MOVIE HEROES

“The Far Pavilions” is a strange movie to watch right now.  It was a book published in 1978 (the year I started seminary) about events almost a hundred years earlier on the northern border of India, at the same time James Willard Schultz came to Montana and fell in love with a Native American woman.  In the 1870’s -- while Americans were populating the prairie --  the British were fighting in Afghanistan to maintain the Empire.  The fighting was cavalry and cannons, nothing like our present weird mix of predator drones and isolated outposts as portrayed in “Restrepo.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DjqR6OucBc

The latter, taking place roughly in the same high mountains, was a recent documentary, showing a small outpost of men high up in the mountains where  people live on the edge of existence.  The two dimensions that have remained through time are the difficulty of communicating across what is not just a language but a world view and the mystery of why soldiers were up there "conquering" villagers anyway.  “The Far Pavilions” are an imaginary place in the high mountains of Afghanistan.  The idea of the movie’s conclusion is that living there would be a kind of Shangri-La where lovers from different contexts could live happily.  The reality shown in “Restrepo” is no such thing. 

Around the world we’re still wrestling with the problem of people marrying across social barriers, except that now they’re often gender-based.  “The Far Pavilions” has a gay tone sort of threading around subliminally, but when one princess declares a love for the other princess so deep that she will stay and die for her “sister” rather than leave with her lover (how could anyone leave Ben Cross?), we are clearly meant to understand that is a good, beautiful and pure thing.  It's just a sahib marrying a half-caste that is forbidden.  Rumer Godden loved the book.  (Godden’s book “The River” and its movie incarnation directed by Jean Renoir are heart-key scriptures for me.)  "The Far Pavilions" was meant to be in the style of “The Jewel in the Crown,” and indeed both films were successful.  Mollie M. Kaye was a petite blonde married to a General who spoke Pashtun.  She knew what she was writing about.  www.mmkaye.com

These movies about the Empire in India (and the same in Africa) are as archetypal as “Star Wars.”  Long rueful films proceeding at a stately pace, savoring the pomp and ceremony without any interpretation -- they offer no alternatives to Empire even as they hint at coming disaster.   "The Far Pavilions" is really a boy’s movie with beautifully painted elephants, balky camels, and those strange narrow long-legged horses with curly ears.  There’s a sassy prince in most of the story and lots of boys roaming around in the background.  The love story is passionate enough, but the real story is the camaraderie among men.  Honor!  It is the highest goal to die in defense of what you believe!  Old-fashioned.  Though Restrepo, the soldier for whom the documentary was named, presumably died for honor, too.

“The Far Pavilions” I watched by streaming on Netflix, but parallel I’m watching “Homeland” on discs.  It’s a woman’s movie: spying, figuring, maneuvering, never able to leave well-enough alone and always confronted by men out for themselves: dishonest, tricky, trying to take control, be the alpha dog.  It’s not about war but the aftermath of war in Iraq and all the tangled loyalties.  Contemporary.  Sleeping with the enemy.  Neither main character is quite sane.  Being half-breeds would be a mild problem compared to the split identities of these two, one bipolar and the other an Irish redhead.  The glamour of the military is now plainly only an illusion.  

Recently I've also watched “Crossing Over” (2009), an Indie film weaving several stories together, all of them about people trying to become naturalized citizens of the United States.   This border is the northern edge of Mexico.   Now the “military” are internal police, the immigration service trying to keep them out.  The idealization of patriotism and willingness to die is in the ordinary little people now. A sort of confusion of prosperity with personal salvation drives these stories.  

Harrison Ford (AKA Han Solo) has the umbrella story which is the simplest: a woman who walks up from Mexico with her young son, but is deported.  The other vignettes are ripped from the headlines: an idealistic Bangladeshi girl who defends freedom of speech a little too intensely, a wannabe movie actress from Australia who becomes a victim of her sexy appearance, a young Korean who gets pulled into a gang, a young British man who pretends to be Jewish and is helped by a wise rabbi.  These are LA-based stories so naturally the Village Voice hated them, sneering at the “lurid” stories while using obscene language to show how hip New Yorkers are.  (Someone ought to do a movie about the bicoastal cultures hating each other.)  “Crossing Over” is written, directed and produced by Wayne Kramer who is from South Africa where they know a thing or two about empires.  

