Standing up to "Bully"

elow is a link to a brief article concerning the latest violent video game sensation, "Bully," in which you are enrolled in a tony Northeastern boarding school and must fend of upper-crust bullies through violent means.

http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=20182

Darcia Narvaez, Assoc. Prof of Psychology at Notre Dame says of the game:

One might think that standing up to bullies makes a good game, but not if you are using violence to stand up to them,” said Darcia Narvaez, a University of Notre Dame psychologist who researches moral development in children and the effects of violent video games on them.

The most powerful effect of violence on users is the hero using violence to meet a goal, especially if it is humorous. This type of violence is more likely to be imitated when seen, and particularly when practiced repeatedly.”

Though “Bully” doesn’t involve any blood or killing, fist fighting in the game is almost constant, with one test-gamer reporting that he engaged in 400 fights by the halfway point of the game.

“With violent video game play, children learn to associate violence with pleasure when they are rewarded for hurting another character, and this undermines moral sensitivity,” said Narvaez , director of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethical Education.

60 Abu Ghraib Photos Leaked to Sydney Paper

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/the-photos-america-doesnt-want-seen/2006/02/14/1139890737099.html

Photograph with the Enemy

http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/06/penn

University of Pennsylvania's president, Amy Gutmann, hosted a Halloween party at her home and was put upon to take a photo with a student dressed as a suicide bomber.  The student, Saad Saadi, wore camo pants, a package of fake dynamite strapped to his chest and carried a toy gun, which he used, according to the story, to stage mock executions around campus.  The photos are circulating through cyberspace on Facebook and have gotten president Gutmann in hot water.

Those of you who have read my book will immediately grasp the relevance of this story.  In a middle chapter of my book (which is excerpted at Killing the Buddha www.killingthebuddha.com) I write about attending a Halloween party and encountering an aquaintance--a guy I had a class with once--dressed as Charles Graner, so-called ringleader of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.  He wore rubber golves, glasses, had trimmed his mustache to approximate Graner's and carried a sandbag and a Polaroid camera.  (Check out the excerpt to see how the situation played out for me.)

Let me reflect on the U Penn situation via my own experience. 

First of all, it's important to point out that at the party I attended, now two years past, no one recognized the costume for what it was.  There was no discussion among the party-goers about the tastefulness of the costume.  There was no whispering behind his back or nervous laughter, at least that I saw.  Not that lack of  recognition on the part of party-goers absolves either Saad Saadi or Graner for their poor taste, BUT the root of the problem here is the photographic record of the decision--both the student's decision to wear the costume and president Gutmann's decision to allow her picture to be taken with him. Deciding whether or not a picture of the moment is worth making is an interesting moral conversation in and of itself. John Berger, in his essay "Understanding a Photograph" agrees that a photo, the actual thing itself, is a statement:
"I believe this moment is worth capturing." Therefore, a photo is a reflection of our moral vision.

BUT is it inherently immoral to take such a photo when it is clear that the intent is to create a memento, a conversation piece to show others? Unsure? Well, what about when it is probable that the photo will be widely disseminated to potentially millions of 18-22 year olds via Facebook, a faddish yet extensive online social network as integral to college lifestyle as a cell phone, IM screenname and wireless laptop? Now we're getting closer to the line, and closer to the reality of picture taking today. If you want to become infamous, just take a photo or a video of yourself doing something tasteless, idiotic, pornographic, or all three, and put it on your Facebook/MySpace account or YouTube. Within days your deed will have circled the globe several times over. But, again, is such behavior immoral?

The short and long answer is "No."

The photographs taken of Saad Saadi create moments that are meant to be seen as transgressive in that they resemble or mimics other images we have seen, images of actual militants brandishing weapons and actual executions. This similarity creates a moment of reckoning for the viewer, a moment where the awfulness of the original image is commented on by the reinactment. In the case of Saad Saadi's costume the suicide bomber is ridiculed, made to look like a fool now he is seen in the absurd context of a Halloween party standing next to the president of Penn, who is dressed a a princess, or fairy, or whatever she is sypposed be. The ultimate effect of scary costuming is thus achieved: All of a sudden the bogeyman isn't so scary anymore now that we've seen him for ourselves and we realize that he has no power over us.

