Where Did All the Westerns Go?

Western author and superb blogger Richard S. Wheeler (pictured below) posted today about a very interesting question:

There is a new study by Bowker, quoted on Lee Goldberg’s website, that indicates that mysteries now dominate American publishing, with 17 percent of all trade books sold. Women’s romances, once the most lucrative of all forms of publishing, account for only 11 percent. Science fiction accounts for 5.5 percent. General fiction accounts for 3 percent, and horror, 2 percent. Apparently western fiction is off the charts, to no one’s surprise.

His question: Why on Earth are westerns so unpopular?

I have often wondered about this question myself. According to Wikipedia, in 1959 there were 29 prime-time western series running on American TV. Where did they all go?

The answer Wheeler gives is one I had not thought of at all: namely, that, while mysteries are about getting rid of violence (violence is the enemy) westerns are about using violence (violence is your friend, or can be). This of course clashes with values that are now fashionable.

Maybe the reason I'd never thought of this answer is that I had always thought of the attitude toward violence in the western was more ambivalent than that. Yes, the western hero is typically violent, but that's why he rides off into the sunset in the end. It's why the last shot of The Searchers has Ethan turning away from the family he has just reunited, away from the darkness and security of their home, into the brilliant emptiness of the desert. Having wrested civil society out of the wilderness, his very success has made his virtues into vices. He doesn't belong here. Still, Wheeler does have a point: in a way, westerns accept violence.

Answers to Wheeler's question that I have come up with from time to time are similar to his in one way: like his, they have to do with people's values.

One is that many western plots are about "taming the wilderness" and turning it into ranches and farms. In other words, its about property, the romance of real estate. This presupposes a whole world of ethical and political values and norms, one that may well have crumbled by now. Maybe people don't feel so romantic about property today.

Another is that a major source of the charm of westerns is that they are set in a situation in which the presence of the state is minimal or non-existent. In the wild West, you often have to enforce your own rights. If you wait for civil society to do it, you'll be dead. In a word, westerns are about anarchy. They are fiction's only constitutionally anarchist genre. As such, they represent a wild sort of freedom. Maybe, like the romance of property, that's not such a popular idea any more, either.

Notice that one of the most popular genres nowadays is the police procedural, in which the protagonist is a government employee. Yecch! Is there any way you could get further away from the ethos of the western? (Try to imagine Ethan Edwards even saying the word, "procedural.")

Folks sometimes point out that though TV westerns have gone the way of the T-rex and the dodo bird, there are a few recent western movies that have been popular. There's 3:10 to Yuma. And No Country for Old Men is a sort of modern western. But these examples usually have very pronounced counter-generic qualities when scrutinized. In other words, they are anti-westerns. At the end of 3:10, the hero, instead of riding off into the sunset, is shot and killed by the bad guys. Old Country, as I have said earlier, is completely nihilistic. It ends with the hero letting the bad guys have the world. True westerns affirm a world in which beauty is real and values can be achieved.

Can that be the real reason they are so unpopular?

Photographs: Telescopes of Time

When a loved one dies, you get all sorts of weird stuff. I just became the owner of my father's entire collection of bow ties. But what for? I wear ties all the time, that's true, but only cravats.

I also got a couple of bags of photographs.

There is a theory that seeing a photograph of a thing is an indirect way of seeing that thing. Just as I can see you by seeing an image of you in a mirror, so I can see you by seeing a photo of you. The photo image of you is formed by light rays landing on the the film, and then my retinal image is formed in more or less the same mechanical way. Just one more falling domino in the chain of causation.

So looking at a photo is completely different from looking at a painting. With a painting, I am decoding the painter's interpretation of the subject of the picture. Every painting is a comment. A photo doesn't comment. It exhibits. Dziga Vertov said that photos are time-telescopes.

I don't think I buy this as a general ontological theory of photographs, as a theory that is about the real relations between real objects, but it sure gets something right about the phenomenology of viewing photos -- about what it is like to view a photo. Every photograph is like a transparent window into a lost world.

The sepia print above (click to enlarge) is picture of dad in the inconceivably remote world of his childhood. Those wooly chaps! That pony's frightwig mane! And how did they ever afford to put him on a pony? This must have been before his father died, leaving the family of ten almost destitute.

To the right is a telescopic view into my own past. From left to right: My buddy Gerald Campbell, my oldest and best buddy Ricky Brazeau, me, my brother Al. My God, I'd forgotten that Gerald was so beautiful. Well, we were all awful cute. But kids don't notice junk like that. That's another aspect of the phenomenology of the time-telescope. You see the past, but you see it in the present. If its a picture of your past, this can make for revelations. You aren't the same person you were then. Seeing a photo of your own past involves a sort of double vision, it brings it back, but it also makes it different.

The other sort of photograph, the one that is not a window into your past, is the remote world photo. On the back of this sepia print, in Dad's unmistakable block printing: Dottie + myself/taken in May 1944/Inglewood, California. (This was before he met my mother.) Who was Dottie Dimples? I don't think she was ever mentioned in our house. Did he get as lucky that night as he obviously thought he would? Is she dead too? When I showed this to my brother and sister, they both said "Eeeew!" But it's one of my favorite pictures of Dad. Most people don't like thinking of their parents as sexual beings. [Here insert obvious comment about how if they weren't, you wouldn't exist.]

Speaking of which, here is Dad at the downstairs workbench at Gensler-Lee Jewelers, on Main Street in Stockton California, circa 1959. He's so young! And thin! And that patent-leather hair! At the time, he was having an affair with the woman you see smiling at him from the rear doorway. Mom never suspected a thing. I know because her talk was often a flood of complaints, threats, and verbal abuse, and she never complained about this. Odd that with all her complaining she never noticed the one worst thing he did. People are certainly odd, aren't they? It's like Nietzsche said, man is the insane animal.

Here is another double vision one. A ninth grade dance, with a girl named Melanie. At the far left is Page, who is now a professor of literature at the University of California. (I believe she is still on the extreme left, come to think of it.) Melanie doesn't look as glad to be with me as Gerald and Ricky do. Sigh. She sure was pretty. Now that I did notice.

Okay, one more time-telescope. Here we are, about to begin a bicycle trip from our home in Stockton to the old gold rush town (almost a ghost town) of Jenny Lind, on the banks of the Calaveras River, a distance of 29 miles. It was the adventure of a lifetime, so far. Ah youth! Ah mortality! Ortega y Gasset defined nostalgia as "the feeling of missing the nearness of the distant, ... a sorrow at being where one is not." It has the same double minded, two places at once phenomenology as the photograph. For us, photos and nostalgia are inseparable. Photos are the nostalgia-junkie's hard stuff. With photos, you can mainline that aching sense of there and not-there.

