Sunday, April 28, 2013

Irrational Hyperbole - A new and Deadly Form (Essay by Bob Racine)



My first days in college in 1952 were not the most pleasant period in my life.  My parents arranged for me to stay on campus in one of the dormitories.  Looking back now, and being as inclined toward privacy as I am, I would have preferred a private home somewhere in the town, but being young and green I didn’t know any better at the time.  In that dormitory were a number of students, mostly in their sophomore, junior or senior years.  I was one of only three or four freshmen living among them.  This was well past the age of what used to be called hazing.  If I had been a beginning freshman about forty or fifty years earlier, there is no telling what I might have had to endure.  Perhaps having my clothes ransacked, or my head shaven, or my bed short-sheeted or any number of other disruptive initiations!  But by this point the rites of passage for freshmen had reduced themselves to simple ribbing and teasing. 

One freshman in particular hated to share a bathroom when he had to use the commode, something you inevitably had to do when living in a dormitory.  He did not like to be seen sitting on it.  One day when he was so inclined by the laws of nature to do just that, he was suddenly swamped by a huge flock of students, who came and crowded into the room, packed themselves into that little space, and surrounded the commode seat, as if they were paying a friendly and celebratory visit.  That staged prank was his initiation.

In my case it took the form of being made aware of my uptightness over studies and problems of one kind or another.  I was so super serious in those days!  I would verbalize to the older guys, the supposed veterans, seeking their help, and they would give me that tweak-y smile, that teasing look that seemed to say, “Why are you so gloomy and worried, Racine, when everybody else is having so much fun?”  It was somewhat annoying.  But much of that was more helpful to me than I was old enough to appreciate at the time.  They would not take the sense of freshman pathos on my part seriously.

Have you ever had your buttons so pressed and reached such a point of aggravation that you were rendered a screamer or something quite close to one?  And then you noticed that everybody around you was calm.  You were the only one in sight who had a bee in the bonnet, the only one angry or outraged.  Few of us can say they have never been in such a situation.  Would it not have been fitting at that moment to be taken by the hand and shown the heavens?  If it happened at night, you could survey the stars, and someone standing by might have urged you to shake your fist at them, bellow at them, make yours a cosmic gripe.  And then after spending your fury, you might hear them asking you to look again.  Look again, and see how many of those stars or planets have stopped in their tracks to take notice of the fact that you are in a rage.  How many of them have altered course or burned brighter or lowered the lamp in respect for your furious petition?  The universe has a way of seeming quite indifferent to our emotional extremes. 

There is nothing new about moaning and complaining.  The Psalms, written anywhere from three to four thousand years ago, are thought of as lovely ballads that extol divine love and power, the work of poets and musicians.  But read them through sometime, the whole one hundred and fifty!  No body of Scripture has given us more examples of irrational hyperbole.  Aside from the likes of Psalm 23, some ridiculously paranoid claims are set ablaze on the sacred page.  Let us consider a few.

Psalm 11:7-8:  “The wicked are everywhere, and everyone praises what is evil.”

Psalm 22:6:  “I am no longer a man; I am a worm, despised and scorned by everyone!”

Psalm 31:12-13:  “Everyone has forgotten me, as though I were dead; I am like something thrown away.”

Psalm 102:3-10:  “My life is disappearing like smoke; my body is burning like fire.  I am beaten down like dry grass. . .I am nothing but skin and bones.  I am like a wild bird in the desert, an owl abandoned in ruins. . .All day long my enemies insult me; those who mock me use my name in cursing.  Because of your anger and fury [spoken to God], ashes are my food, and my tears are mixed with my drink.  You picked me up and threw me away.” 

Do such outbursts invalidate the Psalms as sacred writing?  Certainly not!  The tormented heart is made vivid, and that has teaching value, if not inspirational value.

What are some of the modern hyperboles motivated by irrationality and paranoia?

“This country is going to hell in a hand basket.”

“Nobody in business is honest anymore.”

“All product quality is gone out the window; they just don’t make those thumbtacks like they used to.”

“They don’t put up buildings like they used to.”

“Every Caucasian below the Mason-Dixon Line is a racist.”

“Muslims and Hispanics are taking over the country.”

“The Mafia controls everything.”

“Teachers don’t know how to teach today’s kids.  They’re not teaching.”

“Professional sports are no longer about fair play.”

“All movie makers care about anymore is the exploitation of sex and violence.”

“All Pro-Choice activists are murderers.”

