My father, Roger Warner.

My father, Roger Warner, died last month in Calgary at the age of 67.

Being a self-effacing guy, he left explicit instructions that there be no memorial service, that his body be cremated as inexpensively as possible, and that his ashes be disposed of with no undue fuss. But he didn’t leave any instructions precluding the creation of this memorial website:

Roger Warner, 1946-2013.

I don’t have any illusions that the brief biography I’ve posted there, let alone the handful of his stories, poems, and articles, will find much of a readership. My father wasn’t a famous person. In the 1960s he was a DJ at several western Canadian radio stations, then an announcer at CHCH-TV in Hamilton. Subsequently he worked for various branches of government, writing speeches and managing public relations for low-profile ministers and ministries in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Regina. In the 1980s he launched a general-interest newsmagazine in Saskatoon, Bailey’s Illustrated Monthly, serving as its editor and chief contributor. But Bailey’s put out only a handful of issues before folding. After some lean years freelancing in Vancouver in the 1990s, dad wound up running the marketing department at a small technical college in northern Alberta, where he spent the last decade or so of his working life.

Through his thirties and early forties he wrote stories and poetry in his spare time, always hoping to get something published someday, maybe a children’s book. But he didn’t finish much, only a few short pieces, which he rarely showed to anyone. By the time I was a teenager he’d largely given up fiction. Still, he was a big influence on me. My band was named after one of his poems. One of my songs is an abridged re-telling of a long-running bedtime story he improvised for me as a child. Another song, written for his sixtieth birthday, commemorates a comment he once made about looking in the mirror and being surprised to see his grandfather looking back at him.

Like my father, too often I’ll start writing without having any idea where I’m going, then abandon what I’ve written when my momentum runs out. Like my father, I’ve cultivated a reputation for imagination, but too often I shirk the labour required to actually be imaginative, concealing my laziness behind a patina of forced whimsy. Dad often repeated the aphorism that “no man is entirely useless, for he can always serve as a bad example”. As a former heavy smoker, drinker, and over-eater who at one point weighed over 500 lbs, he wished to serve as a bad example to me, and for the most part his example was scary enough to keep me from duplicating his mistakes. Of course in his humility, empathy, and utter lack of ill will toward anyone, he was much more valuable as a good example than he ever was as a bad. I can only hope to live up to the standard he set as a person. But at least I can try to exceed the standard he set as a writer, and when I die, leave behind something more than a slim folder of half-finished stories and poems.

M.

Robert Heinlein and the basic theorem of population mechanics.

It’s been a project of mine, over the last few months, to catch up on some of Robert Heinlein’s less-famous books that I never got around to reading as a youthful sci-fi fan. That’s how I happened to be reading his 1950 novel Farmer in the Sky on the same day that I saw this Jordan Weissmann article on the Atlantic website about solving America’s demographics problem.

The problem is that the fertility rate in the United States has recently fallen below replacement level. That level in developed countries is around 2.1 children per woman – one baby to replace the mother, one to replace the father, and an extra fraction of a baby to cover accidental deaths. Below that level, barring immigration, a population will gradually contract. The problem isn’t contracting population per se. It’s that as fewer children are born, the ratio of working adults to non-working senior citizens tips toward the latter. With fewer workers, the economy can’t produce enough wealth to support its growing complement of seniors in the state of comfortable retirement they’ve come to expect.

Weissmann’s solution is straightforward – America just needs to bring in more immigrants. He needles the New York Times‘ Ross Douthat for his recent musings on the fertility problem which declined to endorse the open-borders approach Weissmann favours.

If America wants to stay productive, it’s hard to see how it (and other developed countries in the same demographic boat, like Canada) can avoid taking in more newcomers. As Weissmann argues, in the short run it’s probably necessary. But in the long run, reversing demographic decline isn’t a simple matter of slapping a welcome mat by the abandoned border checkpoints. First off, the decline isn’t limited to the developed world. The United States, Canada, and Western Europe are joined on the vanishing side of the 2.1 cutoff line by traditional people-exporters like China, Vietnam, and Iran. India’s fertility rate is 2.58 and falling fast – that’s about what the U.S. rate was in the 1960s. Mexico’s is down to 2.27.

In the past these countries were happy to watch their surplus population drained off via emigration to the West. If current trends continue, it won’t be long before they feel the demographic crunch too. They’ll begin offering incentives to keep their brightest and most ambitious young people at home. America will be obliged to compete against other rich countries, most of them in much direr demographic straits, for a shrinking pool of potential immigrants.

The West will have no difficulty recruiting newcomers, not anytime soon. But these newcomers will be harder to assimilate than ever before. If we want to bring them in sufficient numbers to counter demographic trends, there will simply have to be more of them than we’re used to – a larger lump dropped in the melting pot all at once. And the composition of the lump will resist mixing. Up till now we could take our pick of striving geniuses stifled by a lack of opportunity in their crowded home countries. Increasingly we’ll have to hustle for a share of the dissatisfied B-students whose countries couldn’t be bothered to make an effort to retain them. The easiest to recruit will be those from the poorest, most chaotic, and most fecund countries. They’ll be less literate, slower to pick up the language, more alien to the existing culture than previous immigrants. Being generally ill-educated, they’ll compete for jobs with the poorest slice of the native-born population, driving down the cost of unskilled labour and exacerbating income inequality.

