Apo-calypso!

George Saunders has a great piece in the New Yorker in which suddenly people everywhere start developing superpowers. Except, they don't, they just think they do, causing an "apocalypse of ineptitude". This reminded me of the plot in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening in which people start behaving suicidally because of airborne something-or-other (I haven't seen the film).

Which reminded me: I was thinking today about how the Apocalypse, or just a sudden failing of society in the face of catastrophic change, has become a huge theme in US film, post 9-11. Movies like Cloverfield, Signs, The Day After Tomorrow, The Road, I Am Legend, 28 Days/Weeks Later (UK film, but still), War of the Worlds, Children of Men, or most recently The Happening . These are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are loads more (feel free to leave your least favourite in the comments).

Saunder's piece seems to perfectly capture the sense I sometimes get, watching these films. Apocalyptic fiction gives us great metaphors for little disasters in our own lives (as JJ Abrams, who, by the way, made Cloverfield, says in this clip, "Die Hard" isn't a film about terrorism, it's a film about divorce). Actually, most apocalypse films are about divorce. So is The Happening, from what I can tell (the main character uses the death of millions of people as an opportunity to reconnect with his estranged wife, as do almost anyone in any apocalypse movie evah).

But it always seems to me, now, that after 9-11, people are not seeing the metaphors anymore. After the spectacular, Technicolour, Indepence Day¨-turned-into-reality mayhem of 9-11, people have lost the ability to not see the disaster flick as a rehearsal for an actual threat, or a way of dealing with the psychological strain of actual threats.

That's one of the things that lead to the apocalypse of ineptitude of, say, the current security policy in the west. We've mistaken our stories about small, personal disasters for actual, looming apocalypses. It happened once, right? And then there was the tsunami and Katrina, and oh, look, Cedar Rapids is underwater and anthrax and, and, and... All it took was a few nightmare scenarios to become real. Now suddenly you can't carry hair conditioner onto airplanes, even though this does not make you any safer.

I wonder if this wasn't something that would have happened anyway. I can't help thinking that if it wasn't 9-11, it would have been something else. After the global, mediated interconnectedness was a fact, after our entertainment industry had gone into hyperdrive. It had to happen. Sooner or later, the proliferation of narratives in fiction would meet up with the proliferation of reporting, of connection with other people. Maybe it had to happen eventually that some unlikely apocalyptic scenario became real in some hugely mediated way. Maybe another Tunguska event. Maybe a nuclear bomb in LA out of 24. (I'm thinking up scenarios like this constantly.) 9-11 wasn't a killer that was anything close to, say, world hunger or the war in Iraq. And we seem already to have forgotten that we still live in a world that has enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone. As it turns out, we're the apocalypse.

Zen and the art of nice little details which all directors should put in their motion pictures because they are really rewarding when you see them

Sometimes it's the nice, subtle details that make movies work for me.

Last night, I was watching Charlie Wilson's War and was skeptical about the lack of overview. The movie, a historically mostly accurate pic written by Aaron Sorkin, seemed to be told more or less as a West Wing-style funny/serious romp through the cold war-bureaucracy of Washington and the Middle East, told from within the ethical and ideological framework of the cold war itself. Killing Russians was treated as a joke (granted, the Russians were in the process of killing innocent civilians at the time, but still) and there was very little in the way skepticism about what Charlie Wilson was doing. Which, in case you haven't seen the film, was supplying the Afghan Mujahedin resistance with weapons and training. This actually happened.

Except suddenly, near the end, Wilson is throwing a party in his apartment. The CIA agent Gust Avrakotos and him are standing on the balcony of his apartment, and the agent holds the following little speech:

Gust Avrakotos
There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how wonderful. the boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later The boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everybody in the village says, "how terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight... except the boy can't, cause his leg's messed up. and everyone in the village says, "How wonderful."

Charlie Wilson
And the Zen master says, "We'll see."

And just as this line is spoken, the background noise of the scene becomes that of a jetliner crossing the sky.

Earlier in the movie, we have been delicately told that Wilson's apartment overlooks the Pentagon. It's all a nice, subtle wink and nod at 9/11 and the connection between the attacks and the Afhganistan situation and Bin Laden and everything, and it totally made the movie for me.

You Do the Math

Since it's been 6 years since the WTC attacks, I thought I'd repost this thing I wrote back then. I'd have redone the math, but honestly, it hasn't changed at all. At this point it's just a simple matter of attrition and addition. Multiplication, really.

5 years

5 years.
1825 days.
That's 5 long, long years.
On the other hand, Bush only has 861 days left in office.
861 days, 8 hours and 6 minutes.
And 52 seconds (but who's counting).

