northierthanthou

Time 2021-01-06 14:04:31

Web Name: northierthanthou

WebSite: http://northierthanthou.com

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Are white South African or Mississippi sharecropper, or Mississippi sheriff, or a Frenchman driven out of Algeria, all have, at bottom, a system of reality which compels them to, for example, in the case of the French exile from Algeria, to offend French reasons from having ruled Algeria. The Mississippi or Alabama sheriff, who really does believe, when he’s facing a Negro boy or girl, that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity. Lest one miss the connection to Baldwin s speech in 1965, one has only to think about a few more of his words; We talk about integration in America as though it was some great new conundrum. The problem in America is that we’ve been integrated for a very long time. Put me next to any African and you will see what I mean. My grandmother was not a rapist. Now just think about the plot-line for the male lead in Lovecraft country, a back man (Atticus Freeman played by Jonathan Majors) turns out to be an heir of a rich white explorer. Far from being a blessing, this proves to be a terrible curse.Lovecraft Country, is James Baldwin s critique of American racism transformed into a horror story. Just how much of a transformation that took is another question. It should come as no surprise to find Jordan Peele listed as one of the show s producers. It wouldn t be the first time, he mapped the patterns of racism directly onto a horror story and left some of us more than a little disturbed at how easy and obvious the connection turned out to be. It s also fitting that Lovecraft, in particular, would be the vehicle for this narrative, not just because of the delicious irony, but because so much of Lovecraftian horror resides in the prospect of insanity. In Lovecraft, this horror is about the encounter with horrors such as C thulhu, in the consequence of knowing one day a monstrous God will destroy everything and there is nothing we can do about it. In Baldwin, this insanity the consequences of racism. It is about the perception of whites threatened by those challenging racism, and about the impact of racism itself on the minds of white people struggling to rationalize our own privilege. As Baldwin suggests, white privilege leads us to think of those who challenge it as insane, and yet that same same privilege cannot skew the reality of those who benefit from it. Racism, as Baldwin describes it, does merely enable one segment of society to oppress another; it twists the minds of each into a distorted of reality. I suggest that what has happened to white Southerners is in some ways, after all, much worse than what has happened to Negroes there because Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, cannot be considered – you know, no one can be dismissed as a total monster. I’m sure he loves his wife, his children. I’m sure, you know, he likes to get drunk. You know, after all, one’s got to assume he is visibly a man like me. But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse. You can see the psychological impact of racism all over Lovecraft country. The horrors faced by the central characters in this story are consistently brought to them by white people. For their own part, the world of the white characters in this series appears to be quite insane.How could the white characters in this world not prove insane. They are on the back end of the cattle prod, so to speak, and that, as Baldwin warns us, has its own hazards.This same theme, the psychological effect of racism, also plays out in yet another contemporary series, The Good Lord Bird. Ostensibly a story about John Brown, the series turns into a meditation on the insanity of slavery, and in particular of its effect on those who benefit from it. There are few well-grounded characters in this story. Most of them are slaves. Even Frederick Douglas comes across as a man spoiled by privilege, one whose sense of reality is distorted by his own fame as an abolitionist, and whose commitments to the abolition of slavery are compromised by that very fame. To say nothing of John Brown himself! As he is portrayed in this series, Brown is an absolute lunatic. We love him, of course, at least in the end, but there is little question about his sanity. He doesn t have it. No. To find a sensible character in this story, one has to look with the characters held in bondage. The slaves in this story are the only characters with the good sense to look after themselves. The rest are either too busy defending slavery and exploiting it or spiraling into ever more crazy schemes for opposing it. For those held in bondage, slavery in the Good Lord Bird is a force which keeps subjected to it well grounded; it is a force which sends those free of it into ever more bizarre flights of fancy.The Good Lord Bird follows the story of an adolescent boy, Henry Shackleford (played by Joshua Caleb Johnson). Henry is labeled a girl by John Brown himself and Christened with a new nickname, Onion . When Brown proves incapable of correction, Henry simply accepts his new identity and thus becomes Onion for the rest of the series. Henry knows who he is of course, but this is what it takes to get along in a world driven mad by people high on the privilege of freedom denied to others.There is something especially interesting about the insanity of Brown and Douglas in the Good Lord Bird. It is as though the series producers believe you would have to be a little crazy to cut so far against the grain of