Humans have only recently acquired this sort of access to the past. Before Louis Dagerre (1787-1851) people could only remember the dead with relics, like the bow ties. Or, if you were wealthy, you had a painting, maybe a miniature, showing what the person looked like to the artist (if the artist was skilled enough to convey even that). Now we have raw, uninterpreted pastness, bags and boxes of it, enough to haunt you with ghosts, enough to shatter your preconceptions, to make you laugh, to make you cry.

Bobby Fischer, RIP

Chess immortal and onetime child prodigy Bobby Fischer died two days ago. (NYT photo to left. Please don't sue me! I mean well!) Inevitably, much of the writing about his passing has acknowledged the existence of the elephant in the middle of the room: Fischer's long, long tenure as a screwloose crank. Scroll down this article by the excellent Edward Rothstein and you'll see that some of BF's public pronouncements about the Jews make those of Hitler (if you can forget everything else you know about Adolf) seem mild by comparison. And then there was his hailing the 9/11 attacks as "wonderful news." And calling for the assassination of G. W. Bush.

Rothstein raises an interesting question: does BF's amazing weirdness have anything to do with chess? He thinks it does. Chess, like music and mathematics, is a field in which one can excel at a very early age. But it is also unlike them in a crucial way, he says:

Great music attains its power not simply through manipulation and abstraction, but by creating analogies with experience; music is affected by life, not cut off from it. Mathematics also comes up against the demands of the world, as the field opens up to understanding; early insights are tested against the full scale of what has been already been done and what yet remains undone.

But chess, alone among this abstract triumvirate, is never tested or transformed. The only way expertise is ever tried is in victory or defeat. And if a player is as profoundly powerful as Mr. Fischer, defeat never creates a sense of limits. Seeing into a game and defeating an opponent — that defines the entire world.

I have my doubts about this, for two sorts of reasons:

Sort #1, Empirical: This would imply that the chess world contains more nut jobs than those of music or math. Does it? I certainly don't have any supporting evidence here. Chess has BF, and it had Paul Morphy (the genius who was the unofficial first world champion, and quit chess because it is "only a game" in order to become a mediocre lawyer). But music had Wagner. And Michael Jackson. And don't get me started on how many nutty mathematicians there have been.

Sort #2, A Priori: The argument seems to be that music and math include some kind of reality-check for your ideas, whereas chess does not, unless of course you lose. Which, generally, Fischer did not.

Do music and math involve checking your ideas against extramusical and extramathematical reality in the way required by this argument? I'm really not sure. If I develop a theorem that there is/is not a highest prime number, and my proof is fine according to the rules internal to the practice of math, what reality check am I ever going to get?

Also, insofar as there is an external check, it might not be the sort of thing that would influence the mind of the individual practitioner. Maybe the check is on the realm as a whole. I don't think music could exist if all would-be musicians were as emotionally stunted and out of touch as Michael Jackson. Take one look at him and you know: this guy has no idea how weird he seems to others. His ability to perceive other people's emotions is probably very poor. The sort of music that Jackson does is both simple (compare it to a string quartet, say) and structured by traditional rules and practices, so he can do very well indeed by getting around in that self-sufficient parallel universe: the world of music. He doesn't need to know much about how to get around in the emotional universe of actual, concrete human beings.

But Rothstein does have a point. As Aristotle pointed out long ago in the Nicomachean Ethics, there is a difference between the fields in which the young can excel, and those in which they cannot. The difference, he said, is that the former do not need the sort of wisdom that can only come with experience of life, and the latter do. That's a big difference. Very big.

The Cave Painters

This is the third of the "Three Chinese Horses" in the Axial Gallery of the Lascaux Cave. It's one of my favorite paintings, and was made approximately 16,000 years ago, during the upper neolithic period, at a time when the climate of southern France and northern Spain was about like that of southern Sweden today. I just read Gregory Curtis' The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists (Anchor, 2007). It's an overview by an art journalist of the discoveries and theories about Cro-Magnon art that have developed since the discovery of Altamira in the late nineteenth century.

These painters, who lived and labored between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago, are certainly one of the greatest mysteries in the world of the arts. Though many of their works were unsurpassed, if at all, only recently, they worked at a staggeringly early point in human development. The wheel had not yet been invented. There were no domesticated animals, not even dogs. No plants (not wheat, not barley) had been domesticated. In all the thousands of images in these caves, there is not a single one that clearly represents the use of archery. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers who probably killed the animals they depicted with such loving brilliance by using spears or throwing rocks at them. Not only were there no governments on Earth in those days, the first states were many, many centuries in the future.

And yet, what greatness they achieved! Curtis thinks that the The Crossed Bison, another image in Lascaux, shows a mastery of perspective that was not seen again until Paolo Uccello (1397-1475). There is much to wonder about here, and perhaps some conclusions to be drawn. Among the thoughts that this provokes, at least in me, are the following:

Visual art is separable from every other major, learned human capacity. These works were achieved before there was such thing as writing, or elementary arithmetic. Obviously, they were within the reach of people who had not mastered anything else.

Visual art is therefore surprisingly "primitive." Not only did it occur separately from all these other human faculties, but it came first. The paint brush and the paint sprayer are not only older inventions than the wheel, they are probably much, much older. This says something, surely, though something difficult to formulate in words, about the level of inner complexity that must be achieved by a mind that is capable of such things. It is safe to say that in all likelihood, that level it isn't very high. This is my little contribution to the task of explaining how the miraculous achievement of the cave painters was possible. As great as it was, it wasn't as miraculous as it seems at first. What would be literally miraculous, ie. inexplicable in principle, would be to find algebraic symbols incised into the walls of the caves.

Visual art tends to support the established social order. This culture lasted an astounding twenty thousand years. To put that into perspective, Western civilization, from its earliest beginnings in the eastern Mediterranean, has lasted about four thousand. In all that vast period, their culture changed very little. Obviously, nobody, neither these artists nor anyone else, was doing much to subvert the dominant paradigms of the age. Their work seemed to have a social function -- what it was we can only guess -- and it seems to have served it very well indeed. Curtis mentions their conservatism as something that is distinctive of the cave painters. It seems to me something that throughout its development has been typical of art in general. I don't mean to say that serving a social function is necessarily a good thing. The sculptor of the scowling, testosterone-drenched bull on the Ishtar Gate at Babylon wanted to help the king impress you with his overwhelming power, and with the futility of resisting is will. That was his job. But in his case it wasn't a very nice job. [By the way, if you look at the Ishtar Gate bas-relief and compare it to the Chinese Horse, you get a vivid picture of how different the social functions of art can be. What a world of difference! When I look at the horse, I want to run away and join these imaginative Lakota-like nomads. When I look at the bull, I want to draw a bead on Nebuchadnezzar and kill him.]

