Ripples in a community

For the same reason that I don’t show my daughter’s face, I almost never show pictures of our neighbours here in rural Ireland. Many of our older neighbours grew up in a different world, growing up without electricity or cars, and talking to them is like meeting a different era. Out of curiosity, I’ve looked up a few of them online and can’t find them – possibly some of the last Westerners for whom that would be true. Certainly they don’t need to be plunged into the world of facial-recognition software and phone marketing.

Even out here, we are no longer feel community as people once did, for we no longer need each other -- we can all drive to the supermarket, order online and distract ourselves with endless forms of media. We don’t need to talk to our neighbours anymore, and often don’t want to, as a Youtube presenter will usually be more wackily entertaining than they are.

Of course, I can't judge too harshly, for I'm writing this on a computer, and you're reading it on one; they have their uses. Nor do I have the deep ties from childhood that most people have here; I'm an immigrant to this place myself.

It's obvious, though, that people here still feel the bonds of community more than most modern people I know. Sometimes I'm walking to church, for example, and a neighbour slows down in his car and asks if I need a lift, and I gratefully pile in back with his kids. In most modern societies -- my own USA in particular - people are too scared to pick up hitchhikers, until no one can hitchhike but the genuinely scary.

We see that web of reciprocity when someone dies. A young man who lived near us died a few weeks ago, and people have been talking about it ever since -- at Mass, at the pub, kids at the school, and at the shop. I didn't know him well myself -- I'd merely see him at the pub sometimes -- and of course I didn't grow up with most of the people here. Yet I could get a sense of how, in a more traditional community, everyone's actions affect everyone else, and a death most of all.

Shortly after the death, I'm told, his family held a wake, where everyone comes to pay their respects to the man and celebrate his life. The next day they had a funeral, which here usually means the family carrying the coffin from the house to the church, perhaps miles away, while all the friends march behind. Within a short time various people around us had erected a cross at the site of his death, and the flowers around it have been kept fresh ever since. We have other crosses like that near us, some from decades ago, and people still place mementoes around it.

I talked about the man's death with the teller at my credit union -- we know each other by name, and she knew his family -- and I realised how different such an experience must be from visiting a regular bank these days. I keep a separate account in a modern bank in Dublin, and they refuse to even use tellers anymore -- they rely only on ATMs, which they presumably don’t have to pay. Here, at the local credit union, I know the name of the lady that greets me, and we can talk about all the local news, good or ill.

Likewise, I talked to our neighbour down the road -- we'll call him Bill -- about buying some turf this year. Turf is the fuel we use, centuries of compacted sphagnum peat moss that has become a spongy maroon ground under your feet as you walk through the bog. Where locals have drained the bog and cleared away the brush, they then slice grooves over the landscape, so that strips of turf lie in rows like ropes of liquorice. Then we break them into chunks about the size and shape of bricks, and “foot” them, or stack them in a cross-hatching pattern so they can dry in the air during the summer months. Finally we gather them and bring them home, and for most local people that’s their winter heat.

Bill owns part of the bog near us, and it was he who cut our turf before and helped us cart it home. This time, though, he said he wasn’t sure he could.

“Your man with the tractor cuts it for me,” he said, “and he’s going out of business now. He was going to leave it to his son, but his son was the young man who died.”

In his mammoth work Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam uses surveys, time diaries and membership rolls to track the history of American social life, and the results were staggering. Social clubs like Oddfellows or Kiwanis, bowling and softball leagues, family dinners and neighbourhood poker games, political caucuses and gardening clubs – all these staples of life for decades, which had supported their members through Great Depressions and World Wars, had all diminished to a near-vanishing point.

Life in rural Ireland was less dynamic than mid-20^th-century America, but you could see the same social bonds, centred around families, pubs and the Church. In fact, you could find equivalents in almost every society that has ever existed. As far as we can tell, for most hunter-gatherers, peasants, villagers or urban neighbours through history, community did not exist as an aspiration or buzzword, it was the medium in which human life took place. Most writers and philosophers in history did not even have to talk about its value, for it was the one resource no one lacked.

These days, we try to re-create community with support groups and fan clubs of various kinds, but they are Astroturf, planted to simulate the real thing where it won’t grow. Putnam quotes sociologist Robert Wuthnow in saying that “the kind of community these small groups create is quite different from the communities in which people have lived in the past. These communities are more fluid and more concerned with the emotional states of the individual … the social contract binding members together asserts only the weakest of obligations. Never criticize. Leave quietly if you become dissatisfied. We can imagine that those small groups really substitute for families, neighbourhoods and broader community attachments that may demand lifelong commitments, when, in fact, they do not.”