the society in which you live, to seek to act effectively in opposition to slavery, to actually do what it takes to end it. Brown is typically regarded as something of a lunatic or a fanatic in history. (As I recall, this was one of the gripes mentioned by James Loewen in Lies My Teachers Told Me.) But how does one oppose an institution as powerful as slavery without becoming a lunatic or a fanatic. You can mumble, oh that s wrong, or speak of some day overcoming the institution, but systemic oppression is not so fragile as to be threatened by expressions of passive regret. To actually confront the institution is to wage war against so many other things right along with it, even to risk bringing about harm to many people. That would of course include friends, and family, and even those one might seek to help in the end. You d have to be a little crazy to want to do such a thing. Ethan Hawke is a lot crazy as John Brown in this series, and (for some of us anyway) it is a truly lovable performance. James Baldwin reminds us that it shouldn t surprise anyone to see a man confronting slavery treated as a crazy person, not at the time, not the history books, and not now on screen.But of course Baldwin wrote one other script with his speech back in Cambridge. He wrote the script for his debate opponent. You see, Baldwin was there in Cambridge on that day in 1965 to debate William F. Buckley, Jr. The topic for the debate was the proposition; The American dream is at the expense of the negro. Baldwin was to take the affirmative and Buckley was there to oppose it.Two things are particularly striking about this debate: the absolute brilliance of Baldwin s own speech, and the utterly pathetic response that Buckley makes to it. It s worth noting that two separate publications haunt the debate. (See, I haven t given up the horror references.) The first of these writings was an article published in 1957 by William F, Buckley entitled Why the South Must Prevail. In this publication, Buckley, argued in defense of segregation, suggesting that white southerners needed to maintain segregated institutions and reserve power to whites until such a time as African-Americans ( negroes in Buckley s article) would prove worthy of it. Now some have suggested Buckley had changed his mind by 1965, but at least in this debate the difference is little more than a courteous veneer. Buckley was always capable of being courteous (though Gore Vidal might have thought otherwise); he was always capable of putting a polite face on his life-log defense of elitism and privilege. The second of these publications was book Baldwin had published in in 1963, The Fire Next Time, which is said to contain a warning that violence could well be the result of continued injustice. Buckley would have described it as a threat. Buckley s article is the reason he was invited to debate Baldwin. Baldwin s book is the key to Buckley s response.That and Baldwin s tip that opposing racism must seem like insanity to those whose identity is tied to it.It s worth noting that Baldwin makes a point of personalizing the issue of race in his own speech. He claims that he built the infrastructure of the American south, that he himself is the subject of discrimination and racist policies. In effect he makes of himself an indexical icon (as my old professor would have put it), through which to contemplate all of the implications of racism. This offends Buckley a great (as it often seems to offend many today to hear that racism has a negative impact on persons of color). So, Buckley s first move is to deny it. He suggests that he is going to treat Baldwin as though he were white, and that he will do so, because Baldwin s race is irrelevant to the matter at hand. He does this in order to deny Baldwin the protections afforded to him as a public speaker making use of a negro identity.And thus, Buckley s own speech begins in a world where in Baldwin s race is irrelevant to the topic of racism; a world in which being black is a privilege, one to which Baldwin is not actually entitled.Buckley does not defend segregation here, nor racism. Instead he dissembles his way through the topic, describing segregation as a dastardly situation , mocking the excessive concern about racism in American Universities, and suggesting in the end that it is negroes themselves that have failed to advance themselves as a people. In Buckley s narrative, Segregation appears to be a ghost in the machine, a presence over which no-one takes responsibility, except as it seems, those oppressed by it. If only those gosh-darned negroes and their rotten liberal friends could just get over the whole thing and get on with their lives! As Buckley would have it, the only reason racism is still with us, is because it lives in the efforts of those actively opposing it. You can hear people saying similar things, today of course. It s just a little more jarring to see someone saying this in the very era in which buses were burned, bombs, were set off, and children spat upon while going to school, all over the topic of racism. but wait! Dammit! It s just as jarring to hear it in the era when cops put a knee to man s neck in broad daylight and on camera, when the Republican Party actively works to deny African-Americans the right to vote, and when white supremacists openly mix their own flags and symbols with those of mainstream American politics. And what about this segregation anyway!?! Buckley s vision of segregation is a monster worthy of Lovecraft country, one which somehow appears to the majority of us only in hindsight, but