Be this as it may, such an explanation does not negate the fact that many may be wounded by such images, especially the images that depict execution style killings, in particular the one in which Saadi appears to be reading the Koran (although it looks suspiciously like the green-covered New Testaments campus preachers distribute) while another party-goer kneels before him as though waiting to be shot. Clearly, the Islamic faith is being indicted. Saadi may honestly (however, naively) believe that he has not impugned Islam, but this reveals his ignorance of how religious people of all Abrahamic faiths feel about how they are represented in popular culture. This sensitivity toward religious peoples is rejected because of the perceived damage and destruction religion reaps--such a corrupt institution does not deserve reverence. But, again, Saadi would probably deny such a blatant attack.

A quick glance at Saad Saadi's website reveals the kind of intellect we're dealing with, an intellect that despite his Ivy-League pedigree is woefully common among young men these days. One link on his page takes you to YouTube and dozens of clips of an amateur "Fight Clubs," in which scrawny kids in boxing gloves try to beat one another up. Another link takes you to video footage Saad took himself. The majority feature him in different settings make masturbatory hand gestures.

With this in mind, it's difficult to give him any credit for putting together a "transgresssive" costume. He just desires to be contrary, which is irresponsible, though not immoral, given the current global climate.

What should be the punishment of idiocy and irresponsibility? Having being part of a similar situation--although I am not president of a university--I would say that these moments catch you by surprise. You want to believe that what you are doing has very little consequences. However, I found that the consequences were, for me, personal and caused me to reflect on my own complicity not just in this kind of Halloween shenanigans but how actual images of pain and suffering change us.

A Great Quote from Thomas Merton

I'm writing this review for the Merton Seasonal, a little journal put out by the International Thomas Merton Society, and I really want to incude the above quote but just can't find the room, so I give it to you.

In a letter to Fr. Dan Berrigan:

In the beginning I was all pre-contemplation because I was
against trivial and meaningless activism. 
But now I have been told that I am destroying the image of the
contemplative vocation, when I write about peace.  In a word, it is all right for the monk to break his ass
putting out packages of cheese for the old monastery, but as to doing anything
that is really fruitful, that is another matter altogether.

Killing the Buddha

Killing the Buddha, the "religion magazine for people made nervous by churches," has published an excerpt from Good War.  Check it out and make sure you stay to read their other high-quality articles and essays. 

http://www.killingthebuddha.com/dogma/prime
directive.htm

Thanks to Peter Manseau, the editor of KtB, and author of Vows and coauthor of Killing the Buddha with Jeff Sharlet, editor of The Revealer, www.therevealer.org

Check out this blog

Very interesting blog run by Jim Johnson titled "(Notes On) Politics, Theory and Photography"--right up my alley. 

He wrote and called my attention to a post he wrote on my book.

Thanks, Jim

http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2006/10/good-war-is-hard-to-find.html

He writes:

I find Griffith's stance in many ways persuasive, but also remain deeply skeptical. He repeatedly chastises Americans for mis-understanding or mis-interpreting what it means to inhabit a "Christian Nation." He at several points calls attention to the literal ignorance of American Chirstians, many of whom when questioned cannot, for instance, name the ten commandments. But I find this narrative of authentic Christianity despoiled by those who are inattentive to or ignorant of its teachings too easy. Here is Griffith: "Nations cannot be Christian, only individuals. And while it may be true that all those who believe in Christ are united in one body, they quickly find themselves at odds with one another, divided by those things that belong to Caesar." The problem for me is that the differences in political and social outlook among various sorts of American Christian cannot be attrbuted simply to the distractions of this world - as though there would not be differences in interpretation and doctrine absent such factors. Any cultural system (of which a religion is one variety) will be contested and contestable for all sorts of internal reasons. Such differences, it seems to me, invariably will play themselves out in politics.