In art, for the most part, the object is all-important. Much modern thinking about art has been influenced by formalism, the idea that the appreciation of art as art involves appreciating features of the work that are quite distinct from its representational content -- formal features. To appreciate the beautiful body represented by a nude is to appreciate it as pornography, not art. I think formalism wrenches art out of the context in which it has living value and meaning. The people who stenciled their hands in the 30,000 year old Chauvet Cave were quite literally touching, feeling the cave wall as they made these images. According to a theory developed by maverick prehistorian Jean Clottes, the important aspect of the act of producing these images was the moment when the hand was submerged under the earth tones of the paint, blending with the wall of the cave and the cold earthy world beyond its surface. Whatever the truth about this may be, I find it hard to believe that the cave painters who represented bison, rinoceri and reindeer cared about anything but the bison, rinoceri, and reindeer. For them, painting was a way of dealing with the object painted. To control it, summon it, revere it, or fix it in memory. Nearly all of their thousands of images represent large animals. For them, art was in some sense all about the animals. And so I think it has always been, except for rare episodes in the history of art. The point of Mantegna's Crucifixion is not the composition, balance of colors, nor even the fact that it was an expression of the agony of being tortured to death. The artist and his audience were not concerned with the expression, but with the agony. The painting served as a clear pane through which they felt that they could view a moment in the greatest story of all. If you want to put it that way, then art has always been pornographic. The cave painters were producing animal porn and Mantegna was doing religious porn. Praxiteles did a lot of gay porn. It's pretty much all porn.
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Breaking News: This is very disturbing, to say the least. An article in yesterday's NYT reports rapidly growing international concern about a mysterious black mold-like substance that is threatening the paintings in Lascaux Cave. Note the illustration showing spots above the head of the Great Black Cow. Comparing this picture with the gorgeous photos in Aujoulet's Lascaux: Movement, Space and Time, I see that they were not there a mere five years ago. In France there is a central, national bureaucracy that regulates all research and preservation of paleolithic art (this is France after all) and it seems clueless and unable to act (again, no big surprise there). [Hat tip to Nat Hunt for giving me the Aujoulet book for Christmas!]

I See Beowulf -- With a Beowulf Scholar!

Thursday night Deborah and I attended the local premier of the new film of Beowulf, in a special Imax 3-D screening for press and VIPs. Due to our host, John D. Niles, reigning king of Ango-Saxony, (thanks Jack!), we were indulgently placed in the latter category. Afterwards, Jack held a very interesting question-and-answer period.

Of course, he had to point out that as the writer, Neil Gaiman, adapted the story for the screen, he seemed to feel that he had to "sex it up." In the poem, Beowulf is, as near as we can tell, celibate. Not so in the movie. [This BTW is one of the biggest differences between literary heroes and movie heroes. Yes, Philip Marlowe does marry Linda Loring, but not until the unfinished last book in the series. No doubt, the reason for this difference is that the movies are more democratic. The masses are not interested in celibate heroes.]

In principle, Jack didn't mind that film-makers changed the poem into a completely different sort of story -- an 3-D thrill ride with oceans of gore and eye-popping spectacle -- indeed, the anonymous Beowulf poet was no doubt also re-imagining yet earlier stories. Being "unfaithful" to your sources is keeping faith with the tradition!

But he did regret that the film makes no use at all of the single greatest feature of the poem: the language! I noticed that they put a number of songs in the film (good idea, that! these people probably sang a lot!), but in every case the lyrics were rhyming verse, not alliterative verse. What for?

He also pointed out that the visual design of the film, though often beautiful (especially Grendel's cave), had almost no connection with the design of Viking-age artifacts that survive. [For an insight into what this means, get Jack's brand-new edition of Seamus Heany's translation of the poem. It is crammed with gorgeous full-page illustrations of period artifacts.] Again, this seems like a terrible waste to me. The film seems more influenced by the design of video games like World of Warcraft than by actual Ango-Saxon culture. Great film-makers take everything that is great in their sources and build on them. The present strategy seems to me like turning your back on a banquet to catch and eat flies (to borrow a simile from H. L. Mencken).

Anyway, though this is not Lord of the Rings or 300, it is worth seeing. I recommend that you only see it in IMAX 3-D, though. Otherwise you will sit there wondering why they keep hurling things (spear-points, rocks, pieces of furniture, dead bodies, monsters) at the camera. And you'll miss half of the fun. More than half, actually.

By the way, I haven't mentioned what I find the movie's greatest virtue because it was something that would probably influence no one else. As the world's only fan of Crispin Glover, I relished his portrayal of Grendel. I would have seen it if only for that!

Random Quotations

Below is a list of quotations I've compiled over the last couple of weeks. The only constraints are that I think all are of high quality, and also that I don't remember seeing any of them before two weeks ago.

What makes a good quotation? I think the only thing that all these have in common is a complete lack of unnecessary gestures. There are no wasted words, also no wasted ideas: no qualifications, no explanations, and no explicit argumentation or evidence.

This may explain why of all the authors below, selected at random, few are professors, and only two are philosophers. People who like to spell everything out are not quotable. (I can't think of any quotable statements by John Rawls. In fact, the very idea is comical, is it not?)

It also implies that quotable passages are in effect aphorisms. If other literary forms are islands and continents, aphorisms are mountain-peaks.

I don't think there is anything else the items below have in common. Some are clear, others are vague. Some are truisms, others are paradoxes (the opposite of a truism). Some are like a soothing lotion, others prick like a cactus-spine.

Anyway, here is the list:

"Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine. "
Lord Byron

"They never fail who die in a great cause."
Lord Byron

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Mohandas Gandhi

"Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars."
Bertrand Russell, on the Romanitic admiration for wildness.

"Those who offer false consolation are false friends."
Christoper Hitchens (This one is quoted from memory and so is probably not accurate.)

"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."
Edward Abbey

“I know that I am prejudiced on this matter, but I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.”
Mark Twain

"If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."
Thomas Szasz

"Since everything ends badly for us in the inevitable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time; and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible in the course of doing so. There is no third rule."
Brendan Gill

"¿Y por qué no te callas?"
King Juan Carlos' actual words to Hugo Chavez. ¡Que viva el Rey!

"A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas. "
H. L. Mencken

"A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married. "
H. L. Mencken

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. "
H. L. Mencken

"It is a sin to think evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake."
H. L. Mencken

... Uh-oh. If I allow H. L. Mencken quotes, the whole list will be his his stuff. I hereby ban them....

"There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation."
Jose Ortega y Gasset

"Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved."
Jose Ortega y Gasset

...Okay, Ortega will also take over the list if I let him in. I quess I'd better end it anyway...