Eventually, most likely, the West will absorb and be fortified by the immigrant wave, as it has previous waves. But it’s not such a cost-free operation as Weissmann implies. And once fully assimilated, the newcomers will be just as apathetic about reproducing as the rest of us.

What does all this have to do with Robert Heinlein? Here’s Paul du Maurier, an incidental character in Farmer in the Sky, discussing population projections with a fellow colonist on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. They’re debating how many ex-Earthlings their growing colony can accommodate:

“Studied any bionomics, Bill?”
“Some.”
“Mathematical population bionomics?”
“Well – no.”
“But you do know that in the greatest wars the Earth ever had there were always more people after the war than before, no matter how many were killed. Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to the extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life – the ragged edge of starvation. In other words, if we bled off a hundred thousand people a day, the Earth’s population would then grow until the increase was around two hundred thousand a day, or the bionomical maximum for Earth’s new ecological dynamic.”

This lump of unleavened Malthusianism represents the best wisdom of the forward-thinkingest slice of the American intelligentsia circa 1950. In science-fiction from that era, unconstrained population growth is simply assumed. That was why all those intrepid space cadets blazed their trails to the stars in the first place – so that humanity’s teeming hordes could be deposited on the snowy plains of Ganymede, making room for more babies back home. It would never have crossed Heinlein’s mind that the Ganymede colony might have trouble attracting qualified geo-engineers because the aging home planet refused to let them emigrate.

I don’t read enough modern fiction to know if Heinlein’s successors are contemplating, as he did, the dystopian possibilities of current population trends. My sense is that the so-called demographic death-spiral has been relatively neglected, compared to the attention the population bomb got fifty years ago. I can think of a couple of recent-vintage sci-fi stories that are still built around population-bomb assumptions, but the only death-spiral story I know of is P.D. James’ allegorical The Children of Men, discussed in the article linked above. (I reviewed the entertaining but largely off-point film adaptation a few years back.)

Why has the death-spiral been neglected? For starters, many well-informed people seem oblivious to the direction the demographic arrow is now pointing. Secondarily, there’s an ideological bias at work. While death-spiralers are noticeably clustered on the political right, population-bombers tend to be on the left. Among the latter, there seems to be a widespread feeling that if we do dwindle away, hell, who’d miss us. Take this recent article in the New Yorker on the ethical implications of having children. Elizabeth Kolbert blandly quotes the philosopher David Benatar, who is untroubled by the prospect of human extinction:

“Humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth,” he writes. “The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more” of us.

…But she’s openly skeptical of the economist Bryan Caplan’s suggestion that maybe having kids is, you know, a good thing:

“More people mean more ideas, the fuel of progress.” In a work that’s full of upbeat pronouncements, this is probably his most optimistic, or, if you prefer, outrageous claim.

Until recently that “outrageous claim” was held nearly universally. In a few rich countries it appears already to be the minority view. How much longer will it hold sway in the rest of the world?

The United Nations’ 2004 report World Population to 2300 projects the planet will peak at 9.22 billion people in 2075, then stabilize at around 9 billion. But that projection assumes fertility rates will do something weird:

[F]ertility will fall in all countries below replacement (in the medium scenario) and rebound to replacement after a period largely similar across countries of a century or so.

It’s obvious enough why the UN is projecting fertility rates to fall – that’s what they’re doing already, pretty much everywhere; the only question is whether they’ll plummet in the developing world to the depths they’ve reached in the rich countries. But what about the UN’s assumption that after a seemingly arbitrary period of “a century or so”, fertility will “rebound”? Is there any reason to suppose this will happen in the countries that have already fallen below replacement level?

Is it reasonable to expect fertility to rise from current levels? It is impossible to tell, but one can consider the implications if it does not. … By 2300 … [a]bout half the countries of Europe would lose 95 per cent or more of their population, and such countries as the Russian Federation and Italy would have only 1 per cent of their population left. Although one might entertain the possibility that fertility will never rise above current levels, the consequences appear sufficiently grotesque as to make this seem improbable.

As near as I can tell, this is the only explanation in the report for the assumption that in the long term, fertility rates will “rebound” to replacement level: It would be “grotesque” if they didn’t. Well, there you go.

The UN recognizes, and Farmer in the Sky demonstrates, that you can’t simply project current trendlines until they slope off the edge of the graph. Who knows, maybe there’s another baby boom right around the corner. Or maybe not. Robert Heinlein imagined that mankind was cursed with a biological imperative to overbreed, and that with a little gumption we would escape this curse by conquering the stars. But what if our imperative is nothing more than a polite suggestion, and our real curse is that, given the choice, few of us bother to heed it?

M.

–

I’ve been kvetching about this issue for years, most recently in a 2010 post about how the future will belong to fast-breeding religious conservatives.

Crossing over: Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Hitchens.

Recently, over breakfast, my girlfriend and I chatted about some of the TV programs that she, having come to consciousness only in the mid-’90s, never had a chance to experience. She’s seen enough Cheers reruns to get the gist, but Family Ties, Night Court, and Newhart, among others, she knows only by reputation.

I told her how, in the final scene of the final episode of Newhart, it was revealed that the whole series had been dreamed by Bob Newhart’s character from his earlier The Bob Newhart Show. This reminded me of St. Elsewhere, and I summarized for her the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis: In outline, since all the events of St. Elsewhere were revealed in that show’s final episode to be the daydreams of a snowglobe-clutching autistic child named Tommy Westphall, and since characters from St. Elsewhere crossed over to a number of other TV shows, including Mash, Cheers, and Homicide: Life on the Street, implying that those shows took place in the same fictional reality, and since characters from those overcrossing shows in turn crossed over to a whole bunch of other shows, it can be argued that the events of all these other shows were also daydreamed by Tommy Westphall. The Tommy Westphall Universe turns out to encompass everything from Mission: Impossible to Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper.