I disagree that religion is just "any cultural system," but I take his point and appreciate it very much. 

Nice mention on the National Book Critics Circle Blog

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2006/10/saturday-morning-roundup_28.html

War is Love....War is Porn

A fascinating review of Clint Eastwood's latest, Flag of Our Fathers at beliefnet.com.

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/202/story_20234_2.html

I haven't yet seen the film, but the trailers I've seen on prime-time TV make it seem that this is another shallow glorification of the Greatest Generation's sacrifices.  Robert Nylan, the reviewer, and a veteran, seems to think this film transcends such ultimately damaging pap by "telling it like it is."

But the line from the review that makes me want to see the film is: 

"Maybe there's no such thing as an anti-war movie. On some basic level, it's all war porn." 

Reason and Faith at Harvard

Coincidentally, this op-ed appeared in today's Washington Post by Father John Jenkins, president of the U. of Notre Dame and Thomas Burrish, the university's provost.

The op-ed draws attention to a recent decision by the Harvard curriculum committee to begin offering more classes that explore the "role of religion in contemporary, historical or future events--personal, cultural, national or international," in order to point out that the ways that Notre Dame is already doing so and invite secular scholars into dialogue with scholars of faith. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/22/AR2006102200714.html

The Fragmentation of the American University

This just in... A very interesting essay by Alistair MacIntyre, prof of philosophy at Notre Dame, on the ways that American Universities (even Catholic ones) are failing to address the important questions pertinent to human beings due to specialization amongst academics. 

Such specialization, he argues, obscures the connections between disciplines, places that need to be studied and understood in order to adquately address the rifts between positions and cultures. 


http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1767

Review in TimeOut Chicago

Below is the link for the first print review of my book.

http://www.timeout.com/chicago/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TOCWebArticles1/86/books/a_good_war_is_hard_to_find.xml

From the review:

...Asking key questions about the state of our country’s faith and humanity without the crutch of an agenda, this book is a massively forceful piece of criticism.

5 out of 6 stars.

Abu Ghraib More About Porn than Torture

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/13/ap/politics/mainD8KNUTR00.shtml

Republican Rep. from Conn, Christopher Shays,  said in a Wednesday debate against his Democratic opponent Diane Farrell, that he believed what happened at Abu Ghraib was not torture, but the actions of a "sex ring"--more about porn that torture.

However, when pressed about his remarks Shays captiulated:  "I was maybe not as expansive as I needed to be," he said. "Of course, the degrading of anyone is torture. We need to deal with it."

General Says Abu Ghraib Officer Lied

http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/feeds/ap/2006/10/16/ap3095740.html

Not a big shock, but the lack of attention the story is getting on the major news outlets is astounding.

Good Question: To What Extent Does Art Help to Change Political Realities?

Thoughts?

Abu Ghraib in Paint

http://www.nysun.com/article/41632

An Article on a traveling exhibition of Columbian artist Fernando Botero's series of paintings based on the Abu Ghraib prison photos. 

From the article:


Naked figures writhe in an eerie darkness. Vicious beasts bare their teeth and snarl. The faces of lost souls cry out in unimaginable agony, forced into strange and contorted positions reminiscent of crucifixion.
Such a vision evokes a scene of the apocalypse typical of 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But no, these paintings by Colombian artist Fernando Botero are depictions of real events. Despite their hellish subject matter, they are all meticulously based on photographs and press accounts of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003.
It seems hard to credit, but Mr. Botero says the pictures, which many will undoubtedly view as a scathing indictment of American foreign policy, are not meant to convey a political message.
Although he admits that President Bush "is not my favorite president," Mr. Botero says art has no effect on political realities, adding that his work is merely a relic to be looked upon by future generations as evidence of events past.
"You just leave a testimony," he said. "It's something that comes from the heart. It's something immortal that moves you to do your work."

