Gedicht: Strengstens Verboten !!!

There is so much that our German cousins  are forbidden to view nowadays, beneath the glare of the PC Police (wie damals die Stasi).  Here is the latest, a 1951 poem that -- despite its Hispanic aspect -- proved too rich for thinning German blood:

Falls Sie Deutscher sind --

Augen gefälligst zumachen !!

Extensive further exemplification here.

[Note:  It's awfully minimalist, as poems go -- just a noun or two here and there. 
Imagine the wrath of the Politically Correct, if it had gone so far as an adjective or a verb!]

The Pelican -- Briefer please

This week, John Grisham has  not one  but two novels  on the NYTimes bestseller list.  And the whole back page of this week’s New Yorker is taken up with an ad for these:  suggesting that an audience of (relatively discriminating) New Yorker calibre  might be interested.  What is the attraction?

And so, despite a recent bad experience with another Grisham potboiler (panned here), like Charlie Brown having just one more whack at the football held by (reliably) unreliable Lucy,  I reached down a well-known title from my wife’s discard shelf:  The Pelican Brief (1992).

It’s kind of a catchy title;  further, the basic premise of the thriller -- the murder of multiple Supreme-Court justices -- has a compelling logic to it:  such an Eingreifen into the politico-legal landscape would indeed have much more far-reaching and long-lasting consequences than most assassinations.   And at the hands of a former lawyer (like Grisham) an engrossing glimpse into the ins and outs of Constitutional theory and practice  should be central to the plot, and quite instructive.  

And what a movie it might have made!   Had I the good fortune to have directed it, a good third of the screentime would have been devoted to courtroom drama:  but this time, not to the sordid details of some random murder case (as in most such dramas) but to matters of weight to the Republic; to the (generally high-level, non-grandstanding) pleadings before the Supreme Court; and to serious discussions of all sides of the issues  in chambers, among Justices and clerks:  fine legal minds  grappling with crucial conundrums.  Only once the reader had been drawn in to caring about the issues at hand, and familiarized with the stances (well-founded or otherwise)  of each of the Justices, would one, and later another, be bumped off.   It is the basic principle of the classic dinner-party murder:   The reader has to be skillfully introduced to each of the potential victims (and suspects!), so that he cares about them or at least can recognize them, before the foul deed is done.   Otherwise we’re simply down amid the muck of the police-blotter.

Not only does he do absolutely nothing of that, but, amazingly for a reputed professional, Grisham makes what should count as an authorial Rookie Error:   First comes the slaying of a character we don’t know from Adam (one of the Justices, barely sketched-in);  then, before the blood is dry, and before reader has had time to assimilate that atrocity (one cannot call it tragedy, in Aristotle’s sense;  genuine tragedy has to be built-up-to) and attempt to care about it, another Justice is slain (in grotesquely pornographic circumstances  that itself is an authorial offence against the dignity of the Court), thus “stepping on” the original effect.  So that it feels more like a fairgrounds cockshy  than like anything which might have interested Sophocles.

(For a while it seems as though, despite having skimped on the victims, Grisham intends to make good via due diligence on the suspects:  there are extended Oval Office scenes, featuring a phony unprincipled President, a scheming power-hungry Chief of Staff, plus the heads of FBI and CIA, who, to any properly-brought-up progressive, are villains ex officio.  But nothing ever comes of it.)

The central character is a law-student who gets interested in the case.   In accord with the socio-literary pieties of our times, it is a she, and quickly introduced as a gorgeous athletic brilliant self-possessed do-it-all feminist heroine (“cheerleader … graduated magna cum laude with a degree in biology … planned to graduate magna cum laude with a degree in law, and then make a nice living suing chemical companies for trashing the environment”), and is given a scene in which (though arriving late to class) she effortlessly shows up all the boys  who have been clownishly  ducking and dodging, unable to answer the lecturer’s trenchant questions.   Well, fine (sigh);  and useful for the movies.   Dramatically, the choice of such an outsider to get drawn in to lethal and unsuspected depths, is an excellent old chestnut of the Man Who Knew Too Much school  (cinematically brilliantly depicted in, for example, “Six Days of the Condor”).   Why such a person, with no especial connections, working alone, and stranded out in Louisiana or somewhere, is able almost instantly to penetrate to the solution to the case (and this, without leaving the library), where the police, the White House, the FBI, the CIA, and a special spontaneous Let’s-Put-On-a-Play scratch-team of Supreme Court employees who throw themselves as amateurs  into their own investigation (in another kind of movie, of the Bad News Bears motif, these junior sherlocks would have been the ones to crack the case, though here this wrinkle is immediately forgotten) all mill around  spinning their wheels and getting nowhere,  is left unexplained (and puts the plot down into the adolescent-wet-dream subbasement of Superhero fantasies, quite foreign to the taste of Eustace Tilly’s cognoscenti).

