This election day was tough for a lot of Democrats—myself included—but I am proud of how I spent the afternoon of election day. I went to a theater and saw director Mel Gibson’s new movie, Hacksaw Ridge. It is a very life-and-death movie and extremely gory. On that day, the contrast between all that violence and suffering, on the one hand, and “losing an election” on the other, helped me through the day–and through the night.
I’ve had a chance now to give my attention to what the movie was actually about and it turns out that I value it for more than its immediately analgesic properties. I want to tell you a little about the story. I am confident I can do that. Then I want to tell you about the look on Desmond Doss’s face (Doss is portrayed by Andrew Garfield), his face at one special point in the film. At that job, I am pretty sure I will fail, but I’m OK with that. If I could go back and pay full price to see a five second segment of the movie—and I’m not really sure I won’t—that is the five seconds I would want to see. It is the five seconds I would recommend to you.
Desmond Doss was the first conscientious objector ever to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. [1] That makes him stand out, even as we look back at his career from our present time. But, of course, he stood out even more dramatically at basic training where fusing a bunch of individuals into a team is the job to be done. Doss didn’t look like a team member. “Belonging to the team” was defined in basic training as being willing to kill to protect your buddies. Doss’s commitment that he would be willing to die to protect his buddies didn’t have much traction during basic training. It seemed abstract, somehow.
His commander tried to get rid of him in any number of ways. The Drill Instructor invited the other men to beat Doss up and they did. The psychologist tried to make a case that Doss was crazy. [2] They court-martialed him for refusing to obey a direct order and had he been convicted, he would have spent the remainder of the war in prison instead of saving the lives of the people who has beaten him.
Part of the psychological exam comes back later in the story, so I want to note it here. The psychologist, learning that Doss prays, asks whether Doss hears voices. He doesn’t. But, pursues the psychologist, you do pray, you have conversations with God. Well, Doss says, a little ruefully I thought, they are kind of one way conversations. From the movie’s standpoint, this early in the story, we know that God hears Doss and that Doss does not hear God. [3]
As part of the campaign to control Okinawa, the American troops had assaulted Hacksaw Ridge several times before In the movie version, it was Doss’s first time in battle as a medic. The fighting was horrible and as director, Mel Gibson, makes the most of it. But it establishes the setting for the five seconds I would like to see again. The immediate landscape is a waste of blasted trees and scorched rocks. The sound of war is unbearably loud. The suffering of Doss’s company is awful and personal. We know these people who are in such agony and so does Doss. And in that setting, Doss loses touch with God.
For the first time in the film, we see him confused. He looks wildly around, trying to see something in the smoke and flame and says, “God, I can’t hear you.” Doss has lost touch with the mission that had, up until then, sustained him.
Then, from off in the smoke somewhere, but not too far away, a soldier moans, “Can anyone help me?” We see the meanings of that call—all the meanings—register on Doss’s face.
Those are the five seconds I want to see again and invite you to see if you are able to get through the gore.
Doss knows immediately what to do and knows, at the same time, that he has heard God. You could say he has heard God “through” or “in” the voice of the wounded soldier. [4] Actually, you could say that all he actually heard was the soldier. I think that is an entirely plausible way to describe the event from the outside. But the story gives us how it seemed to Doss from the inside. We can see, as we look at the change in his face, what that voice meant to him.
So he went back into the battle. “Lord,” he prayer over and over throughout that night, “Help me get just one more.” He got 72.
[1] There have been two since, both from the Vietnam war.
[2] At that point, I have to say, my mind flashed back to the wonderful psychiatric exam of an actor in Montreal who was hired to play Jesus in a passion play put together by the local Catholic diocese. The psychiatrist examined “Jesus” along several lines, but it was clear that she liked him and the note she sent to the judge—and which we see the judge reading from the bench—said, “This is one of the sanest men I have ever met. He is in a lot better shape than a lot of the judges in this system.” That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close. The movie is called Jesus of Montreal.
[3] That turns out to be important because once the troops land at Okinawa, the movie turns wildly visual. “Seeing” in nearly all there is, apart from the artillery shellings, for the next hour. But the story turns on “hearing.”
[4] Doss heard that same voice, we may imagine, in the Japanese soldiers he treated.
One of the great pleasures of teaching my Political Psychology class [1] over the years was introducing my students to Martin E. P. Seligman’s marvelous book, Helplessness. The focus of the book was on a particular cognition—something you had learned. And what you had learned is “there is nothing I can do.”
