Politics and Culture: FB meme analysis #1: Bad numbers and bad logic

I wind up writing a fair bit in FB when sharing memes or responding in comments etc, And FB is a dicey medium on its own, and then there is the fact that the stuff you wrote gets lost way back in you timeline and is murder to find, but some of it has ideas and formulations I would like to keep more accessible, so I figure I will make certain kinds of posts in here. I already did it once with the interchange with my friend about the film Contagion. In some of these, it's necessary to the meme image up, so hopefully that goes off without a hitch.

Meme:

Comment:

Wow, it's gematria on acid ... only ... yeah ... it doesn't work on any level ... just insanity.
It's my job as a copy editor to try to make sense out of what people write, to guess what they intend to convey (the intended sense) from what sometimes is some very winding and twisting language on the page and then (1) assess whether the linguistic expression presently on the page is within the bounds of technical grammar and established conventions, (2) try it on for size reading (really, the first job of an editor is to be a reader) and see if there are any places that, while grammatically all right once you get them, make the reader jump through hoops to get because of poor placement of elements for flow (not just flow for a nice sound, or eloquence, but flow in parsing first-level sense in basic reading, before even getting to second-level sense like whether the argument works or whether the pieces of evidence chosen are relevant, which isn't my job as a copy editor .. although some knowledge of the range of such issues within a filed is helpful for assessing whether the sense will be discernible for the intended audience) or ambiguities from unclear antecedents or unclear grammar that needs the help of surrounding content to decipher (my general maxim is that grammar should reveal content, not vice versa), and (3) suggest edits that resolve any issues of type (1) or type (2). (There is also a tech side to my job of knowing the formatting conventions a publisher uses for citations and adjusting an author's citations to those ... and a tech side of providing Word documents that don't make compositors want to kill me). And I've also studied Judaica. And this sign has no sense beyond "hey there are numbers involved in something we don't like that coincidentally add to a number involved in something that's a current threat right now. But no hint of significance."

There is no proposition of causality. In gematria, a classic beginner-level example (you'll find it referenced in Darren Arnofsky's film Pi) is that, in gematria's assignment of numerical values to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet: alef = 1; bet = 2, daleth = 4, yod = 10; lamed = 30; mem = 40; so, alef + bet = av (father) = 3; alef + mem = im (mother) = 41; yeled (child) = yod + lamed + daleth = 44; both "father + mother" and "child" = 44; father + mother = child. The whole point works on the causal idea of "father + mother = child," the mechanics of which I certainly hope we all know as a real fact in life (the point of gematria is that the language in which The Holy One, Blessed Be He, has given us the Torah contains its truths not just on the level at which we usually do language, but on a secret structural level, an inner core that can be a path that the true student can follow to find deeper hidden meanings that aren't seen on the regular language level of the text, because the Holy One, Blessed Be He, is not limited to using language just in the regular way we use it ... this is a practice in Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and its direct descendant, Hasidic Judaism, of which the Jewish man Lenny who does the gematria example in Arnofsky's Pi is a member). An example of a numbers game that might work in a recent context like this would be: the number of letters in Obama's name (5) and the number of letters in Clinton's name (6) add up to the number of letters in "Islamic State" (12), so Trumps "sarcastic" statement that Obama and Clinton created ISIS (their policies created a void that allowed ISIS space to form and gain ground). It's completely inane, but it is at least a discernible sense.

