Mothers’ Instinct

12 Friday Apr 2024

Posted by in Film Friday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

*Spoilers are to be expected*

“Science likes to strut around and Act Smart by putting its labels on everything, but if you look at them closely, you’ll see that they don’t really say much. “Genes”? “DNA”? Just scratching the surface. “Instinct”? You know what that means:

CURIOUS: “Why do birds fly South for the winter?”

SCIENCE: “Instinct.”

It means, “We don’t know.””

– From The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

The 2024 film, Mothers’ Instinct is an adaptation of the 2018 French film, Duelles, which was based on the novel of the same name by Barbara Abel. In the film, Alice, played by Jessica Chastain, lives next door to Céline, played by Anne Hathaway. When Alice sees Céline’s son Max, played by Baylen D. Bielitz, balancing precariously on the balustrade of her neighbour’s balcony, Alice runs into her neighbour’s house to pull Max back down, but she gets there too late and Max falls to his death.

Following the tragedy, Céline starts hanging around with Alice’s son, Theo, played by Eamon Patrick O’Connell, but she does several things that make Alice worried about her intentions towards him. Céline puts ‘Bunny’, the cuddly rabbit toy that Theo cannot sleep without, in the open casket with the body of Max, leading to Theo having a justifiable outburst at Max’s funeral. Céline does eventually give the toy back to Theo, asking for forgiveness.

Other suspect actions by Céline include taking Theo onto the same balcony of the house that Max fell from to blow bubbles; helping fix the birdhouse that Max had made and had been trying to hang on a branch when he fell to his death; and putting nuts out at a dinner party she has invited Alice’s family to when Theo is allergic to nuts, then suggesting he go and find something from the draining board, where he proceeds to eat some peanut butter cookies that cause him to have an allergic reaction. This series of questionable acts are dismissed by everyone but Alice as the thoughtless actions of a grieving mother.

The third act reveals that that Céline has killed Jean, played by Caroline Lagerfelt, the mother of Simon, played by Anders Danielsen Lie. She then murders her own husband, Damian, played by Josh Charles, making it look like a suicide. This raises the question of why nobody but Alice is suspicious how so much tragedy is occurring around Céline. It cannot be because she is a woman, as if it was then Céline’s actions would be equally questioned. There is the possibility that Céline is believed because nobody wants to look too deeply into the actions of a grieving mother, but this is not enough on its own to establish the vast difference between how the two women’s stories are received.

Alice is not believed when she instinctually knows the truth, but Céline is believed despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence that suggests she is lying. The fundamental difference between Alice and Céline is that Alice does not conform to the early 60’s American ideal of the suburban housewife, while Céline does. The juxtaposition is established in an early scene during a cocktail party when Céline’s husband, Damian, tells Céline that she has had enough to drink and should not have another, which she accepts because she is subservient to her husband. In contrast, when Damian says that he is worried about John F Kennedy being too young to be President and handle the Soviets at the age of 44, Alice reels off a list of Theodore Roosevelt’s accomplishments in office and points out that he became President at 43. The problem for Alice is not that she is a woman, but that she is an intelligent woman.

Alice has another thing going against her, which is that she has previously been committed to a mental institution. Her husband, Simon, played by Anders Danielsen Lie, even threatens at one point to have her committed again. She had previously been institutionalised following a feeling of guilt over her parents’ death in a car crash, for which she felt responsible despite being asleep in the back seat.

It is often the case that people with psychiatric disorders who make a complaint to the police are dismissed because of those same disorders. It does not matter whether they have a legitimate grievance: the mere fact of them having a disorder ensures that their testimony is liable to be challenged on its veracity or even dismissed. This makes them the most vulnerable in society: people who can be victimised without recourse to intervention from authority. This leads to a phenomenon that could be described as ‘invisible crime’: crimes that are reported to the police or whatever relevant authority whose job it is to enforce the law, but they can say that the victim is making it up, that they clearly believe what is not true, or that there simply is not enough evidence for it, so it will not become an ‘unsolved crime’ but rather a ‘never-was’ crime, something whose very existence massages police targets.

When Alice finds her mother-in-law’s heart medication in a flowerbed, she realises that Céline has swapped it out for something else, asks for an autopsy, and discovers that the heart medication was not present in her body, despite both her and her husband seeing her take it. Her husband, rather than saying “Huh, that’s weird, we should really look into that.”, instead berates her for getting an autopsy on his mother’s body without her consent.

This is the third reason, after being an intelligent woman and having a history of mental illness, why Alice is not believed. When trying to convince someone of something, you need the person being addressed to either want to believe or at least be open to the possibility of believing. Early in the film, Alice talks about maybe going to back to work as a journalist at the gazette but is told by her husband that if she really wants to get back into reporting, she could write something for the school paper. This is textbook patronising, a word that comes from the Latin ‘Patronus’, meaning master, which comes from ‘Pater’, meaning father, implying talking condescendingly to someone like a father to a child. Simon telling her she could write something for the school paper could not fit this etymology more neatly. Alice is not believed by Simon because he thinks he is smarter than her. Céline, however, is believed because she is not trying to change the beliefs of others, only doing one thing and then providing her summary of events before the listener has time to form their own conclusions.

The film ends with a decision that ‘in this highly unusual situation’ Céline should become Theo’s guardian, but nobody questions why this ‘highly unusual situation’ arose. This is the fourth and final reason nobody believes what Alice was trying to convince them of: it was simpler to accept it. It was simpler for Simon to believe that his mother forgot his heart medication, it was simpler for him to believe that Alice was having a bout of female hysteria, and it was simpler for the person in charge of deciding the fate of Theo not to question why everyone around Céline except the boy died.

Alice was not believed because she was a smart woman, because she had a history of being diagnosed with a mental illness, because nobody was open to believing her and because it was simpler not to believe her. She had a ‘Mothers’ Instinct’, a correct one about what was truly happening, but she was unable to explain how she knew because the problem with instinct is that it is, ultimately, unexplainable.  

Wicked Little Letters and the Psychopathology of Edith Swan

05 Friday Apr 2024

Posted by in Film Friday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

*Spoilers are to be expected*

“I remember golden days when all this was a mystery
and you could write a letter then or, God forbid, come visit me.”

– From “Necessary Evil” by The Dresden Dolls

In the 2024 film Wicked Little Letters, the devoutly Christian Edith Swan, played by Olivia Colman, receives obscene and insulting epistles from an unknown sender. Her parents, who she still lives with, suspect the culprit is Edith’s new Irish neighbour, Rose Gooding, played by Jessie Buckley, because of the latter’s in-your-face uncouth behaviour and language. Her father, Edward Swan, played by Timothy Spall, takes the letters to the local police force, who proceed to arrest Rose.

Around halfway through the film it is revealed that Edith has been sending the letters not just to herself but a myriad of other people in the surrounding area. After Edith is convicted for her crimes, Rose asks why she sent all those letters and Edith replies that she doesn’t know. The question arises from this: What is it about Edith’s personality and upbringing that made her capable of composing these poison pen letters, what motivation compelled her and why is she oblivious to what that motivation was?

Although the film is set in Littlehampton after the First World War, the anonymous nature of the letters and the liberal use of profanity resonates with contemporary fears about modern day internet trolls. Trolling is a nebulous term covering everything from being disingenuous and feigning stupidity to antisocial behaviour like cyberbullying and abuse. Although Edith Swan’s actions are indirect, (sending offensive letters to herself and letting Rose take the blame,) they are a form of harassment and therefore fall towards the more harmful end of the spectrum.

