Apocalypto Again

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto

I wrote a number of posts on Apocalypto, but the most important is:

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/mel-gibsons-apocalypto-and-will-durant.html
where it is said

... I have come across some contrary opinions that are decidedly strange. In filmcritic.com we see by Sean O'Connell. http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/2a460f93626cd4678625624c007f2b46/2e132ed6c5ef09828825723c0075dd17?OpenDocument

The director precedes Apocalypto with a cryptic quote by philosopher Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." Since the quote has nothing, in context, to do with the film, I’ll assume it refers to Gibson himself.

The critic seems not to have the slightest sense that the film is a critique of violence.

... When he [Durant] says a civilization destroys itself from within, what does he mean? What are the details and specifics in this destruction?...

...Mr. Durant lived through World War I. I would guess his age to be around 28 to 35 at the outbreak of the war. World War I was total carnage. It profoundly shocked the generations alive at the time. We have become inured to carnage. We dismiss WWI because we believe our own time deserves the Palme d'Or for killing. The illustrious Arnold Toynbee made it very clear in his extensive historical work that one favorite method by which civilizations destroy themselves is violence. Constant wars which deplenish the commonweal; strife within the society between classes or groups therein; these are the true destroyers of civilization. Hence, the point of the quote is that civilizations will suicide from an overdose of violence.

Violence; whether it be wars or internal strife; riots or mass shootings.
Weapons and violence will be the death of us, so the film says.

--

Absolutely Aztec !

Mictelantecuhtli, Aztec God of Death

First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, USA

Another good day for sacrifices, America. All told, 28 dead and counting. Lots of children, some babies, men, women; a good mix, a good medley of hearts of sacrifice.

The powers of the world and underworld appreciate your faith. Believe in death, as you always have.
Begin your fruitless and inane search for motives, for excuses, for explanations; begin your palaver about the overdue "conversation" about gun violence.

You never could control your violent impulses before. You won't now.
Hate and fear are windows of perception, sensory tools for seeing the evil in the world, just as charity and love are sensory tools for seeing the goodness in the world. But you have let them rule your lives. You have become obsessive compulsives. You cannot touch the world without rifle oil on your fingers!
You have let Fear and Hate become your gods... and having said that, it's totally OK by me.

--

God Punishes Us With What We Can't Imagine...

"It's alive! Alive!" Mary Shelley Dreams

Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in. For example, during the Cold War Era there was a policy of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - that kept things in check. No one would start a war - no rational person, that is - if there was assurance that they themselves would be destroyed.

It was a rational approach.

In fact, it was an island of reason within the great blue sea of insanity.

Same thing with guns.

It used to said, and probably still is by the dim, that, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
And the dim bulb would say this and leave us all amazed at the irony of it all.

However, I hold that Guns actually do kill people.
During the past 20 years as gun ownership grew exponentially, I thought that such a vast "population" of weapons would lead to an age where the statistics of deadly shootings began to also exponentially increase.

Ecce arma!  Behold the weapons!

With nuclear weapons, there was an incredible amount of training that armies and navies had to go through to make things safe, to prevent accidents.
With guns? There is no incredible amount of training. There is barely any training. I mean, a couple of years ago a baby shot its mother dead in a Walmart, using a gun in the mother's purse.

Did this baby shoot? No, the gun did. The baby could not have the intention. The gun did.
Oh, it was an accident...... !!??
Really. An accident.
It was an accident that there was a fully loaded hand gun in a mother's purse, and that purse was lying on top of a Walmart shopping cart, and the baby grabbed it. An accident.
The gun did not have intention, but it was an integral part of an intentional landscape...

The gun was a necessary adjunct and part of the landscape. The gun was imbued with the faith of being-safe and being-secure. The gun, that was part of the promise to secure that young mother and to secure that young baby, turned on them in a tragic way.

That was the irony: the things of incredible violence into which we place our faith and our lives turn against us for no good reason that we can understand. We are left dumb and struck and we cannot explain the turn of events.