In a more traditional world, community isn't a hobby or cause; people need each other. When you stand in line at the shop, the person in front of you might have made the winning play for the local football team ten years ago, might coach your daughter's school, might be repairing your car next week or checking your horses, might be needed to give you a jump start on a cold morning or might make the best jam around. That's the case everywhere, of course, but in the modern world, filled with crowds and distractions, it's easy to forget.

A more old-fashioned community, though, you can see the bonds of support and obligation all around you. They temper your reactions, help you back down from conflict, encourage you to make deposits in the local bank of personal favours, and keep you from sinking too low when things go wrong. They do not free you to indulge any impulse or float unmoored through a sea of strangers, to invent and reinvent yourself endlessly according to your whims. Rather, they constrain you in all the best ways, anchor you in a cultural harbour, and limit your life to a single road taken. Enough such threads of obligation, layer upon layer, weave a civilisation.

When someone dies, everyone feels it. There's a seat empty at the pub, a pew with a space at Mass, local daughters without a father. One of our neighbours is selling his business, another might have to support himself with his cows rather than his turf, and we will have to rely on firewood rather than turf this winter. In a community like this you can see the ripples people make when they come and go, and no one goes through life alone -- alive or departed, they remain part of something larger and older than themselves.

The Breakup

This morning in Ireland, we got the same screaming-headline news as everyone else – the pound crashing, the UK prime minister resigning and so on. To my acquaintances here, though -- bus drivers, clerks and farmers – the news is not an abstraction. They wonder how this will affect their visas, their UK relatives, their pensions, banks, next car, and all the burning minutiae of daily life.

My friends in London, Italy and France are all doing the same; the economies are so deeply intertwined that untangling them will take years. Imagine how Louisianans would be affected by a “Texit,” and you have some idea how it feels. As an American here, I also wonder if it makes Donald Trump’s election look more likely.

It wouldn’t cause a Trump victory, of course, but perhaps presage it. The UK has always been just a little ahead of the USA; Thatcher preceded Reagan, Blair preceded Clinton, and Corbyn preceded Sanders. Moreover, Brexit supporters shared a lot in common with Trump supporters, in both demographics and frustrations.  

The UK and USA are global powers somewhat in decline, with the UK obviously some decades ahead of us. Both powers saw a flood of Third-World immigrants in recent decades – in Europe especially, with millions of refugees escaping the war-torn Middle East --- competing for jobs and causing tension among working-class natives. Both countries took part in the same Mid-East wars and suffered the same Great Recession – both supposedly over, but with loved ones still dead and many working people still unemployed.

Both populist movements promised to make their country great again, toss aside foreign entanglements, reduce immigration, and bring back local industry. Both movements were called “far-right,” but were more about class -- and in both countries the elites of both major parties, along with the media, opposed and underestimated them until the last moment. In both countries the debate turned venomous, even violent, with protesters clashing with Trump supporters in the USA, and a pro-EU minister of Parliament shot and stabbed to death last week in the UK.

Now that the vote is over, as Daniel Larison pointed out,much will depend on how bitter the divorce settlement will be, but this decision could trigger a lot of other dominoes.  

For one thing, this could well be the end of Britain after 300 years. The BBC’s county vote map shows the divide; English counties almost entirely voted to leave the EU, Scottish counties to stay. 

The scheduling of the Scottish independence vote two years ago could not have been accidental, as Euro-advocates must have hoped the Scottish vote would anchor Britain -- it didn’t. As the leader of the Scottish separatist movement put it a few months ago, if the UK leaves Europe, Scotland is likely to leave the UK. (Britain is England plus Scotland, Wales and a few islands. The UK is all those plus Northern Ireland.)

Here in Ireland we have the same questions as the rest of Europe, only more so – the UK is our main trading partner. And we have a unique reason to be wary; we fought a thousand-year conflict with our neighbour, which came to an end only in the 1990s. Since that time, along a border once patrolled by paramilitary units, a generation of Irish have grown up travelling between North and South without even flashing a passport. Now, though, Northern Ireland voted much as Scotland did, with a majority wanting to remain European; if Scotland goes, they might want to leave as well.

