Category Archives: Nihilism

The Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago in August 1968 as demonstrations against the war in Vietnam were churning across the United States. The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy earlier that year added to the pall of anger and uncertainty across the country.

President Lyndon B. Johnson had decided not to run for re-election in the face of intensifying protests opposing the war. The Democratic nominee would be his vice-president, Hubert H. Humphrey Jr.

Outside the convention hall, violent attacks were committed by the Chicago police against demonstrators. These assaults were shown live on American television.

Chicagos legendary combative mayor, Richard J. Daley, as fierce a smoke-filled backroom wheeler-dealer as any character created by a novelist, was determined that his beloved Chicago not be shamed by protests and that the convention would proceed smoothly. He ordered the police to crush the demonstrators who had gathered in his city.

Its this backdrop that provides the core of one of the most important movies about the counterculture and the right to peaceably assemble ever produced by a major motion picture studio. Medium Cool, released in 1969, is as essential as a film can be.

In Chicago in 1968, celebrated cinematographer Haskell Wexler was directing a narrative feature for Paramount Pictures he had written (and would photograph). The result is a superb mix of fiction and fact thats not only the chronicle of a workingman who gets fired from his job because he takes a bold stand against his bosses, but its also a believable story of romantic affection.

Robert Forster plays John Cassellis, a Chicago television news cameraman, who discovers that his station is turning over footage of anti-war protestors to the FBI. His intense anger about this results in his dismissal. His love life has taken a positive turn because hes developed a relationship with single-mom Eileen (Verna Bloom). Her young son Harold runs away from home.

John is doing free-lance work at the Democratic National Convention. Eileen goes to the convention area to seek help from John to find her son and becomes caught up in the chaos. The films closing half-hour must never be revealed to those who havent seen it.

Through it all, Wexler expertly combines fictional footage with actual footage of the battle for Chicagos streets. His cinematographers eye is brilliant and his sense of how to tell a powerful story is equal to any of the great directors who came of age during this period of important American cinema.

In 2003, Medium Cool was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library Of Congress for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

The movie, suitable for adults and teenagers, is available on DVD and Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Meanwhile, the great Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni had decided to make his American filmmaking debut in Los Angeles with a drama called Zabriskie Point. This was after the international success of the sensational London-set Blow-Up, from 1966, his first English-Language work, and one of my favorite movies.

Antonioni, who was the master of capturing ennui among the middle-class in his native Italy, wanted to now capture the revolutionary fervor in 1968 of Americas youth. Drawing from the true story of a young man who stole a small prop plane from a local airfield, Antonioni wrangled four other screenwriters, including American playwright Sam Shepard, and created Zabriskie Point, which was released in 1970 by the legendary MGM studio. Its executives were apoplectic at the sex and nihilism Antonioni delivered.

Gorgeously photographed by Carlo Di Palma, the drama has two centerpieces, an orgy in Californias Mojave Desert and the blowing up of a house that went on for many minutes in slow-motion and actually set the standard for slow-motion Hollywood explosions.

Using mostly amateur performers, Antonionis tale follows Mark (played by occasional American model Mark Frechette), who walks out of an ineffective university protest meeting that is accomplishing nothing. Hes willing to die, but not of boredom for the cause.

Kathleen Cleaver, the real-life wife of Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, is in the scene. One thing we learn is that women are still expected to make coffee.

During protests on campus, a police officer is shot perhaps by Mark, but probably not. Mark steals an airplane and eventually flies it over a car in the desert being driven by Daria, a footloose beauty played by dancer Daria Halprin, but no ones idea of a talented actress. He lands. They meet.

A professional actor, Rod Taylor, is a real estate developer, and the story zooms forward with Mark planning to return the plane and Daria left in tears. Theyve bonded in the desert.

The weak acting hampers, but doesnt derail, what is a ultimately a fragmented study of illusion, reality, and the joy and beauty of youth hampered by capitalist rules and the need to work for a living.

Zabriskie Point is not a failed movie by any stretch of the imagination; however, it feels made by a committee, and never truly soars like Marks revolutionary spirit and airplane. The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, and Pink Floyd provide music. The visuals win the day.

The film, suitable for adults and mature teens, is available on DVD.

Michael Calleri reviews films for the Niagara Gazette and the CNHI news network. Contact him at moviecolumn@gmail.com.

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CALLERI: The right to protest is at the center of two movies about the counterculture - Niagara Gazette

Alarmingly, the landscape of Britain, especially its capital, has assumed an aspect of alien, dystopian desolation. Its origin was three months of pandemic lockdown; the more recent cause is the paralysis of government, national and local, in the face of intimidation by the violent and wholly unrepresentative elements of a mob that is successfully dictating its agenda to the elected authorities. This weekend, London is disfigured by sinister-looking wooden rectangles enclosing the statues of our monarchs, statesmen and national heroes. They have become monuments to the eclipse of civilisation.

Those statues, confined in cubes like nuclear waste, include three of our kings and Sir Winston Churchill the man who did more than any other individual in 20th century history to defeat rampant racism of a viciousness and scale unimaginable to modern woke demonstrators. They have compiled a hit list of 78 memorials they insist must be removed, across 39 towns and cities, 12 of them in London. They include monarchs, prime ministers, a holder of the Victoria Cross and national hero Nelson on his famous column, the global epitome of London. It is a project to erase large parts of Britains history, to create a tabula rasain iconography, a revolutionary Year Zero.