But there's no such idea in this lady's sign. Is it supposed to be that Obama's policy choices left gateways through which something like this could happen? What are those supposed to be? The sign doesn't have even the inane sense of my little ISIS number game above. All a sign like this is is a bunch of people who really can't think, just get a few basic things like addition, trying to couch their emotional flare-ups in something that looks like things used by people who think .
So, what is my point in this little excursion down analysis lane? Obviously this sign is crackpot and many conservatives still trying to maintain some sense of order while still supporting the party would admit this. But this sign is only the grossly exaggerated form of a very common tendency in conservatism in America. You will hear them use terms like, for instance, "logic" with no real concrete idea of what they mean by it. Really what they mean (although would have difficulty admitting to themselves that they mean) is that they have an emotional need to live up to some project set for them by their parents (or substitutions, if the rebelled against parents and now sail under another's flag, but the basic instinct really always goes back to the attachment to the parent in early development), who taught them to dislike liberals and evolutionists etc, and taught them to value the word "logic" as something held by the superior people, and so they gain a positive emotional experience from hearing themselves apply the designation "not logical" to liberals etc. ... which really has nothing much to do with the kind of thought employed by, say, very nerdy modal logicians who get excited every time they write "iff" (the siglum for "if an only if" ... modal logic is the branch of logic that deals with moods other than the indicative mood, particularly the mood of conditionality, closest to the linguistic mood called the subjunctive, which is best described as the mood of possiblity versus the mood of actuality, the indicative mood). It's obviously not the level of whackadoodle that this woman's sign is, but at its core, it's the same basic phenomenon, which was portrayed rather well in Kate McKinnon's parody of Laura Ingraham as spouting "feel facts," which "aren't actual facts, but just feel true" (like "Latinas can have a baby every three months" and "if you have fewer than five guns, you're probably gay"), and here, the feel is really the same one on which identity marketing and identity politics are based: it makes me feel safe (and not needing to be afraid of the chaos in human life) if I can please the people I view as my emotional protectorates by showing that the people we dislike are substandard (prejudice is always positive in the first instance: hating them is always a means to the end of loving us).

Contagion (flim; 4-25-2020 FB interchange turned into a review)

This post is saving a long comment that FB wouldn't let me post for length, but I had it penned and I would have put it up here anyway so that it doesn't get lost amid the many FB memes I post. I rewatched Contagion recently during lockdown and posted a link to youtube video of the musci and lyrics of U2's "All I Want Is You," which plays over the final scenes in the film, and what follows is an interchange between my friend Rob and myself about the film.

Me:
Can't stop listening to this song since I rewatched Contagion and the played it at the end over-top of Matt Damon's character setting up the prom dance for his daughter at home with the boyfriend who now has his inoculation bracelet, as Damon pauses looking at the pictures he found of his deceased wife ... they wrapped a lot up in that one scene about the struggle of being human.

Rob:
I agree. Those scenes were powerful n hopeful/nostalgic at the end of a pretty grim series of events!

Me:
Nostalgic but also, I thought, still painful and looking at character. I found the portrayal of Paltrow's character the most interesting on this watch. I think that one of the things that most drives Damon's character's reaction in finding the pics is the mystery of her doing what she was doing, because he works at being a good husband and father. And it's not really a moral or justice commentary on her action. I think it really is meant to be shown as a painful mystery. That doesn't necessarily negate any possibility of moral commentary being made on adultery, but the film is examining another point, or at least I think it is. I think that the whole way through, she has a kind of unfocused stare that bespeaks in modern life a quiet or masked desperation. I think that the whole way through her scenes, you see somebody who is not malicious, not saying things about what a loser her husband is, but somebody who is going through a lot of motions that your culture tells you you're supposed to go through when your company sends you on trips around the word: gambling at the casino, shaking hands with the chef, taking pictures with everybody, but always with this lack of focus that hints at wondering whether you're being a good "fulfilled" modern person, whether you're doing what you're "supposed" to do in these situations (I think you see that most in the blowing on the dice and things like that ... the "excitement" you're supposed to show when having fun in places like this, but always a little wondering whether you're getting it right) ... and then the same unfocused look (which Paltrow does well, and seems almost like a trademark of hers, just like everybody knows the pensive stare in the eyes of Harrison Ford that Abrams had to get him to break out of to do Han Solo again convincingly) and the same distant stare when she calls her old flame and the unsure "if that's a thing you would like me to do," that look of doing something because, well that's how things happen, right?, at least in all the modern stories you have been told. I think that what drives the final scene effectively is Damon's effort at rebuilding life for his daughter in the midst of the pain of the mystery of what happened with his wife (I've become a big fan of Damon's, he definitely has his stock characterness, but I find it pretty relatable, and what I really like is his choices of roles ... just recently rewatched Downsizing, which I think is an incredible commentary on the precarity and preciousness of life ... and rewatched Adjustment Bureau, which of course has the always-good Emily Blunt ... I think something about his sensibilities breaths some life into places you usually don't think about it too: I like SNL's political commentary and some of their individual players' characters, but there's also a good bit of stuff in which they get stale, and I noticed that, when Damon hosted, the whole thing felt fresher because some core human thing got injected through things like his Christmas skit with Cecily Strong and his being the finally revealed "Tommy" from the Weekend Update's recurring character "Angel, the girlfriend in every boxing movie" ... and the whole thing he has going with Jimmy Kimmel is among the most creative parodies on late night and has really had a staying power as a gag [although I didn't like the "who's the father?" one at all ... the topic was very morbid fascination]).

