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Shabcast 23, Part 2 – New Atheism is the Opium of Misogynists, Islamophobes, and Imperialists

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Yes, I use the Oxford comma.  I use it because it is sensible, stylish, and clarifying.

Oh, and this is Part 2 of Shabcast 23, featuring the continuation of my latest chat with Daniel Harper.  I think the title is pretty much self-explanatory. 

That’s my thing now.  Self-explanatory titles.  And Oxford commas.  They’re my thing too now.  And irrelevant commentary on my own style.

Self-explanatory titles, irrelevant commentary on my own style, and Oxford commas.

See, they’re nice aren’t they?  If that comma hadn’t been there, before the ‘and’, it could’ve looked like I was saying I now make irrelevant comments about my own style and about Oxford commas. 

And clearly I would never make irrelevant comments about Oxford commas.

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By the way, here‘s a link to Rebecca Watson’s video (referred to in the Shabcast), in which she mentions (in passing) that a guy tried to chat her up in a hotel elevator in the wee small hours, and that, guys, it’s probably not a good idea to do that.  That bit starts around 4:30.

Further to the discussions about biological reductionism in the Shabcast, I recommend the works of Steven & Hilary Rose, Richard Lewontin, and Stephen Jay Gould.  Further to the discussion of ‘New Atheism’, I heartily recommend a book called The Threat to Reason by Dan Hind, and (slightly more guardedly) a book by Terry Eagleton called Reason, Faith, and Revolution.

I also recommend (sight unseen but with all confidence) Daniel’s piece touching on these matters, which be along tomorrow here at Eruditorum Press.

 …

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Solid Dick

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NOTE: This article has been amended to correct factual mistakes and clarify arguments.

 

Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey Jnr. and directed by Jon Favreau, is objectively one of the most evil films ever made. Possibly the most evil, actually.

 

Boilerplate

 

I’ll get around to justifying that opening statement in a bit. But first, I just want to say… ahem… fuck Tony Stark. Seriously, fuck him. The arrogant, smug, privileged, sexist, immature, selfish, capitalist prick. The rich, preening, self-satisfied asshole. The callous, self-involved, vainglorious, narcissistic wanker. This guy isn’t charming or funny or lovable. He’s scum, masquerading as humankind’s best friend. He’s the 1% as saviour of the world, at a time when the 1% are directly and knowing destroying the world. He’s the smiling face of the anthropocene (or rather capitalocene) extinction. He’s genocidal imperialism as (lone) humanitarian intervention. He’s neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative foreign policy as a series of bad-boy quips. He’s private capitalist industry as heroism. He’s mega-wealth as heroism. He’s white male privilege as heroism. He’s militarism, imperialism and American exceptionalism as heroism. He’s the War on Terror as heroism. He’s everything sick and twisted and rotten and filthy and evil and insane and false about our world, presented to us as aspirational role-model. He’s Donald Trump in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask… no, scratch that… Robert Downey Jnr. is a rich, reactionary dick too, isn’t he… so we might as well say that Tony Stark is Robert Downey Jnr. in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask. In any case, Tony Stark is everything we need to tear down, ruthlessly demolish, trample on and bury, presented to us as the best of humanity.

 

There’s no secret about this, of course. I’m not expecting any awards for searing, original insight. Everybody knows who and what Tony Stark is. He is, quite literally, stark. The films themselves make no secret about any of this. On the contrary, they loudly and proudly boast of it.

 

This stuff is baked into the character. It’s part of him by design.

 

I don’t pretend to know much about the Iron Man comics, original or contemporary. Generally speaking, I’m not a comics guy. I intend no disparagement of comics; they’re just not my can of Tizer, on the whole. So I come to these Marvel Cinematic Universe films (as I come to most films adapted from comics) as someone with little knowledge of the source material. But I’m not going to apologize for that, or seek to remedy it, for several reasons:

 

a) I can’t be bothered,

 

b) I don’t think it’s necessary, since the comics cannot possibly fundamentally alter the meaning of the films that stem from them, and

 

c) the vast majority of the audience – target and actual – are, like me, coming to these films without knowledge of the comics.

 

Having said that, I was told – by Holly B., during Shabcast 9, in which we chat about Iron Man, amongst other things – that Stan Lee’s original goal with Iron Man was to create a hero whom the hippies would hate but also be unable not to love.…

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“I know it sounds mad,” says Martha, “but when the Doctor became human, he took the alien part of himself and he stored it inside the watch. It’s not really a watch, it just looks like a watch.”

“And ‘alien’ means ‘not from abroad’, I take it,” enquires the frankly incredulous Joan.

“The man you call John Smith… he was born on another world.”

“A different species.”

“Yeah.”

Joan is a sensible woman from 1913 and she’s not having any of this nonsense.

“Then tell me,” she presses, “in this fairy tale, who are you?”

“Just a friend. I’m not… I mean, you haven’t got a rival, as much as I might… Just his friend.”

