dagblog - Comments for "Stockholm (Resilience) Syndrome"

People at the time didn't

Elusive Trope — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:38:58 +0000

In reply to The more things change the

People at the time didn't seem to be ready to follow Beale's window shouting instructions, they could take it some more

I think you're right about this. The zeitgeist at the time if any more along the lines of what Larry was saying - exhaustation. People just wanted to get back to their lives. Such that the 70's was called the Me Generation. Which then turned into a nation that embraced Reagan and Gecko.

But the conditions were in many ways the same as they are now and their were people who were feeling like Beale. There were the people of all political stripes - environmentalists watching the planet going down the tubes and their were the traditional white heterosexual males who begin to see their way of life under attack who later found voices like Downey and Rush. There were some in the far right religious community believing the nation was going to hell in a handbasket and who later emerge as the Moral Majority. There was the beginnings of the punk rock scene stirring in places like NY and the Ramones.

So in the late 70's there were the vanguard of the mad as hell zeitgeist. But through the 80's and 90's, most still had some hope that they could bend the trajectory of the country and culture their way. What we are seeing now I think is from all sides of the political and cultural divides is a collective frustration toward "The System" and those who are perceived to be in control. Although there isn't agreement about exactly what constitutes the elites (at the same time there seems to be some more movement towards a consensus even though there is some resistance from the different sides admitting their commonality because of the years of partisanship and scapegoating).

Also, I think of a real life

artappraiser — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:54:29 +0000

In reply to The more things change the

Also, I think of a real life Howard Beale Show movement not being born until the Morton Downey Jr show, with wide syndication starting in 1988. And what he was doing was very controversial, enough so that for quite some time no one tried to copy him. I'll never forget meeting a German client the evening of his arrival in NYC, maybe 1989, in front of his hotel; the first thing he said was I just watched the most incredible TV show! with his mouth agape.

The more things change the

artappraiser — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:16:26 +0000

In reply to The more things change the

The more things change the more they stay the same.

A nit on that, sort of hard to explain. I think the Howard Beale rant and the whole movie was more visionary about the future rather than reflecting the contemporary mood. When I first saw it, I don't remember seeing much to connect to the current zeitgeist, it was more like a wacky fantasy of how things might turn out in the future. People at the time didn't seem to be ready to follow Beale's window shouting instructions, they could take it some more, it was more like they were worried/scared, about crime, unemployment/inflation, energy costs, not really angry/mad as hell. Even the Japan car smashing stuff, which I would equate to the "mad as hell" thing, didn't happen until a couple years after the movie came out.

But Chayefsky did turn out to be incredibly visionary, way ahead of time. As I see it, the angry mad as hell not going to take it anymore started with Bush v. Gore, Bush II and the blogosphere, the Howard Beale Show thing, i.e., turning news into entertainment, rants and opinion really just ramped up with Monica Lewinsky and Rush Limbaugh; and the corporate oligarchy ruling the world thing that Howard Beale gets into at the end really just became a common meme since 2007, financial crash starting; before that it was the exclusive province of new-world-order conspiracy buffs. I think it took a long time for his vision to show itself.

The more things change the

Elusive Trope — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:46:25 +0000

In reply to The SLA was just one of the

The more things change the more they stay the same:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

The SLA was just one of the

artappraiser — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:51:37 +0000

In reply to They were ethereal terrorists

The SLA was just one of the players that shifted the performance pathos to bathos.

That's a good way of describing how I remember feeling about it at the time; I would have been a junior/senior at UW-Madison. When I had arrived as a freshman, the whole revolutionary action thing was still taken very seriously and admired (I myself went there early, as a 17-year-old, hoping I wouldn't miss "the revolution," and I managed to experience the tail end of it.)

By '75, the whole Hearst/SLA was indeed bathos to nearly everyone as I remember it, with ironies abounding. (Youthquake had evolved to disco-nation/Studio 54/ Warhol/Grace Jones.) So much so that the parody of an SLA-type group selling out for ratings in the movie Network (of 1976) was like a deliciously delightful treat of recognition.

They were ethereal terrorists

Elusive Trope — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:18:53 +0000

In reply to Oh bravo Trope. I wish you

They were ethereal terrorists – terrorists of the mind. It was as if they were presenting a proposition: Even if one violates every moral principle one can still claim to be a moral actor. At the time I found this whole affair evocative of the struggle for self-awareness as described by Andre Gide in “The Immoralist.” “It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.” And what a perfect dénouement the SLA episode was to the story of rebellion and moral conflict in the 1960’s, the war in Vietnam and the ascendance and reign of a mad President, a story that comes to an end in the exhaustion of the national conscience itself.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I enjoyed your thoughts on the matter, but especially liked the above portion.

I think many people just see the Vietnam war as a 60's thang, but a month before Patty Hearst's abduction in 1974

After two clashes that left 55 South Vietnamese soldiers dead, President Thiệu announced on 4 January that the war had restarted and that the Paris Peace Accord was no longer in effect.

The exhaustion of the national consciousness probably peaked in that moment a little more than a year later in April 1975 with this image coming through their tv screens.

The SLA was just one of the players that shifted the performance pathos to bathos.

Against the backdrop of the Watergate Scandal that had been going on for two years, with Nixon finally resigning a few months later in August of 1974.

I was young enough to be pissed coming home from school to find my cartoons being interrupted by a bunch of men in suits asking questions of other men in suits

Stoppard could see the 70s come from a mile away

The Player: We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

Guildenstern: Is that what people want?

The Player: It's what we do.