which haunts the lives of those afflicted with it. One must think those who complain of racism terribly insane to be afflicted by a demon that exists only in their own politics! Buckley certainly seems to think so. Those telling us liberalism is a mental illness today surely do, but of course the brunt of their criticism falls less on liberals than on those in need of remediation. We get insulted; they get to go on living with the with the demon folks like Buckley and his modern descendants will neither claim as their own nor confront in any meaningful way. Buckley did a lot to set conservative politics on this course through his publication, National Review. That his vapid waffling response to racism could be considered intellectualism, as it has for so many calling themselves conservative has always been a mystery to me. Buckley, never really had anything to say about anything, but he could sure as Hell take more words to say nothing than most any other public figure in modern history. Most particularly, he had nothing meaningful to say about racism or segregation in response to Baldwin. Buckley concludes his meandering speech by warning Baldwin and those who sympathize with him of an apocalyptic scenario worthy of modern horror films. If, Buckley suggests, folks such as Baldwin insist that the American dream itself is antithetical to the justice which they seek, then he and others who love their country will be forced to fight over it, on the beaches, so to speak. Oddly enough, they would be doing so, even for for the benefit of the negro himself, as Buckley would have us believe.Thus, Buckley ends his speech by imagining, not how segregation might be ended, but how the call for it threatens everything he loves, and how the defense of segregation under the pretense of basic patriotism is in the end, all for the benefit of those oppressed by it.What s worse! This debate hasn t moved a whole Hell of a lot since 1965. In this Debate, Baldwin struggled not to impress the audience with the notion that racism is wrong, but to get people to give a damn about it, to act meaningfully against it. For his part, Buckley struggles to hide it, and to hide the degree to which racism was always central to the world he defended throughout his life. Buckley has a lot in common with an awful lot of people today.Small wonder that the script for this debate can still be found on your cable television networks.Those present voted 544 to 164 in favor of Baldwin as the winner of the debate. For his part Buckley, bragged that he didn t give them a goddamned inch, or something to that effect.Moni and I spent the last couple hours before midnight, waffling as to whether or not we were going to head out and watch the fireworks show. See, fireworks don t mean much up this way around early July. The big fireworks display in Barrow occurs on January First. And with most people in their cars (because it s cold out there!), social distancing is a big can-do for this kind of thing. We heard different things about the prospects for fireworks this year, but in the end, the celebration was on. not-so-much the gatherings that normally occur in the school afterwards, but fireworks? That part was definitely on! Only thing is Moni and I were both tired and feeling rather wimpy about the cold. In the last hour, we had decided we were definitely not going. Then decided to go in the last 15 minutes before midnight.Hopefully, our inability to make a decision last night has more to do with the lingering effects of 2020 than the coming patterns of 2021. Either way, it was beautiful. I missed the chance to record the grand finale, and if my hand could talk, it would have been calling me names the entire time, but I recorded a decent chunk of the celebration. Moni got the finale. This is just a short videoshowing what an influx of spammers on Tiktok looks like. (I swear, I m not converting this blog into a TikTok support page; really I m not!) So, I am still on TikTok. It s actually kinda fun. In the native language, I guess I am mostly on political TikTok, but I pretty much talk about whatever I feel like at the moment, just like I do here. I don t dance though; that does not happen. Ironically, I am experiencing this constraint as a sense that the format is too long. See, I ve never prepared my speeches or classroom lessons on a word-for-word basis. Some technical points, sure, I spell them out precisely and read them off a note, but most of my public speaking is off the top of my head. I have a general script in mind and improvise my way through the details. If I feel like I flubbed a point, I just take a minute to restate it. That s what I normally do. With only 1 minute per video, however, that just isn t an option. So, every word counts. The trouble is that I can t seem to speak for 1 whole minute without screwing something up. So, the fact that I have only 1 minute means I have to make it through a whole minute. Oh the paradox!Yes, I know, you can record a TikTok in segments. I still think the better vids are all-in-one takes, and anyhow, I like the challenge. except when I flubbed it for the umpteenth time in a row.Anyway, one thing I do not like about TikTok is the lack of any useful curating features. I might be missing something, but at the moment, I don t see any means of organizing vids and bundling them up into themes, etc. So, I am going to do that here, at least with a few selected vids. Yes, Isome of these may appear in more than one category. I plan add to this page from time to time, unless I wake up one day and say to Hell with all of it. I