it in increments for months, so there isn’t a whole lot left to be done. Mostly it’s a matter of deciding how to pack up the delicates and deciding what will be needed between now and then.
2. I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on the Church councils on the way to and from work, which is also a handy little summary of Church history (and, consequently, the history of the west). It’s fascinating and, oddly enough, comforting. Yeah, things are bad now, but things have been bad before, and people survived.
Not only survived, but thrived. At the same time as the corruption, petty power plays, and rampant stupidity was operating in the highest levels of the Church, there were also great Saints pursuing piety and working to save souls. The trick, it seems to me, is to focus on your own duty and make sure that, whatever may be said of the rest of Christendom, your own little patch of the kingdom is doing its job.
3. A rather interesting thought: the lecturer on the above happened to touch on Limbo, the section of Hell where those who die in Original Sin, but without grievous personal sins (e.g. infants, the just pagans, etc.) dwell. He commented that when most people describe Heaven – “a place of total happiness, where you meet all the dead and are content forever” – they are actually describing Limbo. The Beatific Vision – that is, Heaven proper – is something quite beyond that.
The way I think of it is that what God wants to do is not simply to make us perfect men, but something well beyond manhood. The Saints are, in the most literal sense, super human: something that is human and more. Which means they are not just happier than those in limbo, but happier in a way and to a degree that a simple human being could not conceive.
4. To take an analogy I think I’ve used before, it’s the difference between the happiness of a dog and the happiness of a human being. Dogs can be thoroughly happy in their doggish way, but the particular happiness of intellect, art, human love, and piety, and so on is simply beyond them. They can just sort of scrape the surface of it through their interactions with human beings, but they can’t go any further.
A saintly life in this world is like being the dog of a good and happy family: we experience the full doggish life, but also touch on something greater that we could never have gotten on our own and cannot fully experience or understand. Becoming a saint would be akin to a dog becoming fully human (except without the evil side of human nature: so, like a St. Bernard becoming the St. Bernard or something).
5. The short version is that, even while acknowledging that God will always be far beyond any conception we have of Him, we have an inveterate habit of vastly underestimating Him.
“That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him” is not hyperbole.
6. Anyway, I recommend that series on the councils. You can find the whole playlist linked below (it’s especially useful for getting a grasp on the Catholic-Eastern Orthodox issue, though further reading is necessary before I’d feel safe really wading into that).
1. I’m currently in the process of preparing to move, something I’ve been looking forward to and trying to achieve for several years now. I’ve been rather surprised at how disruptive the process really is, not just in terms of consuming time and energy, but in the way it creates the sense of ‘no point in starting anything right now; can’t settle to anything at the moment because there’s a huge disruption coming’. Yeah, probably just an excuse there; another one of the ‘infinity of excuses for non-action’, as Theodore Roosevelt put it.
These underlying mental impressions that don’t really follow logically, but are an aggregation of the whole tenor of a time period are probably a lot more responsible for human actions – and thus history – than we usually give them credit for.
2. Do you notice how most non or formerly Christian Americans (and even some continuing to claim the title) seem to still have the idea that going to church is a way to demonstrate virtue rather than to acquire it? That someone praying and fasting and attending Mass is presenting himself as a very good, righteous person, rather than trying to become one?
This seems to me to be a consequence of the fact that we were born a semi-Puritan, or formerly-Puritan nation: since, as I understand it, in the Calvinist tradition good deeds and worship and such are seen as signs that one is saved, not means of seeking and preserving salvation.
This is a big topic, of course: once you start to notice the Puritan thread in the American mind, it pops up everywhere.
3. I’ve heard – can’t remember where at the moment – that in the Middle Ages there really were Thieves’ Guilds and Prostitutes’ Guilds, and their members would attend Mass every week. They wouldn’t receive, of course, being unable or unwilling to give up their sinful professions, but they would pray fervently to be preserved until, say, they could make a big score or find some way out of their lives, or at the very least be granted the chance to confess and repent before death. Everyone knew who they were, of course, and everyone expected them to be there.
That’s the sort of thing that comes from a Catholic understanding of salvation and which the Puritan tradition would look upon with shocked disapproval.
4. I went to an 80th anniversary screening of Citizen Kane tonight. My hot take is that it’s a pretty decent little movie, all things considered. Actually for most of the run time I was grinning uncontrollably at the shear quality of filmmaking, acting, and writing on display. There’s a reason this is often called the best film of all time, and though I personally wouldn’t give it the top spot, it’s certainly a respectable choice.
