Hollywood occupies New Zealand

Warner Brothers comes swinging its massive male member (yes, a vulgar metaphor, but nothing else quite does it) into New Zealand, growling, “Hey, wankers, suck this.” New Zealand falls to its knees, goes, “Okay, sir. What else can we do for you?” “Give us $25 million, and we’ll call it even.” So the kiwis do that, too.

Can it be? Hollywood is now calling the legislation in New Zealand? Labor laws have changed to accommodate Peter Jackson who did not want to negotiate with a union? And some of the business community is approving?

New Zealand is not an especially obvious consumer society. Close beneath the veneer of their friendly surface roils that surliness characteristic of a massive national inferiority complex. People and cultures with inferiority complexes are dangerous. So they sort of pretend to value your business until you ask them for something and suddenly they flip out, as if you have somehow questioned their manhood. They can’t quite figure out how to do sales. They never caught on to the idea that it shouldn’t cost you MORE to buy the large economy size than two of the small sizes. They consistently screw up at the cash register. No, this is not a society that values consumers. Modern life is not quite under control in New Zealand.

If you deplore the creation of the consumer, the society seems more authentic, more serious, at first, than flagrantly client-oriented societies. But then you start to recognize that the only difference between New Zealand and the civilized world is that these people are poorer. Their income is about half of what it is in Australia, western Europe, and North America. If they could figure out how to be consumers on the scale of the rest of the western world they WOULD do it. There is no virtue in their lack of possession or inability to sell things. They just don’t know how to be otherwise.

This is why the sight of John Keyes forcing legislation through the Parliament at the demand of Hollywood is so appalling. It lays bare the myth that New Zealand is a nice little place where people are poor but happy and genuine. For a few dollars they are ready to prostrate themselves before the Hollywood icon, which is something you aren’t going to see, even in the US. Especially in the US. Is this democracy?? The US is screwed up, but at least directors don’t decide the law.

There just isn’t any safe place in the whole world. The universe if run by business, and the desires of business are by definition good. No questioning of that basic premise. This is Nietzsche and Beyond Good and Evil, part 2. "The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself'." New Zealand sometimes pretends to disdain the vile exploitation, moral and physical, perpetrated by the masters of the universe, but it has shown once and for all that it wants to play. When the little guy stands up to the big guy it is touching. But when it trails the big guy around asking for a couple of scattered crumbs, it is just pathetic.

Suddenly I understand....

The outrage of the Tea Party has suddenly become accessible to me. Went to a film that was part of the Italian Film Festival. I already have a little trouble with the film festival, because in a manner characteristic of this society into which I have been exiled, the organizer, a cheap faux culture nouveau riche swindler, charges way too much for things that if he charged less he would actually make a profit on. It’s a serious failing of this culture – they can’t get anything right, but in business they are especially boneheaded. For example, he used to have an opening lecture on one of the films, which is a great idea in this university city, but he greedily charged $25. Nobody is going to pay that much to hear a lecture on an Italian film, whereas they would have gone in great numbers had the lecture been thrown in for free. So the attendance was so low that he dropped the idea – never occurred to him to offer the lecture for free as a way of drawing crowds. Believe me, there are plenty of university lecturers who would have given the lecture happily as a public service, a way of creating ties between town and gown.

Anyway, back to the outrage and the eventual link to the Tea Party. So this buffoon who runs the film festival charges way too much for his films. In a normal festival you can buy packets of tickets as a discount. Not here. Not only that – I went to see a film on Tuesday, especially because Tuesday at the theatre has a discount. But NOT it turns out for the festival films.

The helpless fury I felt gave me access to the Tea Party anger. It comes from the deep sense of injustice at a system – a system that you can’t really fathom but to which you can attach a dopey face, in this case the foolish festival organizer.

I knew then that if there existed a group of disgruntled people similarly stuck in this benighted country who wanted to throw a manifestation, carry signs, shriek against the cheats, hoodlums, and scoundrels running the film festival that I would be out there with them, screaming my hatred. Throw in the university and there is nothing that I wouldn’t say about this place, no lie so absurd that I wouldn’t believe it if it were to its discredit; there is NOTHING that I would not say about the people in charge and the mindless idiocy with which they bungle their jobs. Nothing can adequately express my loathing of this place – all I could do if asked what I think about things here is bellow like an enraged bull.

