Personal Vengeance, Community Need

Chris and Henry at Crooked Timber have rightly expressed a fair amount of disgust at this surprising comment from Eugene Volokh:

"Something the Iranian Government and I Agree on: I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing--and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act--was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging....I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way."

The man whose bloody and public execution Volokh is celebrating is a convicted serial killer, who dealt out immeasurable pain and suffering to not just his victims but their families and indeed society as a whole. What's wrong with seeing him receive his just rewards? Nothing, assuming one believes that capital punishment can be just. (A big if.) But that's not what leaps out of Volokh's comment; what leaps out is his causal embrace of the rightness of personally extracting death and vengeance upon a criminal. That is, he is applauding the idea that if someone commits a terrible crime against you or the one's you love, you ought to be able to take a hand in bringing that person's crimes back home.

What's the problem with this? As is discussed on both the above threads, Volokh is blurring an important line, a line which keeps the retributive aspect of punishment vicarious, and properly so. This is not to say that there is no place for retribution itself in meting out justice, even retribution of a very confrontational kind. Volokh is correct that eschewing the "deliberate infliction of pain"on the one to receive punishment can undermine and thus corrupt a deeply felt hurt, and to the degree that our or any criminal justice system tends to medicalize or psychologize crime in such a way as to make the desire for retribution itself seem misplaced or wrong, popular support for that system will not last long. Punishment isn't, and shouldn't be, simply about delivering some sort of neutral, merited penalty; there's a legitimate place for the social expression of horror or anger, and that means some penalties ought to be made to serve a larger purpose than merely reforming the offender or, at the very least, keeping them off the street. Discussions of "victim-impact" evidence and testimony goes to show that this point is hardly absent from our own debates over criminal justice, and for all I know Islamic legal and political thought provides some important arguments on behalf of such arrangements as well. But there is a huge gap between making the argument that it is legitimate for a criminal justice system to incorporate the expression of pain by victims and others into the establishment of penalties, and claiming it's good for said victims and others to directly cause pain to the criminal in revenge. That's a line that has more to do with basic law and order than any particular political theory.

You'd like to think that this line would obvious, but I fear it's not, especially given that it appears a kind of vigilante-mindset, which insists that direct action is superior to careful procedure, seems to be winning the day in America (such as in regard to the acceptability of torture). The problem is with making personal feelings of hate and despair not simply a part of a larger retributive argument (that much is probably appropriate and to a degree necessary) but as component of retribution itself. That short-cuts civilization, the very idea that there need to be rules which sublimate our most anguished self-interests to larger goods. It reminds me of that terrible debate back in 1988, when Bernard Shaw asked Michael Dukakis if he'd change his opposition to the death penalty if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered. Dukakis answered like a cold-blooded machine, which cost him dearly. An expression of rage has it's place. But the rage itself is not a justification. To justify actions in a civilized society means a willingness to submit those feelings to civic scrutiny--and, just to be safe, to probably relocate at least some of the actions taken by the civic body away from those who are most interested in seeing them executed.

This isn't an argument against the death penalty--as a friend of mine commented, there is strong reason to doubt the legitimacy of a system "that allows Jeffrey Dahmer to live out the rest of his life in state custody supported by tax payers' dollars (including those of many of the victims' families." I'm for the most part an opponent of the death penalty, but I don't think that it is necessary to turn society into a passionless entity, incapable of saying to some horrible act "we reject you utterly." (It'd be nice if exile were still an option in this world, but it isn't.) Dahmer--and the "desert vampire" too--very well may have deserved that ultimate community sanction. But when it is the community expressing that retributive need, it no longer is simple, potentially law-threatening vengeance. "Vicarious," communally expressed and administered vengeance, isn't exactly vengeance anymore; it's no longer a victim taking what is theirs" from an evil-doer because he and she hurt the victim, etc. Rather, it's society saying, "We cannot tolerate this," which properly sublimates the retributive aspect to a concern for, as I said, basic law and order. To talk casually, as Volokh did, about how he'd personally like to twist the guy's neck, isn't to embrace order; it's to embrace ego-driven retribution, pure and simple, and hence weakens the obstacles in the way of just going all the way to simple vigilantism. Honesty requires that I admit I probably won't lose a minute of sleep over the killing of this murderer. But I would lose a minute of sleep over the possibility that the hurt my next door neighbor feels, however great, is, in itself, sufficient justification for him to commit a killing himself.

How Much More MOR Could I Be?

This Michael Berube post (via Laura) rubbed me the wrong way, I'm embarrassed to say. I mean, hey, it's only pop music. What's the big deal if I happen to like a fair mount of Sir Elton John's oeuvre, however unhip it may be? I don't need to haul out yet another huge populist/simplicity-inspired analysis of the complex problem(s) of pursuing expensive, elite tastes in the context of popular entertainment, do I? Of course not. (Thank heavens, the readers sigh audibly.) Let it go.

I think it's my personal pop music history which does this to me. I grew up in a nice, medium-size, mostly agricultural city--Spokane, Washington--in a nice, big, religious family. I've nothing but praise for both of them. However, one consequence of this environment (which wasn't especially sheltered or restrictive, just...well, not in the mainstream of things, shall we say) was that I didn't get much of an education in popular music. I played the violin, listened to classical and church music and my mom's beloved Hollywood musical soundtracks. It was with great excitement that I discovered, sometime around when I was twelve, Casey Kasem and the existence of a "Top 40" on the radio (which, up until that time, I had mostly surreptitiously utilized to listen to late-night mystery dramas hosted by E.G. Marshall). I suppose my level of cultural awareness during my junior high and high school years weren't that different from that of your typical Napoleon Dynamite-type nerd, but still: the lack of exposure to anything remotely hip or alternative (there was no "college radio" station in Spokane) was painful, to me at least, once I left for college in 1987. (And yes, I attended BYU; but the Salt Lake City area, as those familiar with it can well attest, is one of the better and more diverse radio markets in the U.S.) The embarrassments of my freshman year, as I struggled in vain to pretend to my far more worldly peers that I too had ridden the New Wave, were legion. I attempted to speak knowingly about that hot new band from Australia, "Inks" (oddly spelled "I-N-X-S"). I mortified myself by reciting the chorus of 'Til Tuesday's big hit as "let's go downtown; it's so scary." I could go on. Suffice to say, I ended up spending most of that year in a defensive crouch when it came to popular music.