The pretext for visually deleting our heritage is to protect monuments from rioters. That limp excuse predicates the inevitability of riots and the impossibility of containing them. The message it sends to the perpetrators of violent disorder is: you have won. These clashes on Whitehall would have been illegal at any time, but they take on an extra dimension of nihilism in the light of the fact that Britain is still on lockdown against a deadly pandemic. Demonstrators should have been dispersed at the first signs of their congregating.

Police were not backward in harassing lonely sunbathers during lockdown, so why permit thousands to assemble cheek-by-jowl? They appear to have been crippled by deference to the demands of the more extreme protestors.

It is fashionable to claim we have an obligation to reappraise our society and its alleged faults. True, we do need to revisit many of our assumptions, including an objective investigation of the scale and incidence of racism, but it should not come at the price of abandoning all historical nuance and rationaldebate.

The unjustified slur that Britain is aninherently racist nation today must also be repudiated. This country has, successfully, opened its doors to millions of immigrants, but further integration is made more difficult by the most militant campaigners, often extravagant white liberals, relentlessly engendering a culture of grievance and victimhood that seeks to divide.

Unfortunately, the real agenda of some of these activists, as we have seen on our streets and in their social media proclamations, is to overthrow the political order of representative parliamentary democracy and to destroy capitalism,or the market system.

Many of the supporters of the organisation Black Lives Matter want peaceful change. BLM started in the US with a sensible outlook and noble goals rooted in tackling serious social problems. It has since been hijacked by the far-left. Anyone who doubts that should look at the British website UKBLM raising large sums of money for the campaign and advocating (on the read more section) the dismantling of capitalism and the abolition of the police.

In this way, just as, historically, many scoundrels wrapped themselves in the Union flag, today the catch-all mantra of anti-racism and anti-fascism is being deployed to mask a totalitarian agenda.

Troublingly, most mainstream politicians with very few exceptions appear too terrified to point any of this out. The Prime Minister had a modest go at speaking out on Friday, on Twitter. But he and his colleagues will have to go much, much further. They must make the case clearly in defence of the rule of law, democracy and civic order.

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Black Lives Matter campaign has been hijacked by extremists - Reaction

The one night of glory model has a really strong tradition in stories about teenagers. I thought about movies like Dazed and Confused and Cant Hardly Wait and Detroit Rock City, where the narrowed scope of the narrative reflects the compressed horizon and pressurized emotion of the characters. As a 15-year-oldand, okay, as a 20-something, and beyondI often couldnt see past my immediate circumstances, and the structure of the story reflects that blinkered outlook. Theres an urgency when youre a teenager, experiencing things for the first time, that you cant really get back, and I wanted to capture that.

Gebremedhin: Right, this is a coming-of-age story. Paul, the narrator, describes his efforts to have the best night of my life, to do whatever thing would change me forever. He understands that he is standing at the brink of some great shift, from which there will be no return. How does punk music inform this theme?

Martin: Punk can be about a lot of things, and the bands in the storyranging in approach from Clash-inspired political agitprop to the romantic angst of emo to the nihilism of New York hardcorereflect a small segment of what the music can represent. But they all share a common goal of catharsis, of moving the listener to transcend his or her malaise, anger, whatever through movement and action. Like most teenagers, Paul doesnt really know what he wants to change into; he just knows that he wants to change. Punk provides a kind of perfect buffet of opportunities to imagine yourself different than you really aremore engaged, more angry, more heartbroken. And it also gives you this sort of vision of utopia, where violence can be channeled into community in this unexpected way.

Gebremedhin: Are there any inherent challenges when writing about music? For instance, whats it like to try to describe a song? Who are the great practitioners of fiction when it comes to music writing?

Martin: I do think its hard to convey what a songor a painting, or a filmis like without having any direct experience of it. But I think what fiction or criticism can do is create an alternative version of the thing being described, one that is filtered through the sensibility of the writer to become something else. The story name-checks the critic Greil Marcus, whose books introduced me to a lot of the music I loved in high school. (I realize this makes me sound like Im 100 years old, or from another planet, but its true!) Theres an incredible description Marcus wrote of Every Picture Tells a Story, by Rod Stewart, that made me a huge Stewart fan (I mean, of his stuff up until, like, 1973). I think if you can make a punk-obsessed teen in 2001 love Rod Stewart, youre doing something pretty impressive.

As far as fiction writers go, Proust is probably the world champion in describing musical performances (and paintings, and sexual jealousy, and ). David Gates is no slouch, either. You havent really heard Straight Outta Compton until youve heard it through the ears of his character Willis in Preston Falls, blazing down the road in his truck toward another terrible decision.

Original post:

Andrew Martin on the Coming-of-Age Story - The Atlantic

Philip K. Howard, Opinion contributor Published 6:00 a.m. ET June 8, 2020 | Updated 11:09 a.m. ET June 11, 2020

The doctrine of qualified immunity has been used to protect police from civil lawsuits and trials. Here's why it was put in place. USA TODAY

The tendency is to view accountability as a matter of fairness to the particular person,butwhats at stake is the health ofour publicculture.

Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin,arrestedlast week forthe death ofGeorge Floyd,should have been removed long ago from policing duties. Hehad18 complaints over his19-year tenure. Onlytwo resulted in discipline, but the union rules protecting police make it almost impossible to hold officers accountableevenfor extrememisconduct.

