Of Ringers and Runts: An Experimental Exercise in Geeketry!

01 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by danielwalldammit in Gaming, Uncategorized

Tags

D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Entertainment, Games, Narrative, Role Playing Games, RPGs, Story-Telling, Storytelling

Nerds only now! The rest of you guys just run along…

img450fd49cc8ade I think most of us who play RPGs have had this experience, the one where the game master (GM) brings in a ringer. It may be a non-player character (NPC), or it may be the GM’s own personal player character (PC, which was much more common back in 1^st edition, …yes, I’m that old). Either way, the ringer towers over the player characters. He kicks ass while they struggle to make a difference.

One thing that strikes me about this is just how often the players will initially greet the ringer with joy. He or she typically shows up just when the player characters face some challenge they thought surely would prove too much. Suddenly they have a chance after all. With the appearance of a ringer, you can’t help but feel that hope is alive and well again. At least you can feel that way until somewhere during the course of that epic battle when the three orcs your ranger has killed don’t seem all that significant in comparison to the 6 giants, four ogres, and thirteen trolls the ringer has offed while you were struggling with a random goblin. The ringer is always a mixed blessing. He can win the day, but he can also make winning feel an awful lot like losing.

If the ringer is still in the group six games later, then I for one reckon it’s time to leave.

Should a ringer stick around for several sessions, the players begin to feel they are just along for the ride. The ringer can reduce player characters, and with them the players themselves to the role of an audience rather than a participant. It can take the fun out of the story, and it can make you reconsider how you want to spend your Saturday nights.

I think most gamers would say that it’s bad GMing to let a major character overshadow the player characters like that. It’s the job of the GM to challenge the players, not take center stage and enjoy their applause every time he wins the day. This is why so many frown on GM player characters. Game Masters shouldn’t run characters of their own, so the wisdom goes. That’s just asking for abuse. But in my experience, the taboo against GM player characters just contributes to the problem rather than helping to solve it. Almost every ringer that I’ve seen began as an NPC, just another character in the cast. This is what frees the GM to set them up with extra power. Often, the GM doesn’t even plan to keep the ringer around that long. he’s just another character in the overall plot-line, so it’s not big deal if he has a little extra power. The trouble is that GMs do become attached to interesting NPCs, so much so that they look forward to playing them, leveling them up, and watching the kick ass. A GM can feel this way about an NPC just as easily as he (or one of his players) can feel about a player character. In effect, some GMs have player characters, and they don’t even know it.

img452cb6a3c0f00 Back in the days of first edition, a GM’s player character was most often rolled up according to the same rules as those of the players. This provided a bit of a check on the whole ringer problem. Abuse could still happen, but there was a bit more of a sense that the GM’s character was supposed to be part of an ensemble. When they come in over-powered to begin with, they inevitably become the star of the show, and the notion that a given character isn’t really a player character can very well serve as the excuse for a GM to field one who simply dwarfs anything the other players can produce.

***

Anyway, ringers are a problem, right? “Don’t do them!” That’s usually a pretty good rule of thumb. So, here is a thought experiment. What if we toss that rule aside? Is it possible to put a ringer in a campaign without ruining everything?

Okay, I know you can do it for a game or two, but what if the ringer was there for the balance of the campaign. Is it possible to do this without ruining the players’ fun?

In essence, this is a question of re-protagonization. In gaming, we often talk about deprotagonization, the process by which a character is made irrelevant to the story-line in a campaign, but what can be done to provide genuine significance to a character living in the shadow of a ringer? That is the question posed by the prospect of gaming (deliberately) with a ringer. It’s a thought experiment of sorts, but hopefully an amusing one.

How to go about it?

***

img450fd04546e89 I can think of a few angles. Whether or not they would actually add up to a fun campaign, well that’s an open question! Anyway, here are the guidelines I would use to set up the campaign.

One: Much of the ringer’s activities take place offstage, leaving the player characters free to resolve their own challenges without the help of the big guy. For example, the ringer is a spell caster, and she is performing a complex task inside a building. The players must protect the building themselves. If they fail, her spell is ruined, and the overall plot takes a turn for the worse. What I really like about this example is the characters can fail without this resulting in a total party kill. If they blow it, then the enemy reaches the ringer, and the ringer then enters the fight. This way the PCs will probably live through their failure, but everyone will know the development is bad in the long run, because that spell was important. How? Well that’s a question for a larger plot-line…

Okay, this might be cheating a bit, because a ringer off-stage isn’t all that different from any other background piece of a campaign plot. Arguably, such things are happening just offstage in many campaigns. It’s just not that unusual. The full challenge of making a ringer work would be one of making it work when the ringer is standing right there beside the players, doing things along with them, and providing tangible assistance during the course of events. It could provide an interesting twist for a game or two to let the players cope with the sudden absence of their MVP, but if that’s the campaign, then your campaign doesn’t really have a ringer. That’s ducking the challenge here rather than facing it.

Two: Give the healer an inherently supportive role. What is she good at? She can heal like no-one’s business, or she is really great at support magic. She can make the other characters run faster, hit harder, and otherwise kick ass. If only they were a little better to begin with! (This works particularly well if you combine it with a definite plan for PC growth.)

What I like about this approach is it filters the impact of the ringer through the actions of the PCs. The ringer remains a ringer She can do amazing things, but the PCs will still have to kill the bad guys; they will still have to scale the cliffs, and they will still have to break open the door to the enemy castle. They may get a boost from the ringer, but it’s up to them to make that boost matter. In effect, the ringer becomes their own asset. It is up to them to make her matter.

What doesn’t work about this approach is that it soft-peddles the ringer to the point that she may not seem like a ringer. Fantasy movies and books are full of wise wizards with far more power than the warrior-protagonists which remain the focal point of such stories. Simply put, we care who wields the sword more than we care who keeps him healthy. That’s one of life’s little perversions, but I reckon it’s a common enough feature to storytelling, it doesn’t make much sense to deny it. A real ringer is a ringer than leaves carnage in his wake, not one that brings you back from the dead and gives you an energy drink. Maybe that shouldn’t be the case, but it is.

Three: Let a player run the ringer. I’ve done this countless times. My old first edition D&D campaign ran for over 20 years. Since we started a new plot-line every year or so, we would often roll one or of the old characters into the new campaign. This often meant that a single player would have a 9^th level character or two while everyone else was starting at 1^st. It could be fun. We let different players run the ringers in different campaigns, and with multiple characters on the board, no-one got bored. There was always plenty for the other characters to do.

This approach at least takes some of the sting out of the GM bias, but that may be all it accomplishes, and a PC-ringer poses problems of its own. If the ringer-rolling player isn’t present for a game session, then either someone else must run their character (something I don’t like doing), or your ringer is gone. How to explain the absence of the ringer or the player’s how to cope with his absence is sometimes a tricky question. Also, letting a player run the ringer makes it harder to control the relationship between the ringer and the other players. If that player is selfish, then she will deprotagonize the other players, and you can’t do anything about it without taking the player’s ability to run her own character. That’s no fun. It can all workout, but suffice to say that I don’t think this really solves the problems posed by putting a ringer in a campaign.

Four: Make the ringer its own challenge. It doesn’t have to be obvious that the ringer will help with tasks the players have set out to accomplish. Maybe she doesn’t really want to help at all and the players will have to talk her into it. Better still, if they must actively work to keep her on track over the course of the campaign! Is the ringer a drunkard? The players must keep her sober for the big fights. Is she really forgetful or otherwise aloof to the point of becoming utterly unreliable? If the player characters have to make decisions for her, or even role-play the process of guiding her actions, the ringer becomes an extension of the player’s own efforts. What she does is what they get her to do. It may still be her fireball, but at least it will be the players who told her where to place it.

On a side note: it could be interesting to give players powers enabling them to redirect the actions of the ringer. In effect, she becomes a power source, but at least some of her actions are determined by the players.

I think this approach is promising insofar as it gives the player characters some sense of control over the campaign. Still, convincing the hero to do the right thing isn’t quite as much fun as being the one who does it yourself. a fireball rolled up by another character will never be as fun as one you roll up yourself, even if you did talk the other person into casting it. Giving the PCs a care and feeding role to play in managing the ringer helps a bit, but this alone won’t provide a satisfactory solution to the problem.

