About a month or so ago I was listening to a local sports radio program when a functionary nick-named “Boy Howdy” strayed outside his presumed area of expertise to deliver a review of the film “The Hunger Games,” the next big film “event.” Unfortunately, he only proved that he has no future as a film critic, but maybe as a sound effects man for Z-movie trailers (or local sports radio). His vapid attempt at intellectual critique merely proved that technology is an inadequate substitute for humanism (the Star Trek “reboot” featuring spot-on characters from the original series more than adequately proved that point). However, I cannot fault “Boy” too much, since his generation takes amorality, stupidity, vapidity, venality, cupidity, superficiality, Kim Kardashianity, etc. as normal life.
Young people today have no sense of their cultural heritage or history. When I was growing up, we didn’t have cable television, cell phones or laptop computers. If you were not really into the “party” scene, there wasn’t much to do except read (for me, history), listen to the radio, or watch stuff on TV like “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” or the latest Jacques Cousteau special, both shows which I really dug. I also seem to recall that UFOs, Bigfoot and the alien intervention theories of Erich von Daniken were actually taken seriously by some people. On the footsteps of man on the moon and films like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” technology seemed to promise that the next step into the “new frontier” was no more than a decade away. The future was exciting indeed, particularly if you were young with an expansive imagination.
The point here is not to poke fun at a “naïve” generation, because there were a great many things that were not amusing and people knew it (like Watergate, the fall of Saigon and the oil embargo), and there were the odd warnings of trouble ahead (the “People start pollution, people can stop it” TV ad featuring the Sicilian Indian with the tear in his eye); it is that people’s minds were not yet so jaded or bombarded with competing imagery that prevented them from taking stock of the past and using that knowledge to move forward. Even contemporary “music” seems to unable to move forward. I grew-up having a deep appreciation of Philly Soul from the likes of the Spinners, the Stylistics, the O’Jays and numerous one-hit wonders like Billy Paul, the Three Degrees and George McCrae—music which could trace its roots to at least the 1950s. But music has to evolve to stay fresh, and not remain stuck in what now seems like a permanent rut of rap and hip-hop, with no sense of the past or the future. Back in my time, people were singing about love, peace and hope. Today, the primary emotional response one derives from music is narcissism.
I saw this failure coming when Ronald Reagan took office. “Greed is good” and government is “bad” were the catchphrases of the day, and the Reagan administration walked the talk. The firing of striking air traffic controllers was the first shot across the bow, but arms for hostages, then Iran-Contra—in the old days, these would have been regarded as treasonable acts; instead, ideologically-corrupt, law-breaking fanatics like Oliver North are now considered “patriots.” Today, lying to the American public about weapons of mass destruction that cost more than 4,000 American lives—that’s nothing. Not compared to a president who merely received satisfaction from a willing intern because he just wasn’t getting “enough” to appease his “needs.” Oh no, that’s much worse. We almost impeached the guy for this.
If people have a difficult time with relative goodness and badness, how can they make the informed decisions on the future? We know what they problems are, and they mostly have to do with money and the redistribution of it, whether to people or programs; the only question is do we have the will to do something about them before it is “too late”? If Congress, the Republicans and the Supreme Court have their way, apparently not.
That “future” is knowable and something can be done to mitigate it if we choose to. But then we have “the future” as portrayed by fictional media. The thing that I find fascinating is that if you ask people what they are supposed to be learning from watching “Hunger Games,” they will just tell you it is about some teenage girl-hero saving the world (presumably by the third installment). I have to admit that I don’t pretend to completely fathom what the “message” of the movie is either beyond that, but that is more a function of the fact that its basic conceit is a “future” that has never existed in society, save in the imagination of George Orwell or Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” If you are as old as I am, you’ve seen the imagining of the “future” where a tightly-controlled “state” or controlling cadre where a few “elites” oppress everyone else is a zillion times. The concept that “representatives” of the population are arbitrarily chosen to participate in lethal “games” is also something that is derivative, only that is was more intelligently-rendered when Kirk Douglas played Spartacus in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film—which also had the quality of being based on an actual historical event. But it is a highly unlikely event that one boy and one girl from “districts” are set to fight one another to the death. The conceit that the boys and girls would fight on equal terms also represents the political conceit of the author. The pretentious source novels’ author, Suzanne Collins, claims to have somehow admixed an amalgamation of “reality” shows, the Iraq war, the Greek myth of the Minotaur, and Roman gladiatorial combat, which probably explains why these novels are for easily-fooled youths who don’t know better. If you wanted updated classical, you’d do much better reading a Eugene O’Neal drama.
