Meeting the starsailors

Come on get out
The past will find us out
Come on, get out please

Elbow: An imagined affair (From the Leaders of the Free world album)

Everything is Broken
Bob Dylan


(WARNING: Spoilers for the film No Country for old men)

Watching No Country for Old men was an incredibly chilling affair, not only because of Javier Bardem's seriously creepy performance as a hitman or even the copious amounts of violence. It was just that the film made me think of a world without God or justice- nothing but random events governed by chance. Its a thought which I think haunts everyone at a deep, fundamental level. As the narrator said in Fight Club, "On a long enough timeline, everyone's survival rate drops to zero." Everyone knows that, but what if ultimately that's all that happens?
Its not too far-fetched to take all this from the film because its quite simply brutal. The events are sparked off when our hero stumbles on a pile of corpses and a bag of money. He takes off with the money and is pursued across the country by a psychopathic and truly terrifying hitman. It's not a particularily original plot, but the Coen brothers give it their own dark, nihilistic spin.
The hitman-Anton- doesn't appear to enjoy killing so much as feel compelled to kill. In his warped mindset, anyone is fair game as he pursues the hero Llewelyn as long as they happen to cross his path or happen to find him in a disagreeable mood (which is unsuprisingly very often). Occasionally he gives his victims a fighting chance- in one of the best scenes in the film, he tosses a coin and asks a shopkeeper to 'call it.' The baffled shopkeeper does so and Anton leaves. We only realize a few minutes later that Anton was giving him a chance to save his life. Had he called the wrong side of the coin, he would be dead-just like that. There is no reason for Anton to even contemplate killing him, but he does. The man survives through sheer luck and thats the world the Coen's provide- a world of random and casual violence in which bad things happen to good people, the bad guy gets away and your comfortable blissful life can be wrecked at any moment by events beyond your control. There is no God or higher power in the mix, no deep meaningful lessons to draw from life. There are merely actions and consequences and the latter can cast a much larger web than anyone could anticipate. The Coens portray a world in which nothing is controlling events except sheer, dumb luck and deep down we are all terrified by that. Even Anton who appears to be the person in control of the proceedings- he decides who lives and dies- nearly gets dispatched to the grave in a freak car accident right at the end. He survives and limps away from the scene of the accident. He may toy with the fate of his victims and even relish the random nature of those he kills, but like them he is dancing with death just by virtue of being alive. The accident he walks away from happens right after a chilling conversation with the widow of the film's protagonist. She has just come from his funeral and finds him sitting in her room. He tells her he has to kill her because he promised Llewelyn-her husband, the man who took off with the money- that he would do so before his death. It is his retribution for the fact that the man he is trying to kill keeps evading him. He may be a brutal killer, but he has his principles-albeit very twisted ones.
She tells him tearfully "You dont have to do this"
"Everybody says that" He replies almost tenderly.
He tosses a coin and asks her to call it. She refuses and tells him she's not going to choose her fate through a coin- its up to him. A few seconds later he walks out and although we are not shown what happens in there, it is fairly certain that he kills her. I thought that exchange was one of the most fascinating parts of the film. Anton giving her the chance to save herself, suggesting that events are not entirely in his hands and everything is being governed by the fickle twist of fate. His victim is arguing the very opposite. We dont live in a world of chaos-We are in control. No path is truly unavoidable. Chaos versus order. Llewelyn's wife is right in one sense- the fact that she is facing death at that moment is not random at all, but a result of her husband's actions and actions have consequences. However Anton offers her the chance to save herself not out of compassion obviously, but because it will reinforce his belief in a world of random, uncontrolled events in which even he is not entirely in control.
So at the end, the hero and his wife are dead. The killer is hurt, but limps away. The film ends with the veteran sheriff recounting two dreams to his wife having been powerless to affect the outcome. There is no rousing finale or 'proper' ending. No moral redemption or satisfying justice. Just the sudden and occasionally brutal randomness of life. Even more terrifying than Anton is that scary possibility- a world without justice, unwatched by a higher being. Everyone left to their fate or swept up in something malevolent and much bigger than themselves.
Scary stuff.

