Gotham Diary:
Previous Epidemics
8 May 2013
A day of spring rain, not at all unwelcome after days and days of clear, cool skies. A day for huddling indoors with the windows open. A day for paperwork, with perhaps an opera in the background — Die Meistersinger?
The other day, I came across the DVD of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It had been languishing in a file drawer along with other series (Aliens, The Belles of St Trinian’s et al, Lord of the Rings) which, in setting up the jewel-box-free DVD library, I apparently decided to file with miniseries. In any case, I hadn’t seen Raiders in ages, and it seemed just right for making dinner. So I put it on in the kitchen and watched it over two days. I proved indeed to be a diversion, and no more — a surprisingly vulgar diversion that I wasn’t quite sure about still enjoying.
It’s vulgar in having been made with no thought whatsoever of the second viewing, or the third, or the fourth. Or the umpteenth, which I’d reached long ago. (I can be certain of having seen it more than twenty-five times.) The starchy dialogue is close to self-satirizing, and every character is conceived in comic-book, which is to say racist, terms. There are moments of fantastic inconsequence, such as the fall into that unlikely abyss taken by a jeep that Indy forces off the road to Cairo. Raiders is a stupid lug of a movie, dependent wholly upon its thrilling set pieces and upon John Williams’s score, which is vulgar, too, but in a patriotic way. (Like a piece of popcorn stuck between my teeth, the opening phrase of the main theme torments me with a resemblance to “The Star-Spangled Banner” that I can’t pin down.) As a fan of Harrison Ford’s mature dramatic performances, I have to say that he’s surprisingly unimpressive as Indiana Jones — not that anyone else would be better, or that being better would be an advantage. Raiders is generally regarded, I believe, as the best of the Indiana Jones movies, but that may be simply because it is the least ambitious. What saves the movie for me — what keeps its severe discount of audience intelligence from making it too irritating to watch — is Karen Allen’s laugh.
(I’ve heard Eddie Izzard’s “Death Star Canteen” routine; I wonder if he’s ever done a take-off of John Rhys-Davies baritonal pomposities as Sallah?)
***
As I was walking around yesterday, from one appointment to the next, my thoughts lodged on a remark made by Albert Hirschman in Shifting Involvements, something about the wave of chivalric grandiosity that inspired so many men to rush off to fight in World War I as bearing “some responsibility for the protracted and tragically murderous refusal of the generals on both sides to recognize the nonheroic realities of trench warfare.” (It took me a while to find this passage, because it appears early in the book, and I was slow to realize that I ought to be highlighting such unusually interesting statements.) I have always wondered about those generals, because they seem collectively to have suffered an inability to see the futility of their engagement. Hirschman, building on such diverse writers as Stefan Zweig and Paul Fussell, suggests a more than plausible explanation. Many Western Europeans were unhappy with the bourgeois peace into which their respective nations settled in the Nineteenth Century, and they were clearly bemused, if not troubled, by the apparent pointlessness of their armed might. Feudalism might be dead, but what of its highly romantic legacy of heroic allegiance? World War I made no sense, except that it’s what masses of ordinary people wanted in 1914. Every man could aspire to be Lohengrin.
In this reading, the war was brought on by forces that, although broadly popular, were not genuinely democratic. The war began more as an insurrection, but an insurrection aimed at toppling other sovereignties. The uprisings in any given country could mobilize state power because the populace had been given some sort of franchise to direct it (albeit a right to vote, not to surge into the streets). Governments were not, as in the past, regarded as oppositional — not at the outset. It was only at the end, when the war turned out to have accomplished nothing but massive death in disgusting trenches, that the people turned on their own leaders, and in kingdoms where the franchise was vague or limited. And then, at the Peace, Germany — pointedly not a party to the negotiations — was made out to be the villain of the piece, solely, it would seem, on the strength of its opening moves. The Peace was of a piece with the War, no less aimlessly chaotic in its maneuvers, and just as driven by “public opinion.”
I strongly believe that society — more exactly, the layers of social cohesion that mat the world — is subject to infectious diseases in the form of what it no longer seems quite the fashion to call “memes,” and I also believe that a working knowledge of previous epidemics — what professors call “history” — is our only defense against future outbreaks. As defenses go, history is far more comparable to rude quarantine than to engineered antibiotic; social medicine lags far behind the personal. But, as I say, it is all we have. We will solve the many problems that confront us, from climate change to unemployment, only as a society, ultimately as a society that includes everyone living. Far fetched? Yes. But it won’t happen otherwise.