Chauvinhas nowbeen indicted for murder, buthis apparent killing of George Floyd is seen bymanynot as an isolated crime but asevidence of systematic police abuse. Minneapolis, like most cities, hasa poor record of holding police accountable. Out of 2,600 complaints since 2012,only 12 resulted in an officer being disciplined. The most severe penalty was a suspension for 40 hours.

The fact that three of Chauvins colleagues, themselves now indicted,watched as Floyd choked to deathis alsoan indictment of police culture.

In a show of peace and solidarity, law enforcement officials with riot shields take a knee in front of protesters on June 1, 2020, in Atlanta, during a fourth day of protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. (Photo: Curtis Compton, Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

Theprotests andriots show what happens when large segments of the populationbelieve the deck is stacked against them.Distrust of government leads to corrosion of civil society.The opportunistic looting across the country isindefensible, but itsrationalizedby the logic of nihilism: If police wont follow norms of civilized behavior, then neitherwillwe.

Civil rights leaders have called foranational reckoning to end racism in America. But theunaccountability of bad cops is caused by a factorlargelyunrelated to racism.

The lack of accountability, according toa Reuters report in 2017, islargelydictated by police union contracts. The standard for discipline isbasicallyharder than for a criminal conviction.

Anofficer in Columbus Ohio was accused of brutally beatinga black college student who was sitting on a bench with friends, for the alleged crime of drinking a beer in public. That officer had been the subject of 40complaints for misconduct, but Reuters found that, like most bad officers, he could not be dismissed. Why? Union contracts require that prior complaints be expunged from the record, in some jurisdictions after a few months, so it is practically impossible to terminate repeat offenders.

Union leaders argue that the rulessimplymake sure that due process is given to the officers. Something is obviously wrong with this reasoning:Police officers invoke their rights to get away with violating the rights of citizens. Due process ismeantto protect against abuses of state power by police and other state agents not to protect police when they abuse their power.

Theclash of rights meansthataccountability is basically nonexistent.This is not just a problem with police, but throughout government. A 2016 Government Accountability Officereport found that more than99% of federal employeesreceived a fully successful rating.

Democracy issupposed to be amechanism for public accountability, butdemocracycantfunction if the links in the chain are broken. We elect governors and mayors, but they have no effective control over police, schools or other public institutions.

The organizational flaw hereboils down to confusion betweenlibertyand responsibility. Police and other public employees have an affirmative responsibility to serve the public effectively. They must beaccountable not by the standards of a criminal trial, but for meeting a much higher standard of public stewardship. It is the job of supervisors to make these judgments.

Theconfusion wassownby the Supreme Courtinthe heyday of Vietnam protests, when the court held that public jobs were akin to a property rightand could not be removed without due process. Although the court went out of its way to say that the process could be minimal, due process is a slippery slope.

Due processputstheburdenof proofon the supervisor. Fellow workers describe Chauvin as tightly wound, which is not a good character trait for a cop with a loaded gun. But how does his supervisor prove in a legal hearing that he shouldnt be a cop?

The tendency is to view accountability as a matter of fairness to the particular person,butwhats at stake is the health ofour publicculture. The harmof no accountabilityis far greater than a few bad apples.

Here are a few of thedestructiveeffects:

Loss of public trust, as seen in the last week, can lead to a breakdown of civil order.

No accountability is likeMiracle-Grofor bureaucracy. When people cant be accountable, they find soon themselves wallowing in red tape dictating exactly how to do things. Rules replace norms. Compliance replaces accomplishment.

Publicservice, and especially police work, shouldbe a source ofpride and honor,but the absence ofaccountabilityleads instead tocynicism and disrespect. AVolcker Commission report on federal civil servicein 2003 founddeep resentmentat the protections provided to those poor performers among them who impede their own work and drag down the reputation of all government workers.

Safeguards against unfairaccountability can readily be provided for example, by giving veto power to apeercommittee. But supervisors cannot be put to the proof in a legal proceeding. How do you prove who doesnt try hard, or lacks good judgment or is too tightly wound?

Accountability is not the only change needed to revive trust inAmerican government. Leaders too must be trustworthy. The institutions they lead must display fidelity to accepted norms not only avoiding abuses of authority, butgenerally striving to be fair, truthful and committed to the common good.

Whats needed isa new social contract with public employees. Instead of abulletproofsinecure, the coreorganizingprinciplemustbeaccountabilityfor the public good.

We will not have public trust without it.

Philip K. Howard is founder ofCommon Good. His latest book is"Try Common Sense."Follow him on Twitter: @PhilipKHoward

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Public trust in police is fractured. Here's how to fix it. - USA TODAY

Ending Explainedis a recurring series in which we explore the finales, secrets, and themes of interesting movies and shows, both new and old.

How do you like your action? Peppered with chipper, cheeky one-liners or caked in hot piss, mud, and blood? If youre looking to let off some steam with a bit of nonsensical but cheery Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi silliness, its best to rent The Running Man. If you want to stew in filth and let your anger percolate as Edgar Ramrez brutalizes and gets brutalized, go ahead and press play on Netflixs The Last Days of American Crime.

Based on the graphic novel by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini, the film is directed by Olivier Megaton, who made his bones breaking Liam Neesons with the Taken sequels, and its a grim saga of a near-future on the verge of an apocalypse a.k.a. a world just a few steps ahead of the one we currently occupy. As the government prepares to launch the American Peace Initiative (API), which is a mysterious signal capable of suppressing all criminal thought, the citizens take to the streets for one last purge of death and destruction.