am mostly doing this for myself, just to keep track of what s what, but I sorta hope, someone finds a few of my vids amusing at least. If anyone is curious, I hope you enjoy the content. One of the worst things about Christmas is watching people work too hard at Christmas. People do it in different ways, but they do it all the time. Normally a moderate man, my father once Christmased up a big decoration for our rooftop. It was pretty cool, and as we lived just off Highway 18, people all around Victor-Valley, California certainly noticed it. So, of course he tried to top himself the next year, and again the year after that. I don t recall when it got to be too much (though it might have been when we moved to a colder place). I do remember at least one year when the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth, to him, I mean. The stress was apparent. Afterwards, we settled for a few strings of light.Of course, Christmas lights can be a whole other kind of Hell. They could be a really special Hell back in the 70s. Hell, it was Hell just being my dad s assistant in the annual battle of the Christmas lights. One bad bulb could ruin a whole string, and some of those could hide really well. I swear some would work only when you tested them, but when you moved on, they just conked right out. The struggle to find the one bad bulb was just the battle you fought after the one to untangle the strings in the first place. Don t get me wrong. I ve seen some amazing Christmas displays. Really wonderful stuff! I only hope the people who made them actually enjoyed working on the project. And then of course there is the competitive gifting. As they say, it s the thought that counts. Yes, but money too expresses a thought of its own, a thought that doesn t go away just because we sometimes talk like we don t care about it. So, we dollar up our Christmas love and double down on the price of our holiday thoughts whenever possible. It isn t just the individual presents though; the spectacle around that tree can be a project in itself. That project got out of hand more than a few times when I was a kid. I noticed the beauty of the result, and I enjoyed playing with more than a few of those gifts. If I noticed the crankyness of the tall people around me, I didn t always make the connection.Some people just try way too hard to fill the space under the tree with as many gifts as they can. It really doesn t have to be a mountain of packages that will take all day just to get through Well, for some people it does, which is precisely when Christmasing up the gift-giving gets to be a bit too much yule-tide cheer. and more than a few folks end up paying the cost of the holidays off well into the new year, the interest paid on credit cards being just one more holiday gift.Hell, if a corporation can be a person, I suppose, it can receive a holiday gift just like the rest of us!And then there the tree itself! It can always be bigger, can t it? At least it could if it weren t for the ceiling, but then there are ways to flesh out the total tree display. You can Christmas up a tree a little more each year, making it bigger, brighter, full of more tinsel, decked out in brighter ornaments with each passing holiday happening. Did I mention that special ornaments have a special way of falling from a tree branch? Seriously, the chance of breaking an ornament is directly proportional to its cost multiplied by its sentimental value.And then of course there is the baking! A few Christmas cookies can be a lovely way to celebrate the holidays. But of course you don t just need the sugar cookies (though you need lots of those). You also have to have the cinnamon stars, and those powdery white cookies too. Don t forget the chocolate candies, and the hard candies! Maybe, some It s funny, the way this holiday with all its themes of family and sharing can bring out the worst in people. At least Black Friday doesn t seem to produce a body count anymore, at least I hope not, but the holidays can still deposit a whole butt-load of stress under the tree. Between the fake war on Christmas, obnoxious relatives at the dinner table, and the usual holiday loneliness some folks experience this time of year, the holiday season can sure produce a lot of strife and misery. I suppose that shouldn t surprise anyone. Make a point of any virtue and you create a special room for a little vice to grow. What makes Christmas especially troublesome is just how earnest people can be about it. Among all the other hazards of Holiday Hell, the ones we all know, there is also the hazard of those trying too hard at this Holiday. We don t talk about this holiday hazard too much, I don t think, possibly because it doesn t give us anything to fight about. The fake war on Christmas gives us that, at least. Holiday depression shapes up a good story to tell a therapist, a bartender, or at least a divorce lawyer, but being up till 6am putting the holiday cheer in proper order just seems too natural to some of us. Obnoxious relatives give us gripes to last the whole year. Those we will tell our friends, perhaps even the friends we will gripe about with our relatives over Christmas dinner. Hell, Holiday hell, gives us a lot to gripe about, and a good gripe is a gift well given. But working too hard at the cookies? There is nothing to complain about there.For those who may be in the midst of trying to put together that bicycle before you go to bed tonight, still struggling with a troublesome string of lights or just working at another pan of cookies, don t forget to save a little time to