Volume 59

JUNE/JULY 2009

59. 7:     DISBELIEF AND DATBELIEF    7.27.2009

                       
                          THX (Robert Duvall) confesses his improper use of drugs to his rather insouciant Deity
                                                                                                          American Zoetrope/Warner Bros.

There is a scene in the futuristic fiction film by George Lucas, THX1138, in which Robert Duval, as the title character, enters a sort of phone booth in which there is a large image of a person with a slightly-Asiatic face that is the amalgam of Jesus, Buddha, and Mr. Rogers. This god, it turns out, is projected from a studio elsewhere, to these remote “confessionals,” but is merely a large photo—God as the Wizard if Oz. When supplicants enter the booth the local image intones an audio loop of ambiguous general responses to whatever problem or need is presented. They might come from any politician—exhortations to “serve the state by increasing production and increasing consumption.” It is the sort of mindless idolatry that we find in religion anywhere.

Lucas was implying that we will probably concoct some form of deity and religion even in a distant future, but the need to pray, confess and worship need have nothing to do with the likelihood that there is nothing and no one out there to hear or care. That lonely, dismal prospect is just too much for many people to bear and they will seize alternative that there is a god who cares about us and offers us “salvation” and eternal life, if we will just follow the rules set down in some old, inconsistent and often silly scriptures, and obey the interpretations of some men who wear silly hats and like to abuse women and children. The credulous will also tell people like me that, if I don’t get some faith, God will be pissed off and throw my sorry ass into hell for eternity. It would not matter if I led a life of rectitude and practiced tolerance and charity toward my fellow humans; disbelief negates all of that. Theirs is a god who will not only “have no other gods before Him,” but has a deep need for acceptance.

The First Commandment was always somewhat of a puzzle to me. Mind you, God put it first among the Ten Commandments that He must be accepted at the “one and only” god. In the Old Testament he wasn’t happy when the Hebrews took up with “false gods.” (Doesn’t this guy have any friends to tell Him He should get over this ego problem He has?) I confess that I, too, went through a period in which I worshipped a false god. Like the Hebrews I fell under the thrall of the idol of a golden cloven-footed animal, a gilded fawn. All my fawning over the golden fawn never answered my prayers for a new bike, so I dumped him. I think it was a good idea; God punished the Hebrews pretty bad for their false idol. What can they possibly had done so wrong to deserve the holocaust he gave them? It might be safer to disbelieve.

                      
                           Author and the Golden Fawn God that he worshipped between ages 12 and 14, until the
                           Fawn failed to grant Jim the bicycle that he wanted and Jim dumped Him.   Now they
                           are just friends. . . although with the recession and the escalating value of gold . . .

My disbelief in God is what Christian evangelists would probably call a “lifestyle choice” (by which they really mean I will burn in Hell for it). I wasn’t born a theist, the way gays are born gay. That’s because I learned to believe in God once—at least I think I believed—or I believed that I was supposed to believe in God. Didn’t everybody? It was part of my cultural inheritance, the way it is for all religions. (This was before I was old enough to go to café’s, which is where agnostics and atheists go to worship the sacred little roasted bean.) How do you not just start taking the existence of God for granted when everybody around you is shouting “Oh, my God!” (frequent orgasmic utterance), or muttering “Goddammit!” (failure to achieve orgasm), and such? Who are they talking to, anyway?

One may not be born a theist, but in this society one is born into theism. It is easier to be a theist than not. There is very little work to being a theist; that’s not only because believing is a hell of a lot easier than knowing, but because, to be a believer, you usually just have to choose only one of a small number of books—the Bible, Quran, Torah, Bhagavad-Gita, The Book of Mormon, Dianetics for Dummies . . . whatever, and get with the respective program, which begins by feeling metaphysically superior to those who chose the other books.

To be a non-theist requires a lot of work, a lot of it rather lonely, since (other than cafés) un-believers do not have churches in which to congregate and reassure ourselves about how pious—rather impious—we are. Libraries, laboratories and lecture halls are closest to what we have for churches, where we have to read rooms of books on science, philosophy and history just to refute one fanciful Book of Genesis. While those other guys are praying, worshiping and chanting, and watching The Passion of the Christ (What? Again?), we are reading, conducting experiments, and wandering in the lands of Truth, Hypothesis, and Doubt. Apostasy is a hard earned degree, not just a baptismal dunking.
But, as I said, I was once a theist (of sorts) and not because I chose to be. I did not choose to have water poured on my cute little head when I was only weeks old and have “God parents” accept Jesus and renounce Satan on my behalf, the Church’s version of waterboarding.* I did not choose to be sent into the clutches of the Sister of St. Joseph. I wasn’t born Roman Catholic; I was born into Roman Catholicism. And my spongy little mind languished in innocent, cheerful, reflexive credulity from Christmas to Easter and Easter to Christmas, blissfully unaware of the fragility and silliness of my metaphysical “certainties.”

The secret of success of religions is selling belief in not just God, but in the afterlife. The notion of salvation allows religions to promulgate notions that the present life might not only be endured, but resignation to its sufferings, or even submission to martyrdom, can guarantee an eternity in heaven. How else could the Pope ride through the faithful in Africa and South America in is “Popmobile,” spouting assurances that it is OK that they are oppressed by the corrupt regimes that is Church usually supports, OK that that are suffering the poverty that so contrasts with his own radiant opulence, OK that the sickness and hopelessness of the children, and the abuse of their women, and the AIDS that is spread because the Church regards condoms as “birth control,” will all be more than compensated by a comfortable eternity—all because of their resignation to “the will of God.” The same promise is made or implied by the other major religions. The same hope born of fear that all these faiths rely the existence of which rests not on an ounce of proof, but on the selling of a mass delusion.

In the end, maybe Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca said it most succinctly, when recognizing that the war was more important than his love affair with Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) he reluctantly tells her before sending her away, “. . . it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Not now . . .” Maybe everything doesn’t amount to even a “hill of beans.” In the end, it all comes down to God; either He’s there or He’s not. But if you believe that He’s there don’t try to sell me the bullshit that you believe so because the “proof” of his existence is that, as I read one argument on the Internet, if you took apart a television set it all its parts and put them in a bag, you could shake that bag for 100 billion years and it wouldn’t form into a television set. This is the “intelligent design” argument that “God is a TV repairman.” I actually tried this experiment myself with an old television set. I could not, of course, afford 100 billion years, but in six months I was able to shake the television set parts into a toaster, a fish tank and a personal vibrator. I don’t think God could do much better.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp
*If you are born into a Jewish family you look down when you are just eight days old and, oy vey, your foreskin is gone! Does that mean you are a religious Jew? Hell no but, if the mohel botched the job, you pee to the left for the rest of your life.