Somehow this got me thinking of the connections among some of the books I’ve been reading lately. For instance, Christopher Hitchens in his memoir Hitch-22 crosses over with his old friend Martin Amis in his memoir Experience, providing complementary versions of the evening when Hitchens was introduced to Amis’s “literary father” Saul Bellow. [1] As Hitch tells it:

Martin offers a slightly oblique and esoteric account of a trip on which he took me in 1989, to visit Saul Bellow in Vermont. On our buddy-movie drive up there from Cape Cod – he’s almost word-perfect about this bit – he made it clear that I wasn’t to drag the conversation toward anything political, let alone left-wing, let alone anything to do with Israel. (“No sinister balls,” which was our colloquialism for a certain kind of too-easy leftism.) I knew I was being greatly honored by the invitation, not just because it was a huge distinction to meet Bellow but because, second only to an introduction to his father, it was the highest such gift that Martin could bestow. I needed no telling that I should seize the opportunity to do more listening than talking.

And yet it’s true, as he reports, that by the end of dinner nobody could meet anyone else’s eye and his own foot had become lamed and tired by its under-the-table collisions with my shins.

We learn that Bellow had provoked Hitchens by calumniating his friend, the erudite Palestinian radical and literary critic Edward Said (who was later to fall out with Hitchens as they drifted to ever more irreconcilable positions on the morality of Western intervention in the Arab world, and violent Arab reactions thereto). Hitchens’s defense of his friend had inevitably veered into a lengthy diatribe – “a blue streak of sinister balls”, Amis says – about the misdeeds of Bellow’s beloved Israel. Afterward, Hitchens regretted embarrassing his friend, but:

[Amis] suffered more agony than he needed to, because Bellow as an old former Trotskyist and Chicago streetfighter was used to much warmer work and hardly took offense at all. He later sent me a warm letter about my introduction to a new edition of Augie March.

Bellow makes several other appearances, besides that awkward dinner party, in Amis’s memoir. We hear for instance how Bellow nearly died of a rare neurological infection he picked up dining on a red snapper on a visit to the Caribbean, a story that appears in slightly fictionalized form in Bellow’s Ravelstein. That novel is about the death of Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom, the professor, philosopher, and author of The Closing of the American Mind. As Amis says,

I know Bellow’s novel far, far better than I ever knew Bellow’s friend. Yet Ravelstein comes close to persuading me otherwise. This book is numinous. It constitutes an act of resuscitation, and in its pages Bloom lives.

In the novel, Bloom-as-Ravelstein importunes the narrator, the Bellow stand-in, to write about him after his death.

“I’m laying this on you as an obligation. Do it in your after-supper-reminiscence manner, when you’ve had a few glasses of wine and you’re laid back and making remarks. I love listening when you are freewheeling about Edmund Wilson or John Berryman or Whittaker Chambers when you were hired at Time in the morning and fired by him before lunch.”

We learn in Hitch-22 that Hitchens, in real life, heard the Whittaker Chambers story from Bellow, on the evening of the awkwardness over Edward Said:

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he’d replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right.

Speaking of the “after-supper-reminiscence manner”: both Ravelstein and his model Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind refer to Plato’s Symposium, that famous gathering of Athenian intellects where Socrates, Alcibiades, and Aristophanes and their friends got drunk and declaimed on the nature of love. Taking a poke at modern critical theory, Bloom writes (paraphrasing Nietzche):

[A]fter the ministrations of modern scholarship the Symposium is so far away that it can no longer seduce us; its immediate charm has utterly vanished.

But for non-scholars, the Symposium will always be seductive because it shows us our heroes just as we want to imagine them – hanging out forever in a Valhalla of the intellect, joshing and quipping and making each other spray wine through their noses.

Which brings us to the Friday lunch. Hitch-22 devotes a few pages (and Experience a passing mention) to the boisterous weekly get-together that Hitchens and Amis shared through the 1970s and ’80s with Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Clive James, and illustrious others. Hitchens identifies James as the “chief whip” of the gatherings: “He needed an audience and damn well deserved one.” It’s James who gives us the vividest picture of the Friday lunch, in his memoir North Face of Soho, showing us how Amis could improvise a tall story, sustaining the massed laughter with “the economical stroke of the whip that did just enough to keep the top spinning”, while Hitchens’s specialty was the interjection of sarcastic asides:

[I]f someone was being straightforward, he could make them funny, and if someone was being funny, he could make them funnier.

The actual content of the proceedings, as repeated by James and Hitchens, isn’t quite the stuff of a modern Symposium­. Hitchens gives a few examples of the wordplay and concedes that there were “long interludes of puerility”; James credits, or blames, the illustrator Mark Boxer for “discouraging the anecdote as form – he wanted the flash of wit. … Nobody was allowed to take his time …” It sounds like a riot, in the sense that it must have been obnoxious and nerve-jangling, each man contending to make the biggest smash. [2]

Speaking of that lunch, which Hitchens says has “become the potential stuff of a new ‘Bloomsbury’ legend” – the legend would gain momentum more quickly if it had a catchier name than “the Friday lunch”, which is what Clive James also calls it in his memoir. James reports that when he kickstarted the gathering, he liked to refer to it mock-conspiratorially as the “Modish London Literary World”, a dig at the Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis, who apparently believed such a conspiracy explained why his favoured authors kept getting bad reviews. Unfortunately the Modish brand never caught on. Before they all shuffle off to trade zingers with Aristophanes and Allan Bloom, can we agree on a name for this cohort of legendary British wits? (As with Bloomsbury, MacSpaunday, and the Algonquin Round Table, it’ll help future generations to keep them sorted.) In its heyday the group convened at the Bursa Kebab House; occasionally James calls it the Kebab House lunch. How about the Kebab House Group?