5. Perhaps it’s just the way my mind is going these days, but I think Orson Welles hit on a key weakness of the Capitalist / Classical Liberal system. See, when Leftists go after capitalism or the United States, they tend to point at poverty, or the striated class system. This is actually it’s greatest strength: nothing alleviates poverty or creates more social mobility than capitalism. But the great weakness is that it tends to starve its adherents of the deeper human needs: of family, community, love, spiritual elevation, and so on, commoditizing and stifling these things so that men are left without roots, culture, or identity, knowing “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” (Of course, Leftist variations of liberalism tend to be even worse in this regard, though that doesn’t stop them from sometimes appealing to it, just as their rotten track record on social mobility doesn’t stop them from appealing to that either. I really have to wonder why anyone takes Marxist doctrines seriously anymore, but I digress).
In the movie, Charles Foster Kane has everything: inexhaustible wealth, social prestige, the power to move governments, but he’s a profoundly lonely man, starved of love, but incapable of giving it himself. All he can do is throw spectacular gifts and extravagant gestures at people, but his fundamental selfishness makes it impossible for him to really love or to accept love in return. He has a massive art collection, but he never looks at it or appreciates it. He has a set of principles that supposedly govern his newspaper, but he abandons them whenever it suits him. He’s a very intelligent, commanding, powerful man, a man who has everything the world can give…but he lacks the ‘spiritual’ dimension entirely and thus remains a hollow, frustrated, pitiable figure.
All the prosperity and material advancement of the liberal west, whatever else may be said of it, cannot replace the spiritual needs of man. “Man does not live on bread alone.”
6. David Stewart touches on some of these same ideas here with regards to the ‘Woke’ religion:
1. I try not to talk politics much here. I don’t have the background or knowledge as yet to say anything really worthwhile about it. So don’t ask me for a rundown of how the past twenty years have gone and what we as a nation have to show for it all, though I don’t think anyone would deny that we’re worse off than we were in just about every way. It looks to me like America’s entered a full-on decline, which is accelerating fast, but where that will lead, I haven’t the foggiest.
2. That day twenty years ago marked the end of the heady, hopeful interval of the 1990s following the end of the Cold War: the time where, for many people at least, it seemed we’d reached the happy ending of history, a golden age born of the triumph of the Baby Boomers. It was always an illusion, of course; merely the penumbra of a sin, between the commission and the consequence, when it looks like you’ve gotten away with it after all.
I’m speaking generally. The consequences were already being felt on an individual level, but hadn’t yet penetrated enough into the public conscience to cause the sense of unease and disaffection that they do now. At least, that’s my impression of the era.
In any case, that time came to an end on September 11, 2001.
3. Hard to believe it’s been that long. I remember it quite well. I was in sixth or seventh grade at the time. We were kept in at recess for no reason whatsoever, then at the end of the day there was an announcement: “We in this country sometimes forget how much more fortunate we are than some other people….” That’s how it began. Which, in retrospect, is a kind of disgusting way to break the news that thousands of your fellow citizens have been murdered: rather like beginning the news that a family member was killed in a drive-by with a comment on racial injustice. Bit of a herald of things to come.
As I recall, rumors were beginning among the students even before the announcement. Then I remember going home and turning on the news and seeing a big hole in the side of the building. At first I thought ‘oh, that’s not too bad.’ Then I found out that was footage from earlier in the day. It was a process of realizing what actually had happened: big holes in the building. One building’s partially collapsed. One’s collapsed entirely, the other damaged. Both are completely destroyed. It was odd to my twelve-year-old brain to realize that a great landmark like that was actually gone for good.
4. I also remember footage of people dancing and cheering in the streets in…I think the Palestinian parts of Israel it might have been? Somewhere in that area. I never forgot that over the next few years as ‘tolerance’ and ‘oh, how sad it was that Middle Easterners are being profiled’ replaced outrage and patriotic zeal. I remember how quickly that happened, by the way, and how little there was to go on. I may have missed something, of course, but I only ever heard of a few minor incidents of that sort of thing actually happening. Though it was common enough in TV shows.
5. I was a pretty enthusiastic supporter of the subsequent wars, of Bush, and so on for a long time. I wanted something to be done. I wanted America to reassert its dominance in the world, and I was then still fully onboard with the American creed. Quite a bit has changed since then, and I’m not entirely sure how.
Looking back, I’m still not completely against the wars, at least in principle. But then, I’m not against imperialism. But modern America is not cut out to be an empire. To be an Empire, you have to truly believe in your right to rule. That was true when Americans saw themselves as the shining city on the hill, the beacon of freedom to the world. Conquering large swathes of Mexico, Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, and so on were, therefore, a way of spreading freedom to more people.