59. 6: THE LAST MOON WALK 7. 24.2009

                 Random ruminations on a sort of lunacy

                          
                                                                                                                       © 2009, UrbisMedia

I can just see myself, four decades younger, in what I fancy as my Greek God Period (actually I was lying on the floor on one of those 1960s too-shag carpets with a sore back from working on the lawn and two young daughters jumping on my rapidly-fading “ripped abs”). There was “uncle” Walter Cronkite in black and white, interspersed with shots of the geeks of the day—engineers with white short-sleeved shirts, horn-rimmed glasses, and brush-cuts saying things like “telemetry, GO; bio-systems, GO, ignition systems, GO” while smoking cigars and pipes—counting down for what is, without question, one of the greatest scientific and technological achievements before the iPhone. I still have the moldering New York Times with the biggest font ever: Men Walk on Moon. In real time it was momentous; although there are still people who claim Apollo 11 was all done on a sound stage in Burbank (starring the second gunman from the “grassy knoll,” D.B. Cooper, and the remaining alien from Roswell).

Much press has been given to the forty-year anniversary of the day Neil Armstrong put first foot on the moon, leaving the lasting imprint of a rather banal utterance. But what else was left of that great scientific and technological effort? Samples were collected, golf alls were struck and some excursions were taken in the lunar rover. Then, eight less visually compelling and lower-rating missions later, it all came to a halt. Holy cow! Then, been there, done that. 2001, A Space Odyssey, which came out the year before, was as visually compelling, took our imaginations on a longer ride, and has gotten more air time since.

Not quite, but somewhere in between. Not to put down the daring and drama of the moon landing, the riveting idea that the astronauts, even though mostly passengers by this time, added the thought that we could have ended up watching the slow deaths of two or three human beings. But the answer to why the moon landings came to such a sudden end probably owes to other factors. We had overcome our Sputnik-o-phobia and beat the Russkies to the moon. OK, done that. We easily become bored and we already take Velcro and GPS for granted. Then there were the oil crisis recessions of the 1970 and the inflations from our adventure in Vietnam. Moreover we should not discount the accession of the spectacularly unimaginative Republicans, who felt that rich people should be getting all that space program money, and their national hegemony over the next three decades. Finally, we should not overlook the great rise in religiosity (consonant with that of a Republican base). Why waste all that money on a space program when it’s right there in scripture— at the Rapture Jesus will be coming down here to get us for the bit “lift off” to heaven.

Nevertheless, there was, the inauguration of the International Space Station, sort of a platform for scientific experiments—and maybe, with the residency of several female astronauts, some experimentation with new zero-gravity “positions”—but also a container where geopolitical competitors for future space (military) domination could keep an eye on one another. First it was just the Americans and the Russkies, then it began to look like the international student’s dorm.

From another perspective certain realities certain realities began to set in, the Columbia and Challenger disasters not being the least of them. But there was also the recognition that space stations became places of containment for body odors, gasses and sloughed off skin cells. It took eons for humans to come up with a good toilet; but going into space—spectacular window views notwithstanding—must be like an incarceration in the men’s room of a bus station in Newark. As far as my personal astronaut fantasies were concerned they ended with the revelation (thanks to the whacky female space case who tried to whack a romantic competitor) that astronauts wear diapers.

Still, there are school kids today who aspire to go to Mars (some parents can hardly wait.). And maybe we are already unconsciously preparing them for the voyage. Mind you, these are kids have great opposable thumb dexterity derived from non-stop text messaging and video games, so they handle all the tech stuff very well. But they also tend to have the attention span of a May fly. Have they considered it is probably a six-month trip out to the red planet, that they will have to remain there si-months while the planet re-positions in orbit for the trip back, which is still another six months—a year and a half without being able to order in pizza.

In some of the old footage that was exhumed for this anniversary one of the astronauts remarked about orbiting over earth-night. He said he could see where the deserts are in Africa because the little campfires of nomadic people can be discerned flickering in the blackness. It reminds me first of Kubrick’s opening of 2001 with the hominids discovering bones could be weapons. But it is also a reminder of how far we have come so fast—astronauts contemporaneous with nomads. A lot has been said, then and now, about human curiosity, the need to explore, “to go where no man has gone before”; I admit to a touch of that myself. Once the earth itself, with terra incognita and “dark continents,” and still with sea bottoms no flippered-foot has imprinted, was plenty spacious enough for adventure.

It just might be that the moon landings created two, somewhat contradictory notions. One was that we might want to begin colonizing our solar system, and beyond, that earth might not be big enough or sustainable enough to contain all of us. We have always run from our problems by moving to another place; but we can no longer do that, we have reached finisterre and now must learn to deal with that reality.

The other, and in my view more salutary, notion was that the very view of earth from the surface of the moon—a desolate and inhospitable rock—engendered the environmental movement. The Apollo program brought home that we humans are evolved to inhabit the surface of a planet with the fortuitous (but perhaps not exclusive) chemical composition that enabled life. We are part of that system of life exclusive to earth. Eventually it will all come to an end, sooner than later if we do not respect and value it. The Apollo program gave us the sense not of infinity, but of finiteness.*

Some astronauts remarked upon the stark beauty of the moonscape. OK, space and other planets can be visually beautiful, but my aesthetic sensibilities run to the terrestrial. Give me the evening light over the Bay of Naples from Sorrento, the karst mountains in the misty perspective along the Li River in China, the wild meeting of great oceans on rounding Cape Horn, Venice rising from water on a sea approach from the Adriatic, the color of the water off Mykonos, the exhilaration of sailing down the Nile in the morning. And then there are the cities.

There is no need to pay, as some millionaire did, millions to take a ride to the space station. We are already aboard a spaceship. He views will be beautiful, but only that of earth will be welcoming. If you can’t see that from the expensive photos we took from the moon, you’re a damn fool, earthling. You have forgotten that there is no place like home.

Really? You, really thought this piece was gonna be about Michael Jackson?
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© 2009, James A. Clapp
*J. Clapp, “The Rise of Ad-Finite Planning: Concepts and Concerns,” (1979)

59. 5:   THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA, by Simon Winchester (2008) BR 7.12.2009

                                                  

One way of falling in love with China is first to fall in love with a Chinese woman. That is how it happened to Englishman Joseph Needham. It can happen in reverse order as well. Neither method is requisite, and one can fall in love with one without the other. It is not likely that many will emulate to romance of Needham with China, or with the woman who introduced him to her country, Gwei-djen. This is not a story of a very commonplace love affair, or a very commonplace lover, either.

Mostly it is about Needham’s love affair with China, and not because the Chinese woman in this case, a brilliant young biochemist from Nanjing whowas Needham’s mistress in a open marriage he maintained with his compliant wide, Dorothy, also a highly-regarded scientist. Needham himself was a renowned chemist possessed with a spongy mind and near photographic memory that allowed him to soak up languages (French, German, Latin and Greek, in addition to Chinese) as well as huge chunks of scientific and technological information. He was also a zealous socialist, a nudist, Morris dancer and a bit of a womanizer. Intellectual brilliance not only often comes with such eccentricities, but also often exonerates them.