In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom mentions a student who fretted to him, after reading the Symposium, that “it was impossible to imagine that magic Athenian atmosphere reproduced” in his own place and time. Bloom disputes this: “such experiences are always accessible”; his student “had brains, friends, and a country happily free enough to let them gather and speak as they will”. Most of us will never enjoy after-dinner discussions quite as stirring as the Symposium, or as riotous as the Kebab House lunches. But as Bloom consolingly reflects,

This student did not have Socrates, but he had Plato’s book about him, which might even be better.

M.

1. Amis says of Bellow, “I am not his son, of course. What I am is his ideal reader. I am not my father [Kingsley]‘s ideal reader, however. His ideal reader, funnily enough, is Christopher Hitchens.”

James mentions in passing, in his essay collection Cultural Amnesia,

On the whole, writers find other writers hard to be enthusiastic about, even when the other writers are safely dead. It takes security in one’s talent on top of generosity of soul. … Martin Amis’s praise of Saul Bellow is especially valuable because the younger writer is continually faced, when reading the older one, with things he himself would like to have said.

2. Hitchens and James both note the absence of a restraining female presence at the Friday lunch: “It was a very competitive scene, though,” James writes, “and therefore very male.” This naturally brings to mind Hitchens’s famously shit-stirring Vanity Fair article on why women aren’t funny. His argument boils down to: because they don’t have to be.

M.

–

In previous entries I’ve discussed Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia and Martin Amis’s relationship with his father.

Paul Theroux and the Hanoi Christmas bombings.

In 1973, Paul Theroux chronicled his journey round Asia in The Great Railway Bazaar. In 2006, he retraced much of his route for a sequel, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

Changing political conditions had closed off certain routes that were formerly open – he was obliged to skip Iran and Afghanistan this time – and opened others once closed – he could now travel to Cambodia and what had been North Vietnam.

Theroux’s first visit to Vietnam closely followed the withdrawal of the last American troops in 1973. The armies of the South and North, and the North’s guerrilla proxies in the Viet Cong, pretended to observe the terms of the Paris Peace Accords, but the ceasefire was “a painful euphemism”. Theroux was able to travel as far north as Hué, where he gazed across the river at VC territory, its “scalped hills” defoliated by US chemicals. A month after his visit, the euphemistic ceasefire was abandoned and war officially resumed. Without American support, South Vietnam crumbled in April 1975.

Thirty-three years pass. Now Theroux is able to take the train all the way to Hanoi. He is surprised by the capital’s beauty:

But how was I to know? The noble city had always been represented to Americans as the enemy capital, a rat’s nest of villains, and belittled by our propaganda, better off bombed or wiped off the map.

(Did anyone really advocate “wiping it off the map”? True, the most hawkish of the hawks, General Curtis LeMay, famously said of the Communists, “they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age” – but that quote appears to have been invented by his ghostwriter.)

A couple pages later, recounting the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi, an “unambiguously genocidal act of pure wickedness”, Theroux reports that,

“Military targets” was the justification we were given at the time by Nixon and Kissinger [1], but this lie was transparent propaganda. In one instance, in an old neighborhood of Hanoi, every house on Kham Thien Street was destroyed, with a great loss of civilian life – nearly all women and children, because their husbands and fathers were away fighting.

(But…if the US government’s declared position was that Hanoi should be “wiped off the map”, why did its propagandists bother to pretend it had been targeting military installations?)

Many websites, including those maintained by the government of Vietnam, back up Theroux’s claim that Kham Thien Street and other civilian targets were targeted out of wickedness. Other sources more sympathetic to the US assert that the intended target was Hanoi’s main rail yard, about half a kilometre away, and that the bomber dropped its payload after being hit by enemy surface-to-air missiles.

But if it’s true that, as Theroux not-quite-accurately asserts (quoting J.M. Roberts), “a heavier tonnage of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam than fell on Germany and Japan together in the entire Second World War”, mightn’t there be some truth to what one distinguished observer reported after visiting Hanoi in January 1973?

Telford Taylor, for one, refused to concede that bombing for the sake of terrorizing civilians was permissible but nonetheless concluded that the United States could have destroyed Hanoi in two or three nights if it had so desired. He also noted the proximity of the air base to the hospital at Bach Mai [also destroyed in the bombings] and observed that the damage to civilian areas within the city had obviously been an unintentional byproduct of attacks on legitimate military products.

[Quoted in William M. Hammond's Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968-1973.]

