Right. Just got back from a frenetic session of Ed Norton worshipping, also called watching American History X. This is another movie in the same vein as Fight Club, where a lot of people didn't get it, I think. Of course, I'm guessing, but I base this on how everything I remember about the movie at the time it came out revolved around how violent it is. Again, as in the rant about Fight Club, people watched the movie, but failed to analyse it. The violence has a purpose.

Unfortunately, I think that to see the purpose, you have to be receptive to it. In fact, a friend of mine who watched it with me suggested that this should be the type of movie shown in high schools, simply to illustrate that violence only creates violence, solving nothing. Other than the fact that I think that most students would resent the idea that their administration felt that they needed such a blatant lesson in the fact that racism is bad and consequently would be in rebellion against the movie, my question is why putting blind faith in someone can be portrayed as both good and bad, depending on the point of view of the person you're trusting.

I mean, in the movie, you've got the two characters of Derek Vinyard and Cameron Something-Or-Other. Cameron is a right-wing neo-Nazi chickenhawk, in search of his dumb (in all senses) soldiers who will kill all non-whites, presumably so that he can feel better about himself. His motives are never explained. It suffices that he is Angry White Man, against affirmative action and all the various trappings of pluralist society.

Derek starts out as Angry White Man also, partly helped along by his father and the circumstances around his father's death and partly by Cameron. However, after being the exemplary soldier and killing two black men who are vandalizing his car, he goes to prison. While in prison, we see the breakdown of his ideology of white supremacy, based on his gradual understanding that his fellow skinheads can't walk the talk, preferring instead to make deals with the non-white prisoners for illicit items. When the skinheads then rape him, leading to hospitalization, he truly breaks with them, and goes independent, a position that puts him at the disadvantage of every other man in the prison. He expects an attack to come from the blacks and Hispanics in the prison, since it is quite obvious that he's a skinhead who's no longer under their protection, but when the attack doesn't come, Derek starts to realize that the black people are not the evil that he thought they were. The cycle is completed by Derek's work mate, who is a black man who doesn't let Derek's skinhead pose put him on the defensive, but instead continues to treat him as a person, and in fact is the one who arranged for his safety.

All good myths must have the powers of good and evil fighting over a mere mortal, and this is no exception. When Derek is released from prison, with his previous beliefs changed, he goes home and finds his brother following his footsteps, involved with Cameron and the skinheads, but a conversation with Derek changes Danny's mind entirely and off he goes towards the right beliefs of pluralism and yada yada. Good has triumphed over evil, even in the final scene where Danny has been shot by a black kid at his school, and Derek is clasping the body to him, with Danny's mortal blood all over him My personal belief is that Derek would continue in his good ways, much as Alex in A Clockwork Orange does, since otherwise I don't think he'd be grieving, but rather shooting, as he does in other times of great stress in the movie.

I don't object to the way that Derek and Cameron are presented in black and white, with Cameron being evil (and evil is the only word for his hatred) and the post-prison Derek being good. Indeed, so far as that goes, the movie presents a good, if condensed version of the left wing beliefs about racism, specifically that it starts at home, that Derek's loss of his father provoked him to search for someone to blame, which he found in black people, and that Cameron was able to capitalize on Derek's anger and frustration by enlisting him for hatred. Good and evil are classically presented in such ways, even though real life is not so simple. However, this is a movie, and must condense reality somehow.

The conflict, in fact, between good and evil is exactly what makes this movie a truly great work on so many levels - it shows that violence is ultimately only sterile, only creating more violence, it is a classic exposition of mythological archetypes, and it's got Ed Norton in it, etc, I've got a problem with one part, and that is that both brothers put their faith, unquestioningly, in the words of someone else, Derek being able to break out of that trap only when he goes to prison. For him, it starts with his father's anti-affirmative action lecture; when he dies, presumably in need of a role model, Derek switches his allegiance to Cameron and his rhetoric of hatred. For Danny, Derek's younger brother, his hero worship of Derek causes him to believe in what his brother has done. In fact, when his brother goes to prison, you kind of have this vision that Danny is becoming a skinhead at least in part because he knows that it's what Derek would want, and that doing so keeps him from being gone, as their father is gone. Again, in search of a role model, Danny follows Cameron and the pre-prison Derek blindly.

