Inglorious Decision Makers
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Quention Tarantino - Inglorious Basterds
On Friday night my wife and I watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. Having enjoyed much of Mr. Tarantino’s previous work (Pulp Fiction, in particular) I was anticipating with great relish another dose of his enormous flair for form, pacing, humor, dialog, color, and hubris. He did not disappoint. Bloody, violent, and disturbing, yes, but a great treat all the same.
I had two philosophical issues with the movie. One quite limited and aesthetic, and the other raising a broader question. The first I will explain by saying that I prefer solid wood to veneer. Veneer inserts a fiction between the viewer and the object. Solid wood permits the viewer to see the object for what it is. Tarantino’s script rewrote certain important, nay critical, aspects of the Second World War. While a pleasing veneer from a plot perspective, his choice seemed to me to be unnecessary.
The second issue had to do with something more fundamental. Ends and means.
The script bristled with rousting “let’s stick it to those krauts” moments with its eponymous hand-picked cadre of scalping killers bent on instilling rampant fear in the ranks of the German army. But once or twice I wondered whether Tarantino didn’t perhaps want us to feel just as uncomfortable about the brutality of the good guys as he did about the brutality of the bad guys. (If so, the movie perhaps ventured into new moral territory for Mr. Tarantino, who has previously cleaved to the open plain of moral expedience.)
The Inglorious Basterds slaughter and scalp and leave bloody mark on their victims, and we root for them, don’t we? I mean they’re fighting against the Nazi’s, after all. Later we see the self-important Nazi sharp-shooter hero turned actor picking off allied soldiers in a Goebbels propaganda movie and we’re supposed to feel disgust for him, aren’t we? After all, he’s fighting the allies.
After a while there’s so much wanton mayhem on both sides that we begin to lose sight of who holds the moral high ground. I was confused. I got the feeling that perhaps Mr. Tarantino was confused.
Top (left to right): Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor. Bottom: Kennedy, Stevens, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas.
But that’s not what I really set out to write about. I really set out to write about those inglorious basterds the conservative supreme court justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito. As written about in the NY Times, their recent majority decision on campaign finance puts the free speech rights of corporations and other organizations on a par with that of individuals, opening the door to an increase in corporate money in politics.
Lead dissenter, Justice Stevens pointed out that no new principle required overruling two major campaign finance precedents. “The only relevant thing that has changed since” those two decisions, he wrote, “is the composition of this court.”
The conservative justices sought to equalize the rights of corporations and individuals. But surely the freedoms of corporations or organizations should be distinguished from those of individuals rather than equated to them?
Society affords certain rights and privileges to its individual members by virtue of the fundamental equality it wishes them to have. This is eminently sensible. But to say that corporate entities inherit these same rights by default rests on nothing but a sleight of hand. Corporate entities or other organizations serve society only as far as they don’t impose on the general rights or wants of society. That’s why corporations are regulated, so that we can keep them in check.
The right of free speech implies the voice of an individual conscience expressing itself. Where in a corporation would you find that individual conscience? If it’s in one person, then let that person speak. If it’s in a board room, then let those board members speak. If it’s in the shareholdings, then let those shareholders speak.
Let’s be frank, corporate free speech implies corporate special interest. Permitting it willy nilly in politics further dilutes the voice of the average American citizen.
“While American democracy is imperfect,” writes Justice Stevens, “few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
Bravo, Justice Stevens.
And all of this relates to mirrors how? I’m getting there.
So if I imagine for a moment that I’m Pinky Dinky Doo and that Mike Bloomberg is offering a prize for the person who can come up with a device that would help people quit smoking, I’d say that he should use some of the fund to distribute hand mirrors to smokers or their loved ones so that they can watch themselves puffing away day and night and hacking up gunk first thing in the morning. Just an idea.
“Art is science made clear.”
To understand the failure of the cartoon one must look to Cocteau: ‘art is science made clear,’ he insists. Considering the New Yorker’s high standards, does the cartoon make clear the science it satirizes?
I worked so hard yesterday to repress this awareness. I wanted to laud the New Yorker and Barry Blitt. But as I scrolled through the New Yorker cover cartoons seeking out examples of the same kind of abrasive satire I knew deep down that I wouldn’t find anything quite like the Obama cover.
If the New Yorker in its cover cartoon had, as does the Onion in its copy, a history of satirical lampoon with no holds barred, the cartoon would make more sense; its art would be science made clear. But given the absence of this history, the cartoon’s immediate psychological impact tends to muddy its message.
The New Yorker has a long history of offending people with its notoriously tasteless and offensive output of low-brow hackery. 
Satire has no place in an enlightened society. After all, to appreciate satire one must simultaneously understand the direct impact of the satirical object as well as its indirect object. Surely we shouldn’t be expected to hold opposing or divergent concepts in our minds at one time, that’s just barbaric! This is one nation under god, godamnit!
Republican opposer — John McCain — no stranger himself to satire, limped nimbly to Obama’s support, declaring: “New York can go take a hike! Oh, wait a minute, there aren’t any decent hiking trails around New York. Come to think of it, the only place you can even safely fire your gun in New York is from the roof of a New York City housing project, and who would want to set foot in one of those places…”
So, when you get your hands of a copy of the current New Yorker, be sure to set it on fire and toss it into the grate as quickly as you can. At least, tear off the cover and set fire to that… we’ll decide later what to do with the rest of it.
Contrast this with the assertion of Frank Herbert’s son that his father didn’t finish college because he took only to the courses that interested him, forgoing required classes. Herbert worked at writing for many years before achieving success, relying on his wife’s income to support them. He submitted his landmark science fiction work — Dune — to 20 publishers before it was picked up for publication by a smallish press.
Using structural and functional brain imaging, scientists now have unprecedented insight into the mechanisms of thought. Writing in the Public Library of Science, 
Interrogation experts should take note. If you want to extract an honest answer, break out the Sodoku puzzles rather than the water buckets and manacles.
It started with some reflection on the cost of getting around in the city: I take my son to pre-school on the subway in preference to driving him, because we like the train and because I like the idea that I’m not contributing to global warming and pollution. But this morning as I walked in the Spring sunshine I realized that it costs me $4 for a round trip on the subway, while the cost of driving him to school would only be about 54 cents. That sucks. Shouldn’t we make public transportation more economically attractive than driving to encourage people to use it?
I then had started to write about the changing seasons and the way that this affects our conceptual view of the world. I was thinking about referencing lyrics from a record I was just listening to (The Mountain Goats - 
, on which a track begins with the words “Autumn came around like a drifter to an on ramp…”). It was as I was trying to develop this idea that I pressed the fatal combination of buttons and erased the post.
It is no surprise then that many cultures and religions have conceptualized life and death as a cycle. Reincarnation, life after death. Renewal of life reflects our regular impression of the world, and it salves the pain of total loss.
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