I've managed to straighten up a fair amount since then. For one thing, I realized that a lot of people couldn't give a damn about pop music anyway, and I spent several years learning from them all about jazz, the blues, a cappella, folk, and classic rock and roll. And it gradually dawned on me that pop music itself isn't a single stream, and I found myself digging all sorts of stuff from the 60s and especially the 70s (an unfairly maligned decade, culturally speaking) that weren't even remotely on the average white American's radar back when I came of age. I'd like to think that Melissa and I have managed to develop for our family a pretty broad and eclectic taste in music. But then I read something from Berube about the great old days of WNEW-FM in New York, and I get reminded just how middle-of-the-road my everyday pop tastes have become. The evidence? I own, and enjoy, Elton John's Greatest Hits--Vols. I and II and III. Or how about this? I have, in my office right at this moment, every single album James Taylor has ever released. Yep, I unapologetically (but perhaps not entirely undefensively) decided on a James Taylor marathon this week, beginning with James Taylor, continuing on through Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon and JT, all the way up to New Moon Shine and October Road. (My favorite album? Flag, of course.) Am I enjoying myself? Well, seeing as it's spring break and no other faculty are around to observe me grooving in my seat to "Sun on the Moon" or "Lighthouse"...yeah, I am.

But I promise: tonight, at Chez Fox, it'll be The Chieftains! It is St. Patrick's Day, after all.

A Swedish Addendum and a Summary (Simplicity, Part 5)

I suppose I've pushed the "simplicity" thing about as far as it can go. As a concept I've stretched it in all sorts of probably unjustifiable ways, but that's because I simply couldn't shake it as a basic frame of reference, and so for the better part of three months I've kept trying to find ways to apply it to various, disparate concerns: trade and economics, home entertainment, travel, dining, whatever. It's a powerful idea, elements of which you can find in ideologies ranging from the far right (nationalists longing for a homogeneous state) to the far left (communists longing foran undivided economy); it finds a home in the mainstream (plant a garden!) and the radically counter-cultural (get rid of your car!). It's the ghost of Thoreau which lurks over all our Franklin Planners, and it's good that it's there, I think. But what do you do with it?

My original simplicity post elicited thoughtful comments from Nate Oman and Timothy Burke, both of whom essentially said the same thing (though from very different perspectives): to the extent "simplicity" means a kind of enclosing and enabling of a particular living arrangement, separate from the speed and change and complexity of modern life, then it must be the product of a group of people consciously choosing--in the face of the constant experience of modernity--to maintain it through the imposition of some kind of regime; simplicity cannot remains simplicity, because preserving it on its own terms cannot avoid being both coercive and complex. I'm not sure if I ever actually denied that point, but no doubt I was hoping to elide it to some degree. Consider my example of Sweden, and the $3 cup of coffee--as I described it, "wage controls, universal education, and other actions by the [Swedish] government have constructed in an environment where certain basic social realities are protected, reliable, even guaranteed: jobs and neighborhoods and vacations and so forth." The Swedes themselves don't call this "simplicity," but I took it as an example of such, because it showed one way to think about how a given people can strive to enclose themselves, and thereby exercise a kind of simple control and freedom over the consequences of their own choices. But there is far more to Sweden than I let on in that post. Christopher Caldwell's Weekly Standard cover story on "A Swedish Dilemma" made it pretty clear that the particular transactions which the Swedes have embraced in the name of resisting the "Golden Straightjacket" of globalization are ones which have pretty significant costs, costs which are cultural and sociological and not just economic. To withstand the tides of modernity on such a significant, state-wide scale requires that a people have the resources and willingness to internalize and respond to whatever those tides may wash up--in Sweden's case, a huge, mostly unemployed and segregated immigrant population attracted and sustained by the Swede's own commitment to building a society around the "moral superpower" ideal. The dynamic here is pretty clear. The economics of globalization demands fluidity; to resist such, and to build an economy around security and simplicity (as I call it), requires that prices being kept high and wages equally so. This can be done through policing borders (in matters of trade and immigration, which Sweden has not done) or carefully controlling work and income through taxes on goods, universal unionization and wage ceilings (which Sweden has done). That has created something of a classless, egalitarian society, of the sort which the simple life (in which all are producers and mutually self-sustaining) itself assumes. But it also creates an underclass: and in Europe today, that also means a multicultural (mostly Islamic) one, from which follows all the same tensions which formerly ethnically and religiously homogeneous states like Denmark, the Netherlands, and France of been struggling with so much in recent years. As Mauricio Rojas, a Chilean-born history professor and liberal reformer in Sweden today, put it at the end of Caldwell's article, Sweden has not confronted what its own tax policies demand as a "community." Instead, Sweden has been a "tribe--a good tribe! Very peaceful and nice! But a tribe."

That comes close to putting the whole debate about concisely as one might imagine. Opponents or critics of the communitarian hopes that lurk around this talk of simplicity insist that it is only possible, only plausible, to the degree one puts oneself out of the modern world entirely and back into a tribe (Rousseau's rustic man, perhaps!). And of course we can't do that (not even Rousseau thought we could)--certainly not living as we do in the civilization of states and laws. And so there will be coercion, which will backfire, and thus make the whole endeavor pointless. On the other hand, seriously community-minded folks will similarly shake their heads at Sweden's half-hearted attempts at enclosure, and even more so at my conscription of them for the cause. A nation of millions, with high-tech industries and international obligations and aspirations, they will say, cannot be a tribe. (And if it attempts to build policies as if it were one, well, it'll be unpleasantly surprised in the end!) True simplicity has to do what the critics say is impossible--gather together the faithful, and beat a retreat: back to the farm, to the village, to a tribal life of tradition and faith. Look to the good people who produced Caelum et Terra--they had the right idea, they knew what simplicity really meant. Anything else is so compromised as to be a sham.

Maybe so. Still, I'm nothing if not romantic (and perhaps a Romantic too, at that), and so I keep trying to learn lessons. Maybe the sort of tribal affectivity which makes possible a unified front against the transformations of the modern life cannot be wholly achieved, but what parts of it can? What role does history, language and religion, as reflected in education and civic life, play in making at least some sense of community possible? Is any part of it compatible with nationality, or do we need deeper federal arrangements? And that's just the first part of the inquiry: it only establishes the minimum requirements for a collectivity capable of sustaining the complex burden of resisting elements of modernity, leaving the whole matter of persuading people of the value of security untouched. The fact that some of the best progressive minds out there agree that "security/simplicity" alone can never again constitute an effective political message has to give one pause. Okay, so thoroughgoing simplicity simply isn't appealing on its own terms. It still remains to ask what kind of technologies and strategies ought to attend our individual engagement with and enjoyment of the risky, open-ended, supposedly non-coercive world. Isn't it the case that many of them structurally force us into patterns of work and leisure that are unintentionally more alienating and more complicating than they need to be? This leads us to Emma Goldman's comment on my original post, where she lays down some strong general principles about simplicity: minimizing distance over which any given economic transaction is operative, balancing necessary (and necessarily sufficient) centralized provision with local control, and (in a delightful phrase) getting a handle of the "tchotchke-fication of life." Cut back on the stuff! Not a very clear socio-economic argument, and one that, when applied to such disparate topics as watching TV, traveling to far away places, or eating haute cuisine (such as I've considered them), fails to result in any definite program of action. Still, one must not shy away from asking.