It is the hunger Needham had for facts and information about China’s scientific and technological past that took him there in a somewhat vague “diplomatic” capacity in the years just before the revolution when he was attached to the British embassy in Chongqing as head of a new body called the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office. If that doesn’t sound like a MI-6 cover John LeCarre is a Harlequin Romance author. Needham did meet Ma and became quite friendly with Zhou en-lai. In his later years hid did get in a bit of a political tangle that proved diplomacy was not among his many gifts.

But in his China years Needham seemed too busy with his quest to spy all that much. His obsession and mission was to try to keep Chinese scientists working with modern equipment, which he was instrumental in supplying to universities and laboratories, and in collecting any and all information about Chinese scientific and technological achievement for what would eventually become, under mostly his authorship the most complete encyclopedic record of it in existence. He sent tons of information back to Cambridge for later fodder for his multi-volume magnus opus, Science and Civilization in China.

Needham believed that the West did not fully appreciate the extent of Chinese scientific and technological contributions over its long history and that, indeed, some of China’s achievements had been appropriated by the West. In dozen page appendix to this book listing China’s discoveries and inventions there are some surprises for those of us who have been brought up in the Eurocentric historical tradition. That tradition gives the Chinese credit for gunpowder (9th C AD), paper (300 BC), kites (4th C AD) and the spinning of silk (2850 BC), but there are numerous other inventions and discoveries that Needham’s intrepid research and travels have brought to light.

A brief, but relevant detour. My own Chinese friends like to take credit for the invention of noodles (supposedly, in China in AD 100), but I argue that it was the Roman navy who invented dried noodles—pasta—before that time as a means for keeping weevils and other bugs away from the grains aboard their ships. Moreover, Chinese noodles are of a different composition and so are perhaps a different “species” of noodles. More important to my (obvious) prejudice in this matter is that I have no quibble with the Chinese cooking their noodles to the smushy consistency of worms, but it is a crime to cook fettuccini or penne to any consistency less than al dente. I won’t stand for it, you hear! Bu ha˘o! bu ha˘o!

OK, back to the book and some calmness. But there truly are some real Chinese surprises. One that really surprised Needham himself was a book printed with movable type in Western China in around 1100 AD—that’s at least 300 years before Johannes Gutenberg. And the Chinese were doing print-block printing as early as 700 AD. Let’s just run through are few inventions and discoveries that Needham uncovered in China:

antimalarial drugs (3rd C BC)

anemometer (3rd C AD, so they can measure the winds that blow dust all over Beijing. They probably invented the broom as well, but it’s not in the list.)

chain suspension bridges (6th C AD);

chopsticks (600 AD, when Europeans were shoveling food into their faces with their hands and feet);

escapement clocks (725 AD, sorry Switzerland);

magnetic needle compass (1088 AD)

coins (9th C AD, but no record of whether slot machines were invented shortly thereafter);

coal as fuel (1st C AD, and they need to find some alternatives, and fast)

fertilizers (2nd C BC. Men poop in the rice paddy to the left; women to the right.)

diabetes, discovery of (1st C BC, right after the first MCDonald’s in Beijing sold its billionth burger)

ephedrine (2nd C AD, contemporaneous with the first cramming for finals)

handgun (1128 AD, first one reputedly wrenched from the cold, dead hands of Charleton Chen-ton)

magic mirrors (5th C AD, the ones that give the desired answer to “who’s the fairest of them all?”)

matches (AD 577, to light the coal to cook the noodles to eat with chopsticks; not to find the perfect mate through the first Chinese website for the lonely, qiHarmony.com)

toilet paper (589 AD, but not available in Chinese 3-star hotels until the Beijing Olympics)

harmonica (9th BC, yeah, so what, but America is credited with keeping slavery around until 1865 so Black people could invent “the blues” to play on harmonicas.)

We could go on with this list but it would only upset Eurocentrics who must take some solace in the Western invention of the brazier, the monster truck, light beer, nuclear weapons, reality TV, and ads for male enhancement drugs. But more seriously, folks, there is the nagging question that Needham asked: “Why . . . if the Chinese had been so technologically creative for so long, and if they invented so much in antiquity—why did modern science not develop in China but in Europe and the West?” (p. 260, Or, why do I always have to ask for a fork in a Chinese restaurant?)

By the 18th and 19th Centuries Europe was developing capitalism and the industrial revolution and China appears to have been just sitting back and resting on its laurels. It was the 19th C Emperor Qianlong who famously told Britain’s Lord Macartney, “We possess all things . . . I have no use for your country’s manufactures.” (Macartney apparently did not reply that China did not appear to possess the Beatles’ Hard Days Night album.)

Needham ever really came up with much of an answer to the big question. There is no argument that the Chinese long ago developed a curiosity and intelligence that resulted in many discoveries and inventions. One explanation for their achievements is that they have been around so long and they have been very cohesive in culture and language over a very long period of time. Factors that might have held back advancement—the way that religion obstructed stem cell research in America, for example—were present at various times in China, and Emperor Qin Shi Huang had a penchant for killing scholars, but the Chinese were numerous and emperors were often reclusive and left the people alone if they were not too Troublesome. Still, the impressive record makes us wonder why China came to be regarded as a backward nation in modern times. Was it the Qing Dynasty? Was it Confucianism? Was it the rigidities and stupidities of Maoism?

Or, Did China, as some observers wearily conclude, “just stop trying”? Maybe they went into a sort of Luddite period, or even seriously began to wonder about the “costs” that “progress” exacts. If that were the case it would be ironic that we are now in what is the Post-Mao/Pro Pro-Deng (“to get rich is glorious”) period in China, and there is a growing awareness that the massive production and consumption of a huge society with pent up wants and needs already has a big and powerful head of steam. China cannot simply adopt the West’s technologies or even its political and social systems; that way spells disaster. But it must become creative again, as it was before. It must invent technologies and social systems that will save it from the disaster of just aping the West. They put the first nuclear-capable missile up in 1966. Their first astronaut went into space in 2003. They hosted their first Olympic Games in 2008. They have Beemers and condos, Internet access and cell phones. That is all western stuff; now take it a do something really creative with it, China. We would all become China lovers.

I apologize for letting this review stray into what it would be charitable to call “creative non-fiction.” But, heck, we can’t let the Chinese take over creativity again. And I am still really upset over their attempt to rip-off the invention of pasta. Take the gunpowder, paper and movable type, I don’t care. But leave my ethnic comfort food alone. (This goes as a caution to my Hispanic friends. Watch out, when you are not looking, the Chinese will lay claim to the invention of the fish taco by some guy names Chang rod-riguez in 436 BC.)
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© 2009, James A. Clapp

59. 4:     BOULEVARDS OF BROKEN DREAMS     7.4.2009

                  a review of Revolutionary Road and the Cinema of Suburbia

                                         

Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world. It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the heat and dust.   [Letter written in 539 B.C.]

