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Oct. 3rd, 2005 12:54 am![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
miss_education or other coulrophobia victims do not ( click here to see the motel sign )Oct. 3rd, 2005
miss_education or other coulrophobia victims do not ( click here to see the motel sign )Against last stands
Oct. 3rd, 2005 01:59 amWhen I was younger I was attracted to the self-sacrificial hero character in books and movies. You know, Gunga Din, or Steve McQueen in "The Sand Pebbles". He wasn't so much a tough guy who beat people up and won. He was sort of a bastard mix of Christ and a tough guy. You guys go on and escape. I'm of no use to use now; leave me on the pass with this machine gun and I'll hold 'em off for a while. And then everyone pauses to notice how noble the guy is, and then they go off to their happy ending and he gets whacked. This guy shows up a lot in Westerns, obviously. I think there's one per Western. As a heart-tugging moment in an action movie it's fine.
The Hemingway "moment of truth" is a version of this. There's danger, and a man puts himself in that danger and in some transcendent moment of life versus death he redeems himself. Probably this usually happens by dying, but it's not a Christ-like sacrifice; he kicks ass *and* dies. It's pretty questionable in a good novel, although Hemingway's tough guys are a lot less cardboard that the ones in Westerns.
In America we have a big problem with the popularity of this character. All too often you see some guy who's run out of winning options. He's a laid-off industrial worker, maybe, or a petty criminal who's facing a third strike, or even just a sad and dangerous domestic violence offender. His obvious fate is slow and humiliating doom, emasculation, poverty, incarceration, and admitting defeat in some battle that he's convinced himself is important. What does he do? He walls himself up in his house, sometimes with a spouse or relative as hostage, and picks a gunfight with the police. They can't take him alive! He's not going to jail! He'll go down shooting, and he'll be remembered as the guy who faced his moment of truth and faced overwhelming force.
Nowadays they're better at dealing with these guys; they have a lot of smart ways of dealing with "suicide by police". Put previously they just killed him. As he banged away with ol' Brown Bess a lot of professional tough guys with military rifles took him down. It was on the news and everyone remembered it. Our hero got his blaze of glory. A lot of the time, other people who wanted to go home that day got a blaze of glory too, despite their lack of interest in the idea.
From our protagonist's point of view he was a Hemingway hero, Shane, and every other slow-talking granite-faced B actor who took a bullet for the romantic leads. It's a lie, though. The guy who gets centerpunched by the SWAT team in his two bedroom house is usually a weaselly coward wifebeater, a beer-soaked unemployable waste of space, a serial car thief. His big Last Stand terrifies and endangers innocent people around him and causes expense and risk for the police. The moment of truth for him is a big fat traumatic nuisance for us. It's like suicide with extra selfishness.
My ideal of maturity is different. An adult is someone who takes on responsibility for the welfare of others. Whether it's manhood or womanhood, to me being a grownup implies giving up the self-centered drama of youth for the real rewards of community and family. My heroes are the people who can take a botched career or a prison sentence or a terrible divorce and go all the way through the damned thing, painful and lasting as it is. And that's whether they "win" or not.
The theologian and anti-Nazi rebel Dietrich Bonhoefffer warned against what he called "cheap grace", which loosely explained is redemption from sin without any change in behavior or belief. A good example is the televangelist who gets caught with a whore, yells SORRY KIND OF! in public, and goes right back to his plush existence.
That fake moment of truth, the dude ranch Western last stand, is a selfish refusal to face the long hard life sentence of being human. Real men, like real women, are worthy of honor when they have the courage to go the whole terrible distance and not justify themselves with a moment of false cheap bravery. Real grace is for grownups; it comes day by day and year by year, and not easily.
The Hemingway "moment of truth" is a version of this. There's danger, and a man puts himself in that danger and in some transcendent moment of life versus death he redeems himself. Probably this usually happens by dying, but it's not a Christ-like sacrifice; he kicks ass *and* dies. It's pretty questionable in a good novel, although Hemingway's tough guys are a lot less cardboard that the ones in Westerns.
In America we have a big problem with the popularity of this character. All too often you see some guy who's run out of winning options. He's a laid-off industrial worker, maybe, or a petty criminal who's facing a third strike, or even just a sad and dangerous domestic violence offender. His obvious fate is slow and humiliating doom, emasculation, poverty, incarceration, and admitting defeat in some battle that he's convinced himself is important. What does he do? He walls himself up in his house, sometimes with a spouse or relative as hostage, and picks a gunfight with the police. They can't take him alive! He's not going to jail! He'll go down shooting, and he'll be remembered as the guy who faced his moment of truth and faced overwhelming force.
Nowadays they're better at dealing with these guys; they have a lot of smart ways of dealing with "suicide by police". Put previously they just killed him. As he banged away with ol' Brown Bess a lot of professional tough guys with military rifles took him down. It was on the news and everyone remembered it. Our hero got his blaze of glory. A lot of the time, other people who wanted to go home that day got a blaze of glory too, despite their lack of interest in the idea.