People who engage in such behaviour have been found to have three overlapping characteristics referred to as the ‘Dark Triad’: Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism. A fourth personality trait, sadism, is sometimes added to make a ‘Dark Tetrad’. To what extent does Edith exhibit these traits in the film?

Machiavellianism is characterized by interpersonal manipulation and moral indifference. Early in the film, Edith says she does not want to show the letters to the police until her parents persuade her that doing so is the best course of action. When it is revealed that Edith sent the letters, the context of the scene changes: it looks instead as though her reluctance to get the law involved has been a convincing performance through which she has manipulated both her parents and the police into believing that she is an innocent victim, an upstanding member of society who has been unfairly mistreated. This scheme also exposes her moral indifference to the effects of her actions as she does not care about the repercussions for Rose.

Machiavellianism is also exhibited by Edith’s father, who it is revealed called Child Protection Services on Rose so that her daughter, Nancy, played by Alisha Weir, would be taken away from her mother as revenge for being insulted by Rose at his birthday party. He also sent away Edith’s fiancé, Sidney, because he did not want Edith to leave the household. It is believed that Machiavellianism as a personality trait is heavily influenced by genetic factors, so it makes sense that Edith would also try and manipulate others.

Another trait of Machiavellianism, which is also a trait of psychopathy and narcissism, is a lack of remorse and empathy for other people. Edith does not care about the effect of her actions on Rose and the other hate mail recipients. She does, however, feel sorry for herself when her own reputation is ruined. She is also ecstatic to escape the clutches of her overbearing father, claiming she will not return to him when her stint in the slammer is over. She only cares about her own wellbeing, not the feelings of others.

This lack of empathy is only enhanced in the era of internet trolls. Edith Swan personally knew her targets, whereas cyberbullies do not have to know even the name of their victim: they can just log on and comment on a random person’s picture or status update. This does not mean that all online abusers target strangers, only that there is the means to do so. Inherent in these attacks is a dissociation not possible in earlier, less connected, golden days. One pregnant woman on Reddit said she was told her partner after she discovered he had been abusing people online that: “He did not see them as real people.”

Psychopathy is a complicated subject with countless and sometimes conflicting definitions, but the main three components are the lack of remorse and empathy, a boldness and disinhibition that defy social conventions and lead to antisocial behaviour, and the superficial appearance of being normal or even charming. At first glance it might seem as though this definition applies more readily to Rose than it does to Edith, but the crucial difference is the ability to feel remorse: Rose feels guilty about lying to Bill, played by Malachi Kirby, and her daughter about having the child out of wedlock in order to preserve her reputation, while Edith feels sorry for herself that she got caught.

As to the appearance of normalcy, Edith portrays herself as a very religious woman who is friends with the vicar, Father Ambrose, played by Tim Key, and at one point even prepares to give a reading at the church. She also seems to be so prim and proper that she tries to correct the behaviour of other people that she feels have failed to act in an appropriate manner.

Aside from lack of empathy, narcissism is characterised by exaggerated feelings of self-importance and an excessive need for admiration. When she is pretending that someone else sent the letters, she speculates that ‘they’re just jealous.’, which is a strange thing to be of a woman who still lives with her parents, does not have a job, does not have a partner, and whose only friends appear to be the people at her Christian woman’s whist night, none of whom appear to even like her. However, once you understand that she has those exaggerated feelings of self-importance, it makes a lot more sense.

As to the excessive need for admiration, Edith is particularly proud of her past glories, including having writing so impressive that it was used as the signage for a local business. She is also distraught to discover during one of the whist nights that there are many people who do not like her and could potentially hate her so much as to send abusive letters to her.

The final and most questionable part of the ‘Dark Tetrad’ is sadism, which is deriving pleasure from the suffering of other people. Although Edith can see the pain she is causing; watching Rose have her daughter taken away, almost be convicted of a crime she did not commit and outed as having had a child out of wedlock; she continues to write the letters with a mad grin on her face. The audience is inclined to believe that she is taking pleasure in the effects of her letters, but if this is the case then why, when confronted about it, does she not simply say she enjoyed it? It makes more sense that she is not sadistic and is genuinely unaware of her own motivation.

The response she gives has modern parallels with people asked about cyberbullying behaviour. The woman mentioned earlier who discovered that her partner was an abusive troll confronted him about his online actions:

“I asked him, flat out, if he was harassing and bullying people online. He said yes, and immediately withdrew. After telling him that I needed to know why — really why, not just “I don’t know”, he said he needed time to think about it.”

Both Edith Swan and the Redditor took part in anonymous bullying without knowing the reason themselves. The Redditor did eventually come up with a reason:

“He said he trolled/bullied people because it was an outlet for him to relieve stress.”

One answer in the case of Edith Swan can be found in her upbringing and her treatment at the hands of her father, which is combined with the effect of her environment as she never left home. At one point, Edith is ordered by her father to copy out 100 times the following biblical passage from Proverbs 3 11:12 as a punishment:

11 My child, when the Lord corrects you, pay close attention and take it as a warning. 12 The Lord corrects those he loves, as parents correct a child of whom they are proud.

While she is copying out these lines, she stealthily takes a break to compose the abusive letters. The parallel is drawn between how she is treated by her father and how she treats other people. Like the anonymous Redditor, she does it to relieve stress but does not know that is why she is doing it. It is only when she is in the middle of this act, as well as when she is shouting obscenities at Rose in the street, that she seems genuinely happy. Studies have found that swearing alleviates stress and pain and this is also the case with Edith. Before she is taken away in the police van, she curses at her father in a cathartic release from his coercive control, a control that was so overwhelming that she was unable to comprehend her own actions.

The major difference between the actions of Edith Swan and modern-day trolls is the potential scale: Edith only managed to send letters to the Littlehampton area, but now people can send mass insults to anywhere on Earth with an internet connection. Edith Swan was a precursor to a phenomenon that has spread malignantly throughout the globe and become a problem of such magnitude that people in the 1920s could not imagine it and people in the 2020s do not know where to start in combating it. Edith Swan was only one example and was able to be punished for her crimes because she was under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement, but she cannot be the paradigm of how to deal with the torrent of abuse sent by modern-day online trolls who might not even be in the same country, never mind the same town.

Immaculate Misconceptions

29 Friday Mar 2024

Posted by in Film Friday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

*Spoilers are to be expected*

“For Satan himself often masquerades as an angel of light.”

– 2 Corinthians 11:14

In the 2024 horror film, Immaculate, Sydney Sweeney plays Cecilia Jones, a woman from the outskirts of Detroit who believes she was rescued by God at the age of seven when she fell through some ice and into freezing water. While seeking the purpose God had spared her life for in this metaphorical baptism, she accepts an invitation to practice as a nun at a convent in the Italian countryside, her own church back in the States having closed due to low attendance.

While in this foreign land where she does not speak the language, she discovers that the convent contains a Holy Relic acquired during the Crusades: one of the iron nails that had suspended Christ from the cross. She later discovers that Father Sal Tedeschi, played by Álvaro Morte, has been using the genetic material derived from the blood, tissue and bone found on the nail to try and resurrect Jesus. There had been 20 years of failure in this endeavour but now, according to Tedeschi, Sister Cecilia will be the first woman to successfully give birth to a biological replica of the Messiah.

Commentary on the film has mentioned that both the title and plot refer to the common misapprehension that the ‘Immaculate Conception’ refers to the virgin birth of Jesus Christ when it actually refers to Mary herself being born without sin. At time of writing there are two ‘factual errors’ mentioned on IMDb, both of which make the same point.

Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where people, having discovered something they believe to be misunderstood by others, disdainfully correct them by adding a further layer of misinformation and obfuscating the reality. Neither the title nor the plot of the film necessarily refer to ‘The Immaculate Conception’ of Mary, though It is perhaps understandable that audiences, upon seeing the title and discovering that the plot features a ‘virgin birth’, make the connection in their own head and think it an error on the part of the filmmakers.

Aside from in the title of the film, the word ‘immaculate’ never appears in the script and therefore neither does the phrase ‘immaculate conception’. The only time it comes close to being mentioned is when Sister Cecilia is told, having discovered that she is pregnant despite never having had sexual intercourse, that the child will be ‘born without sin’, which is the meaning of the word ‘immaculate’ in this context. Jesus was also without sin, as the bible itself mentions on more than one occasion, for example, in 2 Corinthians 5:21:

‘Christ was without sin, but for our sake God made him share our sin in order that in union with him we might share the righteousness of God.’

The whole point of Mary herself being immaculately conceived is so that Jesus himself would also be born without sin. In this instance, however, the clone of Jesus would also be without sin, having never been conceived in the sinful act of procreation at all. There is also the remote possibility that Sister Cecilia, as the second incarnation of Christ’s mother, could have been immaculately conceived, as we are never told anything about her parentage. In fact, we are never told anything of Cecilia’s history apart from the incident with the ice, about which the convent retains a copy of an article printed in a local newspaper. It is implied that because of this history she might be more susceptible to the temptations of being one of their experimental subjects, but they could also have been following her progress because they believe she had been immaculately conceived.

Whether or not this is the case can only be a matter of speculation, but Sister Cecilia herself is also ‘immaculate’ in another sense, that of being clean and spotless. She takes the vows of obedience, poverty and chastity, and at the beginning of the film is so pure that she is unable to cut the head off a chicken they are presumably going to eat. Later, she must have overcome her reluctance to kill in order to use a chicken’s blood to fake a miscarriage and thereby be taken to hospital and escape the convent. By the time the credits roll it is implied, though not shown, that she is entirely capable of killing not just a human, but her own baby. She is no longer immaculate.

It is implied that she kills the baby because, while she is pregnant, she comes to believe that the mission of the convent in producing the second coming of Christ is neither their real intention nor what God would have wanted. Because we see the events of the film from the point of view of Sister Cecilia, we are inclined to agree with her assessment of the situation that the institution is not benevolent, but there is scant evidence for her belief within the film itself. One of the moments that nudges the audience towards this frame of mind is when Sister Cecilia sees the excerpt from 2 Corinthians 11:14 scrawled behind a portrait in her bedroom, that ‘Satan himself often masquerades as an angel or light’. She comes to believe the quote is applicable to the inhabitants the convent.

While the actions undertaken by the religious of the convent suggest they are not good people, as when they cut out the tongue of Sister Gwen, played by Benedetta Porcaroli, because she vociferously dissents in front of the other nuns, this does not necessarily mean that their intentions in bringing about the second coming of Christ are not sincere. In fact, it could be argued that this act is brought about to quell any potential revolt and thereby ensure the birth of the saviour.

The final few scenes see Sister Cecilia escape the convent while giving birth to what could be a clone of Jesus but could also be the Antichrist. In the very final scene before it cuts to the credits, we see Sister Cecilia about to smash the infant with a rock and kill it. She hears a deep gurgling sound coming from the baby, so unlike the bawling of newborns, and comes to believe it is evil, just as the audience are also encouraged to believe. We, however, never see the infant in this scene, and there remains the possibility that the child she about to murder is actually the second coming of Jesus; that Sister Cecilia has just murdered the Messiah; and that it is Sister Cecilia who is Satan himself masquerading as an angel of light.

The Storm Before the Circus: Why Hosting the Summer Olympics is an Invitation to Civil Unrest

29 Saturday Jul 2023

Posted by in Sporadic Saturday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

“We’ve got an eco-friendly government,
they preserve our natural habitat,
built an entire Olympic Village around where we live without pulling down any flats.”

– From “Ill Manors by Plan B

Sometimes the cause of what is happening in the present lies not in the past but in what is expected to happen in the future. The riots that occurred in Paris in the June and July of 2023 were ostensibly sparked by the shooting and killing of a 17-year-old French boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent, Nahel Merzouk, by a policeman during a routine traffic stop in the banlieue of Nanterre. In fact, the civil unrest happened because in 2024 Paris is scheduled to host the Summer Olympics. The idea may seem counter-intuitive: surely what happened immediately preceding the hostilities was the provocation? The truth is that the Summer Olympics and the events leading up to it create the conditions for riots.

News reports and opinion pieces have compared the situation in France to the Black Lives Matter protests in the US in the wake of the choking and murder of George Floyd by a member of the Minneapolis Police Department. In both cases a member of the police killed an ethnic minority without just cause; in both cases the act of killing was filmed by onlookers and shared widely on social media; and in both cases the inciting incident led to long overdue conversations about police brutality and systemic racism. There is, however, a more appropriate precedent for what happened in France that took place across the channel 12 years before.

In 2011, one year before the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games were due to be held, there were riots in Tottenham Hale following the shooting and killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black British man, by a member of the Metropolitan Police. In the following days the unrest spread to other regions of the capital and then to large cities around the UK such as Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, just as the violence in Paris proliferated to other urban areas in France like Marseille, Lille and Strasbourg.

The 2011 riots took place on the watch of the coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties, led by Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy PM Nick Clegg respectively, as they embarked on a campaign of austerity in response to the great financial crisis of 2008. In the London Borough of Haringey, which includes Tottenham Hale, youth project funding was cut by 75% and eight of its 13 youth clubs shut. At the same time, the government were spending exorbitant amounts, much more than was initially budgeted for, on the Olympics and their intangible benefit of ‘legacy’.[1]

The riots in France took place following similar moves to cut public spending by President Emmanuel Macron’s Government, including a pension reform bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 that led to months of protests. Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, meanwhile, has ordered each ministry to cut 5% of their budget and freeze 1% of their spending. These moves contrast with the extreme levels of expenditure on an Olympics that has already come in over budget: the cost to the taxpayer of the games rose to €4.4bn at the end of 2022 from around €3.3bn when the bid was made in 2017.

Both riots occurred against a background of cuts to public spending and overspending on an event that lasts 17 days. They happen because poor people see the vast sums of money that Olympic hosts spend on infrastructure and related costs, which usually come in wildly over-budget, and realise the stark contrast it makes with how little investment they receive in their communities.[2] As Andrew Zimbalist points out in his book, Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble behind hosting the Olympics and the World Cup:

“While hosting a sport mega-event is hardly a seminal force behind a country’s inequality, there is little question that it contributes to and reinforces existing patterns of inequality. That the Olympics and World Cup are so heavily publicized and so visible only increases the likelihood that wasteful spending will catch the attention and scorn of the population.”

This creates a tinderbox primed for civil unrest and the match that lights it could be anything that reinforces this narrative of inequality: in the case of the London and Paris riots, it was the shooting and killing of a person of colour by a member of the police. Rather than looking for the cause of the violence, France is adding artificial intelligence programs to its network of surveillance cameras.

The reason these incidents created riots rather than protests can be found in psychology. Studies have found that what fuels normative collective action (action that is socially acceptable such as peaceful protests) is anger and a belief that things can be changed, while the emotions behind non-normative collective action (action that is socially unacceptable such as riots) are contempt and hatred and a belief that things will not change.[3] The inciting incidents in both cases were more likely to arouse contempt and hatred as racists, murderers and the system that enables them are not thought of as changeable.

