It Is Cool to Rebel

Back in The Sixties, which, by my calculation, lasted roughly from 1965 to 1972, millions of young people took to the streets in protest against war, racial discrimination, corporate domination of public policy and in support of various other worthy causes.  But did these acts of rebellion succeed in transforming America?  Perhaps not enough.

According to an occasionally reliable source (MOFI), a meeting took place on April 17, 1972, between Dick Cheney and Karl Rove which included the following dialogue:

Dick (snarling out of one side of his mouth): What are we going to do about these obnoxious brats taking to the streets and demanding “peace” and “justice?”  This could ruin all our plans!

K-Rove (with an air of insidious smugness): Don’t worry, Dick, they may get their “Civil Rights” and their end to the Vietnam War, but when the dust clears, our grip on America’s resources will be tighter than ever, and then the middle class and poor will fall helplessly into our hands like a couple of ripe avocados all ready to garnish our elitist salads – mwahahahaha!

How prescient Rove was.  Conservative opposition to rights for women, minorities, gays and lesbians, as well as conservative contempt for the environment, have all been in retreat since the Sixties.  But - where control of the nation’s wealth is concerned - the right wing has won every battle.  The rise of conservatism since 1980 has resulted in skyrocketing incomes for the super-rich, and stagnant or declining incomes for the rest of us.

So should we children of the Sixties have just shut up and stayed indoors applying ourselves to our  school work?  I don’t have an answer for this question, but I will use it to segue into a topic that has recently drawn my interest: the rise of a protest generation in the People’s Republic of China.  This generation, which embraces values dramatically different from those of its parents, emphasized its uniqueness by the adoption of the word “ku” in the 1990s as its all-around slang term of approval.  Ku as a slang term is based on the English word “cool” and is linked in China to the rise of individualism.

One of my Shanghainese super-students and I produced a power point presentation that focuses on this generation and its dominating presence on China’s social media.  Since the material appearing on social media is anonymously produced, it’s a bit presumptuous for us to attribute it to any particular generation, but not entirely presumptuous for the following reason: since the 1990s, a spirit of individualistic expression (ku-ness) has emerged among young Chinese that is unlike anything China has seen for many generations, and the satirical protests that are showing up in social media have the unmistakable stamp of this generation’s feisty attitude.

A lot of this web satire is based on double entendre as is, for example, the phrase “grass mud horse.”  These three words are pronounced in Chinese “cao, ni, ma.”  As it happens, cao ni ma is a nasty curse in China meaning, literally, “Fuck your mother,” but used more or less the way Americans use the phrase “Fuck you!”

Grass-mud-horse has been extended on the web through the image of a llama, an animal whose countenance and furry coat suggest this phrase.  Artist Ai Weiwei has taken the image one step further by posting a picture of himself completely naked with his “central parts” strategically covered by a llama-like stuffed toy. 

This picture calls to mind the sentence: “Grass mud horse covers central (body parts).”  Pronounced “Cao ni ma dang zhongyang,” this is a homonym for “Fuck you, Central Party Committee!”

The brave and brilliant Ai Weiwei has been imprisoned in the past for his protests, but as of now, he is free to carry on his freedom-promoting shenanigans.

Our presentation at an anthropology conference incorporated a number of these oblique critiques of China’s party and government, including the widely known use of the phrase or image of “river crabs” (hé xiè) to satirize the government’s promotion of a “harmonious society” (hé xié).  The harmonious society concept seems largely to be used to suppress individuals whom the authorities want silenced.

                  Chinese flag with River Crabs in place of stars

Another form of satire is represented by the following reference to the heroic Long March, the Valley Forge-like experience in which battered revolutionary soldiers hiked for thousands of miles through harsh terrain pursued by Nationalist forces in 1934-35.  It was said that food was so scarce that soldiers sometimes wound up eating their own shoes, and, according to legend, a generous older soldier might allow himself to starve by claiming to not be hungry and giving his shoes to a younger man.