“All Pro-Life activists are sexists and bigots.”

“All Israelis are warmongers.”

“All Arabs are terrorists at heart.”

“The FBI is totally incompetent.”

“All policemen are on the take.”

The list goes on!

Hyperbole can be very effective in certain forms of writing and speaking.  It can add color and emphasis and dimension.  “A thousand ages in thy sight are but an evening gone, sure as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun.”  Classic words of hymnody!  But irrational hyperboles are just reckless sweeping remarks that stem either from panic and paranoia, or they can be indicative of a copout attitude, a wish to dismiss someone or something, pronounce it hopeless so that you do not have to assume any responsibility for it or cope with it.  And we have all been in such a paranoid, panicked, despairing place and have spoken in such crazy absolutes.  The enlightened among us know that the words are only a symptom of a mood we are passing through, not the onset of a dire affliction of mind and heart. 

Of course, we are not always sloganeering with our irrational hyperboles.  Sometimes they are subtly situated between the lines we speak.  We carry these stereotypes around in our heads and let out a low, perhaps tacit moan whenever we think we see evidence to support that stereotype.  A soft spoken “Aha! ! ! I thought so!”

Which brings me to the subject of recent events! 

Acts of terrorism are themselves acts and expressions of irrational hyperbole run amok, whatever else we can say about them.  All Americans are fair game, because all Americans are heathen, degenerate, despoilers of other countries, contaminated with capitalistic corruption.  Nothing good can come forth from them.  In “Argo” an incensed man on the Tehran streets cries out in full throttle vehemence, “An American bullet killed my son,” therefore all Americans killed him, or maybe even anyone who looks like an American, as the escaping diplomats do.  The Americans are not pesky neighbors.  They are the enemy, and the enemy is not a face; the enemy is a godless putrescence, a blight to be smitten as callously and savagely as one would attack a bevy of ants corroding a kitchen sink.  The enemy’s only birthright is to be crushed and exterminated.

Fanaticism is irrational hyperbole at its deadliest, because it has extended far beyond any point of spontaneous thought or careless speech.  The exaggeration, perhaps once a fleeting outcry of prejudicial sentiment, has been allowed over years and maybe decades to attach itself to the base of many minds and harden into an intractable widespread doctrine.  Unbridled passion becomes the corporate will; the terrorist is but the instrument of that will. 

For me the most disturbing thing about the Boston Marathon bombers is the cool dispatch in which they went about their deadly deed.  They were not riled up protesters; they were quiet, cool, matter-of-fact killing machines.  In a way it was fortunate for all of us that they were, else the detectives scanning the video footage might not have picked up their trail.  How ironic that what was supposed to make them unnoticeable had just the opposite effect.  It betrayed them.

Of course, unlike the planets and stars that are impervious to our personal moments of irrational outburst and uptightness, civilization cannot afford to be indifferent about those for whom outburst has long been exceeded by entrenched murderous madness.  For fanatics there is no such thing as bridge building or creative dialogue.  You and I as U.S. citizens are being hunted like cockroaches and termites.  We shudder to think that we are so regarded.  But maybe now in this twenty-first century we are beginning to know something of what the Jews of Europe felt under their Nazi rulers, even though we already enjoy the relative safety of our own republic that protects us.  The Jews had nothing like that when they were being hunted. They finally had to create post-Holocaust a republic of their own.          

But a caveat is called for.  In the 1950s a pestilence broke out in our country.  We could call it Communist mania.  Harmless people were being hassled and often jailed for alleged Communist affiliation or for past Socialist sentiment.  Under the instigation of Senator Joseph McCarthy a witch hunt of insane proportions was conducted, and its relentless, mindless assault impacted upon anyone but real Communist conspirators.  Thankfully the nation came slowly to its senses and silenced the furor.  Now it would be a pity if the lesson of that time were forgotten out of paranoia equal to that of those who have branded us the enemy.  Nothing would be gained, if we began imagining that we see terrorists under every rock and roof or behind every act of violence perpetrated by common criminals.  Heaven forbid that anyone begin thinking that the backfire of any passing car or the crashing of thunder from the sky or the outbreak of any spectacular fire in a ghetto apartment building or the collapse of any bridge or overpass is just possibly the terrorist empire at work.  Let us not return to the desperation and fear that the 1950s wrought.  Let us not give ourselves reason to wake up somewhere down the road and discover that we are the enemy – our own worst. 