enjoy it all.Someone I love is downstairs working a little too hard to clean up an already clean house so that we can enjoy it tomorrow. I better go see if I can help her.One of the first things I did when I moved to Barrow was walk out onto the tundra with my little Backberry phone and try to get some pictures of a snowy owl that stayed out behind the college here. He would stare at me as I approached and then fly away just as I was almost in range for a decent photo, only to land a hundred feet or so away and stare calmly at me as I repeated my efforts. I almost got some decent pics of that guy. All day, I almost got them.There was something the way that owl just watched me approach. It was a forgone conclusion. It wasn t going to get THAT close, so he was in no hurry to fly away. He took off just as I was about to get close enough for a decent pic, and he went just far enough to re-establish his own comfort zone, and incidentally to tempt me to engage in one more round of effort.These days, I have an actual camera. I m still a bit clumsy with a lens, but my camera is smart enough to compensate for some of my photo-foolishness, and the result is a (hopefully) passable batch of owlitations. Most of them were taken the summer before last. This year, there just didn t seem to be enough hot lemming action to draw a big owly crowd. Anyway, owls! The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I m from the Government, and I m here to help. At times, it seems like there is no real difference between the Democratic Party and that of the Republicans. At other times, the difference seems loud and clear. In other moments you can practically see the gap between the two parties widening.. South Dakota Governor, Kristi Noem s response to Joe Biden up above is one such moment.First we have Joe Biden suggesting that he will help struggling Americans once he becomes President.Then we have Kristi Noem reminding us of the old Reagan quote to the effect that the worst thing you can hear is that someone from the government is coming to help you.By 2 moments when the gap between Republicans and Democrats widens, you might think I mean, first Biden s comment, then Noem s, but I don t. I mean the Reagan quote and then Noem s use of it. Those two references reveal the ever-deepening cynicism of the Republican Party.It was Reagan that really embedded the libertarian themes in modern Republican politics. He did so through folksy statements like the one Noem s quoted above, statements which contributed to a growing sense that government couldn t be used to solve real-world problems, and a sense that this view was as natural to any real Americans as life itself. Through statements like that one, Reagan took the GOP in a direction which would become ever more hostile to American government. What might have sounded like skepticism at first, the response of those unconvinced in the efficacy of government aid, has become ever more strident, until we have now reached a moment wherein the faithful cannot bring themselves to even the possibility of that government could do anything but hurt people. The trajectory that takes people from this modest skepticism to the fanatical anti-government stance we see in so many today is a simple shift from figurative speech to literal interpretation. One has only to take Reagan s clever turn of a phrase literally. One has only to mean it, and to mean it literally.One of the ironic things about Reagan s anti-government rhetoric? It came from a fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the architect of the New Deal, a President who did more to insert government into American lives than any President in American history. Reagan was fond of saying he wasn t the one that changed; it was the Democrats, but this plainly not true. Reagan changed from a man who could celebrate a champion of big government to one who preached against government programs every chance he got. Statements from Reagan like the one Noem chose to quote above helped to build a new anti-governemnt ideology that now underscores the ideology of modern Republicans. Those seeking government aid are not merely wrong-headed, they are a source of positive evil. You can see this world view in Newt Gingrich s contract With America, and in the careers of every pundit with a prominent place in the right wing echo chamber. You can also see it in the Oklahoma City Bombing, and in the rhetoric of local militia s all over the United States. More to the point, you can see it in Noem s glib dismissal of the possibility that a new President could actually help the American people during a time of crisis.What we see in the modern GOP is a cult which takes Reagan s maxim quite literally. This is not mere skepticism; it is a pious confrontation with evil itself. What they see in any effort to use the power of government to help Americans is nothing less than a genuine attack on the American people. The horrors they imagine to follow from government aid are more real to the true believers in the Republican Party than the realities of Covid19 or its economic consequences. The possibilities of government aid seem more terrible to them than the actual deaths of their friends and family. We are thus left with a political party that not only fails to take reasonable steps to combat a pandemic, it actively resists those efforts and even takes steps (such as Trump rallies) to endanger more people. What does it take to make sense of the Republican Party and its refusal to take responsible measures in combating this life-threatening disease? One needs only