Suffer Little Children

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness. —That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government … The History of the present King of Great Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World. 

He has refused his Assent to Laws, most wholesome and necessary for the public Good. … He has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither … He has obstructed the Administration of Justice …

—Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence of the United States

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The Trump administration is separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents and keeping said children in detention centers. Some of these children are less than two years old.

This is a gross abuse of human and familial rights—I don't care what your general perspective on politics is. Two things, and two things only, justify ripping a child away from its parents: abuse or neglect that endanger the child's life or health, and incapacity (financial or otherwise) to care for the child. 'Being an immigrant,' documented or not, isn't either of those things.

Also, let's be a little more clear what we mean when we talk about 'detention centers.' They're fucking cages. Like animals. As President Trump said they were. This is no civilized enforcement of federal law, this is ethnic goddamned cleansing.

Oh, but it's not really an ethnic cleansing because it's only of people who came here illegally? Sure. And Hitler protected his old friend and chauffeur Emil Maurice from Himmler, even though Maurice was an eighth Jewish. Racists, it turns out, are not always very consistent. And sure, maybe, maybe, Trump isn't a racist, even though he referred to Latino nations as shitholes and Latino people as animals and neo-Nazis as having good people among them. In all seriousness, a person could do those things and not believe that other races are inferior to theirs—though they would still be doing and saying horrible things. Meanwhile, tearing families apart is still fucking monstrous.

Also, let's park for a moment on the whole concept of legality and illegality. The point of having laws is to enforce justice. Strictly speaking, and following St Augustine and many other doctors of the Church, an unjust law has no force. So it is quite pertinent to ask whether the immigration policies of the United States are in fact just.

They sure don't make sense in the context of the Founding Fathers' writings on the subject, as cited above. Inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e. well-being, both physical and otherwise) don't support the idea of a closed border on the face of it—I mean, insofar as a closed border is literally a bar to liberty and, for the overwhelming majority of the immigrants in question here, also a bar to the pursuit of happiness. The fact that immigrating legally can easily take a few years, several thousand dollars, and a flawless attention to Kafkaesque details is just icing; though this is one of those storebought cakes where the icing is about eight feet thick. And, much like those storebought cakes, a lot of the people who need and want to immigrate the most, due to violence and destitution and a lot of other things, can't afford to spend two years and five thousand dollars on doing so. Which, in practice, makes American immigration law not a ban on immigrants, but a ban on poor ones.

It might be argued that our health care system is overburdened and we can't afford these new people, and so on. I am not convinced of that. To begin with, as of 2017, the IMF rated the United States as one of the twenty wealthiest countries, per capita, in the world. We're ranked with places like Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Hong Kong, and the UAE (home of the cartoonishly affluent Dubai). I can easily believe that we as a people aren't willing to allocate enough of our money to the public good to support an influx of new people; or, more briefly, I can believe that we'd refuse to afford these new people. But I do not believe we can't. And I don't see why our selfishness should be their problem.

Further, there's the fact that our birthrate in the US has declined. In the long run, fewer babies means an aging population; and an aging population does mean a serious strain in our health care system—one that only new workers, both as producers of goods and services, and as sources of tax revenue, could relieve. But neither the prudential nor the legal aspects of this ghastly situation are, to me, primary.

Pilgrim praying in front of icon of Saint Mary, photo by Petar Milosevic

Are you a family values conservative? Keeping kids with their parents is pretty central to family values, and the Trump administration has betrayed that ideal. They are trying to manipulate you. Don't fall for it.

Do you reverence Scripture? Leviticus 19 says, If a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the strangeth that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God; and in the same style, Deuteronomy 10 says, The LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: he doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and the widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger. The apostles repeat the same principle in the New Testament: the author of Hebrews commands us, Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares; and our Lord himself relates the following, in a frightening parable:

When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you; for I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, unto everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. —Matt. 25

Christ's teaching was directed to individuals, not to societies? The Torah wasn't. The Torah was delivered only to Israel? Christ's teaching wasn't. And Christ's teaching both presupposed and at times expressly stated the validity of the Torah; and the Torah was made more toweringly perfect and unfathomably pure, not less so, by Christ's own teaching.