Darn! The two-weeks rule I laid down at the beginning prohibited me from giving one of my favorite quotes, but what the heck here it is anyway:

"Those who fight for the future, live in it today."
Ayn Rand

Eating Animals: An Answer

I didn't want to post on this question again until after I had finished talking about it in class. And the discussion went on for almost two fifty minute class periods -- way more than I originally intended. People had a lot more ideas about this than I thought they would! The other thing that surprised me was that no one (except for one student, who came up to me after class) tried to answer what I thought was ultimately the real question.

As you may not recall, Nozick asks us:

Suppose then that I enjoy swinging a baseball bat. It happens that in front of the only place to swing it stands a cow. Swinging the bat unfortunately would involve smashing the cow's head. But I wouldn't get fun from doing that; the pleasure comes from exercising my muscles, swinging well, and so on. ... Is there some principle that would allow the killing and eating of animals, but would not allow swinging the bat for the extra pleasure it brings?

I had thought this ultimately boils down to the question of how we should fill in the blank in this sentence: One may kill animals or impose unpleasant living conditions on them in order to provide _____ for humans.

Almost no one tried to answer this question directly. There were some attempts to reject the question. One person suggested, following in the footsteps of Descartes and Malebranche, that animals simply don't have mental states. (This is a philosophy class, after all!) Another suggested that since eating animals is an activity that rests on pain and death it is morally tainted and the question of whether there is something good about it that is good enough to justify the death and pain involved is simply inconceivable. Another wanted to divide the question (killing animals raises different issues from making them suffer). Others had skeptical doubts about whether we can know the kinds of things that would be required for answering this question. There was also a lot of discussion of side issues that popped up here and there. I declared that eating at MacDonald's is immoral, "unless the alternative is starving to death," and some wanted to defend MacDonald's. And so on.

I'm sufficiently impressed with the fact that almost no one filled in my blank that I offer my own attempt with some hesitation. I assume the reason for this is that it seems like an impossible task. Which of course is Nozick's point.

The one student who came up after class suggested trying to use John Stuart Mill's idea of higher and lower pleasures. Also, he suggested changing Nozick's question: What if hitting the cow is the only action you can ever perform? This is roughly the sort of approach I would take. I guess my question would be: What if, if people didn't do things like this to the cow, the game of baseball would be wiped off the earth? That of course involves values (and even pleasures) that are very different from the pleasure of swinging the bat.

Nozick's question (or more exactly his principled refusal to answer it) supposes that the value of Peking duck is simply a pleasure, conceived as a mere sensation, like the sensation in one's muscles while swinging a stick. It ignores the existence of cuisine. Cuisine is a rich, complex artifact of human history, like baseball. And like certain other rich, complex artifacts of history, it produces results that in some sense are like works of art. Results like Peking duck. The pleasure of eating it, I submit, is in a completely and qualitatively different category from the pleasure of swinging a stick. Peking duck is an ancient dish. Like all high art, it was originally meant only for the rich and powerful few but now, thanks to the miracle of democratic capitalism, is available to all. It originated during the Yuan Dynasty (coinciding with our High Middle Ages) and was perfected perfected during the Qing Dynasty (late nineteenth century). I would say that it is a thing of beauty, except that for some reason we reserve this word for the sense-modalities of sight and sound, rather than taste, smell, and textural discrimination.

Of all the great cuisines on earth, only one of them as far as I know is "vegetarian" in any sense of the word. This is one of the cuisines of India (which has an ancient tradition of not killing animals). And it is very far from being vegan. It swims in milk, cream, butter, ghee (clairified butter), and yogurt. All of the other great cuisines -- French, Italian, Japanese, the regional cuisines of China and Mexico -- are very meat-centric.

If we all became vegans today, many of the great ideas of Escoffier, Carême, and the achievements of thousands of unsung geniuses who have created the cuisines of the world, would be wiped out overnight. This would be a horrible loss to the human spirit.

Of course, something that you could call cuisine could continue to exist. But the loss would still be horrific. Consider again Peking duck. Recipes for Peking duck focus on the skin. Some call for inflating the duck's skin with air (one reason for leaving its head on). One often sees directions like "hang in a cool, windy place for six hours." The point is to achieve a certain level of crispness and in some cases a jewel-like glaze.

You just can't do that with a pumpkin. Or boiled barley. Or tofu. Forget it!

So I'm not sure exactly how I would fill in my blank, but it's obvious there are lots of ways that include eating Peking duck but exclude hitting the cow.

But there still is an important moral residue to the exercise that Nozick has let us into here. The way we treat animals does have to be justified -- which means we have to treat them in justifiable ways. And that doesn't include just any old thing. The chance that what we do to animals is justified is increased if we increase the probability that the bad of what we do to them is less than the good of what we get out of it. This probability is increased if we depress the badness of the bad. Which means treating animals more humanely. It is also increased if we enhance the goodness of what they do for us. There is a moral responsibility on us as cooks to make the most of our animal ingredients. The next time you bite into a bland, gray fast food hamburger, remember that some cow died so you can do this. Did that cow die in vain?

Richard Taruskin, Pottymouth

Richard Taruskin has a sometimes interesting, sometimes wacky, and at all events if way too long article in The New Republic on what I guess you might call the death of classical music. In case you haven't heard of this phenomenon, here is one of many pieces of evidence he brings forth:

Since the "British invasion," nearly half a century ago, it has been socially acceptable, even fashionable, for intellectuals to pay attention primarily to commercial music, and they often seem oblivious to the very existence of other genres. Of no other art medium is this true. Intellectuals in America distinguish between commercial and "literary" fiction, between commercial and "fine" art, between mass-market and "art" cinema. But the distinction in music is no longer drawn, except by professionals. Nowadays most educated persons maintain a lifelong fealty to the popular groups they embraced as adolescents, and generation gaps between parents and children now manifest themselves musically in contests between rock styles.

Taruskin's article is a review of three new books that argue, with one degree of nostalgia or another, that the death of classical music is regrettable and should not be allowed to happen. Since Taruskin is the chair of the music department at Berkeley (where I once audited a fine course on Beethoven's symphonies), you might think he would be favorably disposed toward these books and inclined to help their authors along. Well, you would think wrong, my friend! He dislikes all these books, with an aversion amounting in one case to apparent hatred.

His hatred goes to the author who defends classical music most vigorously, Julian Johnson of the University of London: "disgraceful," a "rant," "Adorno epigone," "futile," "moral grandstander," "obviously mendacious (unless stunningly ignorant)." Johnson, it turns out, is even (almost) guilty of the worst thoughtcrime of them all: "[His] social snobbery," Taruskin says, "borders on racism (we have minds, they have bodies) and the browbeating is blatant (assent or be lumped with Them)." How it borders on racism he never tells us, beyond this cryptic parenthetical remark. (Maybe he's thinking that classical music is only interesting to white people, while popular music is the property of some other race.... Wait a minute. Isn't that sort of racist?)