“And human, I take it?”

She humouring the deranged girl.  As John said earlier, it must be culture shock.  Someone from a less developed culture trying and failing to understand the scientific romances of an ordinary school teacher… an ordinary school teacher, by the way, with whom she is far too familiar.

“Human,” confirms Martha, “Don’t worry. And more than that: I just don’t follow him around. I’m training to be a doctor. Not an alien doctor, a proper doctor. A doctor of medicine.”

This is too much.  Aliens… that’s one thing.  But this?  Joan has tipped over from pitying disbelief into brusque irritation.  This is more than just silly, this is… indecent.

“Well that certainly is nonsense,” she snaps, “Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your colour.”

Martha stops.

“Oh, do you think?”  She holds up her hand.  “Bones of the hand. Carpal bones, proximal row….” she indicates the areas she names as she goes along, “Scaphoid, lunate, triquetal, pisiform. Distal row. Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Then the metacarpal bones extending in three distinct phalanges. Proximal, middle, distal.”

She is as irritated as Joan.  The two face each other across a chasm.

“You read that in a book,” says Joan weakly.

“Yes,” snaps back Martha, triumph in her voice, “to pass my exams!”

I have issues with this story.  There’s the strain of bellicose liberalism, for a start.  Even as attitudes to war and empire are critiqued, the underlying assumptions valorize an ostensible ethical commitment to fighting for liberal values in the context of empire.  The story is, essentially, about anti-war cowardice leading to the assault of fanatical nihilism upon the heart of liberal England.  Run away from a fight with an unappeasable evil and you just defer your problems until that unappeasable evil comes to the English heartland (probably bringing Sharia law or something).  It shows most directly in the Doctor’s donning of a red poppy, when he voluntarily assimilates himself into an increasingly ugly and intolerant trend in British society: the implicit acceptance of imperial misadventures on behalf of neoliberalism, dressed up as ‘respect for the fallen’ and ‘help for heroes’ and all that dishonest guff.  It seems that the character of the Doctor is allowed to get involved in contemporary politics if he’s on the right side, the side of assumptions that ‘we’ supposedly all agree on. …

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“We waited here in the dark space,” booms the Dalek Emperor, “damaged but rebuilding. Centuries passed, and we quietly infiltrated the systems of Earth, harvesting the waste of humanity. The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed. They all came to us. The bodies were filtered, pulped, sifted. The seed of the human race is perverted. Only one cell in a billion was fit to be nurtured.”

So, In Russell’s rewrite of ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ (which would be a better title for this story than it was for Saward’s script), the Daleks are no longer harvesting the elite.  Brought to the brink of extinction, they have been forced to resurrect themselves from the ‘dregs’… which seems to be synonymous with the contestants who lose game shows.  The Daleks take the people who get knocked out before the finale.  Because the Daleks have become TV producers.  They’ve become the people who run Big Brother and Trinny & Susannah and The Weakest Link.  They’ve become the bosses of reality TV.  They’ve become Simon Cowell.  (Which is kind of an insult to the Daleks, if you ask me.)

Big Brother, in our polity, in our system of media signs, is no longer Orwell’s omniscient totalitarian leader; he’s now the eternal, ever-watching viewer.  He’s us.  Just like the Daleks are now us.

“So you created an army of Daleks out of the dead,” says the Doctor.

Again, the gothic, the monopoly, and the zombie labour.

“That makes them half human,” mutters Rose… as always, she is straight to the quick.

“Those words are blasphemy!” bellows the Dalek Emperor.

The Daleks chant in unison…

“Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!”

“Since when did the Daleks have a concept of blasphemy?” asks the Doctor.

“I reached into the dirt and made new life. I am the God of all Daleks!”

The Daleks chant in unison…

“Worship him!  Worship him!  Worship him!”

Bringing back the Daleks in 2005, four years after 9/11 and the start of the ‘War on Terror’, two years into the conquest and occupation of Iraq, Russell T. Davies makes them religious fundamentalists.  The world is in the middle of an apparent ‘clash of civilisations’, with religion as the supposed organising logic.  But are these new fundamentalist Daleks – ‘Fundamentaleks’ – supposed to be Osama and Al Qaeda?  Are they Bush and the neocon Christian crusaders?  Both?  Two sides of the same coin?

To me, they look more like another kind of fundamentalism, a more prevalent and destructive kind.

They run a massive media system based on ruthless competition.  The housemates who lose the battle for popularity get ejected into nothingness.  The Trinny & Susannah bots encourage people to carve into their own flesh in order to look right.  The weakest links get zapped, and the strongest link is the one who most effectively and ruthlessly competes, who must callously fucks over his competitors.  Society has become “a charnel house” in which people compete in competitions of spectacular triviality which are framed as epic battles. …

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A flying ship has plunged into a tall public building, causing panic.