Christian, you must oppose this barbaric treatment of immigrants. It's not optional. It's not the difference between being a Christian and not being one; that difference is defined by the creeds. But it is the difference between honoring the Lord whose name you bear by putting his word before everything, and taking that name in vain to protect a President who doesn't deserve even your respect, let alone your worship.

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Whitsunday Eve

Whitsunday Eve: spirits, awake;
The hells beneath their masters shake;
For unmade Love-in-Light descends
On those their Maker called his friends,
To laurel them with stranger fire
Than priest or Levite could ensire.
From Babylon by riven tongue
Across the earth all men were flung
By the one Word, to curb their pride:
Now Zion meets a changing tide,
A living water-wave of speech,
Of strangers singing, each to each,
In words that only angels knew
Until these minds, uplifted, flew
On silver Dove-wings. Lips of gold
(As Hebrew prophets darkly told,
Before they knew or heard the laud
Goyim would offer to their God)
Proclaim the holy, trinal Breath,
He who woke Lazarus from death
At the Word of the Father: now
He makes the whole creation bow,
Entering in a lovelier light
Than yet had graced man's ghostly sight.
The rushing fire-wind-water sound
Makes all the infant Church resound;
Who once on Sinai fell with fear
Rains down in power and glory here --
Our Lord the Spirit, sacrament
Of God's own being. Heaven is rent
With cries of pure seraphic joy
That hell has no power to destroy;
For lo, the Church receives her birth
And call, to be upon the earth
Her Savior's Body, he her soul,
That his life may suffuse the whole
Creation by her agency;
For this was his great mystery,
His being we should share by grace
For that he shared our fleshly race;
His Spirit this great secret plumbs
And triumphs that his kingdom comes.

Men and Monsters, Part II

Anybody can enact that murder shall not be punishable by death; nobody can enact that the swallowing of a tumblerful of prussic acid shall not be punishable by death. In the former case, the connection between the two events is legal—that is, arbitrary; in the latter, it is a true causal relationship … When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence, and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God. …  

At the back of the Christian moral code we find a number of pronouncements about the moral law, which are not regulations at all, but which purport to be statements of fact about man and the universe, and upon which the whole moral code depends for its authority and its validity in practice. … If they are true, man runs counter to them at his own peril. He may, of course, defy them, as he may defy the law of gravitation by jumping off the Eiffel Tower, but he cannot abolish them by edict. Nor yet can God abolish them, except by breaking up the structure of the universe, so that in this sense they are not arbitrary laws. We may of course argue that the making of this kind of universe, or indeed of any kind of universe, is an arbitrary act; but, given the universe as it stands, the rules that govern it are not freaks of momentary caprice. 

—Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

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At first I’d been thinking of beginning with the sociological side of my first post; however, my language of divine judgment provoked more reaction than I’d expected, and anyway, on reflection it makes far more sense to begin with the spiritual. That spiritual side of things is the suggestion I made, or the suspicion I harbor, that the United States is a nation under judgment, due very largely to the war crimes of which we are historically guilty—but that notion needs a lot of unpacking.

To begin with, let’s consider what is meant by judgment. Usually, the image this summons to the imagination is one of God-as-cranky-old-man hitting people with bolts of smite because they’ve annoyed him in some way. This image actually does have a good use, to which we shall return later, but for the most part it’s stupid and terrible, and most of what it says to our minds and emotions should be discarded without hesitation.

A proper understanding of judgment is, rather, grounded in God’s character as the Creator, and the corresponding integrity of creation. In making the universe, God made an ordered reality, a universe in which cause and effect relate to one another in regular harmony. Why he did this is a question I can’t answer with certainty, and I have a hunch that it’s secretly nonsensical, like asking what the shape of yellow is, or whether eleven is solid, liquid, or gas; if God the Son is the Logos, then order is grounded not just in the choices, but in the being of God. At any rate he did make an ordered universe, and creatures like ourselves that not only rely on order to exist, but can’t even really imagine a world without it. The closest we can get is by mixing known elements of our world at random, but even this depends on our understanding of the order and defined things that we know.