The rhetorical low point comes when Taruskin points out that a passage from Johnson's book "resonates with" a nasty, anti-semitic passage from Wagner's Das Judentum in der Musik. He tells us that Wagner's obnoxious attack on Mendelssohn (Wikipedia picture above) "echoes" Johnson's attack on rock 'n' roll. How it does so is not entirely clear. There's no hint of anti-semitism or racism in what Johnson says. The only obvious connection is that both Johnson and Wagner are attributing quasi-ethical traits (like shallowness) to the music they don't like. But such accusations are best left obscure aren't they? They do more damage that way. They create a sort of guilt by association.

What is all this about? What, one wonders, is the real object of Taruskin's hatred? At one point he attacks another of these authors for having seven index entries under "political correctness," which, Taruskin explains, is "the discredited euphemism through which privileged people have gone on the offensive in defense of their privileges." At this point I think I begin to understand. What we have here is an over-the-top sort of egalitarianism. Even defending classical music is suspect because that suggests it might be better than some other sort of music, which in turn suggests that the people who like it might be better than people who don't and ... oh, the the humanity! Sob!

All this name calling is the PC version of pottymouth. This is as dirty as this guy knows how to talk, at least for publication. He is really, really provoked.

My point here is not to defend Johnson (though from the picture of him on his website he looks like a nice enough person) or Taruskin's other victims. I just think it's amazing that the ongoing egalitarian revolt against the very idea "high" or "fine" art has gone so far that the Chair of the Berkeley music department is actually a partisan of the revolution. Just that.

The War: Stories vs. Maps

Here is an interesting article by Edward Rothstein of the NYT on Ken Burns' new documentary. Burns does his thing, masterfully, this time with World War II as his subject, weaving together vintage photos and clips, actor's voices, interviews with survivors, and powerful music brilliantly chosen (in this case by Wynton Marsalis). (Among many pieces memorably used: two by Edward Elgar, one of the world's most underrated composers. There is "Nimrod" from the Enigma Variations, played on the piano, and Sospiri, for string orchestra. There wasn't a dry eye in our rec room!)

Rothstein points out that this narrative method, though not ideologically motivated, is hardly politically neutral. Burns' dominant motive, as always, is to create something that appeals to your emotions and will become a beloved classic. To human beings, no image is more meaningful than a human face, and no speech is more powerful than the story behind that face. Dealing entirely in faces and stories,The War goes straight to your gut.

But in fact such narrative accounts of great events have a built in bias of sorts. What is the nature of this bias? This question involves issues that Martha Nussbaum has written about, as I have (from a rather different point of view).

Martha points out that, because these stories hook us in by appealing to our sympathies for the travails of others, they have a certain built-in bias in favor of the under-dog. The under-doggier they are, the better their story plays out. This bias also tends to be individualistic. That human face we see belongs to one person.

This means that narrative has a certain tendency to block utilitarian thinking. Utilitarianism finds the best action by performing a calculation: do what will have the best results for everyone who is affected by what you do, when you add everybody together. You can count the effects on yourself, of course, but you may just be one person in millions. The same is true of counting your friends and loved ones. The utilitarian calculation is a melting pot in which people merge into the whole. What we care about is that whole.

So if you present a great human issue in terms of affecting stories, your method of presentation chokes off the source of material for the utilitarian melting pot. In viewing The War, we don't melt down the individuals that we see. In a way, this makes the viewing experience more painful. What is real and vivid to us is the terrible things we see the war doing to these people. Occasionally, the narration asserts that it was all "necessary" but, as Rothstein points out, this feels somehow very abstract. What we are aware of at every turn is, as the inevitable cliche has it, "the horrors of war."

Rothstein objects to this. The more conventional way of telling the story of the war, the one that emphasizes maps, with armies advancing like tide across them or evaporating into isolated puddles, makes it easier to see the nobility of the thing, to see the horror as somehow worth it. We focus on the big picture.

Of course, the conventional method has this effect because it to some extend derealizes the human individual, and brings collectivities into the foreground.

For my part, the fact that it does not do this is just what I like about The War. Regardless of what you think about this "necessary" war, we shouldn't forget for a minute the vast horrors such things inflict on innocent people. Yes, this will make is more difficult to launch the next "just" war. But ... should such things ever be easy?

Another thing that I found refreshing in this narrative was the preference for the underdog. Most war war narratives (such as those on the sadly mis-named History Channel) are given from the general's point of view. They present the things the generals are aware of -- the maps, the lines, the tides -- and tend to deemphasize the things the generals do not see too clearly -- the young men, virtually children, that they are sending to their deaths. In this narrative, the generals do not come off too well. General John Dahlquist, for instance, comes off little better than the vicious morons who send men to pointlessly horrible fates in Catch-22. This, too, seems to me a healthy corrective.
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Footnote: Over at Lew Rockwell, historian Gary North writes a review of The War that is as unfavorable as mine is favorable. Interestingly, he gives more or less the same reasons for his assessment that I gave for mine: that Burns ignores the generals and focuses on randomly selected individuals, avoiding the big picture. In effect, he says, this approach takes the history out of history. I guess this is true: it replaces history with biography. But if you are an individualist, this is not a entirely a bad move. North repeatedly asks: So what? The So what?, he suggests, can only be answered by seeing things from the general's point of view, by looking at such things as maps. I would reverse this strategy. Look at a map. So what? The answer can only be given by what these tides and forces do to individuals. And in war, what they do is mainly horrific. ... One more major difference between North's account and mine: he focuses on the intended theme of the series, that the war was "necessary," and complains that it does nothing at all to support this idea. Like Rothstein, I point out that the functional theme -- which is subversive and individualistic -- actually undermines the intended theme, presenting a work that is in a way anti-war. This is a result of the narrative technique it employs.

Kurt Vonnegut: One More Thing....

I'd like to add one more thing to my earlier post about Cat's Cradle. The first time I read it, what impressed me the most was the idea that believing lies can actually be a good thing (or at least less evil than believing the truth). This time around, something quite different stood out. The book's end-of-the-world scenario I found really, seriously disturbing. It quite literally gave me nightmares. It's not just that it presents a vivid, plausible story of the complete annihilation of all life on earth. It's the point of view behind it. Spending any amount of time between Kurt Vonnegut's ears, at least as we experience it in this book, is really not very pleasant. (On thing you might get out of the ice-9 fable is a bit of insight into what it would be like to seriously be in the grips of global climate catastrophism. Really believing that sort of thing, should you ever be able to do so, would not be fun.)