Five: You can give the player characters independent tasks and even long-term goals that diverge slightly from those of the ringer. Perhaps, the ringer is happy to demolish all the orcs in the northern wastelands, but she isn’t all that concerned about the elven princess the characters want to keep alive. Their challenge thus requires tasks that the ringer won’t help with and their sense of accomplishment will then rest (at least partially) on terms that don’t involve the ringer.

I think this is critical to resolving the problems posed by a ringer. Whatever problems the ringer can be relied upon to help the players solve, the players must face some problems they have to resolve on their own. If these problems can be put in play at the same time, in the same scenario, then so much the better. The ringer is in play on the table, and the player characters must do something for which her help will not be provided. Not only does this go a long way toward resolving the problems posed by a ringer; it can also spice up game combat in general. A battle with a subplot is more interesting than a straight-up fight, and if that sub-plot skews the significance of the characters present, so much the better.

Six: Let the characters progress to a level comparable to that of the ringer. This really is the big one, as far as this challenge is concerned, because it makes the ringer into a challenge that must itself be resolved over the course of the campaign. In effect, this turns the problem posed by a ringer into a source of meaning in itself. To make this work, though, you must risk letting the characters feel the weight of the ringer initially. Let them struggle to matter for challenge or two, then let them solve a problem or three, and finally give them a moment when they see the ringer as an equal rather than a superior.

For an extra twist, let the ringer become an enemy in this final moment, and let the battle with that ringer be the final test of progress. You know you’ve made it when your mentor lies defeated before you! …extra fun if some cryptic prophesy alludes to this early in the campaign.

Extra twist, or not, I think letting the players overcome the difference is the key to making a ringer into a positive force in the campaign. It’s an experience, I recall from my early days in gaming. I spent most of my gaming days playing first edition D&D. It was a consistent expectation back in those days that your character would start as a grunt and grow into power over the course of a campaign. Most importantly, first edition was a definite sense of diminishing returns. You could bring a 1^st level character into an 8^th level campaign, and by the time the other characters had made 10^th, your own character was probably only one or two levels behind them. You weren’t quite even with the others yet, but at that point, you were one of the group, a force to be reckoned with. Watching your significance grow in comparison to the established characters in such a campaign could be a lot of fun. In effect, the over-powered characters provide a base-line from which you gauge your characters progress, effectively making it all that much more obvious than it would be in a campaign where the characters (and their enemies) are both relatively evenly matched.

The sense of character progress is something I missed in 3rd edition. The balance of power in that game didn’t shift much over the course of a game. If one character was 5th level and another 1st, ten games later, then 5th level character was till significantly more powerful than the 1st. You just couldn’t overcome the difference like you could in first edition. It’s one of the things that made the presence of a ringer that much more toxic in 3rd edition, I think. Under normal circumstances, the differences could not be overcome. I miss it. Maybe that’s what has me thinking about ringers.

No, I haven’t played 4th or 5th edition.

SixB: As a further twist on progress, give the ringer an active role in helping the PCs develop and grow. It’s easy enough to role-pay a mentor apprentice relationship, but it’s a little more fun to provide some significance to this in the game-mechanics. IN my home-brew system, I allow characters to share experience points, and I make this more effective under selected conditions, as in cases where the advanced character has specific teaching abilities, or if the characters have entered an established relationship of some kind). I let the players choose these things, of course, but I give these choices weight in character development. This can help to accelerate player character growth relative to the ringer even as it slows the ringer down. Such mechanics can help to facilitate the change in balance for an overall campaign. It’s particularly interesting when the players themselves have a ringer. Letting them decide how to deal with the differences in power-level provides another layer of meaning to the plot, and of course I try to ensure that the rewards for sharing experience and helping younger characters grow will outweigh any costs.

…of course, none of which is going to help any of the poor bastards when it’s time to meet the dragon!

The Man With No Game!

02 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in Gaming, Movies, Narrative VIolence

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Ambiguity, Ambivalence, Clint Eastwood, Morality, Narratives, Role Pllaying games, Stories, Story-Telling, The Man With No Name

Who could forget the man with no name? It’s easily the most memorable character in Clint Eastwood’s acting career. After generations of protagonists so apple-pie obvious in white hats and chaps, always doing the right thing, and always winning in the end, there was something especially compelling about this antihero. You never quite knew what he was going to do. He might save the town, or he might kill everyone. You didn’t really know until right about the same time you learned the outcome of the conflict itself. This vision of moral ambiguity was a wonderful contribution to film.

As a character in a role-playing game, he totally sucks!

To be a little more specific, he makes a terrible player character in an ongoing campaign. The Man With No Name has some potential as an Non Player Character, if the guy running the game uses him well, but in the hands of a player this sort of character can be a terrible buzzkill. That doesn’t stop players from creating characters with similar personae. Time and again players bring such characters to the game table only to they aren’t nearly as interesting as their cinematic counterparts. The difference illustrates a little about storytelling, I think. But of course the issue is larger than the man with no-name. It extends to any number of morally ambiguous characters, characters who inspire fear and hope in roughly equal amounts.

What makes such characters work is the extra tension they provide to the narrative. Instead of just wondering if the hero will beat the bad guys, a morally ambiguous protagonist leaves you wondering if he will even take up the right side of the fight. He might just as easily prove to be the biggest nightmare of the narrative. Done well, such personalities will leave you on the edge of your seat well into the third act, but of course resolution will come in the end. Sooner or later these characters do the right thing, even if reluctantly so, and perhaps with a trace of wrong mixed in with it for bad measure, but they will step up to the challenge and save the day.

The audience needn’t do anything but soak up the story.

And therein lies the difference. Role playing games (or at least the pen&paper variation thereof) are an inherently cooperative enterprise. The players must come to a series of agreements in order to make it work. At minimum this means coming to an understanding of the game rules, but it also requires some agreement on the essential features of the setting as well. Ultimately, the players will need to come to a shared understanding of the plot-line for a campaign. Failing that, an rpg can easily descend into an endless session of bickering over one tiny detail after another. Were things going right, these very details would be the icing on the cake, the features of the story that make it so much more vivid. But when the players aren’t on the same page, such details instead provide fodder for a series of arguments about imaginary things, and being imaginary, those things don’t admit easily of resolution by rational argument. This is of course what makes the old Summoner Geeks parody so brilliant. Most of us who game have been there at one time or another. ….A story that isn’t quite happening, its every detail becoming an excruciating source of pointless conflict.

The morally ambivalent character is just one more variation on this problem. It poses the dilemma of a character who may or may not accept the central plot-lines of the story. More to the point, it poses the challenge of a player who may or may not accept the central challenge of the story. Unlike a movie viewer, the other players must then actively contend with the possibility that his ambiguous loyalties will undermine their own efforts to resolve the central story line. They have to worry if the dark and mysterious character will piss off the one great side character whose help they really need; if he will start a random fight in a bar where they hoped to meet an important contact; or if he might simply wander off when the big battle is about to go down. The possibilities are as countless as they are frustrating. It’s a bit like watching a side-plot to a movie take-over the entire narrative. …except that you’re not simply watching that happen. You are actively trying to resolve the central problem for the storyline and the player running the ambiguous character has just derailed the whole project!

Of course a player running a morally ambivalent character needn’t do this. He can do as the writer of a movie or a book might and choose to let his character do the right thing, so to speak, perhaps grumbling a bit in the process or adopting an ironic reason for doing so. That can be fun. It can actually work.

For about a game or two.

What makes such characters really frustrating is the prospect of dealing with their ambivalence three, four, even ten games into an ongoing campaign. It can actually be kind of fun to figure out a mysterious character in the early stages of a campaign when the story-line is just beginning to emerge. If you are still worried about his likely course of action well into the campaign, and long after the central challenge of the plot has taken shape, the whole act is going to get damned old. Ironically, such characters eventually lose their bad-ass quality and start to seem more like pampered children or special snowflakes.

It isn’t just that such characters are frustrating (though they are). The problem is that the sense of mystery – the dramatic tension that makes them tick – fails over time and they simply become tedious, just one more detail that cannot be settled. Part of what makes ambivalent characters interesting to begin with is a sense of anticipation. What will he do? It’s an interesting question, but this question must eventually be answered to provide a satisfactory theme in a story. If a player leaves his or her character sitting on the fence umpteen plot twists into a narrative, that in itself starts to become the answer to this very question. He’ll stay on that damned fence and make you beg him to help out every damned time something needs doing.