We don’t believe in that anymore, at least the majority of the population doesn’t. We’ve been raised on tales of Vietnam and the movements of the 1960s and 70s, conditioned to regard imperialism as an insult, something that bad people and bad countries do out of greed and arrogance. So we had the ridiculous spectacle of America trying to do an empire’s job while insisting that it wasn’t an empire: that we weren’t ruling Iraq and Afghanistan, we were liberating them, and that they would be eager to accept democracy and so forth once it was offered to them, because who doesn’t want to be free?
I rather think that if we had acted as an empire, if we’d put down in these places and simply said “we’re in charge now, deal with it,” and claimed them as territories, that may have gone off better. A fait accompli is generally accepted better than a patronizingly half-hearted ‘we’re just going to rearrange the furniture a bit and make things better for you and then we’ll let you alone’. Because for most people, stability is far more important than the specifics of law or government. A settled and enforced rule as the new status quo is easier to accept, whoever the rulers are, than an indefinite and hazy promise of improvement.
But all that’s academic, and I may be completely wrong. I haven’t studied the situations either Iraq or Afghanistan, so I don’t know.
6. For me, the past twenty years, especially the past few, have brought considerable disillusionment. I don’t believe in the American creed anymore, for one thing: the notion of ‘the last best hope of mankind’, the ‘shining city on the hill’ and the rest of it. I view it in much the same way that I see classical mythology: beautiful as a story, but false and dangerous to believe in. But that doesn’t mean I’m no longer invested in my nation. I feel towards it much the same way that, say, a Catholic Jacobite in 18th England or a Christian in Japan might feel: precisely insomuch that I want it to survive, thrive, and be great, I see that it needs conversion.
7. A rather grim and downbeat retrospective, I’m afraid. Here’s an Mst3k short to lighten things up:
1. I missed seeing Coco when it came out in theaters, since I was by the disillusioned by Pixar’s deteriorating quality. Last week, upon seeing it recommended, I pulled it up and gave it a watch.
My goodness, that is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Certainly one of the best recent films. Not to mention one of the most Traditionalist / Reactionary films of recent years, being all about family tradition, family piety, recovering lost heritage, subordinating personal desires to obligations, and so on.
It’s also the first movie in a long time to legitimately make me cry. Not just tear up, but full on weeping.
I’m going to hold off on doing a full essay for the time being, because I want to see it again first, but I heartily recommend it.
2. Most of the related thoughts springing from the film and other things that have been on my mind lately are frankly too big to get into in a Flotsam. I want to organize them better and work them out first.
3. One thing that occurred to me while watching, however, was this. Everyone seems to love the Day of the Dead: it’s become the Mardi Gras of Mexico (e.g. the event that people think of when they think of the place and that always seems to brought up). Nothing wrong with this, except that I notice there’s always a particular emphasis on the pagan elements of the holiday, to the exclusion of the Christian ones.
This is what I call the ‘isn’t it interesting?’ approach: “Oh, the Mexicans have a tradition of such and such, and the Japanese say this, and the Irish have a story that yada yada, and isn’t that interesting?”
But there is one culture and one tradition that is never given this treatment, that always, without fail, is regarded as illegitimate, imposed, and generally not worth bothering about (even when it’s an integral part of a culture, it tends to be ignored in favor of folklore and pagan stories). Of course, it’s Christianity and the Church. Funny that, isn’t it?
4. This isn’t a criticism of Coco itself, or of Grim Fandango or any of the other works that have used the folklore around the Day of the Dead to good effect (Fandango, I would argue, is probably the closest to a Christian view of things of the one’s I’ve seen, since there the world of the dead is explicitly a transitory state that the good get to cross through almost instantly and the bad have to work and earn their way across, thus being more explicitly akin to Purgatory). It’s a criticism of the cultural attitudes that relegate the Faith to the sidelines and gleefully tries to sever us from our heritage, then regards us as defective when we try to preserve it.
5. One thing I am trying to develop (it’ll help when I get my own place, I’m hoping) is what I call the ‘shopkeeper mentality’. Again, Coco reminded me of this and helped it click in my mind: the mentality of “we have a family enterprise that is keeping us fed and gives us a place in the community. You’re part of this family, so you are going to help in it. Get up, do your chores, say your prayers, help in the shop, don’t complain if you don’t want the slipper.”
Thomas Sowell touched on this as well, describing how successful ethnic groups – e.g. Jews, East Asians, etc. – would practice this sort of behavior: start a commercial enterprise that the family would run, everyone pitch in and work their fingers to the bone to make it a success. Kids do their chores in the morning, then go to school (and they’d better get good grades), then come home and help with the shop.
That’s the kind of attitude I want to have: that this is a trade that gives me and my family a place in the community and supports us, and so it’s expected that we work at it like our lives depend upon it, because they do.
Basically, I don’t want to be a starving artist sacrificing all to his muse, I want to be a shoe shop that happens to make books.