Rob: 
 I think u r correct in that the movie doesn’t really comment on g.p.’s character’s moral choices. I’m not sure if the influence of the modern world is the culprit behind her character’s actions. I really think it is more the case of a person putting their own desires over the commitments to others she had made. Good old sinful impulse at work there. When I was married, I was the stay at home husband taking care of young kids while my wife enjoyed a high profile job n travel n all that stuff. I think Damon’s character deserves better than what he got. In the midst of all the chaos, he remains true n steady, parenting the child he has left through the worst. Steady, faithful people aren’t often painted as heros, but that character is a hero to me! 

Me:
Oh, I definitely think he's a hero, and I definitely think he deserves better. And, as I say, I don't think seeing this other side precludes examining the story for whats there on a justice side for his character and maybe even a moral side for hers. But I think the commentary I'm thinking of on her is, I guess, not so much about whether the modern world is the influence that causes, but more about her as a sort of emblem or representative of humanity in the modern global world, which I mean in a little bit different way than metaphorical symbol but maybe still a little bit like it (I spent waaaaay too much time on metaphor theory in relation to other figurative language when doing comps). I think part of what the film examines is that, in our globalization, we are a bit in over our heads. We have ideas like "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" because we still think of the physical distance between us and Vegas like a safety buffer (ironically, while we keep it in mind in hoping it's a buffer, we have also become alienated somewhat from our own embodied nature through the speed of travel, it doesn't register with us that a thousand miles is a thousand miles because of how quickly we can cover it ... heaven help us if we ever find a way to make the Star Trek teleporter more than just fiction; even if the material side works, we're going to wind up the psychological version of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly), and THAT becomes sort of an "if you build it, they will come" in the form of "something should happen in Vegas that you would want to stay in Vegas" (I think this thing occurs on the consumer side that is a bit like the technological imperative, that we feel like, if something is potential in the package we paid for and we don't use it, we're somehow wasting it; I remember being on the BX 12 bus hearing a guy talking about sports on his cel phone loudly and thinking, you know, if we hadn't built the cel phone, we would have never thought there was a need to discuss sports scores right now on a crowded bus with a bunch of people also having conversations on their phones; we feel like, if we don't use up the airtime we paid for, then we overpaid), and we still sort of have these ideas of distances as buffers that we don't realize we have broken when we broke the barriers of getting ourselves there and back so quickly. We wanted to travel at jet speeds but thought that we were going to be the only ones who could or that we got to decide who else got to, as if we could put up a sign that said "no viruses allowed on this plane" and it would be obeyed, just like, once we could go to Vegas hundreds of miles away for a weekend, we thought that we could tell what happened in the weekend in Vegas to stay there (and there's a bit of social justice at play in this one ... if all the naughtiness that happens in Vegas stays there, then it's a pretty infectious place to live for those who can't leave Vegas because they live in the industry there, or on cruise lines, in both of which places promiscuity among personnel is supposedly rampant, and there I do think there is a bit more of a metaphor between the virus and lifestyles that sink in when people live in and services the zones where we think we get to go to have fun and then leave it there). I think maybe there is a bit of critique of not taking consequences into account (still one of my favorite lines, maybe in all of lit, at least for being both funny and very insightful, in one of the last two Tiffany Aching books in Terry Pratchett's disc world series, I think the last one, which makes it the last book in the whole series, actually published posthumously, when Tiffany's personal favorite excuse from the people she has to help, as their witch, out of the scrapes they get themselves into, is "I didn't know it would go boom," when it says "Goes Boom" in big letters on the side of the box it came in).