As a side-thread, she is having an affair with her ConLaw professor (author checks off that box;  naturally the silver screen will require a bit of that sort of thing).  But sociopolitically (in the current climate), the matter is dicey.   The reader is supposed to sympathize with everything that WonderDamsel does, including her choices for her love-life.  But the professor is male, and superordinate in the power-structure, and several years her elder, and therefore (as dictated by the pieties, vid. sup.)  scum.  What to do?   Well, the author makes him a grotesque drunkard, so that we can all righteously sneer down at him (and, interrestingly, though at a semi-conscious subtext level, suggestive of impotence, hence he is merely a toy  and never an actual sexual threat  -- the figure of the Castrated Rapist, as it were),  and then -- startlingly early from a narrative standpoint, given the man’s prominence in the early sections (thus, a structural defect) -- summarily yanked from the stage, as though by the proverbial shepherd’s-crook of the cartoons:  somebody smashes his lecherous head like a watermelon, or whatever.    Cross out politically-incorrect love-interest;  call Casting for a socially acceptable replacement.

This arrives in the form of a crusading Bob Woodward-style newsman (he even works for WaPo),  who, despite his journalistic eminence, takes orders from her meekly, like a little boy  (for she had suddenly, after a few days on the run, become an expert in clandestine tradecraft).  And though he is of course attracted to her (like the entire world, Princess), and though he is repeatedly (at her invitation -- she calls all the shots) drawn into potentially libidinous situations, he ever and again simply sleeps on the couch, dutifully neutered  in line with the requirements of present dogma (at which later ages will gape).

*

The featured blurb, from the NYTimes Book Review, atop the cover of the paperback edition my wife initially fished out from some remainder-bin (“Half off all titles”), stated:   

“A genuine page-turner.”

And here I must concur, in both a good sense  and a bad.

It is the sort of book which is best consumed in circumstances where you do not invest overmuch attention or insight:  either amid the hectic distractions of air-travel, or, on the contrary, late on a tired Friday, before bedtime, the brandy-glass sampled, then emptied, then re-filled, mind wandering off the page and lazily back to it, the depictions of campus affairs evoking fond (or frightful) memories of one’s own, the chase-scenes allowing you to lie back and close your eyes, imagining how your favorite director might stage them -- nothing much riding on all this  one way or the other.   Amid the general background murmur of workmanlike prose, there is the occasional phrase (“They power-schmoozed with senators”) felicitous by the relaxed standards of the post-prandial, pre-somnial bedside reading-lamp, or cinematic imagery (“She draped her legs across his lap” -- the later screenwriter will bite his lip, wondering whether to swipe the trope, or to can it and come up with his own take), so that  for the first hundred pages or so  the pages really did turn effortlessly, as by themselves, requiring no more digital exertion than the text did mental. 

But in time, it dawns on the reader  that the mainspring of the killings really is that blasted pelican -- endangered down in the bayou, thus foiling the envirocidal plottings of an oilman (boo!) whom we eventually meet as a cartoonish melding of Mr Kurtz and late-life Howard Hughes, who is somehow able to recruit a host of killers including a Carlos-the-Jackal lookalike -- ah but the plot is too stupid to summarize.  By then we are no longer turning the pages, but flipping them, faster and faster, like those day-calendar sheets blowing rapidly off in a cinematic wind to symbolize the passing of time.   The thing drags, and bogs down…  It is as though Grisham had received a contract for a 400-pp. novel, but had misread it as “300”, and only after he had expended his last twist and least idea, did his agent inform him that, per contract, a further hundred pages were required, so that Grisham had to grind grind grind, or perhaps hand the task off to some uncredited amanuensis, like the apprentices who finished-in the details after Michaelangelo had drawn the main scheme and toddled off to the winehouse.

*

Ah well, the man continues to get away with it, and to bank the results, as ever new generations of unilluminati are born-yesterday.   No doubt his latest efforts will make it to the screen as well -- or, in accord with continuing developments, perhaps becomes comic-books or video-games.