The educated dog lies there. The light comes on. Eventually, the shock starts. The educated dog lies on the floor looking philosophical. The first dog says, “Hey. Like this. See? The light comes on, I jump over the barrier. Neither of us is wearing a leash. Come on! It’s not hard. Just Do It.” The second dog doesn’t respond because he knows it is no use and he continues to “know” that even when safety is a few easy feet away. This dog in exhibiting “learned helplessness,” which is the subject of Seligman’s early work.
old people. I had seen a lot of Truly Amazing Elders (TAE) before I came to Holladay Park Plaza, but I had never seen such a concentration of old people before. There is nothing like living in a retirement center to see a lot of old people, after all.
If I had really wanted a restoration of that relationship, wanted it urgently, I think I would have noticed when the grievance left. So what I called “a failure of attention” at the time (I just didn’t notice when the grievance stopped) may actually have been a failure of will (I just didn’t want it badly enough). So to translate this everyday catastrophe back into the world of Seligman’s dogs, I didn’t want to be free of the leash badly enough to notice when I actually got free.
The title of this ballot measure is as follows: Limits contributions, expenditures, requires disclosure in Multnomah County candidate elections. The measure in the form of a question (Should the charter require…?) follows, then a Summary, then an Explanatory Statement. Then there are 18 “arguments” in support of the idea. All of the people you expect to weigh in against the perversion of elections by the dominance of big spenders are represented here. All these arguments make good sense to me.
is that it calls for a comparison of “amounts” or “degrees” of being blessed. It is the word “more” in the maxim that has us comparing one amount of blessedness with another and saying that one amount is larger. That is what “more” means and what it needs to mean. [It says right here than you aren’t allowed to do that.]
The wife, Parveneh, (Bahar Pars) of Ove’s new neighbor is Persian. That’s a short way of saying that she doesn’t know how to be Swedish. It turns out that she has no intention of becoming culturally Swedish, but that’s another story. [2] Parveneh has to make a quick trip to the hospital and leaves Ove in the waiting room with her two children. [This one picture nails the two characters exactly.]
because I think that there is an affinity of some kind between one act of kindness and another. [4] Something like the current of a stream is set up and Ove “drifts downstream” following the implications of the kindnesses he has done, just as he had been following the logic of his refusal to help any of his neighbors. Actually, “who he is to the neighbors” is very much like “who he was to his wife,” who was a marvelous person and the first person ever to really believe in him.
As I continued thinking about the sign (I do walk by it every day), I began thinking about the premise. That’s just the way my mind works. Negatively, the premise can be put this way: the milk does not belong to you unless you are a calf. Positively, we could say that the milk is the rightful property of the cow’s progeny, not the cow’s owner.
Another unfunny way to think about the sign is to think about the alternatives the sign offers. Nothing against coconut milk, of course, or soy milk. It isn’t that I have some fantasy that little coconuts or little soy beans are being deprived of milk that would otherwise have been theirs.
I don’t think the sign would have gotten under my skin the way it has if I had not enjoyed it so much the first few times I saw it. I saw it as a clever pun (de-calf your coffee) rather than as a moral admonition. And when I saw the sign for what it was, I had the feeling that I had been ambushed—as if someone had whacked me on the knuckles while I was still laughing.
The answer is Yes. First, he needs to do a little defining of terms. Second, he wants to answer the question positively: Yes, you can have a good life even if you don’t have a good job. I’m right with him so far.
That’s the feather. That’s how you know you are flying. And I think a “magic feather” is a really good symbol for this effect because this kind of a world is not something that individual workers can do or groups of workers can do. It is not something a candidate supported by the workers can do. It’s “magic” and the symbol of the magic is the feather.
All we need now is the mouse. But politicians, people who are actually running for office and who tell voters “what they need to hear,” lose . And not only do they lose, but they also take a lot of other candidates down with them, candidates much further down the ballot.
the bad people over there. Of course, there are other things that are incredibly bad—like when an ICBM lands on you, sent by people following the same script. Still, firing them off is a pretty tidy action.
The woman who is trying to look “just slutty enough” is an example of the communications paradigm. The women who are dressing modestly so that they will send the message they want to send are, likewise, examples of the communications paradigm. And when Cranley complains: “Too loose. Too tight. Too low. Too high. Who teaches us about these things anymore?,” she is complaining about a lack of the vocabulary that will enable women to say what they mean.