to take them at their word.She will not protect her people. To do so would be a heresy against Reagan s old maxim.I had already booked a work-related flight to Fairbanks when Covid19 began spreading through the U.S. I remember talking about it with Moni in the days before I flew, and especially the night before I was to go. We seriously talked about cancelling the trip, but I thought it best to follow through with my plans. By the time the plane hit ground the next day, pubic sentiment had shifted from something along the lines of maybe wear a mask, wash your hands a lot, and avoid crowds to something more like don t go out at all, definitely wear a mask, and start shutting down the businesses. By the time I left Fairbanks 3 days later, the University was all but closed and restaurants were take-out only. Touching people, even to shake hands, was not done. Needless to say, I didn t get much done. I felt pretty relieved to get home safely.And then there was a period when we were all just locked down and travel wasn t really an option. I had already scheduled a visit with an oral surgeon. He was to take the remains of 2 molars out the right side of my mouth, hopefully before the botched cap on my left side fell out and left me on a solid yogurt diet.As the time of Covid stretched on, and people began to realize this wasn t ending any time soon, I started to think about flying south to get my teeth done after all. With the help of her sister (a nurse), Moni had the safety precautions down to a science, and we started making limited forays out of the arctic. I still cringe at the thought of leaving the state, but with a little planning, I feel like we can get down to Anchorage and get what needs doing done. We can even venture pout of our room a bit, in which case we figure it s best to keep going right out of town. One good thing about Alaska, some of the best things about it take you well away from other people. Still got one last procedure before I can sink my teeth into a proper steak. I would prefer to hunker down completely for the next few months, but I may need to risk one more trip. In the meantime, it occurs to me that I haven t done a proper poto-gallery in awhile. So, here are a few pictures from recent travels. This of course includes a few drives around town, and maybe a few from before the pandemic. Anyway, pics!We ve all heard the deus ex machina, right? Everyone knows that little story about how the folks in ancient Greek theater used to end a play by hoisting a God out over the stage at the end of a play to resolve the major problems in the story line. We all know that the phrase is now used derisively to describe any device in which an author solves problems by means of an external resolution. When the protagonists of the story can t solve their own problems, we consider it cheating to have the cavalry ride in at the end or cut to the central character waking up to find it was all a dream, or find out the protagonists were really faking the audience out right along with their villain. (Supernatural, I m looking at you!) I cringe when a hero pinned down by bad guys with automatic weapons manages to run across and open field without getting hit, and I have long since grown tired of engines that are supposed to blow up at warp-factor 10, but somehow manage warp factor 12 for a minute or so as Captain Kirk looks at us with that special mixture of fear and confidence, and possibly without his shirt. It s also bad when the hero somehow gets through all the guards without any explanation as to how she got there to confront the big-bad-evil Night King and win the most important battle of the whole series two full episodes before its over, and now we have to wonder why we should watch the last two episodes at all when this was supposed to be the biggest conflict of the whole story? Why!?! WHY!?!Anyway, the point is that it s cheating to impose a solution on the end of a story without forcing the protagonists solve the problems for themselves. If they can t solve their problems, then they can end tragically. Sometimes that works too, but when the problem is solved magically, it feels like a cheat. We call that sort of ending a deus ex machina , and when we use that phrase it is not used in praise.I m probably botching the grammar in that phrase, but in my defense, the Devil Made me do it.I personally find it no less irritating when the central problems to be resolved in a story are unmotivated by any reasonable sense of how the world works or what a villain wants. Oh, I can suspend belief for a central premise or two, but there is a point at which the story should begin to follow a logic of it s own. Once those premises are established, the actions of the characters in question, including those of the major antagonist of the story ought to make sense within the universe in which they live. If this isn t the case, then how do we understand the protagonists own responses to the difficulties at hand? What do they need to do to solve those problems? Unless the problems facing our main characters present them with some meaningful choices, they are just as deprotagonized as they would be if someone else solved their problems for them, and the problems posed by the story do not have a meaningful logic of their own, then they impose no meaningful choices on the protagonists.I m talking about the villain who is doing villainous things just to be a villain? Worse yet, I am talking about the villain who has a clear rationale for their actions, but whose actions leave that rationale aside as the story approaches its