Letter to the World

Dear World,

Not all Americans are deluded souls or ethically challenged losers. I feel it is important to insist on this point, believing, as I do, that there are those who would dispute it.

Granted, our president is an ethically challenged loser, as are some of the people he associates with, for example, Donald Trump, Jr., Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Rob Porter, Mike Pence, and…okay, pretty much everyone he associates with.

But please note that Donald Trump was not the popular choice of the voters in the last presidential election. Most Americans did not vote for him. Only 62,985,134 did. The rest of us are innocent!
 

Really, if it weren’t for the quirkiness of the electoral college system, along with at least one other factor (or, what is known in Moscow as a “фактор”), Donald Trump would not be in the White House today.

Recently Trump has argued that many of our school teachers should start packing heat. Yes, go ahead and read that sentence again; it is what I meant to write. And it is true. Trump really thinks it would be a terrific idea to have America’s teachers stride into the classroom with their shootin’ irons at the ready.
 

You may well ask, “What kind of incredible loser would want to see teachers and suicidal maniacs having shootouts in the halls and classrooms of public schools???”
 

The answer of course is a violence-prone or ethically challenged loser. The kind of loser that thinks the NRA, in its relentless quest to promote more profits for America’s gun manufacturers, needs a little boost from the White House. And this kind of loser, by the way, is characteristic of practically all the Republicans in Congress today, the Republicans being party that has decided that ethics are bullshit.
 

It is worth noting (as many others have) that every country in the world has mentally disturbed individuals, and every country has law enforcement officials who sometimes fail at their job – as did the deputy who declined to enter Stoneman Douglas High School last week to confront that school’s maniac killer. But not every country is awash with automatic weapons. That’s just us. This doesn’t make us all losers! Only the politicians who strive to put automatic weapons at everyone’s fingertips are losers.
 

America actually has some truly amazing people, people who are the opposite of losers. In support of this statement I submit to you the students who have been leading the discussion about our need for better gun control. These young people are incredible – and they’re Americans! See what I mean?
 

So please, World, don’t give up on us. We will be normal again someday, I promise you. And when we are, it will be because of people like these young Americans - who are striving with all their hearts to make our world better.
 

Sincerely,
Culture World

                       Photo: Newsweek

Funny or Fascist

On a scale of 1 to 10, how funny would you say the following cartoon is?


 
"Good shootin', son. I'm pretty sure that was a squirrel."
                     (By Tom Toro in The New Yorker)



I'm giving it a 9.5 at least, because I find it hilarious.

Of course, you may not find it funny at all, in which case you are probably a fascist.

JK, IG.

What?  An explanation is called for?

OK, what gives this cartoon its ultimate bite is the social comment it makes about Americans of a certain mentality.  These Americans, sometimes described as “gun nuts,” hold one or both of the following opinions:

(a)    the U.S. Constitution gives ordinary citizens a sacrosanct right to wield assault weapons,

(b)   wielding such weapons is a good idea.

These are views with which I adamantly disagree, and, when I am in a cheerful mood, I often refer to people whose views clash with mine as fascists.

But Where Does Funny Come from, and Why Does It Sometimes Die at Cultural Boundaries?

When I showed this cartoon to a Chinese friend, she didn’t get it, even though she is a bright young woman who speaks English well and who has lived here for two years.  What gives?

It has often been said that humor is one of the most difficult things to translate across cultures, and, though this may be true, I haven’t heard any good explanations as to why this should be. 

In the case of this cartoon, I believe, the humor depends on an understanding of America’s ongoing gun-law debate, and is further augmented by a degree of frustration with the reasoning that is often offered in support of gun ownership. This “reasoning” boils down to a sentiment that says, “I love - yes, LOVE - my implements of death, and if you can’t sympathize with my devotion, you just better shut up.”

It is in this emotional hothouse that points (a) and (b) cited above grow roots.

Obviously, someone from China might have difficulty picking up on the humor of Tom Toro’s clever cartoon, depending as it does on a viewpoint embedded in contemporary cultural ideals.

Three factors are said to underlie humor: incongruity, superiority and release of tension.*  Different authors emphasize one or the other of these, but I believe each can contribute to funniness.

In the Toro cartoon, incongruity rules.  We see it in the horrendous destruction rendered by the boy’s shootin’ and in the very idea of hunting with an assault weapon, especially hunting a small creature like a squirrel.  But adding greatly to the hilarity is the incongruity between the madness of assault-weapon hunting and the calm demeanor of the Dad – a man who talks as though he were quietly commending his son on his fly-fishing or hoop skills.  A man who talks, in other words, as though he and his son weren’t doing something insanely violent.

But there’s more, and this is where the “release of tension” theory comes into play.  For me, the very idea that assault weapons should be readily available to whoever wants them is so destructive and so irrational, that hearing this position argued as though it were reasonable is frustrating.  And yet we do hear this argument being made on a daily basis.  Having the lunacy of this idea so beautifully skewered is, for me, downright therapeutic.  Laughing at the incongruity here is one thing, but thinking about the crazy people who might say “there is no incongruity here,” adds to the hilarity.