This orderly creation in which we live is, also, the prerequisite for free will, which is itself a sine qua non of love. A world of pure chaos would be incomprehensible by definition, and no self-awareness or meaningful choice (which are the things we mean theologically by free will) would be possible. Accordingly, love, which is the most divine choice, would not be possible either.

But if the universe is ordered and governed by cause and effect, and if there are free agents in it, then suffering and evil become real possibilities. Through ignorance or inattention, any free being could run up against the order of the universe in a painful or damaging way; and through deliberate malice, any free being could attempt to violate, break, or circumvent that order. But freelance modifications of creation would require the same power (in the double sense of authority and ability) that the God who made it possesses; and we don’t have that. Accordingly, the effect of such attempts will naturally be as painful and damaging as mistakes made through ignorance, if not more so. And the more a creature perseveres in its error, the worse the consequences will be, until that creature is either destroyed or corrected.

Thus, judgment is not an arbitrary act of God, intruded into creation as a punishment for behavior he doesn’t like. Rather, it is a name for what happens when a creature defies the inner logic of creation, and is met by the self-consistency of that logic, experienced as hostile because of the creature’s own hostility. Judgment may, in that case, sound like a strange choice of name; which leads into the one great advantage of the ‘cranky old man’ depiction of God. By representing the Creator as a Person, this image can remind us that forgiveness, patience, restraint, and mercy are possible, too. C. S. Lewis, in his epistolary on prayer, Letters to Malcolm, wrote:

You suggest that what is traditionally regarded as our experience of God’s anger would be more helpfully regarded as what inevitably happens to us if we behave inappropriately towards a reality of immense power. As you say, ‘The live wire doesn’t feel angry with us, but if we blunder against it we get a shock.’ My dear Malcolm, what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? … The angry can forgive, and electricity can’t. 

And you give as your reason that ‘even by analogy the sort of pardon that arises because a fit of temper is spent cannot worthily be attributed to God nor gratefully accepted by man.’ But the belittling words ‘fit of temper’ are your own choice. Think of the fullest reconciliation between mortals. … Anger—no peevish fit of temper, but just, generous, scalding indignation—passes (not necessarily at once) into embracing, exultant, re-welcoming love. That is how friends and lovers are truly reconciled. Hot wrath, hot love. Such anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it. … Wrath and pardon are both, as applied to God, analogies; but they belong together to the same circle of analogy—the circle of life, and love, and deeply personal relationships.

Fine, fine. But what has all this got to do with describing America as a nation under judgment?

Our nation has, from its inception, been soaked in blood. With the exception of Rhode Island and parts of Pennsylvania, every square mile of US territory was either taken from its indigenous inhabitants by compulsion, or purchased from European powers that had done the same thing—England, Spain, France, Russia. The insultingly named ‘Indian reservations’ (as though they were parks maintained for endangered animals!), whose rights we regularly violate despite their technical status as independent nations, are an embarrassing continuation of colonialism. Our history in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries was imperfect even in relating to other Western powers; but we’ve really taken to war crimes since World War II. Interfering with other countries’ internal affairs, [1] killing foreign soldiers with no declaration of war, killing foreign civilian men, women, and children en masse, torturing prisoners of war … And all this is only about how the US deals with other countries, let alone immigrants and internal injustices like slavery, capitalist oppression, racism, and abortion.

John Gast, Spirit of the Frontier, 1872

I believe that, by this history of atrocities and by our general acquiescence to them (if not in many cases outright, vocal approval), we have invoked judgment upon ourselves. This violence indicates contempt for human life as such, and the nature of judgment is to work backwards, so that contempt of human life falls upon us. It certainly has: in the schools where we’ve taught children that destroying First Nation civilizations and killing or deporting them by the thousands was a historical footnote; at the military bases from which we’ve sent our brave boys to bomb Japanese or Vietnamese or Iraqi civilians with nuclear and chemical weapons, whose long-term effects we could never hope to control; in the office towers where the goods of clientele and employees alike are ruthlessly subordinated to profit.