Now, wait for last year

This week: The myth of the rational voter and New Times cartoons

One thing I hear constantly in discussions about the Zimbabwe crisis is that if that election had been free and fair, Tsvangarai would win in a landslide. The thinking-quite understandably- is that having seen Zimbabwe ravaged by Mugabe, people would act rationally and vote for a change.
Im not sure I agree with this kind of thinking. Mugabe would probably lose the election, but I figure it would be pretty close. Why? Because the average voter is not rational. The average voter is stupid and ignorant- a petri-dish swimming with biases and prejudices. They may be geniuses in their daily lives- heck they could even have the ability to split atoms with their bare hands. However once it comes to elections, rational thinking goes out of the window.
Mugabe knows that come what may, there are millions of people who will vote for him. He has a core constituency who probably go to sleep at night dreaming serenely of their candidate walking on water. That's not suprising- one constant aspect of the human race has been our uncomfortable relationship with reality. When we see it walking on our side of the pavement, we tend to cross to the other side of the road glancing furtively at it. What prevents voters from being rational?

The 'Blame someone else' complex: If things get bad- as they obviously have in Zimbabwe- the trick is to blame someone else. With Zimbabwe, the most obvious solution is those ghastly white people who want to recolonize Zimbabwe. Tsvangarai is by extension a Western puppet so voting for him would be voting for the colonialists (who frustratingly did not field their own party in the elections to make it easier to identify them)Presto! Vote Mugabe because the other side wants to enslave you. Sometimes the vast conspiracy takes a backseat to simple denial in which case, those who support Mugabe would accuse Tsvangarai himself of orchestrating the massacres of his own supporters.
Confirmation Bias: This is something we all suffer from in our everyday lives- the tendency to interpret things to conform to our own opinions. For example in the US elections, Hillary Clinton's supporters would see her steely ruthlessness as an asset and proof that she is a 'strong woman.' Those same suporters would then consider the same behaviour coming from Obama as arrogance. Likewise Obama's flip-flops on a variety of affairs (in the last 2 weeks, he's reversed his position on at least half a dozen issues)is potrayed as compromise-seeking and flexibility by his supporters even though they would have condemned that same behaviour in another candidate. We tend to assume that someone's actions will vindicate our opinion of them and this is particularily true of the politicians we idolize. Rational?
The Loony fringe: While Im not yet convinced by Obama, I do sympathize with him because his candidacy has brought out some of the most colourful larger-than-life loonies. A few of the theories held by right-thinking americans- 'Obama is a secret Muslim', 'Obama is going to establish sharia law', 'Obama will lead a Black revolution to enslave white people','Obama is a Communist and will use its tenets once he is in the White House'...The loony fringe is never as small as you would imagine either in the States or elsewhere in the world- just eavesdrop on a typical bar conversation for ten minutes. The people who see grand colonial conspiracies in Zimbabwe are also part of this group.
Strawmen: A strawman argument can be quite compelling- this simply means attacking your opponent for an argument he has not made. You get to demolish his argument and then feel smug about it irrespective of the fact that you are attacking a 'phantom' argument. People do this because they would rather deconstruct an argument they find easier to dismantle whether this has been put forward by their opponent or not. If people convince themselves that these are the arguments their opponents are using, it is easier for them to not change their minds when presented with conflicting information.
The Higher power argument: From President Museveni to Robert Mugabe and George.W.Bush, some voters tend to assume that their candidate has been chosen specifically by God to lead their respective countries to the promised land. Such voters do not bother with trifling things like 'proof'- proof is for suckers. They FEEL that God supports their candidate and that is enough. With this mental anchor in place, nothing less than the candidate peeing on the holy bible in public will make them change their minds. Sometimes the candidate himself is given God-like qualities- witness the doe-eyed adoration that very many people have for Barack Obama. It's quite creepy.