Kahneman, Dyson; Freud and James; plus Pinker (expanded)

Daniel Kahneman is an intellectual grey-eminence of the past several decades.  If you read at all, you have met some of his ideas (usually written in conjunction with his trusty sidekick Tversky) , though generally at second-hand.  Now he has written his own lengthy and systematic account of his research, aimed at a lay audience.

Most reviews of Daniel Kahneman’s new book (Thinking:  Fast and Slow) simply choose a few from his wealth of anecdotes  and recount them.  Not a bad plan -- they are all worth hearing.  By contrast, Freeman Dyson, in a typically canny offering in the current New York Review of Books, goes beyond the usual review, offering some trenchant personal experiences that illustrate the cognitive case being made, and -- quite surprisingly in the current climate -- puts in a word for Freud:  not the Freud of Die Traumdeutung or the cigars, but of the seminal Psychopathologie des Alltaglebens.   He concludes: “The insights of Kahneman and Freud  are complementary rather than contradictory.”

Noting that neither Sigmund Freud nor William James comes in for mention in Kahneman’s long book, Dyson also outlines the present relevance of this giant of psychology (and one of the heroes of this blog).

Make no mistake -- Kahneman, like Steven Pinker, is one of psychology’s good-guys, plumbing the richness of human experience  though coming to mostly dry and deflating conclusions.   Unlike the eliminative materialists (which includes many of the tribe of neuroscientists), they do not take mere mechanism as a posit, rather than as an occasional result.  James and Dyson, unlike most of their scientific colleagues then and now, have thought deeply about religion and take it quite seriously;  our family had the benefit of Dyson’s teaching at the Presbyterian Church in Princeton.   His invariably broad and thoughtful perspective is ever welcome.

Footnote:  I subsequently borrowed an audiobook of Thinking:  Fast and Slow from the library, to listen through in stages along my commute.   Alas, it turns out not to be suitable for that medium, save perhaps for a beginner.   Far too much of it is platitudinous  -- boring to sit through, while the reader-aloud drones on.    With a printed work, your eyes rapidly scans past the overly familiar, and plucks the occasional novel niblet.

Part of the problem is adumbrated in this passage from America’s premier psychologist of the nineteenth century:

Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere familiarity with things is able to produced a feeling of their rationality.

-- William James,  “The Sentiment of Rationality”, in The Will to Believe (1897).

Kahneman rediscovers that remarkable fact, with much spilling of ink, waving of hands, and conducting of unsurprising experiments. 

More interesting is what James writes immediately after that, showing that today’s postmodernist-style relativists  have also not brought forth something new under the sun:

The empiricist school has been so much struck by this circumstance  as to have laid it down that the feeling of rationality and the feeling of familiarity  are one and the same thing, and that no other kind of rationality than this exists.

(I have satirized that dreadful mindset  here.)

~

In an earlier essay, we examined the politics and natural selection of sex as reflected in the writings of Steven Pinker.   There is a Kahnemanian cognitive dimension here as well, of which we now give an example.

Pinker wades patiently through the swamps of Political Correctness;  we salute his perseverence.   It really is remarkable, the sort of emotionally-founded cognitive distortions he must contend with.

Thus, consider this thought-experiment:  Imagine that some researchers published a study suggesting that the higher crime rate for American Blacks is a consequence of innate criminality.  They would of course be denounced by Blacks and their champions;  but would scarcely be denounced as blaming White crime victims.  So much is obvious.

Yet now put in different substitutions for x and y, and though the logical structure has not changed, the political picture has changed entirely.   The Blank Slate, p. 161:

Even heavier bipartisan fire has recently been aimed at Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer  for suggesting in their book A Natural History of Rape  that rape is a consequence of men’s sexuality.  A spokesperson from the Feminist Majority Foundation called the book “scary” and “regressive” because it “almost validates the crime and blames the victim.”

By contrast,  men as such  did not object.  We’re used to it.

The average zealot would be quite incapable of perceiving the logical parallelism between the two accounts.
Similarly Pinker, op. cit., p. 372, re the "Laws of Behavior Genetics":  "It is because the laws run roughshod over the Blank Slate, and the Blank Slate is so entrenched,  that many intellectuals cannot comprehend an alternative to it, let alone argue about whether it is right or wrong."  A depressing, accurate, and important observation.

~

Here and elsewhere, Pinker counters the Noble-Savage ideology that whatever is found in nature must be good.  P. 164

It is inherent to our value system that the interests of women should not be subordinated to those of men, and that control over one’s body is a fundamental right  that trumps other people’s desires.  So rape is not tolerated, regardless of any possible connection to the nature of men’s sexuality.

