dagblog - Comments for "Falling Sideways"

It would seem that the

Elusive Trope — Sun, 26 May 2013 22:51:16 +0000

In reply to Seems to that a lot of "home

It would seem that the personality or mind set that makes one more likely to blow people up is also more easily manipulated by a dominate alpha male.

Seems to that a lot of "home

artappraiser — Sun, 26 May 2013 19:46:17 +0000

In reply to Falling Sideways

Seems to that a lot of "home grown jihadis" are shaping up to be William Foster types, the only difference being that it's not "the deck is stacked against white men who play by the rules," but "the deck is stacked against Muslims." The London perp has loser written all over him so far, couldn't even be successful with becoming a bonafide jihadi: He was arrested with a group of five others trying to travel to Somalia to join militant group al Shabaab.

Not just the Tsarnaev story comes to mind, others like the Fort Hood shooter come to mind. Anwar al-Awlaki apparently really had skill in pushing this type's buttons....

The veil separating reality

moat — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 23:06:16 +0000

In reply to But was what people were

The veil separating reality from illusion is a problematic boundary; a place or many places where people line up on either side to marvel at the unreality of the other.

I am certain that those veterans you encountered saw a "true face of humanity" that the people back in the "World" did not. There are reasons to doubt that it is the only face. In his book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges speaks eloquently of how combat completely engages a person and that the experience of it can dull the senses of life outside of war. So for him, the land of illusion is mapped by means of a specific type of relativity:

Illusions punctuate our lives, blinding us to our own inconsistencies and repeated moral failings. But in wartime these illusions are compounded. The cause, the protection of the nation, the fight to "liberate Kuwait" or wage "a war on terrorism," justifies the means. We dismantle our moral universe to serve the cause of war. And once it is dismantled it is nearly impossible to put it back together.

Much has and can be argued about this statement but I don't offer it as a last word on the matter but as a use of a veil that places what is happening in a different light. Looking from this "reality", the veterans and the citizens they fought for are part of the same catastrophe, seeing each other in the reversed manner of a mirror.

Disillusionment, the removal of the veil, is depicted by Auden in The Shield of Achilles as the moment the goddess Thetis watched Hephaestos at work on her son's armor:

She looked over his shoulder

For athletes at their games,

Men and women in a dance

Moving their sweet limbs

Quick, quick, to music.

But there on the shining shield

His hands had set no dancing-floor

But a weed choked field.

_______

Your investigation of the common thread connecting why these "losers" lost it is worthwhile. I think the work requires many more than one axis or range of values for the comparisons to hit the mark. I will mention just one that I have been thinking about.

There is the element of renunciation common in these stories that points to other choices than the ones made. Foster could have gotten out of his car and turned his back on every item that was on his agenda that day. He could have availed himself of Dharma and began freeing his mind from hatred. Or he could decide to do nothing but what occurred to him after deciding to leave his former life. The paths of freedom may not be infinite but more than my tiny mind can survey.

Ebert's comments sort of touch on this aspect; If you are going to blow up your world, why is it the same world with the same obligations after the "break" occurs? In the language of scripts, there is a logic of pretending that deals with failure by pretending harder.

There was an account by someone who knew Zawahiri when he was young that rattles around in my head (sorry don't have the reference at hand); the person spoke of Zawahiri as someone who engaged with the people around him when he was young and then a time came when the narrator met him and reported: "He was there but he wasn't there. I no longer existed."

I will treasure this rant for

Richard Day — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:24:42 +0000

In reply to Someone once said almost 40

I will treasure this rant for the rest of my worthless existance.

hahahahahahaha

I hereby render unto Trope the Dayly Comment/Reply/RANT of the Day for this here Dagblog Site, given to all of him from all of me.

hahahahahah

I really have never cared about toasters per se. hahahahahahahah

Stop Making Sense.

Michael Maiello — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:44:04 +0000

In reply to ...voiced rational complaints

Stop Making Sense.

...voiced rational complaints

Elusive Trope — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:23:00 +0000

In reply to Another fantastic essay,

...voiced rational complaints while acting so irrationally.

Maybe part of all this is trying to see the rationality in what appears to be an irrational act (which is definitely not the same as justifying the act).

Herbert Blau wrote back in the seventies [emphasis mine]:

In the era of information systems, we don't know where we are, as if all knowledge (as it is) is the agency of illusion, part of the conspiracy, since we don't appear to know what we know either. Thus, the life we actually live is threatened at the extremes, as if there were still at the periphery a barbarian invader. The via media under tension becomes a virtually excluded middle, and all we appear to have left is the pathology of the margin, a via negativa, which is the path by which reason yields to the unreasoning for the sake of making sense of a dead end.

An illustration of our times

Elusive Trope — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:08:41 +0000

In reply to However, Marty is a humble

An illustration of our times maybe is that these days Hollywood gives us The 40 Year Old Virgin instead?

Yes. I would toss into this

Elusive Trope — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:48:42 +0000

In reply to This story really inspires my

Yes. I would toss into this that here in America there was the post WWII economic boom, a rise in living standards and income (along with a rise in technological improvements) that has few equals in history. I would argue that the collective notion that one's children should have a qualitatively (esp economically) better life than one had arose during this boom. Before that most people assumed one would follow more or less in one's parents footsteps. The rich stayed rich, the family farm stayed in the family, the miner's son became a miner. Life went on as it always had.

I would also put out there that the Spartan children were less traumatized by the savages of war when they first encountered it simply because it was what they were raised to expect from life (and death). Long ago I remember some pundit on PBS talking about how poverty in the Philippines was physically more harsh than in the United States, but more pyschologically painful in the US, mainly because one was surrounded by those not living in poverty, because they were constantly bombarded with messages that said they should have all these things.

However, Marty is a humble

artappraiser — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:30:57 +0000

In reply to This line in his bio caught

However, Marty is a humble lonely loser who does not act out in violence but finds love and joy with another humble lonely loser.

Edit to add: Apropos of my most recent comment elsewhere on this thread, I am just reminded by re-reading the plot synopsis that at the end it is implied that he opts out of the extended family that strangles and binds him, and goes for the individualism, for him and Clara together alone, happy.

This story really inspires my

artappraiser — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:12:50 +0000

In reply to But was what people were

This story really inspires my thinking, combined with the Network/Chayefsky quote and thinking about Chayefsky's time frame. Bear with me, it's convoluted. I am thinking along the lines that few in the western world considered fairness and a happy life as a birthright until after WWII. When the prominence of the nuclear family came about after the war, and release from extended family and tribe, individualism flourished, and you were no longer bound to do things like stay married forever even if you were miserable, nor obey your mother, father, great aunt (and your Uncle Ruslan) forever, nor practice the trade of your father and grandfather, etc. Prior to that, the right to a pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence were still quite radical words, even though they were just about pursuit. Seems to me that many Vietnam vets were the first vets raised to believe that everyone deserved to be happy, to believe that that just didn't happen by luck and that most people were miserable, and that everything could be good., that most people needn't live miserable lives. Hence, seeing the "illusion" after seeing war.

Maybe expectations of happiness and fairness are what's really new in the world?