Of Dirty Harry, Eastern European History, and Infomercials

You’re Off the Case, McGarnicle!  …err, Callahan!

I think it’s been long enough.  Finally, the world will be able to enjoy a Broadway musical about Dirty Harry.  More specifically (and awesomely), the musical is based on the second movie in the series, 1973’s Magnum Force, the plot of which revolved around four ex-special forces soldiers turned rookie traffic cops meting out vigilante justice to San Francisco’s sleaziest villains and running afoul of Inspector Callahan and his big ass gun.  The fun of Dirty Harry movies, to me, has been that they always gave the audience heaping helpings of what many of us deep down inside want: nasty jerks and murderers getting their asses kicked, shot and blown up.  Magnum Force had that in spades; and not just from Inspector Callahan and his heavy hand, but the four vigilante cops.  Bad guys they might be, but how satisfying was it when one of them pulled over that pimp who murdered his ho by making her drink drain cleaner and shot him to a pulp all over the gaudy interior of his ridiculous pimp-mobile?  Damn satisfying.  It’s also the most engaging in terms of what it says about justice.  Whether the plot of Callahan taking down actual vigilantes was driven by the loud criticism the first film received for its underlying vigilante spirit, I don’t know.  But Callahan’s observation to one of the vigilantes,

“I hate the goddamn system, but until someone comes along with changes that make sense, I’ll stick with it.”

is uncommonly profound for what is otherwise a violent and sometimes mindless take-out-the-bad-guys flick.  But you tell me – you have a pretty good view from behind your desk!  Fuck, that’s McGarnicle again. 

You Forgot #Poland

A recurring theme I’ve seen repeated by certain GOP types on this week’s cable shows, and somewhat less frequently on the #IranElection twitter feed, is that Reagan dealt with the emerging democracy movements in Eastern Europe better than Obama is currently dealing with the one in Iran.  The evidence is this: Reagan gave a speech, sometime later the Berlin Wall fell, ergo he was responsible for it.  The formula is the same for Poland, except you replace “speech” with “vocal support of the Solidarity movement” and “Berlin Wall” with “Wojciech Jaruzelski’s Communist dictatorship in Poland.”  Aside from the obvious fallacies involving causation at work here, this is indicative of a larger trend among right-wing foreign policy thinkers to attribute all the positive developments toward democracy that occur abroad to our influence, and all of the negative to other forces, which used to be commies, but now are usually Muslims, which are the commies of 2000’s.  More often than not, tyrannical regimes fall for internal reasons: powerful contradictions, class-based or ethnically-based cleavages, conflict among the elites, and so on.  To illustrate my point, here’s a brief run down of how the Berlin Wall became irrelevant. 

The Berlin Wall did not crumble immediately after Reagan’s speech, but, rather, after a colossal fuck-up by a party apparatchik named Günter Schabowski.  Schabowski was supposedto make a relatively benign pronouncement to the press about how travel restrictions for East Germans were being lifted.  The correspondents in the room were confused about whether this meant that the wall was now open (not exactly) and when the decree became effective (not immediately).  To the correspondents’ questions, Schabowski, who wasn’t really caught up on what the decree was about, mistakenly said that he thought it was effective immediately and everything else they needed to know was in the statement.  Predictably, thousands of East Berliners converged on the checkpoints at the wall as word spread.  The border guards’ frantic calls to their superiors either went unanswered or their superiors didn’t give them permission to shoot.  Eventually, the border guards relented and thus began the end of a divided Berlin and a divided Germany, though the decrepit East German regime limped on for a little longer. I don’t want to turn this into a book, but the situation was fairly similar in Poland, which, unlike Germany, had been never really stopped resisting Soviet-imposed rule.  In broad strokes, the regime there suffered a similar crisis of legitimacy, and in the late 70s, during another of Poland’s periods of restiveness, a non-communist union called Solidarity formed.  Solidarity’s existence undermined the government’s legitimacy because every other union was more or less a creature of the government.  The movement gained steam throughout the 1980s, culminating in a crushing electoral defeat in Poland’s first free elections, which, I would add, were a response to the domestic power of Solidarity as well as the realization by the regime that the only way they could possibly stay in power now that the Red Army was no longer backing them up was to roll the dice with elections.  Perhaps foreign encouragement played a larger role here, but the encouragement of Pope John Paul II, himself a Pole who had endured the regime, was no doubt more powerful than Reagan’s. 

The story of the Berlin Wall’s fall as well as the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland are stories of a people heaving off an oppressive government that they perceived – and rightfully so – as deriving almost all of their legitimacy from an enormous foreign military power and the associated threat of a military intervention by that power.  When the possibility of Soviet tanks rolling into East Germany and Poland vanished, so too did the legitimacy of those countries’ respective tyrannies.  The real hero – and the reason that tanks did not roll into Berlin and Warsaw – is Mikhail Gorbachev, who revised the Brezhnev Doctrine of assisting fellow socialist nations if their regimes are threatened to the “Sinatra Doctrine” of “you’re on your own, dudes.”  To boot, it was also the economic chaos and spirit of criticizing the government that were part and parcel to Gorby’s policies and ethnic tensions inherent to and exacerbated by the Soviet system that made the Soviet Union collapse – neither of which, you’ll notice, have Reagan anywhere near them.  Words help, and the Solidarity movement and East Berliners certainly felt better knowing they had the support in their struggle against dictatorial governments with foreign backing.  If anything, though, the lesson here is that it’s the taint of a much-hated foreign power that can level the most tyrannical dictatorships.  Unless for some bizarre reason we decide to interfere, there is no perception of a foreign power dominating Iran that we can condemn in Manichean, Reaganesque terms to hearten the forces we favor in the conflict. 