The final week of debauchery mostly amounts to various acts of looting and bare-breasted cartop dancing, but for Ramrezs Graham Bricke, its an opportunity to pull off one last score. What should be a simple excuse for criminal-on-criminal ultraviolence is instead muddied by the APIs presence. Where there is a mind-altering radio wave, there will also be plenty of bait and switch and confusion.

Brickehas lost the thrill of the hunt. His brother Rory (Daniel Fox) killed himself in prison, and the loss transformed Brickeinto a lumbering morose sack of frowns. Hes reenergized after he hooks up with Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster) in the bathroom of a hellish dive bar. Brickes enthusiasm strengthens even further once Duprees scuzzball psycho lover Kevin Cash(Michael Pitt) reveals that Rory was beaten to death by prison guards while he watched. If Brickewants revenge on the system, he should join Cash in knocking over the governments money factory where bills are made and destroyed.

All is well and good until Cash turns his shotgun on Brickeand blasts a hole in his belly. Why? Rory did not kill himself, and he was not beaten bloody by prison guards. Instead, Cash tells Bricke that it was he who ended his little brothers life. In the process of ceasing Rorys motor functions, Cash discovered nihilism: the sweet bliss of nothing meaning anything.

The philosophy is Cashs golden rule, and it allows him to bypass the API. His concrete unbelief makes him invincible to the governments mind games. However, it does not make his skin impenetrable to bullets. Cash is wiped from the board by a barrage of FBI sniper fire, leaving Bricketo fend for himself under the spell of the API.

Ah, but the thug has one last trick up his sleeve. Earlier in the film, Bricke bought an extremely intense, nondescript drug from some punk at the same bar he scored with Dupree. Remembering the warnings of his dealer, Brickeconsumes the whole dose, which fries his brain and allows him to operate free of the API, and he slaughters the FBI agents while theyre gloating their victory.

So, Cash defeated the API via nihilism. Bricke bypassed it through narcotics. How does Dupree release herself? She doesnt. Shes merely lucky.

While Cash, Bricke, and the FBI come to Jesus, Dupree is battling the grabby hands of Officer Sawyer (Sharlto Copley), who can commit all the heinous acts he wants thanks to an inhibitor chip implanted in his brain. In a film already bursting with Deus Ex Machinas, Dupree is rescued when the two wrestle off a table, and Sawyers neck falls upon a metal shard.

Dupree explodes the API building, meets up with a gutshot, drugged-out Bricke, and the two flee to Canada. The land of hockey, maple syrup, and free healthcare offers sanctuary, but Bricke wont live to see it. He expires in Duprees truck shortly after crossing the border. She could do nothing for him, but the least she can do is spread Rorys ashes in an unpolluted lake.

For a film centered on a technological transmission worthy of George Orwells ire, The Last Days of American Crime cares very little about its sci-fi trappings. The hows and whys dont matter. Cashs philosophical workaround is given a ten-minute showcase to explain how he beat the beam, but without the aid of the rewind button, its easy to miss Brickes brain damage bypass. Drugs arent all that bad, kids.

With a two and a half hour runtime, Olivier Megaton has plenty of space to delve into the science fiction, but he would rather wallow in car chases tangential to the narrative and family squabbles with hints of incest. The Last Days of American Crime is a miserable foray into banality. The flick is convoluted and seemingly infinite in length.

Remove the API from the plot, and not much would differ. In fact, its absence would free the script of its puzzlement. If all you wanted to deliver was Edgar Ramrez chopping his way through chumps just a little more deplorable than he is, then why even dabble in the extraordinary?

The API is a distraction. While its easily the most interesting aspect of the film, the script just barely bothers to acknowledge its mechanics. Megaton wants his Children of Men, but in posturing significance, he cant even deliver his take on The Running Man. The Last Days of American Crime ultimately amounts to nothing more than the latest Netflix dump.

Originally posted here:

The Ending of The Last Days of American Crime Explained - Film School Rejects

Mayor de Blasio has it right and, yes, youre reading a Post editorial.

New York Citys problem right now is not the inevitable, even necessary, peaceful protests. The problem has been folks who are clearly trying to incite violence against the police and create vandalism and property damage. Theyre a small number, but theyre clearly very motivated and very violent, de Blasio said Sunday.

And theyre largely out-of-towners coming from outside the neighborhoods that are raising the concerns peacefully and trying to create a violent, negative situation with police.

That doesnt mean that some locals arent joining in on the violence; the city has its own idiots trust-fund Trotskyites, for starters. But here as elsewhere, the worst confrontations reeks of the roving radicals who rush in to turn protests into riots in some demented dream of fomenting full-on revolution.

Theyve been doing it at least since the anti-globalization protests of the 90s, all the way to the Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore protests of 2014-15. Whatever they say, their true agenda isnt economic or racial justice its chaos and destruction.

The same nihilism fed off the idealism of the 1960s to produce the sheer terrorism of the Weathermen bombings and the Brinks assassinations.

To quote the mayor again: This is not the American progressive protest tradition. This is not the tradition of Dr. King. Its dangerous, its counterproductive. It puts the lives, particularly of young men of color, in danger if it creates deeper tension between police and community. It puts the lives of police officers in danger. So, no, this does not represent our values, and it has to be addressed very forthrightly.