The movie wasn’t the right kind of cynical for the politically correct and the critics, even those lesser than the Manhattan caliphs, hated the film.  I don’t think their dislike was based on cynicism about the naturalizing ceremony in which a lady judge gives a very a nice sermon.  I doubt that any critic knew these kinds of lives in real life.  It was released in the shadow of 9/11 and I was watching it in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing.  That has made a difference.

Maybe the difference is recognizing that the Empire, ANY Empire, triggers desperate behaviors both by holding their citizenship up as though it were access to Shangri-La and yet at the same time enforcing borders with bureaucracy and military-style raids.  It is a fabulous Eden!  But you can’t come!  Such a situation is a magnet for crime, corruption, and a million tiny tragedies that add up eventually to hatred of the nation, coming both from outside and from inside.  We know examples of this system clear back to the 12^th century.  Like the Crusades it’s a system based on us-against-them and wanting to take possession of them.  So maybe the bottom line is what is addressed in “Homeland,” the psychotic confusion between the two categories (us v. them) and the desperate need for a new way of looking at nations and religions, entitlements and means that overwhelm the ends.  We have internalized so many “third world ghettos” that national boundaries to keep undesirables out seem redundant.  They are already in our prisons.

We know about “Star Wars,” the Empire striking back, but we need to think more about “Star Trek” and it’s basic principles of respect for other cultures.  I haven’t seen the newer versions of "Star Trek", but I think I should.  In fact, I’m finding a need to revisit the whole oeuvre of science fiction.  The past seems to offer more negative solutions than new ideas, so maybe visiting the future will work a little better.   I’m eager to see Ben Cross as Mr. Spock’s father. 

 This insight is from Carl Pettit.  http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-conspiracy-man/  “It’s only under the cover of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of astute, crazy and almost always contradictory conspiracy theories that the actions and misdeeds of the less-than-benevolent among us can be hidden in plain sight.”  

Often we figure the conspiracy is fomented by the government itself.  Pettit suggests “Which makes me wonder how the same group of folks who’ve botched disaster relief, entire economies, military occupations and the day to day governance and protection of common citizens (guns laws, health care, immigration) could carry out conspiracy after successful conspiracy throughout the annals of history.”  Today we expect Obama to be Mr. Spock.  He tries, baby, he sure tries.  

(I’m picking up Pettit at http://goodmenproject.com/ where you can read about men who are heroes or NOT, in their own words.)

HEROES IN OUR MIDST

The root of all evil is sequestration of knowledge.  The most dangerous form of sequestration is that of stigma which proposes that not knowing about evil will make it go away.  The second most dangerous ignorance is believing evil cannot be converted into good.

Philip Zimbardo  http://www.zimbardo.com  is a Berkeley psych prof -- therefore he goes where people are afraid to go because he lives right there anyway. (jokes) If you watch this TED talk by him, you’ll see that he looks quite a bit like Lucifer himself.  He is most famous for two studies: one is an experiment to see how punishing people can be (terrifying!) and the other is a study of Abu Ghraib.  I won’t bother to warn you about how shocking the images are because I suspect you’ve already seen them -- even sought them out -- because many of us (99% of the people who read this blog) want to understand this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OsFEV35tWsg#!

After Zimbardo had thought about this a while, he flipped it over:  what is it that allows people to be heroic?   If you’ve been following my posts, esp the recent ones, I think you’ll be able to see that I’ve been working towards this subject.  His key idea is that good/evil are human and that they are effectively controlled by group dynamics.  This is what lured me into the ministry -- the idea that organizational design, powered by a sense of the Holy, could produce heroic people.  What put me out the other side was the discovery that because my denomination was so open to the general culture it was vulnerable to the same cultural craving for prosperity and safety.  Ministers who get too far out of the norm are eliminated.  My privilege now is to use my independence from ALL group definitions of how I should act.  Not that there is a lot of divergence in my nonconformity.  Most people would see me as a fairly conventional old lady because I don’t reject groups per se -- just their mindless control of individuals.  I have a past, I have a mind, I have heroes, and I use all of them.

