Droogs and Public Safety

A while back in correspondence with a person who did not want to be named publicly, I had reason to reflect upon violence and social dysfunction perpetrated by young savages.

This conversation (about an accused white supremacist who is--surprisingly--not white) came in the context of Trayvon Martin aftermath, so any mention of "savages" needs to be immediately defended against a false charge of racism. If you want to dismiss me as a blatant racist, here's your excuse. You may now retire to your cocoon now.

I don't think being black or white or yellow makes you more or less likely to be a savage. 

Yet, how do we explain all that crime without being willfully blind to the statistics? And when you get down to individual cases, I'm thinking about the Australian baseball player murdered by youths who happen to be black.

The two competing narratives on right and left are: this is a racially motivated crime vs this is just bored kids acting out. I will go with the lefty narrative because it is more interesting.

At first, I thought the violence commonly reported in the black community (particularly black-on-black violence) was a bitter legacy of slavery. Though the peculiar institution ended over a hundred years before any of the perpetrators were born, it is nevertheless conceivable that dysfunctional social patterns of criminality fitted to slavery persist to this day.

Supposing, as many would prefer, we believe (despite one perpetrator's tweets) this murder is a modern day reenactment of the Leopold and Loeb case, or the Hitchcock movie Rope that Leopold and Loeb inspired. If so, where did this savagery come from?

The disturbing image of Malcolm McDowell came to mind. Consider the savages of A Clockwork Orange. They have their every need provided by a generous and beneficent State. The droogs are all lily white and the story of their violent criminality is utterly believable. No racism here boyo.

If race does not cause savagery, then perhaps welfare causes it. 

Earned accomplishment is the source of happiness. Leopold and Loeb were trust fund kiddies, as were the privileged antagonists of Rope. When opportunities for earned accomplishment are limited, or social forces discourage or sabotage it, people act out. When every material need is provided without effort boredom becomes a problem. 

The savagery that we find so offensive may not be the legacy of slavery, but an unexpected consequence of Santa Claus. Maybe you do should dismiss this line of reasoning as mere racism. It's less threatening than an attack on Santa Claus.

Depiction is not Endorsement

I was discussing a movie with a friend, A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick. And my friend casually said that there were a lot of misogynistic movies in the '60s. This bothered me, because it implied that Clockwork Orange was misogynistic. I don't think so and here's why.

The movie follows the exploits of a band of evil men, termed droogs, moving about a utopian socialist Britain. I think that is an important aspect of the movie's message. These young men aren't stealing loves of bread for starving loved ones, they have every material need supplied by a generous government. Yet they are evil.

To demonstrate how evil they are the movie shows them perpetrate serial rapes, assault, and murder. (I've said elsewhere that this movie could not be set in America with its Second Amendment. An armed citizen would put put down a rampaging droog like a mad dog.) In particular, the movie shows brutal rapes and assaults to remind the viewer that these aren't just boys out having fun, but murderous villains.

IF the movie showed women "asking for it" by dressing or acting provocatively, then excused the droogs on that basis, YEAH that would be misogynistic. Big Time. This movie does the opposite of excusing or justifying violence against others, it condemns it and uses it as a premise for what happens in the 2nd and 3rd reels.

Ergo, I don't think the depiction of violent assaults perpetrated against women makes the movie misogynistic. You may disapprove of the crimes Stanley Kubrick depicted. For the love of God I hope you disapprove!

Where it might be sexist, I suppose, is that women were victims to evoke greater sympathy in audiences. Is it sexist to think women are inherently weaker or less capable of defending themselves? Is it sexist to think viewers will be naturally sympathetic to a female rape victim. Maybe, but that's a bit of a stretch. (And the 2nd Amendment empowers women to carry an equalizer.)

EVIL is part of the human condition. The Problem of Evil won't be solved this side of Judgment Day, so evil is a worthy subject of depiction in art. Art tells the truth and there are truths about evil that art should depict and explore. In my own prose, I've depicted various acts of evil. I desperately hope none of them are ever regarded as endorsements for those crimes. Yet, because I want my art to tell the truth, I feel I should accurately depict criminal acts of which I do not approve.

As stated elsewhere, criminal acts are more common in the small than in the large. For every criminal mastermind there are a legion of petty crooks. Now, if you're the kind of writer who wants to Tell The Truth About The Human Condition, then you'll want to depict a mix of petty acts of crime and major cases. There is such a thing as horrendous atrocities--like shooting up a grade school--but those things are relatively rare. If you're going to tell the truth about the human condition, then you should depict both venal and mortal sins.

The hard thing about good and evil is knowing the difference. There are things that I think are evil, that if I told you, you'd think I'm evil for thinking them evil. Should those things come up, I'll depict them as accurately and as honestly as I can, while leaving the reader to make his/her own mind up about good and evil regarding these things. Other things like rape, murder, and assault are not in this category, the writer can express disapproval, but the wise writer doesn't hit the reader over the head with a moral club.