In Ireland, meanwhile, voters had their own populist moment earlier this year, and elected a near-majority of third parties and independents.  Chief among them is Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, and if this anti-establishment trend continues they could lead the next government. That doesn’t mean they would resume their old ways – they have spent decades working hard to be a respectable political party, and their younger members are too young to even remember the terrorism of the 70s and 80s – but within hours of the vote, they did renew their call for Irish reunification.

How the rest of Europe will handle this remains to be seen – they are left holding several unenviable crises, including sky-high Mediterranean unemployment and a million refugees a year flooding into the continent. Right now, the rest of the world is shaking its head at Britons’ apparent foolishness, and half the UK is doing the same. For the other half, though, this is their independence day, the moment they can remake their country in their image.

This November 9, we’ll see if my native USA looks the same.  

 

Once and Future Superheroes

First of all, you like superheroes.

Sure, you think you’re above that sort of thing. You picture muscle-bound men in Mardis Gras outfits, floating through air shooting eye lasers, fighting people with names like Doctor Atrocity and making little “BLAMMO!” signs when they punch. And yeah, that can happen.  

Here’s the thing, though: As long as humans have existed, we have told legends of people with super-human abilities, and delighted in stories of how they faced danger and out-fought or out-witted enemies. Gilgamesh for the Sumerians, Odysseus and Jason for the Greeks, Samson for the Hebrews, Beowulf for the Saxons – ancient scriptures, barbarian sagas and oral traditions swell with superheroes. In a more modern era the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, Paul Bunyan, the Lone Ranger, James Bond and Sherlock Holmes are all basically super-heroes, doing things real people can’t do. Every culture has stories like this; our forebears told them around campfires or mead-halls, 20^th-century kids read them in comic books.

By the end of the century, moreover, comic books had grown up with their audiences, until series like Sandman or Watchmen won literature awards competing against regular fiction. Moving to the silver screen, though, proved a delicate business; men in fluorescent tights look better on newsprint than on a five-metre-tall screen, and the countercultural types in Hollywood weren’t keen on Captain America’s values anyway. The last few decades left a long string of embarrassing failures, painfully campy or painfully dark.

In this century, though, the superhero genre took over Hollywood as thoroughly as musicals and westerns once did, and pitched to adults as much as children. Literally fleshing out a two-dimensional hero, though, means keeping the basic traits and the broad strokes of the mythology, while distilling decades of character development down to a few hours. Do it badly and you keep the juvenile tone and just make it boring or violent. To see both of these choices in action, you can see this spring’s two competing blockbusters, Captain America: Civil War and Superman vs. Batman.

The films came from each of the two rival comic-book franchises that dominated the industry since the Great Depression, DC and Marvel. Both pit two of their central heroes against each other – one a patriotically-coloured, super-powered, idealistic hero from the World War II era (Superman, Captain America), the other a genius playboy billionaire who invents a techno-suit in his cave (Batman, Iron Man). Both sets of characters are orphans in fights that involve their dead parents, both involve superheroes giving testimony to government committees, and both involve ordinary humans who became collateral damage in superhero fights in previous movies now plotting revenge.

More importantly, both films deal – or in Superman/Batman’s case, pretend to deal – with the thoughtful questions that must be answered in any modern, grown-up treatment of superheroes. If we learned that demigods hid in disguise among us, how would that change us? Would we regard them as celebrities? Would we fear them as aliens infiltrating the human race – which, to be fair, Superman is? Would they become the new nuclear weapons, and tip the global balance of power?

More importantly, any one super-battle destroys far more than the September 11 attacks did; how would that change us? Superheroes break laws all the time, from New York’s anti-mask laws to international treaties – to whom do they answer? If they answer to no one, and have power over all of us, how do they represent freedom and democracy? On the other hand, should they answer to governments that we don’t trust ourselves?  Americans increasingly have a problem with the behaviour of regular, non-super-powered police officers, who don’t fire lasers from their eyes.

These questions could launch a great story, in which the moral dilemmas allow decent people with the best intentions to take opposite sides. None of it works, though, unless the superheroes are, on some level, decent people. Both films promised; one delivered. 

Superman/Batman failed with critics and audiences, seeing its mammoth opening weekend collapse after word got out. Much has been made of the lava-pit colour scheme, the incomprehensible plot, Jesse Eisenberg’s grating performance, and director Zac Snyder’s slow-motion action scenes – but a uniformly mediocre film would not have angered audiences as much. This film upset fans because, like Snyder’s Superman reboot Man of Steel, it had a few promising moments early on, only to squander their potential later. 