But in China today, certain inadequately regulated companies (perhaps by virtue of bribes to responsible government officials) have been found putting shoe leather and other grossly inappropriate and impure substances in their processed food before selling it to unknowing customers.

In light of the discovery that contemporary Chinese have been eating shoe leather, some snarky internet rebels posted the following picture from the Long March along with a caption saying,

“The old soldier gives his shoes to the young man. Then, looking at the young man he says to himself, ‘Once we are liberated, I hope every Chinese can have as many shoes to eat as he wants.’”

Here are a couple of the many comments that this bit of web satire inspired:

“That old soldier must have been a fortune teller!”

“We have damn sure made it!”

The spirit of satirical protest lives on in China.  This month it was reported that 14,000 pig carcasses have been found floating in the Huangpu River which flows past Shanghai.  As concern spread about the effects of this shocking development, the government announced that the city’s water supply was nevertheless safe to drink.  A Chinese netizen posted the following response on Weibo (China’s Twitter): “Thousands of rotting carcasses in the water, but it is still safe to drink.  What a magical country we live in!”

This is all interesting stuff, and to an extent, encouraging.  A clever and active citizenry that dares to defy its government is a necessary element in any decent society.  But what does this portend for China’s future?  Will the government give way on some issues, while still dominating and exploiting the citizenry a la Cheney and Rove?  Or will China impress us all when Generation Ku ® grows up and builds a society with a spirit of justice and freedom such as we in the U.S. have so far failed to attain?

MOFI: my own fertile imagination.

® See “Generation Ku: Individualism and China’s Millennial Youth,” Ethnology, Vol. 44 Fall 2005, by R. L. Moore.

Doomsday Schmoomsday

Hearing lots of talk lately about preppers and the reality show on the National Geographic Channel called “Doomsday Preppers.”  I suppose it’s crass and unfair to mock or criticize a show I’ve only heard of and never actually watched, but, knowing that the Florida statutes against crass unfairness are pretty weak, I will surge ahead.  And, after all, how seriously am I supposed to take a show that apparently refers to an upcoming “Doomsday?”

I’d like to know first of all what do the preppers expect is going to bring about Doomsday next week, or at some other specific point in the foreseeable future.  There are those, of course, who fret about economic collapse, and we did have an almost-collapse at the end of the Bush administration and a real collapse in 1929.  But neither of those scenarios brought about “Doomsday.”

Or could it be that preppers are expecting climate change to do us in?  Certainly we have suffered catastrophes in the face Katrina and Sandy, but each of these was local in its effects and neither came close to a Doomsday worthy of the name.

I notice that preppers talk about being “off the grid,” which, I gather, means living without the support of such vital utilities as water, electricity and HBO.  I actually can envision a catastrophic breakdown of utilities, but again, such breakdowns in the past have been localized and always temporary.  We have never come close to seeing the power grid for the entire country go dead as a doornail leaving us at the mercy of the elements for weeks, let along months or years at a time.  In fact, to my knowledge, such a thing has never happened in any country, ever.

So, if Doomsday scenarios based on past experience seem so unlikely, what is it that motivates the current prepper movement?  I think the main factor is the American obsession with (and delusion about) individualism, an obsession which breeds among some citizens a longing to feel they are in control of their own fate.  Of course, we are not in control of our own fates.  The one thing that has characterized humanity over the past 500,000 years or so is our super-sociality, that is, our absolute need for cooperative interactions with others.  This need and the complementary drive to assist compatriots in need are features of human nature that not even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, share. 

We are nothing if we are not deeply and thoroughly embedded in the thoughts and actions of our fellow Homo sapiens.  So what’s the point of imagining that in some not-too-distant future we will be thrown back on our own individual resources, forced to produce our own food and provide our own power and plumbing facilities?  In the final analysis, whatever fate awaits us, it will surely involve our continued negotiation of relationships with our neighbors, and with those institutions, including government, that seem to survive no matter what disasters befall us.