However, the movie falls down on one point, specifically the idea that Danny must place blind faith in one or the other forces, rather than considering the choices that he wants to make. The scene where Derek convinces Danny that his new beliefs are correct is, in that respect, extremely poor, since Derek recounts what had happened to him in prison and Danny, without question, follows Derek's lead, as always. I'm not arguing that Danny should have remained a skinhead - that would have put the movie in the same category as Jude Suss, widely considered to be the most extreme propaganda movie ever made. I am saying that expecting someone to change their convictions based entirely on one night's conversation comes a little too close to Christian faith, and eliminates the possiblity that this supposedly intelligent boy could make his own decisions, and that observing Derek's behaviour might be more instructive to changing Danny's mind. (Of course, the movie doesn't allow time for this, since Danny gets killed the day after Derek gets out of jail, but it could have done so.)

My point is that Danny does not make his own decision about right and wrong, but conveniently follows the view of right that most of America holds.

As far as I know, free thinkers have been considered a problem in most of the world. It is perceived, generally by the rulers, that their society cannot function if someone is constantly asking questions, and this is true. If one continually asks why, someone must be prepared to provide a better answer than "Because I said so," which most societies are not capable of. In part this is because the reasons for actions, even when they were admitted, were known only to a few, and then eventually lost. Two examples illustrate this.

The first, from history, is the murder of Hypatia in 4th century Egypt. She was one of the last of the educated women of the ancient world, a free thinker, and (as I recall) involved with the library at Alexandria, as well as being tremendously intelligent. Her education put her beyond most of the rest of the people, certainly, and her status as free thinker (and I believe pagan) was seen as a threat by the Christian hierarchy that was attempting to become dominant at the time. She was murdered by a mob, who dragged her from her chariot and flayed her alive with oyster shells, as Carl Sagan documents in Cosmos. Although Sagan did not go into the motives of the mob, and I haven't read anyone who has, considering that Cyril of Alexandria, one of the major players in the Church at the time, didn't disapprove of their actions, I surmise that it was done either with his connivance or with his tacit approval but not with his help. By help, of course, I mean anything as simple as letting someone preach a sermon against such people - such women - and using her as an object example. Either way, she was murdered, and the Church pretty much wiped out the focus of discontent in Alexandria, as well as managing to forget that it was the wealthy women of Rome who supported the early Church, not the men. Undoubtedly, Cyril managed to convince himself that she was an ungodly influence on the people whose souls he was trying to save, and either really didn't see or didn't want to see the cynical side of it all, that with her dead (and the library burned shortly thereafter) the focus of the common people would be on the Church that promised them salvation, rather than on freedom of thought, which is particularly dangerous to the Church, as I'll get to in a minute. Suffice it to say that he managed to convince others that it was God's punishment on an impertinant woman, and that God was trying to show that he really did know what was best for his people, which, conviently enough, the priesthood were prepared to dole out in penny-packets at mass.

The second example is from fiction. Michael Marshall Smith's book, Only Forward deals largely with the future, specifically one in which London (no longer called that) has spread over 70% of England's surface and has splintered into Neighbourhoods, with each Neighbourhood being a self-regulating entity, with a distinct lifestyle. One of the Neighbourhoods is called Stable, and it is a forbidden Neighbourhood, based on the fact that the residents believe that the whole world, except for their Neighbourhood, was destroyed by a nuclear war, and that they cannot possibly expect to enter the outside world in the future because of the radiation danger etc. However, it is also made quite clear that anyone in a position of governmental authority is aware that this is a lie; the main character, Stark, breaks into the Neighbourhood to rescue someone who is hiding there, and all of the government figures he encounters have no evident problem in reconciling this outsider - ergo, they know that the outside exists, and indeed have dealings with it. They do not, however, question whether the common people might like to know the truth, preferring instead to present it as their choice not to know, that their ancestors chose to wall themselves off from the rest of the world and pretend that it didn't exist. There is no assumption that maybe the modern day Stablents would like to know the outside, or whether it's possible that too many Stablents do know, by virtue of their governmental positions, the truth about the supposed nuclear war.