Soldier Hoped to Do Good But Was Chaged By War

Check out this article in the New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/us/13awol.htm

A born-again Christian from Washington  who claims to have gone to Iraq to serve his country and God and began to doubt if he was serving either.

From the article: 

He said he saw American soldiers shoot and kill an unarmed Iraqi teenager, and rode in an Army Humvee that sideswiped Iraqi cars and shot an old man’s sheep for fun — both incidents Sergeant Clousing reported to superiors. He said his work as an interrogator led him to conclude that the occupation was creating a cycle of anti-American resentment and violence. After months of soul-searching on his return to Fort Bragg, Sergeant Clousing, 24, failed to report for duty one day.

Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism

I'll be giving a paper at a conference this weekend in Grand Rapids, MI at Grand Valley State U.  The conference is uncannily titled, "Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism"  Fits right in with what I've been writing about.

Tonight I sat down to make sure I know what I'm going to say.  As usual, I started reading another book instead: Archbishop of Cantebury, Rowan Williams' book of essays, Grace and Necessity.  His chapter on Flannery O'Connor is perhaps the best thing I've ever read concerning her work that treats her Catholicity as the reason for her consistently soul shaking brilliance, instead of pointing to it as her tragic flaw.

Williams points out that the irony famously associated with her work can hardly be helped.  The irony in her work is the greatest irony: Humans made in the image and likeness of God yet tend toward evil.

I'll be talking about this irony and its relationship to Grace--the notion that God extends invitations to deeper intimacy with Him through unexpected encounters.  Because it is inevitable that Humans tend toward evil, irony, although unhinging, should not be looked to as an end in itself, but as a surface indication of a deeper spiritual disturbance--a starting point rather than impasse.  

This is what it means for art to empower depth of sight.

Today is Good War's Official Release....I Promise More Posts!

October 1st.  

This is the official release date of the book.  Let the reviews begin...I hope.  

It seems that Good War will be reviewed in the New York Times Book Review.  No idea when.  That's just the hunch at Soft Skull Press because the Review asked for a finished copy.  


Time Out Chicago is reviewing it sometime in the next week or so.

I just downloaded this gadget for my Mac that lets me post to the blog without going to the site  and logging on.  This should lead to more posts.  So keep it tuned here.

Flattering Words from Lo-Fi Tribe

An excerpt from a review at Lo-Fi Tribe (www.lofitribe.com), a hip blog dedicated to religion and theology maintained by Shawn Anthony. He's a seminarian studying to be a minister in the Unitarian Universalist Church:

David Griffith has produced one of the deepest critiques of contemporary American culture I have read to date. He did so in less than 200 pages....I was moved by the author’s ability to totally avoid the familiar rhetoric and party lines owned and wielded by the twin sides of a culture war whose participants miss the big picture entirely. This is especially impressive considering the inspiration of the book: Abu Ghraib. Griffith, however, holds up Abu Ghraib as a mirror in which we can honestly see our state as a nation of collected and individual selves.

Click on the title of this post to see the entire review.

Thanks, Shawn.

Abu Ghraib: the Last Great American Movie

The other day, Peter Manseau, editor of Killing the Buddha sent me an email with this quote from author Michael Tolkin's interview in the New York Times:

"I don't think America's had a good movie made since Abu Ghraib," Tolkin said, before clarifying that he's talking about big movies, not the minuscule ones that have met the industry's quotas for unembarrassing award nominees. "I think it showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don't think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way."

It's difficult to know whtat exactly he means by this, but I'm taking it as a statement about the provocative nature of the images and the way the images call the audience to reflect on not only the character of the American military but their own character, their own response to such images. Let's face it, very seldom do American films provide such a critique. "Boys Don't Cry," the fim that dramatized the life and death of Tina Brandon comes to mind, but I can't think of others off the top of my head.

