Fail-safe?

Have you ever watched victory slip from your hands and remained numb as the tables  are turned? That’s what the Golden State Warriors may feel like after their loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers and that is apparently what the Republicans are naturally hoping for in Cleveland this summer (“RNC: Cavaliers Victory a Sign of Things to Come,” Politico, 6/20/16). You never know until you know and while Donald Trump may continue to make statements that even his own party leaders disapprove of like his comments about the judge in the Trump University case, Hillary Clinton cannot afford to sit on her laurels. Upsets are always in the offing. One of the most famous of course was that of a Democrat over a Republican in the Truman victory over Dewey in l948 (The Chicago Daily Tribune famously printed the erroneous headline"Dewey Defeats Truman"on November 3). But losing itself is physiological process and it’s almost like the body is responding to some kind of unconscious mechanism which puts it into shock. You may have a major lead and all of a sudden you experience a kind of paralysis that’s familiar to being anesthetized. You’re feet are still moving, but they start encountering first one then another defeat, as you become the observer of your own self. You start thinking about losing instead of winning, since you lack the extra bit of willpower that’s needed to clinch victory. Back in 2000 Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article on “The Art of Failure” (The New Yorker, 8/21/2000) and Jonah Lehrer, another New Yorker writer who turned out to have his own problems, which may or may not have had to do with failure, addressed the subject in “The New Neuroscience of Choking” (The New Yorker, 6/5/12). It’s a fascinating subject, provided you're not the one who's experiencing victory being wrested from your hands.

Central Intelligence

Sometimes a movie, no matter how good or bad, strikes a chord that enables it to transcend traditional critical and esthetic judgments. Such is the case with Rawson Marshall Thurber's Central Intelligence. The subject of the movie is bullying and for all intents and purposes it falls into line with a whole bunch of recent silly comedies (The Boss, The Nice Guys) that gain traction by crossing the line with respect to political correctness or taste while at the same time dealing with shall we say "developmental issues." The idea is that a bullied high school student (Dwayne Johnson), who is the subject of a cruel prank, grows up to be the equivalent of Superman. He becomes a C.I.A. agent of extraordinary talents with a physique to match. Both sides of the movie’s protagonist (the before and after) are cartoons. The comedy is a little like Popeye’s biceps which are always ready to explode. But the subliminal effect of all the hyperbole is to detoxify trauma while giving it full imaginative play. Central Intelligence manages to be both antiseptic (to the extent that the bullying that’s presented is so exaggerated as to defy realistic concerns) and at the same curiously psychological. The subject of the bullying comments that he's pushed the incidents that occurred years before far down. They run him, but he’s at the same time rarely, if ever, cognizant of them—despite the fact that the central line of plot has him glomming on to the class valedictorian and star athlete (Kevin Hart), the one person who ever treated him with respect. Melissa McCarthy makes a cameo appearance as another damaged soul—she’s cross-eyed—who’s reunited with her the weirdo on whom she’d had a crush. In the end, everyone marches into the sunset or rather into the CIA, an agency which, despite the clandestine neuronal like connectivity with which it’s portrayed, is not to be confused with the central nervous system.

When is a Duck a Duck?

photo of Mandarin Duck by Adrian Pingstone

“If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck,” is certainly not tantamount to “the pot calling the kettle black.” “The pot calling the kettle black” signifies a kind of cognitive dissonance, where as the duck homily is basically pointing out that “what you see is what you get.” The duck metaphor is not surprisingly invoked in matters of sexuality. If he or she acts sexually, and dresses sexually (red nail polish has been cited as a sign of lubricity while a bulging crotch conjures both a large and tenacious package), he or she is hot. From a philosophical point of view the duck is like giving Plato the bird. As you may remember Plato believed in ideal forms and compared the human condition to a cave in which dwellers could only see the shadows on the wall. Knowing that a duck is a duck is a product of the senses or phenomenon while stating that the essence of the thing cannot be cognitively ascertained posits the notion of the Kantian noumenon. Aristotle was more of a duck man as he believed that fundamentals of reality were ascertainable through perception. Where does the expression “like water off a duck’s back” stand in this discussion of the nature of reality? Well the meaning of the phrase refers to the idea of imperviousness. For instance you might say that Marco Rubio’s insults fell upon Donald Trump “like water off a duck’s back” meaning that Trump was basically unperturbed by them, (though the same might not be said about the insults of more formidable opponents like Hillary Clinton). Another way to put this is to put a duck out in the rain and sea how the water affects the duck’s back. If raindrops are like Rubio’s insults hitting Trump you can be sure that the duck is a duck and not some other Avian creature.

The Donald is a Quack

No one is going to solve the problems of the world and Obama is the one not to do it. He is our resident mortician. He’a smart and humane, the perfect candidate to wheel in the corpses, to console the living. The problems the planet faces are bigger than any one person and the only thing to be suspicious of is those who would propose a cure. Quack cures will only make the sickness worse. Obama is a realist and relativist and he’s totally on target in refusing to refer to radical Islam, which will only flame new fires  (“Obama Slams ‘Yapping” Over ‘Radical Islam’ andTerrorism," NPR, 6/14/16). Hopefully, if she is elected Hillary Clinton will follow in President Obama's path. Moliere wrote a play about a quack preacher called Tartuffe. Trump is our Tartuffe, but there are others who whose platforms are based on big and unfulfillable promises. It's important to remember that with a few significant exceptions (The New Deal was one) radical solutions to radical problems have tended to be the province of despots. Despair produces windmill chasing and the history of the Twentieth Century is rife with millenarian solutions that have been the product of tragic conditions. The North Korean State is a case study in radical problem solving as were the platforms of Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Hitler and Mussolini before them.  When you pay a condolence call, you don’t lecture, you listen. We’re sitting in shit, waiting for the next self-proclaimed prophet of Armageddon to elicit vengeance with automatic weapons or worse. This is an era that requires the services of the stoic and the statesman,  not  firebrands who’re going to set the world on fire.

Sperm Count: Fifty Shades of Janovic Paint

Fifty Shades is such a ubiquitous part of the collective unconscious that’s its spawned a TV series, Submission, in which the characters' fantasies are fueled by a book called The Slave (though creators of the series have tried to differentiate it as a more realistic portrayal of human sexuality than that of its predecessor). It’s a little unrealistic to have a book like The Slave lying out everywhere, as it is in the series. Usually you keep Fifty Shades clones, in a drawer or under a mattress. The Story of O, for all its notoriety, never had it so good. But what'd most interesting is the meta universe in which the series exists. Unlike Fifty Shades, the willing suspension of disbelief is constantly cut short when characters wake up from their fantasies. And daydreaming is really what Submission is about. Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, but someone could do an analysis of the show called The Interpretation of Daydreams. Further, the world in which the series takes place, in which much of the sex is catalyzed by fiction, is a comment on our pornographic culture, in which those who read highly stimulating texts or go on sites, are inundated with imagery that ultimately separates rather than unites them with others. So strong are the images that may have stimulated sex that they end up overwhelming the sex itself, leaving the person who's fantasizing as solitary as he or she would have been were they simply masturbating to the same scenarios. E. L. James may find herself writing yet another sequel entitled Fifty Shades of Janovic Paint to deal with the color combinations on the walls of the rooms in which the characters of Submission live out their reveries of being enslaved.