So far, the standard viewpoint, sensibly put.  But then Pinker, whose logical scalpel is sharp, cuts down another level to make a quite interesting philosophical point:

Note how this calculus requires a “deterministic” and “essentialist” claim about human nature:  that women abhor being raped.  Without that claim  we would have no way to choose between trying to deter rape  and trying to socialize women to accept it, which would be perfectly compatible with the supposedly progressive doctrine that we are malleable raw material.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

For college psychology instructors:

Here is an experiment you can do with your class, if you don’t mind being denied tenure.

Divide your students randomly into two groups, and send them to separate rooms.  To the first group, present the sentence:

Men are hot;  women are cold.

(This is along the lines of such parlor-game titles as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”.)

To the other group, present this sentence:

Women are hot;  men are cold.

Assignment:  Discuss.

Prediction:  Both groups will denounce their respective sentence as sexist and anti-woman.

[Postscript]  Chesterton anticipated this sally:

Re G.B. Shaw:

He has pleased all the bohemians  by suggesting that women are equal to men;  but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women.

-- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905)

~

Kahneman, as Dyson points out, avoids discussing religion; this is probably just as well.  Pinker -- whose range of interests is extraordinarily broad -- to his credit  does not avoid it;  indeed he quotes (pp. 186-7) from the magnificent 1996 address by Pope John Paul II on the subject of Natural Selection and the “ontological  discontinuity” (we have treated of this subject here);    but analytically, in this arena, he is not at his best.  On page 189  he dishes up an absurd false-dichotomy:

Who says the doctrine of the soul is more humane than the understanding of the mind as a physical organ?

Already so much has gone wrong.  We do not adhere to the doctrine of the soul (or of free will) because it is “humane”, but because it is true, and we experience it as such.   Nor does such a doctrine impede or even impinge upon the understanding of the brain as a physical organ.  As for the mind as a physical organ, um, did you really mean to write that?  Are we back with Descartes and his lodgement of the soul in the pituitary or the pineal gland or wherever the hell he placed it?

It gets worse.  The consequences of the “doctrine” of the soul (though, in our view, this is rather like speaking of the “doctrine” of the existence of the physical world)  is “letting people die of hepatitis  or be ravaged by Parkinson’s disease  when a cure may lie in research on stem cells…”  Indeed a cure might be thus expedited, or it might not;  the soul is nothing to the issue.   The moral quandary is rather to what extent society is willing to go, to benefit group A at the expense of group B.   Effective but morally debateable maneuvers include:  harvesting stem cells from embroyos;  harvesting embryos; harvesting aborted fetuses; harvesting fetuses not yet aborted but which, for a fittybone, the unwed mother would be happy to sell you.  Plus harvesting organs from dead adults; from living but brain-dead adults; from criminals; from political prisoners; from the luckless, kidnapped for this very purpose.  Perhaps less effective from a flinty Western medical perspective, but quite real and effective to its practitioners, is harvesting such organs as genitals from living children (our group B, here rather at a disadvantage) for use in sorcery to benefit group A (which in their own estimation, includes all the best people).  All these practices may be found in the world today, though generally not in places where the influence of the Holy Mother Church is at its strongest.   John draws the line at one place, Mary at another; and if you were to do a statistical study, it might well be that churchgoers, on average, place it somewhat more towards the less-interventionist end  than do vivisectionists, grave-robbers or eliminative materialists.   That would be sociologically rather interesting, if true;  Pinker has however made no logical point.   Nor does his heroically rising to the defense of helpless Alzheimer’s patients, who apparently are being abused by nuns when these are not otherwise engaged in cackling over the sufferings of Parkinsonians,  contradict anything a theist would say (apart perhaps from heretics like Christian Scientists):  “Sources of immense misery” (notice the purely emotion-evoking addition of the adjective) “such as Alzheimer’s disease … will be alleviated   not by treating thought and emotion of manifestations of an immaterial soul  but by treating them as manifestations of physiology and genetics.”   Amen; hear, hear;  we can all of us drink to that.  Pinker’s lance has pierced a straw-man.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

Pinker touches bottom with this assertion:  “The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body  is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on earth.”   (Compare:  "The doctrine that we should become adults  is offensive, as it devalues childhood.")
Leave aside that outsider’s-assessment-word “righteous”, analogous to the skewed perspective of the word “humane” above (We believe, or disbelieve, or simply hope, as the case may be, in eternal life, from conviction or revelation or even logic or what have you, but not because such a belief -- true or false -- seems “righteous”).  Notice, though, that qualifier “necessarily”, which changes the assertion from a sociological generalization or barroom opinion  into one of logico-philosophical apodixis.  Yet the only evidence he offers for this extraordinary doctrine  is the self-serving rationalizations (or irrationalizations) of maniacs who kill their kids, and the rants of al-Qaeda suicide-bombers.  (Page 189 -- look it up if you can’t believe your eyes.)