Outside 10 Downing St., the media have been sat around for hours with their cameras trained on the closed black door, waiting for someone official to come out and hand them their version of events… which will, of course, be repeated verbatim as The Story. 

Luckily for these relentless seekers after truth, a politician comes out to give them a press conference.

“Our inspectors have searched the skies,” he tells the journalists, “and they have found massive weapons of destruction, capable of being deployed in 45 seconds.  We face extinction unless we strike first.”  He goes on to beg the UN for “an emergency resolution” which will give them permission to launch this pre-emptive strike.  His words are relayed on the TV news without comment… except by the Doctor and the other people watching.

As satire, this isn’t subtle.  It’s like a sledgehammer to crack a nut… because that’s what the WMD story always was: an easily cracked nut.  But in a world in which barely anyone in the global media is capable of cracking nuts even with a nutcracker, maybe it’s time to get out the sledgehammers… if only to make a sarcastic point.

As a satire of US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11, it’s crude… but then US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11 was crude.  It didn’t need to be anything else.  The media could be relied upon to discount the idea that respectable politicians in ‘democracies’ might have cynical or imperialistic motives.  They could be relied upon to train their cameras at closed doors.  They could be relied upon to accept the contents of press conferences as basic common sense, and then amplify those press conferences and call them The Story.

This is the aspect of RTD’s satire that is so often overlooked: what we might call ‘the Andrew Marr aspect’.  Marr did a cutesy little cameo in this episode, in which he stands outside 10 Dowing St., wittering about personalities and process, while the government within – which now comprises evil, sniggering babies hidden inside the fleshsuits of respectable, well-groomed, sincere professionals – plots mass murder in order to make a killing on fuel profits.  Again, about as subtle as the truth.

On April 9th 2003, as the invasion of Iraq proceeded, beginning a process which would lead to the takeover of Iraq’s economy and perhaps more than a million Iraqi deaths, Andrew Marr stood outside 10 Downing St. and said this:

Well, I think this does one thing – it draws a line under what, before the war, had been a period of… well, a faint air of pointlessness, almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren’t going to thank him – because they’re only human – for being right when they’ve been wrong.

…

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And the award for the most nuanced bigotry goes to…

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This article – from Rachel Shabi in The Guardian – is really great.  It’s about the Islamophobia encoded in the recent spate of much-lauded movies (and a TV show) about Americans, Arabs, terrorism… and all that kind of stuff.  Argo, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty – all recently rewarded at the Golden Globes.  Supposedly nuanced and complex, they peddle the same old lies… just in a way acceptable to liberals.

Here’s a snippet:

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal ‘humanitarian intervention’.  I’m all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn… but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too.  I can’t help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar).  See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.

Oh, by the way, here‘s blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the ‘nuanced’ Zero Dark Thirty.  Like this ‘nuanced’ response, for instance:

 Nothing like ‘nuance’ is there?

(Actually, I’ve blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama’s aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects – here.  Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity.  It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she’s not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)

Why do I care about movies and TV shows?  *Sigh*  Look, fiction matters.  In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people’s opinions (and I include myself in that).

Ayn Rand never proved anything as a ‘philosopher’, but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued.  Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.

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ADDITIONAL:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda

http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html

 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html

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YET MORE (27/01/13):

“This awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.”…

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Murder is Murder

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The terrible killings of Americans in Libya have provoked an entirely foreesable reaction.  Loads of smug conservatives and equally smug liberals have found common cause in singling out Islam as violent and intolerant. 

That cartoon in The Onion is a good example.  ‘Nobody Murdered Because of This Image’ reads the headline, above a cartoon of several non-Muslim religious figures engaged in an explicit gang bang.  Because only Muslims kill people for bigoted reasons, you see.

It’s interesting to witness the implicit hierarchy of human value.  The (entirely deplorable) murder of Americans by Libyans elicits howls of outrages.  The (equally deplorable and far more common) murder of Arabs and Muslims in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine etc by the American and British militaries – and/or NATO, and/or the Israelis – doesn’t provoke any such widespread and sustained spluttering horror.  It’s for ‘them’ to die at our hands.  That’s just routine.  And ‘they’ mustn’t draw any conclusions from this (i.e. the West despises them and values their culture at nothing) because if they do then that’s the medieval intolerance of Islam talking.

Of course, nobody who died at the Embassy deserved to die, nor would they have deserved to even if they had been involved in creating the disgusting, hateful, maliciously provocative film that everyone is talking about.  Most Muslims would agree, I’m sure… even those who were insulted and shocked by hearing about the film. 

Meanwhile, our Western response (the response of those who are supposedly living in the civilised, liberal, modern, progressive, democratic world… as opposed to the lands of the backward, whom we take it upon ourselves to slaughter in the name of freedom) will probably be to massacre yet more Arabs and Muslims.

And all those people who chortle over the religious touchiness of Muslims will immediately go blind and deaf.…

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