climax. We knew why he did this, but why is he doing that? Why would a bad guy who steals a ton of money, for example, wish to cause havoc with the global economy on his way out the door? (Sorry, Die hard. It s a sticking point.) I m talking about a supernatural power that kills people right and left, and does so without any clear explanation. I m talking about any sort of fight in which supernaturally powerful characters pound away at each other with no effect until the writer finally decides to show us mercy and let one of them actually get hurt and/or die. (Alright, this may not be entirely a problem of villain construction, but it s damned irritating and all-too damned common.)I m talking about a world in which the rules are frequently rewritten to undo whatever resolution our protagonists come up with. If It was a dream makes for a cheap resolution to a story, then so does; You only beat the bad guy in a dream and now you are back in the battle again. You may even get by with that one if I can be seduced into believing the next solution will actually matter. Do it enough times, and I am ready to surrender the hero to his nightmares.In all of these cases, the villain, the monster, the mysterious force or natural disaster, all seem to emerge from out of nowhere, being imposed upon the plot almost as if hoisted in on a machine themselves. Think of the wolves from The Grey. They don t really make sense in themselves; they are just there to make the characters miserable and kick off a plot point there never really rises above the implausibility of its central villains.I get the fact that a certain degree of mystery can help drive a story and pose interesting questions for us at its start, but somewhere along the line, we need to get a sense for what is happening and what can be done to stop it? We can even be mislead about that sense of a possible resolution, providing the revelation that our hero s strategy won t work after all makes sense when we come to it. If mystery persists, however, the central characters need some plausible course of action to pursue, at least a hope that this or that stratagem could help to resolve their problems. Otherwise, they are just thrashing around. Hell, they can even thrash mindlessly for a scene or two, but if we don t develop a meaningful sense of the problem and a meaningful response to that problem at some point, then I for one start to lose interest. This is the central damage done by villains that are just their to be villainous; they often leave us with no sense of how the heroes are to engage them at all, no ideas about what could possibly work. An apparently infallible villain renders the actions of a protagonist pointless. A pointlessly evil villain deprives the conflicts they create of depth and richness, and a one dimensional villain tends all-too-often to set us up for a one-dimensional hero. If the events that kick off a story have no motivation behind them, it is unlikely that the responses to them will have much more depth to them in the end.I think writers sometimes leave the villain undeveloped to convey a sense of mystery; they sometimes leave a natural disaster or a mysterious force unexplained in order to convey a sense of hopelessness. This approach can certainly be interesting, for a moment anyway. If that hopelessness persists throughout the whole story line, then, I for one start to say; let the bad guy s have them! (Even monsters gotta eat,)A villain, a monster, or even a natural disaster must have some logic to it in order to give the protagonists a meaningful chance of beating the challenge. Letting us wonder about them works early in a story line, but if the answer to our questions comes too late (and by too late , I mean after the central strategies of the protagonists are put into play), then this doesn t help the story. Generating a problem with no central rationale to it is a lot like solving one without addressing the problems posed in the opening scenes. In the latter case, the heroes do not engage the problem; in the former, they cannot. The effect is the same. It makes us care less about the main characters. As with any kind of writing, I m sure there are times when all of this works anyway, but in most cases, the kind of narrative I am talking about just seems lazy. You won t get an interesting answer if you ask a stupid question. Likewise, you will not get an interesting hero out o a conflict with a poorly written villain, and you will not get an interesting 3rd act out of a story whose first act is just literary vandalism. A villain too has to make sense. Her actions must be part of the story. They must fit in the story.And by fit in the story I do not mean that we should learn all about the true nature of the villain or mysterious force in the last pages of a novel or the final minutes of a movie as we also learn why some strategy we could never have imagined from the story-line actually works after all. In such moments, we get both Satan and a god on a machine. I know! Most of y all will get a few more of these, but no so, those of us up here in Barrow. Our last sunset was yesterday. I m told we can expect to be overrun by vampires any moment. We hear about that every year, actually, but this being 2020 and all, it seems like it actually might happen this time.Anyway, I was flying up from Anchorage yesterday, caught a couple pictures of the sunset as the plane came in for a landing. Turns out, my nephew, Danielito, was filming the sunset on the ground, and he caught my plane coming in.

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