2547 years later comes the release of Revolutionary Road, in the midst of a global economic recession ignited by a housing crisis fueled by “sub-prime” housing mortgages, comes another tragic suburban drama. Set in the early 1950s, when the “suburban dream” was just taking form, the Wheelers, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) and their two young children abide in a classic clapboard “Early American” suburban home on a very generous grassy plot. They are a demographic cliché; Frank commutes to the city by train to a boring corporate office job, April is what we now call a “stay-at-home mom.” They are like many other couples forsaking the city to set up a life “away from all the heat and dust.”

There is not much of a story in that, but in Richard Yates’ novel on which this Sam Mendes film is based, the Wheelers are sufficiently introspective and projective to discern that their suburban dream just might be existential death. Frank’s job is unfulfilling with the same co-workers, the same lunches, an occasional dalliance with a secretary to relieve the boredom. An acting role in community theater only depresses April. So why not Paris, the ultimate city of expat dreams in the 1950s? Frank had been in Paris during the war, and the suggestion to April that they might chuck it all and live an exciting urban life.

No sooner are their plans to escape suburbia announced to their friends and Frank’s co-workers than realities intrude. April learns she is pregnant and Frank objects to her wish to have an abortion, but maybe he is really lured by a promotion in a company that appears to have a future in the digital revolution. The existential reality of the suburban life they have already made is torn raw in a visit by a neighbor’s mentally deranged son whose verbal rages contain truths the Wheelers seem unable speak to one another. Their suburban dream turns into a prison of mutual contempt until April tragically botches her self-administered abortion.

Surely, there have been couples that have come to grief in Newark, Detroit, Indianapolis, and other cities. But suburbs have for millennia been places with more quietude, space, cleaner air and greenery, especially grass, where families could be raised away from urban traffic, housing density and the proximity of the motley throng of immigrants. They were the ideal vision of the best of city and country, the antidote to the pressures and discomforts of urban life.

In fact, American suburbs have performed a far more practical function: they did not just allow erstwhile urbanites access to the countryside, but they allowed them access to the middle class. The lower land prices of exurbia permitted millions of former apartment renters in the city that had gained no interest or equity in property to take acquire the most essential aspect of the “American Dream”—home ownership. The home, a steady job, and a car to commute to it became the three-legged stool on which that dream rested. But for some, it could all go up in barbeque smoke. For some they dare not allow themselves the question, “is this all there is?”

For most suburbia was an economic foothold; for many the reality was close enough to the dream. But, since the cinema is interested in drama, not satisfaction and complacency, it was misfits and miscreants that drew its attention. Hexemplified by films such as Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1961). Based on a best-selling humor book about the suburbs it was also a vehicle for Doris Day to showcase a hit song of the same title. Day and her screen husband (David Niven) move to the suburbs at her insistence, but he must continue to work in New York, where he is a drama critic and there is the temptation of city women (Janis Paige). Minor misunderstandings, and other plot elements that soon became the staple of television sit-coms, resulted in ultimately happy endings.

These kinds of comedy situations pop up again in suburban settings in Wives and Lovers (1963), and The Grass is Greener over the Septic Tank (1978). By far the most amusing scene on this theme appears in The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) where urbanite Mel Edison (Jack Lemmon) is having a nervous breakdown because he has lost his job. He and his wife, Edna (Anne Bancroft), are invited to the suburban home of his older brother, Harry (Gene Saks). No sooner do they arrive and are accosted by Harry’s enormous dogs than Harry begins extolling the advantages of the suburbs over the city. He badgers his brother to fill his lungs with the fresh air, and to walk over his extensive property, from which Mel gets poison ivy. Meanwhile, Harry’s wife involves Edna in her home-making projects and gardening with comic ineptitude. The city dwellers seem relieved to return to their high-rise apartment and be free of the sub urban zealotry of their well-meaning relatives.

With the exception of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, such conditions hardly qualify for a compelling comedic or dramatic setting, unless the security and serenity of suburbia are threatened by circumstances alien to its putative homogeny and conformity. Indeed, this dramatic plotline appears to be a common one when screenwriters elect to address life in the suburbs.

That a film might be titled Bachelor in Paradise (1961) is an indication that the suburbs were family-centered places in which an unmarried individual would be a sufficient anomaly to drive a plot. The suburb in this case is a generic California subdivision of new homes inhabited mostly by young families in a circadian round of husbands departing en masse to jobs in the city, and wives engaged in child-rearing, homemaking and coffee-klatching. One establishment shot shows an early morning routine in which all of the husbands on a street depart at the same time in cars backing out from garages and driveways and driving off on the commute to the city.

Introduced into this paradise is a womanizing best-selling author of books observing the manners and mores (particularly romantic) of Europeans. A.J. Niles (Bob Hope), compelled to spend a year in the U.S. for tax purposes, decides to use the time writing about American suburbanites. As a bachelor who is the sole male remaining in the subdivision with a potential harem of somewhat bored wives, Niles becomes the subject of amorous possibility for some of them, and a threat to their husbands.

Much of Bachelor in Paradise is a stage for comedian Bob Hope deliver one-liners, and for situation comedy sequences. Along the way much fun is poked at suburban lifestyle and the need for something interesting to happen in it. As it happens, the other single individual in the cast is Rosemary Howard (Lana Turner), the woman from whom Niles is renting his suburban home, and there is little doubt they will end up together. Anyone who settled in a California suburb in the 1950s or 1960s will immediately recognize the setting of this movie, and perhaps the social ennui as well.

Marital infidelity was only hinted at in Bachelor in Paradise. But that was before the “sexual revolution.” By the late 1960s and the 1970s the suburbs were a couple of decades old and sexual escapades had come to be regarded as a prime preoccupation to relieve marital boredom. The Ice Storm (1997) looks back to the 1970s from the vantage of some thirty years on. The suburb is New Canaan, Connecticut, the hometown of the Hood family. The “new way of life” has already begun to tatter, and nice houses, late model cars, and good schools, are no guarantee for happiness in suburbia. The father, Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is having an affair with the mother of his children’s friends. Ben’s wife (Joan Allen) suspects it and has retreated into her own emotional “ice storm.” Their children, Wendy (who plays sex games with the boys next door) and Paul, are at least, if not more, grown up as their parents (whom they refer to in their private language as “parental units”).