Good - Heavens!  For all we know, some serial killer has excused his crime-spree by an allusion to the Riemann Hypothesis;  the effect of such grotesques upon number theory  will rightly be nil.

Beyond the logical point, Pinker’s assertion is psychologically absurd.   It may well be the case (though God forbid), that those who hope they may one day rest in the bosom of Abraham  are destined to be cruelly disabused;  but their doctrine does tend rather to distinguish this view of life  from that of scorpions in a bottle.

For a glimpse at the value placed upon human life  among a proud, free people  unpolluted by Christian superstitions, click here, and here.
[update 8 May 2012] And now here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/05/south-koreans-confiscated-pills-human-remains.html
South Korean customs said it had confiscated more than 17,000 “health” capsules smuggled from China that contain human flesh, most likely extracted from aborted fetuses or stillborn babies.



(Note, though:  these are quibbles;  just a turf thang, folks.  Pinker's book overall is broad, sound, and beautifully written.)

(For more along these lines: )

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

Word of the Day: “Airman”

Since 9/11, I have worked side by side with folks in the Air Force  every day.  The universal term for any one of these is Airman.   It rhymes precisely with chairman -- which means that the -man is here merely suffixal, the vowel being unstressed and qualitatively reduced:  chairm’n, airm’n.  (Phonetically, the unstressed vowel has been demoted to at most a schwa, and often has disappeared altogether, the -n becoming syllabic by compensation:  cf.  rock ‘n’ roll.  -- Contrast the vowel in stunt man, which remains full.)

Accordingly, the term *airwoman does not exist, and no-one is clamoring for it.  And no-one, but no-one, is demanding to be rechristened as *airpeople or *airpersons or *airindividuals or *Americans with airiness or whatever.

The USAF has a lot of cool slang, and perhaps sometime I’ll share it (or you… airmen  can add your favorites in a comment to this post);  but the point here is merely to notice the irenic lexical state of affairs in today’s Air Force, versus the hurry-scurrying going on over at the Marines, as reported in today’s MSM:

The Marines just took ‘man’ out of 19 job titles, and people are losing their minds

The force will rename 19 of its job titles to make occupational specialties more gender neutral. Critics argue political correctness is taking over the military.

“You’d think someone who has seen combat would have more stones.”

“You know, I was going to [complain] about PC crap … but “Infantry Assault Marine” sounds kinda cool …”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/06/28/the-marines-just-took-man-out-of-19-job-titles-and-people-are-losing-their-minds/

Now, there are neologisms and neologisms;  this batch seems to have been crafted with a good ear, at any rate. Infantry Assault Marine  does indeed sound way cool.

Prolegomenon to any adequate pataphysics

Satirists have joined the breadlines, ever since actual reality became too wacky to satirize.

Unemployed satirists.

Send in your aluminum pull-tabs to help!

Surfing the Net, you can always find some silliness somewhere -- to notice it, would be shooting fish in a barrel.   But the editorial board of the NYTimes  is not quite a straw-man (though perhaps it should).   So here goes.

This morning they served up an editorial entitled, stirringly, “French Women Fight Back”.   For anyone familiar with the social relations in current-day, multi-culti Western Europe, or with the already misandric slant of legislation in those countries (see Looking at Someone Up and Down), will smile at this, or sigh.   To polemicize would be pointless.  But as part of our series on European political gestural semiotics,  we reproduce the photograph -- the only one illustrating the editorial -- which the editors saw fit to stand for this righteous uprising:

Or maybe they're doing "I'm a Little Teapot"

To all appearances, they are flashing a yoni-symbol!
(Can you imagine if a group of men had thus, publically and polemically, reduced women to their anatomy like that?)

Compare the Merkel-Raute:

American readers might here deny the senses of their eyes, or try to explain it away.  But actually, in France, the way feminists protest being noticed for their physiques, is to march naked in public:

What are *you* looking at, you dirty old man!