Doomsday, in other words, is no more reasonable a scenario than was the Y2K collapse that was supposed to accompany the turn of the century.  But like the Y2K obsession that gripped so many Americans back then, the current prepper fantasies are nothing more than delusional notions about self-reliance and a “you’re-on-your-own” worldview that ignores the fundamentals of both human nature and human history.  For most preppers, I strongly suspect they also include a bonus idea along the lines of, “I’m smarter than most of my fellow citizens, and when the Great Collapse comes, they will have to admit this when they see how I am prepared and they are not.”

After a quick search on the web I came across a site called Backdoor Survival that included a recent post titled “11 Important Skills For Preppers.”

This posting was revealing to me.  I was surprised, for example, that the author, Gaye Levy, refers to the prepper survival scenario as likely to be temporary.  Under the Perseverance item (number 4 on her list) she writes that “[Perseverance] will allow you to focus on the future – and hopefully better times – rather than staying stuck in the moment when all may not be perfect.”

In other words, Ms. Levy’s notion of Doomsday, is that its effects are likely to be temporary.  It really will be a Doomsday or Doomsmonth, not a Doomscentury or Doomseternity.

Also interesting is her reference to “the community.”  Under Basic Fix It Skills (8), she writes that “Plumbing, welding, electrical and general carpentry skills will always be in demand and will give you a marketable skill that will make you valuable to the community.”

So now I’m finding it harder than ever to grasp the Doomsday concept.  If your basic prepper sees herself as dealing with electricity and welding equipment in the context of a community, what is it that has vanished in the Great Collapse?  The mayor?  The police department?  The school board?  But not the commercial distribution system that gives one access to welding equipment and electricity-generating equipment along with the fuel and spare parts to maintain them?

At any rate, here is Ms. Levy’s list of 11 important skills for preppers (minus their elaborations – which can be found on the Backdoor Survival website):

1.  Interpersonal Skills

2.  Problem Solving

3. Home Arts (e.g., cooking, food preservation, sewing, sanitation)

4.  Perseverance

5.  Frugality

6.  First Aid

7.  Gardening

8.  Basic Fix-It Skills

9.  Defense  (“Whether you choose a stun gun, pepper spray, a knife or a firearm, get to know your defensive weapon well so that you can defend what is yours in a safe and sane manner.”)

10.  Compassion for Others

11.  Know Yourself

I would say that all of these skills would be useful in a variety of situations, Doomsday-related or not.  

And finally, I have to confess that I am impressed with the cheerfulness with which the author envisions us facing Doomsday, as evidenced by the following picture which she includes with her posting:

       Just cuz it’s Doomsday, doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy ourselves


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Outrages on Personal Dignity

Kathryn Bigelow, the director of Zero Dark Thirty, wrote the following: “I think Osama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn't mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn't ignore.”

Bigelow is no fan of torture and, in fact, as her Los Angeles Times essay makes clear, she is fundamentally opposed to it.  But did her film inadvertently help promote it?  Popular movies do have their effects on the public imagination.  Witness the way in which Gone with the Wind promoted a heart-warming view of plantation slavery and Juno made teen pregnancy seem cool.

Steve Croll, in a terrific piece on Zero Dark Thirty in the New York Review of Books points out that Americans have grown more comfortable with torture in recent years.  Stanford scholar Amy Zegart attributes this change in attitudes, in part, “to the influence of ‘spy-themed entertainment.’”

Zegart is referring to shows like the TV series 24 in which torture is portrayed as vitally important in saving America from catastrophic terrorist attacks.  But torture is not crucial to our well-being, and shame on the 24 writers for making it seem so.

Croll goes on to argue that Zero Dark Thirty is problematic because it may influence the public debate about torture by virtue of its “distorted contribution.”