There’s some reason to think Telford Taylor was right. Pace J.M. Roberts, during the war the largest number of US bombs fell not on North Vietnam but on Viet Cong positions in the South. Take a look at these stats, from James P. Harrison’s essay “History’s Heaviest Bombing”, in The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives. The “tons” are tons of explosives dropped:

South Vietnam	4 million tons
Laos	1.5 million tons
North Vietnam	1 million tons
Cambodia	.5 million tons
All targets of Allied bombing, WWII	2.7 million tons

Harrison goes on to explain that despite the exponentially greater explosiveness of the Vietnam air campaigns, they killed relatively fewer people than WWII:

An example of the greater accuracy and attempts to avoid civilian casualties, however, might be shown by the contrast between the estimated … 593,000 Germans killed by 1.25 million tons of Allied bombs, and the 330,000 Japanese killed by some 147,000 tons of US bombs; with the perhaps 52,000 people killed by the 643,000 tons dropped by Rolling Thunder [1965-68] on North Vietnam.

To put it more clearly:

Japan WWII	2.2 deaths per ton
Germany WWII	0.47 deaths per ton
N. Vietnam 1965-68	0.08 deaths per ton [2]

Harrison supplies a figure of 20,000 tons for the 1972 Christmas Bombings of Hanoi. If 1,600 people were killed, as Theroux claims (based on Vietnamese statistics), the ratio is consistent with Rolling Thunder – 0.08 civilian deaths per ton.

How do modern air campaigns stack up? According to USA Today, a mere 18,858 tons were dropped on Iraq between 2003 and 2009. But the death ratio has gotten worse. This study in the journal PLOS Medicine compiles all civilian deaths from 2003-08 and categorizes them by cause of death. [3] I’ve combined the totals from the categories “air attacks without ground fire” and “air attacks with ground fire” for a total of 2,636 civilian deaths by air strike. [4] That gives us a very low-end ratio of 0.14 deaths per ton, which suggests US aerial bombing has become nearly 100% more lethal to bystanders than it was in the 1970s.

I don’t think anyone outside of the Chomskyan far left has accused the US and its allies of deliberately targeting civilians in their Iraqi air campaigns. Yet, somehow, in its “unambiguously genocidal act of pure wickedness” the Satanic team of Nixon and Kissinger failed to equal the lethality rate that our modern armed forces achieve through mere carelessness.

Or maybe they really were aiming for military targets.

***

That’s not to say the Christmas Bombings were okay, or the war was okay, only that it was more complicated than Theroux seems willing to admit. Which is funny, because his 33-years-younger-yet-oddly-wiser self offered a more balanced take (I quoted it in an earlier post):

Some [soldiers] watched the train, with their rifles at their shoulders, in those oversize uniforms – a metaphor of mismatching that never failed to remind me that these men – these boys – had been dressed and armed by much larger Americans. With the Americans gone, the war looked too big, an uncalled-for size, really, like those shirts whose cuffs reached to the soldiers’ knuckles and the helmets that fell over their eyes.
…
[T]he Vietnamese had been damaged and then abandoned, almost as if, dressed in our clothes, they had been mistaken for us and shot at; as if, just when they had come to believe that we were identified with them, we had bolted. It was not that simple, but it was nearer to describing that sad history than the urgent opinions of anguished Americans who, stropping Occam’s Razor, classified the war as a string of atrocities, a series of purely political errors, or a piece of interrupted heroism.

But Theroux seems to have come around to the opinion that the war was, after all, just “a string of atrocities” perpetrated by American villains. As cynical as he rightly is about 33-year-old American propaganda, he displays a perfect credulity in retailing the still-current propaganda of the Vietnamese regime. This would be fine, or at least consistent, if Theroux were in any way a credulous tourist. But he’s not. A couple chapters earlier, he dinged the Cambodian government for peddling its Killing Fields ruins as attractions for western tourists:

Even though I knew that this torture prison had been turned into a museum by a sanctimonious government that itself violated human rights (corruption, embezzlement, torture in police custody, land seizure, and extrajudicial killings) …

All fair. But for perspective, that year Human Rights Watch’s World Report had this to say about Cambodia:

Cambodia’s veneer of political pluralism wore even thinner in 2006.

Meanwhile Vietnam had no veneer of pluralism to wear away:

Despite having one of Asia’s highest growth rates, Vietnam’s respect for fundamental human rights continues to lag behind many other countries, and the one-party state remains intolerant of criticism.

But when Theroux meets a Vietnamese who spent time in a work camp after the fall of Saigon, who “allude[s], with exaggerated facial expressions, to the sinister ways of the current Vietnamese government”, he is treated as a mildly ridiculous character.

I don’t want to step on any American’s sense of guilt over Vietnam. It was of course a stupid, futile, insanely deathful war, and the US officials who ordered the napalming and Agent Orangeing of large swathes of the country (the cities got off pretty easy) deserve much of the blame. But it was also a civil war among native-born zealots who massacred and terrorized each other over ideology and religion. Even if the vast majority of Vietnamese were ultimately sympathetic to the Communists, Washington was understandably loth to abandon its allies in the South to execution, enslavement, and crackpot sociological experimentation. Theroux knows this, but Occam’s razor flies readily to his hand:

It was an astonishing paradox that, after we had failed to destroy their dream of a socialist paradise, divide their loyalties, and visit ruin upon them for our own profit, they had risen – in spite of all our efforts to demolish them – and become businessmen and entrepreneurs. Saigon was one big bazaar of ruthless capitalism, of frenzied moneymaking, of beating us at our own game.

But the paradox isn’t that Saigon rose up and “beat us at our own game” – how is rejoining the global economy beating us? Does Theroux think the 1972 Joint Chiefs of Staff were bombing the hell out of the Vietnamese to prevent their offspring from someday sewing our blue jeans? In 1972, Saigon was already well on its way to becoming a big bazaar. That’s what America was there to preserve.

