David Attenborough, where are you?

Here we go ... another occasion when I justify the title of this blog.

I have an inner conflict over historical accuracy in films (other media too, but most strongly in films and television; so "films" is my shorthand for the lot).

On the one hand, I robustly defend the thesis that fiction has no obligation to fact – as Ralph Harper puts it, “Fiction and romance do not need facts to tell the truth...” Its only obligation is to the reader: violate too many expectations and the contract to suspend disbelief will be ruptured, but short of that anything goes. Without that acceptance, we would have no fiction at all.

On the other hand, I am alarmed by how common it is to have a view of the world which results from the failure to separate fiction from fact.

I suppose, if pushed to it, I would say that I am happy with any amount of invention if it supports the fiction but that I see no reason to mess with accuracy where there is no reason to do so.

Why am I moaning on about this? Because I am surrounded at the moment by advertisements for the DVD release of Ice age 3: dawn of the dinosaurs.

I watched and immensely enjoyed the first in this franchise; I watched and moderately enjoyed the second. The anachronisms and other liberties (including the extinction of the dodo several millennia early) didn't bother me in the slightest; hey, it's a fiction. I haven't seen the third, but have no doubt that I would enjoy that too ... yet that title gnaws at me. For a bunch of mammals to witness the dawn of the dinosaurs (who actually predeceased them by tens of millions of years) is ... just ... one violated expectation too far, for this viewer at least.

Why undermine children's learning, and the efforts of overworked primary school teachers, for no reason?

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• Carlos Saldanha, Ice age 3: dawn of the dinosaurs. 2009: 20th Century Fox
• Ralph Harper, The world of the thriller. Cleveland, Ohio, 1969: Press of Case Western Reserve University. 0829501487.
  
  

A vivid view of things

It's good to see VIVID back after a lull.

Anyone who agreed with, disagreed with, or otherwise reacted to my Soul searching posts (17th and 27th September) may be interested in readin Animals and us: an off-planet view of a species in denial.

“We know that the alien will quickly discover what we are doing; and, assuming a sensitive disposition, will likely reel in dismay at the kinds of things that go on to assess how much of these various substances must be injected, smothered, rubbed or otherwise forced into the flesh, eyes and organs of animals to make them blind, paralysed, crippled or dead, and thereby to enable us to rate the substances as toxic or safe.”

Ugh.

“US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has blocked the public release of 44 pictures of foreign detainees abused by their captors, saying their release would endanger American soldiers. The Obama administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court late on Friday saying that Gates has invoked new powers blocking the release of the photos.”

(Irish Times, 15 Nov, 2009)

From the moral hope in the days after Obama's election to ... this.

With our tails between our legs

In the countries which have troops there, opinion is shifting increasingly in favour of withdrawing them from Afghanistan. In the two main provider states, US and UK, president Obama and prime minister Brown are both obviously considering it as an option; populations in both countries are ahead of them.

I am one of those who doubt that the troops are doing anything useful there. As with Iraq, the intervention in Afghanistan was incompetent at best and ... at worst would take more time and heart than I have for it at the moment. But withdrawal will be yet another in the long chain of betrayals which we perpetrate over and over again: enter, promise the world, realise the cost and withdraw leaving locals to carry the can. Even as I agree that troops should be withdrawn, I am deeply ashamed.

Fragility

I was talking to a group of teenagers on a community education programme, and they started discussing the subjects they were doing. After a while, they got around to sociology, and the sociologist who is teaching them.

“It's all about feminism, nothing but feminism,” said one of the lads, “she's a feminist, and it's indoctrination.”

I know the person concerned, and this sounded extremely unlikely. Although she is no doubt a feminist (and quite right too), I never remember her ever having mentioned feminism – and her opposition to anyone either delivering or accepting indoctrination is strong and passionate. She would always be scrupulous about presenting both her own views and those of which she disapproved with equal neutrality

“Well”, I said, “you've only been doing it for six weeks, and feminism is a very important force in the way the world has changed over the past century – especially the past forty years or so. You need to learn about the forces which shape society, and the ways in which society is viewed by those who study it. Feminism is part of both. When I was at school, it would have been less so; but now you need to see it alongside others like Marxism and...”

“Marksism?” he queried, looking puzzled, “Is that about how our work is marked?”

Pop goes the weasel

There are more strands and trains of thought that could be followed from military psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan and the Fort Hood shootings than I could begin to count, never mind pick up and examine. I have no great urge to pursue the obvious ironies. The perennial imbalance of concern between western lives (whether thirteen US at Fort Hood, five British a few days earlier at Shin Kalay, or any other) and eastern ones (tens of thousands, uncommented) is not for this moment. The reflex to condemn Islam for harm done by one Moslem (though not to credit it for any good done by others) while separating individual from religion when the perpetrator is Christian, Jim Putnam has compellingly highlighted already.

One aspect which catches at me and holds me is one which may or may not be true, but nevertheless stands as an example of something incontrovertibly true.

Hasan's aunt and cousin, before fear silenced them, asserted that he had been harassed and abused because of his religion, his name, his ethnicity. Whether that is true or not, it is only too believable. It is very believable to anyone who has even fleetingly observed the canteen cultures of military communities (anywhere, of any nationality or culture). More than that, it is very believable to anyone who has seen how human beings behave in any closed community from campus to small town to workplace to neighbourhood to playground.

Within spatially constrained groups, as they get larger, our human urge to alienate "the other" turns inward and reaches pressure cooker levels. The other can be anyone who is different, in any way. Religion will do. Ethnicity will do. An unusual name, a weight problem, different opinions, just a quiet and inward nature, will do.

Whether or not Nidal Malik Hasan had been harassed and abused because of his religion, his name, or his ethnicity, it is certain from his actions on Thursday 5th November that he was, for whatever reason and by whatever mechanism, alienated.

To suggest that an alienated individual will automatically go postal and top the nearest random group of passers by is as grossly ludicrous, inaccurate and unfair as to make the same assumption on the basis of religion. People suffer alienation every day, in their thousands and millions, and never take it out on anyone else. I see two of my students, currently, being subtly victimised by their peer group, and neither of them will hurt a fly in return, never mind stage a Columbine or a Dunblane.

But: when an explosion does occur, there are two important differences between religion and alienation. Unlike religion (or ethnicity or name or sexual orientation or any number of other factors), alienation to the point of fracture lies, one way or another, behind every such explosion. And unlike religion, or ethnicity, or whatever, alienation is created by us: we, the populations around the alienated perpetrator, the ones who supply her/his victims, are also the ones who all too often create the alienation. And we are the ones who could stop doing so; but blaming religion, or ethnicity, or something intrinsic to the other, is so much easier.

As long as we create broken people, we will suffer the consequences.

Grapher 8

Golden Software's new version of its big gun product Surfer, reviewed here in June, was followed last month by an upgrade to version 8 of its page-oriented technical graphics sibling Grapher. [More]