(They have done far more egregious things in public, than that;  which we decline to link to.  This is, after all, a family magazine.)

[Update Feb 2017]  "Raute" has become the new nickname for Merkel (earlier: Erika, after her supposed DDR intel career).  It is used with much the same dismissive tone that people said Dubya for George W. Bush.

~

AirBNB has come out with its own corporate version of the yoni-symbol, cleverly tweaked so as to accommodate Rorschach projections of lingam, mamillae, or podex as well:

~

There is a “Société du spectacle” aspect to the androphobic fanfare in Germany and France.   Cf. this extended essay, from yesterday:

   Vergewaltigung: Spiel mit den Zahlen

   http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/48/48265/1.html

.

Salutes and Semiotics

We earlier offered semiotic analyses of politically-tinged postures and gestures, in Europe

     La quenelle

and in the Middle East

     The Rabi`ah

And now such a controversy has flared up in the United States, specifically at West Point.   In a highly interesting and well-illustrated article in this morning’s New York Times,

     Raised-Fist Photo by Black Women at West Point Spurs Inquiry

we are invited to consider this graduation photo:

Now, as a non-veteran civilian, I shall have nothing at all to say about this Army-internal controversy, leaving that to the warfighters themselves.   But a word about the ambiguities of the symbolism.

The raised-fist gesture has been around a long time, appearing in a wide variety of contexts, though  in general  with a common theme of militancy.   I first encountered it personally in the late 1960’s, as part of the movement against the Vietnam War.  At the time, there were actually two raised-hand antiwar gestures.  The one more familiar to outsiders was that of a raised hand with two lifted fingers, the index and the medius (“Pointer” and “Tall-man” as we called them in kindergarten -- O happy days!);  and that, to be sure, with the palm towards the onlooker; the same gesture with the onlooker facing the back of the hand, is not used in America, but is used in England, and means something quite different, and very very bad.  This gesture was often called the “Peace sign”;  it was the badge of the peacenik.  Although most of us who flashed the thing didn’t know it at the time, it was an odd choice for an antiwar symbol, since the same sign during the second World War was the “V for Victory” sign, universally known.   Well, autre temps, autre sémiotique.

The raised fist, in its beginnings, was subtley different:  it was the signature gesture, not of peaceniks, but of activists, militants, and had roots in the Communist movement (a fact probably unknown to most who came to use the gesture, simply for its jaunty sexiness).  In their purist form, the gestures meant respectively  “Bring the Boys Home” (a moderate slogan, suitable for patriots) and “Bring the War Home” (in the startling formulation of the Weathermen, of insurrectionary intent.).

Back to the posed photograph.   Its evaluation, and the actions to be taken as a consequence, hinge crucially on the fact that these soldiers are in uniform;  that is the essential context, sine qua non. I know of people who have been stripped of their security clearances and even drummed out of the service, for having done something publically in uniform  which they would be perfectly at liberty to do in civvies. As such, it is a matter for the Army in general and West Point in particular;  for the rest of us, it is none of our affair.

But as semioticians, we may consider a bit.

The pose itself is striking -- and, to this observer, strikingly handsome, considered only as a tableau.   It calls to mind  such sculptural compositions as  this (from the Arc de Triomphe):

But more pertinently, we are dealing here, not with such stray, subjective associations, but with a context within a context, the larger context (as the article illustrates) being specifically a long-standing West Point tradition, exemplified by this, from 1884:

Thus, while the raised-fist motif (of ambiguous interpretation, now that the gesture has been so watered-down as to be exploited by pop stars) might or might not seem defiant or truculent (eye of the beholder),  it occurs in a framing that is in fact ultra-Army and ultra-traditionalist.  And quite possibly,  what was in the minds of these young women at the time  was not really that of insurrection (let alone Communist), but more along the lines of another Army tradition:  esprit de corps.

[Aesthetic footnote]  The distaff composition actually seems quite a bit more "Hoo-ah!" than that of the 19th century men.  Most of them can't stand up straight; the guys  towards the bottom  seem to have melted.

[Psychological footnote]  As a complete outsider to all this, what first struck me (and somewhat shocked me) about the picture, was not the fists, any minatory interpretation of which was at least partly neutralized by the merry grin on the woman stage-left, and the cocked-head dreamy half-smile of the woman at the opposite bannister (who resembles a -- white -- woman I work with).  Rather, it was the grey old-fashioned uniforms.  Had they dressed up as Confederates?  Surely not;  the article identifies the kit as “traditional gray dress uniforms”.   To contextualize adequately  requires expert testimony;  you can’t just go by the sight of your eyes.