It reminds me of a fable. Perhaps "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" wherein a inanimate, unliving object is given life! The Frankenstein fable, is it not? "It's alive! Alive!" yelled Colin Clive as Victor Frankenstein yelled in James Whale's movie.

That which we considered dead is suddenly alive.
We are finding out that Guns are a Power in the World and at a high enough concentration, Guns - like the mythical Skynet of the film Terminator - begin to act as if they were already independent of mankind. At a critical concentration, independent and baneful artificial intelligence precipitates out of the idolatrous mix of dreams and fears of those who trust in violence.

Guns only need our fingers on the trigger. Everything else they can handle.

--

ps. The title is a quote from Stephen King's Duma Key.

Ben Carson Condescends...

Ben Carson's Idea of Protesting a Faulty Toilet Installation to the Plumbers' Union

PoliceBen Carson on the Baltimore Protests: If You Wouldn't Protest a Bad Plumber, You Shouldn't ProtestPolice
BY Jason Zengerle
http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-feed/2015/04/ben-carson-baltimore-plumber-police.html?mbid=synd_ypolitics

Before Ben Carson was a hero to Tea Partiers, he was a hero to African-Americans—nowhere more so than in his adopted hometown of Baltimore. When he wasn't in the operating room at Johns Hopkins, Carson, a retired Pediatric neurosurgeon, could often be found at Baltimore inner-city schools telling the remarkable story of how he rose from dire poverty to become a world-renowned doctor. He was even immortalized in an episode of The Wire. Earlier today, Carson—who is expected to officially announce that he's running for president next Monday—spoke to me about the unrest in Baltimore. A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation is below....

[...]

Do you think that's indicative of a larger problem?
It's certainly indicative of some problems. In no way am I saying that all the police are righteous, by no stretch of the imagination. And clearly we need to be dealing with that. But recognize that we're dealing with a people problem. When you look at the Baltimore police force, it's about as diverse as any police force you're going to find in a big city. There may even be more minorities on that police force than there are non-minorities. The point being that inappropriate behavior comes in all colors, it's not specific. And just because it comes by one color or another color doesn't mean it should be ignored. It needs to be dealt with.

We need to get to the bottom of any problems of discrimination. But the larger issue here is, how do you react when something is wrong? If you have an unpleasant experience with a plumber, do you go out and declare a war on all plumbers? Or teachers or doctors? Of course not. And it makes no sense to do that with police either.

I shall keep that in mind the next time my plumber, Clint, kills one of my neighbors by... oh, breaking their spines, suffocating them, or shooting them with a gun they thought "wuz a taser"

--

Radio Raheem

Spike Lee marching in Washington D.C. demonstration against police violence.

Sal's pizzeria was in the NY Times Crossword today, and I could only remember Danny Aiello at first, not Sal. (Do The Right Thing)

Spike Lee foresaw and prophesied Michael Brown and Eric Garner in his film in the character of Radio Raheem (I'm pretty sure that was the name... too lazy to look it up).
Of course, it is easy to prophesy future violence against black folks when you're in a society that has such violence as one of its hidden pillars.

--

Violence and Revolution

Do not seek to redress injustice with violence.

There has been so much injustice in the world that nothing will remain.

One may put karma in one's pocket with the left hand, but one may also remove it with the right hand.

By making a dharma of violence, we shall be reaping the fruit of our own actions.

Gandhiji

--

Abso-Aztec !!

or... Absolutely Aztec !!

It has been a good past week for death and slaughter.

Just in time for the pre-harvest Blue Moon. That is a very good (or, depending on which side of the axe or gun you are, very bad) omen!

--

Museums Of Memory

 

World War II Re-enactment

This is a photo of people re-enacting World War II.

My father would only speak of World War II in generalities and superficial descriptions. He never spoke of the horrors of Salerno and Anzio.

It is for us the survivors to honor their memory by continuing to play at war, and to define appropriate icons for future sacrificial feasts.
The spilling of blood is often a necessity, but it need not be a recreation nor need it be recorded and replayed as a sadistic pornography.

