Assistant Village Idiot

I went to see Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, built from actual footage and recordings from The Great War. Jacksons’s attention to detail, to get the colorisation, movement, and sound right make it a different experience than what we usually see in archival film, where people are moving jerkily and too quickly. This is smoothed and shaded, and the sound recordings made by the BBC in the 50s and 60s of actual veterans of the war have been cleaned up as well, so that much of it seems as if it had been filmed recently. A good deal of it is grim, of death and decay, rats, lice, mud, and noise. The audience is not spared those realities.

The lighter and matter-of-fact attitudes of the soldiers are also captured with film and recording. We had a job to do and we did it… A lot of the lads were volunteering and I went down at lunch and signed up direct.  My boss said he couldn’t promise me a job when I got back.

There is a fascinating half-hour at the end in which Jackson describes the techniques they used to recover the footage and make it come alive, which is also fascinating stuff. For example, he describes how the original filming speed was not uniform, as it was cranked by the cameraman at 11-18 frames per second, usually about 15. Getting the speed right was not linear, but involved guesswork, which he says the eventually got good at.  Jackson describes seeing very clearly when the speed is right, and when he shows the film movement, you see exactly what he means.  When the speed is exactly right, the movement looks natural and human, it jumps out at you.  A touch slower or faster and it just isn’t right.

I have neglected my cross-posting. I( will make it up slowly over the next few days.

One of my Romanian sons sent this.  Please push through it a bit, even when it is not fascinating at the moment.  People should remember.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp3sZbGmR2c&t=001s

A lot of 20th C American fiction was about a small-town boy leaving his oppressive upbringing. It is one of those themes that combines truth and untruth. Small homogeneous communities have pluses and minuses. David Foster recently posted about how the internet in general mimics those small-group interactions, and social media accentuates those negatives.

Gavin Longmuir gave examples of peer-pressure groups that believe in Political Correctness, in contrast to the rest of of the society, which is less in sympathy with it. Academia, the media, the politically active, the bureaucracy.  I would add in students, which while part of academia, are not who we usually think of when we use that term.  Those groups have a strong tie-in with each other that might not be immediately apparent, and that is the social competitiveness of youth. Bear with me for a moment on that. That high school students care deeply about what is fashionable and who is cool is well-known. There is something about this that is developmentally normal, as each age cohort must learn to get on together to take on responsibility in the future. This used to be more limited, as children coming of age did not spend so much time exclusively with each other.  They were in larger families, and those families were together more (not always a good thing, but generally so). They had more contact with extended family, multigenerationally. They worked at jobs earlier, went to churches, and had more contact with physical neighbors, all putting them in contact with people of different ages more than is common now. As the years of education increased, children spent increasing time with each other. Since, say, the 1950’s, high school and college students increasingly have their own world.

And they have money, or parents who will spend money on them for things like, oh, college. Suddenly there are lots of people who care what the opinions of 16-26 year olds are. High-turnover entertainment targets that group: music, movies, video games, youtube, sports. Political activists are disproportionately young. Unless they can get jobs doing activist work, they stop having time once they get jobs, spouses, or (gulp) children.  Even for Trump rallies, lots of people who might go just can’t, because
Tyler has a doubleheader that day, or work is really busy just now.  I wish I could find the article I read years ago by an ex-environmental activist who believed that environmentalists got extra exercised about peers having children, not just because of the ZPG extra drain on the earth’s resources, but because experience had taught them that they would now stop having enough time to volunteer for The Cause.  Politicians in campaign mode need to hire lots of people at temporary, low-paying jobs, and that means a steady supply of young people.

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As with many topics, I don’t go looking to beat the drum how many people are wrong, but I do rather lie in wait around the accusation that America is a particularly racist, or even most-racist nation in the world. People are stunned, angered, shocked to have the idea even challenged.  Their claim is ludicrous, among the least-reflective things a person might say, yet I do have clear understanding how people might get to that idea.  The key is in that word reflective. If one simply follows the prevailing news and conversation, I don’t see how one could come to any other conclusion. America leads the world in news stories about racism. We are probably well up there in incidents of racism as well, partly because there are 330M of us. The Chinese may rack up bigger numbers, which we seldom hear about, of racist incidents against the Uighurs, but in most of their territory there aren’t any incidents of clear racism at all. Because there’s only one race there.  Stay tuned.

But why so many stories of racism? Real stories, not made up.

It is a relatively simple exercise to stand back and say “compared to whom?” but it is difficult because it is not natural to most of us. Just because something is simple does not mean it is easy. Prayer for one’s personal enemies, for example. Dieting and exercising would be another. Once one can get to the second half of that sentence and say “America is a racist country…compared to whom?” the ground suddenly changes.  In one simple sense, America is a racist country.  We have racist comments, racist incidents, and racist attitudes all over the place, all the time. Yet there is a simple reason for that, and it’s not just because we have horrible white people here.

If we are going to measure countries in terms of how racist they are, I propose we start by asking “Do they actually have different races there?” Okay, that just changed the whole discussion completely, didn’t it? Before looking at my examples, consider your own.  Take your time.

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Whenever a tragedy with a mental health angle occurs, there are predictable responses. These vary in awareness of the realities. As I have made my living working with psychiatric emergencies for forty years, I know enough to be at least moderately helpful, and from time to time I reiterate some points that get consistently missed.

After the fact, and working from scraps of information, many people conclude that it was patently obvious that the bomber or shooter or pact suicide was dangerous and ill. Therefore, they believe that the emergency room, or clinic, or hospital messed up by not picking up on the obvious and moving to treat that person. Well, we could always do better, as in everything else, and sometimes it’s true, but that conclusion is often spectacularly wrong. No, that’s just making excuses. The guy told them he was thinking about killing people and was also suicidal. We admit over 2,000 people a year to our 150-bed involuntary facility, and every single one of them reaches some threshold of dangerousness, enough that it has to hold up at minimum, at a probable cause hearing. The suicide and homicide rates of our discharges is not that much higher than the general population. (The self-harming rate is much higher.)

Yet they have said and done dangerous things, which is how they got to our hospital. When I read the news stories of what the killer said when he was brought in for evaluation two months or two years before, I am seldom impressed with how alarmingly dangerous the statements are. I have known thousands of people who have said or done similar things. Sometimes the quotes or actions do sound more alarming to me, but not reliably. Most usually, the person is acting more rationally after a little treatment and is no longer actively suicidal or homicidal. We have to decide what is the safe amount of time after to hold them to reduce the risk.

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