Michael Walzer years ago defined the communitarian critique of liberalism as more a "communitarian correction," a recurrent attempt to qualify and moderate the consequences of liberal modernity. I think that's probably correct, but not because communitarianism (or populism, or simplicity, or whatever) is merely derivative of the liberal order. Rather, I think there is something real to be gained and felt in lived experiences whose roots transcend that order; that the living a liberal life is both a good and important historical accomplishment does not make liberalism itself an order which goes all the way down. There is a more fundamental teleology--or a "direction in being," as Charles Taylor put it long ago--present in our worldmaking than that provided by superficial liberty, and taking our unenclosed and unpatterned modernity to be more than it deserves to be distracts us from that fact. Accessing that direction is no simple matter, paradoxically; it thus it may be that we will always be more edified by our attempt to grasp the call of simplicity than whatever complicated compromises with such we may actually come up with. But some other romantic once said something about our reach exceeding our grasp, right?

Defending the Fourth Estate

I haven't seen much debate in the blogosphere over the story in the New York Times on Sunday about the Bush administration's increasingly common and sophisticated use of prepackaged video segments, generally passed off as "regular" news stories, to get their message out to the public. Timothy Burke has a typically smart and unconventional take on it: whatever else is wrong with the practice, it is also clumsy, banal, classless, "tinpot"--making the U.S. that much more like every other place in the world which lacks a robust public sphere. And John Quiggin brought it up over at Crooked Timber, tying it into how the age-old collusion between advertisers and the media often crosses over into plain propaganda: "Of course, reprinting press releases with minimal editing has been a standby of lazy journalists for decades. But...[e]ven if the reader is led to imagine that the statement was actually made to an audience of reporters, there's no serious deception, though a well-designed press release can certainly ensure that the writer's key points get prominently reported in a way that makes them seem like fact rather than opinion. But the video news release goes way beyond this. The closest analog in the print world is those supplements, designed to look like news, with 'advertisement' in small print at the bottom of the page." I agree with John, though I think the problems inherent in this practice (which, to be sure, long predate the Bush administration) go way beyond the advertising mentality. In fact, I think the important issue is the need to distinguish between what government does and what advertisers do.

Advertising exists to sell things. In a very crude way, so does the government, at least in its executive function; it's the branch responsible for enacting policies and enforcing laws, and communication is a big part of that. Every department in the federal government--Agriculture, State, Defense, Education, etc.--has public relations people who are responsible for communicating with Congress and innumerable constituents, making a case for what they're doing and how they're doing it; if they fail to do that, then they aren't going to be able to do their job. That's a reality of public administration, and no one denies it. But advertising, in its selling, seeks to make a particular kind of case for its product, a case which involves a good deal of selectivity, misdirection, even deception in how it conveys its message. We don't want the government to make that kind of case for itself, however much it might increase its public effectiveness in the short or long term. Why? Because, to invoke Rousseau, we do not want the government--meaning specifically the executive branch--to exercise its own institutional or "corporate will" independently of what the people (ideally the legislative branch) desire. (As he put it (Social Contract, Bk. III, Sec. 2), the corporate will is "the common will of the magistrates, which is relative solely to the advantage of the prince"--or in other words, those actually holding executive power.) It is a precarious but necessary thing that certain specific persons and agencies be entrusted with the power to enact and enforce policy; a legitimate polity will be one which limits and watches the power of the executive to do so. To allow such limits to collapse is to allow the executive too much command over not just the establishment of policies, but also the determination of such. We're tolerant of advertisers exercising a significant degree over control over how their work is received by the public; after all, it is private goods they are selling (though we properly lay down certain standards, especially when it comes to goods that could potentially impact the health or safety of buyers and others--medicine, automobiles, etc.). But the government is selling public goods: our own business, in other words. And hence, we ought to be careful about letting the people in executive positions determine what or how much about that business is known.

In other words, we want an independent media. One needn't go deeply into political theory to make this case--the idea that press ought to form a "fourth estate" representing a defined body of interests in society, one set in opposition to those who are actually in government, is practically synonymous with the modern age. Still, I think the detour into theory is helpful, because it clarifies some important distinctions. Consider the obvious defense one might make to this article (a defense which, in fact, an old friend of mine, a former employee of the Department of Energy who regularly handled press releases and all manner of "strategic" communications): it's the journalists fault! The article makes it clear that financially strapped local affiliates and unprepared reporters can be counted on to desperately make use of any prefabricated story which falls into their laps; if they don't do the work to come up with "the other side of the story," or at least identify the source of the footage or words, it isn't the government's fault, right?

The reply to this response can take one of two forms. First, you could argue that the media is supposed to be "neutral," and that, by taking advantage of the decentralized structure of the American media today, the government's clever use of prepackaged news stories undermines the "objectivity" which news organizations are committed to. The news, in short, is supposed to be disinterested and trustworthy enough to give us the facts without interpretation, thereby enabling the people to decide things with an open mind. This ideal of journalism as a selfless, impartial labor on behalf of democracy is a great myth, and it makes for a strong argument against tolerating, at least not without strict limits, the ability of government agencies to use their PR resources to provide unnecessary crutches to media affiliates across the country. Unfortunately, I think this argument also has a serious flaw: as soon as anyone can plausibly make the case that reporters are not, in fact, neutral, objective, impartial and disinterested, then the door is kicked wide open for the party in government to step right in and claim that the "real story" hasn't been told, and justify using their position to spread as much partisan (that is, in service to their own party) information as possible. The fact that Fox News, which has never seriously pretended to be anything other that a voice for the Republican party, can insist that they're just playing the same objectivity game as everyone else ("we report, you decide"), I think shows just how weak this liberal ideal in practice actually is.

I don't particularly mind a partisan media, at least not in many things. Michael Kinsley made the argument years ago that, especially in regard to stories involving highly contested political, social, or economic facts and issues, he'd rather read the Wall Street Journal or some other similarly slanted paper, because someone not worried about hiding their opinions is more likely to dig into the real implications of the story than someone who feels constrained by an "on the one hand, on the other hand" ethic. I think his point is basically correct--the goal is to have a responsible media, and such responsibility isn't necessarily incompatible with a partisan one. The way to preserve that responsibility isn't primarily making certain that the media has no interests; rather, it is making certain that the media remains an interest entirely distinct from the institutional or corporate interest of those actually making and enforcing policy. That makes, I believe, for a much sharper and brighter line--no running of news stories which directly originate from the government without identifying them as such!--than the attempt to impose a nonpartisan perspective on the mainstream media itself.