What would we say if the many Holocaust Museums were regarded as playful recreation of horrors, rather than a manner of teaching every generation the true nature of evil and why it should be avoided?
Am I mistaken here? Do you think me extreme?

I wish I were mistaken.
Consider the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit; consider those exhibits dealing with slavery. Are these depictions "re-enactments" of a playful nature or are they warning admonitions?

Does it matter? I mean, what are the chances of modern day people trivializing the ways of evil violence?

Actually, they are pretty good.
Referring back to the Charles H. Wright Museum, I am familiar with numerous divergent depictions of slavery, from Gone With The Wind to Birth Of A Nation to Django Unchained. Each of these widely popular films uses slavery and its evils as part of the story very much subsidiary to the main thrust of the plot. And the main part of the plot is a basic trivialization or dismissal of the evil upon which the story is based.

We are fortunate enough to have current examples for both slavery and World War II: Tarantino's Django Unchained already mentioned and his Inglourious Bastards, for even though the latter depicts violent and brutal Jews as well as Nazis, I find this equation to be the acceptance of evil, not an inspection which will lead us to avoid it.

--
photo: Ric Wright,  BBC

Deadly Bombings

 Boston

In the last 24 hours, there were bombings in Boston, Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Nasariyah. At least 33 people were killed and 300 wounded.

No one has claimed responsibility for any of the bombings so far.

When I stopped writing about guns, I think it was due to a sudden clarity about violence in the USA. I cannot claim any great intuition about Iraq, since I have never been there.
However, when writing about Newtown, it quickly became crystal clear that guns were here to stay and any laws that were passed would not restrict guns in any meaningful way. Indeed, it was suddenly clear that in a society where there are so many guns and which now allows most of its citizens to carry concealed weapons, that Mr. LaPierre of the NRA was actually correct when he opined that the only way to make schools safe is to have armed guards.

Our future would be a future of armed guards. Here I sit tonight watching the NBC News ( a rare event ) and one of the main topics is how to provide security for public events, and I sense that one part of the response will be more armed guards.

 Baghdad

I realized that the rest of my life would be lived in a society that thinks it can control "irrational" violence through the just exercise of "rational" violence. I think what I saw clearly was that violence, whether rational or irrational, justified or unjustified, feeds off itself and grows exponentially.

And we are never to escape it now.

Just look at the Gun Control law which is not a beginning, but sounds more like an end, a souvenir of a moment of morality thrown to the people of Newtown.
And there are attempts by these same lawmakers to allow people who have a license to carry a concealed weapon in one state to be able to go into any other state carrying that same concealed weapon.

How fascinating that gun people think it perfectly acceptable to overextend the power of the government and trample on the states' laws when it comes to their guns -  a perfect example of gun fascism which has infiltrated everywhere in our lives.
(This has nothing to do with hunting. Gun conversation in the USA is incredibly complex. The stridency of the discourse has nothing to do with hunting, a perfectly acceptable pursuit.)

I am so sorry for those people who have been killed and wounded, and I extend my condolences to their families.

--

Notes On Violence 03/15/2013: Justifications

 

 Waco

February 13, 2013 – In an interview with WND’s “Radio America” program, National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent states, “Defiance is the heart and soul of the American experiment in self-government.  We had to defy the king.  We had to defy the emperor.  We had to defy the tyrants, and sometimes we had to meet them at Concord Bridge and blow their brains out.  I like defiance.”

http://www.csgv.org/issues-and-campaigns/guns-democracy-and-freedom/insurrection-timeline

I know which king Mr. Nugent is referring to; it is King George III.

I am unclear on which emperor we had to defy. Perhaps it was a Holy Roman Emperor? Or the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef? Or possibly the Kaiser.

I am unclear on the other tyrants referred to. Perhaps those who put down the Whisky Rebellion... like George Washington.