This is the emotion that motivates the Tea Party. I get dizzy with delight imagining how I would love to pile on a bus to be barfed out on the Mall and shriek my hatred of the Italian film festival, the university here, along with similarly irate people. The Tea Partiers, pissed off that they have lost their jobs and that a system to which they have no access seems not to be paying them any heed, want to howl at the world. I would howl along with them if my agenda matched theirs.

An exiled Catholic woman

Since reading Colm Tóibín’s “Among the Flutterers” in the August 19 LRB I have felt a measure of comfort in my usually anguished meditations on being exiled from the Catholic Church. Here it is: the Catholic hierarchy is composed of gay men, probably celibate, but gay. Let’s turn the proposition around and imagine an institution owned by lesbian women, celibate, but self-identified lesbians. Would men feel that they had a place in that institution? Of course not. No wonder, then, that I feel exiled; it is always comforting to me to realize that my feelings are justified.

In fact, this is not really what Tóibín is writing about. But in bringing to our attention how much of the being part of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, is, for men, wrapped up with their sexuality, we have to acknowledge that gayness, dealing with it, accepting it, is the central life issue for most of the Church hierarchy, its mission. I have never NOT accepted gayness, I recognize it as central to the identity of a sizable proportion of the population. But I want to belong to a Catholic Church whose hierarchy represents a diversity of identity issues, including mine.

It ‘s fine if as Tóibín writes that
"Some of the reasons why gay men became priests are obvious and simple; others are not. Becoming a priest, first of all, seemed to solve the problem of not wanting others to know that you were queer. As a priest, you could be celibate, or unmarried, and everyone would understand the reasons. It was because you had a vocation; you had been called by God, had been specially chosen by him. For other boys, the idea of never having sex with a woman was something they could not even entertain. For you, such sex was problematic; thus you had no blueprint for an easy future. The prospect, on the other hand, of making a vow in holiness never to have sex with a woman offered you relief. The idea that you might want to have sex with men, that you might be ‘that way inclined’, as they used to say, was not even mentioned, not once, during that workshop in which everything under the sun was discussed."

I want all young men to have the opportunity to find a place where they can work out who they are.

But when I stop by to pick up gay friends, I find them in front of the computer chatting with potential dates, the most fleeting random message more important than anything I could possibly have to say, when I go out with them I know that they are looking over my head for guys, I know that for them I represent a sounding board against which to try their ideas, I don’t really exist for them except as, sometimes, a front, or a sympathetic ear. The minute a man in whom they are interested comes along, I am OUT. I exist only to buoy them up.

Of course I have no objection to gay men being priests. But I do have the strongest objection possible to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church being entirely gay. For too long Catholics have gotten away with pretending that celibate is celibate, that gayness is not inherent. But since the late nineteenth century at least, this has not been the case. Gay men live together in sufficient intellectual (and sometimes sexual) relationships. Being gay is not really about sex, although it is about that. But sex is not the important part. What is important it that “they” do not need “us.” That’s fine in the context of my many relationships. I take what each has to offer. It’s just that I don’t want to belong to a Church that views me in the way that gay men view me, as an ear, as a confidence booster, as a spectator to their show. As a nun.

Terrific for the Pope if he likes to dress up in red taffeta:
"When I listed the reasons homosexuals might be attracted to the Church and might want to become priests, I did not mention the most obvious one: you get to wear funny bright clothes; you get to dress up all the time in what are essentially women’s clothes. As part of the training to be an altar boy I had to learn, and still remember, what a priest puts on to say Mass: the amice, the alb, the girdle, the stole, the maniple and the chasuble. Watching them robing themselves was like watching Mary Queen of Scots getting ready for her execution.

