Didactic Synapse

“Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo. It is a luxury for the affluent, a sop to the guilt of the politically inactive, a comfort to those who continue to enjoy the amenities of privilege.” — Leon Eisenberg

“All the pessimists in world history together are nothing against reality.” — Elias Canetti

“[A pessimist is] a man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.” — George Bernard Shaw

Note: I haven’t read the books. If you feel this disqualifies me from responding to the show, it’s probably best that you stop reading now. You will be missed.

Game of Thrones is the Human Centipede of fantasy epics in the 21st century. Both stories revel in the deplorable wretchedness of humans at their worst, without any viable mention of compassion, empathy, or conscience. Both stories work primarily to shock and revolt audiences, exploiting our emotions rather than digging into the deep soil of humanity.

There’s no question about the skill of Monsieur Martin (and the show’s writers) in creating complex characters, effective dialogue, and epic story arcs. My complaint is not with his skill with the tools of fiction writing; my complaint is with how he uses these tools.

There’s also no question about — and therefore hopefully no reason for me to discuss — the horrible brutality of GoT. We’re introduced to sympathetic characters and hopeful situations, only to watch them mutilated without mercy. Much has been written about the veneer of Schadenfreude that permeates Martin’s work, and many of his fans delight in watching newcomers cringe and squirm as good butchered by evil.

Responding to this phenomenon, Martin is quite clear. When asked by Entertainment Weekly if his books present a cynical view of human nature, he said:

I think the books are realistic. I’ve always liked gray characters. And as for the gods, I’ve never been satisfied by any of the answers that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the world full of rape and torture?

A fair question, and I wish neither to argue to problem of evil from scratch, nor demand a theistic narrative paradigm. But Martin’s worldview as depicted in GoT is unrelentingly negative, and it is pessimistic. It pretends that compassion and empathy are statistically insignificant freaks of nature.

But this is not a full and fair accounting of reality, and I am tired of seeing hideous atrocities presented as the only “real” things, with the vast array of other human interaction derided as “unrealistic”.

To wit: Martin was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He worked with the VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America) program, part of Johnson’s War on Poverty. He clearly believed that there was a pathology in carpet-bombing thatched huts in Vietnam, and that he could do some good in refusing to fight.

So where are the conscientious objectors in Westeros? Why are there no scenes of compassion triumphing in small ways against hideous evil? I’m not calling for simplistic Pollyanna happiness, nor an idiotic deus ex machina to stop the wicked machinations of the Lannisters. But blood and suffering are the only “reality” we’re given. (A few tiny moments of romantic or motherly tenderness are inevitably bookmarked by elongated sequences of torture, rape, and murder.)

At the risk of repeating myself: Those horrible atrocities are not the full and fair reality of our world.

You cannot tell the story of the Santa Cruz massacre without mentioning Amy Goodman. You cannot tell the story of Black September without mentioning Marie Colvin. You cannot tell the story of Rwanda without mentioning Paul Rusesabagina. You cannot tell the story of the My Lai massacre without mentioning Hugh Thompson, Jr. And so on.

I’m not done with Game of Thrones, but I’m sick of its facile emotional exploitation. If a storyteller asks me to give up 30 hours of my life, I think I deserve a little more than crude manipulation and superficial reminders of how nasty people can be.

I can’t stop thinking about the horror and sadness in this story about three kids who killed a guy because they “were bored and didn’t have anything to do”. Obviously my heart goes out to his family, and I simply cannot imagine the grief and pain they’re going through.

And I also feel horrible for the kids who did this terrible thing, and what their families must be going through. They more or less ended their own lives on that day as well. As Wackle says in Rudy Rucker’s novel Spaceland, “Killing kills the killer.” (Of course their lives were probably pretty horrible before that fateful moment.)

It’s tempting to think about all of this as a post-modern phenomenon, something totally new and unique to our decrepit age. But I’m pretty certain that it’s not. There’s an important scene in the movie No Country for Old Men in which Bell and his Uncle Ellis discuss when Bell’s father was killed in a savage and horrible way. Ellis says:

What you got ain’t nothin new. This country is hard on people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it yet folks never seem to hold it to account.

(The conversation is a bit different in the novel, and contains an important story about Bell’s actions in the war.)

I’m also reminded of this comment made by the Chicago writer Nelson Algren, in an interview from 1963:

I think the trouble with American literature is it doesn’t know who it is. […] American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, “Isn’t anybody on my side?” It’s also the phrase I used that was once used in a court of a kid who, on being sentenced to death, said, “I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow.”

More recently I think American literature is also the fifteen-year-old who, after he had stabbed somebody, said, ‘Put me in the electric chair — my mother can watch me burn.’

Even more recently, American literature is a seventeen-year-old kid picked up on a double murder charge, two killings in a boat, in a ship off Miami, who said he was very glad it happened, he had absolutely no regrets, his only fear was that he might not get the electric chair. He had no vindictiveness toward those two people he killed. He said they were pretty good about it. They didn’t know, they had no idea, that he was going to come up with a knife. He had, in fact, a little bit of admiration for their coolness.

One of them, finding himself stabbed, said, “Why?” He wanted to know. He said, “I can’t tell them why.” But I know he’s been trying to get out of it since he’s six years old. This is an honors student, you understand, this is a bright boy from a respectable home. He never remembers a time when he wasn’t fully convinced that death was better than life. And now he was very contented, his only worry being that he might not get the electric chair. He’s afraid of that. That’s the only fear he has, that he might have to continue to live. I think that’s American literature.