Does this mean the individuals upon whom these judgments have fallen were the most guilty? No. It doesn’t mean they were guilty at all. Societies are vast webs of coïnherence, and as many people suffer for others’ sins as thrive on others’ virtues. This should be no new idea for the Christian: for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. The Last Judgment, the final settling of individual accounts, is yet to come, and while it tarries we still have an opportunity to invoke mercy, both for ourselves and for our society.

What does this invocation of mercy involve? First of all, individual repentance, because nothing can be done until and unless individual people—that is, you and I—own our thoughts, words, and behavior. To the extent that we’ve involved ourselves in social sins, whether by active approval or passive indulgence, we must repent: i.e., say that we’ve done wrong and that we’re sorry, ask for forgiveness from anyone we’ve wronged (God or neighbor), and resolve to do better.

Source

And then, as far as possible, we must participate in societal repentance. Now, maybe our own influence on society is a very small thing. Maybe all we can do is swallow our pride by letting someone win a Facebook argument and switch to fair-trade coffee. But, in truth, those things aren’t nothing. Small decisions to foster peace are where the power to make biggers decisions for peace comes from; it’s like lifting: you don’t start with benching 350 pounds. Then again, maybe our influence on society is a bigger thing than we think. Maybe we can sponsor the education of a child in a war-torn country, or write music that celebrates kindness and honesty, or help organize an anti-war campaign, or all sorts of things. But it’s always those little things coming from us individual people that multiply and grow and finally start moving whole cultures. Bartolomé de las Casas, William Wilberforce, Susan B. Anthony, Cardinal Manning, Eugene Debs, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr made things happen because they did not wait for others to act. They went and did something. It was that which inspired others to do something too.

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[1] I’m not saying that this is never justifiable. I am saying that we are way too ready to dictate to other states what they may and may not do.

Men and Monsters, Part I

Why? McVeigh told us at eloquent length, but our rulers and their media preferred to depict him as a sadistic, crazed monster who had done it for the kicks. 

—Gore Vidal, on the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 

It was Adela, yet it was not. It was her height, and had her movement. The likeness appeased Wentworth, yet he did not understand the faint unlikeness. He was up to her now, and he knew it could not be Adela, for even Adela had never been so like Adela as this. That truth which is the vision of romantic love, in which the beloved becomes supremely her own adorable and eternal self … that was aped for him then. The thing could not astonish him, nor could it be adored. It perplexed. He hesitated.
‘Who are you? You’re not Adela.’
The voice said: ‘Adela!’ and Wentworth understood that Adela was not enough, that Adela must be something different even from Adela if she were to be satisfactory to him, something closer to his own mind and farther from hers. She had been in relation with Hugh, and his Adela could never be in relation with Hugh. He had never understood that simplicity before. It was so clear now. 

—Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell

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Trigger Warning: Terroristic Language and Ideologies

On Monday the twenty-third, in Toronto, a man named Alek Minassian drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians and killed ten people. He faced the Canadian police, shouting ‘Kill me’ and apparently pointing a gun at them (it was later determined he had none), but was taken down without a shot by the incredibly brave Officer Ken Lam, and is now awaiting charges for his terroristic murders. Immediately before the spree, Minassian posted this on his Facebook page:

Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!

And, like a number of other people, I’m left wondering, What the fuck is going on with men in America right now?

Minassian was part of the self-styled online ‘incel’ movement, a portmanteau-abbreviation of involuntary celibate. I call it a movement only for lack of a better word. It isn’t monolithic or doctrinaire. For many, participating the incel community seems simply to be an expression of loneliness and depression in the face of sexual frustration, and some incel forums police radicalism quite strictly. But there are others in the community who pass from experience to philosophy, arguing that desirable women—‘Stacies’—are shallow and cruel, and only respond to muscular, alpha-type men—‘Chads’—whom the incels cannot become due to poor genetics. Incels, they reason, are thus deprived by an unjust social hierarchy of the sex they have a right to.