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Lincoln (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                             (2 hrs & 30 min, color, 2012)

It is my supposition that by this time at least 95% of you reading this have already seen Steven Spielberg’s superb film dramatizing the last four months in the life of our sixteenth President, four months that chronicle a marathon movement of forces shaping history, though they seem in retrospect but a brief moment on the world stage.  No piece of legislation ever passed by the U.S. Congress has ever been more pivotal and fundamentally altering of national character and compass bearings for the life of the nation than the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, to which Abraham Lincoln devoted the lion’s share of his energy during those hazardous weeks.

Here is a motion picture that the American movie-going public has not only seen and liked; it is one that a vast majority of them have taken to their hearts.  And would we not expect as much of any film pertaining to his life!   Lincoln is one historical figure who has had very few detractors during the century and a half since his death.  His life and memory seem to have transcended the ideological variances and political party-line disputes and shifting fads and ferments of government in each succeeding epoch.  Even in our polarized times, even amidst legislative deadlock and dissension, just about anyone aspiring to be a leader of the people or a catalyst for change, whatever the party label, will sooner or later quote from him or refer to him to support their political philosophy.  It is and always has been kosher to be identified as a descendent of the man.  But in the light of this lasting esteem we forget that during his time in office he was not liked by many in the government and certainly by most southerners.  He was regarded by some as nothing short of a despot, and this biopic will not let you forget that fact for long. 

It is strange that this particular portrayal of Lincoln should have the appeal it has enjoyed, when you consider that Spielberg has not come forth with a bright and happy movie.  Not by a long shot!  We need mention only the opening brutal combat scene and the vast landscape display of the battlefield dead among which he rides astride his horse in the closing minutes.  No, Spielberg does not come crashing onto our brain pans with flourishes and fanfares and high-sounding acclaim.  His approach to his subject is studied and measured and somewhat brooding.  The camera (wielded by Director of Photography Janusz Kaminski) lets in very little of the blaze of noon.  The images are dark and shadowy.  They simulate candle lighted spaces and interiors.  The pace is never brisk.  And though the expected outcome, the passing of the amendment, materializes wondrously at the movie’s climax, there is a pall that hangs over every scene before and after, an aura of sadness in anticipation of the tragic death we know this President is going to suffer and the turmoil into which we know the nation will be thrown upon his untimely passing.  Slavery’s demise will be much slower and more agonizing than a mere legislative achievement, however landmark, would suggest.  Few movie makers other than Spielberg could have gotten away with this approach, even as few if any others could have gotten studio approval in 1993 for filming “Schindler’s List” in black and white.  The barons of Hollywood have come to trust him; they know what a commercial best bet he is.   

The man Lincoln has been extensively analyzed by the scholars and pundits who have come and gone throughout the last one hundred and fifty years.  And out of their ruminations have emerged many portraits of him.  There is on the revered side The Liberator, The Noble Statesman, The Eloquent Speechmaker and Writer, The equally Eloquent Debater, The Supreme Leader, The Determined Warrior, The Visionary, The Beautiful Dreamer.  On the more sobering side we have The Pragmatist, The Loner, The Melancholy Man, The Private Sufferer, even The Shifty Politician who was not averse to sleights of hand and the bending of the law when it suited his purpose, as this screenplay is so scrupulous in demonstrating.  The character of House Rep Thaddeus Stevens, dynamically portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones as an intemperate and troublesome ally in the fight to end slavery, provides us with a few more choice designations to add to the list – “The Inveterate Dawdler and the Capitulating Compromiser.”  All of these Lincolns – all of them – stride across the screen in limp shouldered, somewhat stoic gracefulness during the course of the film’s footage, all of them made vivid and tangible in the brilliant hands of Daniel Day-Lewis.  His body language and his unassuming manner of speech bear this out.  In my estimation this actor can do no wrong.  Once again we look in vain to find any trace of other characters he has so powerfully portrayed throughout his career.  Someone has observed that from this point on it will be difficult for many Americans to think of Abraham Lincoln without seeing Day-Lewis in their minds’ eyes.  Who could conceivably improve on the work he has done?