Of course, the problem with partisanship is that partisans will form alliances, and from there you're only a step away from the government (or business, or liberal advocacy groups, or whomever) just writing the news themselves. Even the sharpest line will have some gray edges to be negotiated, and negotiated again. But to baldly accept the idea that the government has every much "right" to sell it's own version of the news to supposedly independent institutions is to blind oneself to the very real power imbalance here. It is one thing for a reporter to tell a story in such a way to make it easier for his or her preferred lawmakers to do what he or she hope they'll do; it's another thing for the lawmaker herself to tell a story to increase her own popular power. I see the real harm here not in the willingness of some news organizations to do some advertising, and let their sympathies show, but rather in the blinkered arrogance of a state or party that makes use of the needful and important tropes of journalism directly on its own behalf--and the fact that many journalists, too concerned about political goals or slashed budgets, are apparently happy to let them. To the extent that such is the reality of television journalism today, then the fact that video segments are flowing out of Washington D.C. without big red stamps on them, marking them "A Department of Agriculture Production," is a potentially a far greater threat to democracy than it may first appear.

My Dinner at Charlie's (Simplicity, Part 4)

This is a post that I've been meaning to write for over six months. As they say, better late than never. Don't worry if this doesn't seem to have anything to do with my previous simplicity posts; that comes in later.

On September 3, 2004, I had the pleasure of eating dinner at one of the most highly acclaimed restaurants in the United States, and thus the world--Charlie Trotter's, in Chicago. We--myself, two old friends (one from Portland, the other from Dallas) who are themselves superb guides to good food, and an acquaintance well-connected to the Chicago food scene--sat at the Kitchen Table, and got to watch the wonder of world-class cooking, serving, and restaurant management unfold all around us for three-plus hours. Plus we ate the finest meal I've ever had in my life. Not that I can claim any sort of expertise in that matter--I do all right with the culinary arts, on my own level, but when it comes to "Aka Yagara with Emerald Cove Oyster and Peas" I'm at a loss: I just eat it and enjoy (or not). There are, I've come to learn, profoundly differing philosophies out there guiding how one might assess any particular restaurant or dish--debates over the presentation, ingredients, and overall aims which go into the construction of every menu. Some of that I can, perhaps, say something about. But as for the food itself--for that, I just sat back in wonderment.

Just for the record, out of more than 17 separate courses served us, what did I really like? (Fortunately, one of my friends kept a very complete photo record of the whole evening.) Well...

Bluefin Tuna with Cucumber Soup (also here and here): The soup had jalapenos in it, somewhere, and immediately set me to fantasizing about making some cucumber salsa (which I've since learned is actually not at all uncommon). One of our favorite dishes at home is just a very simple salmon with salsa, and as a well-prepared tuna has all the taste of salmon, I took to this wonderful mix of flavors immediately. It was my favorite fish course (there were five) all night.

Heirloom Tomato with Arugula and Heart of Palm Sorbet: Leaving aside the sorbet, of which I remember nothing (I confess I didn't really understand or appreciate the restaurant's tendency to dress up every other course with multiple special sauces, souffles, and sorbets, but I guess that's haute cuisine for you), I have to say this was the tastiest tomato I've ever eaten in my life. Great presentation too.

Bread and Olive Oil: Someone, I don't remember who (maybe me) asked for some oil to go with our bread, rather than the (very cool) unsalted butter and separate sea salt available on our table as condiments. This being Charlie Trotter's, they didn't just plunk a bottle of olive oil on our table; they brought us three fine selections, one from California, one from Italy, and one from Spain. The Californian olive oil tasted flat, but the other two were wonderful, the Italian being my favorite. I love good bread, and I must have emptied most of oil dish all on my own.

Lamb with Rutabaga and Black Truffle: I haven't had lamb nearly enough in my life. An incredibly tasty course.

Cashew Cheese Cake with Peaches, Kumquats and Star Thistle Honey: This was, hands down, my favorite dish of the night, and very likely the best dessert I've ever had in my life. The egg-like thing in the picture is a compact, smooth cashew "cake," with a consistency almost like ice cream. I have no idea how they made it; something about whipping cashews in a machine until they're reduced to a paste. I could have eaten a pint of it--simply astounding. It was served alongside a caramel custard with espresso jelly, which was quite nice, but which couldn't even touch this luxury. I wish Trotter's had been the kind of place where I could have ordered some of this to go.

Hot Chocolate with Nibs and Cream (also here and here): Since a few of us aren't coffee drinkers, someone asked for some hot cocoa, and this is what Charlie Trotter's came up with. Delicious, rich chocolate, complemented by some tasty, mildly bitter chocolate nibs. I generally prefer hot cocoa to chocolate; the latter is usually a little too sweet and syrupy for my tastes. But the nibs made up for that, and made for a tremendous finisher to the evening.

What's the point of listing all these fine dishes? For someone who loves good dining, going into the details of what restaurants like Charlie Trotter's--or any restaurant for that matter, whether pricey or cheap, world-famous or entirely local--is much the same as movie fans listing their favorite scenes from great movies, or arguing about the choices great actors have made in interpreting classic roles. It's about enriching our appreciation of a particular cultural endeavor: filling in the nooks and crannies of, and thereby situating our own preferences in relation to, a given creative space.

Ah, but is it a space worth exploring? Movies are available to everyone nowadays, or just about; fine food, at least on this level, is most certainly not. Furthermore, as huge as Hollywood may be, the fact is that it is a mostly enclosed economy, one that we can shut ourselves away from, or selectively partake of, as we think best. But food is something else: buying (literally!) into a world of great food is to partake of and thus support a truly global economic superstructure, where foodstuffs are grown and raised and traded and shipped worldwide, where tremendous energy and expense (and waste) go into the manufacture a single, ridiculously labor-intensive, complex and therefore pricey desert. This isn't primarily an environmental question--after all, a truly wealthy place like Charlie Trotter's can afford to select from only the rarest organic and free-range meats and vegetables, and thus come off smelling quite green. It's a question about turning something as basic as keeping our bodies fed into a competition, a business, a luxury, something with a hierarchy, economy and ranking that puts certain diets and food choices beneath others, encouraging us to spend our time, if we're so inclined, climbing the ladder, spending our money and searching out culinary experiences instead of dealing with simpler, more necessary things. Sitting there in Trotter's didn't exactly fill me with guilt about starving masses in Chad or Bangladesh (though there's every reason it could have), but it did make me wonder if it wasn't flirting with a kind of idolatry or addiction, waiting to see what amazing new thing the cooks have discovered you can do with caviar, whose very presence in a restaurant in Chicago goes to show that we sometimes seem to care a great deal more about such complex things as making the arrangements so that fish eggs can be transported across continents, than the innumerable humbler, more egalitarian things that would employ and feed ourselves (and others, especially desperately hungry others) just as well.