The debate is not about guns; the debate is about Society and Deadly Violence. In particular, it is about where and when society needs armed groups to achieve its ends.
We have not required armed groups recently; we have not been in a conceptual space wherein we feel the need for armed and regulated groups to achieve the right degree of compulsion for social internal needs. However, we have transformed to a space wherein we feel the need for armed individuals who remain essentially unorganized: once these armed individuals achieve a degree of organization, they are considered domestic terrorists... so we remain focused on the armed individual... that is what we talk about.

But as Mr. Nugent demonstrates, it is not difficult to cross the Rubicon into a state of insurrection, where our Ideals are justified by our Arms and Weapons, contrary to the intentions of the Founding Fathers where our Weapons were justified by our Ideals.

--

Notes On Violence

 

1) The Mass Killers of gun violence see themselves in a Story: they are playing a role.

Check and see how often the boys of Columbine quoted and referenced the Quentin Tarantino film Natural Born Killers.

2) Films and stories do not cause people to kill, but they form the Semantic Meaningful framework for the killer to create their work of violent art.

3) After the first subway killing of pushing a person onto the tracks in the path of an oncoming train, there were at least 3 more copycat subway pushing killings within 2 months.

The copycats had a rage looking for a Narrative, and suddenly they found it in the subway-pushing story.

4) People who are outside of the Society of Gun Violence express their anger differently, as for example the Amish group recently in court who attacked some Amish neighbors and cut their beards off.
If they had been part of our culture, the probability of reaching for a gun would have been much higher.

5) Art is no excuse for violence.
Defoe wrote the pamphlet "On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts". Anything can be Art if we find that it pays off somehow.

6) A person with perverse tastes may be offensive, but at least their sins are secret. An artist or film director makes their offense and degraded tastes public and presents it as a potential Narrative for a troubled mind to use.

7) Art is the creation of Meaning. Meaning is a powerful weapon for good or bad, yet we pretend it has no power at all compared to $80 million on the opening week-end.


8) Ritual has no meaning apart from the participation of Intelligent beings in the Ritual.
That is why archaeologists often have a hard time understanding depictions of ancient rituals with which they have little information or points of reference.
We have many, many rituals of love and hate, peace and violence. We take great care to give the bad ones as much meaning as we do the good ones.
--

Violence

Violence - and, by implication, mass shootings and killings - is not a mental health problem. It is not a mental state which is dysfunctional.

Violence is a culture construct; we create behavior patterns and scripts of violence, and when the time comes, we answer the call to begin to act our parts.

Violent acts are a trauma. When the participants leave their violent actions, and they return to a more "normal" state of affairs, the distortions  of violence in society prevent the trauma from being assuaged, and the "normal" states of affairs become more and more dysfunctional.

Violence and anger breed more violence and anger.

We are not insane.
We have a history of violence and intransigeance. We do not forgive. We are monsters of our own destruction..., but we are not insane.
--

REDRUM in ADIROLF

In Florida, so far one Dead, one possibly to be imprisoned, two families lives disrupted for no good reason,...

and one Florida Legislature and one NRA off the hook scot-free, after having created an enticement to violent death.

The NRA and the death-enabling legislature remind me of Lloyd the barkeep in The Shining: always ready to help one to join in the Dance of Death.

--

The Nature Of Violence In History: John C. Calhoun

March 31, 1850 marks the end of the life of John C. Calhoun, American statesman and orator. He served the state of South Carolina in the Senate, and was a proponent of free trade, in this opposing the North, which was very much protectionist, seeking to protect the infant industrial northern society.

The South saw Northern protectionist tariffs as strangling free trade and their exports, and feelings ran so high that secession from the Union was seriously discussed. A forceful speaker, Calhoun orated thus in this period:

'We are told that the Union must be preserved. And how is it proposed to preserve the Union? By force! Does any man in his senses believe that this beautiful structure, —this harmonious aggregate of States, produced by the joint consent of all,—can be preserved by force?

Its very introduction will be certain destruction to the Federal Union. No, no! You cannot keep the States united in their constitutional and federal bonds by force.