Man of Steel’s hopeful early moments dealt with a young Clark Kent, discovering as a child that he could see people’s skeletons, or a young Superman just learning to fly. Few premises are as reliably engrossing as a regular kid realising he’s special and having to hide it, as fans of Harry Potter and a million other young-adult books can attest. It also makes a character sympathetic and relatable, particularly vital when portraying a laser-eyed alien.  

Unfortunately, the movie soon descends into giant action sequences that seem to obliterate most of a city, like Superman causing Nagasaki. With its tin ear for humanity, the film treats the end as a happy, romantic embrace between Superman and Lois Lane, apparently unconcerned with the thousands of corpses all around them.  

In the same way, Superman/Batman begins brilliantly, seemingly correcting Man of Steel’s mistakes by showing that same destruction from the perspective of the victims – including Bruce Wayne, running in civilian guise into the disaster to rescue his employees. It gives us something superhero movies have long needed: actual people, not just pointing at the sky and waiting to be saved, but acting to save each other when their ordinary day turns tragic. Yet this, too, quickly falls by the wayside as Snyder’s heroes stop acting heroic, or even sane, after the first few scenes. 

As directors accumulate a filmography, quirks that we forgave in isolation look uglier when exposed as part of a pattern. Woody Allen looked brilliant as the director of Annie Hall, but after thirty movies about neurotic upper-class intellectuals having affairs with younger women in a bizarrely white city, it started to feel creepy. Tim Burton seemed refreshing when he made Beetlejuice, but not after a quarter-century of unnecessarily grotesque films masking thin, inconsequential stories. 

Likewise, Zac Snyder’s heroes look awesome – literally -- on screen-savers and trailers; they come back-lit by halos and spotlights, their violence captured in sensuous detail, not so much filmed as uploaded in computer-generated glory. When they fly, they hurtle through the clouds; when they punch, their fists appear solid as marble, and when they land the shock wave obliterates neighbourhoods.    

But in what sense are any of his heroes … heroic? The Spartans in 300 kill their handicapped babies, but audiences rationalised that as historical accuracy -- even in a film where the Persian army had mutant troll-monsters. The two-fisted protagonists of Sin City and Watchmen largely failed to save anyone, although we could write that off as a “deconstruction of the superhero mythos” or some other English-major phrase. Pa Kent in Man of Steel scolds his teenaged son from rescuing his drowning classmates, but we told ourselves that was simply a creative step away from the cliché of the angelic dead parents. 

This film, though, is the last straw. Snyder’s Batman brands the flesh of criminals with a hot iron, which we’re told condemns them to be killed by other prisoners when incarcerated. It’s a bizarrely sadistic detail for a character defined by his unwillingness to carry a gun or kill, and just raises more questions -- Why would being branded by Batman mean death from other inmates? What difference is there between shooting someone and condemning them to death? How did he suddenly get a hot iron? Then again, this Batman carries a gun and kills people, so perhaps torture is not too much a stretch for him. Ben Affleck turns in a decent performance; the trouble is the script, which puts an actor in the costume and has them act like some other character than Batman.

Superman receives even more disservice. Let’s be blunt: there has never been an interesting story about Superman. Any interesting story is about Clark Kent. He has the power to leave his office job, punish his bullies, and earn the adulation of billions – and every day he must say no. He is Jesus forever tempted by Satan, each moment refusing to turn the stones to bread. He must endure casual disrespect from the woman he loves, knowing secretly that he is the man she loves. That makes for an interesting and sympathetic character, in a way that a man in underwear throwing giant things is not.   

Here, though, the one relatable aspect of Superman’s character is removed; Lois knows he’s Clark Kent from the beginning. They whisper a few Meaningful Conversations, but she has nothing interesting to say; she exists to be rescued as much as Lois did in the 1950s children’s show, but that Lois came across as an intelligent professional with a personality.

The basic conflict, and Batman’s armour for it, seem modelled after Frank Miller’s Dark Knight series, which helped redefine comic books and superheroes into their modern incarnation. At the end of Miller’s series, Batman fights Superman for logical reasons – he is an anti-hero fighting crime outside the law, whereas Superman works for the government, and is sent to bring him in.