This might sound like an unfair caricature of even the lunatic fringe. It isn’t. Here is some of the milder content from ‘BlkPillPres,’ screenshotted by journalist David Futrelle:

This shit right here [the Toronto attack] is lifefuel for me and exactly what I was talking about, too many ER [Elliot Rodger] guys are using guns so its expected and they get taken down very quickly these days, not only that but having these killings only take place with guns makes normies feel safe. … You can’t ban hatred, hatred is all it takes to go do a mass killing event. This is literally what I asked for, somebody finally breaking the mold … ER doesn’t always have to be violent, it just has to be strategic and punish normies in some way, they need to be in constant fear for EVERY ASPECT OF THEIR LIFE …

I won’t horrify you with more of this satanic filth, and I sure as fuck won’t link to their website. Suffice it to say that it does not improve as it goes on.

Now, obviously men like this are outliers—if this were normal, what we’d have is not ghastly news stories, but civil war and socio-economic collapse. And obviously not all of the incel community is this way; a lonely young man can have any number of grievances, justified or not, without turning to violence to resolve them. And even among young men who get, in one way or another, radicalized, [1] not all turn to violence nor go this far. But the fact that these outliers are common enough to be noticed at all is what’s creepy and frightening, and it would behove us all to know what’s happening.

There are a number of stock answers, for this and other explosions of violence in our time, that I find rather unsatisfying. The language and identity of victimization that can be found in a lot of Incel forums, and indeed in a lot of contemporary culture. The tendency of some feminists to rail against men indiscriminately. The misogynistic male sense of entitlement to sex. The culture of death, fostered by euthanasia and abortion, that degrades all human dignity into human usefulness. Toxic masculinity and its impossible standards. Lack of gun control. Class warfare. Video games. Smoking in bed. Sunspots. Neap tides. eBay.

Any or all of those things could be contributing factors, but my gut’s telling me that no one of them, nor the sum of them, is the whole story. Now, from here forward, I’m embarking on a speculative examination of what the underlying problem may be. I doubt I have all the relevant facts at my disposal, and I welcome others’ input; nonetheless I’ll go ahead and speculate, because if we all just sit around with our thumbs up our asses for fear of being wrong, nothing will improve.

Let’s take a step back. Starting with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, there have been at least eighty mass shootings or terrorist attacks (foiled or successful, minor or major) on American soil, an average of one every three or four months for the last twenty-five years. These acts of violence have come from many very different sorts of men [2]: differing ethnic backgrounds, religions, parts of the country, and professed principles. Ravening, sexually motivated hatred of attractive women and of the men who sleep with them seems to be a comparatively new motive, while racism (principally against blacks), outrage over killings in the Middle East at the hands of the US military, homophobia, and anti-abortion wrath are long-standing culprits—though school shootings seem to present a much more puzzling problem, partly because, contrary to popular belief, mental illness and a history of bullying aren’t consistently to be found in shooters.

So … what? Are we supposed to think that, sometimes, dudes just kind of snap, apropos of nothing in particular, and decide to kill some folk?

I think there are two causes, one sociological and one spiritual. I want to explore both at greater length: here I’ll content myself with a précis of each.

The sociological one is that a lot of men today feel powerless—whether in the sense of having nothing worthwhile to do with their potential, or in the sense of feeling inadequate and weak. This isn’t to shunt aside the crippling loneliness that afflicts so much of Western culture, but the pain of that loneliness is shaped by the feeling of powerlessness, too; and powerlessness is, not necessarily a more important, but a different thing for men than it is for women. [3] The ‘primal’ expressions of characteristically male aggressor instincts aren’t needed in a technocratic, sedentary society (such as they arguably were even as late as the Industrial Revolution). The traditional institutions and expressions of masculinity, except for football I suppose, have been largely sidelined, de-gendered, or dismantled—and perhaps justly. But with nothing put in their place, men are left without the tools of coming to understand ourselves as men that most societies depend on for cohesion, and that most individuals use to build a sense of self. And that’s an ideal breeding ground for the alienated, angry, hurt young man who’s been given nothing constructive to do with his fire, and decides to turn that fire against others, to prove to them and especially to himself that he does have it.

