Alan Jacobs

I actually wouldn’t wish I had a gun. I’ve shot a rifle at camp once, but that’s about it. If I had a gun, there is a good chance I would shoot myself, thus doing the active shooter’s work for him (it’s usually “him.”) But the deeper question is, “If I were confronted with an active shooter, would I wish to have a gun and be trained in its use?” It’s funny, but I still don’t know that I would. I’m pretty clear that I am going to die one day. That moment will not be of my choosing, and it almost certainly will not be too my liking. But death happens. Life — and living — on the other hand are more under my control. And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.

This is not mere cant. It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it’s enough to have a baby. It’s a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I’d have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I’d have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. What I am saying is, if I were gun-owner, I would feel it to be really important that I be a responsible gun-owner, just like, when our kids were born, we both felt the need to be responsible parents. The difference is I like “living” as a parent. I accept the responsibility and rewards of parenting. I don’t really want the responsibilities and rewards of gun-ownership. I guess I’d rather work on my swimming.

oldhollywood:

Dwight Frye in Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale) Set design by Herman Rosse & Charles D. Hall (via)

What has happened in one industry after another is that it has become standard practice to tell people who create anything of aesthetic or intellectual value that they are going to have to be cool with getting paid little or nothing for their work while the people who develop the closed platforms used to “share” what they produce burn through a few rounds of VC money figuring out how to monetize their users. So this summer, I read about Mark Zuckerberg refinancing his multimillion dollar mortgage at 1% interest and then about how the members of Grizzly Bear contemplated whether they would be able to afford health insurance.

I just can’t imagine this playing out too differently in academia. We are such easy marks. Compared to academics, indie rock musicians are positively entrepreneurial. Just look at how we have allowed for-profit publishers to amass fortunes built on our free labor. Decisions about how MOOCs get implemented will be made above our pay grade, anyway, by university administrators who are constantly faced with difficult decisions that pit fiscal realities agains institutional ideals. I would not trade places with them, and I don’t want to caricature them as ruthless pragmatists with no patience for the life of the mind. But it seems hard to explain the alarming shift toward dependence on precarious labor over the last decade, with non-tenure track faculty positions added at approximately three times the rate of tenure-track or tenured positions (raw data are here) without assuming at least a weak bias in favor of budgetary concerns over the ideal of academic freedom.

The Swallow said, He comes like me, Longed for; unexpectedly.

The superficial eye Will pass him by, Said the Wren.

The best singer ever heard. No one will take much notice, Said the Blackbird.

The Owl said, He is who, who is he Who enters the heart as soft As my soundless wings, as me.

Laypeople also had an active role in announcing the reassurance of God’s forgiveness to one another. When a Christian was suffering spiritually over a sin he had committed, absolution from a pastor after a private confession was ideal. But since confessing to a clergyman was not always possible, the church made provision for lay absolution. (A fascinating example, which one can trace from Rittgers’ book to a 2004 article by Christopher B. Brown, is the authority of midwives to pronounce absolution: as quoted in Brown’s article, “In order that the mother in labor may be assured of such divine grace and of the forgiveness of her sins, the midwife or another knowledgeable person may, in such danger and necessity, where no minister is available, absolve and remit her sins herself: ‘Dear sister, since our dear Lord Jesus Christ has given us Christians this power here on earth, that each should and may, in necessity, absolve and remit the sins of another who confesses her sins, believes in Christ, and desires the grace of God, and that the same is then absolved in heaven … [and] since you have made such a confession before me, and in true faith desire the grace of God and the forgiveness of your sins, I therefore, in the stead and by the command of Christ, hereby release and pronounce you free of all your sins, in the Name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.’ ”) In such lay absolution, ordinary men and women were taking up the seemingly clerical work of giving God’s consolation to one another.

I must confess to considerable irritation on this score. When people tell me that “Story” does this or that for us, I always want to throw up my hands and cry, Which story? Haven’t you noticed the astonishing variety of literary productions? Haven’t you noticed that some are brilliant and many are stupid and most are somewhere in between? That some are mean-spirited while others are generous-hearted? And that people don’t agree about which are which? How can anyone who has thought about such matters for five seconds think that you can say anything meaningful about an abstraction as vast and wooly as “Story”?

Christians have been guiltier than most of this tendency, arguing that people love stories because they are responding to the story God is telling through salvation history. Thus Brian Wicker’s 1975 book The Story-Shaped World; which sounds good until you ask which story the world is shaped like. The One Hundred Days of Sodom? The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin? Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? It matters, you know. Now of course, a reasonable person is likely to reply that the gospel is the story Wicker is referring to, which is true. Why not, then, refer to “The Gospel-Shaped World”? Because, I submit, Story is a word to conjure with, as Wicker and Gottschall alike, in their very different ways, know. But it is time to stop conjuring.