It’s all a bit like watching unrequited love in a sit-com. It’s kinda fun for an episode or three, but it’s a bit old by the second season. By season three it’s a distraction from the cool parts of the series, and by season four it’s the reason you’ve decided to watch something else.

Ultimately, the mystery that makes such characters tick resides in a moment within a plot line, but that moment must eventually pass. A character who doesn’t know what side he’s on well into an ongoing plot becomes a source of irritation. When a player tries to make moral ambiguity a lasting feature of his character, he or she may well end up as a the buzz-kill that ended the campaign.

And the man with no name thus acquires one after all.

It just isn’t a good one.

With Apologies to the Moths Along I-40; My Summer! (Includes Pictures)

10 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Bad Photography, Las Vegas, Write Drunk, Edit Stoned

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Cooking, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Mexico, Road Trip, RPGs, Story-Telling, Summer, Vegas

Just an excitable boy!

Stays in Vegas, my ass! What happens in Vegas gets bigger, wilder, and more sordid with every retelling of the story!

My summer in Vegas might even have included the slaying of giants, for example. Dice might have been involved, but let’s not dwell on the details. Other frequent activities included book night. Book club did involve Scotch I believe, or at least a Corona. I could say that I really don’t remember the books and leave it at that, but it’s entirely possible that no books were to be found at book night.

…or even discussed for that matter.

And if RPGs and an occasional beer ain’t wild enough for a good Vegas yarn, then let me tell you about the museums. Yeah, that’s right. Vegas has museums! No, I’m not going to tell you about the mob museum, because that’s just what you’re expecting me to do. But Las Vegas does have a Mormon!

…Fort.

I do recall a bit of neon!

And then there was the place that went boom! Lots to lean at the museum that goes boom. More on that on another day. The Mojave Penguin at the Clark County Museum was cool! The Springs Preserve was annoying, then amusing, then kinda cool, but there were absolutely NO butterflies, dammit! Pin Ball, you already know about, and of course there is the sexy museum that isn’t really that sexy! I took a former student to that place. He declined to go next door. Otherwise, we’d have some real story to tell.

I met an old friend in an alley. Shhhhhh….

Downtown is always fun, and the Container Park rocks!

…sometimes literally.

I narrowly escaped a giant flame-spouting mantis somewhere in that area. No big deal. So did the others, you might say. I know. I saved everyone!

Hoover Dam is still there. Much of the water isn’t. Dammit!

Also I biggened the moon while I was in the area. Yes, I did!

The strip? What happens on the strip might as well stay on the strip, cause I couldn’t care less.

Apparently, I am now on Instagram.

Bob still makes great steaks, and Pam hasn’t greened a chili in a long time, but this summer was special. Plus Moni approved my gringo tacos, so I is a happy cookery-guy!

Vegas might well have included the Santa Monica Pier and a visit to Church, unless I was just sober. Not that I’m not often sober, or that any of this will make sense to you, but I don’t give a damn.

If you make sense to people, they will only make sense back at you!

Vegas might also have included a Corn Dance and a lovely stay in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but hey, I told you what happens in Vegas gets bigger with every retelling. Sometimes Vegas itself gets bigger with every retelling.

Or so I telled you!

Big skies happen!

Moni almost went boom at the corn dance. My fault on accounta I’m a bad person, but red chili be praised! She came out okay. My thanks to the kind people at Santa Ana Pueblo!

On a serious note, I really enjoyed our stay at Rancho Gallina and a chance to visit a couple of old friends. If you are ever planning a stay in Santa Fe, do yourself a favor and check out this bed and breakfast!

Yeah, there were utility boxes too, in vegas I mean, and the utility was sometimes amazing! I mighta seen a few other street-arts, some of which were quite cool. Or maybe they were hot, but only if being hot is cool, if you’re cool with that, I mean!

Hot pots also happen!As does Kimchi! And Origami statues happen! Lots of happenings happen, as it happens.

The View from Pikes Landing

I would tell you that Vegas included the Chena River, but that might be stretching the bounds of credibility, so I’ll just admit that was Fairbanks. I went to Fairbanks before I became really Southy, and Fairbanks was cool. That said, credibility is a damned kill-joy and he’s not invited into any more of my stories!

Also, I really am a bad man, and I will probably be kicked next time I go to Vegas.

That’s ‘boiled alive’ in What-happens-in-Vegas talk!

***

You may click to embiggen!

: Biggish Moon

: I’m pretty sure this counts as metagaming!

: A kind and helpful sign.

: Container Art

: Yeah, this is kinda creepy.

: Hot Pot!

: Kimchi!

: The terrible beast at the gates of the container park

: A great guardian mantis stands outside the container park.

: Container Park is Contained!

: Container Rock

: I geek! yes, I do.

: Carpe no diem. …in lake Meade

: Hoover Dam (Kinda sad)

Er, …the Los Angeles part of Vegas.

: Santa Monica is pretty, but I worry about the fauna. ..flora. …fauna. …Argh!

: So this is what people do in sunny and beautiful places!

: Piers happen!

: Comedian John Fugelsang and the Choir.

: I wish I could tan like that!

Moar Street Art!

: Back of the container park.

: A Phoenix in the back of the old Huntridge Theater. …Irony is a cruel mistress!

: The Precious Slut Tattoo Parlor

: Run away!

: Splash of color!

: Zebra’s happen!

: Mural by ARG

: Back of the Beauty Bar as I recall.

: Also the back of the Beauty Bar.

: Nuther one from the back of the Beauty Bar.

: Hammerheads also happen

: oooh, …sexy!

: Pretty!

: Near downtown.

Museums. …I like the one that goes boom!

: The Neon Museum (AKA the Boneyard)

: One Aisle

: Inside the Mormon Fort!

: Told you the museum goes boom!

: You need these at the museum that goes boom!

: Okay, the Springs Preserve had plenty of these butterflies.

: Desert Bighorns! …the artsy kind at the Springs Preserve.

On the road again…

(My friend Monica took a lot of these images, and I think she even tweaked the colors a bit for her Instagram page.)

: Blue in front of us and blue behind us.

: Road

: Clouds

: Near Gallup

: A bluing path

: Me Drivinating!

: Sunset

: Moni likes clouds!

: Near Gallup

: the road is cloudy and cool!

Santa Fe and thereabouts.

: Rancho Gallina

: Entrance to Rancho Gallina

: The dining hall and office for Rancho Gallina

: Rancho Gallina

: Interior of Rancho Gallina

: Common Area (Rancho Gallina)

: Desk and Fireplace at Rancho Gallina

: Santa Fe

: Spanish Market

: View from a friend’s house.

: At the Museum of Contemporary Indian Art associated withe the Institute of American Indian Arts

: We have no pictures of the corn dance.

: My friend had another guest.

: Origami Tower

: Airplanes taking off

: Rock,Paper,Scissors

The Problem with Deepak.

05 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Apologetics, CNN, Deepak Chopra, Faith, Law of attraction, religion, Skepticism, Story-Telling, Unbelief

I consider skepticism a way station on the way to a higher, more fulfilling kind of spirituality.

Millions of people have walked away from organized religion to become more spiritual, not less. They call themselves seekers; their disbelief is a starting point for starting their own investigations.

Deepak Chopra wants something from atheists. I somehow doubt he knows what that is anymore than the rest of us do, but his efforts to feign dialogue with unbelievers are among the creepier things one can encounter on the net. If you’re not careful you may encounter his particular brand of word salad on the #atheism hashtag at twitter, but don’t try too hard to make sense of his posts. That way lies madness!

And then the man lays this egg just before Easter weekend. It purports to be a critique of atheism, but of course it isn’t. What Chopra is doing in this post is passing off a story for a criticism, and it isn’t really a story about atheism at all. It is a story about the heroism of those who struggle with skepticism and in the end emerge victoriously with some sort of faith intact. What that belief is, or even how much the hero of his story is supposed to believe it, Deepak does not exactly tell us.

…but they will surely believe in something.

…kind of.