During an actual ice storm, which glazes the suburb, the adults engage in games of wife-swapping that were becoming popular in the period. At boozy parties men threw their car keys into a bowl and women chose randomly from it to determine their sexual partner for the night. But as director Ang Lee looks back upon this recreation from the vantage of later years the scene takes on an irony. The men evidence an anxiety over having their keys drawn from the bowl, and one woman is relived that she has selected her own husband’s keys. Supposedly even the swinging lifestyle of suburbia quickly loses its momentum.*

It is bored suburban husbands, preoccupied with crabgrass and spying on each other, who drive the storyline of The Burbs (1989). With little else of interest, the writers reprise the plot from Frankenstein: mysterious, unsociable, and unsavory looking neighbors move into a dilapidated house next door to the family of Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks). Ray, concerned about his property values, but also suspicious of strange noises and lights coming from the shuttered old house, is fed sinister scenarios by other bored husbands. A neighbor who has not been seen for days is considered to be a victim of some vile doings. After a social intrusion (under the ruse of being “neighborly”) the newcomers prove to be absurdly sinister looking and have strange accents.

In search of evidence of evil-doing, Ray and his fellow protectors of the neighborhood break into their house while the occupants are away. After several silly mishaps, a gas main in the basement is broken and the house explodes. When the occupants return they are exposed as ghouls after the trunk of their car is shown to be full of human bones. The Burbs has little, if any, cinematic or sociological value, although it is interesting that its writers seem to take delight in having the youth of the subdivision act as observer-narrators who’s main enjoyment of suburban life was watching their parents make fools of themselves.

A more interesting variation on what might be regarded “the Frankenstein in suburbia” sub genre, involves a young man created by a weird inventor, again in an old gothic mansion at the edge of s suburban subdivision. With allusion to Pinocchio as well, a lonely aging inventor turns a cookie-cutting machine into a young boy, but dies before finishing the project, leaving the boy with scissors for hands. Edward Scissorhands (1990) is an endearing little Frankenstein, played touchingly by Johnny Depp. Reclusive Edward, who knows the outside world only from the magazine pictures he has clipped, is discovered by Avon Lady Peg (Diane Weist). She brings Edward to her home in the pastel-painted suburban tract and introduces him to her husband, Bill (Alan Arkin), their son, and cheerleader daughter, Kim (Wynona Ryder). Edward’s pasty complexion is often scarred when he attempts to flick away his long unruly hairs. He wears a Goth-inspired black leather suit, which only adds to his alien stature. Much is made of Edward’s physical predicament; he not only scars himself, but puncture waterbeds. But he also is capable of giving haircuts, and creating, with great artistic flurry, topiary and ice sculptures.

Director Tim Burton also shows how the curiosity of some of the suburbanites about Edward turns suspicious and hostile when Edward is called a fake and a freak, and is bullied toward crime by one of the local boys. Even an oversexed housewife tries to seduce him. In the end, suburbia is too unaccommodating for such a misfit and Edward is once again alone. Like ET, Steven Spielberg’s cuddly little alien visitor to another American suburb, he really doesn’t quite fit in when the initial curiosity wears off because its normalcy and security that suburbia wants most.

According to Hollywood, the last thing any property-value respecting suburbanite wants are “neighbors from hell.” Neighbors (1981) presents Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi playing against type in a farce about middle-class suburbanites. Earl Keese (Belushi) is a polite and nervous man living and uneventful life with his unremarkable wife when macho, boisterous and boorish Vic (Ackroyd) and his vixen wife move in next door. The movie proceeds as a send up of suburban conventions and expectations about to descend into a suburban nightmare. Wife-swapping is the theme in another suburban neighbors film, Consenting Adults (1992), in which Kevin Spacey plays the threatening neighbor who broaches the subject to his benign and retiring neighbor played by Kevin Kline. But the ultimate suburban neighbor from hell might be “the terrorist next door” played by Tim Robbins in the innocently titled Arlington Road (1999). While essentially a thriller that takes its market impetus from the events of Oklahoma City, it’s suburban setting lends an especially unsettling element to the possibility that the person mowing the next door lawn or firing up the barbeque might have as benign an appearance making a sinister intent as that of Timothy McVeigh.

We have witnessed the wholesomeness that characterized the early films set in suburbia give way to satire and then to darker themes. The sociological fact was that suburbia changed the environment, but it didn’t really change people. The American tendency to put too much faith in physical determinism, much in the same way we regard our nation and it’s ideals as historically exceptional, proved to be unfounded. If suburbia was the best expression of the American Dream, it was found wanting. Suburbia’s critics made the same mistake, stereotyping suburbs as homogenous social wastelands concerned with crabgrass and keeping up with the Joneses. Demographically, suburbs were often more ethnically diverse than inner city ethnic enclaves.

Although suburbia became associated with the American Dream it was also often purchased at the expense of other aspects of the American experience. This is an aspect of the subject that rarely makes its way into cinematic expression, except indirectly. Chinatown (1974) is a film noir murder mystery, but it is set in Los Angeles in 1937 during a drought. This was also the period in which the city was expanding into the San Fernando Valley. The film chronicles the chicanery of corrupt public officials and land speculators behind the construction of a reservoir and the eventual building of new suburban housing developments. Los Angeles had already proved itself to be a place where the “gold in the hills” was real estate value. Between 1906 and 1926 it went from twenty-nine square miles to over four-hundred square miles. In the arid climate of the Los Angeles basin it was water that made that grew real estate value and the political power that came from an expanding city.

Corrupt politics aside, the suburbs ate up erstwhile farmland, swallowed small towns, and eventually established political rivalries with central cities. As suburbs matured internal political divisions emerged as well, tax burdens increased as new services were added, debates over growth, integration, pollution, and other matters began to remind some of the problems they had supposedly escaped the city to avoid. Central to many of the problems of suburbia was the question of property values.

While suburbs were associated with familism, they also engendered a growing independence for women, who took more responsibility for the development of the social infrastructure of these areas, sitting on school boards, establishing Girls Scouts and Little Leagues, selling real estate, and other activities. This independence took flower among some suburban women in the 1960s and 1970s in the “women’s movement” and also posed a threat to the notion of suburban family solidarity as more women questioned traditional marriage roles and marriage itself.

By the close of the millennium the suburbs had become such a dominant feature of the American urban scene that films set in suburbia no longer had much of a locational distinction. The largest demographic cohort going to the movies now comes from the suburbs, filing into the multiplexes in suburban malls to see films that may well be made by film makers who, like themselves, were born and raised in suburbs. Films such as Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), about an awkward and unattractive girl in a suburban high school humiliated by her classmates and unsatisfied with her family, or the schemes and infidelities of Election (1999), or The Ice Storm (1997), all plumb the sinister, dark, and unfulfilling sides of the suburban experience.