People have often pointed out that one thing that is remarkable about this book is that it laughs its way through the end of the world. That's true, but this is not a healing sort of laughter. The impression it creates, for me at least, is one of more or less pure nihilism. The book ends with a creepily Jonestown-like scene in which we find that Bokonon has urged his assembled followers to have "the decency to die," leading them to commit suicide by touching their mouths with crystals that turn their bodily fluids to solid ice-9.

Nihilism, said Nietzsche, is the radical denial of value. It is the pouty teenager's murmur that life sucks. Reading this book reminds me of another Nietzschean theme: how easily extreme forms of moralism, such as Christianity and the closely related idea of socialism (secular Christianity, you might call it), lead to nihilism. Vonnegut was of course no Christian, but he was apparently some sort of Trotskyite.

What is the connection, you wonder? Here is one way to look at it. If you are a real socialist or honest-to-God Christian, you believe in a moral standard to which human beings cannot possibly measure up. Love your neighbor as yourself. Share and share alike with everyone. Care about the whole planet instead of caring about your own self. Shun material gain as the root of all evil. Human beings are apparently hard-wired to not act this way.

Eventually, you will notice this. If you happen to be a genius, this realization might drive you to become a brilliant social satirist, like Vonnegut. But what will the resulting point of view be? You really have a choice. You can choose life and reject your "principles." Then of course you are no longer a hyper-moralizer, a Christian or socialist. On the other hand, you can keep your principles and decide that life sucks. There are two types of hyper-moralist: those who have made the life-sucks choice, and those who have not yet wised up to the fact that, by their principles, all of humanity stands condemned. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut clearly comes accross as the post-disillusion, frowner-at-everything sort of socialist.

Darn! I ended up sounding more negative about the book than I meant to. Let me repeat that I really do recommend it. I think I got something out of it that many deny can ever come out of a work of art: genuine enlightenment. Of course, it wasn't the sort of enlightenment that the author intended ... but that's what great books are like!

Cat's Cradle: Here's One that's Not Overrated

A while back I seriously annoyed people with a post that claimed Heller's Catch-22 is the most overrated novel of the twentieth century. Today I thought I'd point out a beloved novel from the same era, similar in themes and tone, which I think is not overrated at all, but deserves its status as a classic. (Warning: not only does this post contain spoilers, but I will also say a couple of negative things about the book. I can't help myself!)

From about 1960 to 1963, I was a member of the Doubleday science fiction book club. When I joined up, I got an omnibus volume that included a reprint of Alfred Bester's then-recent The Stars My Destination. During the following years, the monthly selections included Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Glory Road, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, Poul Anderson's Trader to the Stars, L. P. Hartley's sadly neglected little masterpiece, Facial Justice -- and perhaps most remarkable of all, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.

(Yes, it was a golden age. If there is anything nearly this interesting going on in scifi today, I would sure like to know about it. A glance at what the book club is offering today suggests that things have steeply fallen off.)

Reading this book as a teenager, I was dazzled. It made a strong impression on me intellectually. When I read it a second time last week, I still found it a brilliant piece of work.

It is a sort of rollicking satirical end of the world fantasy. It has to satirical foci. One centers on the imaginary religion of Bokononism. Bokonon, the founder of this religion, teaches that people ought to live in accordance with foma, which I guess I would translate as "expedient falsehoods." The point here seems to be that truth as a good is much overrated.

The other focus is political and centers on the fictional scientist Felix Hoenikker, "the father of the atom bomb." Just for the heck of it, as a sort of hobby, Hoenikker develops ice-9, a crystalline form of water which, if dropped into any ocean, lake or stream, will instantly transform all the water on earth so that its freezing point is 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit -- in other words, it will become solid. I think you can guess what happens.

Here the point is a very clever attack on the idea of pure research, the notion that knowledge as knowledge is an unqualified good, out of any relation to the needs of human life. At first Hoenikker is an appealing character. He says in his Nobel acceptance speech that he was just an eight-year-old boy dawdling on the way to school. He aimlessly follows the lead of his curiosity regardless of consequences. Long before his last discovery destroys the world, you realize that this cute old guy is an inhuman monster who should have been murdered in his crib.

I found this aspect of the book very convincing. Having been influenced by people like Plato and Aristotle, I have a certain tendency to lapse into thinking of knowledge and truth as context-free unlimited goods. This book is an effective cure for that error.

Having said that, I can't resist pointing out that Vonnegut seems clearly wrong on one point. He seems to think that the pure-research point of view is what created the atom bomb and, thereby, subjected humanity to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Nowadays, every schoolboy knows that this is not true. "The Bomb" was invented by social idealists like Robert Oppenheimer, who hated Hitler and wanted to blow him to smithereens, not by Aristotelian seekers after pure theoria. In other words, it was created by people who resembled Kurt Vonnegut a lot more than they resembled Felix Hoenikker.

More later...

[Tip o' the sombrero here to Ruchira for her Second Glance post.

I Finally See "300"

Our son, Nat, is about to go away to college, so yesterday I thought it would be a good time to view his favorite movie with him. It's out on DVD. (Later that evening, his buddy Matt came over to help him upgrade the memory on his laptop -- and watch the same movie ... again!)

One thing that makes this movie, about King Leonidas and 3oo Spartans holding off many thousands of Persians at Thermopylae, interesting to watch is the amount of hatred - "hatred" is surely not too strong a word - that was directed toward it when it first came out. It was hated by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, the President of Iran. Even Norman-Lear-type liberals begin to shake all over and holler when they think about this movie.

As the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson pointed out, the main objections seemed to be these:

• “300” is not sufficiently ironic. It takes its themes (duty, loyalty, sacrifice, the preservation of Western civilization against enormous odds) too seriously to, well, be taken seriously.

• “300” is campy — meaning that many things about it can be read as sexual double entendres — yet the filmmakers don’t show sufficient awareness of this.

• All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained....)

Then too there was the complaint that it was historically inaccurate in ways that are favorable to the Spartans.

Some American leftists seemed fixated on the possibility that it might be pro-Bush.

Up to a point, this movie was what I thought it would be: just the sort of thing that would be hated by people who have the values that these particular people have. What none of the vituperative reviews prepared me for, what came as a complete surprise, was that it was about ideas (and, no, I don't regard being pro- or anti-Bush as ideas). And what were these ideas? That was even more surprising.