In George Orwell's fantastic Down and Out in Paris and London, he talked about how he worked as a plongeur (a dishwasher and general errand-boy) for a just-opened restaurant in Paris. His workday was hell, and the conditions in the kitchen were worse. When I first read that book, I could sympathize: I'd washed dishes in a restaurant before, and I found his reading of the tense interactions of the backroom staff (waiters, cooks, hosts, etc.) at a busy restaurant exactly right. But what stayed with me even more was his general condemnation of the whole enterprise:

"People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary--we must have coal....And similarly with a plongeur's work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering. Is a plongeur's work really necessary to civilization?...He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury."

Orwell then went on to talk about rickshaws, and the people and ponies who carry them. The animals are driven until their death, and then shipped off to the knacker; the men run themselves ragged, "earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few years." And for what? The luxury of riding in a rickshaw--usually an uncomfortable and even slow ride--is hardly great; it only exists because the upper classes (or those who wish to pose as such) of south and east Asia long considered it vulgar to walk. "They afford a small amount of convenience," Orwell wrote, "which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals. Similarly with the plongeur....He is the slave of a hotel or restaurant, and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, what is the real need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it....Some restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get...in a private house....Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want."

Now, of course, things have changed in the last seventy years. There is a great deal more wealth in the world, and a great deal more labor protection too; between minimum wage laws and health code inspections, the working lives of most of those who wash the vegetables and clean the dishes in our restaurants are significantly better than they were for Orwell. Moreover, Orwell lived in a world where there was relatively little travel, and comparatively less exchange of goods: the enormous rush of attention and money which would be pored into the creation of easily replicatable living environments to serve mobile populations (hotels, restaurants, highways, etc.) was still a few decades away. But I wonder if that changes anything essential about Orwell's diagnosis. He's still right that there's little to the luxury of restaurants that isn't obtainable in the home--or at least would be, if people still knew how to cook and the global economy hadn't either enticed or thrown so many of us into patterns of work which leave few with the time to learn. He's right that the luxuries afforded by these institutions are rarely all that luxurious, especially once the expense and the time and the distance have all been tallied up. And he's especially right that such luxuries are a product of a relentless push by owners to get those who labor under them to create something that is, almost certainly, unnecessary. Which means, as Orwell thoughtfully concludes, that on some level perhaps, as consumers of luxury, we do not see the labors of plongeurs and their contemporary equivalents as "honest work," and thus hypocritically figure that those who can do no better than to wash sheets and clean carrots are probably better off being left there, out of sight and out of mind.

But wait, a possible response! At Charlie Trotter's, the carrot cleaners were not out of sight and out of mind; on the contrary, we watched them all night, as they bustled around us. They made us part of the meal, in a way; there was a kind of interactivity to our eating, as the passers-by asked us questions about the food and we asked questions in return. One could argue that there was a bit of performance art going on in that setting; that the dirtier work, the expensive, complicated, crude work of transforming foodstuffs into a luxurious experience had perhaps been outsourced, so that we could imagine the eating experience as something spare and simple and direct. Maybe. But then again, perhaps treating fine dining as a performance art is the better way to think about it. Clearly, a fine restaurant could simply be about feeding, our personal nutritional satisfaction transformed by competitive acquisition. But to the extent such is the case, and we buy into it, we've allowed our natural appetites to be co-opted by an attitude which insists that eating ought to be luxurious, and the more luxurious the better: that food makes demands on us ("What, you eat that? Haven't you heard? No one eats that any more!"), and we have to respond, giving credence to those food profiteers who insist that we must be so hungry, so weary, so bored, so unsatisfied that we've no alternative but to clamber on up to the next feeding level, or else be condemned with the rest of the pizza-munchers below. But art doesn't have that attitude, or at least it needn't. It isn't so demanding; it's inviting. Try something, and see if you like it; if you don't, try something else.

That's not to say there can't be a place for normative concerns in food as in any other cultural space--actually, some food is better than others, and just as it's worth developing an ear for music, it's worth developing one's palate. At Charlie Trotter's, my palate was stretched a long ways, and I'm a better person for it. But I went into that restaurant--that expensive, complicated restaurant--and was treated to a show, a show (however truthful it may have been) of honest work in the name of adventuresome, avant-garde tastes and combinations. It was like going to see a Picasso--which is also a luxury, but one which doesn't inject itself into my daily life, encouraging me to unknowingly burden myself with all the expectations and unseen costs of a complicated, luxurious act. The cruise ship, the command performance, the complete collection--usually unnecessary, almost always wasteful, rarely as good as anything you couldn't do more humbly on your own terms. But a bit of fine cashew cheese cake now and then--that's craftsmanship, and I was blessed with the chance to draw up a chair and watch them do their work. An expensive blessing, to be sure; Picasso may not have worked entirely alone, but he didn't need nearly as complex an economy and organization around him to do his work as Charlie Trotter does. Still, given that we live in a world where such resources abound (and sometimes oppress), putting them to work in an artistic way, wherein the food really does matter as much as the feeding, perhaps Trotter's aim is more simple than it appears.

Orwell ended Down and Out by resolving, among other things, to never again "enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant." "That," he concluded," is the beginning." He may be right to think so; maybe the complicating costs and distractions of pursuing great food in even as careful and admirable an environment as Charlie Trotter's just can't be justified. I'm not sure. I know that the artistry of food doesn't call to me the way it calls to so many others, and I'm fine with that. As with most every act of cultural consumption, the gains have to be weighed against what that cultural practice depends upon, and what it encourages. It'd probably be much, much better if all of us stuck with eating simply and humbly. But for those who want a good honest show, if only once, I know a great place in Chicago I'd recommend in a heartbeat.

Comments Fixed

I've got it fixed; the comments should be working now. Or at least, they were when I tested them. Changes in Blogger messed up the hack that I'd installed to allow the comments function to operate smoothly in the first place; thankfully, this good gentleman has provided an update to the hack, and now all is well. I think you'll still end up jumping to a Blogger page when you post a comment, but you'll be able to click back, and you shouldn't have to sign in at all. So, comment away.