The paradox is that Vietnam had to detour through another decade of war and a quarter century of economic backwardness to arrive, under its own steam, at the destination Saigon had already reached in the 1960s: political repression and economic liberty.

So much stupid, stupid waste.

***

Apart from all that, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is really good.

M.

1. Nixon in a press conference, June 29, 1972: “I do not intend to allow any orders to go out which would involve civilian casualties if they can be avoided. Military targets only will be allowed.” July 27, 1972: “When, as a result of what will often happen, a bomb is dropped, if it is an area of injury to civilians, it is not by intent, and there is a very great difference.”

2. Wikipedia provides different figures . It claims 864,000 tons of bombs were dropped during Rolling Thunder, resulting in 72,000 civilian casualties. The ratio would then be…0.08 deaths per ton.

3. The PLOS Medicine study is based on data from the website Iraq Body Count – which almost certainly undercounts deaths, since IBC relies on media reports to build its database.

4. I’m aware the date ranges for tonnage dropped in Iraq (2003-09) and casualties by airstrike (2003-08) don’t match up, but according to that USA Today article there were hardly any airstrikes in 2009 anyway, so it shouldn’t skew the results much.

Um, has anyone noticed this Muhammad video is hilarious?

The sadly unsurprising lunacy on display in the Middle East over the last couple days has cast a morbid shadow over the online artifact that supposedly triggered it all, Muhammad Movie Trailer.

That’s too bad, because if the video hadn’t gone viral in the course of triggering demonstrations, riots, and maybe the killing of the American ambassador to Libya, it deserves to go viral for being hilarious.

Muhammad Movie Trailer supposedly shows highlights from a feature film called Innocence of Muslims, which presents a silly and sensationalized account of Muhammad’s rise to power.

Germany’s Foreign Minister calls the trailer “unspeakable”. Hillary Clinton says it’s “disgusting and reprehensible”. Bloggers and journalists are examining it with the same solemn rigour they’d apply to documentary footage smuggled out of a war zone. I guess that’s their job; the trailer is news now, and it’s associated with some very grim events. But all this fake seriousness is counterproductive, because it reinforces the idea widespread in the Muslim world that the movie is something not to be giggled over.

But how can you not giggle? The makeup, the costumes, the special effects, the acting, and especially the script attain such heights of unbelievable badness, I’m half-expecting a sheepish announcement that the whole thing was actually the work of some alternative comedy troupe. In a more sensible world, we’d all be celebrating the emergence of a classic of found comedy – the Birdemic of religious satire.

I like to think Muslims would acknowledge its ridiculousness, too, if they simply allowed themselves to watch the stupid thing. Maybe once everyone over there is done breaking stuff – or rather, once they resume their customary posture of readiness-to-break-stuff-on-a-moment’s-notice – they’ll put aside their piety for a few minutes and we can all join together in mocking some of the most incompetent filmmaking ever seen.

But I’m not holding my breath.

***

It’s possible the trailer’s incompetence will actually make it more effective as anti-Islamic propaganda. I clicked to it out of curiosity, planning to watch just enough to get the gist, not expecting to actually sit through the entire 14-minute clip. But it was funny enough to hold my attention to the end.

Afterwards, curious to see how much this silliness really owed to the historical tradition, I flipped open my copy of H.G. Wells’ Outline Of History to the chapter on the life of Muhammad, and read the following:

Near Medina was a castle of Jews, against whom Muhammad was already incensed because of their disrespect for his theology. … Muhammad now fell upon them, slew all the men, nine hundred of them, and enslaved the women and children.
…
Nor was his domestic life … one of exceptional edification. Until the death of [his first wife] Kadija, when he was fifty, he seems to have been the honest husband of one wife, but then, as many men do in their declining years, he developed a disagreeably strong interest in women.
…
This led to much trouble and confusion, and in spite of many special and very helpful revelations on the part of Allah, these complications still require much explanation and argument from the faithful.
…
One of his wives was a Jewess, Safiyya, whom he had married on the evening of the battle in which her husband had been captured and executed. He viewed the captured women at the end of the day, and she found favour in his eyes and was taken to his tent.
…
These are salient facts in these last eleven years of Muhammad’s career. Because he, too, founded a great religion, there are those who write of this evidently lustful and rather shifty leader as though he were a man to put beside Jesus of Nazareth or Gautama, or Mani. But it is surely manifest that he was a being of commoner clay …

This critique, which sticks to the acknowledged facts of the prophet’s life, is a lot more damaging than Muhammad Movie Trailer, with its bedroom antics and goat innuendos. Wells goes on to say that in spite of all the above, Islam is in his view a pretty good religion, one which

created a society more free from widespread cruelty and social oppression than any society had ever been in the world before.

One of the precepts of Islam in its currently ascendant fundamentalist form is that, in order to prevent idolatry, the human form must never be depicted. This taboo is particularly acute in the case of Muhammad, who was not a god or supernatural being, Muslims emphasize, but only a man. The antique term “Mahomedans” they reject because it implies they worship Muhammad.

But the violent obsession with defending Muhammad’s honour, on display yet again these last few days, is more idolatrous than merely setting up a shrine could ever be. It’s possible, in fact it’s essential, to separate Muhammad, the sometimes horny, sometimes vengeful human being, from Islam, the faith that he created. That faith ought to be strong enough for its adherents to shrug off petty insults to their prophet. Sometimes I suspect these dauntless defenders of Islam of being mere Mahomedans after all.