We could also add to the list of titles The Unhappy Husband and Father.  Many of the most reliable sources have opined that Lincoln was subject to depression.  Molly, his grief stricken wife, was even more so, if Sally Field’s unforgettable profile of the woman can be believed, and I for one believe it, from all I have read.  The ordeal she underwent after her husband’s assassination, not only emotionally but materially and legally, is yet another reality that the consistently brooding temper of the movie foreshadows.  They do not make dramatic scenes more lucid and penetrating and air clearing than the one in which the two of them have a go at each other over the issue of whether or not to allow their son Robbie (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) to join the army and fight.  They have already lost another son to the war, a loss from which Molly has never totally recovered, and this altercation brings forth daggered words about other resentments and feelings as well, ones they have both suppressed – of betrayal and neglect.  Almost as explosive is the scene in which Robbie finally stands up to his father over the question of his desired enlistment.  This one even comes to blows.  The young man then stalks off bitterly and does as he pleases.  Father and son are never reconciled, not that that much time was left for that reconciliation to take place, as it turned out.  Lincoln’s private life was no bed of roses. 
   
Also broodingly foreshadowing but far more gentling and reassuring and hopeful is the candid conversation Lincoln has with his African American household servant Mrs. Keckley, a former slave (portrayed with deep sensitivity and restrained passion by Gloria Reuben) on the steps of the White House at night.  She opens her heart to him about how vital to her is the impending vote on the proposed amendment.  They both realize they are strangers to each other in many ways, but they manage in those few moments to cross the barriers and touch at a profound level.  I was brought more to empathetic tears by this scene than any other in the entire picture.  It pours healing waters over the impending sorrows and sufferings of her race and those of the nation itself in the coming decades.                  

The cast and crew are huge.  Space does not allow a listing of everyone who had a part in the movie’s making, but in addition to those already noted I make special mention of David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward, whose practical mind was both a help and an irritant to Lincoln in his fight.  A word of praise is also due Tony Kushner who wrote the intricate and exceptionally intelligent screenplay, each word of the script rapier sharp and swift to find the ear.  Nothing is soft pedaled.  Lincoln’s immortal, time honored words are not neglected either.  And Spielberg adds another star to his glowing crown.  Here he treads where other movie treatments of Lincoln have feared to tread.  He plays nothing safe, but he leaves most American citizens shrouded nevertheless in national pride and soulful wonder.

I have a suggestion for all of you who have seen the film: See it again, and maybe again.  You will never feel from repeated viewings as if you have learned all that is to be known about this iconic figure, but you just might wish to keep feeding your lingering appetite for more.        


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

My Beautiful World by Sonia Sotomayor (Book Review by Bob Racine)



                             Published in 2013

Judges on the bench are often looked upon by the general public as belonging to a world of their own, in which they are eternally ensconced behind a wall that cannot be penetrated by anyone else, not even by lawyers who plead cases before them.  We think of them as having attained a position so high and holy and remote that it conceivably would be sacrilege for a mere citizen to invade their domain of transcendent and learned authority.   Has a judge ever invited you over for a cup of tea or coffee just for the purpose of chit chat?  In all likelihood the answer is negative.  The fact that they are physically elevated before the courts they serve goes a long way in creating this mind set.  We literally look up to them, rarely across. 

This is especially true of justices on Federal court benches, and that goes exponentially for the ones appointed to the Supreme Court of our land.  Once the Senate has unearthed every pertinent fact about the candidate’s past experience and has confirmed her or him for appointment and the candidate has taken the oath, the one so invested tends to be sealed off in our minds’ eyes from that point on.  Could it be that these immaculate icons ever catch a cold or suffer anxiety or have to interrupt their busy days with visits to the “necessary?”  Maybe that robe is a talisman underneath which God preserves their purity and immunity from all things mundane.  This is why it is so refreshing and sobering when one of them opens up and shares a personal history, as Sonia Sotomayor has done in this rich and informative and inspiring autobiography.  She is the first Hispanic appointed to that highest court and the third woman.  In recent years in fact we have had not just one but two Supreme Court justices to share their lives in writing, the other one being Clarence Thomas.  (No, I have not yet read his book, but I plan to.)

Let me make it clear from the outset that “My Beautiful World” is not a political statement.  Sotomayor makes it indelibly plain in several places that she does not attach her name to any party or any activist movement.  Her narrative in fact begins with her discovering at the age of seven that she had diabetes, a condition that has plagued her all of her life.  She was required to learn how to give herself insulin injections, neither parent feeling competent enough to do it for her – beginning at seven.  This disclosure in the very beginning of the book sets the tone for all that is to follow.  She opens up her life in fine detail, giving vivid depiction of her world as a child in the South Bronx and as a member of the Puerto Rican community.  She demonstrates ethnic pride in multiple ways while she speaks candidly of her personal struggles and losses.  She divests herself completely of any mantle of high-mindedness or acquired purity or professional inaccessibility.  There is nothing the least bit stuffy about her writing.       

