Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie, Peut-être

Friend of the blog and all round super-brain Tomsk has himself up a series of links defending the reputation of Charlie Hebdo in wake of the wave of criticism that magazine has taken this week for some of its past cartoons. And whilst Tomsk is clearly correct that "Anglosplaining" is a great word, I'm forced to disagree with the idea that it's necessarily of much use here.
Simply put, the problem I have here is that a great amount of the criticism I am seeing directed at these cartoons is coming from people of colour. In my case, simply because of the directions my whims have taken me, the criticisers are also by and large American.  And I have a huge issue with the white people I've seen defending Charlie by telling black Americans they can't recognise racism when they see it because they're not French.  It's just too easy and glib and frankly patronising an answer, and not one black Americans are used to hearing in far too many similar forms.

I'm not saying there's no chance nuance is being lost, of course.  And I'm aware that as a white Englishman I can't speak with no greater authority on racial theory as espoused by non-white people than I can on the satirical history of our Gallic neighbours. I can say that the position that using the imagery of racism to mock racists is still hugely problematic is a common-held and entirely considered one, though, and that in everything I've seen - including some of the links Tomsk offers- that stance is being ignored or straw-manned so that black people can be lectured for "not getting it". Pointing that out isn't "Anglosplaining", it's simply noting that an argument has been made that I'm not seeing anyone refute. Various deconstructions of the French humour mechanism that generated these cartoons are on offer, but as to why drawing a black woman as a monkey is cool if you're doing it to mock racists, I'm still none the wiser. [1]

There's also the issue of Islamophobia to consider (the degree to which one cannot help but be racist if one demonstrates Islamophobic tendencies is an exercise I leave to the reader). The suggestion Charlie is Islamophobic is far from limited to non-French people; even current/former employees of the magazine have taken exception to its treatment of the religion after 9-11. I read an article this weekend that I'm desperately trying to locate from a former Charlie artist/writer staffer (Update: here it is) who took the magazine to task for a decade plus of increasing Islamophobia, for example.

Lastly, it should be remembered that one can hold explicitly anti-racist stances and still produce racist material. Indeed, this is essentially inevitable. Even worse, it can be more common for those of us on the left to do so than others, because we make mistakes whilst trying to engage with the problem whilst others ignore it entirely (I saw a depressing synecdoche for this on Twitter a couple of months ago when a black woman explained most of the racist tweets she got were from progressives, because they try and show solidarity in offensively incompetent ways, whilst at least the conservatives just completely bypass her). Hell, I've based this entire post on the theory that I have a half-decent working understanding of why so many black Americans are furious over these cartoons, which itself might be presumptuous of me to the point of racism. [2]

In short, I can completely respect an argument that says Charlie Hebdo is dedicated to the fight against racism.  I can respect an argument that says given that fact, we shouldn't rip apart its missteps in this regard, and recognise that taken holistically CH is a force for good (though as a white guy I don't get to decide how much anti-racist work counteracts even one racist cartoon). But defending these specific cartoons is a much harder job than I've seen anyone inclined to do so willing to admit to, and that job doesn't even seem to be being seriously attempted because their so-called defenders are more interested in building a hierarchy of authorities on recognising racism. Which, as I've noted, just so happens to have a bunch of predominantly white people at the very top. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

[1] See also the Suey Park/Stephen Colbert controversy last March, in which Colbert's twitter feed was jumped on after he mocked the Washington Redskins franchise's refusal to change its name by announcing he would "show the Asian-American community I care by starting the 'Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever'". My point here is not that Suey Park was clearly in the right, but that the argument that satirising bigots by appropriating their rhetoric (linguistic or visual) is something those on the shitty end of that bigotry can have a problem with. That's what needs addressing here, not whether this kind of appropriation is more common in France than elsewhere.

[2] It strikes me that at least some of the back-and-forth here stems from the conflation of "being racist" and "being a racist". I'm only interested in the first formulation, and a lot of the defences mounted on behalf of the magazine is that their staff clearly aren't racists. To be clear, I am criticising the cartoons, not the artists. I am insisting that everyone on the left - myself included - is capable of being racist, not that we're all racists. This is hardly an original point, but since I'm on the subject I shall bring it up once more: one consequence of our culture concluding racists are terrible people is that it's led most of us to assume we can't be racist, because we're clearly not a racist. The truth of course is vastly more complicated.