What does atheism have to do with this story, you might ask? Well we are one of the monsters to be encountered along the way. Near as I can tell, we represent a kind of undead to him. We are people who lost the struggle. Somewhere along the way, it would seem that we gave up all religious beliefs and thus fell into outer darkness, condemned to haunt the world of spiritual questers for the balance of our lives (or at least until Aragorn releases us from our obligations after helping in some epic battle). It is our role to test the faithful, and perhaps to bring down the champions of bad beliefs, but not to taken too seriously in our own right. Those on Deepak’s spiritual quest must ultimately get past us.

Okay, so Deepak didn’t mention Lord of the Rings. I know. But what he did do is tell us a story in which organized religion (presumably conservative Christians) and unbelievers both simply fail to meet his ideal. What that ideal is, Deepak doesn’t say. And given insistence that beliefs fall upon a sliding scale, it seems fair to suggest no answer will be forthcoming, or at least that no answer will take the form of a definitive belief. It isn’t a straight forward belief that interests Deepak so much as a kind of belief, well-hedged, and almost asserted, kind of. This belief is something about which people are not quiet certain, but certainly haven’t given up altogether. He can describe this state in the third person, but cannot assert it directly without contradicting himself (or at least in some sense preserving the option to disavow it at some point or another). Thus, it is easier for Deepak to tell us a story about the quest for this state than it is to outline the features of the beliefs in question.

One might suggest that those beliefs reside somewhere in the space between the hard problem of consciousness and current state of modern science. (We could call this land Adignorantia!) Alternatively, it could lie somewhere in that layer subatomic mysticism in which Deepak imagines Quantum Mechanics to have found a playground for wishful thinking. Either way the place in which Deepak’s beliefs reside is a place in which his word salad will actually mean something, so we are invited to imagine. It lies at the end of a never-ending quest, and if we can’t quite make sense of it today, well then that is because we aren’t there yet.

Keep trying!

One of the more amusing aspects of this game is that everyone can play it. The secular version is at least as old as Auguste Comte and his stages of progress (in which man progresses from theology, metaphysics, to positivism in every branch of study). Modern unbelievers play it every time they call religious beliefs superstition or speak of secularism as something that arises naturally from scientific progress. Conservative Christian variations are usually more personal (and hence far more interesting), but of course the tradition goes back far in the history of apologetics. The process of coming to believe appears in the all-better-now narratives of Christians throughout history (from St. Augustine or C.S. Lewis to – I’m sorry about this… Kirk Cameron). Some of these stories are profound. Some of them are damned trite. Either way, it is a common enough gambit for folks to ensnare their opponents in their life stories, the passing off a story in which unbelief appears quite as a matter of fact to be a plague in one’s life for a direct criticism demonstrating that it really is so, or even that it is simply wrong.

…or better yet, that what one actually believes is correct.

Whether it be an argument from personal biography or faith in some universal arch of progress, stories in which the happy ending takes the form of what one chooses to believe are a dime a dozen. If Chopra has anything unique to add to this it is little other than his own unique brand of obscurantism and pseudo-science. he is otherwise, treading in tired waters. It’s an easy enough game to play, telling a story in which someone else’s way of thinking is but a stage on the way to some higher calling. There was a time when I once enjoyed telling such stories mys… Oh wait a minute!

So, in the end what is wrong with Atheism according to Chopra? It would seem to be that it’s simply our role to be wrong in his script.

Meh, …I can live with that.

One Story to Rule Them All!

13 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Fantasy, Film, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Movie Reviews, Movies, Peter Jackson, Story-Telling, The Hobbit

We All know that the ring destroyed the kings of men. We know it haunted Bilbo all those years in the shire. The ring destroyed Boromir and he was never even a ring bearer. We all watched as Frodo waste away under the influence of the one ring. But my question is what has the ring done to Peter Jackson?(Warning – Spoilers to follow. And yes, I know. I’m a grumpy old grognard. It’s worse than you think.) Yeah, I finally saw The Battle of the Five Armies, so I guess now is as good a time as any to share my thoughts on it. I’m not angry really. I’m just disappointed. More than that, I am concerned, very concerned.

I think I read the hobbit around 6th grade or soon thereafter. What I remember of the book was an enjoyable light read. It was the sort of story you read when young and cherish well into adulthood. I could identify with it as a youth because it was the story of a child like character adrift in a world larger in every respect than he was. Bilbo learned to get along in the Hobbit, even to thrive in it, but he never quite got a handle on the larger forces at work in that story, and neither did we as its readers.

It was a fascinating world that Bilbo carried us into. It was a world of myth to be sure, but not just because of the elves and the dragons. It was also a story in which the quest for gold seemed a perfectly sufficient reason to undertake a dangerous adventure, and a world in which orcs and goblins attack, because frankly that’s what they do. It’s a just-so logic that guides The Hobbit, and that is just as any good mythic narrative would have it. a world in which great wars will happen. They will simply happen. No need for political complexities or struggles on which the fate of a whole world will hang. That sort of story will come later, but in the Hobbit, wars happen for simpler reasons, and that is all there is to it.

It is one of the charming features of The Hobbit that Bilbo never quite accepts the logic of that world, at least not its more violent features. His rejection is visceral, childlike. It isn’t a worldly critique of the Draco-gold standard or the perils of Dwarven real-politik. Bilbo just never quite understands the logic of the battle which serves as the focus of this last film, not that I remember anyway. One suspects that there is nothing really to understand; it is simply what these characters were born to do, how Thorin was born to die.

Tolkien does not unleash the complexities of Middle Earth on his readers until the Lord of the Rings. He did rewrite the Hobbit to put it more in sink with the larger work, but even then he let much of the larger scheme rest on the background of The Hobbit. We may even see hints of that larger scheme, even as we continue to see hints of material from the Silmarillion in the Lord of the Rings. But what isn’t explained in both stories is as essential to each as what is explained. We aren’t supposed to get all this, and we are certainly not supposed to get all of it when seeing the whole thing through the eyes of Bilbo. Tolkien understands this. If Jackson ever did understand it, he has almost certainly forgotten it by now.

Watching The Hobbit has been a lot like attending a play with someone who has read he script and wants to make sure we know it, along with everyone in the next three rows. Just as an annoying theater-troll will spout the next lines ahead of the actors, Jackson keeps turning The Hobbit into a chance to tell us about the Lord if the Rings. He simply will not let the Hobbit be the Hobbit. It must instead be a prequel to that later (larger) story.

Focused as he is on the grand scheme of things, Jackson has all but forgotten Bilbo. The epic narrative that Jackson insists on relating has little time for a simple hobbit and little place for a Hobbit’s point of view. Yes Bilbo does many of the same things in this trilogy that he does in the book, but his story is never really allowed to compete with that of Thorin’s quest for power, the rise of the bowman to leadership, the doomed love affair between a Dwarven romeo and his elven Juliette, or for that matter, Gandalf’s efforts to piece together the story of the Necromancer. How could Bilbo possibly compete with all that!

All that Bilbo can do is to play a bit part in a failed bid to avert a war. Yet, the problem isn’t that Bilbo is a minor player in the great scheme of things. Rather it is that this version of The Hobbit has forgotten the importance of bit players. It is too interested in the great heroes to give any real credence to those with humbler ambitions. In that respect, this version of The Hobbit couldn’t have wandered further away from its original source.

This Hobbit is a story that contains a hobbit, but it most certainly is not a story about a hobbit. It is too busy being a story about other things.

So what? If Jackson and his writing team want to tell a different story, there is no particular reason why they shouldn’t do just that. And yet The Hobbit remains unsatisfying (for me at any rate) because it can never really be what Jackson and his team want it to be, which is another Lord of the Rings. The story line simply doesn’t support the tone of an epic narrative; it’s characters have never been quite up to the task. The Dwarves are just a bit too foolish, the elves a bit too vain, and the men too reluctant to be anything at all. These are interesting characters for a story with less ambition than Jackson has brought to the story. For a grand epic, they simply will not do. So, The Hobbit trilogy remains overshadowed and upstaged by the epic narrative which is to follow, the one we’ve already seen, the one against which this story cannot help but pale in comparison.

Yes, Jackson and company can certainly tell us whatever story they like, but I cannot help thinking something a little closer to the original Hobbit would have been more valuable. I find myself wanting to say; we’ve seen this. You did it right the first time. Now show us something new.

But alas! This was not to happen.