I think that one of the things that tipped me to thinking of the film Contagion like this is the abruptness of her death and the lack of exposition of any kind of interaction with MD;s character versus the amount of exposition you get through flashback. The process is sort of doing a character archeology in the same way the researchers are doing an archeology of the path of the virus's transmission. There I think there is a much more straight-up metaphorical relation: researching the virus is symbolic of trying to figure out the human behavior being interjected in flashbacks of her trip, trying to understand why we do the things we do. There's definitely a moral component and free will, but I think we also have a lot to learn about the psychological forces that impinge on it. The exposition of her character just seems too intensive to me and intensive beyond the issue of infidelity to be simply about that. It doesn't hold a real revelation placement, for one. You get pretty early on that she cheated, because the male voice on the phone mentions having sex recently and then she gets back to her house and it seems pretty obvious that it was not MD she had been talking to, if she is returning to him ... and then, just like that, she is dead, but then you have all this screen-time of her in the casino, making that the sort of setting that is important for some reason before you get the full researcher archeology of the timeline in which that is where it definitely started its spread (I think, along the lines of interpretation, that having so much time in the casino before you have the end-of-film revelation that that is where the spread started, happens not just so that you get this revelation feeling about the physical spread of the virus, but also so that the setting can saturate you brain a little bit and make you focus on her disposition there as a character exposition that works hand-in-hand with the revelations about the physical spread of the virus). And then, in that packed ending sequence, pretty much right alongside the final revelation scene of the bat dropping the stuff in the pig pen and her shaking the chef's hand, you get Damon's discovery of the collage of pictures on the camera as a last kind of emotional exposition in the midst of the trying to move forward and create a meaningful life experience for his daughter. I think that that is one of the things that really endeared me to the film on this watching, the layers of human issue and human experience in the midst of this pandemic. setting.

I think that one of the things that the social distancing in the present situation can do is to teach us to pause and think, take time to "be still" and, if not "know that I am God," at least reflect more on why we do the things we do, what ways of thinking we let in the door that make it easier or harder to have the presence of mind and the disposition to do the right thing. I don't think it is good for us to stay always like this because there is something quasi-holy in contact with other human beings, but sometimes we need to step out of being swept in the jet pace of the world we have created and realize that we might be bringing narratives on our travels with us that, in their impact on our disposition, will make it harder to be good (to answer that question so wonderfully put by the drunken angel singing a Lou Reed song in Wim Wenders's Far Away So Close, "why can't I be good?") , the same as we bring viruses on a plane without realizing it because we don't listen and take into account the fact that those kinds of things can be carried with you and can be spread "under the radar." I always like that moment at the end of Her when, after the OSes have departed, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams are on the rooftop, forced to take a moment in the void left by the OS "relationships" to reexamine human relationship (I thought that film also had some strong exposition of the embodied nature of human existence and relation by contrasting it with the OS thinking ... I've thought for a while now that it's important to the understanding of the Incarnation to see that it's important that it says the Word became "flesh" [sarx] and not "body" [soma], I think of flesh as kind of the squishiness of human bodily experience, and while it's important that that is not the more sort of abstracted holistic concept of "soma," it does dovetail and mesh with that concept because, for that ancient mindset, body was not defined by extension in three dimensions [they did think about breath, height, and depth, but it was not what defined "body"], it was defined by relationality: the body is the way you relate to the soil through tilling it, to God or the gods through cultic acts, to your spouse by physical conjugal acts, to your kids through hugging them ... and the way we experience "body" is through the squishiness of "flesh" ... "Why had [Harry] never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?" [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 692).

OK, enough exposition lol ... but I will probably copy and paste this out to my blog.