I think Croll is correct.  Though I have to admire Zero Dark Thirty as a work of dramatic art, I believe it will all too likely help fix the idea in American public opinion that torture was useful and justified in the hunt for Bin Laden, when its usefulness is clearly debatable and its justification even more so.

Even if torture was helpful in finding bin Laden (and remember, a number of knowledgeable insiders say it was not) we should not, in my opinion, resort to it.  Better that the scruffy, bearded 9-11 mastermind had lived to a ripe old age watching video porn in his dank Abbottabad hideout than that our country should besmirch itself with waterboarding and the beating of helpless captives.

Let’s just say that we have faced more dangerous forces in our past than anything presented by today’s Al Qaeda-type religious fanatics.  Abraham Lincoln dealt with the greatest threat our nation has ever encountered and yet he did not feel it necessary to torture Confederates in order to preserve the union and end slavery.  Nor did Eisenhower tell his underlings to torture captured German soldiers in order to defeat Hitler.  If these threats to our nation were met without sanctioned torture, why should it be so damn essential to us in our fight against nutcase losers like Osama bin Laden?

Some people (former Vice President Dick Cheney, for example) claim that torture is as American as Honey Boo Boo and just as lovable.  Of course, the kinds of beatings, waterboardings, confinement to coffin-like boxes, being stripped naked and hung from the ceiling by one’s wrists for hours at a time portrayed in Ms. Bigelow’s film are not, Mr. Cheney insists, torture.  They are, to use CIA parlance, merely “enhanced interrogation techniques.” 

I wonder if Mr. Cheney ever pictures himself or his loved ones being interrogated in such an enhanced manner.  My guess is no, the only ones he imagines will ever be subject to such techniques are people who he thinks deserve it: terrorist suspects, Iranians, Palestinians and Democrats.

There are, we should note, prominent officials in the U. S. government who are vehemently opposed to torture and they have made their objections known to Cheney and company.  Most notable of these are Senators John McCain (himself a victim of torture) and Dianne Feinstein.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit combatants (or anyone else) from inflicting “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”  So I have a question for Mr. Cheney and others of the Bush administration who seem so enthusiastic about using their “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  When you all advocate waterboarding captives, the placing of them in narrow boxes for extended periods, etc., do you tell yourselves that you are not doing anything that could be considered “humiliating and degrading?” I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you need to face facts: to normal Americans your very existence is both humiliating and degrading.

OK, I’m not really sorry to be the one to tell you that.

Even if torture does work, decent people should oppose it and so should Dick Cheney.  And, though I congratulate Ms. Bigelow for having made a compelling film, I object to her film’s implication about the usefulness of torture and am concerned that it will strengthen the hand of those who want it to become a permanent part of “the American way.”

On Not Taking Humor Lightly

In view of my longstanding interest in humor, I was intrigued to see that today’s NY Times referenced “the first-ever United States symposium on the artificial intelligence of humor” organized by computer scientist Julia M. Taylor et al.  Well, I say it’s about damn time.  Humor, after all, is no mere laughing matter.

I want to acknowledge up front that not everyone shares the same sense of humor.  For example, at a conference last fall, I managed to crack up the group at my table with this bit of hilarity: A colleague named Murray was complaining at some length about spending time at a hotel where a Chinese family, the Wongs, were having a major event.  “Well,” said the exasperated Murray, “wherever we went, we were told, ‘The Wongs have reserved this room -- these hors d’oeuvres are for the Wongs -- the Wongs will be using this area, etc.’”  To which I responded, “Jeez, Murray, you were at the Wong place at the Wong time.” At this, the entire table burst into laughter.

But, when I related this hilarious incident to a spouse and daughter (who shall remain nameless), the former responded with a combination head-shake and eye-roll, and the latter by saying flatly, “Were these Dads at your table?  That sounds like a Dad joke.” 

Rodney Dangerfield, now I understand you.