Oh wait, I guess you'll need something to comment about. Sorry; it's been a stressful few weeks around here. But blogging should resume shortly. Thanks to everyone who has continued to check in.

Comments Trouble

Apparently the comments function is broke; thanks to those of you who informed me, and my apologies to those who have attempted to leave comments anyway. I've informed Blogger and am trying a few things; hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

The Problems of Founding

It was President's Day today, and given my obsessions with both civic life and holidays, it's probably not surprising that I find myself a little disappointed. No parades, only crummy furniture sales. Well, you can't have everything. But perhaps I can honor the day by putting down some thoughts which emerged in the context of a productive discussion in my human rights seminar a few weeks ago. (Yes, it's lecture time, but bear with me; Washington and Lincoln show up in the end.)

We were discussing notions of individual and group rights, and how defending the rights of the former can involving infringing upon the reigning conceptions of the latter. But where does that leave the group out from which the rights-bearing individual emerged in the first place? (The specific context of the discussion was Iraq, and whether one can coherently speak of fighting against some portion of the population of a state in the name of providing "rights" to another, in some ways indistinguishable portion of the population.) With a little bit of guidance from Rousseau, we gradually came to talking about the political problem of beginnings. Figuring out how to legitimately initiate a political project is a central, perhaps the central, preoccupation of political theorists, and takes us far beyond Iraq; it haunts Locke's theory of property rights, is echoed in the fears of ancient Roman republican thinkers, and animates the argument in Plato's Republic, the touchstone of all philosophical literature in the West. The crux is always the same: as Juvenal (and then Alan Moore) put it, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Or, more relevantly, who makes the rules for the rule-makers?

Ruling and rule-making wouldn't be much of an issue if we didn't connect legitimacy to the existence of a people capable of determining such for themselves. This isn't a democratic point; the idea of a government being legitimate, of truly serving or reflecting or at the very least merely belonging to, a particular people long predates the idea that such a people could directly or indirectly govern themselves. (Bernard Yack associates the emergence of this kind of pre-political sensibility to the modern democratic era, but the distinct notion of a people forming a specific, bounded body is much older than that.) To ignore the fact of peoples when talking about legitimacy, peoples who exist in particular places and thus can be distinguished from peoples in other places....that reduces "legitimacy" to a question of who or what has the brute power to draw a line and make everyone on one side of it submit to his sword or her gun. It's not politics, not even Hobbesian politics, because there's no polity, no incipient city or group or commonwealth to which matters of rule-making could be posed. Looking at the question this way, of course, suggests that "politics" remained the exception rather than the rule in too many places around the globe for many millennia, and remains the exception throughout much of the world today. I think that's right; "people-making" (or imagining, or articulating, depending on whether you prefer a more or less constructivist or essentialist approach to the question of peoplehood) precedes politics; the emergence of some sort of common, bounded consciousness--whether conceived on the part of the people as a whole demos (which would lead to some kind of popular sovereignty) or as a "public thing," a res publica, comprehended and tended to by some small, relatively elite group (a classical republic, in other words)--is a prerequisite to legitimate politics; outside of which, as Aristotle said, there are only monsters and gods.

Hence, we have to begin with a people. But how does that "beginning" begin? If we could convince ourselves (or reconvince ourselves, depending on how you read the last several centuries of intellectual history) that any given people definitely shared some common quality--a moral sense, a human nature, a basic rationality--that lent itself to political theorizing, then we could postulate a legitimate founding at the moment when this quality is put into play or addressed. In short, the social contract: whether driven by an empirically demonstrable fear of others (Hobbes) or a personal desire to secure our property (Locke) or by the force of Enlightenment itself (Kant), we could all agree to constitute a government in accordance with the requirements of that commonality which we all share. Of course, we won't all like all of the results all of the time, but having come together on common ground, we can call the resulting grouping "legitimate," since no one was left out.

The reason Rousseau is the most important of all modern political thinkers is that he forces us to deal with the history of inequality, unevenness, and dependency that characterizes the development of civilization, with its unavoidable consequence of always leaving someone out. Even if one accepts the existence of some universal quality shared equally by all those who potentially enter into the contract, there remains the problem that the prior constitution of "those who enter into the contract"--the act of people-making itself--was no doubt a bloody and exploitive affair, involving the imposition of unequal conventions on a natural world. Even basic rules of order are subject to this challenge. The principle of majority rule? Was that decided upon unanimously at some point, Rousseau pointedly asks, or was it also a forced decision which followed hard upon the emergence of decided unequal (in power, position, and wealth) majorities and minorities? I frequently quote in class one scholar's assessment of Rousseau as the "prophet of history who despaired of history," and his refusal to allow any "universal" characteristic of the world to excuse us from a consideration of how our groups and peoples historically got to be what and where they are puts his critique of social contract thinking front and central in this debate. It can be gotten around, of course (there was Locke's famous suggestion that the original, and very unequal, distribution of property rights could be considered legitimate as long as one acknowledged that there was "enough and as good" property left around afterwards), but not easily, and not without leaving tensions and fissures in any founded group that could explode it all apart at some later date. Rousseau's alternative was to abandon any hope for a universal quality or capability entirely, and content ourselves with contracting on the basis of some general act of will--a general will, that is. But wouldn't the content of that general will be suspect, being--as it must be--the product of local history as well? It would be, except that Rousseau does not believe the content of the contract arises from within the people. It comes from outside, from the legislator.

In all likelihood, if you've read this far you already know how this all adds up: Rousseau's quasi-divine lawgiver comes down from the mountain like Moses, hands over a law that fits the cultural requirements of the existing people and which they can therefore embrace in an act of general, perfectly equal willing, then departs (just as Moses couldn't enter the promised land). That last part is important: if the legislator sticks around, he or she becomes a part of the now founded people, bringing whatever particularity may or may not have lain behind the legislator's articulation of the law along with him or her, and thus compromising the general, unanimous willing. (The people will think: hey, that sneaky Moses, he left the best part of Israel for himself!) It's a wonderful myth of founding, but can we take it seriously? Of course not. And yet....employing Rousseau's analysis throws into sharp relief some of the contentious matters which face any political beginning. In Iraq today--its boundaries and inhabitants themselves a haphazardly drawn and ahistorical, post-colonial creation--there are Shiites and Sunni and Kurds, each with their own ugly histories and resentments. What kind of education in politics (or science or philosophy) will be sufficient for these groups to perceive in one another a common element upon which they can declare themselves all "Iraqis" and thus commonly obligated to whatever government emerges from "Iraqi" elections and receives consent under an "Iraqi" constitution? As I suggested in another blog entry a while ago, a much larger one that I think we or anyone else is capable of delivering in the short term, I'm afraid. So what's the alternative? How about President George W. Bush, legislator? Smashing the existing social structure, eliminating the history of oppression, American forces swoop in, grant a new law to the acclaim of the people, and then depart! Make sense? Well, no, not even on Rousseau's own terms: the people of Iraq are probably too poor, too divided, too numerous, and definitely too devastated, at least if the requirements listed in Rousseau's Social Contract are to be believed, for any lawgiver to play midwife to a constitutional order that doesn't have all sorts of bloody fingerprints all over it. (And then, of course, there's the fact that it is by no means clear that the "presence" of Bush the legislator will evaporate once the founding work is done.) So no, Rousseau's arguments do not provide a justification for American forces to credit themselves with creating the conditions for a legitimate founding in Iraq. But Rousseau's thought does force us to acknowledge both the rarity and necessity of such conditions, and puts other foundings which American lawgivers oversaw in a different, usefully comparative light. (Japan under Douglas Macarthur, for example.)