From our protagonist's point of view he was a Hemingway hero, Shane, and every other slow-talking granite-faced B actor who took a bullet for the romantic leads. It's a lie, though. The guy who gets centerpunched by the SWAT team in his two bedroom house is usually a weaselly coward wifebeater, a beer-soaked unemployable waste of space, a serial car thief. His big Last Stand terrifies and endangers innocent people around him and causes expense and risk for the police. The moment of truth for him is a big fat traumatic nuisance for us. It's like suicide with extra selfishness.
My ideal of maturity is different. An adult is someone who takes on responsibility for the welfare of others. Whether it's manhood or womanhood, to me being a grownup implies giving up the self-centered drama of youth for the real rewards of community and family. My heroes are the people who can take a botched career or a prison sentence or a terrible divorce and go all the way through the damned thing, painful and lasting as it is. And that's whether they "win" or not.
The theologian and anti-Nazi rebel Dietrich Bonhoefffer warned against what he called "cheap grace", which loosely explained is redemption from sin without any change in behavior or belief. A good example is the televangelist who gets caught with a whore, yells SORRY KIND OF! in public, and goes right back to his plush existence.
That fake moment of truth, the dude ranch Western last stand, is a selfish refusal to face the long hard life sentence of being human. Real men, like real women, are worthy of honor when they have the courage to go the whole terrible distance and not justify themselves with a moment of false cheap bravery. Real grace is for grownups; it comes day by day and year by year, and not easily.
hic haec hork
Oct. 3rd, 2005 09:04 am- The Nobel Prize in Medicine very properly went to the researchers who proved that stomach ulcers are caused by infection. Not too many people seem to know about this one, but it was a huge discovery and their tenacity in defending their results changed uncounted lives for the better.
- Good piece on plagues and pestilences here. Warning: scary and kinda gross in bits.
- My favorite headline of the day: Pheromones may be used to herd alien fish.
- "All it will take is a cross-continental array of submillimeter telescopes to effectively create a single telescope as large as the Earth. " Ah, well that's no problem then!
- I want to balance rocks on each other for a living too!
First, an Episcopal school in Texas does something surprising. The novel "Brokeback Mountain", best described as a gay-themed Western novel, was on the high school senior optional reading list and had been for years. A trustee and major donor objected to its presence, and a furore ensued. The school not only declined to remove the book, but returned a $3 million donation from the objector on grounds that they cannot accept any conditional gift. Considering how far schools will bend over for that kind of cash even without the current climate of intolerance, this shows extraordinary courage on the part of their board. The punch line is that the book won't be taught next year anyway because the teacher who had it on her reading list doesn't teach anything that's been adapted for a movie, and it's being released as a big Hollywood picture.
Second, four Christian anti-war activists carried out a peaceful and minimally disruptive demonstration at a military recruiting office. The government threw the book at them, charging them with criminal mischief, and when that failed trying them again for conspiracy in a federal court. Apparently reading a statement, spilling a ceremonial quantity of blood, and then praying is a very serious crime in this country if you don't do it at an abortion clinic. Found via this rancorous and poorly written but informative blog post from one of those folks who likes to yell about politics a lot.
Second, four Christian anti-war activists carried out a peaceful and minimally disruptive demonstration at a military recruiting office. The government threw the book at them, charging them with criminal mischief, and when that failed trying them again for conspiracy in a federal court. Apparently reading a statement, spilling a ceremonial quantity of blood, and then praying is a very serious crime in this country if you don't do it at an abortion clinic. Found via this rancorous and poorly written but informative blog post from one of those folks who likes to yell about politics a lot.
Carbonated what? Peripherally linked from boingboing.
Also from boingboing, they totally lost their shit about a doom asteroid coming to hit us, and then had to correct themselves after people pointed out that they had old bad information that could have been corrected with Google and Wikipedia. I know they're not a newspaper, but at that level of popularity they should at least check their stories against the the toolbar options that came with the browser.
Meanwhile, O.J. Simpson appeared at NecroComicCon and signed autographs, making a punchline unnecessary. A long jail sentence would still be good, though.
I hope you're all celebrating Pandemic Flu Awareness Week! Come with me on a magical journey through the scary-ass statistics from the history of influenza. Check out especially the life expectancy graph with the big ol' notch in it around 1918.
Also from boingboing, they totally lost their shit about a doom asteroid coming to hit us, and then had to correct themselves after people pointed out that they had old bad information that could have been corrected with Google and Wikipedia. I know they're not a newspaper, but at that level of popularity they should at least check their stories against the the toolbar options that came with the browser.
Meanwhile, O.J. Simpson appeared at NecroComicCon and signed autographs, making a punchline unnecessary. A long jail sentence would still be good, though.
I hope you're all celebrating Pandemic Flu Awareness Week! Come with me on a magical journey through the scary-ass statistics from the history of influenza. Check out especially the life expectancy graph with the big ol' notch in it around 1918.
Dr. Gacy to the O.R.
Oct. 3rd, 2005 11:34 pmWorst Pediatric Idea Ever. Hey everyone, let's ease the worries of children facing surgery by ( something that miss_education and other coulrophobes won't like at all )