M.

–

In March 2005 I wrote a lengthier post on Wells’ Outline of History.

Stanley and the Women, and why Martin Amis didn’t like it.

I read Kingsley Amis’s Stanley and the Women with curiosity. All I knew of it was what Martin Amis had said in his 2000 memoir Experience, that it was “a mean little novel in every sense, sour, spare, and viciously well-organized”, that with its “programmatic gynophobia” his father had effectively announced the “cancellation of his own artistic androgyny”.

Although Martin suggests these failings are evident from page one, for me it wasn’t until the end of the book that Kingsley’s agenda became apparent. True, the chief villain is a woman, a psychologist who lectures Stanley, whose schizophrenic son she’s treating, on the defects of his generation’s childrearing methods:

“Of course with changing social conditions the elitist role of education is passing too.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“Nowadays there’s much more emphasis on the social function, training the kids to relate to each other and preparing them to take their places in the adult world.”

“At my school we got that thrown in, just by being there. We didn’t attend classes in it.”

“No, and we can see the results, can’t we?”

I thought about it. “Can we?” She probably meant sexism and censorship and things like that.

And true, other female characters are characterized as undependable, irrational, vindictive, and self-deluding. The men, meanwhile, even the minor characters, routinely take Stanley aside to share their unflattering take on gender relations. A police superintendent, after an encounter with the security chief of a Middle Eastern embassy:

“You know, Mr Duke, from a personal point of view, speaking just for myself you understand, the Major Fuads of this world have got one thing to be said not for them at all, just about them. They do seem to have got the women problem sorted out nice and neat. Whether you like it or not.”

An Irishman Stanley finds standing in the rain, kicking and punching a wall:

“The wife’s being a little bit provoking … you know, feminine. Now whenever that happens I don’t say a word, I come straight outside wherever I may be and I do what I just been doing for two minutes, and then I go back in the full joy of spring. When I got married I told myself I could be happy or I could be right, and I’ve been happy now for twenty-two years.”

In his memoir Martin mentions a recurring theme of Kingsley’s around the time he was writing Stanley:

It made my head drop, during this time, when my father, elaborately and not entirely unmordantly, started to liken women to the USSR (department of propaganda): when they do it they say this; when you do it they say that; and so on.

A variant of this made it into the novel. Here’s Stanley on the challenge of maintaining cordial relations with his self-absorbed ex-wife:

I remembered Cliff Wainwright saying once that women were like the Russians – if you did exactly what they wanted all the time you were being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace, and if you ever stood up to them you were resorting to cold-war tactics and pursuing imperialistic designs and interfering in their internal affairs. And by the way of course peace was more peaceful, but if you went on promoting its cause long enough you ended up Finlandized at best.

The hero is unshocked by opinions like his friend Cliff’s, but he generously continues to make allowances for the females around him. If most of those females are “fucky nuck cases” (to quote a barroom interlocutor), at least Stanley’s wife is a paragon of good humour and well-adjustedness. I suppose it should have been more obvious to me as I read that finally she too would go off the rails, and so she does, precipitating Stanley’s acquiescence, at novel’s end, to Cliff’s resentful maunderings:

“According to some bloke on the telly the other night,” he said, “twenty-five per cent of violent crime in England and Wales is husbands assaulting wives. Amazing figure that, don’t you think? You’d expect it to be more like eighty per cent. Just goes to show what an easy-going lot English husbands are, only one in four of them bashing his wife. No, it doesn’t mean that, does it? But it’s funny about wife-battering. Nobody ever even asks what the wife had been doing or saying. She’s never anything but an ordinary God-fearing woman who happens to have a battering husband. Same as race prejudice. Here are a lot of fellows who belong to a race minding their own business and being as good as gold and not letting butter melt in their mouths, and bugger me if a gang of prejudiced chaps don’t rush up and start discriminating against them. Frightfully unfair.”

So I see what Martin Amis means when he talks about the novel’s “programmatic gynophobia”. I can also see how, with just the perfect tilt of one’s irony antennae, one might detect in Stanley a subtle satire of discombobulated manhood. Martin floated this possibility by his father:

- And by the way. There’s a huge piece in the London Review by Marilyn Butler saying that Stanley is pro-women after all. That’s balls, isn’t it.

- Oh, absolutely.

Martin’s verdict on Stanley and its similarly-themed predecessor Jake’s Thing:

The critique of womankind that seeps its way through Jake and Stanley is certainly not without interest or pertinence (both novels are sinisterly vigorous). … My objection to these novels is simpler than that: I can feel Dad’s thumb on the scales.

Of course, the author’s thumb is always on the scales, that’s how fiction happens. Books don’t write themselves, characters don’t dictate their own actions, however much it sometimes feels that way to an author in thrall to inspiration. Ultimately it’s you making your characters do and say particular things to achieve some intended effect, whether it’s to advance the plot or to make some didactic point, like Kingsley’s point that women are fucky nuck cases.

It’s no good to say that didacticism is itself a failing – Martin has himself written didactic fiction about the Holocaust, nuclear weapons (both of these things bad, let’s agree), and, over and over again, the delusions and dislocations of modern English manhood (also pretty bad). Nor is it a question of having to agree with the lesson the author is imparting. One can read Dickens or Jane Austen and be entirely unconvinced by the supposed moral conundrums faced by their characters – what are one’s obligations to a daughter who has dishonoured herself? what should be one’s attitude to a friend who marries a person of lower social station? – yet still respond to the books as literature.