And the NYPD, in the face of this threat, has overall shown enormous restraint. Even that video of the police van driving into a crowd has important context, as the mayor noted to WINS: A small group of motivated, violent people has been surrounding police cars, surrounding police vans, attempting to do violence to police officers and to the vehicles. And thats exactly what you saw in that video [The cops] were being surrounded by people who are attacking that vehicle as they were in a situation where it was getting more and more dangerous, and they had to get out of there ... If those protesters had just gotten out of the way we would not be talking about this situation.

With a national network of would-be revolutionaries looking to exploit the righteous anger over George Floyd and other clear victims of excessive police force, its entirely appropriate for the feds to step in as the Eastern District did in charging Samantha Shader.

Video shows Shader hurling a Molotov cocktail at a police van in Brooklyn late Friday night plainly intending grievous harm to the four cops inside. Her sister, Darian, then jumped in to try to prevent Samanthas arrest.

The Shaders, incidentally, hail from Catskill, 120 miles north of the city perfectly fitting de Blasios profile of people coming from outside the community to sow chaos.

Police arrested Samantha on four counts of attempted murder of a police officer, plus attempted arson, assault on a cop, criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment and Darian for resisting arrest and obstruction of governmental administration.

But the Brooklyn DA has yet to file any charges. Instead, the feds stepped in, hitting Samantha with property-damage charges that would mean a sentence of five to 20 years if convicted. She may yet face stiffer charges we certainly see attempted murder as appropriate: Even though her Molotov turned out to be a dud, her intent was murderous.

Local prosecutors have been rushing left in recent years, and we fear they wont get tough on the radicals pushing violence. But someone needs to throw the book at everyone apprehended for striving to turn peaceful protests into a conflagration.

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Mayor Bill de Blasio is right about the riots -- and the NYPD's response - New York Post

Talk to me about philosophy, morality, and the meaning of life, and you're likely to conclude that I'm a conservative. Yet I've voted exclusively for Democrats since 2004 and I'm convinced my conservative assumptions entail voting that way.

I said as much, in passing, in a column earlier this month, and that raised some eyebrows, with several conservative acquaintances on Twitter and at least one prominent Republican friend requesting a broader explanation. Why am I "situated on the center left" despite holding "assumptions about politics and life [that] are more often held by philosophical conservatives than modern liberals"?

The answer is complicated in its details but clear in its conclusions: There is nothing remotely conservative about the present-day Republican Party. It injects moral nihilism into the body politic on a daily basis as a means of acquiring and deploying power primarily for the sake of enriching a class of plutocratic donors mainly wealthy businessmen and defense contractors. Democrats may have their problems, including a contingent of online progressive activists who work to pull the party in directions that would be politically ruinous. But at least the economic policies Democrats support don't actively shred the social fabric of the country, leaving workers and their communities in tatters while right-wing media rabblerousers get rich directing the resulting anger and blame at liberals.

At the center of the maelstrom is the singularly appalling figure of Donald Trump, but the GOP began trending in this direction long before he emerged to codify and consolidate the transformation. That's where many conservatives will part ways with me. Rejecting Trump is understandable, but embedding him in the longer-term trajectory of the Republican Party goes too far. Yet this view of the party and its history follows directly from my conservative assumptions about politics, society, and morals.

What are some of those assumptions?

That the liberal vision of politics founded on the consent of rights-bearing individuals is a myth that badly distorts political reality. That the elementary unit of politics is society, not the individual, and that the customs and traditions we receive from our communal past deserve respect (though not unthinking deference). That the notion of historical progress is a fiction. That claims to knowledge and mastery need to be taken with a dose of skepticism. That the best we can reasonably hope for from politics is muddling through, enacting modest reforms that attempt to make things somewhat better while not unintentionally making them worse.

I'm both suspicious of absolute moral claims and consider them indispensable for maintaining social and political decency which means the love of justice needs to be both cultivated and tamed. The best way to achieve this balance is through the encouragement of moderation and recognition of the reality of pluralism. As I explained in another recent column, pluralism holds that:

[T]here are many objectively good ideals or ends freedom (in its multiple senses), equality, communal solidarity, piety, justice, to name just a few and that they inevitably clash with each other. The liberty of a gay couple to marry, for example, will clash with the piety and communal solidarity of the bakery owner who doesn't want to be forced to bake a cake for the wedding ceremony. And of course both sides appeal to conflicting notions of justice as well. [The Week]

I went on to note that the implications of pluralism for politics include a commitment to seeking "compromise and accommodation whenever possible, using every available means, including appeals to federalism and the crafting of highly nuanced and narrow court decisions that carve out space for different ways of life to flourish as much as possible."

Both of America's two major parties respond poorly to the reality of pluralism, with Democrats eager to use the power of the state to impose and enforce one set of absolute moral claims and Republicans aiming to do the same with another. Each affirms a comprehensive vision of what Aristotle called "the good life" and wants the political community as a whole to affirm it while ruling certain competing moral visions out of bounds.

Aristotle himself proposed ways that the city-states of ancient Greece could balance such clashing moral outlooks to produce decent polities. The challenge of achieving such decency in our vastly larger and more diverse nation-states is much greater and the culture war makes it even harder than it might otherwise be, because it absolutizes political disputes, turning policy disagreements into assertions about non-negotiable goods.