Anyway, my research into the functions and bases of humor recently included the reading of a fascinating book by Hurley, Dennett and Adams called Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind.  But this book, interesting and thought-provoking though it is, does not quite hit the nail on the head in my opinion.  One point I did get from it is that the actors involved in humor always include humans or anthropomorphized entities.  I had never thought of this before, but I am convinced that it is not only true, but very significant.  It emphasizes that humor is above all a social construct with a social kick.

These authors review some of the major theories of humor including the release of tension theory, the incongruity theory, and the superiority theory.  Of the factors these theories highlight, the most crucial, I believe, are incongruity and superiority.  Other points, like the release of tension, may sometimes be relevant, but, it seems to me, that virtually every humorous situation includes either something incongruous or an occasion to feel in some way superior to a victimized individual.

My favorite joke from the entire book can illustrate this.  Here’s a version of it:

Eight-year-old Johnny and six-year-old Jimmy were about to go downstairs for breakfast when Johnny says to his little brother, “Say Jimmy, I think it’s about time we started cussing.  So at the table this morning, I’ll say hell and you say ass, OK?”

Jimmy happily assented to his brother’s plan.

So, when they sat down at the table, their mother asked, “What will you guys have for breakfast?”

“Sure as hell, Mom, I’ll have some Cheerios!” says Johnny.

At this, his mother grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, threw him over her knee and walloped him five or six times.  Then, dragging him upstairs, she threw him into his bedroom and slammed the door.  Finally, she stomped downstairs, sat back down at the table and said, “So, what will you have, Jimmy?”

“I don’t know, Mom,” said Jimmy, “but you can bet your ass it won’t be Cheerios.”

OK, so here we have it.  There are incongruities between Jimmy’s innocence and his rough language, between his focus on the issue of Cheerios rather than cussing as the source of Mom's anger, and, finally, between the expectation of self-preserving compliance vs. blatant defiance in his response.  We also have the victimization of poor little Johnny and, perhaps, of Jimmy as well.

The authors of Inside Jokes emphasize the incongruity feature of humor at the expense of the victimization or “superiority theory.”  And, though I agree that incongruity may be the single most important factor in humor, I’m not willing to discount the superiority aspect as these authors do.  I can’t imagine how people find America’s Funniest Home Videos amusing without acknowledging the importance of superiority/victimization.  I mean, we all see the idiot attempting to jump his bicycle over the muddy ditch, we know what’s coming, yet all too often we laugh at his disastrous splat when it comes anyway.  And how do groin shots manage to evoke laughter year after year?  I’m expecting that an archaeologist will someday find a cave painting depicting a Megaloceros butting a Neanderthal in the groin while a gang of Cro-Magnons stand around laughing.

My main problem with the theory of Hurley et al. is that it gives too much weight to the cognitive payoff of having an incongruity resolved as the main driving force behind humor -- and even as the main explanation for the very existence of humor.  With apologies for oversimplifying their position, I suggest that they make a mistake by not recognizing the importance of humor’s social function.

If we are going to explain the universal existence of humor in human societies, it seems to me the best way to do so is by noticing the way in which humor functions to define social relationships, either by cementing them, as when individuals share a laugh, or by specifying or denigrating outsiders as in the case of satire and mocking humor.  A theory encompassing these functions has room to accommodate both the importance of incongruity (as when two people share a perspective on an issue, sometimes by resolving an incongruity that reveals a heretofore unspoken truth) and superiority, when the butt of a joke takes it on the chin or some other anatomical area.

Related to humor is another human phenomenon, slang, which not only often incorporates humor, but which, like humor, is very often employed either to strengthen a social bond or to distinguish in-group members from outsiders. 

I have to stop here, given time's winged chariot, etc., but allow me to offer a couple of pictures for your consideration as I go:

  

This tree is not at all funny, but I took a picture of it during my morning walk because I  thought it looked very cool. 

This tree, however, is hilarious - it has a palm frond stuck in its branches.  Ha, ha, ha!  What a stupid tree!