American literature is The King and Duke selling Jim out in Huck Finn. It’s Cholly doing horrible things to his daughter in The Bluest Eye. It’s Bob Ewell doing horrible things to his daughter in To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s Lenny killing things in Of Mice and Men. It’s the firebombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five.

I want to turn away from this sadness and horror, but I can’t. And I guess it’s a good thing. As Franz Kafka supposedly said:

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Now I’m going to go do something for someone else, because that’s usually the best way to deal with this sort of thing.

A little something I made today. True story!

It’s only been, what? Four years since the last episode? I hope it was worth the wait!

DS #84: Pegatron and the Cult of Money

Top Links + Action

• Apartheid Regime Bomb Victim Father Michael Lapsley on Using Forgiveness to Heal From Tragedy
• Wal-Mart and The Gap refuse to sign worker protection agreement
• Simpsons food court at Universal Studios
• Take Action: Stop US government spying!

Current Events

• 200 killed in Bangladesh factory building collapse
• Different places have different safety rules and that’s okay
• Bangladesh collapsed factory owner arrested
• Blaze at locked Chinese poultry slaughterhouse kills 119
• Texas fertilizer company didn’t heed disclosure rules before blast
• Fracking drives potentially explosive demand for potentially explosive ammonia factories
• Q&A with Josh Fox: Gasland II
• Woman in Kuwait gets 11 years for “insulting” tweet
• News archive, 1994: MADD co-founder goes to work for liquor lobby

Economics

• How austerity kills
• “How austerity kills” co-author Stuckler on DemocracyNow
• Apple shifts production from Foxconn to Pegatron
• Pope: “cult of money”
• How many HFT firms actually use Twitter to trade?
• Twitter hack was the work of the Syrian Electronic Army
• How the robots lost: HFT’s rise and fall
• Are American taxpayers subsidizing Wal-Mart’s low wages?
• “The Low-Wage Drag on Our Economy: Wal-Mart’s low wages and their effect on taxpayers and economic growth” (pdf)
• Why ending extreme poverty is not enough

Education

• There are no D or F schools in Wisconsin
• “Pay for performance” pitfalls
• Common Core: Cutting edge or dull blade?
• Tea Party groups rallying against Common Core
• Be glad for our failure to catch China’s schools
• French teacher shows pupils horror movie “Saw”
• Why French kids don’t have ADHD

Killer Robots, Etc

• Summary of Obama speech on drones
• The Drone War: A comprehensive map of lethal US attacks
• Medea Benjamin on why she disrupted Obama’s speech
• UN report wants moratorium on killer robots
• Teaching robots to anticipate human actions
• Modelling scouts target anorexia patients
• The Tumblr bucket: Yahoo needs to make cash off it
• Reading literature makes us smarter and nicer
• “Urgent need” to remove space debris

Hip-Hop

Sir Mix-A-Lot: Swass

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkaJoMicA04

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR7mRC85C3c

This episode has a gross title, but it’s a real quote from Dark Pools, the book I’m reading right now about high-frequency trading. Also this episode: stabbing people with letter openers, psychotic robots that follow you into the bathroom, killer super weeds, and cinder blocks to the face! Enjoy.

 DS #82: Trading Through The Puke

Top 3 Links of the Week

• Herbicide-resistant “super weeds” increasingly plaguing farmers
• Dying veteran writes to George W Bush and Dick Cheney
• United by loss, Israeli and Palestinian dads call for a joint nonviolent intifada against occupation
• Take Action: Tell Obama not to appoint fracking advocate Dr. Ernest Moniz to Dept. of Energy
• Also: A Place at the Table

Current Events

• 14 adults “cured” of HIV
• New LBJ tapes: Nixon sabotaged Paris Peace Talks to win election
• Dying Veteran Tomas Young on DemocracyNow
• BBC documentary podcast: After Saddam
• Democracy Now: Iraq is a failed state existing in “utter devastation”
• Torture at Guantanamo
• The Geography of defense cuts (infographic)
• After three years, BP is finally headed to court
• Companies, environmentalists agree on new fracking rules
• Windfarm sickness spreads by word of mouth, Australian study finds
• India covering canals with solar panels
• Two boys killed in Afghanistan airstrike
• Wisconsin legislator admits to never having transvaginal ultrasound
• New Pope chooses “Francis” after the saint of the poor
• Pope Francis’ Junta Past
• CPAC’s “Trump the Race Card” forum derailed by an actual segregationist

Economics

• Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson: Let banks go bankrupt
• Ha-Joon Chang on laziness and poverty
• Will robots create economic utopia?
• EU’s financial tax is likely to spur trading exodus
• American University law student: SEC will regulate HFT
• Australia finds HFT fears “overstated” but considers minimum hold time
• Demos Report: Cracks in the pipeline part two: HFT
• European officials cap banker bonuses at one year’s salary
• Vandana Shiva on Democracy Now
• Take action against super weeds: JustLabelIt.org

Education

• Value-added teacher evaluation models fail kids and communities
• 100 education experts write to the Independent to protest misguided UK education reform
• Black Agenda Report: Why isn’t closing 129 Chicago public schools news?
• Water into wine? Jeb Bush, Cheapistas, and education reform
• Scott Walker proposes expanding voucher school program in Wisconsin

Killer Robots, Etc

• General Stanley McChrystal on drones
• Pentagon robot hurls concrete blocks
• MarionetteBot fuses Kinect and mannequins
• Tongue computers are just the beginning
• Print your own AR-15
• Dogs understand human perspective: Study
• First came the Russian meteor, now the meteorite deals
• JJ Fad: Supersonic

Hip-Hop

Snoop Lion on Tavis Smiley (Sorry, the PBS embed isn’t working.)