But if both parties deserve blame for contributing to our civic turbulence, why do I so forcefully side with the Democrats in the voting booth? For one thing, because Republicans have come to believe that they benefit electorally by transforming policy disagreements into culture-war clashes. This has had the effect of turning increasing numbers of political disputes into total war, and driving a segment of Republican voters to embrace positions that in some cases actively threaten the common good as we can see very vividly with absolute opposition on the right to gun regulations as well as the adamant refusal of some to wear masks in public during a pandemic that has already killed more than 100,000 Americans.

But Democrats also do much better than Republicans at responding in a civically healthy way to the challenges of self-government under modern conditions. They do so by focusing their attention on the advancement of lower-level goods. If appeals to the good life tend to spark disagreement and divisiveness about the highest goods, directing our attention to what political philosopher Leo Strauss called the "low but solid ground" of economic and material well-being which Aristotle dubbed "mere life" can be politically salutary.

That's because everyone in a political community even a political community as large and differentiated as a modern nation-state benefits from a thriving economy. And because, again following Aristotle, one way to minimize rancorous disagreements in politics is to encourage the growth of a large middle class. The corollary of this view is that the immiseration of a large share of a country's population is bound to produce an increase in unrest and political agitation.

From Otto von Bismarck to the advocates of the American New Deal and beyond, modern reformers have understood that preventing the rise of radicalism requires a robust social-welfare system along with regulation of the economy to help foster the flourishing of a large, dynamic middle class. In this respect, the economic policies pursued and enacted by the Republican Party since the election of Ronald Reagan ever-greater tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, support for trade policies that have contributed to the decline of the manufacturing sector and the communities that benefitted from it, the thinning out of regulations on business, the shrinking or elimination of welfare benefits, opposition to the expansion of access to health care have actively contributed to the struggles of the middle class and the growth of political extremism on both the left and right.

Democrats have been complicit in some of these policies, but Republicans have been the driving force behind them and that makes the GOP a party that deserves a lion's share of the blame for the increasing radicalization of the electorate on both sides of the spectrum, very much including the distinctive moral degradation, vulgarity, incompetence, and corruption of Donald Trump.

For those, like myself, who desperately want to see the country pull back from radicalism and return to a more moderate style of politics, there is really only one option. The Democratic Party is far from perfect, but it will at least do what it can to address the inequalities and injustices that Republican policies have encouraged and exacerbated. That makes the Democrats the party in greater harmony with conservative insights and assumptions about the preconditions of a healthy politics.

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The conservative case for the Democratic Party - The Week

Yet there was Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, issuing a wee-hours statement that asked Americans not to ignore their pain, but to use it to compel our nation across this turbulent threshold into the next phase of progress, inclusion, and opportunity. There was Killer Mike, the rapper from Atlanta, reminding his fellow citizens, Atlantas not perfect, but were a lot better than we ever were, and a lot better than cities are.

Conservatives will focus on the pleas for law and order in their messages. But what I hear is a repudiation of Trumpian nihilism a rejection of the tyranny of the perpetual anxious present that Masha Gessen describes in her forthcoming book Surviving Autocracy. Theyre instead speaking with what Gessen calls moral ambition, inviting fellow citizens to build a more expansive country, rather than an us-versus-them one. Their messages werent, Dont destroy your community, so much as, Theres still a community left for you to join. Come and make it better.

And so, along with terrifying imagery of fire and fury, we also saw images over the weekend of police officers and protesters in solidarity. The bonds were sometimes fragile, only to later disappear. But they happened. In Flint, Mich. In Camden, N.J. In Coral Gables, Fla. In Santa Clara, Calif. In Ferguson, Mo. In Kansas City, Mo., where two cops, one white, held aloft a sign saying End Police Brutality.

Or listen to the chief of police in Atlanta, Erika Shields, tell an anxious protester, I hear you. When Trump met with those whod lost loved ones in the Parkland shooting, he needed an empathy cheat sheet that contained those very words; it was item No. 5. For her, they simply spilled out, as naturally as rain.

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What Trump and Toxic Cops Have in Common - The New York Times

Yes to Life

Yes to Life

Photo: Beacon Press, Handout

Yes to Life

Yes to Life

Book World: In the midst of despair, discovering a way to have hope

Yes to Life

By Viktor E. Frankl

Beacon Press. 127 pp. $19.95

---

Late in March, holed up in my apartment in New York, I received the terrible news that the coronavirus pandemic had claimed the life of someone I knew. Just as shocking was the fact that it wasn't the physical symptoms of this terrible disease that had overwhelmed her body. It was, instead, despair that had killed her spirit.

We cannot know all the factors that played into the tragic logic that led her to suicide. But piecing the story together afterward, her closest friends think that when New York shut down, she believed that so, too, had the possibility of continuing the full life she had created there. Before the pandemic, her calendar overflowed not just with work and volunteer activities, but with social engagements and cultural events, scheduled through the rest of this year and into the next. And now amid the cascade of closings, cancellations and postponements into an unknowable future of all the work, volunteer, arts and other in-person events she had so carefully planned but could no longer look forward to, her own life seemed to be crumbling into ruins. So she negated it, all of it, on her own terms.

And this is only one among many deaths of despair against our current backdrop of heightened stress, uncertainty and vulnerability.

It's the challenge posed by any crisis: How do we hang on to hope? It is also the question that Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), the Viennese psychiatrist and author best known for his exploration of trauma and resilience, "Man's Search for Meaning," devoted the bulk of his career to answering.

Now, with the publication for the first time in English of "Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything," originally written as a series of lectures in 1946, we have the opportunity to read what amounts to a brief, early draft of the concepts he presented in more accessible form and in greater detail in his later classic. But in whichever version you encounter them, Frankl's ideas bear particular consideration right now.