Dickens and Austen are undoubtedly didactic authors – great ones. The problem with bad didactic authors like Ayn Rand or Upton Sinclair, say, is they’re clumsily didactic. Their characters say unbelievable things because their authors don’t have the skill to render any voice besides their own.

I guess that’s sort of Martin’s complaint about Stanley. It’s not the presence of his father’s thumb, it’s that he can feel it, Kingsley’s stubby digit, poking his characters in the ribs, reminding them to stick to the script. I don’t doubt that Martin Amis has subtler sensitivities than me. But I never noticed it, Kingsley’s thumb. It’s as well-hidden to me as it is in all his other novels, in every one of which, in just as ruthless a fashion, he prods his men and women along a preordained path toward a destiny he’s decided for them.

Stanley‘s women are wicked, as women sometimes are. Their creator is only showing a partial picture, of course, but that’s what a novel always by necessity is.

M.

Why Anna Faris will never take a wrench to the face.

For a while I kept up, in addition to this blog and the Sea Water Bliss website, a third web presence, the Spokesmonster Blog, where I talked about my gig in software marketing. This was back in the early days of my marketing career, when I was paid to make funny cartoons. (Nowadays I spend the bulk of my time writing press releases, and it’s pretty hard to blog about that. So the Spokesmonster Blog hasn’t been updated since late last year.)

In a post in 2008, I speculated about why, despite my best efforts to create a gender-balanced roster of cartoon monsters, my cartoons kept on coming out male.

Why is it so much easier to come up with male characters than female characters? I’m not the only animator with this deficiency. Look at the old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons. Disney had Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck, but they were stuck in minor supporting roles. Warner Brothers had Bugs Bunny in a dress – that’s about it. The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park all have girls in them, but I’d reckon there are ten male characters for every female one.

Why aren’t animators more interested in drawing female characters? Perhaps they’re limited by a sense of decorum. You needn’t have seen too many episodes of The Simpsons to summon up examples of Homer being dropped from great heights, having heavy weights dropped on him, or losing his pants. Those things just don’t happen to Marge or Lisa. If the definition of comedy is inflicting pain or physical humiliation on your characters, and if our culture is uncomfortable with seeing women brutalised in those ways, that’s a powerful disincentive to drawing female cartoons. Why use Daisy Duck if we can’t clunk her over the head for laffs? We’ll just use Donald instead.

I was reminded of these speculations while reading this profile of the comic actress Anna Faris in the April issue of the New Yorker. Why is the funny Faris wasted in so many unfunny movies? Perhaps because the men in charge of making movies aren’t interested in casting funny women:

David Zucker, the director of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, says that the recipe for classic comedy is to pair a dumb, thin guy with a smarter fat guy: Laurel and Hardy, Norton and Kramden, Rubble and Flintstone. “That wouldn’t work with two women, because…” he trailed off, then suggested, “Maybe women have a built-in dignity, and if a woman slips on a banana peel…” After a moment, he concluded, “You know, maybe it’s just that I’ve never tried it.”

…The director Keenen Ivory Wayans says that vanity impedes most actresses’ efforts at humor. Referring to the scene in Old School of Will Ferrell streaking, he said, “If Will Ferrell was a girl, and she’s got a belly and a hairy back, she’s not running down the street naked.”

I think Zucker and Wayans, in their floundering way, are onto something. This “built-in dignity” that Zucker refers to isn’t exactly built-in; it’s imposed. It’s a by-product of our culture’s protective attitude toward girls. Perhaps this attitude is old-fashioned, but human biology is pretty old-fashioned too. As Faris acknowledges:

“I felt like I was born with a disadvantage – not only female but small, and not particularly athletic. If there is a God, it’s so confounding why he made a physically weaker gender, but one that was just as smart. Couldn’t we just be dumb, and weak, and happy?” She smiled. “Such were the thoughts of a fourteen-year-old girl.”

Since Faris was a young girl there’s been a proliferation of ass-kicking Ripleys and Xenas and Buffys in our popular culture – characters intended to subvert our assumptions about female helplessness. Yet in some ways we’re actually more protective of the “physically weaker gender” than we used to be. Take 1940′s The Philadelphia Story – #5 on the American Film Institute’s Top 10 Romantic Comedies list. In the very first scene, Cary Grant grabs his soon-to-be-ex-wife Katharine Hepburn by the face and pushes her roughly to the ground. The accompanying musical cue tells us it’s meant to be funny.

Take that, uppity female!

Nowadays, you’d never show the hero acting so brutishly. In the 21st century, the surest way to make an audience hate a movie bad guy isn’t to show him kicking a dog – it’s to show him abusing his wife.

Even the most cro-magnon Hollywood producer must see that Anna Faris is funny. But he probably also recognizes that there’s a narrower range of funny that she’s able to occupy. Audiences are happy to watch Faris bumble around and trip over her high heels, but we’re not so keen on seeing her get stabbed with a fork, or hit in the face with a wrench, or threatened with anal rape – punishments routinely meted out to male comedians.

Much of modern comedy – especially the kind of comedy favoured by moviegoing teenage boys – is centered on violence. Should we feel bad about that? Maybe we should; I don’t, really. But so long as we laugh at Charlie Day getting fork-stabbed while cringing at Cary Grant’s comedic domestic abuse – so long as that double standard endures – funny women will always be at a disadvantage.

M.