For whatever reason, Jackson could not bring himself to let the hobbit be the hobbit, or even to fashion it into something altogether new and creative. So many of his interventions pull the story towards the Lord of the Rings, which is something it simply can never be. Jackson’s heart is set on the Lord if the rings. His mind is bent on it. And it is his master.

The final scenes of the Hobbit are filled with allusions to the coming trilogy, and truth be told, that is to be expected, even relished. Yet each of these references drags on a bit too long. We get the reference to Aragorn, and we get the moment Bilbo replies to a knock on his door, which is actually kind of clever, or at least it would have been if Jackson had been content to let a couple quick lines connect the two stories. But he can’t do that. Jackson has to make sure we get the point, and each of these references seems to carry on well after we get the point.

Spoiling it.

It seems as though Jackson just cannot let the coming epic go, and the urge to tell us about his precious Lord of the Rings won’t let him settle for a proper allusion, just as it would not let him simply tell us the story of the Hobbit in the first place. It’s as though the Lord of the Rings has hold of his spirit.

It will not let him go!

I know Why the Scaped Goat Bleats

05 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

atheism, Irony, negation, Priorities, scape-goating, Schools, Story-Telling, Villains, Villainy

What’s the best part about using a graduation to preach the word of God? I imagine you are thinking that the best part about talking about God might be spreading the good word, right? Well you’d be wrong about that. Very wrong. The best part about talking about God on a public occasion is hope that it will piss off the atheists.

Just ask Joe the Plumber!

…and dozens of people taking advantage of the occasion to tweet about how this speech pissed off atheists over the last day or so. The anger of atheists plays a prominent role in most of these narratives. It isn’t the blessings of God or even those of a theocracy-Friendly SCOTUS that these people want to talk about; it’s the anger of atheists. Which is kind of flattering if you think about it. The most important part of addressing God is, for some believers anyway, what it will mean to us non-believers.

It’s almost as though the real point of the exercise has less to do with the Old Man Himself than it does with us lowly nay-sayers.

…in much the same way that the best part of prayer is not the talking to god part. Frequently, it’s the irritation inflicted on unbelievers when you say to them; “I will pray for you.” I mean prayer is hit or miss anyway, or just miss, but what the Hell, that look on the other guy’s face when you dismiss him with that special condescending note, it’s just pure gold. The good guy in the sky may or may not bring you a puppy, but if you address him on the right occasion (or at least threaten to), you can sure count on getting under someone’s skin.

Am I right?

Could it be that the best part of waving a flag is the hope that it will make some lefty uncomfortable?

Maybe the best part of printing God on your money is the hope that it will give someone conflicted emotions about his pocketbook?

Do you ever get the impression the best part of a really cool thing is the part where it pisses someone else off? And do you ever wonder if maybe that really cool thing might not be so cool after all, if it didn’t piss off that other guy? Cause maybe it’s really pissing that other guy off that’s the really cool part of the cool thing after all, and if we take that away, maybe the cool thing just becomes too damned dull to bother with.

…which is how God in the schools used to be, at least until someone made him a rebel.

Do you guys know that all the troubles in America began when God was chased out of the schools? Seriously, I’ve been hearing this one since I was a kid, so I’m guessing you heard it too. Now, a smart person might wonder how a god could be kicked out of the schools, but a smarter person would know damned well that’s just the way the script is written. I mean, why ruin a good story? The bad guys chased Jesus out of homeroom, and then guns and drugs and teen pregnancy came in to take his place. Hell if only the Prince of Peace were still allowed in math class, no-one would shoot anyone there anymore.

Nope!

Of course, every good story needs a villain. Every rebel needs a tyrant, and every free spirit needs a stuffy old codger to make her inner beatnik shine. Even God, it would seem, needs a brutal oppressor, and that’s why the Devil gave us teachers, and atheists. They come together in the schools, or at least in evangelical stories about the schools, and the wonderful thing is that we can all identify with God on this one. We’ve all got that image in our minds somewhere, the horrible ruler-wielding fiend who made it his job to fill misery with a whole company of children from his own classrooms. Well now that guy is torturing God too, just like he did in our own eighth-grade science class, and all we have to do is pray to god to piss him off and all the people like him. And thus prayer becomes a supreme act of rebellion, a grand middle finger held high at the demons of our own childhood and those of human history too, or at least the evangelical version of it.

It’s a good story, or at least a compelling one, this Bible-wielding rebel theme.

The problem of course is that some of these rebels aren’t rebels. Some of them have authority, and some of them are celebrating the use and abuse of authority. They just don’t want the responsibility that goes with it. But what the Hell!?!

WWJT?

Who would Jesus Troll?

Silencing the Base Villains and Sending us Back to the Old Narratives: Yep ‘Atheism’ Again

03 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Philosophy

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Agnosticism, Apologetics, atheism, Bertrand Russell, God, religion, Story-Telling, Unbelief, Villainy

“Who should I swear by? thou believest no god: That granted, how canst thou believe an oath?” – Titus Andronicus

It isn’t often that the villains of a narrative grow up to lead lives of their own. Such a thing seems beyond improbably; the mere suggestion flirts with magical realism. And yet, such a thing has happened, ironically enough in the growth of modern atheism.

For many centuries, atheists lived in churches and temples, so to speak, or rather, they lived in the stories told in such places. For those equating belief in a god with moral values, unbelievers have long provides a ready source of villainy, a bad counter-example to the moral of many a pious story. One really doesn’t find people proudly claiming the name of atheism until the modern era. It is only then that stories about atheists as an other come to compete with narratives told by those of us who claim the label for ourselves.

One can see readily enough that the existence of self-proclaimed atheists is perplexing to some believers. The resulting confrontations can be a rather telling moment, as some believers adjust and alter their messages to engage in real dialogue. Others seem only to find it deeply offensive that characters who should be under their control have shown up in person and refused the roles assigned to them. It isn’t really all that surprising then that a good portion of the popular dialogue over unbelief should focus on the meaning of ‘atheism’ and questions about just who gets to claim the term. It is also a question about whether ‘atheism’ will remain the province of characters known primarily in the third person, or will it now remain a label that lives in first person?

You might think that the matter has been settled in fact if not in principle, but one often finds folks trying to put the genii back in the bottle. One of the most common stratagems is a simple evidence press. “How can you be sure?” I’ve been asked that question directly a few times, and I find variations of it in a broad range of apologetics. In some of the more telling variations, atheists appear once again as the villains of a religious narrative, one in which we are presumed to be arrogant since only an omniscient being could possibly be sure that no gods exist. Those rejecting claims to omniscience may soon find themselves told they aren’t really ‘atheists’.

…they probably aren’t really Scottsmen either!

I often marvel at the double standard behind this approach; but of course it’s not just a double standard, it’s also a double bind. On the one hand people proclaiming all manner of faiths can stake out their stance on the existence or nature of God(s), and few would think to infer anything about their sense of certainty from this alone. We don’t typically assume someone has claimed omniscience simply by choosing which church they will attend on Sunday. On the other hand, that sense of certainty seems uniquely objectionable when it is projected into the mind of an atheist. Time and again, I hear (or read) believers claiming that they know with absolute certainty that God exists, and few would think they were bragging up their own abilities in so doing. Yet many of these same believers seem quite aghast at the possibility that anyone could be so certain as to the existence of God(s) as to take up the mantle of atheism. To be an atheist is, many would assume, to assert with absolutely certainty that which cannot be known at all.

Perhaps the believers are right. Perhaps there is something about the nature of the question that ties the no gods stance to some unique scale of uber-gnosticism. You can believe in Mormon-Jesus, Krishna, or even the Virgin Mary with or without certitude, but to say ‘no’ to the lot of them one must be omniscient.

Meh, ….I don’t think so.

This is somewhat of a sticking point, however, and those of us proclaiming our god-free lives must deal with the problem in one manner or another. Somewhere in the process of breathing life into the stale villain’s role of atheism, a non-believer must arrive at an answer to the question of what to do about all the possible gods, not merely the one that this or that believer is urging on you at this particular moment. If this sweeping negation of gods seems implausible, at least to the believers, then it seems a fitting enough cause to cancel the improbably narrative turn, …sufficient reason so to speak to return ‘atheism’ to the province of believers, to grant them once again the exclusive right to use that notion as they see fit.

The consolation prize is invariably ‘agnosticism’.

Old Berti!