Oh, and Ahmadinejad/Khamenei are not Mikhail Gorbachev.   


Death of a Sales Pitch

It occurred to me while watching infomercials yesterday that if someone were to ever actually figure out the 10/5/12/etc. steps to a happy/successful/motivated/etc.  life/career/mind/etc., no one would ever believe them.  They’d be lost among the menagerie of late night hucksters shilling snake oil.  We’re all so accustomed to every single one of the late night infomercials peddling enlightenment being frauds that if it one of them ever actually had a real system no one would believe it.  That’s a little sad to think about.  But kind of not, since there isn’t such a system.  I’m 99% sure about that.

Edit:
Assorted typos, grammatical errors fixed. I really need to proofread before I publish these… >:|

Florida, Retributivism, and Old Ass Intarwebs

Ah, the Sunshine State

So far I’m a little angry at the South for not conforming to my stereotypes.  Granted, there are a great deal of people cruising around in confederate flag shirts and I have seen more than one sign for Ronald Reagan (!?) around town, but all this could just as easily be found in Bakersfield, California.  So far, the biggest difference is the humidity.  The air is so thick you can drink it.  That and the high temperature guarantee that if I spend more than 5 minutes outside I will come down with what is known here in the South as the vapuhs.  So I spend the majority of the day cloistered inside an air conditioned house reading or watching TV.  As it happens, I buckled down to the omnipresent ads on TNT and finally watched “The Closer.”

Sweet, Sweet Retributivism

The episode of “The Closer” I watched was mildly interesting and revolved around a spunky Kyra Sedgwick bouncing from one preposterous clue to the next trying to solve the murder of two corrupt Tijuana cops found in pickup truck bed in Los Angeles.  By far, the most fascinating part about the show, though, was the ending.  Not because of what happened – there was, as in all procedural dramas, a stupid twist – but because of what it suggests about people’s intuitions about morality and punishment.  Sedgwick figures out that a liason officer from Mexico that had ostensibly been aiding her investigation is actually crooked and had placed a bounty on the (innocent) suspect’s head so that as soon as he was booked he would have been murdered by other inmates in L.A. county jail.  Instead of booking the corrupt cop on another (and, it should be noted, the only provable) charge that he could easily slip out of, Sedgwick arrests him as the suspect – thus ensuring he will be murdered by inmates the moments he is put in prison.  That is exactly what happens.  So the bad guy gets murdered, the innocent suspect gets away, and the audience is expected to pump their fists and boo-yah.

There are, of course, other shows that embrace a simplistic, stick it to the bad guys morality.  24 comes to mind in particular; the audience roots for Jack Bauer and his Geneva-Convention-be-damned attitude because he’s taking out terrorists, drug lords, and other baddies.  Dexter, a much more ambiguous show in terms of morality, still asks the audience to root for the eponymous serial killer/police investigator who takes out the trash that the justice system can’t successfully prosecute.  But in each of these shows it’s implicit that what the character is doing is wrong – we either feel it’s justified anyway or it’s just fun to root for an anti-hero.  What disturbed me about The Closer was that it portrayed Sedgwick as a squeaky clean, if somewhat irritating, hero whose actions were not only morally justified, but morally right.  For a TV show to get away with this, it’s reasonable to assume that they expected the end to be consistent with prevailing intuitions about punishment in the viewership.  I think the following two are the most likely candidates:

-That the prevailing intuition for viewers is some kind of retributivism; that we punish crimes because it is ethically correct to do so and any other benefits accrued are purely bonuses.  Proportionality often figures into this conception of punishment, too – most people don’t want to punish speeding tickets with death – so the murder of the corrupt Mexican cop would be perfectly justified, since he was also guilty of murder.  In essence, the old “eye for an eye” formulation.  Wrong deeds deserve punishment. 

-That there are several goals or justifications packed into punishment along with retribution, perhaps utility and deterrence, but these all get suspended in favor of retributivism when it’s expedient.  Everyone can approve of trying to reform a serial rapist, but if that rapist openly boasts they will attempt to rape anyone who approaches them and will never stop raping, a lot of people would probably look the other way if they were quietly disposed of.   

A third way of looking at this, I suppose, could be that our legal system is broken so whatever way one can punish criminals roughly in proportion to their crime, be it legal or extralegal, is justified.  That seems unlikely to me, since the show centers around law enforcement.  Hell, even Dirty Harry, for all his badassery and devil may care brattitude, was at core a believer in the legal system and spent the whole movie Magnum Force sticking it to vigilantes on the SFPD.  It’s because Sedgwick is a cop that her punishment has an air of legitimacy.  All three of the outlined intuitions strike me as distasteful, but especially the one that I think is most likely: the second.  It’s the same kind of thinking that has delivered humanity unjust kangaroo courts in the past and today is probably one of the main reasons why those involved with the Guantanamo Bay prison can rest easy at night.  I certainly hope it isn’t an intuition shared by a substantial sector of the population, but I guess I’ll never know since no one fucking watches The Closer.

Nostalgia, 1996 Style

Also, check out this post of what some popular websites looked like 12 years ago.  I can almost hear my 28.8 squealing. (from reddit)