Fevre Dream II: The Emancipation Strikes Back

We watched this at the weekend, and I have (probably unnecessarily complicated) mixed feelings about it.  On its own terms, it's perfectly serviceable, being fully aware of how bonkers it is on every level.  I've been a sucker for spinning ludicrous fantasy/sci-fi conspiracy theories out of historical events ever since my teenage years and Dark Skies, and this film doesn't disgrace that absurdly narrowly-defined genre.  Rufus Sewell glowers, Mary Elizabeth Winstead charms, Jimmi Simpson puppy-dogs, all amongst a gloriously deranged plot that swings unrepentantly between po-faced recreations of abolition movement idealism and slow-motion vampire decapitations. Watching the attempts to make this a single coherent movie rather than two short films edited together at random is a large part of the fun, even if it a goal it never had any real chance of reaching.

But - and I know going into this that I'm about to start hanging issues onto a narrative too slight to hold them - do we really want to be dealing in fiction that suggests the slave plantations of the American South were being run as farms by malevolent vampires? Do we want - even for 105 minutes of nonsense - to imagine a world in which we could be absolved as a species for our own grotesque moral failings? This bothered me a little in Fevre Dream, too, but at least there it was just a single vampire who saw worth in running a plantation. Here the entire structure of slavery in the States exists because superhuman monsters want it that way. I get the same jitters signing off on that storyline as I do those that suggest Hitler was an alien stooge or a shape-changer.  The absolute worst way to respond to grotesque human evil is to suggest some qualitative difference between the evildoers and the rest of us.

On the other hand, though, it's a pretty hilarious slap in the face to every single unbearable fool who insists the Civil War didn't have the fight over slavery at its heart.  Of course it did, you idiots.  Why else were the vampires involved? "War of Northern Aggression"? You need to check your history kids. You picked the side with all the killer fucking vampires, and what's worse, you've done it retrospectively.

Hell, it's not even that the Southern gentry were aligned with the vampires; they were the vampires, gaining power they could never have forged for themselves by gorging themselves on the lives of others.  One could object to the film suggesting Lincoln was even more virtuous than his popular image insists. Here he not only took on the South purely for the benefit of others he did so despite knowing he was kicking an undead hornet's nest that might soon feel the need to start eating white folk. I can respect that viewpoint, but I think it's the wrong one, because it doesn't take into account all the advisers surrounding Lincoln here insisting the war is too great a risk because the vampires might attempt to subjugate the whole of the nation rather than just the slave states. Adapting for the comforting rules of real-world biology, this is exactly what Lincoln was told over and over: it simply wasn't worth the risk.  If the price of maintaining the union was letting the worst damn human beings in the country get to keep writing obscene cheques with human blood, then so be it.

Whatever his limitations, whatever his failures, whatever other factors were involved in the war, Lincoln would have none of it. He saw the worst damn people doing the worst damn things, and calling themselves countrymen and Christians whilst they did it. He watched engorged ticks build their balconies from the bones of people they considered property, and he watched them loudly trumpet their intention to murder their neighbours if those neighbours forced them to stop murdering the unpaid, unwilling help. He saw all that, and he stepped forward. He didn't step forward alone, of course - the "great men" never do - but still, he took that step. He took that step, and the Lost Cause was lost, drowned in a fraction of the blood it had spilled for generations, swept away in the same ocean they had once used to raise their slave ships.

It was just that simple. It was always just that simple. And whilst as mentioned I have my concerns about pretending anything separates us from the slavers but time and fortune, and whilst I'm well aware that the move that most enrages our enemies is not necessarily the move we should want to make, AL:VH does us all this one service. It takes the vampires and drags them screaming into the light.

LstFlt

No messing around here. Nine pages in, the Admiral is dead. Totalitarian fascists are even bigger dicks than walking chrome toasters. Twenty-nine pages later, the long flight of the fleet has begun. If this is an obvious rewriting of the new Galactica (it is; Campbell’s claim 2006 and 2003 are “about the same time” is ridiculous), there’s no interest in redoing the miniseries, part one. Just no time. Fight, brood, fight, brood. Done. Readable in a weekend; a holiday book leaving you plenty of holiday when you've finished. Not smart (though perhaps pleasingly progressive), but fun.

And fast.

Spectres Of The Long-Dead

Holy Glaaki, are people still making films like The Haunting of Radcliffe House? Can't the dead be left in peace?

