Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich

 Movie Monday

(Although life is pretty hectic around here and Movie Monday is still on hiatus, I found the time to write the following [in 2 sittings]  so I thought I would share it. Sorry for the length.)

Helped the girl get her bibliography and footnotes in order for her last advanced history essay of the year: Did antisemitism cause the Holocaust? This will be the last of the much too-nuanced essay questions given to 9th graders who are in advanced history and not AP history for this school year. But I think she’s made her case as I looked through her back-up evidence.

Today, legit internet sites can be referenced and R. J. Rummels at:

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.CHAP1.HTM

has the first chapter of his book: Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder there and she’s citing this section: Most Nazis were absolute racists, especially among the top echelon; they believed utterly in the superiority of the "Aryan" race..... But many other regimes have also killed opponents and critics, or used reprisals to maintain power. What distinguished the Nazis above virtually all others was their staggering genocide: people were machine gunned in batches, shot in the head at the edge of trenches, burned alive while crowded into churches, gassed in vans or fake shower rooms, starved or frozen to death, worked to death in camps, or beaten or tortured to death simply because of their race, religion, handicap, or sexual preference.

Which got me thinking about the peoples of today, many of whom  truly believe they, their country, their race is superior to others and easily slip into a mind set that invading random countries or dropping bombs randomly from the sky on a peaceful countryside with drones and killing innocent bystanders is OK. We’re not unique in our times; it’s all happened before in other variations. Then, like now, many humans oppose these evils and some have the courage to act (Ellsberg with Vietnam, now Assange, Manning, and Snowden) never knowing if they will be vindicated for their actions or condemned. Man seems to work the circle from redemption to evil over and over . If he is ready to move away from the darkness (such as, acceptance of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, acceptance of false charges for the invasion of Iraq, almost unquestioning support of the Patriot Act) and into the light these "whistleblowers" may become modern heroes; if not.........

Which brings me to the id and my movie review for today. It was written before the latest revelation about the NSA leaks but I hope you’ll see a connection:

Id, ego and super-ego. Sex, violence and sublimation. Paging Freud. He's been relegated to the background of our modern day "Dr. Phil" feel good psychology but way back in the nascent days of psychiatry, Freud nailed it. Using our brand of sublimation, we may suppress Freud but he's always there and relevant.

I intended to review Prometheus for my next Movie Monday but then, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, TCM was showing Crumb, a 1994 documentary on controversial cartoonist, Robert Crumb. And I mean controversial in its most uncomfortable meaning. Like Swift's A Modest Proposal, Crumb drew cartoon obscenities to hold a mirror to all our hidden, never-talked-of, warts and he didn't blink.

But what brings me to Crumb today is not the entire documentary of his life and times (though I do think it should be watched) but a small segment of it where he and his older brother, Charles, discuss Charles' dark desires for pedophilia (which were never satisfied) and his descent from an accomplished, quirky cartoonist to a producer of compulsively repetitive  artistic drawings and script. (The pages and pages of words from Charles' notebook are so reminiscent of the protagonist's descent into madness in The Shining.)

This segment with Robert and Charles took me from passive watching to "Wow" when Charles starts talking about the id. It was like a blast from the past because I haven't heard the id discussed as part of the human personality since college! And, until last night, I didn't realize how successfully that part of human behavior had been removed from modern conversation. Like "bad" sex which was removed for almost 30 years from the movies starting in the early 1930s when the Hollywood Code of Conduct finally kicked in, I must have blinked because the id, that unrestrained part of the human where every desire must be fulfilled, has also left the room. (As Wikipedia says so well: The id is the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains a human's basic, instinctual drives.)

We don't talk about the id today. In fact, I don't think we've given it much thought in decades. It was probably up and running during WWII with the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco but once "democracy" kicked in post-WWII, bad stuff if it were done by "good" people was always given a lofty causation. The good guys might have ego and super-ego but base instinctual drives? No way! Every thing we did, even horrors, were done for lofty ideals.

We have artificially removed ourselves, the good guys, from the human dynamic. That is, from that part of the human dynamic which deals with our baser nature. Our enemies, sub-human as they must be, have this thing called id, not we.

We can't possibly possess what Freud describes as: "It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of the Dreamwork and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations.... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle." Wikipedia.

That's why, watching Crumb and hearing the id mentioned was like a family member, and a potentially very destructive one to be sure, returning to sit at the dinner table. It was like the final missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle of human behavior clicked back in.

Watch Crumb. It's disturbing and not in a good way. He messed up lives but I have a lot of leeway for greatly creative people. Unfortunately, their families often pay the price for their take on the world and how they are compelled to express it.