Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Let The Hate Flow Through You: Towards a Finer Understanding of Irrational Prejudices

Yesterday, I learned to hate Zack Snyder. It's not for his lukewarm remake of George Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead. It's not even for his universally overrated adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, a blissfully short film stretched to a terminally long trainwreck by slowing down every action scene to a slow motion crawl. It's not even because I'm pretty sure he's going to trim the incredible story of Watchmen to a whiz bang seminar on how to use CGI effects to make people forget that you're not actually telling much of a story. I find all these things annoying, certainly, and I think they are all reasons to dislike Snyder. And I did. But up until yesterday, hate would have been far too strong a word to describe how I felt about the guy.

No longer.

So what happened? Zack Snyder didn't do me any personal slight in the last twenty four hours. He didn't punch me in the nose or publish a snarky blog post about me or puncture the tire on my bike. In fact, I'm sure Snyder is a perfectly nice guy who calls his mom every week and would never dream of kicking a puppy, even an ugly one. But yesterday, in an NPR interview about the return of Brett Favre, I found out that Snyder is a Green Bay Packers fan. And as a life long Bears fan in the mold of Bill Swerski, I am thus honor bound to dislike the guy.

I put it to you that there is nothing wrong with this.

While I, like any other liberal arts major in the U.S., abhor racism, sexism, and pretty much all "-isms" as a matter of principle, I firmly believe that hanging on to a couple of bone deep long held prejudices do much to build character, to give one a complete and fully realized personality. In this day and age, so much of our identity is tied into the things we like. The bands we listen to, the clothes we wear, teh food we eat - we display the things we like for all to see. But what we dislike, we hold closer to our chests. But as any playmate questionairre teaches us, our dislikes say as much about us as anything we enjoy.

Now, like any properly prejudiced person, I have a few buddies who are gold and green diehards. Some of my best friends and all that. I've learned, through effort and practice, to play down my distaste for this deep and basic personality flaw. I like having beers with these guys. I would be sad if any of them were struck by a heavy object moving at a high velocity, and I would make the appropriate hue and cry. But at the end of the day - well, it's like knowing someone you're close to is a pathological liar. There's not much the poor bastard can do about it, sure, but it's just sort of an oily thing for a person to be.

And why shouldn't it be so? Does this hate make me a bad person? No, it doesn't. It makes me a person who doesn't like things, and we all don't like things. Lots of things. People who, in the year of our Lord 2008, still cannot use an ATM, bad grammar, the clicking of pens, people with no inside voice, cell phones in movie theaters - these are all things that incur our wrath, and rightly so. But rather than grit our teeth at these petty irritations as polite society dictates, I'm urging the opposite. Embrace your hate. Be comfortable with the things that annoy you. As Peter Finch would put it, "Get mad as hell!" and don't feel bad about it. Because it is as much who you are as your loyalties, your loves and your My Top Rated playlist. And it deserves a little respect.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

On Disturbing Trends

So, prior to last week, I can't recall the last time I heard about someone being decapitated. I understand that people die all the falling off of buildings and being struck by leaping sea rays. But I thought that, like powdered wigs and print news, were a thing of the distant past, that had gone out of style along with the guillotine.

I was wrong. In the last week, there have been a pair of horrific murders in vastly disparate regions of the world sharing this common thread - after the were finished stabbing, the assailants severed the heads of their victims and displayed them to terrified onlookers.

On Thursday, Vince Weiguang Li, a 40 year old Canadian newspaper delivery person with no prior criminal history sat down next to Tim Mclean on a Greyhound bus travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg. Li then proceeded to stab his 23 year old seatmate to death with what one witness termed "a Rambo knife." After terrified passengers abanodoned the bus and sealed the murder and victim inside, Li proceeded to decapitate McLean's corpse and calmly carry the severed head to the front of the bus. Further reports imply that Li, while dismembering the corpse, may also have eaten his victim.

Fast forward to today, when a 35 year old as yet unnamed suspect on the tiny Greek island of Santorini was apprehended after being shot several times following a high speed car chase. And just why was he being chased by the police at a high speed? Well, because he killed his girlfriend and then went for a stroll along the streets of his village holding her decapitated head in his hands. Which is the sort of thing that tends to impel people to report you to the police.

While 2 reports in a week is probably not necessarily a spree, it's a little troubling to think that otherwise normal people separated by continents both decided to cut off people's heads. Here's hoping this isn't exactly a trend.

In other news, Russian author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn died today aged 89, with his head still presumably attached. If you haven't read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, you should really check it out. Brief, stark and stunningly told, I read it when I was 17 and it's stayed with me ever since, one of two books (along with Jack Abbot's prison memoir In The Belly of the Beast) stolen from a high school civics teacher that almost made up for the horrendous class.