Writers and filmmakers apparently can’t imagine a “utopian” world governed by the Latin term “communis”—a world where the accumulation of material goods is discouraged (because it promotes “selfishness”), and where “reason” is the governing principle. On the other hand, they can’t imagine a future that may look like something we already see today, because it doesn’t “sell.” If you really want to see what a future would look like for an increasing percentage of the population, one that portrays the ugly underbelly of poverty and hopelessness, go buy or rent the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy.” It is still real and immediate, something you would have to come to grips with now, not sometime in some unfathomable future.
However, the early criticisms of “Hunger”—even before principle shooting started—were not about the pretentious, unbelievable plot, but about the actors chosen to play the various roles, principally the lead actress. Arian-Nordic Barbie Doll blonde Jennifer Lawrence plays a character who in the novel is dark-haired and olive-skinned, doubtless to show a greater “kinship” with the people (non-white) who would really be the ones oppressed in such a state. After the outcry from fans of the books, Lawrence dyed her hair and apparently spent some time in a tanning bed. That made all the “difference.” The focus on a white female is in line with female as both superior and victim at once (something like Helen Reddy--both the "invincible" I Am Woman, and the Delta Dawn and Ruby Red Dress driven mad by the men who dumped them) , although in a post-apocalyptic world, white folks are more likely to align themselves with their own kind and let everyone else fend for themselves. There are one or two black characters in this film, while Latinos and Asians are hard to spot in the crowd shots. This movie is no more “reality”-based than, say, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is another feminist novel/film which is also based from the perspective of the “oppressed” white female (or author Margaret Atwood), while all the “colored” people are tucked out of sight in some gulag, so that the target audience isn’t discomfited by things like context, perspective and relativity. Get this plot conceit: Through the miracle of electronic banking, some theocratic dictatorship withdraws all the money from bank accounts with female names, and all the women are reduced to a subhuman species with no rights a man is bound to respect, good only as breeders—or those who can breed. Talk about truly paranoid. And worthless in understanding the “future.”
Another conceit about the “future” is that everyone will have incomprehensible names out of a two-year-old’s grammar book. At least in the Star Trek universe, people still had normal-sounding names like “Jim” and “Leonard.” But with Star Wars, silly, made-up names were supposed to signify “the future,” although current English names would not have been unrecognizable to people a thousand years ago (many of which have Latin derivations), and probably for at least another thousand years, provided that the human race doesn’t find a way to extinguish itself.
In the “Hunger” world, the country is divided into oppressed “districts” controlled by the inhabitants of a wealthy city, which I suppose is supposed to remind us of the Roman Empire. But this stretches credibility, since the idea of imperialism has long lost its appeal to nations who can barely see to their own affairs. The society “Hunger” imagines is an anachronism of the past—made more unbelievable in that it imagines a post-Apocalyptic world where there are sufficient resources and technology to create a stereotypically “futuristic” city, while the “districts” are havens of poverty. Such a world would not be allowed to exist for long in this country—regardless of what absurd name it is called.
The writer puts forth this possible vision of the future, because it fits into her political agenda. But the film isn’t anymore “prophetic” than “2001,” “Blade Runner” of even” 1984.” If you want “prophetic,” you have to go back in time—way back, when people didn’t have technology to save themselves. The fall of the Western Roman Empire (the eastern half survived for nearly a thousand more years), followed by the so-called “Dark Ages” engineered by the Germanic peoples and their “uncivilized” ways, and the collapse of infrastructure that kept the Roman world connected and maintained, and the loss of classical learning—and finally the effects of the Black Death in the 14th Century are a truer picture of effects of a calamity, although possibly how we would get out of it.