In both cases, there is no possiblity of free thought. There is no consideration of what that would imply. Instead, someone in both cases blindly follows the will of another, without understanding it. This is, as far as I know, a specifically Western problem.

Partly I base this on the fact that in Western culture there is less room for someone to renounce society and say that it is all shit as there is in India, where a holy person, in pursuit of enlightenment, can leave the caste system and all of society to find his own truth. Another part of it is the idea of faith in the first place.

In religious terms, faith implies trust. Belief, on the other hand, implies absolute conviction. If someone has faith in the existence of God, they trust that God is there. If someone believes in God, they are convinced of the existence of God, in the face of contrary evidence if necessary. This is why every die-hard Christian I've known points to the world around when I ask them to prove the existence of God - they consider the earth a miracle, while I consider it a scientific process. Muslims I have known, on the other hand, have tried to use rational arguments, and have not resorted to something as silly as calling the earth a miracle. I don't view it as such, so any attempt to convert me that uses little birds as miracles and evidence of God isn't going to get very far. If you really need a further explanation of this, check out Malcolm Ruel's article, "Christians as Believers", in an anthology edited by J. Davis.

Getting back to the original topic, placing your faith blindly in anyone is looking before you leap. It is as bad as belief. When Danny places faith in Derek, no matter what he does, he is trusting his own version of God to be right. While I do believe (not in the religious sense) that Derek was right to stop seeing the world in terms of strictly - both senses - black and white, I disagree with the notion that Danny was able to make up his own mind on the basis of Derek's opinions. It's just exactly like me taking the word of someone who's talked to God - say, Oral Roberts - and saying to myself "Oh, well, shit, that makes sense! Praise Jesus, and Hallelujah!"

The contradiction to me is that of the difference between life and death. If you don't make your own decisions, and learn from your own mistakes, you're basically dead. Life consists entirely of learning. Nothing else.

After all, you're not going to come out of it alive - all you get out of life is the things that you do, which includes your mistakes. And it includes having the guts to make your own decisions, rather than having them made for you. I am not advocating hatred here. I believe firmly that hatred of people because they look a different way or whatever is silly. I do believe in the hatred of specific people - such as Bush - without reservation, but that's different from hating all Texans or whatever.

Without harping on the theme of personal responsibility, which has had entirely too much screen time in the archive, I believe that it is important to make decisions based on more than merely who else is making the same decision. In American History X, Derek's viewpoint is presented as good, and ergo the one that Danny comes to accept, while Cameron's is presented as bad and the one that is rejected. I find it just possible that Derek would win, having a brother relationship with Danny. I also find it possible - if you look around, it's more than possible, it happens all the time - that Danny trusts Derek to be right without stopping to consider any of the other information he's ever received. From the standpoint of the movie, that's fine. Reality must be condensed. But ultimately, all that we are is our decisions, and Danny fails to make a decision. He pays for Derek's, however.

The decisions that you make are what will determine who you are. Trust a funny-looking German politician to pull your country out of the 1930s depression, and all of a sudden, you're helping to exterminate 'inferior races'. And that's what you'll be remembered for. Not the fact that all you maybe wanted to do was help out your family, but the fact that you've become, at least through silence, a willing participant.

Freedom of thought is one of the very few things that they cannot take away from us. Every other freedom, yes. Those can be removed. However, not even the most paranoid people have figured out a way to take our thoughts. Consequently, use them. Soren Kierkegaard said that people demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought they avoid; he was right. As long as you can just say something, without having to think about it, that's not freedom. If you have to make a decision - as both Danny and Derek do - don't just follow someone else's decision. Consider your reasons, and theirs, and then make the decision based on your own thoughts.

Always make the decision. Do not place your faith blindly in anyone, right or wrong.

Still electioneering, but with no surprises

Channon