And so, this being President's Day, one's thoughts turn to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, how they might fit into this model, and to a reflection upon how frequently we Americans hopefully talk about discerning "founding fathers" in whatever country we examine (or invade). Rousseau would likely have had as little respect for America's founding as he would for the one being attempted in Iraq today: the 13 American states had a population of over 2.5 million by the 1780s, stretched from the North Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico, and had been built upon a century and a half of economic expansion, regional suspicion, and slavery. And yet....there's Washington, the noble planter, called to war by the Continental Congress. He fights, he wins, he retires. Then he is called to service by the Constitutional Convention, after which follows eight difficult years in power, after which he hands over the reins and steps back into private life (unlike, it must be said, Cromwell and Napoleon and practically every other military man turned ruler in human history). He was like some sort of Roman myth come to life--and it is a myth, of course. Historians can and have long since given life and shades of gray and context and self-consciousness to all these hagiographic stories about Washington. But all that good history (and if you're going to read about the historical Washington, do read James Thomas Flexner's biography of the man: 4 volumes, and every page a treasure) still can't undermine the basic fact: here is a man who from a very early age imbibed the ideology of republicanism, loved its more popular literary incarnations (like in the play Cato), and devoted himself to living its virtues and enacting its formal conceits. And the result was a man whose public identity so completely fulfilled the people's trust that he could....well, be a lawgiver. Take charge, take office, lay down the strategy, lay down the basic rules and expectations, and then depart, confident that all else would follow as it should. Which it did, more or less. He was not a philosopher, but he understood that in order to make lasting a people who had cut themselves off from their own source of identity, and had only words and deeds and local histories (but not a national one) to support their necessary self-conceptions, great dignity and care needed to be employed to cut for us a path. We were already here, but in an important way, he founded us; we would, very likely, have been lost without him, split apart into mini-states subject to constant replays of Shay's Rebellion. Would that every people could be blessed with a man like him.

Of course, there were nonetheless plenty of tensions in what Washington, riding upon and in some sense embodying the work and inspiration and sacrifice of so many others, enacted for all Americans, slavery being the most prominent. Our feelings about Lincoln are more passionate than those about Washington, and hence more divided; the "new birth of freedom" which we associate (correctly in general, though far from accurately in particular details) with Lincoln and the Civil War utterly burned away whatever tensions Washington's founding pulled us through, and left with a host of other, deeper scars. As I think the very best book about Lincoln's achievement, Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, makes clear, Lincoln's re-founding was more romantic and aspirational than the one which had taken place 80-odd years previously; Lincoln himself, as is well known, had little desire to see a fully and freely multiracial society emerge in the United States, but he did proposed that the content of that group of people called Americans be something altogether distinct from race or locality. That last one grates on more than a few philosophical conservatives: a people without a place, indeed! Equality (or any other principle) arises from placed habits and history; it cannot be realized through some top-down intellectual intervention, even one backed up by force of arms, no matter how persuasive Jefferson may have such seem. Maybe Lincoln himself didn't believe that either (though I think he did; Jefferson's language was like scripture to Lincoln). But in any case Lincoln, the true father of America's civic religion, freed our attachment to such ideals from the republican, institutional embodiment they'd previously enjoyed in America--he out Rousseau-ed Rousseau, if you will, not so much drawing a general will out from the people as pointing us toward one: a people oriented towards the future, finding themselves in a "proposition." And then he was killed, leaving us alone, re-founded, and with the profound sense that anything which fails Lincoln's prophetic call cannot be called legitimate at all.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? Founding a people through acts of republican or romantic will alone, so long as the appropriate legislator can be found to make it all legitimately general. I don't particularly believe it; unlike David Brooks and all the other American exceptionalists out there, I don't think this country gets a uniquely Rousseauian pass towards legitimacy and away from history. Language still matters, culture still matters, and no amount of forward-thinking aspiration can clear one's politics of those. (Herder was more right than Rousseau.) That doesn't mean I'm a Lincoln-basher, much less a Washington one (on the contrary, I've a painting of the latter on my office wall that I've kept for years). It just means that, also like Rousseau (who was a wonderfully, frustratingly double-minded thinker), I believe politics will probably never escape history, no matter how excellent or willful the founding which gives the polity it's start. Tragedy rules all free states. But in the meantime, I'd rather be forced to recognize these hard historical realities, and the rare (and dangerous) ways to elide them, then to accept a doctrine of simple universals which will result in me being thrown for a loop every time (probably daily, like clockwork) it's revealed that a people need more than just a rational process to consent to. Maybe there's a Washington waiting somewhere in the backstreets of Baghdad; we should all hope there is, because President Bush, I'm afraid, is unlikely to play Moses. Of course, even if there does turn out to be such a person (or persons), and even if an Iraq with Rousseauian legitimacy can be founded out of the midst of conflict, that would still just be the first step. But first steps are worth holidays, at least.

I'm a Finalist!

Wampum posted the results yesterday, but only just noticed it (I was away over the weekend on a job interview): this blog made it into the final ten for the 2004 Koufax Award for Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. Thanks to everyone who voted before. If you'd care to vote again, I certainly wouldn't object.

I Miss the Old Zhang Yimou

While in Hawai'i, Melissa and I also caught a showing of House of Flying Daggers. A good, but not a great flick; definitely better than Hero, I think. I was glad we saw it in the theater; I've been a fan of the films of mainland Chinese director Zhang Yimou for years. When I was an undergraduate, Raise the Red Lantern played at our campus's International Cinema, and it was huge with those of us who had spent some time in Asia. I thought it--as did practically everyone else who saw it--a beautiful, wrenching, powerful film. I didn't become a serious fanatic for Zhang's work, however, until I caught his earlier film Ju Dou--which I think is about as earthy, sexy, and emotionally rough a movie as I've ever seen, while also being gloriously heavy with luscious, vibrant colors and visuals. Since then, I've seen just about every movie of his that has made it to the states, whether on the big screen or video, and that includes his aforementioned recent big splashes. And I'm here to tell you: his earlier stuff was better.