Force may, indeed, hold the parts together; but such union would be the bond between the master and slave—a union of exaction on one side, and of unqualified obedience on the other.

It is madness to suppose that the Union can be preserved by force. Disguise it as you may, the contest is one between power and liberty.'

In the present day, we celebrate this very application of force, and never more question the nature of the outcomes of such a procedure. The productive and beneficial outcomes of Force and Violence are orated and applauded and the icons associated with them are enshrined.

The Founding Fathers saw the necessity of Union, compelled to it by the logic of history, not by the calculus of armed conflict and compulsion. The Union, although it struggled to be born, was not in its nature a compact to which the parties were driven by arms and cudgels.

Yet, the continuance of the Union was seen to be such a process of exaction and unqualified obedience.

The question in Calhoun's mind probably was:

Did we, indeed, freely agree to enter into a Union, whose existence immediately abrogates those same freedoms, upon our crossing the threshhold into it?

(note: During the aftermath of the presidential election of 1824, Calhoun denounced the "corrupt bargain" of Henry Clay and John Q. Adams, saying that power - improperly acquired - will be undoubtedly improperly used.)

All Eyes Were On Mumbai...

...and none were on the Indian state of Orissa, where Hindu extremists organized a methodical anti-Christian pogrom in August of 2008.The authorities and police are accused of not intervening. I suppose it would be impolitic to cover such a story, since we are giving nuclear assistance to India. If we learn nothing else from the past 8 years, let it be this: that as you sow, so shall you reap. If you visit violence upon someone, violence will be visited upon you. If you deny well-being to your fellows, well-being will be denied you All the arrogant attitudes in the world will not save you.

Thugs In Israel

Right wing Israeli thugs bombed the home of Professor Ze'ev Sternhell, a peace activist.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1024412.html ...Recently, Sternhell has received threatening phone calls. Police assess that the background for the attempt to harm Professor Sternhell is politically motivated. They suspect that right-wing activists carried out the attack in response to his remarks decrying Israeli settlers... This is the element Bush and Cheney have supported.

Studying Violence

The manner in which scientists study the link between violent images and consequent violent activity in American society is rather like: Studying a group of people for 2 hours per day, during which time the members of the study group each smokes 2 cigarettes. After 1 year, we issue our findings on the effects of tobacco on longevity. What we have neglected is that each member of the study group smokes two packs a day outside the study group, has done so for 30 years, and will continue doing so for as long as they live. They also have high cholesterol diets, love trans fats, and avoid exercise. The picture is incomplete, uninformed, and truncated.

Violence 1

abc

I believe: Violent imagery, stories, imaginations, and narratives increase the acceptance of such behavior by the great mass of a society; This same imagery, etc. increases the tendency to increasingly sophisticated, final, and satisfying forms of violence by a select sub-group of a society; The acceptance of the great mass of the society, thus, effectively enables the sub-group in in quest for horror. With such enabling, the sub-group grows in size. At this point, you may think "Virginia Tech", or "John Muhammad", or "Natalee Holloway", or what have you. In the past, bullying occurred. It was violent behavior and often called forth violent behavior in reply. In a place called "Columbine", those who were bullied refined their response into an "Endlosung" - a final solution. Herein, we see the wicked wedding of Reason and Analysis and Violence again. We have already seen it in warfare. War was nothing compared to what it became under the rein of Reason when Professional Scientists created and continue to create hellish weaponry. Under the kingship of Torture, Violence, and Mayhem parading as Governmental Policy, we are setting the stage for our own Wagnerian "Gotterdammerung"........... Ah, what gods we were! So sublime in our aims! So ethereal in our means! We were the greatest nation ever! We were indeed. We still could be if we would divorce ourselves from the Scripture of Disaster, the Fear of End of Times, the Pastor Hagees who PowerPoint the mathematics of Death and Rapture! It is now a Godless generation. (To be with God, it is not enough to cry "God! God!" all the time. It is nothing to say Jesus is your savior. Your words cannot move the hearts of men nor stop your own wars. Your words cannot move God.)