Take for example, an essay written by Clare Carlisle, a Lecturer at King’s College in London. This is part of a series on Bertrand Russell, focusing on his views on religion and spirituality in general. Russell is of course one the great figures of freethought, and many atheists (myself among them) would count him as a strong and positive influence. Carlisle insists that Russell was an agnostic who rejected atheism. She explains:

However, the same intellectual integrity that made Russell unable to accept religious beliefs also prevented him from embracing atheism. Rather like the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, Russell maintained a sceptical attitude to metaphysical questions. He explains this position very clearly in a 1953 essay on his agnosticism, where he states that, ‘it is impossible, or at least impossible at the present time, to know the truth in matters such as God and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned.’ Theoretically, agnosticism is very different from atheism, for atheists and theists share the conviction that knowledge about such matters is attainable – and, indeed, that they have attained it while their opponents have failed to do so. However, from a practical point of view Russell admits that agnosticism can come very close to atheism, for many agnostics claim that the existence of God is so improbable that it is not worth serious consideration.

Carlisle goes on to recount some of Russell’s criticism of religion and ends this particular piece by telling us that there is something spiritual about Russell’s agnosticism, that it is in fact analogous to Christian proclamations that one should not pass judgement upon other people. She has an interesting take on the subject, and I do not see clear factual errors, but I do think their is something misleading about her narrative. Far from an admission, I think Russell’s claim that agnosticism is often in practice equivalent to atheism is rather precisely the direction he wanted to take his point to begin with.

A few years back, John Wilkins of the Science Blogs used this same essay from 1953 to suggest that many who now call themselves ‘atheist’ are simply mistaken, and I sense at least a trace of that implication in some of those now shopping Carlisle’s piece around. It wasn’t that long ago that giddy believers were reminding us at every turn about rumors of Anthony Flew‘s conversion to belief (which proved true-ish). Details matter, and they often matter more in the philosophical discussions than they do in popular discussion about the great icons of any philosophical position. So, we are left with a twofold question (this seems to be a morning of homologous reasoning); was Russell in any sense an atheist? And what is the best way to deal with the problem mentioned above, nameless the impossibility of knowing whether or not God exists.

Happily Russell himself outlined the beginnings of an answer to both questions in another essay, entitled Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic, published in 1947. Russell explains:

Here there comes a practical question which has often troubled me. Whenever I go into a foreign country or a prison or any similar place they always ask me what is my religion.

I never know whether I should say “Agnostic” or whether I should say “Atheist”. It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove (sic) that there is not a God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof.

Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.

Significantly, the passage above addresses the issue in terms quite similar to those of the latter article. Here is the passage Carlisle referenced, as quoted in Wilkin’s own piece:

Are agnostics atheists? No. An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not. The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time, an Agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism. His attitude may be that which a careful philosopher would have towards the gods of ancient Greece. If I were asked to prove that Zeus and Poseidon and Hera and the rest of the Olympians do not exist, I should be at a loss to find conclusive arguments. An Agnostic may think the Christian God as improbable as the Olympians; in that case, he is, for practical purposes, at one with the atheists.

Perhaps the latter essay reflects Russell’s final take on the matter, but what seems most interesting about the two passages above is just how closely the mirror each other. The only difference is that in 1946, Russell was claiming to be an agnostic in one sense and an atheist in another. In 1953, he was distinguishing atheism from agnosticism on the basis of the claim that atheism necessarily believe they can know whether or not God exists.

The problem with this hard and fast distinction between atheism and agnosticism is illustrated in both passages. Russell is aware of that problem, and he is commenting on it directly in both essays. On the one hand, Russell’s earlier text shows us clearly what is lost in the narrower use of the term ‘atheism’, a sense of the active rejection, a sense of someone who has considered the prospect of God’s existence and in effect decided against it. This atheism doesn’t reside in epistemology, but it is worth noting just the same. Ironically, this atheism comes close to some of the more archaic uses of atheism as if it were a synonym for immorality, those informing the character of Aaron the Moor for example in Titus Andronicus. Labels such as this one are not merely descriptions of theoretical positions in technical discussion; they are also descriptions of the way one lives one’s life. Believers have been commenting on that larger question of godlessness for millennia, and I don’t believe unbelievers gain much by restricting our self-representation to the more theoretical questions about what can and cannot prove with absolute certainty

Which brings us to a second points…

Both passages above proceed immediately from a comparison of atheism and agnosticism to present a more subtle approach to the question of belief. Russell seems to be suggesting that the possibilities at hand are not sufficient to resolve the problem. One could perhaps recognize hints of Russell’s Teapot in both passages, but more to the point, in both of these essays Russell moves on to suggest that we need a more finely grained approach to the question of knowledge to deal with this question. He raises the prospect of degrees of certainty in the essay of 1946 whereas he speaks of probability in 1953, ending the quote above by telling us that for practical purposes an agnostic might as well be an atheist. In both cases, Russell suggests grounds for rejecting belief in God even as he concedes his inability to present a categorical solution to the question of his existence.

Russell’s position is little different from that of many atheists today; it is his use of vocabulary which seems different, and he is clearly uncomfortable with that vocabulary.

This is far and away from a rejection of atheism; it is at best a qualification as to what atheism means. Russell is effectively locating his atheism in the practical sphere of life, distinguishing it in some sense from a philosophical claim. Significantly, he appears to assume (as many do today) that philosophical atheism must take the form of a strong assertion backed by something greater than considerations of probability. But of course there is little reason to restrict use of the word ‘atheism’ to such narrow grounds, and still less precedent for that approach in the vocabulary used for other people’s beliefs and religious orientations.

I don’t particularly know if Carlisle or anyone else is hoping to inspire others to reject atheism through this argument as she believes Russell does, but she does seem intent on working a wedge into the difference between agnosticism and atheism. In point of practice, this denies to atheists a range of considerations quite available to believers, and it provides yet another spurious reason to restrict use of ‘atheism’ to an exceedingly narrow range of acceptable applications. Suffice to say that I do not find the argument convincing.

Sometimes the Story Tells You! A Few Comments on Narrative Scope and Survey Sedatives.

22 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education, History

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

American Indians, College, Dakota, Native Americans, Santee, Sioux Uprising, Story-Telling, Survey Texts, The Dakota Sioux Uprising

When people introduce a given piece of information as “something you don’t learn in the history books” or “something they don’t teach in history class” I often find myself wondering if the individual in question really has read any history books lately?

I think these are comments that just roll off the tongue while someone thinks about what they are going to say next. When I hear what they do say next, as often as not I find myself thinking; “well I teach that,” or even “Hell, that’s right in my textbook!” Sometimes I even find myself thinking; “Every teacher I’ve ever had and every textbook I’ve ever used teach that very thing you numbskull!”

Just kidding; I don’t actually use the word ‘numbskull’ in my internal monologues.

The kind of history-bashing that I am talking about almost always involves old yarns long since unraveled by the majority of historians out there. Just to provide one example, most of the myths about Columbus fall under this heading. I don’t think I’ve ever had a teacher present the classic myth of Columbus discovering America or proving the world is round, at least not without including some form of ironic commentary. I can think of numerous instances where the critique didn’t go far enough, but even my second grade teacher in a conservative lily-white community way back in the 70s made a real effort to debunk some of the standard Columbian themes. My American history textbooks don’t present the classic Columbus myths and my world history textbook even has a small section about the invention of those very myths. Yet, I still hear people preface the standard critique of Columbus with the pretense that we are about to take on the entire history profession just by listening to them.

I get a little tired of it.

***

This isn’t to say that I don’t have my own complaints about the state of the art in teaching history, and especially about textbooks. It’s a rare day that an encounter with any given survey text doesn’t leave me in tears, or at least put me to sleep, and I regard it as poetic justice that I will forever be teaching introductory classes where these instruments of torture seem to be a staple crop.

The problems that plague survey texts are generally a bit more subtle than Sunday morning historians would have it, however, and those problems are often difficult to resolve without asking students to do more than most wish to. The inaccuracies of history texts aren’t always due to fundamental misunderstanding; they often seem to be the result of narrative choices, choices often dictated by the nature of survey-text sedatives.

Case in point?