The spiritual cause is harder to explain, without sounding superstitious. A person who doesn’t mind sounding superstitious might just drily point out that nearly the whole US is after all built on top of an Indian burial ground. The way I would put it is that I believe, or rather suspect, that we are a nation under judgment. Lots of fire-and-brimstone televangelists and hysterical Catholic conspiracy theorists like to say we’re under judgment because we tolerate the sin of Sodom; and I agree with them, if we turn to the pages of Scripture to find out what it in fact has to say about the sin of Sodom.

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good. … Thou also, which hast judged thy sisters, bear thine own shame for thy sins which thou hast committed more abominable than they: they are more righteous than thou … [4] 

And it isn’t just our cruelty to the poor (stop to reflect for a moment that many US cities have laws against private citizens giving to the homeless, and that many if not most have laws against panhandling; that is, laws against people in need asking for help). Consider. The US regularly interferes in the internal affairs of foreign nations, up to and including military action with no declaration of war and no international approval. That military action regularly incurs civilian casualties—or, to de-sanitize that concept a little, our boys regularly wind up killing unarmed men, women, and children. The US is the only country on earth to have ended a war with nuclear weapons, whose effects are completely uncontrollable, and did it by targeting civilian populations. This administration and the last two are all known for holding prisoners without counsel or trial indefinitely, and for practicing torture on prisoners, sometimes hundreds of times. That’s a pretty formidable list of war crimes; especially considering how many of them we packed into just the last quarter-century.

Did we really think there would be no consequences? That God would ignore all this?

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh, a veteran of the Gulf War (aka ‘Operation Desert Storm’), bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City. One hundred and sixty-eight people were killed, nineteen of them children due to the presence of a daycare center in the building; it was the single deadliest terrorist attack on American soil—for the next six years. He was mostly dismissed as a sadistic psycho by the press, but the truth is that he was something far more frightening: an eloquent, driven, rigorously consistent man with a defective conscience. But his defective conscience was a mirror of ours, and he held that mirror right up to our faces.

The [Clinton] administration has said that Iraq has no right to stockpile chemical or biological weapons (“weapons of mass destruction”)—mainly because they have used them in the past. Well, if that’s the standard by which these matters are decided, then the US is the nation that set the precedent. The US has stockpiled these same weapons (and more) for over 40 years. The US claims this was done for deterrent purposes during its “Cold War” with the Soviet Union. Why, then, is it invalid for Iraq to claim the same reason (deterrence) with respect to Iraq’s (real) war with, and the continued threat of, its neighbor Iran? 

The administration claims that Iraq has used these weapons in the past. We’ve all seen the pictures that show a Kurdish woman and child frozen in death from the use of chemical weapons. But, have you ever seen those pictures juxtaposed next to pictures from Hiroshima or Nagasaki? I suggest that one study the histories of World War I, World War II and other “regional conflicts” that the US has been involved in to familiarize themselves with the use of “weapons of mass destruction.” 

Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad? What about the big ones—Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (At these two locations, the US killed at least 150,000 non-combatants—mostly women and children—in the blink of an eye. Thousands more took hours, days, weeks, or months to die.) If Saddam is such a demon, and people are calling for war crimes charges and trials against him and his nation, why do we not hear the same cry for blood directed at those responsible and involved in dropping bombs on the cities mentioned above? 

… Hypocrisy when it comes to the death of children? In Oklahoma City, it was family convenience that explained the presence of a day-care center placed between street level and the law enforcement agencies which occupied the upper floors of the building. Yet, when discussion shifts to Iraq, any day-care center in a government building instantly becomes a “shield.” … Whether you wish to admit it or not, when you approve, morally, of the bombing of foreign targets by the US military, you are approving of acts morally equivalent to the bombing in Oklahoma City. [5]

And so we have to ask ourselves a very nasty question. Was Timothy McVeigh wrong only because bombing innocent people is wrong no matter the pretext? Or was he also wrong because even that wouldn’t wake us up?