Or let's consider the n-word. Suppose you have a low-income white boy using the n-word a LOT. And let's suppose he even says of an industrial accident, "nobody was killed except a couple <<n-words>>." Now, if I tell you the white boy is the hero of the novel, you'd think the novel and the novelist racist. Right?

BUT suppose I tell you a little more about this white boy who uses the n-word: He's a fugitive and he's helping Jim, an escaped slave, get away down the Mississippi river. And the author is playing a sly game of showing a noble black man surrounded by white savages. Huckleberry Finn is in the middle coming to realize Jim is a better man than the whites known as "the duke" and "the king" who are scalawags.

By depicting Huck Finn's moral journey from unthinking racist to enlightenment, the novel is the opposite of racist. It is anti-racist. Depicting the evil of racism in this novel is Mark Twain's sly method of condemning racism.

When you find your story taking you into something you don't approve of, you should tell the truth of it. If it's something we all agree about like Nazis, we'll understand the irony of Springtime for Hitler. If it's something like rape and murder, it should be clear you're not endorsing it. But a reader like my friend can err by thinking it's misogynist or racist.

That's a risk, but I think the game is definitely worth the candle.

I Prefer Green Slave Girls

As a tender lad I read exactly one dystopian novel, 1984. Being properly inoculated against the genre, I went back to reading Heinlein, Asimov and pretty much any book with a spaceship on the cover.

The future of my past was nifty. NASA was sending men to the moon and Star Trek was in its first run. I was expecting a future of rocket ships, flying cars, jet belts, and green Orion slave girls. Sure there were some nuclear war nightmare scenarios like On The Beach, or Dr. Strangelove, but they were the exception, not the rule.

Contrast that with now. Contemporary writing trends are dystopian up the yin-yang. Want to read an American rip-off of Battle Royale? There's a dystopian novel for that. Want to read racist claptrap about saving pearls? There's a dystopian novel for that, too. Does YA stand for Yet Another dystopian novel?

Is there market pull for bleak or is this just producer push of bleak? I'm not going to put on my tinfoil hat. But I will note the power of group think. If you have an island wherein folks don't "know anyone who voted for Nixon," then you should expect some insular attitudes and a disconnect from the market. Certain things will go without saying about what's right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Surprisingly, humanism is in decline among the Anointed.

I think the decline of humanism is at the root of the rise of dystopianism. I recently had someone tell me that Snow Crash had a dystopian setting to better illustrate the humanity of the protagonists. I wasn't all that sure Snow Crash was dystopian.

This raises a question in my mind. Maybe the lines are fuzzier about what is and isn't dystopian. Was A Clockwork Orange dystopian? I'd say that it is more U-topian than DYS-topian for the following reasons:

• The dole kept Droogs in spiffy hats
• Nobody was homeless except for a drunk
• There was free medical care
• No polluted air or water

Nevertheless, the society of Clockwork Orange was not all beer and skittles. (When I saw the movie I thought, "what a compelling argument for the 2nd amendment." A small handgun discretely brandished by a putative rape victim would do marvels to concentrate a Droog's mind, but I digress.) The evil depicted in Clockwork Orange stems from the in-humanity of the Droogs. How is a society that solves all the social problems listed above capable of producing the likes of this?

Perhaps a more idyllic setting should be considered: perhaps a Village in rural Pennsylvania seemingly at the end of the 19th century. Though The Village is civilized in ways that are light-years beyond Clockwork's England, the Village lives in constant terror of what lies beyond the pale. And this society proves equally capable of producing a murderer as Clockwork.

Is The Village a dystopian tale? Probably not, though it demonstrates the same lesson as Clockwork Orange: the fault is is not in our stars, but in ourselves. As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. Put fallen man in an ideal setting, be it socialist utopia or Elysian fields, and he'll bring in some measure of depravity.

So, do we give up? Does the world suck, it's falling apart, and in the long run we're all dead? Ah, now that's probably a better question than dystopian or not.

Though there is the demonic in each of us, there is also the angelic. Though we've fouled our nest on planet Earth, we've also cleaned things up. Though many children go to sleep hungry each night, many more are fed or overfed. The world has gotten better at solving world-hunger problems in my lifetime. Though we are fallen, we aspire to be better.

Graph life expectancy over the last century. Look at standards of living over that time. Can we make these improvements long-term sustainable--and build upon them? Or will we fall back into a dark age of "bad luck?"

I think that's up to us to make happen. Each of us can contribute in our own way (or give up in our own way). And if you're a writer, I think that means writing stories that will inspire the reader to get up and invent a jetpack or a flying car. I've written about that here.

And I hope you'll decide that I've written that sort of science fiction here.

p.s.
Here is Robert Heinlein's "bad luck" quote is in full:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as "bad luck.".”