I use a reader for my Native American History class, Major Problems in American Indian History. It contains both primary documents (those produced by actual participants and witnesses in various stages of history) and interpretive essays. One of those essays in this text, “The Dakota Sioux Uprising, 1862” by Gary Clayton Anderson, presents a wonderful glimpse into the internal conflicts associated with this event. In this article Anderson takes on a terrible event in the history of Indian-white relations, one in which a number of atrocities were committed against non-native civilians, including women and children. If one were of a mind to tell such stories, this event could easily be the classic ‘Indian massacre’ that haunts the background of virtually the entire western genre in both film and literature. The uprising certainly contains enough frightful particulars to transform any narrative into a genuine nightmare. In fact Stan Hoig makes a point to suggest fears of a similar outbreak helped to explain the actions of officials in Colorado during the events prior to Sand Creek.

Note: I said prior to Sand Creek; Chivington and his men are a special kind of evil, but that’s a rant for another day.

In Anderson’s view, the uprising is a complex story in which various factions within the Dakota (otherwise known as Santee Sioux) square off against various factions of outsiders. As hunting became impossible, and rations promised by the U.S. government failed to appear, the prospect of starvation became inextricably mixed with questions about ways of living (farming versus hunting) and relations with outsiders. Some Santee had taken up farming; others wanted to resume (or take up) hunting as a primary means of subsistence. Significantly, many of those who had taken up farming had established connections (even marital relations) with local whites. So, the Santee population included a substantial ‘mixed blood’ population, and the local whites included many who had established ties to the tribe, some of which rose to the level of fictive (adoptive) kin ties.

Without going too much further down this rabbit hole (interesting as it is), Anderson does an excellent job of putting the violence of the outbreak in the context of all these factions. He argues that those perpetuating the violence were trying to pull their own community towards hunting as a way of life while punishing those whites they regarded as responsible for their own situation. Mixed bloods and whites with clear ties to Santee were generally spared (with some Santee going to great lengths to protect such people), and significant factions of the Santee pressed to end the fighting. Rivalries between those pressing the fight (which included a conflict over the question of whether to attack civilians or focus on military targets) and those seeking to end the fighting rose to the scale of potential intra-tribal warfare. Indeed, the actions of Santee opposed to the fighting helped to bring an end to the fighting.

One read through this article, and the simple narratives for this uprising go right out the window.

***

So, what do the survey texts in American History classes have to say about all this? Well let’s look at a couple of them…

I used to use a textbook called Out of Many: A History of the American People by John Mack Faragher, et. al. The third edition of this book has the following to say about these events:

Elsewhere in the West, other groups of Indians found themselves caught up in a wider war. An uprising by the Santee Sioux in Minnesota occurred in August of 1862, just as McClellan conceded defeat in the Penninsular campaign in Virginia. Alarmed whites, certain that the uprising was a Confederate plot, ignored legitimate Sioux grievances and responded in kind to Sioux ferocity. In little more than a month 500-800 white settlers and an even greater number of Sioux were killed. Thirty-eight Indians were hanged in a mass execution in Mankado on December 26, 1862, and subsequently all Sioux were expelled from Minnesota. In 1863, U.S. Army Colonel Kit Carson invaded Navajo country in Arizona…

Let’s look at another text called Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (Concise Fifth Edition) by John M. Murrin, et.al. This book has the following to say on the subject:

The civil war set in motion a generation of Indian warfare that was more violent and widespread than anything since the 17th century. Herded onto reservations along the Minnesota River by the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux in 1851, the Santee Sioux were angry in the summer of 1862 that annuity payments did not arrive, threatening them with starvation. Young warriors began to speak openly of reclaiming ancestral hunting grounds. Then on August 17, a robbery in which five white settlers were murdered opened the floodgates. The warriors persuaded Chief Little Crow to take them on the warpath, and over the next few weeks at least 500 white Minnesotans were massacred.

Hastily mobilized militia and army units finally suppressed the uprising. A military court convicted 319 Indians of murder and atrocities and sentenced 303 of them to death. Appalled, Lincoln personally reviewed the trial transcripts and reduced the number of executions to 38, the largest act of executive clemency in American history. The government evicted the remaining Sioux from Minnesota to Dakota Territory.

My current textbook, The American Promise: A Compact History, Fourth Edition by James L. Roarke, et. al. has the following passage on the uprising:

The Indian wars in the West marked the last resistance of a Native American population devastated by disease and demoralized by the removal policy pursued by the federal government. More accurately called ‘settlers’ wars’ (since they began with ‘peaceful settlers,’ often miners, overrunning Native American land, the wars flared up again only a few years after the signing of the Fort Laramie treaty. The Dakota Sioux in Minnesota went to war in 1862. For years, under the leadership of Chief Little Crow, the Dakota, also known as the Santee, had pursued a policy of accommodation, ceding land in return for the promise of annuities. But with his people on the verge of starvation (the local Indian agent told the hungry Dakota, ‘Go and eat grass’), Little Crow reluctantly led his angry warriors in a desperate campaign against the intruders, killing more than 1,000 settlers. American troops quelled what was called the Great Sioux Uprising (also called the Santee Uprising) and marched 1,700 Sioux to Fort Snelling where 400 Indians were put on trial for murder and 38 died in the largest mass execution in American history.

Anyway, that’s three texts. I have a couple more that don’t even mention this event, which is a little disturbing.

***

So, what do we get out of all this?

Well, first, you gotta love the way one book describes the event as the largest use of executive clemency in history and another describes it as the largest mass execution in American history. There is probably an interesting lesson in fact selection there, but the most interesting thing about that little point may well be that both facts seem to be part of the same story. In one text, that is a story of great mercy, and in the other it’s a story of slaughter, and neither story is contradicted by the facts (at least not at this level of detail).

Ah well, moving on…

The first thing that I would say here is that none of these texts paints the natives in an overtly negative light. These were not written with the intention of slandering the Santee and pleading the cause of manifest destiny after the fact, so to speak. Such narratives do exist, but I didn’t find them in my stack of survey sedatives. If anything, each of these narratives seems almost painfully to be pleading the Sioux’s case and working hard to ensure the reader understand they had their reasons, so to speak.

The distortions here are a little more subtle; most of them being a function of basic story telling technique. Simply put, the question here is one of peopling the story-line. Where Anderson talks about multiple factions in and around the Santee community, each of these authors is telling a story about whites and natives. When they choose to break that down a little, we get references to ‘warriors’ and to Chief Little crow. Gone is the conflict within the tribe between pro-war and pro-peace factions, the entire existence of mixed bloods, arguments about who should and who should not be killed, and especially the active opposition of some villages to participation in the fighting. The decision to spare some whites while killing others is nowhere on the horizon here. And of course the notion that Little Crow simply led his people ‘on the warpath’ (reluctantly or otherwise) simplifies the nature of his leadership as well as the politics of the uprising itself. None of these sub-themes can be worked into the narrative (or even envisioned within it), because the characters are not even in the cast. There is simply no place for them.

So, what do I expect? Pretty much this, actually. These are survey texts, and the authors are struggling here to get a complex story into a paragraph or two. This means simplification, even oversimplification. It seems to me that in each of these cases, the author has made choices based at least partly on the larger narratives in which this story fits. Where Anderson is telling the story of a specific event, each of the survey text authors is treating this as a moment in a larger narrative about Indian-white relations in the west. They identify the participants in the Santee Sioux uprising based on the characters already filling that larger narrative.

Of course one of the central ironies here is that having put an insufficient number of players on the stage, so to speak, each of the survey authors is then at pains to make understandable the actions of the fictional Santee tribe which has become responsible for these events. Unable to assign specific actions to specific agents in the story, these authors must then work to keep us from walking away with a great big anti-Santee bottom line. But that bottom line is precisely a function of the narrative decisions they have already made. If we knew more about who was doing what and why, that impression would have no place to creep into the story, but we don’t. In the end, I suspect that anti-Santee bottom line will be the take-away for so many students, no matter how many sympathetic comments an author works into the text. In the larger story of American growth, the Santee can’t help but appear as an obstacle to that growth. You can make them sympathetic, but the only way to make them something other than an antagonist is to change the larger story altogether. Nothing done within the space of a couple paragraphs is going to work.

But a couple paragraphs are all the Santee uprising are going to get in the average textbook.

Now, just imagine that same kind of trade-off in every paragraph of virtually every page (side-bars excepted) of every history text out there. So, you see, this isn’t a problem of what is and isn’t taught; it’s a problem of how it’s taught. Many of these stories are just begging to be forgotten. You can see it in the way they are written.