Priests prance around in elaborately fashioned costumes. Bishops and cardinals have even more colourful vestments. This ‘overt behaviour’ on their part has to be examined carefully. Since it is part of the rule of the Church, part of the norm, it has to be emphasised that many of them do not dress up as a matter of choice. Indeed, the vestments in all their glory might make some of them wince. But others seem to enjoy it. Among those who seem to enjoy it is Ratzinger. Quattrocchi draws our attention to the amount of care, since his election, Ratzinger has taken with his accessories, wearing designer sunglasses, for example, or gold cufflinks, and different sorts of funny hats and a pair of red shoes from Prada that would take the eyes out of you. He has also been having fun with his robes. On Ash Wednesday 2006, for example, he wore a robe of ‘Valentino red’ – called after the fashion designer – with ‘showy gold embroidery’ and soon afterwards changed into a blue associated with another fashion designer, Renato Balestra. In March 2007, for a visit to the juvenile prison at Casal del Marno, he wore an extraordinary tea-rose-coloured costume."

I have watched the gay-pride parades in Provincetown, cheering and urging them on. But the men who march in those are my friends, they are external to me, they have no interest in me, because their issues are so much more significant than mine. I love them, but I do not want them to have the sort of intimate power over me that the Catholic hierarchy does. They have no time for the likes of me. The Church, on the other hand, should have time for all of us. It should not be a boys’ club, forever excluding the girls.

Rejoice Twenty-Somethings!

The New York Times article on the new stage of adolescence – the period that covers the twenties, approximately – is still making the rounds. Twenty-somethings graduate, but they do not go immediately into the work force. They remain in a sort of twilight adolescence, seem dependent, try on different sorts of lives. Life is longer; this is a luxury we can now afford. Strange how people are reacting as it the piece were somehow a criticism. But not at all – an observation. Things have changed. Different theories might explain it, but they don’t matter. All social change comes about through a strange nexus of events – change is very rarely good or bad or even intentional. It just is. People have protested that twenty-somethings don’t want to hang out for several years in what is essentially a state of animated suspension. They have been forced into the status by the economic climate, by the dismal job outlook. They have complained that it simply isn’t true, that young people are more pressured than ever to accomplish great things, build up their CV.

I say that none of this matters; the essential thing is that we now have yet another model for plotting out a life. The more numerous and the more flexible the options for creating a life happen to be, the greater the number of potentially satisfied people. Whatever the reason twenty-somethings happen to find themselves in an in-between place, they can now profit from the position. You take the hand life deals you and you play it. Now we have been handed one more way of making sense out of the play, another option for winning.

I rejoice. I have a lost decade, a period that I have always looked back upon with shame. Now I have the means to reclaim that time. So many horrors – too many and too deep to speak of. And then I grew. It took me a long time to break away from home, to realize that I was just reproducing my own miserable situation. Little by little I clawed my way out, started to make decisions. It took a lot of time to get educated, to see through the fog. But I did. And I want to take back those years as a victory rather than a loss. It was a time of voyage and sorrow. There were many adventures.

I have a distressing image from that time – a young woman on her knees praying in a house that was not hers. Begging God to deliver her from the prison of her life. God of course did not listen – and, indeed, there were many Gods colliding in that house. Big blown up deities making all the decisions, creating reality, brewing the very air that she breathed. Did God deliver her from that place? Of course not. It was in God’s interest that she stay there. But as round-faced, helpless, and earnest as she was, she finally developed a tiny bit of any edge. It got sharper. She began to carve her way out, cut the God stuff away, excise a life that was still animate from a clump of fat. Then she got on a plane and it was off to find a new day.

Yes, twenty-somethings! Rejoice in this new possibility! Take your time and think. Experience. Remember that it is only in the past thirty years of so that we have even been able to conceive of self-fulfillment as a serious life’s goal.

Perpetual alienation....

I imagine myself a person of limited education with one of those jobs requiring a couple of years training – that is, a job that requires a very specific knowledge but no larger sense of a system, a set of skills that is not transferable, a set of skills that creates a mini-dictator insufficiently knowledgeable to move past the little box – making, say, $40,000 a year.

I then imagine that I have lost the job.

I further imagine that I get my news from Fox; I do not read, so make no effort to keep up on serious news. I watch football while drinking enormous soft drinks on Sunday afternoons with large groups of middle-aged friends who are quite overweight, many of whom have also lost their jobs. I go to church. We joke. The weeks pass. The savings go. I panic.