There wasn't a sniff, not the barest molecule of postmodernism in Channel 5's Christmas serving of "scares". Everyone talks and acts like they've never seen or heard of a ghost story.  Psychics splutter, dogs slink, mysterious strangers appear from nowhere, and everywhere terrified children and sensible alternatives are ignored so that the narrative can stumble along to an ending which - in generalities and in specifics - is so derivative it does a better job of presenting the resurrected dead than the scenes with ghosts in them.

This is simply not something that should be being created in the 21st century.  Not because there's almost nothing here that requires the story be set after the 1970s (a faintly nice use of a computer screen notwithstanding), but because we should be past the point where writers can get away with this kind of unironic strip-mining of the past.  Doubtless those involved convinced themselves they were crafting something "traditional". Which is nonsense, obviously, because the central aspect of the traditional Christmas ghost story is that it should be scary. In the service of that goal you can use all the trappings of the past you want - though you can make that approach into a fetish, which carries its own problems - but the underlying story mechanisms need to be fresh. The one the one thing familiarity breeds more surely than contempt is a lack of fear.

In short, then, the aims and approach of ...Radcliffe... are working directly against each other, and the result is a pointless warmed-over corpse of a tale. It's not uncommon for this kind of total misunderstanding of tradition to exist - for people to obsess over form rather than intent - indeed it's just one more of the hundred thousand reasons people like Nigel Farage (Person of the Year in much the way Harold Shipman was briefly World's Most Interesting Doctor, one assumes) should be banished from public life, polite conversation and if possible all historical documentation.

But simply because a mistake is common doesn't make it forgiveable.  I very much think Olivia Williams and Matthew Modine deserve better than this. And I'm absolutely sure we do. What a fucking waste of Yorkshire.

Christmas Pessimus

Everyone have themselves a great Christmas, if that's the sort of thing you're into. Oh, and if I can offer some unsolicited advice: try to avoid telling your entire family that they're a bunch of anti-Semites, as this can darken the mood during Christmas Eve dinner.

Oh, Sorkin (Part Two)

Trigger warning: references to rape storyline.

Update: My apologies to Abigail Nussbaum for incorrectly attributing her article to Emily Nussbaum.  The latter is quoted in the piece, hence my confusion, but she didn't write it.

OK, so.  The post not everyone is going to be happy about.

To recap - and therefore re-spoil - last week's Newsroom episode included a storyline in which a college student responded to being sexually assaulted by setting up a website where other rape survivors could name their attackers since, you know, it's not like any other form of punishment is likely to be forthcoming.

This plot bothered an awful lot of people, because the only main character who passed comment on the idea was a) male and b) not a fan of the idea.  And as I argued in my last post on this, the lack of a female male character here is indeed a genuine problem.  My issue here is entirely with point b).

From the comments I've read (Emily Abagail Nussbaum's being the one that sticks most in my mind) a large part of the anger over this plotline is based on the idea that the audience is supposed to sympathise with Don over the rape survivor, Mary.  Why are we supposed to? Well, because Sorkin is a sexist who writes characters who just spout his own opinions.  How do we know this? Well, just look at what Don is saying here.

This strikes me as a somewhat circular argument.  Which is not to say I don't think Sorkin isn't a sexist (or, since sexism is simply impossible for a man to escape, let's say I think he's noticeably sexist and totally unwilling to examine that fact), or even that I think his characters don't have a tendency to be preachy.  It's just that this approach doesn't strike me as the most useful one in this particular case.

For my money (and as I said last time, this is the money of straight white middle-class man, which is to say easily spent and hard to see as evidence of talent) the most useful framing for this storyline is that the idea of a name-and-shame website aimed at rapists is absolutely an idea we should discuss, and part of that discussion involves raising objections that can then be countered. The central premise of website like this is that it's worth bypassing due process in order to combat the toxic culture that says if a guy insists it wasn't rape we can just forget about it and head to the bar. And it seems to me that if you want to float this idea you don't do it by pretending it's immune to abuse, you do it by accepting it could be abused and they say so what? You say a man is afraid of being called a rapist, and a woman is afraid of being raped, and that this is a trolley problem with an actual body-count and where changing the tracks somehow seems to just make men's employment prospects a little harder.

Someone needs to ask the question so it can be answered. So it can be driven into the ground. Mary, I thought, drove it into the ground.  Maybe I'm wrong in that. But even if I am, I'm right that we should discuss this stuff. Simply put: I'd rather run with the message than beat up the messenger. No matter how much of an embarrassment he keeps making of himself.

Oh, Sorkin (Part One)

Trigger warning: references to a rape storyline.