The stories that haunt me, that come back in the middle of the night and keep me awake, are the incidents when I was unable to intervene or even one or two cases when my mother in her girlhood couldn’t intervene, which I know about only because in her last living days she was still trying to resolve them.  I hadn’t known about them until then.  If I write a long essay, I’ll try to analyze them, but what they all come down to being aware of someone’s need in a context where others disapproved, and it has driven nonconformity -- much less in my mother than in me.  I mean, I’ve been far more defiant than she was -- but she was a leader who responded to challenge.

Maybe I should describe again one of her stories.  An adult female relative had brought a friend to visit on my mother’s birth family’s farm.  It was supposed to have been a profitable prune orchard, but wasn’t, so my grandmother depended in part on income from chickens who roamed the hillside yard, making it slick with droppings.  The lady visitor slipped and fell, breaking her hip.  She was Christian Science and refused all medical help or to even be taken to a hospital in Roseburg.  My mother was working in town and was considered a reliable, sensible young woman.  She listened to the torment of this woman and went to the pharmacist for advice.  He gave her a “powder”  folded up in paper, which is how tablets were dispensed then.  She took it home and offered it to the woman, who refused it, so my mother mixed it into orange juice and offered it again so she would drink it.  When the woman realized what had happened, she threw a huge fit, accusing my mother of all kinds of terrible things.  When my grandfather, who did construction and was gone most of the week, got home a day or so later, he threw his own fit, insisting that the woman be taken to town regardless of how, why, or where.  “I will not have some female moaning in the guest room and oppressing my family!” he declared.  There are enough ambiguities in this tale to keep a discussion going for quite a while.

Zimbardo came to my attention through a website called  “http://goodmenproject.com.  His most recent project is about boys:  “The Demise of Guys,” about why some boys are so much more passive, timid, and unskilled these days.  The TED talk is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FMJgZ4s2E3w  All the things that Zimbardo talks about have been witnessed by myself in classrooms, on the street, in the animal control locker room, at ministerial meetings, in bureaucratic offices and in my own family -- in short, everywhere.  

But most of the boys I’ve known recently have been the opposite: they have chosen a sub-group and use it to support an active and potent identity against the larger society.  This does not mean the sub-group is virtuous -- it may only protect its members. Neither does it mean that boys who don’t go out for football are any less manly.  It may be that they are simply waiting and watching in hopes of getting the information they need in order to act effectively.

Let’s hope they get it quickly.  The news is full of stories of young people witnessing rape but not intervening -- even mocking it -- and of military rapes in which the victims are the penalized ones rather than the power-drunk rapists who have the power to deflect their own punishment.  There are more than a few things to learn about effective interventions, chief among them being strategy.  This is what makes the series called “The Protectors” so interesting: strategy is their means of choice.  But you need to know a lot of options, make a lot of contacts, rally social support, be a close observer.

Even on the Blackfeet Reservation there are micro-societies or layers of society.  A couple of outsider guys hanging around a bar at closing time in order to beat up drunken losers (other than themselves) were counter-attacked by a tribally enrolled county commissioner and his wife, who were beaten themselves but followed up on their injuries in court.   It was more of a brawl than a take-down, but in the months-long rez-wide rhubarb over it, a lot of consciousness was raised.  The interveners DID win in court. These incidents have the power to protect individuals -- not so much by helping the individual (as my ministerial colleague and I did for the ill old lady in the hotel sundries shop) -- but by challenging the tolerance and resignation people develop to bad behavior.  These thugs had been beating up people in front of others for a long time. No one had wanted to stop it or even report it, so they pretended not to see anything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybpg_B9S_q0&feature=player_embedded

Be a hero.  See it, name it, risk it, follow up.  Strategically.