We are missing God. We are missing the stories that come from God.

The missing stories of heroes are the stories inspired by God. They are missing because we no longer have such stories. We have none at all.

AND we are so corrupt that during this war we had to conspire to fabricate hero stories. We lied about Pat Tillman. How can you be so corrupt and low as to lie about a soldier who gave his life for his country? We had to. There is nothing heroic anywhere, so we have to fabric it in the Goebbelsian Factories of our 1984 Fuseli nightmare ... and send it to the Coulters to read on the compliant Media.

(It reminds me of the children's song:

Papa Goebbels dead and gone,

but his memory lingers on.

When his mood was one of bliss,

he'd tell jolly lies like this.)

Virginia Tech 3: The Bonfire of the Inanities

It has been said that IF the students and lecturers of Virignia Tech had been thoughtfully supplied with their own guns, they would have shot the gun man soon after his opening salvo. Unfortunately for a definite conclusion ( yet fortunately for sweet sanity) the following observation also has equal validity: If the student body and staff were heavily armed, then the possibility of more shootings by students and staff increases. In fact, the shooting might have taken place pre-2007, given the armed tension of finals week in 2005. It all hinges on whether we with our magnificent insight can spot the future perpetrator. Given our history ( "he was the nicest guy on the block.", "so-and-so was a scout master, he always helped out. I can't believe he'd do such a thing!" etc., etc., etc.), this is doubtful. If we can spot the future perpetrator, then all we have to do is deny fire power to the perp. However, if we deny fire power to the perp, then the rest of the population has no need for fire power to defend themselves from the powerless potential perpetrator. Hmmmm.... I give up. Say, did they ever find out who was the father ( or..."perpetrator") of Anna Nichole Smith's baby?

Virginia Tech 2: Rampage!

www.ableekertomorrow.com/whatsnew.html

Rampage: The Social Roots Of School Shootings is the title of a book by Katherine Newman, published in 2005. No one paid too much attention to it, for obvious reasons. Those reasons are that it speaks about ourselves, and we always find that an uncomfortable topic. It is a topic we only trot out after the outrages and rampages that punctuate our lives social. Then we forget it all. I excerpt from a website that references a book review no longer available to me: http://www.stiftungleostrauss.com/bunker.php?itemid=466

From these premises Newman forwards five necessary conditions for rampages. First, the shooter must see himself as marginal to his immediate social worlds, and as having lowly status in peer hierarchies. Some were victims of bullying and ridicule, but often they simply felt socially isolated, resentful, and desperate. Second, they suffer from a host of individual vulnerabilities that magnify the impact of this marginality, i.e. shooters' deteriorating mental states worsened their sense of isolation and paranoia. Rather than being impulsive or suddenly erratic, the shooters' great common fault was to ruminate and obsess over their social difficulties. Most had at least once attempted suicide. Third, all shooters had access to 'cultural scripts' that glorify armed attack. By venerating social blueprints that connect manhood to violence, guns, domination, and the thrill of terrifying the innocent, would-be shooters understood that outward aggression would somehow reinstate their status. In their own minds, these scripts offered a 'masculine exit' from social subordination. Fourth, local surveillance systems failed to provide warnings. Most shooters were doing moderately well in school, and most lacked extensive histories of criminality. Yet, Newman argued that enough warning signs were present in each case. Shooters usually uttered threats leading to their rampages, but were not heard beyond their peers, or were ignored by adults. These would-be killers thus fell under the radar screen of adult networks.

Due to a lack of official coordination between schools, law enforcement, and mental health agencies, no one individual had access to all the relevant information that would allow them to piece together the many warning signals that existed across the disparate spheres of school, family, or neighbourhood. Finally, each shooter had access to guns, the plentiful availability of guns in rural areas made them easily accessible to troubled youth. The paragraphing is mine. I have difficulty reading ( always have) and need to spread things out a bit. Read this before it is out of the public eye and American Idol returns !