The two intervening Summer Olympic games are exceptions for different reasons. Tokyo 2020 did not happen until 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic and took place behind closed doors. As this BBC article notes, although Japan is not a country known for protest, there was still a petition against the Olympics that gathered 420,000 signatures, one survey found that 70% of Japanese people wanted the games cancelled or delayed, and hundreds still protested the opening ceremony from outside the Olympic Stadium in spite of strictly imposed quarantine regulations.

Rio de Janeiro, however, is an exception because two years before it staged the Summer Olympics, Brazil hosted the FIFA World Cup. This had the effect of bringing forward the civil unrest by two years. In the June and July of 2013, the year before the football tournament took place, protestors in Sao Paolo took to the streets to protest an increase in the price of public transport, a demonstration that rapidly escalated across the country and included pockets of violence in Rio de Janeiro and clashes with police during the final of the FIFA Confederations Cup. Further protests took place throughout the 2014 World Cup itself. In 2015 and 2016, millions of Brazilians took to the streets to call for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, and her predecessor and chief of staff, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, over the Petrobras scandal that saw both Rousseff and da Silva, as well as a number of other politicians, accused of receiving bribes in exchange for favourable construction contracts.

Interestingly, the reasons given for participating in the protests in Brazil in 2013 and France in 2023 are the same. One 19-year-old from the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro, Oscar José Santos, said at the time, “We are here because we hate the government. They do nothing for us.” In 2023, the BBC reported that a middle-aged woman who lives on the Frais-Vallon estate in Marseille, Mado, said that “For the politicians we are nothing. We are really nothing.”

When people feel that the government and politicians are doing nothing for them; when they feel like they are really nothing; at the same time as those in power are splashing out on an ephemeral sporting occasion, the chance of the people turning violent increases. Perhaps nothing illustrates how closely the two are interconnected than when the façade of the Aubervilliers Aquatic Training Centre was damaged as a result of nearby buses being set on fire during the 2023 riots in France.

So long as the governments and politicians representing the host cities and countries care more about their reputation and legacy than serving the needs of their citizens, there will always be discontent, protests, petitions, riots and all manner of civil unrest beforehand. The circumstances that make these protests more likely to become violent are a high level of inequality in a concentrated space, the greater potential for an action that highlighting this inequality that provokes hatred and contempt among the populace such as the killing of a person of colour by the police, and a historical predisposition of the place to civil unrest.

The Summer Olympics scheduled for 2028 are in Los Angeles, a city where these ingredients are already present and likely to mix. The only mitigating factor is that LA has claimed it will be the ‘no-build’ Olympics and use existing infrastructure, as they did in 1984, rather than building new facilities. Unfortunately, as the campaign group NOlympicsLA have pointed out, this promise does not preclude building hotels that replace rent-controlled properties and defending the investment through a manufactured potential hotel room shortage. If nothing is done to assuage the concerns of Angelenos, then prepare yourself for the LA Riots of 2027.

[1] (In “Going for Gold: The Economics of the Olympics”, Robert A. Baade and Victor A. Matheson note that: “The 2012 London organizers originally won the bid in 2005 with a cost estimate of £2.4 billion, which was revised upward within two years to £9.3 billion. Then, when the final costs came in at a mere £8.77 billion, the organizers laughably claimed the event had come in under budget.”) Baade, Robert A., and Victor A. Matheson. “Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 201–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43783713.

[2] One study by Guillaume Dezecache, James M. Allen, Jorina von Zimmermann and Daniel C. Richardson published by the Royal Society used a virtual game to investigate the psychology behind riots. Putting participants in competing teams that were tasked with constructing parks, it found that:

“…the experience of being treated with inequity can lead to acts of collective aggression in a disadvantaged group, associated with reports of being unfairly treated together with one’s own team. In our experiment, hostile behaviour took the form of damaging another team’s park. This behaviour was also detrimental to the individuals themselves, as they were spending time vandalizing the opposition rather than improving their own park, or simply doing nothing.”

Dezecache, Guillaume, James M. Allen,, Jorina von Zimmermann, and Daniel C. Richardson. “We predict a riot: inequity, relative deprivation and collective destruction in the laboratory” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Volume 288, Issue 1959

[3] For more on this see “Explaining radical group behaviour: Developing emotion and efficacy routes to normative and nonnormative collective action” Tausch N, Becker JC, Spears R, Christ O, Saab R, Singh P, Siddiqui RN. Explaining radical group behavior: Developing emotion and efficacy routes to normative and nonnormative collective action. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2011 Jul;101(1):129-48. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21500925/) and Eric, et al. “Explaining Normative Versus Nonnormative Action: The Role of Implicit Theories.” Political Psychology, vol. 37, no. 6, 2016, pp. 835–52 http://www.jstor.org/stable/44132930

 

Underground Man by Gabriel Tarde

06 Thursday Jan 2022

Posted by in Thumbing Through Thursday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

– “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

In Gabriel Tarde’s 1896 utopian novella, “Fragment d’histoire future”, which was translated into English by Cloudesley Brereton in 1905 as “Underground Man”, the last surviving members of the human race are forced to withdraw into the Earth’s interior because the cooling of the sun has turned our planet’s surface into an uninhabitable realm of ice. If you replace this catastrophe of ‘solar anaemia’ with global warming, there are parallels to be drawn between the reactions to the fictional disaster described by Tarde and the response to climate change in reality. Of course, the change in the temperature in the book is downward rather than upward, but it remains a catastrophic change in temperature nonetheless.

Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist and psychologist, and it is because of this background that he had a unique insight into human behaviour and was able to make uncannily prescient observations about the reaction to a catastrophe on a global scale. The cooling of the sun begins by being ignored:

“Whatever the reason was, the public concerned itself little about the matter, as in all that is gradual and not sudden.”

In her history of the climate crisis, “Our Biggest Experiment”, Alice Bell evaluates a study produced by the CIA in August 1974, long after the discovery of the ‘Greenhouse Effect’ and the warming of the atmosphere through increased carbon dioxide had been established, by saying that the report “had a point that climate change wasn’t getting the attention it could have and there was a lack of urgency in discussions. There was no large public outcry, nor did anyone seem to be trying to generate one.”

The catastrophe in the novella then “become[s] the subject of several rather smart articles in the reviews”, an obvious analogue to climate change being mentioned in newspapers. An example of this from the aforementioned history is the 1980 New York Times headline, “Global warming has begun, expert tells Senate”. Bell adds that: “The New York Times wasn’t the only place covering the story. The resulting coverage was the first time climate science really made a news splash.”

Even the scepticism about the disaster and whether it will truly have any impact is foretold:

“A few unorthodox persons of heretical and pessimistic temperament remarked, it is true, that at different epochs, if one believed the astronomers of the remote past, certain stars had gradually burnt out in the heavens, or had passed from the most dazzling brilliance to an almost complete obscurity, during the course of barely a single year. They therefore concluded that the case of our sun had nothing exceptional about it.”

Compare the above quotation to Bell’s description of “Global Warming: What Does the Science Tell Us?”, a 1990 book written by conservative think tank, the George C. Marshall Institute:

“It wasn’t out-and-out ‘denial’ of climate change or the greenhouse effect. They simply argued the sun had caused the slight warming of the past century, and when its natural variation calmed down again that would balance out any future greenhouse warming.”

You could even end the second paragraph with the sentence that concludes the first and it would not seem out of place.

In response to the solar cooling, Miltiades, a man who has been wounded in the face and therefore given the nickname, “scarred face”, (not Scarface, as even the original movie had not come out in 1896) proposes that the remnants of humanity retreat to the interior of the Earth. The parallels with the colonisation of Mars propounded by certain billionaires are clear.