Moreover the line between city and suburban is less distinct. Suburbs increasingly are experiencing many of the problems associated with the inner city. Americans are less shocked to learn of school shooting like those at Columbine and other sub urban schools, perpetrated by students with all the supposed material advantages of suburbia. The scourge of the triangle of drugs, gangs and prostitution, once associated exclusively with inner cities, has surprisingly made its way into the American suburb.**

When American Beauty (1999) received the Academy Award for best picture in 2000, the suburbs might have seemed to have finally arrived as environments that could be taken seriously for cinematic drama. That is, the suburbs were no longer those tracts of bungalows and Cape Cods of the 1950s portrayed in farces like Bachelor in Paradise. Nearly a half-century of American suburbanization has brought us to the realization that it is not so much where we are, but what we are, that makes the difference. Urban planners, who long denigrated and scorned the visual blandness of suburbia, continue to offer physical fixes and palliatives. “Neo-traditional” design proffers communities that harken back to the neighborhoods and small towns before the suburban era, places where, presumably, people sit on stoops and front porches, greeting neighbors, and women push prams along cozy streets of American Gothic homes. But “neo-traditional” design cannot make neo-traditional people, families, jobs, and values.

American Beauty is, in a sense, a summation of suburbia’s social pathology set against an antiseptic physical environment. With beautiful colonial homes set in manicured lawns, driveways full of late model sports utility vehicles, all the surface features of the American Dream are all present in the establishing shots. But the narration track tells a different story. Very much is wrong with Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), his family, and his neighbors. Entrapped in a mid-life crisis, masturbation is the highlight of his day. He has a beautiful, but “Stepford,”*** wife, and a sullen daughter who regards him as a loser. The viewer tends to identify with Lester because it is his story and he is its narrator, with all the grim irony of Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. Lester hates his job so much that he is willing to resign from it and take a burger-flipping fast food, minimum wage job instead. His wife is unfaithful to him and he has an infatuation with a high school cheerleader. He may be flailing about, but at least he is rebelling. None of it turns out satisfying for Lester, not the house, not the job, the family, or the neighbors. American Beauty even reaches back to the old suburban them of the neighbors from hell, in this case, a Nazi memorabilia-collecting homophile ex-Marine and his weird voyeuristic son.

Perhaps it is because America never seemed to have enjoyed a golden urban age that the suburban dream seemed to offer so much promise. Americans have always had a good case of anti-urbanism. They might have left the farms and small towns in great numbers to take advantage of the allure of the city and its riches, but they seem to have done so without fully grasping what that meant in terms of the diversity, disorder and distance from traditional norms, and they have retained a nostalgia for those “good old days” that never were, but fade into myth with the passage of time. Suburbia was the compromise. It did deliver much of the material promise of the American Dream. Many Americans entered the middle class through the door of suburbia. But in both the virtual and actual suburbia on the other side of that door is a volatile world on the edge of self-destruction.

That the first Academy Award “Best Picture” of the new millennium was American Beauty might have seemed to express Hollywood’s summary dark vision of a suburban future centered on the theme of contemporary American suburban disappointment. It is perhaps significant that “suburbia,” the most significant American urban phenomenon of the latter half of the 20th century, was the kick-off theme for the next century. By going back to the 1950’s to examine the genesis of that disappointment in Revolutionary Road, Hollywood apparently feels there is more suburban angst mostly suburban moviegoers are willing to pay to see. It is not just the superb screenwriting and acting that make films like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road such a successful films; it might also be its plausibility.

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© 2009, James A. Clapp

*Apparently not with everyone, however. The 1999 documentary, The Lifestyle, chronicles the activities of those who have adopted swapping houses and spouses as a full-fledged way of life. Spoken of by its adherents with almost religious zeal, the “lifestyle” is promoted as something that can even, paradoxically, enhance marital fidelity and monogamy. The documentary shows them to be rather dull, and unappealing people, who sometimes admit they have not found sexual paradise and opt out for more conventional lifestyles. It is also notable that what came to be called “swinging” (partner swapping) in the 1970s also proved to be, if in perverse form, an expression of the growing independence of women in American society.

**From Rubies to Blossoms: A Portrait of American Girlhood: The New Gangs of New York, National Public Radio, February 8 – 9, 3003

***She, like Rosemary (Lana Turner) in Bachelor in Paradise, sells real estate.

59. 3: THE EVOLUTION OF HAND TO MOUSE COMBAT 6.26.2009

                                                                                         © 2009, UrbisMedia

Again, yesterday it was announced in the news that an American drone predator had killed several Pakistani civilians along with some Al Qaeda insurgents. The ratio is the subject of argument.

It wasn’t really that long ago that when going into battle you had to get right up to where you could “see the whites” of the enemy’s eyes, smell the foul breath of fear, hear the cracking of bone and sense the resistance of organs to your blade, and finally, to feel the heat of your enemy’s blood as it burbled out with his last cry. Of course, it could be the other way round; that’s the way war was for most of human history—up close, very close up, and personal, very personal. That has, for the most part, gone into history, first with the bow and arrow, and finally, with the gun.

Wellington and Bonaparte stayed within the sight, sound, smell and danger of their great marching phalanxes thrown against one another in some giant chess game in the fields of Belgium. But by WWI, the last Great War fought in the trenches and fields, generals were removed from the field and sent, a la Paths of Glory,* wave pn wave of men to almost certain death, in numbers more befitting astronomy.

In the old days battles were mostly fought on fields of battle—the Plains of Marathon, Agincourt, the Argonne, “The Bulge,” Iwo Jima—places where the clash of armies and armor, tanks and artillery, settled matters, and usually without much, if any, “collateral damage.” WWII is some sense is responsible for changing that. The idea that an enemy could be weakened if you destroyed his means of weapon production (usually city-based), or his supply of oil, could ensure his defeat. Along with the rise of air power, it made everywhere and anywhere part of the field of battle. Today we say that there is “no way to define the battlefield,” and people in small towns in the American Midwest who used to send their sons off to America’s wars abroad, now fear that if a few (innocent) enemy combatants from Guantanamo are released into their midst, they will have their throats slit in their beds.

In the old days all men of fighting age went into combat, usually along with their officers; they survived or died together and their women and children either welcomed them home or went into slavery with the victorious enemy. You were close enough to your enemy to insult him (a common practice), such as by exposing your bare ass to him (a common insult), but not before measuring the distance of the throw of his spear (the longbow may have ended that practice). These days an American soldier abroad is more likely to walk right by an enemy who wears no uniform and blends with the civilian population. And, since insurgency had become a more common form of fighting for non-state enemy combatants, globalism and immigration have made it possible to engage in terrorism—a strategy that has proven to be almost as effective in its threat as in its practice.

Today we have what is sometimes called an “asymmetrical” battlefield. In the so-called “War on Terror,” the “enemy” is one without an air force, navy, armored divisions and with limited artillery. He fights not in the open, un-uniformed, from the cover of civilian populations, and he is willing to even sacrifice his own body into an explosive weapon for the “honor” of being a martyr to his faith. With such mobile tactics he has been able to hold off and frustrate the most powerful military on earth. Mostly, it is he who chooses when and where to fight. He can lie and wait at home and work, like a local militiaman, a relatively low-cost, low tech, but often highly efficient shadowy fighting force that knows the local terrain because it is his home as well as his “battlefield.”