I've no interest in dumping on Hero and House; both are fun movies, and interesting experiments with the wuxia genre, which is a kind of classic martial arts-chivalry storytelling tradition. Zhang's skill in framing his characters, building around them scenes of brilliant light, shadow and sound, remains top-notch, and the wire-work and choreography in both films is spectacular. I don't think that fact that Zhang played around with some scenes for their own sake, rather than fitting them into a larger symbolic cinematic language designed especially for the movie, is necessarily a criticism, as Adam Graham-Silverman alleged in a recent TNR essay; as Albert Gilbert pointed in a letter in response, there's nothing wrong with making a movie "pretty": aesthetic reactions are their own justification. Still, it wouldn't surprise me to find that a great many people go into these movies, lured by critical comparisons to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, a truly superlative movie, and come out disappointed. Not because of the violence (or lack thereof--House is the more intense movie, whereas Hero, superficially a much more violent film, blunts the impact of much of the killing by the tight control Zhang maintains over the emotions his actors display), and not because their political or ethical messages are confused (more about which below), but because I just don't think Zhang is able to make these wuxia movies flow. They feel far more pushed by Zhang's determination to make them than anything organic to the plot or the sensibilities of the main characters. In short, they ring artificial, something I never would have said about a Zhang Yimou movie before.

One point which Graham-Silverman gets right in his criticism of Hero and House is that they can be productively compared to musicals. People do not break out into song and dance while going through their everyday lives; the conceit of post-Oklahoma musicals is that, if done right, singing and dancing out a story needn't be reserved for Gilbert and Sullivan-style comedies and fantasies; the music and choreography can actually enhance the "realism" of the tale, putting the excess to use. In wuxia, the fighting is the excess; it is what brings the emotional terrain of the story into gritty, realistic focus by paradoxically making the characters themselves larger than life. Let's stick with Crouching Tiger, since that's a film many are acquainted with. There you saw profoundly different fighting styles, tailored and choreographed to fit into, or conversely be exposed against, disparate tableaux, each in their own way underlining an thematic point: the regal and minimalist combat of Chow Yun-Fat, sweeping through a bamboo forest; the hard-won control of Michelle Yeoh, bit by exhausting bit taking down her adversary on her home territory; the almost hysterical fury of Zhang Ziyi, lashing out with over-the-top moves in a race across a barren desert. Ang Lee direction has never been more fluid; the battle sequences captured the story and carried it forward with an ease that made clear his comfort with a storytelling tradition that he knows by heart. Yes, many were put off by the mystical, obscure ending; but the point is, there was no sense that the characters wouldn't have gotten to that point on their own. Whereas in Zhang Yimou's wuxia movies, I can't help but feel the director moving them forward like chess pieces. The narrative structure of Hero compelling, but also random (why this battle sequence and then that one?); the storyline of House doesn't feel quite as forced, but perhaps that's because Zhang does his best to bury and forget the dynastic struggle which initiates the action in the first place as soon as possible.

Again, Hero and House both make for some great entertainment. But the Zhang Yimou of Ju Dou, Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju or To Live never let anything drop out of place; he directed masterful dramas, whether historical or contemporary, bringing a rich pageant of characters into painful, perplexing contact with one another, without ever giving the sense that he needed to sacrifice one plot point for the sake getting his characters from point A to point B. An abusive husband is made a cuckold; the multiple wives of a distant aristocrat struggle for supremacy; an uneducated peasant woman makes a farcical journey through the communist bureaucracy; a family plagued by tragedy survives the Chinese civil war and the purges which follow it--all this and more was Zhang's meat and drink, and the fact that he could bring such visual style and beauty to such dark and rough material made him, in my view, simply one of the most talented living film directors in the world.

Many Westerners, and not a few Chinese, thought they saw a deep critique of communism and/or China's patriarchal culture lurking in his films, but Zhang has never been a very political director; all the ire which has been directed at Hero for "celebrating authoritarianism" assumes that Zhang ever cared much for the politics of his films in the first place, which simply isn't the case. Zhang's great dramas from the 1980s and 90s often pushed the envelope, and got him censored by the state more than a few times, but it should be clear that his aim was never to agitate against anything, but rather to create extreme situations that he could visually explore and vivify. And he had a vessel for doing so: Gong Li. A stunningly and unconventionally beautiful Chinese actress that Zhang discovered, trained, and promptly fell in love with, she starred in all of his films from Red Sorghum to Shanghai Triad. Alan Stone has written some insightful essays on Zhang Yimou over the years (here, here, and here), and it's his thesis that Zhang's early oeuvre can essentially be reduced to a prolonged meditation on Gong Li "as desire, as beauty, and as subversive inspiration"; when their affair ended and they parted ways professionally, Zhang's muse left him, and he has ever since cast about in vain for a similar actress to focus his artistic vision. (Zhang Ziyi, whom Zhang Yimou has taken under his wing and who appeared in The Road Home as well as Hero and House, may or may not be able to fill that role.) I'm not sure I'd go entirely along with that; not all of his films since he and Gong Li split have been failures, and Zhang does seem to want to experiment with both more fantastic and more documentary styles that perhaps wouldn't have served Gong Li well anyway. But I won't deny that Gong Li is like a Dietrich or a Hepburn, an actress so physically captivating that her visage and performance can used as an emotional palimpsest, upon which a skilled director could write almost any story. There is one moment in To Live, soon after a friend of the family at the center of the film suffers a great tragedy, and speaks as though his life has no meaning. He is plainly is toying with suicide. Years before, a mistake of his had cost this family dear, and Gong Li, the matriarch, had insisted he owned them "a life." As this utterly defeated and hopeless man staggers off into the night Gong Li suddenly bursts from the doorway, denying him the right to kill himself: "You owe us a life! You can't take yours; we claim it; we won't let you have it!" It is a beautiful moment, practically saintly--and yet, as Zhang Yimou filmed it, it flowed naturally, without any of the artificiality and formalism which deadened the self-sacrifice in Hero.

Anyway, if you've liked Zhang's latest films, and you're not opposed to learning more about Chinese cinema outside the wuxia genre, you could do far, far worse than to find a good video store and become familiar with Zhang Yimou's and Gong Li's collaborations. You won't be disappointed.