Finally, there are the forecasts of the future. In the novella, a “chief of the fashionable school in sociology” predicts that mankind will, in time, continue to migrate and dwell in ever deeper recesses of the Earth. The modern parallel is interplanetary space travel, and, once the habitable and terraformable planets of the present solar system are exhausted, interstellar colonisation. Tarde’s sociologist foretells that the last member of humanity will be a “sole survivor and heir of a hundred successive civilisations, left to himself yet self-sufficient in the midst of his immense stores of science and art”. Imagine, if you will, a long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far away, a scion of the Musk dynasty, sitting on their own in a sports car in a rocket sending memes to themselves in order to try and make themselves laugh one last time.

I think I know enough of hate

It would be remiss of me not to remark on the racism in the text. This is not the accepted view of the time seen as problematic in retrospect, but pure unadulterated racism. The first hints of it appear at the beginning of the chapter entitled “Prosperity”, when Tarde refers to the ‘barbarous tribes’ of Oceania and Central Africa who are ‘incapable of assimilation’, but he reserves his most explicit racism for the Chinese. It is prefigured by the abominable sentence:

“The meadows were no longer green, the sky was no longer blue, the Chinese were no longer yellow, all had suddenly changed colour as in a transformation scene.”

It later happens that the underground civilisation comes across a separate community of Chinese people who have had the same idea as Miltiades. Tarde says that “they had hastily crawled underground without encumbering themselves with museums and libraries, and there they had multiplied enormously”, “they had shamelessly given themselves up to ancestral cannibalism” and that “The words of our language refuse to depict their filth and coarseness”.

Somehow, the description of this Chinese community as filthy, uncultured cannibals is not the worst part. This is:

“Several proposed, it is true, to exterminate these savages who might well become dangerous owing to their cunning and to their numbers, and to appropriate their dwelling-place after a certain amount of cleaning and painting and the removal of numerous little bells. Others proposed to reduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on to them all our menial work. But these two proposals were rejected. An attempt was made to civilize and to render less savage these poor cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that direction had been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up.”

So, despite being a good predictor of human behaviour, it is a shame Tarde’s crystal ball did not show him that his racism would not be tolerated in the future.

Talk on Corners

28 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by in Sport Sunday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

“(Still) Hittin’ them corners in them lo-los girl”

From “Still D.R.E” by Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Dogg

In their first season in the Premier League for 16 years, Leeds United have been accused of being too vulnerable to set pieces and especially corners. This defensive fragility has been apparent from 20 minutes into the opening game of the season against Liverpool, when the German centre-back making his debut, Robin Koch, lost his man and allowed Virgil van Dijk to make it 2-1. Conceding from corners has continued to plague Leeds until the last game before the international break, when Joachim Andersen got the better of Luke Ayling at the far post and volleyed Ademola Lookman’s out-swinging cross into the net.

Between these two games, Leeds let in another nine goals from corners, bringing the total up to 11 in the first 29 games of the 2020/21 season. During this period, Leeds have given away 160 corners, meaning they have a 6.875% chance of conceding from one, the worst record in the whole league:

TeamGames PlayedCorners ConcededGoals Conceded from Corners%
Leeds United29160116.875%
Brighton & Hove Albion2911986.723%
Liverpool298256.098%
Sheffield United2917795.085%
Wolverhampton Wanderers2914374.895%
Manchester United2912464.839%
Leicester City2915274.605%
Crystal Palace2916174.348%
West Ham United2914264.225%
Newcastle United2916863.571%
Everton2815953.145%
Chelsea2912843.125%
Arsenal2913143.053%
Burnley2917742.260%
West Bromwich Albion2918742.139%
Southampton2914232.113%
Aston Villa2813821.449%
Tottenham Hotspur2914821.351%
Fulham3015221.316%
Manchester City308811.136%
Total58028781033.579%
Goals Conceded from Corners

My brother has a theory as to why Leeds are so bad at corners: He conjectures that because Leeds rarely score from set pieces in matches, and especially corners, they also rarely score them in training. It therefore creates the illusion that the defence is amazing when corners are practiced, but it is actually just symptomatic of a wasteful attack that makes them look good.

If this was the case, then Leeds would not only have the highest rate of conceding from corners, but also one of the lowest rates of turning corners into goals. Leeds are actually the fifth worst, behind Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Leicester City and Brighton & Hove Albion:

TeamGames Played Corners WonGoals Scored from Corners%
Arsenal2915221.316%
Crystal Palace2911021.818%
Leicester City2915231.974%
Brighton & Hove Albion2917042.353%
Leeds United2917252.907%
Sheffield United2913143.053%
Aston Villa2816353.067%
Fulham3012943.101%
Southampton2912743.150%
Liverpool2918863.191%
Newcastle United2912343.252%
Manchester United2915053.333%
West Bromwich Albion2910143.960%
Manchester City3019984.020%
Tottenham Hotspur2911754.274%
Burnley2911454.386%
Wolverhampton Wanderers2915274.605%
Chelsea2917995.028%
Everton2811986.723%
West Ham United2913096.923%
Total58028781033.579%
Goals Scored from Corners

So, while I think the inability to defend corners reliably is partly attributable to this, I do not think it is the whole story.

There is another aspect of training under manager, Marcelo Bielsa, that the players talk about with inappropriate smiles and have nicknamed ‘Murderball’. It involves 11 players against 11, the same as in a normal match, but there are no stoppages. If the ball goes out of play, staff are waiting to throw it or another ball back in. Jermaine Jenas has said he would have loved Murderball because it would have avoided people wasting time arguing whether there was a foul or free kick or not.

Murderball keeps the players extremely fit, to the point where some of the players say that the Wednesday training is harder than the actual matches, but like everything, it has its disadvantages. It does not reflect the reality of competitive matches and may be another reason Leeds concede from corners. I am not saying that Leeds do not also practice set pieces and corners, but part of Bielsa’s philosophy is for players to repeatedly try things that are difficult in training so when they are faced with having to do them in matches, they become natural. Playing a game in which there are essentially no boundaries could, potentially, make something that could not happen in a game the first instinct.

It is also worth noting that the heightened state of fitness that drills like this create, combined with weigh-ins and timed runs, is the great equaliser that got a team mostly comprised of players who finished mid-table in the Championship into the Promised Land of the Premier League, but it is less of an advantage at set pieces and corners.

The above possibilities suggest ways that the whole team is responsible for conceding from corners, but there is also the matter of individual errors. I looked through all 11 goals that Leeds have conceded from corners to see if there was a particular player who was out of position or some other pattern.

I have already mentioned Koch and Ayling’s mistakes against Liverpool and Fulham, respectively. In the 4-1 away defeat to Crystal Palace, Koch and Liam Cooper both jumped with Scott Dann but were unable to stop him from heading it in. When Kurt Zouma scored for Chelsea, Cooper, who was marking him, ended up sitting on the floor with his arms spread out and appealing for a foul because of what I think is a trip by Olivier Giroud. In the 2-1 home defeat to West Ham, Tomáš Souček rose above Stuart Dallas to head in from a Vladimír Coufal corner.

In the 5-2 win over Newcastle United, it was Ayling who lost Ciaran Clark. In the devastating 6-2 loss to Manchester United, Patrick Bamford should have been in front of Anthony Martial and Dallas should also have challenged him before he flicked it on. When Lindelöf came in at the far post, it was Kalvin Phillips who was beaten. In the 3-0 loss to Tottenham Hotspur, Bamford got caught out and Phillips was beaten to it by Toby Alderweireld.