It's now been a week since The Newsroom reached its penultimate episode that made so many people furious.  The show being what it is, there were plenty of elements for people to fasten their teeth into, but the most stinging criticisms involved a storyline - which I shall now thoroughly spoil, though it has no real bearing on the ongoing plotlines or even really the episode itself - in which a college student sets up a website to name and shame rapists after her own sexual assault, in the certain knowledge that no other punishment is ever likely to be forthcoming for her assailants.

Obviously, with so serious a subject, with so great a risk of triggering people, this is the kind of plot element that's liable to upset and anger no small number of people. This is particularly true when you're dealing with a writer who has come under a great deal of criticism for sexism in his work and his public pronouncements, and even more true when you decide that this is the kind of issue you can shoehorn into a plot about something completely different and then throw casually away.

Having said all that, though, my reaction upon watching the episode was quite different to that of many feminists and allies, and I wanted to explore why that is, because I think there's an interesting question inside all this that needs more promotion than I've seen it get in the mainstream (I suspect it's been thoroughly dissected in plenty of places, but not anywhere I've seen). To state my position ahead of time: I think Sorkin went wrong here at least three times , but the points where I find fault with him don't quite tally with the various criticisms I have read elsewhere.  Obviously, this is at heart a straight white guy announcing he wants to offer thoughts on how much he agrees with feminist critiques of a rape storyline, and those with no interest in hearing that sort of thinking might want to wander off about now.  Or, you know, switch your mind to "hate-read" mode. Whichever you prefer.

In any case, I wanted to split this into two posts, and the first one is likely to be the less contentious, since I'm starting with the areas in which I think Sorkin screwed up. The first I've already mentioned - this is not the kind of storyline you use as a B-plot and then stroll away from. A show in which we spend less time with the girl trying to regain her agency after a sexual assault than we do on the question of whether celebrity-finder apps are a good idea is not one whose priorities we should be comfortable with. Related, the fact that none of the female main characters get to weigh in on the issue in any real way leaves Don's opinions on the website unchallenged by anyone to which the narrative gives equivalent weight. This imbalance allows Don to deep six the story at the end of the episode as part of making a larger point, which both buries the issue itself and means Don is consciously ignoring the stated preferences of the rape survivor, Mary, because he knows best.

All of that are issues surrounding the actual scene which generated so much criticism, though, the actual discussion between Don and Mary.  It's here that I find myself disagreeing with some of that criticism, but like I said, I'll stick here to what I did find problematic, which in this case is Don's ridiculous assertion that he is somehow morally obligated to believe the story of the rapist over the rape victim until and unless the former is convicted in court.

This is a common and transparently idiotic dodge, brought forth like a talisman by any number of people who don't want to be inconvenienced by having to believe things about people that might actually require some action on their part. To underline how ludicrous this position is, let's try a brief thought experiment.  Imagine two housemates put a twenty pound note each on their kitchen table once a week, saving up their money.  Over the course of a year they therefore end up with over two grand on the table, in two separate piles of a little over a grand each.

Then one day one of the piles goes missing. Housemate A accuses housemate B of having taken the money and spent it on booze and blackjack, despite them having previously agreed they were going to spend the money on a ludicrously ostentatious home cinema set-up.  Housemate B for his part insists the money must have been stolen by an intruder.  Both housemates give you statements and offer various pieces of evidence to corroborate their story.

For the Don Keefer Theory of Belief to hold water, you would have to argue that whether you believe Housemate A or Housemate B would depend on which of the two identical piles of money went missing.

There's just no way this can make sense in any theory of belief.  Either one person's story is more compelling, or the other's is, or you find yourself coming down in the middle.  Not one piece of evidence or testimony changes in its plausibility depending on whether the actual remover of the cash let their hand creep six inches to the left before grabbing the wad.  Obviously it makes a difference in court, because in court you have to charge someone with the right crime, but in terms of who did what out in the world, no such absurdly narrow focus exists. [1]

Pretending it does is a way to stay comfortable.  A way to remain privileged. The fact that Sorkin saw no problem having a character espouse so self-serving an idea is a real and severe problem, for which he deserves to be roasted.

But...

[1] One could counter all this by pointing out that there are some people for whom it would be very easy to believe they'd shaft their roommate by spending their own half of the savings but would never steal someone else's money.  But that's again a specific element of the case at hand, not a general rule.  I'm also aware that my legal naivete may mean the example I've constructed doesn't quite work - some wrinkle about communal property or something - but I'm sure with little effort alternative examples could be worked up.