I cannot distinguish between the two parties. I have no job and the Democrats don’t have any plans to get me one. I don’t know anything about the obstructionism perpetrated by the Republicans because I only watch Fox. All politicians are equally bad in my opinion. I want to throw the scoundrels out, so I start to scream with the Tea Party. I don’t know who they are or what they stand for: I just want a job. I want things to be the way they used to me.

I just want a job. I want an income. I want a job. I want an income….

The very essence of making a pact with the devil is that we don’t know that we are doing it. Faustus is an exception, or maybe a metaphor – he represents that semi-conscious striking of a bargain. But the real horror is that we don’t recognize what we have done. Living in a world created by Fox news, we agree with the Republicans that freedom exists and that it means leaving the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place. We scream about activist liberal judges, Obama’s birth certificate, and we don’t notice that we have signed onto a world divided between the wealth and moderately wealthy on the one hand, and a mass of semi-educated, massively unemployed, un- or underinsured , sometimes homeless people. We have been turned into a perpetual underclass, easily controllable through religious platitudes, pulled into friendly complicity through gay-bashing, fear of immigrants. We can no longer pay for higher education; the lines are drawn forever.

This person I imagine is the person I would have been had I been born about a generation later, had my dad been born in 1960 where I was born, myself then pushed up later. My dad comes from a farm family of eight children. He never would have gone to university, which means that he would not have worked his way up into the middle class in my generation as he did in his. He would have been a foreman or some such thing, itinerant. His success is purely aleatory, nothing that he deserves. He worked hard, but that is not a trait that is valued. He works patiently within a box, dependent on the large father up there in charge, and the large father has no interest in him, no matter what a busy bee he is. My dad could not make it in this world.

I wonder if he grasps this in some primal way, and if this is why he is so furious at the usual imaginary suspects? In his old age, guided by Rush Limbaugh, he has turned into a raging anti-intellectual, a moronic repeater of the cyclical messages of hate towards the bogeymen against which the Right’s campaigns are directed. He is undoubtedly in love with Sarah Palin; he has no more ability to pick out a charlatan than he has to fly to the moon.

If his spuming anger is a latent recognition of his own helplessness before the forces that have overtaken the country, marginalizing him and his (our) kind, I feel a little better about it. I generally find it agonizingly embarrassing that my family so eagerly colludes with the Republican demagogues in their own destruction instead of just getting an education and trying to hold back the division of the country into a permanently divided over and underclass.

On the other hand, I have moved out of the underclass and am now firmly established in the upper one. Why do I care? Why should I pull my hair out worrying about the masses who will lose their savings to greedy purveyors of health care? It isn’t my problem – I have a job, I have health care. I don’t have to leave this place. And even if I do, it will be for an admin job with good health care. Philosophically, I do not spontaneously the position of “let them eat cake.” But they have acquiesced in their own annihilation. They needed to think a little and they punted. So this is not my problem. I quit anguishing about my lack of statehood and embrace my stats as cosmopolitan.

Our leader

Bright as a little button, huge head perched on a wiry little girl’s body. Slightly wall-eyed. Unfailingly chipper. Can’t help but like her, want to pat her on the head.

But she is one of those kiwis enraptured with the intricacies of form. Utter indifference to substance; for her, the university is a dazzling maze of arcana, a series of secrets penetrable only by druids. To have a prosperous academic career means purely and simply to be initiated into the code. Success bears no relation to good deeds; hers is the fundamentalism of academic ideologies. One learns to decipher the kabbala, progressing through promotion not by doing promotable things but by reciting the magical words in the correct order – by getting the form filled out just so. But the catch is that one cannot know how to fill out the form. No one can know but the initiated, that is, those with access to the Faculty of Arts committees. Hence her reason for being. Whatever she suggests, we must needs follow, because only she among us knows how to utter the charms correctly. She possesses the magic. She crossed out all of my “second semester” and replaced them with “semester 2.” She diligently changed my lower case names of department (history department, politics department) to upper case. Not a single change of substance, not one. And yet my copy was black with her little changes.

Cute as a gamine. But look more closely and suddenly you realize that she is coiled up inside tight as an old fashioned alarms clock ready to snap and unwind, lightning fast, reverse reverse. If she started spinning she would never stop, but go careening into the ethersphere. She must control the crossing of every t, the dotting of every i that she touches; her hold on sanity depends upon it.