Perhaps the most egregious of the corners was in the 2-1 home loss to Everton, when Ben Godfrey beat both Dallas and Cooper to flick the ball across goal, where Dominic Calvert-Lewin escaped both Pascal Struijk and Ayling to launch a diving header into the back of the net. There were a few more passes leading up to the only goal in the 1-0 defeat to Aston Villa, but it was ultimately Helder Costa who lost the scorer, Anwar El Ghazi. For the last corner, it was Diego Llorente, who has only played seven matches this season due to injury, who lost Craig Dawson in the second defeat to West Ham.

The common denominator in all of these is not a player but that each player lost their man at the corner, which makes all the above hypothesising irrelevant. You can make complicated theories based around statistics and training methods all you like, but to paraphrase Gary Lineker, football is a simple game: twenty-two men chase a ball around for ninety minutes and at some point, Leeds United will concede a goal from a corner.

Slaves

04 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by in Industry Comment, Music Monday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

“Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.”

– Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

There are presently two bands that go by the name Slaves that are made up of white men, one from the US and one from the UK. The US band has vowed to rebrand following the release of their latest album, To Better Days, although their UK namesake has no such plans.

The two bands have both put out statements regarding their names, the US one in June 2020 and the UK one all the way back in May 2015. The two statements contain many similarities; the origin of their names, how they have evolved, the purpose of their music; but they reach different conclusions about how to move forward:

Slaves (UK): “Our band name relates to people not being in control of their day to day lives. […] Our name and music is aimed at being a slave to day to day life and routine, it is a metaphorical use of the word. […] we are all slaves in this modern age, whether it be to our jobs, corporations, social media or society in general.”

Slaves (US): “The name ‘Slaves’ was conceived as a reference to the band’s battle with substance abuse in the past, to the idea that we became enslaved by our addictions and by our own demons.” Lead vocalist at the time, Jonny Craig, also described the origin of the US band’s name in an interview after they had formed: “Men have been enslaving men for as long as we’ve had gods to hide behind. Every man is a slave to what we love — whether it be women, drugs, music or sports.”

Both bands chose the word ‘Slaves’ because it represented their respective struggles in a figurative sense, the UK band in 2012 and the US band in 2014. It is unlikely the US band were aware of the UK band when they formed because the latter did not become widely known until the release of their 2015 debut album, Are You Satisfied? and its subsequent nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. As music attorney Bob Celestin noted in a Rolling Stone interview about Lady A’s name change, which was discussed in a previous blog: “This problem with [the same] names is not too common, because it’s easy to do a Google search.”

The two bands also agree on the purpose of their music:

Slaves (UK): “The music we make is motivational and aimed at people personally as well as collectively.”

Slaves (US): “Our goal has always been to tackle these difficult subjects head on, as well as to build a community and share stories of hope to let others know that their inner demons can be defeated.”

Both claim their music encourages people to metaphorically emancipate themselves, but their conclusions diverge, as the UK band is gearing up for a defence of their appellation while the US band is prefacing an apology and announcing their upcoming name change:

Slaves (US): “This definition of the name neglects to take ownership of its racial connotations. As obstinate supporters of the BLM movement, we cannot continue to tie our music and our positive message to a word associated with such negative weight and hurt.”

Slaves (UK) “On this point we would like to highlight the Oxford dictionary definition of the word Slaves; “(Especially in the past) a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.” As you can see, there is no mention of race. All different slave trades could be discussed now, but it would be futile.”

One reason for the different responses is their nationalities. The US has a long history of confronting racial issues, from slavery to the Civil War to Civil Rights to the modern Black Lives Matter movement, so there is an awareness of the term ‘slaves’ referring to African Americans embedded in the culture in a way it is not in the UK, despite the latter’s instrumental role in the Atlantic slave trade. The uproar over Edward Colston’s statue being toppled and thrown into Bristol Harbour proved that the UK has yet to seriously reckon with this ugly part of its history.

Although the US band say they are changing their name because they are “obstinate supporters of the BLM movement”, there are other advantages. One was the departure of lead vocalist, Jonny Craig, who had been the only permanent member, as bands often change their name when they get a new singer, and he was also the one to explain the origin of their name. It also avoids confusion with the UK band. It is difficult to estimate the outfits’ comparative popularity, but at time of writing, the UK band has 922,594 monthly listeners on Spotify and the US band has 515,222, it will help cut through the noise of internet search results.

Before these two bands came to be, there had previously been a band of white men called Slaves from 1997 to 2000, forming from members of The VSS and becoming Pleasure Forever in 2000. In an interview with online publication, Westword, drummer Dave Clifford gave his explanation for choosing the name: “I’ve also always been intrigued by the human will toward slavery. This isn’t any new revelation, but more of an artistic interpretation of Wilhelm Reich’s writings about fascism and human nature. We all seek authority figures, whether to ultimately rebel against them or for the comfort of having someone make our decisions for us. Ultimately, all of us are slaves to one thing or another, and we all revel in that.”

What Clifford is referring to is a hypothesis put forward by Wilhelm Reich in his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich contended that the suppression of sexual desire in a patriarchal society created an anxiety that manifested in the political sphere as a propensity for authoritarian idealism. The patriarchal family is therefore the most fundamental of the institutions supporting fascism, whether the resulting internalised desire for an authority figure was unconsciously followed, or, as Reich proposed, consciously fought against through a revolutionary sexual politics. Reich would later go on to obfuscate this fascinating idea with baffling pseudoscience based around the debunked concept of the ‘orgone’, which he claimed to have discovered, and makes any attempt to research it on the internet lead you down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and online lunacy.

In an interview with the Phoenix New Times, Clifford explained why they chose to stop using it: “The name ‘Slaves’ was easy to be misinterpreted, and didn’t fit what we were doing [at that point]. We were addressed as ‘The Slaves’ a lot, like we were saying as a band, ‘We are slaves,’ like getting into some victim ideology. The real, actual impetus for the name was an interest in slavery as an idea, the different forms it can take — as part of something that’s human will, or an external force that guides someone’s life. That was more involved and heady, and that was difficult to get across.”

To avoid confusion, they could have called the band ‘How humanity’s repressed sexual desire subjugates people to authoritarian idealism and other implications of the word slaves’ but it’s difficult to fit that onto a bass drum.

The three bands independently chose the name because of the sheer all-encompassing nature of the how the term can be applied. In these statements, people are described as being enslaved to day to day life and routine, jobs, corporations, social media, society, personal demons, women, drugs, music, sport, family, authoritarian thinking and fascism.

Remember that each of these three bands used a version of the phrase ‘we are all slaves.’ To explain their name. The 1997 to 2000 band: “all of us are slaves to one thing or another”; Slaves (UK): “we are all slaves in this modern age”; Slaves (US): “Every man is a slave to what we love”. Aside from the androcentric formulation in the last quotation, the same basic idea crops up in each of their explanations.

As the UK band noted, slavery has happened to many peoples. In fact, the the foundation of music is tied-in to the history of slavery, as Ted Gioia noted In an interview with the Syncopated Times about his book, Music: A Subversive History:

“Take for example the most basic building blocks of music, our musical modes. These simple scales are usually the first thing students are taught when they study the theory of Western music. And each mode has a name. So students learn about the Lydian mode or the Phrygian mode, but no one ever tells them that the Lydians and Phrygians were the slaves who performed music in ancient Greece. These enslaved outsiders came up with the most exciting and disturbing sounds—so much so that the Greeks became very concerned about controlling which modes people were allowed to hear.”

However, slavery is not just “(Especially in the past)”, as the OED so quaintly puts it, but often used in contemporary parlance as part of the phrase ‘modern day slavery’, which has been used to describe, among others, kafala workers in the Middle East, debt bondage in South Asia and sex-trafficking in Eastern Europe. It may initially bring to mind the enslavement of African Americans, but that is a bias of the present moment and Western culture. The word ‘slaves’ has had and continues to have hundreds of other connotations throughout the world and throughout history. It is why three bands chose the name separately and why yielding to pressure to change it, subjugating themselves to the will of others, only makes the original moniker more appropriate.