That’s the very premise of Civil War, and would have made sense for these characters. Instead, they went with a baffling plot full of loose ends and nonsensical developments. Superman is being framed for murder, and the public thinks he shot people … with a gun, even though he’s Superman. When a building is destroyed by a bomb, people believe Superman did it …. with a bomb. When he’s Superman.

Most dispiriting, though, are the scenes with Superman’s parents, when his father (dead, in a dream) implies that there’s no point in helping people, and his mother (alive), tells him that “you don’t owe this world a thing.” If this guy doesn’t feel obligated to help anyone, in what way is he Superman? Comic books already have other costumed, super-powered characters who feel unconstrained by civic duty – they are called villains.

 Of course, the last few decades have seen a darkening of most film protagonists into joyless and amoral anti-heroes, and this just gives bus-throwing protagonists the same treatment. A humanoid alien throwing a bus into the air, that we accept readily – but to have a hero that’s a dutiful, well-adjusted person? That’s too unrealistic for many filmmakers these days.  

In a strange way, Zac Snyder’s films are starting to remind me of the Left Behind books, that wildly popular series in which a group of ostensible Christians ostensibly fight the Antichrist. The Left Behind authors gush over their characters, describing them as Tribulation Saints fighting for God against Evil in the End Times -- but in fact, the characters just come across as Colossal Jerks, disregarding other Human Beings and thinking only of Themselves during Actual Tragedies. They are saints in name, but never show compassion, nobility or even responsibility … kind of like Snyder’s superheroes.

If you want to know how to handle the same premise and issues well, you can look to Marvel’s Civil War film. Marvel did superhero movies intelligently, spending a decade building a world one hero at a time -- Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and finally combining them in The Avengers. Each film built on the last, not just in their trademark teasers and after-credit “cookies” but with genuine character development.  They recruited Shakespearean actors and comedians more than movie stars, people who could take goofy comic-book premises and imbue them with the proper gravitas or cheerful humour.  Most importantly, their films were funny without being silly, dramatic without being dour, and never forgot to have fun.

Thus, this film feels inevitable, as characters who began a journey several films ago have reached a logical conclusion. The mercurial Tony Stark, having spent much of his life irresponsible hedonist, is now burdened by his near-death and the deaths of others he caused in previous movies. Desperate to assuage his guilt, the former rogue commits himself to following the orders of a higher authority, even if it means turning on his colleagues. Captain America’s character arc has taken him on the opposite track; the quintessential patriot has seen his trust betrayed again and again in previous films, until he listens to no one but his own conscience. 

Other characters each rally behind the two leaders, each on their own journey. Most don’t get more than a few lines or camera shots, but we often don’t need a lot more; Spider-Man makes a brief appearance here, and the film gives him more character in his few minutes than Superman gets in Snyder’s two-and-a-half-hour film. Refreshingly, he looks and acts like a real teenager, unlike the 35-year-old bodybuilding models who usually play teenaged boys in American films, and the filmmakers had the intelligence to skip the origin story. He’s Spider-Man; we know who he is.

Most of all, Civil War has the courage to end on a note of tragedy, without the usual neat resolutions. As Norse epics did, it sets up a conflict between loyalties, in which good people betray one oath to keep another, and live with the consequences. Within the confines of a fun summer action movie, it shows its heroes as people – flawed, stubborn and conflicted – yet essentially good-hearted, taking responsibility for their actions, and striving to become better. About time; this is what superheroes were for in the first place.

All human cultures have had superhero tales, and when cultures are at their peak, they write about the heroic ideals to which they strive, as Sophocles did of Ajax or as Vergil did of Aeneas. During the Depression and World War II, the USA’s peak of power and conflict, it began creating superheroes, an image of what we would like to be.

When societies abandon that heroic ideal, when they acquire the “philosophic indifference” of Gibbon’s latter-day Romans, the culture is in deep trouble. As our country slipped away from the post-war glow into an era of escalating hedonism, it abandoned superheroes save as pablum for children.

Yet Generation X-ers and Millennials, children of the counterculture, embraced them even into adulthood, perhaps desperate for the heroes their culture no longer provided. In this century, as the nation grows ever more troubled, we are turning back to stories that give us heroes to believe in – a sign that there is hope for us.

Top: "Cú Chulainn Riding His Chariot into Battle" by J. C. Leyendecker, in T. W. Rolleston's Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race, 1911. 

Bottom: George Reeves as Superman in the U.S. government film "Stamp Day for Superman."