Careers for women in the Islamic State

The New York Times this morning provides an intimate glimpse into the exciting life of the “Daesh dames”:

Dua had only been working for two months with the Khansaa Brigade, the all-female morality police of the Islamic State, when her friends were brought to the station to be whipped.

The police had hauled in two women she had known since childhood, a mother and her teenage daughter, both distraught. Their abayas, flowing black robes, had been deemed too form-fitting.

 “Their abayas really were very tight. I told her it was their own fault; they had come out wearing the wrong thing,” she said. “They were unhappy with that.”

Dua sat back down and watched as the other officers took the women into a back room to be whipped. When they removed their face-concealing niqabs, her friends were also found to be wearing makeup. It was 20 lashes for the abaya offense, five for the makeup, and another five for not being meek enough when detained.
[...] Within the brigade, women had started using their authority to settle petty quarrels or exact revenge.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/world/middleeast/isis-wives-and-enforcers-in-syria-recount-collaboration-anguish-and-escape.html?_r=0

Former member of the Khansaa brigade,

dressed for success

Weiteres zum Thema:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33985441

For analysis and further particulars:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/isils-caliphate-gender-aspect.html

~

Another interesting tidbit, from the same very informative article:

To the outside world, the territory controlled by the Islamic State might seem to be a hermetically sealed land governed by the harshest laws of the seventh century. But until relatively recently, the routes into and out of Raqqa were mostly open. Traders would come and go, supplying the Organization’s needs and wants — including cigarettes, which some fighters smoked despite the fact that they were banned for Raqqa residents.

More on the political theatrics of smoking, here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/02/back-of-bus-re-updated.html

~

The Washington Post as well  offers a well-informed inside glimpse into those who make ISIL’s société du spectacle  possible:

What they described resembles a medieval reality show …

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside-the-islamic-states-propaganda-machine/2015/11/20/051e997a-8ce6-11e5-acff-673ae92ddd2b_story.html

More on the matter here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/on-psycho-theatrics-of-beheadings.html

~

Der Spiegel likewise got an inside view, thanks to captured ISIL documents provided by Iraq:

http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/video/video-40295.html

The main takeaway is a refutation of those who would dismiss ISIL as basically just a large street-gang, disorganized and devoid of strategy.

Our own view of the organization was presented here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-islamic-state-911-2014.html

[More than  once  al-Qaeda,
ISIL is proving  a Rorschach  for the West.]

[Update Nov 2016]
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-uncovered/how-all-female-isis-morality-police-khansaa-brigade-terrorized-mosul-n685926

[Update 8 Feb 2017]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4199024/Girl-10-bitten-death-torture-device-ISIS.html

[Update 25 April 217]
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/features/2017/04/26/Fear-of-ISIS-female-biters-haunts-women-during-night-at-Iraq-s-camps.html

Arabic version:
http://www.alarabiya.net/ar/arab-and-world/iraq/2017/04/26/%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B0%D8%A7-%D9%81%D8%B9%D9%84%D8%AA-%D8%B9%D8%B6%D8%A7%D8%B6%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%B9%D8%B4-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B5%D9%84%D8%9F.html

Whack-a-Male

[We continue with our analysis of the “Blindspot” pilot.]

An obstacle towards guys’ enjoying the show is the grating Twofer Boss.  Her role is to serve as the mallet in Whack-a-Mole -- the moles being the males.  As:

(1)

* Labcoated Science Guy quickly discovers what pharmaceutical is responsible for Jane Doe’s amnesia.  Briefing his boss and FBI Guy, he pronounces the long chemical name, and adds “commonly known as” (the acronym).   Impeccable. But she slaps him down:  It may be “common” in the hoity-toity circles you move in, “doctor”, but for the rest of us… Against all plausibility, the dramatic logic somehow has the male doctor wrong-footed.

(2)

FBI Guy tools off to the Statue of Liberty, which (as he has figured out) is about to be bombed by a terrorist.   In any approximation of reality, the Bureau along with the NYPD would deploy dozens of agents and officers for this op;  but the program sets it up so that FBI Guy is seemingly about to go in alone.  -- Now, that is the annoying scenario so frequently recycled by masscult so that the male hero can do some heroics heroically and not have to share the limelight with anyone;  it is the narcissistic/solipsistic Rambo motif, and it appeals to eight-year-old boys (and to the less intelligent among the nine-year-olds).  In recent years, the tired trope has been retooled with a sex-switch;  it is supposed to appeal to grown women.