Contemporary warfare has therefore become a strange combination of ancient and modern forms of combat—an enemy, deprived of the high technology of highly** developed and wealthy states, that must engage their enemy as closely and personally as possible, often little different in appearance than a shopkeeper or a goatherd. His most extreme stealth tactic is the suicide bomber—the warrior as weapon and delivery system. Opposed to him is the highly technological military with warriors outfitted with body armor, communications systems, sensing devices, night vision, “camo” uniforms, and employing tanks and armored vehicles.

The very nature of war against insurgents requires what our military refers to as “boots on the ground,” a presence on the undefined battlefield that results in fighting that places combatants at least within sight of one another. For what it is worth it “humanizes” the foreign soldier to some extent when is presence can be combined with the delivery of aid and services to “collaterals” corraled into the ambit of the “battlefield.”

Since the beginning of armed conflict adversaries have tried to achieve technological advantage. Many years ago I read From the Crossbow to the H-Bomb, by historians Fawn and Bernard Brodie.*** As I remember it, they make a good case that, ceteris paribus, the technologically superior force almost always wins (this is not a case for expanding the Department of Defense budget). Iron swords broke bronze swords, cannons ended walls as a defense, crossbows penetrated armor, the machine gun ended mass assaults, and the atomic bomb . . . .

But while superior military technology usually wins battles it does not necessarily win wars. War is not all about body counts. As media have become more immediate we have seen how it affected the resolve of Americans to continue the Vietnam War. We have also learned that when wars that are not contested on relatively neutral “battlegrounds,” but in homelands, it can make a substantial difference. People who have nowhere to go if they lose often fight on to the bitter end.

In some respects, the tactics of insurgents are a permutation of lack of sophisticated technology, the shape of the battlefield, and that intangible—ideological/religious fervor. The capacity and ability to rely upon sophisticated technological solutions has allowed America to choose more remotely deployed weaponry, with the Predator drone being the most recent manifestation. There are some 180 drones operating in the skies above the Pakistan-Afghanistan battlefields, operated by “pilots” (some of them expert former video-game players) from “bases” near Las Vegas, Nevada.

Ironically, the remote war technology that is not quite able to distinguish a farmer with a hoe from a combatant with an AK-47, or an Al Qaeda strategy meeting from a wedding feast might just produce kinds of collateral casualties that will once again bring the battle to our homeland, perhaps this time even to the true center of our American “civilization”—Las Vegas, Nevada.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp
*The great Kubrick anti-war film
**Although he does use some higher tech and sophistication for communication and the IED.
**That must have been in the 1960s and I have lost my copy, but was happy to see that Amazon.com has copes for sale.

59. 2:    PROMISED LANDS    6.8.2009

                    

Several years ago I was on a bus traveling through the West Bank of Palestine. As we passed through the ancient city of Hebron, a holy place to both Muslims and Jews because it contains the burial place of Abraham, the father of both religions, I could not help but notice the bright new residential constructions on the hills surrounding the old city—Israeli settlements.* Other than the hegemony of Jerusalem there is perhaps no more contentious issue that keeps Palestinians and Israelis at one another’s throats—and by extension, American and the Muslim world—than the building of Israeli settlements in erstwhile (pre-1967 war) Palestinian territory. In President Obama’s address to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, 2009, he stated unequivocally that the process of Israeli settlements (the settlement of lands conquered in war is also proscribed by the Fourth Geneva Convention) must cease.

One of my favorite topics back in the days when I taught my Seminar in Urban Theory was titled “Space and Place.” Anyone who has read these pages with any regularity over the years can see that I haven’t “let go” of my interest and fascination with the way in which humans relate to terrestrial space.** Space is, of course, just that, space—volume of some dimension or another, ad variously “contained.” We fill various volumes of pace with different things—packing our suitcase space, or closets with things, leaving parts of other spaces unfilled, and even putting entire cities and countries in space, and, of course, floating around in space on our little planet.

But space gets filled up with something else—with human experience. It is our human experience in space that fundamentally changes a discreet part of space into something else, something that is not created by the Big Bang, or God if you wish, but by us. Space becomes Place. A place differs from space in that it is where something happened. That is why humans mark, and remember, and often care deeply about places—because something happened in a place.

What actually happens in a space might not be of especially great social-historical moment. It might be the place where you were born, or where some other significant aspect of your life took place. It might be the place where you met the love of your life. It might just be your old neighborhood. But it will be a place with a significance unique to you. When we return to such a place, say, after many years away from it, our memory and the actuality of it merge—often with distorted scale and clarity—the two lenses on the same object might be out of focus.

Moreover, we can see in this conceptualization that place is not only about where (Space), but also about when (Time)—hence, this is where I was when something happened. Places are therefore our nexus of space and time; they are our aides de memoire that situate us in both place and memory. This is why they are important to us, because they (re)locate us in the stream of our lives. People who are driven or otherwise removed from their place are dis-placed persons.

But there is another dimension to the importance of place in human existence; that is where there is a significance of place in a collective consciousness. What as happened in various places can acquire significance beyond personal experience that bestows up such places great power and importance through which a virtual or vicarious “experience” is conjoined. The mere evocation of Rome, Hollywood, Paris, Nashville, Benares, Mecca, Shanghai, Jerusalem, or specific points or locations within them evokes meanings and emotions of historical, political, religious, artistic or other importance, even for people who have never encountered such places beyond media or imagination. Numberless other places, Omaha Beach, El Alamein, Wounded Knee, Dealey Plaza, Yalta, Bikini Atoll, The Vatican, The Killing Fields, Versailles, Auschwitz, as randomly chosen from memory, all evoke common recognition and emotions.

This is where we return to the matter of the hegemony of such places, especially contested places such as Jerusalem, or Hebron. Israel’s right-wing parties have offered rationale for settlements as a necessity for “natural growth,” a term that bears an uncomfortable ring of Germany’s lebensraum. But also to be heard are that the lands of Palestine’s West Bank are “holy,” bestowed in ancient covenant by God to the people of Israel. Such claims are hardly unique to the Israelis. In the historical scrambling and rearrangements of territories (especially in the Middle East) from Balkans, to East Timor, on every continent, aboriginal presence, rights of first arrival, and particularly religion have been and are the source of disputes and conflicts over discreet chunks of he surface of the earth.

While peoples might share common biology, similar histories, and even share similar governmental principles, the sharing of space tends to emphasize differences. The Western Wall and the mosque on Temple Mount in Jerusalem, for example, occupy the same location—but a different elevations—and each represents a major religious/historical event for two different faiths. Both spaces and places are territorially mutually exclusive; that is, each space and place is discreet and territorially mutually exclusive. I, for example, am writing this at a café that is at 32 degrees, 44’47 minutes and 18” seconds North, by 117 degrees, 10’32 minutes and 98” seconds W on the face of the earth. No other space or place shares or has those coordinates. Place is finite and defined by arbitrary borders; when I occupy this able, this is exclusively, if only temporarily, my place.