The reason for the crawl and slither of these later scenes is plain: the director is coiling himself, as is his wont, for an apocalypse of blood. Dr. Schultz triggers it with one brief deed. “I couldn’t resist,” he says, and that mix of mock-apology and merry boast is purest Tarantino. He has such a fine eye, and his travelling shots of horses and riders are a hint of what tremendous cowboy flicks he might have made, in a straighter age, but his films continue to be snared in a tangle of morality and style. Tarantino is dangerously in love with the look of evil, and all he can counter it with is cool—not strength of purpose, let alone goodness of heart, but simple comeuppance, issued with merciless panache. That is what Django delivers, and it’s the least that Candie deserves, together with other defenders of the Southern status quo: such, at any rate, will be the claim of Tarantino’s fans, although I was disturbed by their yelps of triumphant laughter, at the screening I attended, as a white woman was blown away by Django’s gun. By the time Tarantino shows up as a redneck with an unexplained Australian accent, “Django Unchained” has mislaid its melancholy, and its bitter wit, and become a raucous romp. It is a tribute to the spaghetti Western, cooked al dente, then cooked a while more, and finally sauced to death.

For alcohol and firearms alike, there’s room for sensible restrictions in a non-prohibitionist world. I don’t think the Assault Weapons Ban was remotely effective as public policy, but I don’t think it was a severe blow to liberty either, and maybe there’s a better version waiting to be crafted. The chance, however small, that an experiment in restricting high-capacity magazines might reduce the deadliness of massacres could make such a restriction worth trying. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging gun safety in the same way that we try to limit underage drinking (though those efforts are sometimes counterproductive) and discourage drunk driving.

It does, however, make a case against a worldview that ignores other possible policy responses to gun violence, treats guns themselves as a “ravaging infection” and gun ownership is a form of mass psychosis — and yet sees no contradiction in rhapsodizing elsewhere about “the mystique and the smoke and the complexity” of a substance whose widespread availability kills just as many people every year. I am not one of the many millions of Americans for whom gun ownership provides a sport, a pastime, and a feeling of security, and like Adam Gopnik I enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner. But I don’t confuse that cultural difference with a self-evident moral distinction. Recall that Tartuffe’s real sin wasn’t self-congratulatory piety; it was hypocrisy, and the refusal to apply to his own pleasures and appetites the judgments he passed so easily on others.

On his death-bed, the dwarf king, Thorin commends Bilbo’s blend of courage and wisdom, adding, “if more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” Food and cheer are transitory pleasures, which take their value from the moment and the company. The Hobbit is actually as much about food or lack of it - as well as the fear of being eaten - as it is about the shiny solidity of metal. The dwarves are continually tightening their belts or existing on cram.

Just as Bilbo teaches the dwarves the value of sharing their gold, so they teach him at their first encounter - the unexpected party - the value of sharing food and distributing it as widely as possible. What, one wonders, was one bachelor hobbit going to do with a larder as full as his obviously was with mince-pies and cheese, seed-cakes, pork pies, cold chicken and pickles?

Economics is not a party, and the Incarnation is not a political program but I believe The Hobbit has something profound to offer us at this festive season about the true use of the bounty and beauty of the earth, which is to distribute it in such a way as to enable and make visible as many relations between producers and consumers, and fellow-workers as possible in contrast to the barren golden abstractions and glamour of money-markets. Ruskin wrote, “there is no wealth but life” and the hobbits are so successful a race as enablers and burglars because deep down they know that too.

At a concert in New York, he instructed his bandmates to walk onstage and begin the set by destroying their instruments, since “everybody’s breaking their stuff at the end; who’s breaking it at the beginning?” Standing amid the wreckage, only then did it dawn on him that there would be an audience of people waiting. At other concerts, crowds were treated to twenty minutes of reggae or Miles Davis or jazz-punk iterations of “Loser.” He recalls looking up at the end of one show to see fewer than five people remaining. In a show in Los Angeles, he used a leaf blower to send leaves billowing into the crowd; he’d been preoccupied by Los Angeles’s obsession with manicuring lawns. This was after the riots, it was meant to say something important — “I can’t remember what exactly,” he says now. “Some civic speech” about “the streets running with blood.” It became a self-fulfilling narrative: the “Loser” acting out.