Maybe Eastwood with The Gauntlet was trying to be postmodern. I was 13 when I saw it in the theater, I liked the scene when the police watched the house collapse because it had been riddled with so many bullet holes as the best part.

Maybe the SLA should have pondered what Dirty Harry said in 1971:

"You've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?"

But what I had forgotten about the whole Hearst episode was

When the attempt to swap Hearst for jailed SLA members failed, the SLA demanded that the captive's family distribute $70 worth of food to every needy Californian – an operation that would cost an estimated $400 million. In response, Hearst's father arranged the immediate donation of $6 million worth of food to the poor of the Bay Area. After the distribution of food, the SLA refused to release Hearst because they deemed the food to have been of poor quality. (In a subsequent tape recording released to the press, Hearst commented that her father could have done better.)

Somehow that seems to make it all so perfect.

[and yeah I think we would be good neighbors]

Oh bravo Trope. I wish you

LarryH — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:56:25 +0000

In reply to Stockholm (Resilience) Syndrome

Oh bravo Trope. I wish you lived next door. The conversations we could have. I would like to encourage you in the strongest terms to give this piece a wider distribution, at least by posting it at some larger web venues.

There is much to ponder (and pursue) in your thoughts here. For now I will just offer a couple of personal notes. As a Californian at the time, I followed the drama of the SLA/Patty Hearst affair with anguish and real interest. The Hibernia Bank branch was actually about 10 blocks from my family home. At the end I sat with an odd collection of acquaintances and watched live news coverage of the final assault on the SLA hideout in Los Angeles.

To my mind there was never anything to recommend the SLA. And yet from the beginning I had to grant them a certain talent for theatre. From the choice of a meaningless name to the musical “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the lives of the people,” it was a kind of mad satire – part Monty Python, part what today we might think of as “Steven Colbert-esque.” There are two thoughts of mine about all of this that I think comport with your very thoughtful reflection on this whole affair.

The first is that at the time and for ever more I have thought that intended or not the SLA presented a kind of moral hypothetical that is not easily resolved. With each outrage the SLA violated one after another of the mores that any revolutionary clique would claim as their raison d’etre. But they weren’t really a terrorist agency. They weren’t the Baader- Meinhof or Red Brigade. They had no practical ambition. They were ethereal terrorists – terrorists of the mind. It was as if they were presenting a proposition: Even if one violates every moral principle one can still claim to be a moral actor. At the time I found this whole affair evocative of the struggle for self-awareness as described by Andre Gide in “The Immoralist.” “It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.” And what a perfect dénouement the SLA episode was to the story of rebellion and moral conflict in the 1960’s, the war in Vietnam and the ascendance and reign of a mad President, a story that comes to an end in the exhaustion of the national conscience itself.

For an ex-hippy and professional iconoclast these musings were rewarding enough at the time but for the ordinary citizen this was a period bereft of much solace. For them Patty Hearst had to be guilty. Otherwise they faced the specter of social norms as merely a veneer that covers a pitiless reality. And as I say the national conscience was exhausted. Nixon begat Carter who begat Reagan. In the end the general public settled for a second rate cowboy impersonator and escaped into a rapturous embrace all their own.

My other thought has to do with the dramatic scene of the assault on the SLA hideout, reprised by the deft hand of Clint Eastwood in his movie “The Gauntlet.” As in the plot of the movie, the idea of the SLA coming to some public trial was unthinkable. It would have meant another long and difficult public debate about morality, violence and the whole “means and ends” thingy. One can almost imagine dramatic readings of “The Stranger” (Camus) or The Trial (Kafka) on the steps of the L.A. courthouse. The nation was still teetering on the edge of its own moral abyss and such a public debate could easily fly out of control. No. No trial. No speeches. What was needed was to use a prototype of what we now know of as “shock and awe.” Case closed. And the message could not have been lost on the general public. War is the path to peace. No. Better. War is Peace. Case also closed.

Epilog: I am a recovering Catholic. Back in the day when I was fighting my way out of that abyss, I was quick to challenge even the hint of any theism. Nowadays, safely distance from its clutches and much more experienced, I am loath to take up the argument. I have not found any easy alternative consolation for the discontents of life. So if today I meet a theist, worst yet a Christianist, I keep silent. In all candor I don’t have an alternative way to ease their pain and I am not a sadist. “Go in peace” I say. So while I pursue my solitary quest for understanding and “progress,” I can not in good conscience begrudge another human their moment of peace and concordance, even if it is based on a fantasy.

Thanks again for your hard work and creativity on this subject.

Hope you get a chance to blog

Elusive Trope — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:02:21 +0000

In reply to Excellent post, especially

Hope you get a chance to blog about it.

There is something to Obama's campaign saying "you are the change you've been looking for." While it is nice to have someone who can become the voice of a movement, like MLK, in the end we do have no one but ourselves. The thing is, the leaders will eventually follow. They will adapt if we are persistent. And maybe then there can be a transformation. We just need a way to frame the next step. the 99% has been effective, but what's next? I don't think there is a single answer, but a lot of little answers happening all over the place.

Excellent post, especially

erica20 — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:03:29 +0000

In reply to Stockholm (Resilience) Syndrome

Excellent post, especially regarding the sharing of resilience. I said last week that we would need to be ahead of the president on some of the important issues--ie sharing--but haven't had a chance to blog it yet.

Please keep bringing this up.

I think we got the wrong

Elusive Trope — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 04:17:56 +0000

In reply to This is a remarkable piece

I think we got the wrong directions for the ransom's drop spot.