The Germanic tribes that invaded and consumed the western half of the Roman Empire were much like the bands of militias and disorganized tribes that we see in some parts of the Middle East and Africa, that seem unable or unwilling to coalesce into a united, centralized governing entity. The Roman civil engineering that created roads and aqueducts that sustained large cities and maintained communication links over large areas fell apart, and expertise in agriculture created a society in which manufacturing and the technological advancement that went with it declined because more people had to devote their time to farming—usually as a serf with no incentive save survival. The “barbarians” showed little interest in art and learning, although classical scholarship in the West was preserved to a certain extent by monks who had a lot of time on their hands. The only “unifying” force for a millennium was the church, based in Rome, but that only insured that world was rife with superstition and backward thinking. But change was on its way, during the 16th Century with the Renaissance, in when classical learning, humanism, art, commerce, science and the opening of vistas beyond the shores of Europe opened people’s eyes to the possible. The Enlightenment that followed it caused thinkers to question what they were told and use reason to develop other rationales to explain the world.
But before the world was reborn it had to endure the greatest human calamity in recorded history, greater than even than the world wars: The Black Death. One book I find a fascinating read is Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century” which chronicles the political, social and economic effects of the plague starting with the first outbreak in 1347 until the end of the One Hundred Years War between England and France in 1453. All of the following were symptomatic of the period: “Economic chaos, social unrest, high prices, profiteering, depraved morals, lack of production, industrial indolence, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice, maladministration, decay of manners.” Few had any inkling of the cause of this disturbance; we now know that Turkic nomads laying siege to a Genoese outpost in the Crimea catapulted disease-infested corpses within it. From there, Genoese traders passed it on to Italy and beyond.
The saints that victims prayed to in order to save them from the menace were soon taking some of the blame; this was followed by the phenomenon of self-flagellation, in which penitents whipped or had themselves whipped in an effort to appease God. But it was that all-purpose scapegoat—the Jew—who bore the brunt of blame. “In the torment of the plague it was easy to credit Jewish malevolence with poisoning the wells, “writes Tuchman. “In 1348 Clement VI issued a Bull prohibiting the killing, looting, or forcible conversion of Jews without trial, which halted the attacks in Avignon and the Papal States but was ignored as the rage swept northward. Authorities in most places tried at first to protect the Jews, but succumbed to popular pressure, not without an eye to potential forfeit of Jewish property.”
But while the persecutions and murders went on unabated, they didn’t appear to have an effect on the spread of the plague. In countries like England, it is estimated that by 1400 the population had been reduced by half of what it had been in 1300. “’The forests came back with the English,’ as war and pestilence emptied the land. In Picardy, the invaders’ perennial pathway, villages were left in blackened ruin, fields were uncultivated, disused roads vanished under brambles and weeds, unpeopled lands lay solitary where no cockcrow was heard. In the outskirts of Abbeville, a starving peasant woman was found who had salted down the bodies of two children she had lulled.”
It is generally estimated that one-third of Europe’s population was extinguished when the first outbreak ended, but there would be at least five more outbreaks of the plague before it exhausted itself. Half of the population of Europe had been extinguished by the time it was finally over, and would not recover to its pre- 1348 numbers until the 16th century. One “positive” in the reduction in the labor force was the predictable effect of empowering labor. Tuchman writes, “To keep them on the land, the lords offered many concessions, and towns welcomed the wanderers to fill the shortage of artisans, so that they grew aggressive and independent. They were most angry and seditious, and haughty about food… when their fortunes prospered. ‘They deign not to dine on day-old vegetables . . . penny ale will not do, nor a piece of bacon,’ complained one contemporary, ‘but rather fresh-cooked meat and fried fish… Joining with villeins and artisans, they learned the tactics of association and strikes, combined against employers, subscribed money for ‘mutual defense,’ and ‘gather together in great routs and agree by such Confederacy that everyone shall aid the other to resist their Lords with a strong hand.’ A generation ready to revolt against oppression was taking shape.” Although rulers of the day tried to repress workers, by criminalizing increases in pay, or when workers sought to change employers who offered higher wages, once a better life was tasted, change was inevitable. The plague had another long term impact that opened the way to the “rebirth” of Europe in the 16th century:
“If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all,” writes Tuchman, “then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead.”
What does this mean for us? If we were subjected to a devastating denouement brought on by carrying capacity collapse, a biological contagion or war, a renewal of individual freedom—rather than oppression—could be what the future holds. After the initial impact that brings confusion and fear, a reawakening that exposes and refutes the propaganda and deceptions that previously maintained those in power and wealth, and rather than strengthen the grip of the political elites and rich, loosens their hold to oppress—not so dissimilar that what was seen during the Great Depression. We may not be destined for the stars, but neither are we destined to “cultural” annihilation of right-wing paranoids, nor the victim mythology of certain political activists.
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