Frankl stressed the importance of what he called the will to meaning. He believed that having a sense of meaning or purpose or a goal in life drives us forward from one day to the next, even when we confront personal suffering, family tragedy or public calamity. That is the inner compass that gives us direction; when we lose it, we begin to drift and can become lost in, and to, despair.

Frankl had begun to develop his ideas about the pivotal role meaning plays in our lives before the Nazi regime deported him and his family to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. As Jews, the Frankls were in Hitler's crosshairs for annihilation.

But despite four years of being shuttled from one camp to another, suffering the ravages of typhus and starvation and the nonstop threat of being shot, beaten or gassed to death, Frankl endured. He held onto the hope that he would see his family after the war. He also set his sights on completing the unfinished manuscript describing his theories that the Nazis had seized and destroyed when they imprisoned him.

Those goals kept him focused on the possibility of a postwar future. He even jotted down brief notes on scraps of paper, which he hid in his threadbare uniform, about how his experience of life in extremis bore out his ideas. He observed that fellow inmates who were able to maintain an inner purpose were less likely to give up and give in to the futility of camp existence.

It did not matter what the goal was - whether to reunite with loved ones, to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, to stay true to religious faith or to spite the enemy simply by staying alive. Just having a reason to live bolstered the will to live, to try to persevere, evade death, survive, even if just for another day and then the next, with each day holding the possibility of bringing the goal that much closer.

After the war, Frankl was devastated to learn that neither his parents nor his wife had made it out of the camps alive. But he did have his work, and he buried himself in it, reconstructing and in time completing the manuscript the Nazis had seized, "Man's Search for Meaning," as well as composing, less than a year after being freed from his hellish incarceration, the three public lectures that make up "Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything."

With World War II's horrific death toll still being reckoned, and the atomic bomb having just been unleashed as a new existential threat, Frankl was acutely aware of an underlying public mood he described as numb, fatalistic, "spiritually bombed out."

How could survivors return to life, if they did not believe that their lives held value? In the approach to psychotherapy he developed, which he called Logotherapy, Frankl proposed an antidote to giving in to such nihilism: taking hold, instead, of life's meaning - and more precisely, the particular aim we set for ourselves. If we search, such a purpose can be found embedded in our values, beliefs, experiences and capabilities, and in and through the different personal and professional interests, communities and caring relationships we've created. Even at the end of life, Frankl wrote, a sense of fulfillment can be derived from taking "a stance toward the unalterable, fated, inevitable, and unavoidable limitation of their possibilities: how they adapt to this limitation, react toward it, how they accept this fate."

The fate Frankl confronted was the Holocaust. Our fate today is wrapped up in the coronavirus pandemic. Finding and sustaining meaning in the midst of crisis is not easy. I wish my friend had known about this strategy, and had sought help that could have harnessed her back to life.

---

Cole is book columnist for the Psychotherapy Networker and the author of the memoir "After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges."

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Book World: In the midst of despair, discovering a way to have hope - Alton Telegraph

Hope.

Four little letters, yet together they represent the most powerful substance in the universe. Whether associated with Princess Leia or Samwise Gamgee or Gene Roddenberry, hope conjures up images of the impossible victory, the candle in the darkness, the moral arc of the universe finally snapping back to its correct path.

In recent years, the idea of hopeor, as Barack Obama once famously put it, the sheer audacity of hopehas taken on a more tangible form as a movement among storytellers. The term hopepunk was originally coined by fantasy author Alexandra Rowland to be the opposite of grimdark. As Rowland puts it:

Hopepunk says, No, I dont accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full. YEAH, were all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. Weve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and heres the important part) weve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesnt equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.

A narrative beacon in a time of political and environmental chaos, hopepunk as a movement is equal parts dreamer and realist, the former holding onto the thought of a better tomorrow and the latter unafraid to get ones hands dirty in the process. In a time of resistance when the daily news feels like a dystopia fueled by chaos and disinformation, hope is indeed the most punk rock thing you can have.

Its important to note that hope isnt as simple as a happy ending. Its a sense of justice that is greater than a single characters romantic or business aspirations. In recent years, such a feeling has been seen in the best of science fiction and fantasy, from Annalee Newitzs The Future of Another Timeline to Mary Robinette Kowals Lady Astronaut series to Rowlands own A Conspiracy of Truths.

But can you find hope when the world has literally ended? The answer, it seems, is yesif you know where to look.

Throughout many traditional subgenres of science fiction and fantasy, hope is inherently woven into the elements of a narrative. In an epic tale of good versus evil, regardless of whether it takes place in space or a magical realm, the very existence of the proverbial good guys inspires hope, even if it starts with one person. Time travelers have a built-in mechanism to set things right. In cyberpunk, the goal is often to reset a beings or a societys humanity back after layers of technology have buried it.

Those examples find hope built into the narrative DNA of the subgenre. The timeline can be corrected, the empire can be overthrown, humanity can overcome machines. The apocalypse, though, presents a much different challenge: where does that hope exist? The apocalypse, whether it came via zombies or climate change or nuclear war, cant be reset. The dead cant be brought back to life. Water, infrastructure, and other resources cant return.

Except that isnt the end of the story. If it was, then the following books wouldnt exist. In each of these examples, the end of the world is the storys foundation. But while the desolate landscape may feel like its own character, each story has a heart much greater than any apocalypse.