John Lennon – Imagine

19 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by in Music Monday, Song Analysis

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

“Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom
and the people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit
and there will be no thieves.”

– From Chapter 19 of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

In a recent survey conducted on behalf of the book series, Little People, Big Dreams, it was found that 15% of children aged six to 16 had never heard of John Lennon and a third of them did not know why he was famous. Imagine, the most well-known of his solo offerings, is one of the reasons why Lennon was famous not just as a member of The Beatles.

Imagine by John Lennon is not, as the title would suggest, a song about imagination. It is concerned with reality without the imposition of human preconceptions. The means of achieving peace it advocates is not idealistic dreaming, but rather the unlearning of several ideas that have been invented by humankind, and which have become so entrenched in society that it is difficult to imagine a world without them.

“Imagine there’s no heaven…”

This is a strange line to open a song about a desired world peace. Surely heaven is a positive idea, or, at least, not detrimental to society? Lennon, however, is not singing about a utopia. He is proposing a world that no longer needs heaven because life is enough. As Douglas Adams said: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

The first verse continues:

“It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky.”

Heaven and hell are the concepts in the song most demonstrably the imagined creation of humankind. The existence of these posthumous destinations for the soul can be neither confirmed or denied because nobody can experience death and return. Lennon is arguing that without the expectation of reward or punishment in the afterlife, people would instead focus on the importance of the journey and living in the moment because life, which it is much harder to argue against the existence of, is all that matters: “Imagine all the people living for today”.

He expands on this theme in the second verse with the line “and [imagine] no religion too”. Like heaven and hell, religion is also the invention of the human mind. (If you are religious, at least admit that the religions you do not follow are such). Religion can have both good and bad consequences. It follows the line ‘Nothing to kill or die for’, so the emphasis is on the negative effects, such as religious fighting, but since he is imagining ‘Above us, only sky’, it is not only these but also the positive repercussions, such as being a good person to get a ticket to paradise, that he imagines not existing.

The second verse begins with the line “Imagine there’s no countries.” Countries are also the invention of humankind. The world is just the world and it is only people that have divided it up into separate entities like a spherical blue-green cake. The world we live in has countries only because of a consensus that they exist, and even then, the boundaries are unstable. Look at Russia reclaiming Crimea in 2014, the fighting between Armenians and Azeris over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, and the revelation that President Trump enquired about purchasing Greenland from Denmark in 2019. Sometimes there is no consensus: Kosovo, Israel and Taiwan are all unrecognised by some states.

If this is hard to accept because the idea of countries is so ingrained in how people view the world, a passage in Book III, Chapter VII of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, when the world population is reduced to less than 100 people journeying from France to Switzerland, might help explain it:

“We first had bidden adieu to the state of things which having existed many thousand years, seemed eternal; such a state of government, obedience, traffic, and domestic intercourse, as had moulded our hearts and capacities, as far back as memory could reach. Then to patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation, to enduring fame, to the name of country, we had bidden farewell. […] To preserve these we had quitted England–England, no more; for without her children, what name could that barren island claim?”

Without people, there are no countries. Of course, Lennon is not imagining a world without people but with “all the people living life in peace”. What he dreams of is a world not without humans, but without the delineated borders of countries created by humankind.

The line “Nothing to kill or die for” follows this after “It isn’t hard to do”. Take, for example, the current Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: The two belligerents are fighting over control of the enclave to say “that region is in my country”. If there were no countries and borders imposed on the world by humans, such fighting would never take place and there would be nothing to kill or die for.

The final verse begins with the line “Imagine no possessions”. Possessions do not exist without the human belief in ownership. There are things, and who owns them is, like the borders of countries, a matter of popular consensus and legal definition created by governments, rather than unmitigated truth. The line reminds me of a verse in the Billy Bragg song, “The World Turned Upside Down”:

“The sin of property
We do disdain
No man has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain.”

Lennon is asking the listener to imagine a world without the concept of ownership. As the quotation from the Tao Te Ching at the beginning of this piece says: “Throw away industry and profit/and there will be no thieves.”

There is a concept in Taoism called ‘Pu’, most commonly translated as the ‘uncarved block’ but which is perhaps better translated as ‘unworked wood’ or ‘unhewn log’. It refers to natural simplicity without any unnecessary complication or human interference. (It has other connotations, but this is the most relevant to Imagine.) What Lennon is actually asking the listener to do is to return to this state of being, before humans imagined these notions; the afterlife, religion, borders, countries, the concept of ownership, and possessions; to perform a miracle and uncarve the block of life by undoing the layers and layers of concepts humankind has constructed and sewn into the fabric of our perception.

Imagine, therefore, is not about imagination. It is about a reality unencumbered by the intervention of human preconceptions. The children who do not know who John Lennon is, whose minds are yet to be ‘carved’ by the preconceptions of their ancestors, are perhaps the ideal form of this concept, the people who could grow up to make Lennon’s dream a reality. Can you imagine that?

Confederate Band Names in the Court of Public Opinion

10 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by in Industry Comment, Music Monday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

“What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?”

“History is the lies of the victors,” I replied, a little too quickly.

“Yes, I was rather afraid you’d say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.”

 – Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Lady Antebellum and The Dixie Chicks have ditched the Confederate allusions in their names and become, respectively, Lady A and The Chicks.

The word ‘antebellum’ refers to the period before a war and commonly to the years preceding the US Civil War. It is often used in the phrase ‘antebellum South’ to refer to the Confederate states and to describe a style of architecture then popular in the region, particularly on plantations where slaves were worked. Given these connotations, it is no surprise the band chose to remove it from their name.

The change of appellation, however, has resulted in a conflict with the Seattle-based African American singer, Anita White, who has been using the name Lady A since the early 1980s, first as part of Lady A & The Baby Blues Funk Band and then in her ensuing solo career. Upon hearing about the change, Lady A (the singer) responded“It’s an opportunity for them to pretend they’re not racist or pretend this means something to them. If it did, they would’ve done some research.”; “now [they] want to take my professional name and brand.”; “I don’t even know how much I’ll have to spend to keep it.” In the American songwriter article, Paul Zollo wrote: “Given that the world knows what that A stands for, to many this change does little more than add extra insult to this ongoing injury.”

Lady A (the band) then apologised and the two parties held talks about co-existing. On receiving the contract offer from Lady A (the band), Lady A (the singer) said “I’m not happy about it. […] Their camp is trying to erase me.” She submitted a counteroffer that either the band would choose another name, or that she would change hers for a $5m fee plus a $5m split between Black Lives Matter, Seattle charities, and a legal defence fund for independent artists.

Lady A (the band) have now filed a lawsuit against Lady A (the singer), which, as Natalie Maynes of The Chicks has said, is ‘kind of going against the point of changing their name’. I would agree with Lady A (the singer): In an effort to eradicate the Confederate reference from the title, they have appropriated the name of a black singer, sued her to use it, and have retained the A as a reminder of what it used to stand for. The tokenism of the gesture implies they believe black lives matter but their actions suggest they think the voices of black musicians do not.

The word ‘Dixie’ also refers to the 11 states that comprised the Confederacy. The Dixie Chicks said they had wanted to change their name “years and years and years ago” but were finally roused to action after they saw someone on Instagram refer to the Confederate flag as “The Dixie Swastika”. Emily Strayer of The Chicks said she saw the image and thought “I don’t want to have anything to do with that.” In contrast to Lady A, The Chicks also reached out to a New Zealand duo of the same name requesting permission to share the moniker and received their blessing. The group also removed the whole word rather than reducing it to an initial, but that may just be because a band called The D Chicks has other unwanted associations.