Cognitive dissonance: I've discussed this concept previously on my blog- the mental discomfort that comes from having deeply held beliefs or prejudices challenged by new information that appears to contradict those beliefs. If you are pro-Mugabe and you witness the violent campaigns he has condoned in Zimbabwe, what do you do? How do you reconcile your belief with the new information suggesting he is in fact a bloodthirsty monster? Well for many people the only way to cope with this is to cling even more stubbornly to their original views. Not many of us want to discover that not only are we wrong- we are staggeringly wrong. As I said when discussing Arsenal fans many weeks ago, this makes people even more sure that they were right. Proof of their error only vindicates their opinion that they were right. The facts are made to fit into their opinions and not the other way round.
<em>Priorities: Voters give priorities to different things so for example Mugabe's anti-imperialism crusade would impress his supporters who value that more than his terrible economic policies. In the US, Obama's charisma and highly effective rhetoric is enough for many people to vote for him. It's the same all over the world- voters have their own set of priorities and these are usually unlikely to be the more pressing issues.
One of us: We want someone who is just like us- whether he/she is the better candidate is irrelevant. In Kenya, it was telling that voting was on such sharply ethnic lines as people voted only for their fellow tribesmen. In the US, there are plenty of black voters who are behind Obama primarily because of his skin colour just as many female voters will back Hillary because she is a woman.
***
As The New Times ran another pedestrian and incredibly unfunny editorial cartoon last week, I wondered for the umpteenth time- do these people even have a ghost of a shadow of a sense of humour?
What New Times havent grasped is that an editorial cartoon has to be either a) Genuintly witty b) Insightful or c) Preferably both. It is NOT a dry factual comment on something in the news. The typical New Times editorial cartoon is a picture of say a footballer with a trophy shouting triumphantly I WON! while his opponent lies vanquished in the grass with the caption usually something along the lines of 'Rwanda defeated Mauritania yesterday...' or alternatively a Minister standing infront of an attentive student and telling them to 'Work hard to develop Rwanda.' There are few things as irritating in the paper as their complete inability to publish a 'legitimate' editorial cartoon. A good editorial cartoon is supposed to help you see the world in a different way or to make you chuckle in a 'Thats so true!' kind of way or to aim for the profound, should ambition kick in at some point. As the country's only daily newspaper, you expect The New Times to offer more telling insights into our society.
However it gets worse when you turn to the Uncle Jeff section towards the back. This is a weekly cartoon in the Sunday Times entertainment section about the travails of the lead character. Unlike their editorial cartoon, this one is published explicitly to make people laugh but it fails miserably. Infact, words cannot explain the epic failure of this cartoon to make anyone even chuckle never mind laugh. The thinking behind Uncle Jeff is that Laurel and Hardy humour can translate well to a newspaper so for example we get a cartoon in which he tries to break into someone's house and gets chased away with a large stick. Every week has Uncle Jeff facing similar pratfalls, none of which is funny to anyone older than five years old. It doesn't even begin to touch on the humour in our society
Infact, the only reason it makes me smile, is because it is so monumentally unfunny that it ends up achieving a roundabout form of humour- like Alanis Morisette singing Ironic while using examples of things which were not actually ironic. Morisette sang a song about irony without knowing what it meant and in the process did achieve irony (although unintentionally). In the same way, The New Times have found humour thanks to their herculean failure to achieve anything remotely close to funny. There is an almost zen quality about their published efforts.
A good example of what I am talking about is Kingo which I read regularily in The New Vision(but which I believe is originally Tanzanian). Kingo was gloriously funny without even the use of any dialogue. He was a Chaplinesque hero- sometimes tragic (the world seemed to be stacked against him) but wily and devious the rest of the time. The jokes were often very elaborate or occasionally merely slapstick but either way they worked and stuck in your head for days. And it had a lot of truly interesting things to say about the society of its tragic hero. Kingo is a majestic triumph and has a lot to teach us.