In Sam J. Millers Nebula-nominated title, the pressures of the modern world have led to collapse, as climate change and economic warfare have led to a new world. From this emerges Qaanaaq, which symbolically merges these issues into a floating Arctic city. Despite living in post-apocalyptic conditions, the inhabitants of Qaanaaq have not relied upon grimdark violence to re-establish society as seen in so many other end-of-the-world scenarios. Instead, Blackfish City presents a living, breathing society that combines the simple pleasures of spectator sports and steaming noodles with the repeated horrors of economic inequality and deadly disease. In short, Qaanaaq represents a microcosm of the world at large as humanity pushes onexcept with an old woman leading a polar bear across the sea.

Emily St. John Mandels novel is recognized as a seminal work in post-apocalyptic fiction, something that stands apart from many of the ideas established by The Road or The Walking Dead. Yes, theres a pandemic, and yes theres danger on the road, but at the heart of it is a different type of survival. Station Elevens shifting narrative puts a spotlight on the survival of ideas rather than daily sustenance, acknowledging that art and music and stories are as vital to our civilization as infrastructure and technology. And by keeping the creative spirit alive, Station Eleven dares to challenge the reader to examine what exists outside of the general definitions of faith and communityand how the answer to that can keep humanity going.

The cover for The Book of M uses iconography familiar to fans of post-apocalyptic media: the lone vehicle traveling down a dark road. But in the end, Peng Shepherds debut novel pushes beyond tropes found in other post-apocalyptic fiction towards the establishment of a new society. In this realm where memories and shadows disappear and mere ideas can become magical reality, ultimately the building blocks of civilization lay in two separate but equally important pieces of the human experience: the stories we carry with us and the search for answers. Each of these feed into the other for an emotional chicken-egg cycle that allows humanity to step forward from the shadows of devastation.

The bond between humans and their pets often represent the best, most wholesome parts of our lives. Consider that social media and video streaming sites often feel filled with mudslinging and division, and yet, cute animal photos unite all of us. The unconditional love we give and receive with animals is universal, and yet heightened even more so in C.A. Fletchers tale of the apocalypse. In this book, a young boy named Griz traverses the post-apocalyptic landscape following The Gelding, an event that leaves only thousands in the world. Griz sets out on a simple quest: to find his dog.

Through his journey, Griz encounters both humans and people, some helpful and some harmful. Things get messy of course, and the plot twists and turns, though the bond between Griz and his dog remains the foundation of the story. Through it all, Griz maintains his humanity by refusing to let the desolation and violence pull him down. Holding onto hope in our world is hard enough, but maintaining that humanity in the face of nothing sometimes needs a guiding lighteven one with four legs and a wagging tail.

If Station Eleven dove into how live theatre could carry on the human spirit, Sarah Pinskers book gives that a punk-rock boot to the face. Rather than a single decimating event for humanity, Pinker portrays a world on edge with death coming from multiple sources: powerful viruses, climate change, terrorist attacks, and more. These threats take a mirror image of our own world and, to quote Spinal Tap, turn it up to 11. The public response to this is an authoritarian rule, where public gatherings are illegal and homogenized entertainment rules the day.

This repression leads to two very different points of view: dynamic performer Luce and corporate employee Rosemary. As their stories begin to intertwine (along with some cool worldbuilding for transforming the live music experience), this dangerous world details the risks of suppressing the artistic spirit. As Luce begins to perform illegal concerts, Pinsker deftly illustrates a key point: art, hope, and rebellion often overlap, making each an indomitable part of the human spirit.

Hope is only human.

Despite the devastation in these examples, hope is found simply by existing and engaging in the things that make us human: relationships, art, and community. This all boils down to a common thread through each of these examplesin each story, humans adapt rather than give up.

In fact, that core trait is more than just a narrative tool, its a scientific theory called variability selection. Our brains are essentially social brains, paleoanthropologist Rick Potts told Scientific American in 2013. The originator of the term, Potts spoke about how humans may be the most adaptive species in earths history. We share information, we create and pass on knowledge. Thats the means by which humans are able to adjust to new situations, and its what differentiates humans from our earlier ancestors, and our earlier ancestors from primates.

Resiliency, adaptability, making the best out of situations even in the face of widespread destructionthats not just the way to survive after the apocalypse, but to thrive when everything else has gone. Should the world end (hopefully only a fictional one), then theres still a reason to be optimistic that the survivors wont always be murdering each other over resources, despite numerous stories portraying this.

Our wiring is a little better than that.

We change. We adapt. And we find a way to overcome. Fiction offers a mirror to humanity, and by creating the most extreme and hopeless circumstances with end-of-the-world stories, it becomes clear that hope will always win. Because, as it turns out, hope is an inherently human thing.

And in times like these, where headlines can feel more dystopic than post-apocalyptic fiction, hope might be the most powerful thing in the world.

Originally published in January 2020.

When hes not writing about sci-fi for Tor, The Mary Sue, StarTrek dot com, and other geek media, Mike Chen writes sci-fi books. His second novel A Beginning At The End (January 14, 2020, MIRA/HarperCollins) is an intimate post-apocalyptic story with heart, hope, and humanity (Publishers Weekly). Visit his website or follow him on Twitter for geekery discussion, dog photos, and many curse words. Visit him on twitter and on his website.

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Five Books About Finding Hope at the End of the World - tor.com