This got me thinking about ground that I wanted to cover in my book (A Good War is Hard to Find) but just didn't have the space or the time. Might there be a connection between a national cinema that boldly deals with issues of pain, suffering, war and peace in earnest (unironic) ways and the peacefulness of that nation's people? I'm going to need some help from international film experts on this, but my instincts are leading me to think that there might be some truth in this.

The absolute dearth of American films critquing violence as a means of conflict resolution leads me to ask:

Is it plausible that American cinema is responsible for the degradation of a culture's moral imagination, its movement from a nation (prior to WWI) that looked upon war as a barbaric solution to a nation that largely supports violence as a means of achieving what is in the nation's "best interest"?

It's hard to know exactly which films Tolkin is critquing in his statement, but let's take a look the 1980s, since that was when I was doing my first movie-watching. Consider Rambo (especially part 2) Friday the 13th (and its interminable sequels and imitators) and Indiana Jones; in each, violence and identity stand in interesting relation.

Rambo II: Rambo wants to get even with American policy-makers who botched the Vietnam War by sending the cartoonish Army-of-One, Sly Stallone back into Vietnam to kick some Vietcong ass. Pauline Kael's review is a hilarious read as she skewers the film not only for the its crude appeals to the barely pubescent (Arrows tipped with explosive charges blowing up helicoptors) but also the disgruntled vets with not-so-subtle Christ imagery and troubling lines such as, "In order to survive in war you have to become like war." In effect, the film celebrates vigilante justice, critiques American foreign policy makers but, ultimately, further projects the myth that America's strength lies in its rugged individualism. Thus, we see the logic of the U.S. Army's current "Army-of-One" ad campaign: Entice a generation of young people cagey about authority to enlist in the military, a decision that signs away your civilian rights, by telling them that they will become "somebody"--the ultimate fighting machine.

Friday the 13th: Although intended as cheap thrills for teens, through the lens of Tolkin's comments, becomes a series of films that shows us teen on teen sex through the eye holes of a hockey-masked (he was badly burned as a child) serial killer who's pissed off because he's badly deformed and his mother is dead. This formula continues to be bankable, so much so that contemporary American culture is inundated with similar plots and images. There is an odd sickness in American male culture that makes us interested in the violent assault of beautiful woman. Men both revere and wish to protect beautiful women but also punish them for being so beautiful and therefore beyond attainment. Violence becomes associated with the sexual urge to both love and conquer at the same time. (Brett Easton Ellis' "American Pscyho" most recently and infamously explored this issue.)

Indiana Jones: While the most dear to my heart is, nonetheless, a film that portrays bearded men in turbans (Muslims) and men with sinister German accents and monocles (Nazis) teaming up to use the Ark of the Convenant, one of THE most powerfully holy relics to Judeo/Christian thinking, to, ostensibly, wipe out the Jews and the Americans. Hmmm.

What do these films have to do with Abu Ghraib, torture, and the American public's authorization of violence? Well, based on the research done by sociologists and psychologists on what motivates torturers, such films aren't necessarily creating torturers. On the whole, torturers see what they do as a job, a job that would be unncessary if only the subject would talk. Though this may be the case, it seems that Abu Ghraib is not so much about state mandated torture (although the boundaries of what is what is not torture do seem to have been intentionally blurry), it is about young people whose moral consciences did not cause them to balk and a citizenry that failed the same test.

Film studies folks have been thinking about the roots of misrepresentating the "other," and "problematically" totalizing the complexity of cultural identity, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. through the deployment of a subtle visual rhetoric, some of which is conscious and some of which is, arguably, subconscious. These scholars hold that film can call attention to such problems. Just look at countries along cultural fault lines, such as Irish and Mexican film: both deal quite literally with borders and the violence that erupts as a result of the tension between perspectives. In these films the violence is understood as symptomatic of deep social undercurrents.

The explication above is just a beginning, but I think it starts to get at the sinister undercurrents in American culture: how sex, violence, nationalism and religion are connected in the American psyche. The Abu Ghraib seem to be a nexus point for thinking about these connections in the American subconscious and how the connection influences the American mind.