What the book’s narrative makes incontrovertible is that this woman is a survivor.  She had to survive not only the ever threatening diabetes and the death of her alcoholic father when she was at the tender age of nine but the protracted grief of her mother and grandmother over that death that left her swimming emotionally and constitutionally on her own for an extended time.  She also had to deal with her reputation in and out of the family for not possessing great physical beauty - “a pudgy nose. . .gawky and ungraceful. . .bad taste in clothes,” none of which she forthrightly denies.  On the sparse occasions in high school when a boy asked her out, she always felt like she was “everyone’s second choice.”  She had to survive in the relentless struggle to summon confidence, always fighting a “tide of insecurity,” rooted in the awareness that no one in her family or among her ancestors had ever aspired to study law and make a career out of it. 

Sotomayor also had to shed the prejudices of her ethnic clan and the terribly harsh Catholic school environment where corporal punishment was meted out for the most ridiculous reasons and where learning was strictly by rote.  When she reached her junior year in high school a very enlightened teacher introduced her to essay writing, something she had never heard of.  She had to learn that real education consisted of “understanding the world by engaging with its big questions rather than just absorbing the factual particulars.”  Her former instructors had only required her to repeat back what she had been told.  She explains in great detail how this shift played a big part in her later ministrations as an attorney and eventually as a judge.  Someone practicing law must absorb a lot, often having to become a temporary expert in some vocational field to make an informed judgment.  You have to see the big picture.

She also had to penetrate the language and cultural barrier, when she found herself at Princeton, a culturally foreign environment.   A lesser spirit might have succumbed to the estrangement she felt from the old guard Ivy Leaguers.  She had to work twice as hard to win respect and acceptance. 

Not the least of the complications and personal failures Sotomayor had to survive was the demise of her marriage to her childhood sweetheart, Kevin.  The two of them met in high school and formed at once what they considered an indissoluble, life time bond.  Both were great students, and they held to the mistaken assumption that intellectual compatibility was enough to insure all other kinds.  Neither foresaw the problem that her career demands would create for them when they tried to set up a household and his career interests carried him in another direction.  As friendly as the break-up was, she was left for the first time in her life with little money as a childless single woman having to make her material way on her own.  This turn of events added to the stress of pursuing her dream of being a judge, one that had been conceived as a child when she feasted off the drama and excitement of the Perry Mason series on television.  She admired both attorneys in that show but was fascinated even more by the figure each week on the bench.  Now she was in the real game with all its rough and tumble strains and stresses.  In short, her last crutch, her marriage, had been snatched away from her.

She went from Princeton where she graduated in 1976 summa cum laude on to Yale Law School where she obtained her law degree in 1979.  From there she went to work for the district attorney’s office in New York City as a prosecutor and from there to a private law firm.   From 1992 to 1998 she served as a judge for the U.S. District Court in New York state and from1998 to 2009 on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where she remained until she was sworn in to the Supreme Court in August, 2009, though she does not go into detail about the nomination or crack the book on her present job.  Her narrative actually ends about fifteen years ago, about a decade before her present appointment.   She does share gripping details and moments of crucial decision making when she gets down to cases she handled as an attorney, but even in this phase of her writing she keeps things personal and links up all her experience to her ongoing process of self-discovery and self-realization.  Political posturing never occurs.

I would like to close with some quotes from the book that especially moved and inspired me.

In reference to her father:  “For all the misery he caused, I knew with certainty that he loved us.  Those aren’t things you can measure or weigh.  You can’t say: This much love is worth this much misery.  They’re not opposites that cancel each other out; they’re both true at the same time.”

“I abhorred being pitied, that degrading secondhand sadness I would always associate with my family’s reaction to the news I had diabetes.  To pity someone else feels no better.  When someone’s dignity shatters in front of you, it leaves a hole that any feeling heart naturally wants to fill, if only with its own sadness.”

“A chain of emotion can persuade when one forged of logic won’t
hold. . .[and] a surplus of effort [can] overcome a deficit of confidence.”

Describing what family has meant to her:  “What really binds people as a family?  The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald.”
 
“My childhood ambition to become a lawyer had nothing to do with middle class respectability and comfort.  I understood the lawyer’s job as being to help people. . .The law for me was not a career but a vocation.” 


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net