Humans, being place-makers (other animals attempt to control territory, but so far as we know, not for symbolic purposes), being inclined by fear to religious beliefs, and land being finite and never purely substitutable, seem destined to conflict. For our relatively brief existence there has failed to develop an ethos capable of resolving the disputes over space and place. As creatures of memory, humans are by nature, place-makers, but since space is finite, it is only religion that is variable in this equation. Unfortunately, as each human cohort has chosen its supreme god, each feels justified in claiming that their god has bequeathed them their “promised land.”
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© 2009, James A. Clapp
* See DCJArchives: 19. 5: Sweet Waters in the Promised Land (Part 2) 4.13.2005.
** See, for example, DCJ Archives: 4. 3: The Home of the Gods 1.07.2004; 4.7: . . . and they shall be led into the land of corn (1.12.2004); 4.3 The Home of the Gods, 1.7.2004; 25. 5: The Planners are Coming, The Planners Are Coming!! 10.17.2005; 43. 2: The Pig in the Parlor 10.7.2007; 24. 6: The Blancocruxians 9.16.2005.

59. 1:     “THEY WANT OUR WOMEN!”    6.1.2009

                                   

                                                                                           Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna in Florence,
                                                                                            Loggia dei Lanzi, seen from the Piazza della Signoria

There is a joke I heard many years ago. I’m not sure I remember it exactly, but it goes like this:

Back in the days of marauding hordes a village is taken by Mongol raiders. A large, fierce Mongol strides into a hut where a man and his wife are cowering. The Mongol says to the man, “I am going to rape your wife, and you are not going to interfere.”

The Mongol takes his sword, scrapes a line in the mud floor of the hut and tells the man, “If you step over this line I will kill you in a horrible way.” Then he grabs the wife, throws her on the bed and proceeds to rape her. When he is finished he walks out without saying a word.

The husband rushes over to his wife who is weeping, but when she looks at her husband the man is actually laughing.

“How can you be laughing when a barbarian has just raped your wife?” she says.

“I sure showed him, the husband replies,” snickering.

“What can you mean, husband,” the wife say incredulously,” that barbarian raped me right in front of your eyes!”

“Yeah, the husband says,” proudly, “but he was so busy at it that he never noticed that I stepped over that line three times!”

One shouldn’t make jokes about rape, perhaps, but this one is really puts down the husband’s ridiculous machismo. In the reality of the many, many times such rapes have occurred throughout history, the husband would have most likely been killed in any case. Probably from the beginning of humankind raping, then enslaving (or sometimes killing) conquered women was not an uncommon practice, as was putting the conquered men to the sword. The practice seems to have been ubiquitous. Tribes on Borneo went off on raids of other clans and villages, kidnapping women. The fear might have been from so-called ”barbarians,” but armies from ancient history, through the Greeks and Romans, up to he present day have engaged in the practice of using conquered women as slaves and concubines. The Japanese army engaged in a practice of enslaving women in conquered territories in WWII, pacing them in brothels as “comfort women” for their troops [Theresa S. Park, A Gift of the Emperor, 2005]. Russian soldiers went wild in the conquest of Berlin and there was the notorious “Rape of Nanking” by Japanese soldiers that combined rape and murder. [See DCJ Archives, 19. 7: The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang 4.22.2005 ] These days it is likely happening as these words are written in Darfur and elsewhere.

Rape as an instrument of warfare was, and is, as much a “political act” as was vanquishing enemy combatants. At another level, warriors often went without sex for long periods, but the reasons for raping captives may have been lodged in the conscious or unconscious purpose of conquest by impregnation, the same impulse that “alpha males” exhibit throughout the animal world. Male bed bugs, I have read, engage in the practice or raping their competitive males, which ensure that the competitors semen is infertile. So rape results in a form of “possession” and offspring carry the DNA of the conqueror. Given that in many societies women were (and still are) regarded as chattel, or property, their rape and enslavement was just an extension of pillaging. The surprising extent of enslavement and trafficking in women remains a distressing proof of the enslavement of women and girls.

The fear of this practice runs deep; it presents the prospect of the literal annihilation of a people the conquest and usurpation of their biological identity. Despite the sort of highly consensual interactions recounted in circumstances such as those recorded in Mutiny on the Bounty, many aboriginal societies regarded, rightly, intruders from other races and ethnicities, with suspicion and fear, and did what they could to repel or kill them. [Lynn Lofland, A World of Strangers, 1973]

And so it is not surprising that one of the forms of expression that fear of rape has taken involves the imaginary world of encounters between species. Until Steven Speilberg and his cuddly little Extraterrestrials [Close Encounters of the Third Kind, (1977), E.T. (1982)], none of which appear to possess any threatening genitalia by the way, the prevailing fear of conquest and rape seems to have been transferred to the cinema of Sci-Fi. Until Speilberg, most all of the inter-galactic Sci-Fi I grew up on in films and books regarded our visitors from “beyond the stars” as malevolent and bent upon enslaving humankind or wiping it out. Of course the invaders were, for practical reasons, almost always anthropomorphic, and hence, it seems, invited into these narratives, the prospect (though never the completion) of that ancient and embedded fear of rape.

Consider, by way of evidence for this hypothesis, the following movie posters of Sci-Fi films:

The rather gratuitous visual references to alien creatures carrying off our blond, buxom and scantily-clad women extends even to the poster of the venerable The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which there is no blond woman and no such scene. [see DCJ, April/May 2009, Global Warnings]

If the prospect of the next generation of humans looking green and bug-eyed, or semi-robotic(?), doesn’t seem quite plausible, there are always our own terrestrial monstrosities who appear obsessed with our blond women. In addition to King Kong’s penchant for blond beauties [DCJ Archives, 11. 5: Going Ape for Blondes 8.13.2004], there are these nasty fellows, among whom only the Creature From the Black Lagoon seems to prefer brunettes.

   

Then again, these imaginings of extra- and intra-terrestrials female abducting monsters might also be code for the more likely inter-racial and inter-ethnic worry that the “alien” is always out to “take our women.” From Paris in the Illiad to Tony in West Side Story (1961), to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), the “other,” even in legitimately winning the heart of “our” women has made “their” men feel rather like some male bed bugs. But, of course, even that protective attitude is suffused with possessiveness.

Regrettably, male attitudes toward rape may be more about possessiveness than concern for the intrinsic rights of women to be the possessors of their own anatomy. To often we have seen the attitude of “she was asking for it,” or “why not just relax and enjoy it,” from colloquial to judicial response to rape. It just might be that our critters from outer space or terrestrial underworlds are counting on the male of the human species being pre-occupied with how many times they can “step over the line.”
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© 2009, James A. Clapp