So how would someone from a less gun-crazy country like China understand this?  They probably would not, unless they were keeping a close eye on America’s gun debate, and unless they too felt stymied by the bizarre ideas that are offered by the gun lobby as normal.   

Culture boundaries: where laughter goes to die.

OK, next time, maybe I’ll find a Chinese cartoon and try to see why Americans might not get it.

Until then, 再見.

____________________________________

*See Culture World January 6, 2013 for more on humor theory.

Freedom: the Capacity to Gun Someone Down

I find myself lately changing the channel when I see news about Trayvon Martin’s killing. This reflects my weariness with the sorrowful tragedy of the case. It could so easily have been avoided had the killer been less gun-obsessed.

I’m making judgments about the killer, George Zimmerman, without knowing more about him than what the news offers, but I feel pretty sure about my judgments. This is partly because the idea of carrying a gun around in your neighborhood of an evening bespeaks obsession.

But it also reflects some of my experience as a receiver of hate mail over the decades. Soon after I began writing for newspapers some 30 years ago, I noticed that the two topics I could write about that would almost guarantee hate mail responses were guns and race. At first I couldn’t see a connection, but gradually, it dawned on me that the depraved hatred expressed in these two kinds of letters was rooted in a single sentiment: Dread. People who feel encroached upon by “those they perceive as different” are often the same people who nurture a need to arm themselves with murderous weaponry. Both of these sentiments reflect a feeling of vulnerability that drifts easily into fear.

However, we non-psychotic citizens also have cause to be fearful when we consider the crazy laws that the gun lobby has managed to get Florida to put on its books. The infamous “stand your ground law” that was passed here in 2005 is a perfect example. It might more accurately be called the “I-think-I’d-like-to-kill-someone-today-and-claim-that-I-was-standing-my-ground law.”

From the start it was obvious to normal people (but not, apparently, to Florida’s legislators) that this law was an invitation to gun nuts everywhere to snuff out those fellow citizens whom they found particularly annoying. Passing this law was, at the time, surely the craziest thing Floridians had ever done - but that was before they elected Rick Scott as governor.

The use of the phrase “stand your ground” is part of the problem, and it calls attention to the fact that the gun industry knows how to win wars of words. “Stand your ground” calls up visions of John Wayne or Gary Cooper displaying American-style manliness by bravely facing down a no good varmint or two. But it’s hard to see that kind of Hollywood bravado in a heat-packing, middle-aged man tracking an unarmed teenager until a confrontation results in the latter’s death.

There is a sickening difference between the gloriously brave sounding phrase that the gun lobby used to shove this law through the Florida legislature, and the creepy reality surrounding the many killings that have been justified by this law - a number which, by the way, is rapidly rising (Tampa Bay Times). Also rapidly rising is the number of Florida residents seeking licenses to own guns.

I’m not sure how the gun nuts are managing to win the language war, but so far they are. In their world, the word “freedom" means little more than the capacity to blow someone’s head off with a twitch of the trigger finger. Anyone who isn’t packing heat, they seem to believe, isn’t free.

Note that there are dozens of countries in which people are free even though almost nobody owns any weapons - England and Japan for starters. It’s also true that in some countries households have long been heavily armed where there is no freedom at all – Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, for example. I’m not sure how the gun lobby, in spite of these realities, has managed to indoctrinate the culture with the idea that guns equal freedom, but it has.

Related to this is the nutty idea that we are only truly free if we have the household armaments necessary to face down “the government.” This notion harks back to the Revolutionary War era, a time when it made some sense. But face it, is there a community anywhere today in which citizens are prepared to take up their household armaments and go mano-a-mano against the U.S. Marines? Or the First Armored Division?

I raise this point with some hesitation since I’m sure there are some crazies among the gun lobby who would like to demand the right to own howitzers and anti-tank missiles and I’m frankly a bit leery of stirring them up.

Finally, in the language war department, there is the phrase “Second Amendment rights.” True, the Second Amendment references the right to bear arms in the interest of maintaining a militia, but the gun industry has used the phrase “Second Amendment rights” so regularly to promote legislation like Florida’s “stand your ground law” that the real nature of the Second Amendment is buried beneath their propaganda.

In an ideal world, every time some pro-gun politician or lobbyist used the phrase “Second Amendment rights,” a courageous journalist or politician would stop them in their tracks and insist that they reference the basis of a “militia” as the constitutional justification for gun ownership. But Florida, I fear, is light years away from this “ideal world.”

It may be too late, but I still believe it is worth the struggle to take back some of the language that the Murderous Weaponry Lobby has so effectively commandeered. Let’s start by bringing back this good old American phrase - “gun nuts.”






Trayvon