Repeadedly, Leonidas says in conferences with the enemy that he is appealing to their "reason." One of them tells him with a sneer that you Greeks are so "logical." The film lays great emphasis on the fact that the Ephors oppose marching out against the Persian invaders because it would profane a religious festival, the Carneia. It depicts the Ephors as if they were mystical priests, and not elected politicians (which is what they were). At the climax, Leonidas tells Xerxes that the Spartans are taking a stand against "mysticism and tyranny." More than once, the Persians tell the Spartans that their criticisms of Xerxes are "blasphemies." Leonidas is told many times that his campaign is a violation of both Spartan religion and Spartan law. Thus, events place the movie's hero in opposition to both (so to speak) church and state.

I take all this to mean that freedom and reason are good, while religion (or at least mystical religion) and tyranny are bad. Further, freedom is connected to reason in some important way, and religion, or at least irrational religion, is likewise connected to the lack of freedom.

(So much for the movie's being pro-Bush! As everyone knows, W is opposed to modern biology because it's agin the Bible. It should be obvious what side of the reason/mysticism divide he is on.)

All this is quite obvious to any comic-book-reading teenage boy (the target audience of this film). But the many critics who loathed the movie never seemed to notice this. Why, I wonder? Come to think of it, every single religious reference in the film is negative. Any time it rears its head in this movie, religion is nasty and oppressive. I haven't seen anyone mentioning this at all.

It does seem to be worthy of mention. I can't think of too many movies that are both pro-freedom and pro-"reason," and that even show some awareness of what reason is. (Leonidas seeks to convince others by giving evidence. He does not subject his own judgment to to political authority or to religious revelation, nor does he ask others to do so.) And it's hard to think of other Hollywood movies with the guts to even hint at a critical attitude toward religion.

If you want to make an action movie in which the good guys represent reason, I suppose the Greco-Persian wars are a pretty good choice of subject. This is where the Greeks pushed back the expansionist Persian empire. Some historians think that this, as much as any other single event, prevented Europe from becoming a mere peninsula of Asia. It permitted the West to become the West. As it happened, the Greeks invented logic and the rudiments of scientific method within the century and a half after Thermopylae (480 BCE). If the Persians had succeeded in imposing autocratic rule on them, I'm not at all sure this would have happened.

On the other hand, I have to admit that using the Spartans as symbols of freedom is a less fortunate choice, for the obvious reasons. If this were just a matter of a historical inaccuracy that has no effect on the meaning of the film as a narrative, I would be able to ignore it. But as a matter of fact it enables the filmmakers to dodge a crucial political issue: is it possible to be the sort of brilliant fighting machine the Spartans were and also represent reason and freedom (which the real Spartans did not)? Still, the film's philosophical virtues are so striking and so unique that I suppose this problem doesn't bother me that much.

So I guess I don't mind that this is Nat's favorite movie. The basic values from which his love of it comes seem sound to me. But of course I admit I'm biased. (Above you see him, earlier yesterday, hooking a big trout. This was the first time he had ever used fly-fishing gear. Such a clever lad!)

Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89

The great film maker died today at his home on the Swedish island of Faro, as reported here.

I have mixed feelings about this man. Pauline Kael says somewhere that he is the favorite director of people who don't like movies. If the thing that annoys you about the movies is that they aren't existential novels or turgid philosophical disquisitions, if they are just too darn interesting a too damn much fun, if you hanker and yearn for the gloomy and the depressing, then Bergman is your man. The fact that he idolizes Bergman has always seemed to me an expression of the neurotic side (is there any other side?) of Woody Allen.

On the one hand. On the other hand, he did make The Magic Flute, one of my two favorite opera movies (the other being Powell and Pressburger's immortal The Tales of Hoffmann). I also loved The Virgin Spring -- But then I'm a sucker for Medieval revenge tales, so consider the source. (I once read the entire Nibelungenlied while on a camping trip. What a nut!)

The thing about Bergman that is often overlooked is that he was a master storyteller. He also had a wonderful sense of humor, when he would allow himself to use it. Like all the great film makers, he told stories -- not in marks on a page or words around a campfire -- but in light. The level of interest in Bergman's work today is be a tiny fraction of what it was in the sixties, at its height. If he does survive, which he well might after all, it won't be because of the profundities his admirers see in his works, but because he was a great story-teller.
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Added later: I later found out that Michelangelo Antonioni died the same day.

The Wisdom of Ratatouille

There’s one thing about this movie (which I just saw at the local multiplex) that none of the reviews seem to mention. I found it not only very obvious but very exiting. In an animated feature that has both human and animal characters, usually the humans are the bad guys because they either a) kill and eat the cute animals or b) pollute the animals’ environment and despoil the earth or c) both a and b. This is the story of an animal who wants to be human, or at least live like a human being. In other words, human is good! And the film explains what the essential difference between the human and the animal is: humans make, animals take. Rats take other people’s food, humans invent new foods. Thus, cuisine is a symbol of what gives human beings whatever dignity they may have. Remy, the cute animal protagonist, is a rat who wants to be a chef. Throughout the movie, stealing food (even to feed hungry friends!) is treated as the one thing he must not do, or he will lose his hard-won human dignity. We repeatedly hear the motto, “Anyone can cook” (ie., even a rat). At the end, we realize that what this means is not that everyone can be a great cook (sorry, not everyone is great) but that greatness can come from anywhere.

Imagine something like this coming out of Hollywood. And from Disney, no less! There exists in our culture an ideology that I think of as egalitarian-enviro-vegatario-anarcho-socialism. Not only is everybody equal, but animals are as good as people. All violence is evil (don’t even think about self-defense). The highest experience would be a big warm, fuzzy group-hug with the whole world. Sometimes I think this ideology was invented, not by Karl Marx, Rachel Carson, or Jean Jacques Rousseau, but by Walt Disney in the thirties and forties. If calling it enviro- ... etc. is too complicated, just call it “Bambi-ism.” I don’t think anyone will wonder what you mean. The philosophical core of “Ratatouille” is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bambi-ism. And that is really something to celebrate.

Also, the voicework is magnetically charming, the dialogue is witty, the story well-constructed, the music (though not especially memorable) is effective, and the computer-generated mise-en-scene is brilliant. Most amazingly, even though it is an animated feature, it shows an unprecedented amount of respect for the viewer’s intelligence. Notice that the title breaks one of the oldest rules in Hollywood: never, ever give a movie a title that you have to explain to the audience -- especially if you also have to explain how to pronounce it! (Paramount once made Joe von Sternberg change a movie title from Capriccio Espagnol to The Devil is a Woman. Need I say more?) The tradition is to treat your audience like slow-witted children. This movie treats them like intelligent adults.

Having said this, I guess I have to say that I think it is probably a bad thing that this movie is so good. (Here I am being influenced by Eddie Fitzgerald at Uncle Eddie’s Theory Corner!) It has two characteristics that I really don’t care for, and its success will no doubt make movies with these two traits even more common than they already are.