There were warnings that changes like this had been coming. The band Confederate Railroad were removed from the bill of the Ulster County and Du Quoin State Fairs in 2019, officially because they used the Confederate flag in their logo, but most likely because of their name’s link to the antebellum South. In an interview with Rolling Stone, lead singer Danny Shirley espoused this view, saying he had no intention of changing the name and that the removal was because “You had one political blogger bring it up”.

The larger question in all this is why terms like ‘Dixie’, ‘Antebellum’ and ‘Confederate’, words associated with the side that lost the US Civil War, found their way into the names of bands in the first place. One answer is that the popular perception of what the words meant when the bands were formed has changed: Confederate Railroad are the oldest, starting out in 1987, The Dixie Chicks in 1989 and Lady Antebellum most recently in 2006.

You can trace the change in attitudes through the evolving perception of what the Confederate flag symbolises. The earliest nationwide poll to ask what the Confederate flag symbolised to the public was in 1992, when 69% of all Americans saw it as a symbol of Southern pride. The previous year, a poll of Southerners found that whites thought the flag was a symbol of Southern pride, while blacks thought it was a symbol of racism. As Shirley notes in the Rolling Stone interview, “To us, we were taught that [the Confederate] flag means you like the part of the country you come from.”

But times have changed since Shirley was taught. In June 2020, a poll found that 44% of Americans saw it as a symbol of Southern pride and 36% as a symbol of racism, while a separate survey the following month found that 56% saw it as a symbol of racism and 35% of Southern pride, with those from the South reflecting the national averages at 55% and 36%. Despite the considerable difference in responses, both show that recognition of the flag as primarily symbolising Southern pride has declined over the 30 years.

It is not known whether this change in understanding of what the Confederate flag, the Confederacy and associated terms signify will prove to be a continuing trend or simply a blip. I do not expect the defence of such things ever to entirely disappear: History may be written by the victors, but the self-delusions of the defeated have a tendency to persist.

 

Jeffrey Lewis – Keep It Chill! (In The East Vill)

03 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by in Music Monday, Song Analysis

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

“No, my prophecy will come bright, charging full at the eastern rays of the sun!”

 – spoken by Cassandra in Agamemnon by Aeschylus, as translated by George Theodoridis

On 24 March 2020, the singer Jeffrey Lewis posted a video of the song “Keep It Chill! (In The East Vill)” to his YouTube channel. It was a solo piece on acoustic guitar written in response to the COVID-19 outbreak reaching New York and the subsequent shutdown. Just over three months later, many of the worries and fears he enumerated in the lyrics have become eerily prescient.

In the third verse, Lewis predicted that rats are ‘gonna run out of things to eat’ because there’s ‘no one in the street’ and ‘it won’t take long ‘till they’re a billion strong.’ There were more sightings of rats after the implementation of the lockdown in both New Orleans and New York, and the reopening of outdoor restaurants and other eateries in the Big Apple has brought a surge in visible rat activity.

The verse continues with the lines ‘They’re sure the food they’re missing’s/now stored in out kitchens,/so look out, here they come!’. In the UK, a report by Aviva found that there had been a 42% increase in rat infestations for JG Pest Control between January to March 2020 (Q1) and April to June 2020 (Q2), a 120% increase in rodent-related callouts between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020, and that residential rodent cases for the first half of 2020 was equivalent to 90% of cases in the whole of 2019.

Lewis finishes the prediction with the lines ‘So each virus life we save/is gonna die in a mighty rat tidal wave’, which has not happened yet, thank goodness, and may never happen. Recently, however, the first case of tick-borne babesiosis was diagnosed in England. Babesiosis is a disease ticks acquire after they have fed off infected cattle, rodents or deer and then pass onto humans with bites. At present, there is no evidence to suggest this case was because of rodents, but the aforementioned increased human proximity to rats will likely lead to the spread of other diseases.

In the second verse, Lewis forecast that ‘the teeming hordes that can’t take no more is gonna loot the stores and then they’re coming for us’. Following the police killing of the African American George Floyd on 25 May 2020, there was widespread civil unrest that included, but was not limited to, looting, although the vast majority of it was peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. The section is concluded with the line ‘there’s blood that’s gonna spill’, and (graphic content warning) blood did spill, but from police brutality rather than rival looters.

In the fourth verse, Lewis refers to President Donald Trump as the ‘orange clown who runs DC’ and provides a list of actions he expects the leader to take. This begins with the President seeing ‘there’s perfect cause to declare martial laws’. Although he has not, in fact, declared martial law in response to the civil unrest, he has taken it upon himself to use a military general for a photo opportunity, threatened to deploy the National Guard, and sent federal agents in unmarked vehicles to detain protestors. So, while martial law itself has not been invoked, everything but martial law has been.

Later in the verse, Lewis sings that ‘all his Klu Klux kranks/patrol the streets with tanks/saying “Behave and you’ll be spared!”’. The use of ‘Klu Klux kranks’ to make reference to the Klan carries with it the connotations of racism the police have been accused of, and their anonymity, hiding under the hood, also anticipates the anonymity used by the officers in unmarked vehicles.

Lewis follows the ‘perfect cause to declare martial laws’ with ‘and pause elections indefinitely’. On 30 July 2020, the President tweeted: ‘Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???’, saying it will be the most ‘inaccurate and fraudulent’ election in history because of ‘universal mail-in voting’. Although later in the verse, Lewis opines that ‘you can’t send mail out’, the coronavirus outbreak means that a lot of people will be choosing to post their ballots. In Nevada, for example, lawmakers are looking to provide every registered voter with a mail-in ballot, much to Trump’s chagrin. The President has dangled this proposition of a rescheduled poll, and although the constitution clearly states that only congress has the power to authorise it, it would not be surprising if he attempted to carry out such a threat.

Another thing Lewis expects Trump to do is ‘call the banks’ and say ‘let’s all join ranks/unless their money might get shared’. The $2.2 trillion stimulus package passed in the senate on 25 March 2020 included a provision of $500bn for businesses in what was criticised as a ‘corporate slush fund’, as well as $400bn in loans for small businesses to be made available through banks and credit unions, which resulted in ‘larger companies with connections to major national or regional banks’ getting ‘priority treatment’. It did, however, include sending cheques to individuals, so Lewis’s fear that ‘you won’t get no bailout’ proved to be unfounded, but not far off, given the unprecedented increase in unemployment and the lapsing of rent protections paving the way for mass evictions.

Lewis also worries that “if the internet’s not a memory yet/it’ll get surveilled outright at will’. On 29 May 2020, President Trump signed an executive order targeting Twitter after it fact-checked one of his tweets. A lawsuit against it has been brought by the Center for Democracy and Technology, claiming the order could ‘discourage other platforms from exercising their free speech rights’. Add Trump’s intention to ban TikTok from the US to the mix, and the internet is not just being surveilled, but the wild west of the world wide web is becoming increasingly regulated.

Despite all of this, Lewis ends the song on a happy note, claiming there is a chance humanity will take ‘total warning about global warming’, that the shutdown will ‘slow greenhouse gases’ and ‘makes things greener and the whole world cleaner’. He also says there could be a ‘full-on call for healthcare for all/and better safety nets rolled out’. The hope is that these calls are answered and, unlike Cassandra, the warnings are heeded, because Lewis’s future-telling hit-rate of ill omens in one song is frighteningly high, so there is grounds for optimism that his harbingers of happier times will be too.