But, interestingly, neither of these flavors of that motif are the goal here.

FBI Guy is not quite alone;  over his own objections, he brought along Jane Doe, at the insistence of his Twofer Boss.  Still, he tells Jane to wait back at the car (the patriarchal  beast!) while he singlehandedly Saves the Day(**); but again, Jane insists, and accompanies him into the Statue.   They meet up with the perp, and, in an extremely badly choreographed bit of sciamachy, the screenwriters maneuver FBI Guy, helpless and unarmed, into the grip of Perp, and only a head-shot by Jane saves his life and his bacon.

[**Footnote to laypersons and residents of Mars:  SWAT teams, Special Forces, and FBI on a takedown-attack  do not actually bring along tourists, bystanders, or embedded journalists along for the ride, regardless of the relative genders.]

Now, simply as an action sequence, that was incredibly inept, and likely to disappoint an average audience (let alone a more instructed one);  and yet a large well-funded team of producers and writers had plenty of time to craft the scene just-so, to help define the series in the pilot.  To make sense of it, we must proceed precisely as does a Freudian confronted with a Fehlhandlung:  as a symptom of something deeper, not as a random goof.

And the Trieb here finding expression is soon seen to be:  Feminine Revenge.  For:

* Back at headquarters, he reports to Twofer:  Jane saved his life, plus captured the perp.  Yet then, in an astoundingly implausible switch -- really, like a rift in the screenplay, as though someone had forgotten to delete his immediately previous remarks -- he shends his boss, saying Jane is our most valuable asset ever, and you almost wasted it by letting her go out into the field.   Why ever would he say that?  So as to set up the comeback: Twofer then acidly replies:  “She saved your life.”  As though Guy had been unaware of that, or had been churlishly ungrateful.

It reminds me of softball for the Pee-Wee League, where the kids are too young to hit a pitch.  You position the ball motionless atop a rubber pedestal, and let the kid take his time and swing.  Only, here the softball is FBI Guy’s head.

With this perspective, we revisit (1).  Here, it is beyond possibility to imagine this scene, the female boss’s putdown of the male boffin, with genders reversed, in modern Medialand.  (Just try to run such a scenario as an experiment in your head;  you will shrink back as from a hot stove.) Moreover, the putdown is truly gratuitous, and indeed off  (acronyms being in handy breezy use among laymen).  So what is the meaning of this exchange, absurd on the face of it?   An analyst refuses to accept things as merely, meaninglessly absurd. Again our Freudian:  It makes perfect sense on the underside of it.  It is revenge for an (imagined or remembered) scenario with genders reversed.

For exposition of a similar gender-squelch, cf. this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/09/res-ipsa-loquitur.html

~

The commercials chosen to accompany this show online, bear out the analysis.

In one, a demure, appealing, somewhat mousy carrot-top sits in a droning business meeting.  Suddenly, a cowgirl-clad mini-persona of herself leaps out of the laptop and starts vociferously twerking:  Eve Black to the original’s Eve White, in the classic fantasy “The Three Faces of Eve”.  Her twerking booty then knocks over a coffee-cup into … a guy’s lap (take that, you nasty phallus);  then she hits another guy in the eye (one of a twinned pair of sensitive round organs; to the reader we leave the rest) with her lasso.  Neither, of course, remonstrates or even reacts:  they are there to be abused by one of Eve’s daughters;  to take it, and like it.

Afternote:

There may have been adverse viewer comment on Twofer’s imperious personality, since by Episode Two the producers had popped in a new personality-module (into the P-drive that opens in the back of her head).  Now she is the wise, feeling counselor.  She tends to FBI Guy’s tormented soul.  At first, natch (typical for a guy), he doesn’t want to talk about it;  but under her gentle prodding, he opens up to, he emotes, and pours out childhood memories.  Pheromones are exchanged until the atmosphere becomes unbreathably estrogenic.

I first fast-forwarded over this glurge, but then was obliged to go back, as it quickly emerged that the traumatic memory in question is key to the whole plot.  He is traumatized with guilt at having inadvertently victimized a female playmate.  She was later kidnapped and has been presumed dead for a quarter of a century;  but naturally, to tie everything up into a neat bundle, she is hypothesized to be none other than … Jane Doe!