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[1] I don’t propose to belabor the question of whether the kind of men who do these things count as terrorists. When your stated aim is to change society through violent acts that inspire fear, you’re a terrorist. You don’t need to be a Muslim, a Basque, an alienated veteran, or any other specific subcategory to qualify.

[2] Nearly all of them men. The only female shooter I came across in my research was Rachelle Shannon, an anti-abortion fanatic who attempted to murder Dr George Tiller (yes, that George Tiller) in 1993.

[3] Obviously I’m speaking in generalities, for convenience’s sake.

[4] Ezekiel 16.49-50, 52.

[5] An Essay on Hypocrisy, written and published in 1998 while McVeigh was in prison.

Review: "A Quiet Place"

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Horror seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance. After a decade or three of mostly formulaic and forgettable movies, films like V/H/S, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Babadook, The VVitch, Hush, The Invitation, and IT are a cut above the jump-scare-bound slasher films and predictable monsters of the nineties. I don’t often see movies while they’re still in the theater, but I went to see A Quiet Place, and loved it.

The premise of the film is that a race of man-eating creatures (whose origin, wisely in my opinion, is never explained) that are blind and hunt by sound have taken over, and those who survive have done so by never making more noise than a whisper, even creating safe outdoor paths out of sand on which they walk barefoot. The story follows a family eking out an agricultural living in the countryside, raising a deaf daughter and a hearing son—and trying to construct a soundproof room in their home, due to the baby they’re expecting. But even before the birth, keeping silent isn’t easy.

The Strong Points

The acting is outstanding at every point, whether spoken or signed. The cinematography is beautiful, taking in great sweeping shots of upstate New York’s forested mountains; the clear autumn sunshine provides a creepy counterpoint to the terror stalking the characters. The use of silence, which so many movies are afraid of, is superb, varying enough with ambient and exceptional sounds to engage the viewer, while still being continuous enough to effectively communicate the sense of massive wariness that is a ceaseless aspect of these characters’ lives. Even small details, like substitute Monopoly pieces made from yarn, are incorporated.

Like Hush, A Quiet Place made innovative use of a deaf protagonist. Ironically enough for a medium that started without sound, there don’t seem to be many of these: The Miracle Worker, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and Children of a Lesser God are the only others I’m familiar with. The film doesn’t (as Lonely Hunter did) break with the not-wholly-satisfying tradition of having the character’s deafness be central to the movie, and perhaps it couldn’t, given its premise; but it does avoid the more blatant pitfall of representing deafness solely as something to be overcome, and gives the character in question opportunities to use it to her advantage in key ways.

The Weak Points

The script isn’t great. The acting and directing compensate considerably; but the dialogue tends to fall victim to cliché in the more emotional moments of the film, which in turn causes their artistry to lurch uncomfortably. The plot, likewise, has some flaws. A few of them are continuity problems (how’d that monster get there?), a few are plausibility problems (why would they have kept batteries in something they’d never use?), and a few are just rather stereotypical story decisions that I was hoping A Quiet Place would be clever enough to avoid.

The biggest flaw, to my mind, however, was the decision to eventually show the monsters not only clearly, but close up. Almost any monster is frightening in proportion to its aura of mystery; but filmmakers love showing off their special effects, and A Quiet Place failed to resist the temptation. The result is that, from being an eerie, unearthly presence that we barely glimpse save by their ravagings early on in the movie, close to the end we get something that sort of looks like a cross between an inside-out ear model and a wet cockroach. Gross, but not nearly as intrinsically scary. A more imaginative cinematography might have allowed the concluding scenes to avoid this.

Should You See It?

Totally. Flaws notwithstanding it is an excellent film, plus John Krasinski with a beard is pretty hot. I place it right on the cusp between B+ and A-, in the same territory as IT.

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