(Can you imagine her putting her feet up with a beer in her hands?)

She is the quintessential teachers’ pet, perky little brown-noser, the ultimate goody-goody, the administration’s little toady. She breathes utter submission, devotion, to her higher cause, the bright shining beacon of the Faculty of Arts. She worships at that altar. And therefore as a leader she is an embarrassment, one who cringes rather than advocates. A sad little quisling, a ludicrous little party member. She would be Hitler’s secretary, the Pope’s housekeeper, Cody Jarrett’s mother. Top of the world, Ma.

Absolutely adorable and absolutely disgraceful.

It might be otherwise....

She has a fuzzy golden-brown perm, a kinky halo that she has worn since at least 1984. In her overdetermined world, a woman with straight hair must have a perm – keeping straight flat hair is not a matter of taste, but a crime against common sense. And someone told her once that a woman with a high forehead must wear a fringe. This rule too has been incorporated into her world view. There are no exceptions. She once said to me that it is a fact of nature that I must wear a fringe (actually, she called them “bangs,” our Midwestern word).

That certain things were inevitably right and others wrong was part of my life from the very beginning. I experienced this triage with desperation: I could only be good by agreeing fully and in every case. There was no agreeing to disagree. There is the seed of future sorrow and ambivalence. It is a heavy burden to live in a world wherein you can only be good by accepting without question a list of rules that are, on the face of it, so arbitrary that any person with the least amount of common sense would go, “What?” Why is chocolate cake with white frosting bad? Why are only braids, not two ponytails, called pigtails? Why does the Pope decide which movies can be watched? (Even she said sadly that it seemed unfair that Catholics could not watch “The Greatest Show on Earth,” a movie she longed to see when it came out.) Why were boys dumb and girls who liked them crazy? Why does a person who divorces and remarries go to hell?

I had a game when I was a teenager – on the rare occasion I went to a restaurant, I would sometimes order the last thing I would normally choose. So if I went to the Sirloin Stockade, I would chose a steak, a baked potato, and jello cubes for dessert. The idea, I guess, was to prove to myself that things could be otherwise. I still do the game with myself, in my head, imagining my life with no children. My children are central to my identity – they are who I am. I have always wanted them, always dreamed about them, always knew that I would have them. So the hardest leap of imagination for me is to reinvent my life without them. I force myself to do it. Because I do believe that things could be otherwise. The rules that she laid out as natural law simply are not. I do not have to wear a fringe.

Living in exile has a logic. It is proof that I did not have to live anywhere in particular. It is proof that I do not have to live according to those rules. It means that we Americans are not naturally right, but rather irrational Lockeans, that our most fundamental beliefs are grounded in easily-identifiable myths, just as are those of all cultures, and that they can be deconstructed, de-chunked, reduced to a series of primal reactions to a philosopher over-relied upon. Things could be otherwise in the US; they could be much better. We don’t even need to go back and change the reading programs of our founding fathers: we could require high school students to study political philosophers and think about what they best sort of society would be. We could force them to write essays at the age of, say, fourteen, reacting to Locke, and then ask them to read Rousseau and respond to him. We could demystify our political discourse. We could train people to think, to be responsible for their ideas. Then things would be better.

These are the complaints of one in exile: looking over there and picking out the problems. Slowly training myself for what I have now begun to realize as inevitable, that there is just too much that is toxic in that society for me to accept it in the way I used, too, with full-hearted ease and a sense of belonging, of being at home. I no longer have the urge to kiss the soil when I land at LAX. I used to be so willing to embrace the fuzzy golden-brown perm. Usually we become more tolerant of what is our own as we get older. For me the process is just the opposite, slowly approaching the point where I can begin to contemplate without grief finally letting go. Where I can hear criticisms about us and shrug them off, because I am, after all, a cosmopolitan.

Christopher Hitchens has cancer of the esophagus. If ever there was a person who manifested in his very being the proposition that it might be otherwise, it is he. He is infuriating, self-centered, vain, and smart, smart, smart and thoughtful. Half of the time I want to throw what he writes out the window; but whatever he writes is interesting. If I prayed I would pray for his recovery, even though he of course would not appreciate that. I will hope actively for his recovery.