2973 people died in the September 11th attacks (oh, and the 19 hijackers, but who is counting them? And incidentally, why aren't we counting them?).

2973. That's a lot of people dead for no reason.

Every single one of those one thousand eight hundred and twentyfive days since those 2973 people, roughly 30.000 children died from easily preventable causes.

Jeepers, if we were counting, that would be 53 million children. Put it another way: think about that really big class you were in when you were a kid? 30 kids, far too many for the overworked teacher. You're dead. You are all dead, and a thousand other classrooms like the one you were in. Every day for five years.

On the day that those 2973 people died, roughly 30.000 children died from easily preventable causes. That number of children also died the day before and the day after. That's like 60 crammed-full jumbo jets crashing every day.

Somewhere between 62.000 and 180.000 people have died thus far in the war "on" terror, according to the Independent. That's at least 33 people every day = roughly 1/1.000th of the WTC disaster, or roughly 1/10.000th of the children who died that day.

The thing we spend the most money on around the world is weapons that enable us to kill other people. We spend $950 billion on this. The US alone spends $441.6 billion on this.

If you take what the US spends every single year on being able to kill other people, and had put it into food distribution, sustainable development, clothes and medicine for those 53 million children (they mostly die from things like diarrhoea, pneumonia, measles and malaria), you could have saved every last one of those children about 200 times over, and still have money left to put them through school for five to eight years.

Also, 2.9 million people died from AIDS last year. Somebody should really be looking into that.

We like to focus on big, dramatic dangers, and because of that, we're less focused on actual problems that are actually killing us. Unlike September 11th, life is mostly not like Hollywood movies. Statistics are realer than anything to the people doing the dying, and there are 30.000 good reasons every day to stop being idiots.

I have a suggestion. It's a really simple and easy suggestion. My suggestion is based on the fact that a) I consider myself as being strongly opposed to human beings, both children and adults dying unnecessarily. b) I think that we are vastly overestimating our need for killing each other.

1) Maybe we can all get together on the children not dying, and the not killing each other unnecessarily?

2) Then we could funnel some if not all of the money and work skills used for the military into non-military work around the world.

3) Maybe we could all get together on the not occupying other countries and killing people there.

4) Points 1, 2 and 3 would lead to other people maybe feeling less inclined to coming over to our place and killing people over here, or having their cousins who already live here not killing people over here. It might even lead to people over there killing each other less, and people over here killing each other less.

5) It would also lead to less dying in general from easily preventable cause, like hunger, AIDS, malaria, diahrroea, pneumonia, infections, terrorism and laser-guided smart bombs.

Reading Material

Real life has me a little busy right now with actual paying jobs. I'm working on a couple of translations while applying for jobs with steady paychecks, in order to pay off my annoying new friends mr. Mortgage and mr. Student Loan. Also, no internet at home (or, y'know, furniture), so kinda difficult to find the time to write blog posts when I need to spend my actual internet time looking for work and answering emails.

So in lieu of actual posting, I can, at least, give you some links to what I'm reading online these days (or rather, saving in an open tab and reading offline when I get home).

First off, there's this massive profile of Bill Clinton in the New Yorker. It focuses on the post-presidency, and is from last October. It does spend a little too much time on the whole will-Hilary-run-or-not-issue, which is not too interesting to us now, but the personal observations of what Clinton is like in person are priceless. David Remnick, the reporter, is, as a recent New York Review of Books article (only available to subscribers) observed, at his best noting significant personal habits and actions by his subjects.

Also in the New Yorker, this fantastic piece on the CIA black sites. How some asshole legislator (+ the president, secretaries of Defense, attorneys general and vice-presiden) can sit in their office and tell us that simulated drowning, sleep deprivation, induced hypothermia, sensory deprivation and forced exposure to extreme noise is not torture and still sleep at night signifies, to me, having moved beyond the realm of being a part of the human race. The piece is well-researched, well-written and horrific. Investigative reporting at its very best. It clearly shows that the US has by now let go of its already-tenuous status as a democracy, and that the Bush administration is deeply implicated in war crimes.

I'm going to read this review of Don DeLillo's Falling Man as soon as I get done with the novel. I'm only about 1/3rd of a way into it so far, but it doesn't quite seem to be an adequate artistic response to 9/11. More on this, maybe, later.

And I've just gotten started on this article on guaranteed basic income in the Boston Review. It seems thorough and interesting.

In print, I'm working simultaneously on Hermione Lee's excruciatingly well-researched biography, Virginia Woolf (it must be the definitive biography of her), Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Falling Man and Sara Stridbergs Drömfakulteten.

The last one is an acclaimed Swedish novel about Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, about which I have no sense of humour whatsoever, and shooter of Andy Warhol. More on this, maybe, later.