For one thing, it's yet another one of those fully computer-animated movies. The goal with computer animation seems to be to make the frame look as much like a photograph as possible. That means that it will have none of the sort of visual style that a drawing or a painting can have. What is the point? The end credits of this movie, which were hand-drawn, had more style than the whole rest of the film.

The other characteristic I don't at all care for is that the aesthetic of this film is actually much more like that of a live action film than it is like a traditional animated one. The classic animated movies were visual-driven, as were the slapstick comedies of the twenties. This movie is more like the witty, wise-cracking, talky comedies of the thirties. Per se, there is nothing wrong with that. I love The Front Page, The Twentieth Century, It Happened One Night. But if a movie is going to be so script-driven and dialogue-dominated, why should it be animated at all? Again, what is the point? There is really no reason for this movie to be animated, other than that actors in rat suits would look silly. But the worst thing is -- it makes it even less likely that Hollywood will make the the other, visually driven kind of animation again, and that is really something to be mourned.
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Image at head of this post taken without permission from Jenny L.'s excellent review of the film. Please don't sue me, anybody!

Not that Kind of Zoo

I saw this movie last night at the fabulous Sundance Film Center in Madison Wisconsin. I balked at seeing it, because I found the subject matter upsetting, but Deborah wanted to see either this one or something called "After the Wedding." In all my life I've never seen a movie with the word "wedding" in the title. I didn't want to break my perfect record, so I chose "Zoo."

No, it's not about the kind of zoo that has bored-looking lions, masturbating monkeys, and hippos who look like they would commit suicide except that all sharp instruments have been carefully taken away from them. (I wonder, am I the only one who finds those places seriously depressing?) Anyway, the subject of this movie is even more disturbing than that. A lot more.

Whatever else you think about this movie, there is one thing that makes it interesting: it has made a lot of people really mad.

It is a sort of semi-documentary, with re-enacted scenes rather confusingly interwoven with actual footage, directed by Robinson Devor, about events that came to light after a certain man, known to his associates only as "Mr. Hands" was accidentally killed near Enumclaw in western Washington in 2005. He died of internal bleeding due to a perforated sigmoid colon as a result of having anal sex with a stallion. (The anus was his, not the stallion's.) Eventually, it turned out that he was a member of a club of a half-dozen or so zoophiliacs who met at a local ranch to have sex with Arabian horses. They called themselves "zoos" for short. (Yeah, that kind of zoo.)

This boggles the mind in more ways than one. These "zoos" were all men. The horses, apparently, were male horses. According to the one man we hear being interviewed about this, the men would, er, do the deed by, um, acting sexually interested in the horses, and this was enough to inspire the horse to, well, take the active role and penetrate the man. (There, I've said it!) My first response to this was like Queen Victoria's on learning of the existence of lesbians: I wasn't sure such things were possible! (However, I know you can get animals to do some pretty weird things. Tip o' the sombrero here to Two Blowhards.)

At the time of Mr. Hands' death, having sex with animals was not against the law in the state of Washington. Now, as a result of the public furore inspired by these events, it is. Inevitably, the film raises the issue of whether it should be. It doesn't overtly take sides. It allows both points of view to express themselves. You decide! But it leaves you with the impression that the film makers think it probably should not be.

At one point in the film, the ranch owner tells a story about a horse he had that went blind. The poor creature kept wandering into thickets of thorns, looking for food, and its eyes would be reinjured by the thorns. He considered taking the horse in to be put down. Instead he decided to have its eyes surgically removed, so they wouldn't be poked out any more, and continued to care for it. He said that having a problem like this is not a good enough reason to be put to death. So the film gives the impression that, in some ways, these people were more humane toward their animals than most of us are.

I am not quite sure what I should think about the issue of whether this sort of thing should be illegal or not. Here is a brief tally of factors that I think are relevant.

1. Sex with animals might be regarded is animal abuse/cruelty. Sex with children is regarded as abusive per se. Why not with animals? This argument is made by one of the people in the film.

2. The consent issue. At least one of the zoos in the film says that the animals in this case "consented" to having sex with these men. In the sound track we hear at one point the voice of a radio commentator, instantly recognizable as Rush Limbaugh's, saying that there can be no debatable issue about that at all, because if the animals had not consented, "none of this could have happened"!

I think Limbaugh is confusing consent with desire. Desiring is not consenting. Desire is an animal thing. Consent is very human. In the cases where consent is really important, what you are consenting to is written out, and you consent by signing your name. Of course I don't mean that you can only consent if you can read and right. But the consent argument here infers from the alleged fact to a conclusion about the rights of the animals, whereas something like the reverse of this must take place. When you consent to my doing something to you, you are giving me the right to do that thing, and furthermore you intend to do so. That is the point of indicating consent. You also thereby acknowledge that you are giving up some rights of yours: mainly to complain (about a violation of your rights) later on. Infants can't do this, because they don't have the needed sorts of concepts and understandings. The same is true of (all non-human) animals.

3. This may be an unusual sort of case. Well, I don't know anything about this stuff, but I would think that this sort of zoophilia, animal-penetrates-man, might be unusual, and the man-penetrates-animal sort is more common. That might be a totally different issue. The consent argument, if you find it appealing, cannot be given for the other sort of thing.

4. How abusive is it? You might want to just make the latter sort of zoophilia illegal, on the grounds that it is more abusive, or more obviously abusive (of the animal), than the animal-penetrates-man sort. But how abusive is it? Having something inserted into an orifice and then pulled out. What is the abuse? It horrifies us because we interpret it as sexual, and we have all sorts of ideas and attitudes about that. But all this seems to be completely absent in the animal. It probably does not find being penetrated by the human sexual at all. And even sex itself does not have anything like the meaning for them that it has for us. We see it as an intensely personal connection between people. For them mating is no more personal than any other bodily function. And besides, if this is abusive, there are things that will still be legal to do to animals but are much worse. Like killing and eating them, for instance. So even if man-penetrates-animal is abusive, it might not be abusive enough to justify making it illegal.

Bottom line: Maybe the only reason for illegality here that is consistent both with obvious facts and other policies most of us are already committed to is legal moralism. It can't be because of harm to the animal, because the harm would have to be a "dignitary" harm that does not exist. It would have to be because the act is considered wrong in and of itself, apart from hurtful consequences to anyone. Like many liberals and all libertarians, I am no fan of legal moralism, hence I think this sort of thing should probably be legal.
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My rating of "Zoo": *** (out of a possible ****).

Some reviewers compared it to the work of the great Errol Morris (one of my personal heroes -- how many filmmakers have made a movie that got an innocent man out of prison?). You can see Morris's influence in "Zoo", but I would say it is a notch or two below his level.