Enjoy your reading kids!

Great Movie Villains, Volume X: The Troll Hunter!

15 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movie Villainy, Movies

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Film, Irony, Movies, Norway, Story-Telling, Troll Hunter, Trolls, Villainy

We can breathe a little easier here in America, because you won’t find this filthy bastard on our shores. His name is Hans, and he was last seen haunting the frozen fjords of Norway. It’s a good thing too. Let the vikings have him! We don’t want that kind of trouble here.

Don’t be fooled by clever disguises. It ain’t bears this man is hunting (though that is what he would have us believe). No, it’s trolls. That’s, right. Hans hunts trolls.

Now you might have thought, as I did, that trolls don’t actually exist. And that is just what the documentary film crew that made this movie thought too. But they found out for themselves just how wrong they could be. These things actually do exist, and they live in the mountains and forests of Norway.

And this dirty son-of-a-bitch kills them.

Now you would think a species so rare as to be regarded by most folks as mythical would be something you’d want to preserve and protect, but no, not this man, nor the Norwegian Troll Security Service (TSS). It seems the government of Norway hires him to slay any trolls that venture near civilization. Sometimes they even send him into troll territory where Hans engages in murder on a scale worthy of a war crimes trial.

All of this is top secret of course.

So, how do we know about it? Hans lured a team of college film students into joining him on his quest to commit cryptocidal atrocities. Oh he pretended that he didn’t want them to follow him at first, but at a critical moment Hans shouted the word ‘troll’ and ran away.He then let the poor innocent babes wheedle the truth out of him. It isn’t often that such violent men resort to passive aggressive manipulation, but apparently Hans knows no shame, not even that of a serial murderer.

This is Hans

As with so many violent criminals, it seems that Hans longs to share the guilt of his awful deeds. Like a master assassin teaching his tricks to apprentice killers, Hans shows the college kids how to track trolls, find them in their lairs, and even kill them. Hans even takes care to introduce them to a scientist who explains in excruciating detail just how painful the troll hunter’s murderous methods really can be. Everyone knows that light kills trolls. What they don’t know is just how much the troll suffers when it hits him. At least until this terrible man, Hans, shares the insight with his chosen band of accomplices.

Of course there is flaw in Hans’ plan.

The government of Norway doesn’t want anyone filming trolls, much less its hired thug doing their dirty work for them. What exactly happened to the film crew, no-one will ever know. You see the video tape of their documentary just showed up, but no-one really knows what happened to the college kids who made it.

Nor does anyone really know the current whereabouts of Hans.

Now some might say that this film bears a striking resemblance to the Blair Witch Project, and some might even say that film was fake. But then again some people serve mild salsa to dinner guests or sell crack to innocent children. Remember that when some pimply faced snot-fer-brained kid tries to wax skeptical on you about this film. Some folks don’t even think jackalopes are real. Try telling that to any small game hunter in Wyoming!

Anyway, the point is that this isn’t just any movie. It’s just the tip of the mixed metaphor, and the truth is staring us all right in the face. It’s out there somewhere dammit.

…armed with UV rays.

So, I take back what I wrote earlier; we are not really all that safe here in America. People everywhere should be afraid of this terrible bastard. Hans could be anywhere at this point, and who knows how many people he has with him now. I think everyone should watch this documentary and take good care to commit this man’s face to memory. Lean his tactics and his habits, and be on the look-out.

The fate of Chupacabra and the Jersey Devil may well depend on it.

Great Movie Villains Volume VI: The Baudelaire Brats (Yeah – Spoilers!)

16 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movie Villainy, Movies

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Film, Lemony Snickets, Movies, Story-Telling, Villains

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. Remember those names. And should these “children” ever show up at your door…

Run like Hell!

These are not really children. They are demons. Just ask their beloved uncle, Count Olaf. A Series of Unfortunate Events, my ass! The terrors of this story-line are precisely what happens when the world is thrown out of balance, which is exactly what happens whenever these kids enter the story.

The Baudelaire children are way too smart for their own good, solving problems children aren’t suppose to solve, and generally proving themselves smarter than the adults around them at every turn. Even the world which they inhabit seems somehow way too interesting and way too clever for a children’s movie. And you may think that is hardly their fault, but you would be wrong to think that.

Just ask Violet!!!

You see the whole point of a children’s movie isn’t to tell a story that children will find entertaining; it is to tell a story that adults like to think children will find entertaining. The children in such movies have faults we can live with; they might like candy a little too much or want to stay up a little too late. But they are not too cool for the whole school.

Not so, the Baudelaire Brats! They are smart. They are savvy.

Shame on them!

A good child would accept without question the wisdom of the adult world, but these little demons notice things. Oh yes they do. And they exchange knowing looks.

More a living shark than a little girl, the youngest (Sunny) is a true freak of nature. The middle brat reads incessantly. Like some sort of uber-nerd who won’t settle for throwing the class average, Klaus consumes whole libraries and then uses the knowledge contained therein to crush his enemies and bring about their downfall. Worse yet, Violet is a devious inventor. Give her a ribbon and a few trinkets and she will fashion for you a gadget to solve whatever problems you may have.

So, where did she get the ribbon, you may ask?

Could it be ….Satan!?!

You bet your sweet ass it was Satan that gave this little girl her powers. When Robert Johnson went down to the crossroads all those long years ago, he took the spirit of this sweet little girl with him and she sowed the fate of her family that very evening.

Small wonder that the children lost their parents. Why did that happen you may ask? And we are supposed to believe it had something to do with a giant magnifying glass? Not a chance, baby! The fate of their folks had been sealed down at the crossroads. You know it, I know it. Robert Johnson knows it and so does Eric Clapton. Most importantly, Violet sure as HELL knows it. So, let’s not hear of any more great mystery deaths okay. The Devil torched the Baudelaire house when he came to reclaim is due. Her parents were just collateral damage.

And that was just the start of it. Are we supposed to believe that the deaths of Uncle Montgomery and Aunt Josephine are mere accidents? With Uncle Montgomery being so brave and Aunt Josephine so careful, do you really think they could be offed so easily as this movie suggests? I don’t think so. And don’t even try to tell me it was Count Olaf that killed them. No, it was their love that condemned them.

Their love for these demon-children.

Anyone could see those deaths coming. When children are too smart for their own good, bad things happen to those that care for them. It’s as obvious as sending someone else down to the planet with Mr. Spock, Bones, and Captain Kirk. These characters were dead from the moment they opened their doors to the Baudelaire children. Blaming Uncle Olaf is like condemning a gun for serving as the instrument of a murder.

It should come as no surprise that the film culminates in a blasphemous attack on the institution of marriage. Violet rejects her marriage to Uncle Olaf just as she rejects every other good wholesome value that may fall in her path. What’s next? A pact with the ACLU?

I wouldn’t put it past her.

And then of course we get the final insult. These characters somehow contrived to avoid parts 2 and 3 of the trilogy altogether. Yes, that’s right, the actors who played the children are now well into adulthood, thus forever ending the hopes of a sequel. Don’t think it’s an accident either. Only the likes of the Baudelaire children could have foiled plans for a sequel by aging out of the narrative, letting the real world stand in the way of a good story.

Devil children, I tell you!

I know damned well that Count Olaf would have gotten them in the end. Cheated, he is, out of his money, just as we were all cheated out of a righteous and proper ending. We will not be seeing a Lemony Snickets Two and Three, and that is indeed a crime for which the Baudelaire Brats should be condemned for all time. They have cheated all of us out of this ending, I tell you.

Just like Uncle Olaf, we are all cheated.

Cheated!!!!

northierthanthou

Tag Archives: Story-Telling

Of Ringers and Runts: An Experimental Exercise in Geeketry!

The Man With No Game!

With Apologies to the Moths Along I-40; My Summer! (Includes Pictures)

The Problem with Deepak.

One Story to Rule Them All!

I know Why the Scaped Goat Bleats

Silencing the Base Villains and Sending us Back to the Old Narratives: Yep ‘Atheism’ Again

Sometimes the Story Tells You! A Few Comments on Narrative Scope and Survey Sedatives.

Great Movie Villains, Volume X: The Troll Hunter!

Great Movie Villains Volume VI: The Baudelaire Brats (Yeah – Spoilers!)

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: