Archive for November, 2010
The Invisible Man Strikes Again: A Review of Bob Woodward’s Book Obama’s Wars
Posted by Keith Spillett in The Politics Of Catastrophe on November 26, 2010
"There is no fighting in the war room!!!"
If Bob Woodward were a superhero, his special power would be invisibility. No modern writer better understands how to get out of the way of a good story and let the events unfold like Woodward. His new book, Obama’s Wars, is an attempt to inform the reader about what it was like to be part of the decision making process for a President during wartime. He has a genuine love for detailing the way that decisions get made and it shines through in all of his work. Woodward disappears into the fabric of the story leaving us in the fascinating position seeing the story unfold before our eyes.
Obama’s Wars is a story about process. The book details Barack Obama’s system of decision making during the ongoing Afghan War. Obama is surrounded by human beings with differing agendas, egos and belief systems, all of which have an impact on the course of the war. Obama himself is presented in a very human way. The reader is given a first hand account of a person making critical decisions that may well affect the fate of the nation. If you didn’t like him before you read the book you don’t like him after, if you liked him before you read it you probably still do. It’s not a book about judgment; it is a book about explanation. You get to be a fly on the wall for a major event in history.
Obama’s Wars is not a political book in the modern sense. The writing is devoid of any clear political, social or economic agenda. The audience is never clear on how Woodward feels about the war. Woodward’s commitment seems to be only to the art of journalism. He wants to get the story as correct as possible based on the insights and beliefs of the people who were there. Woodward has access to all the major players and gives them room to tell their story. They confess their mistakes, laud their own triumphs, admit their petty dislikes and acknowledge their most base desires in a shockingly candid way. At the end of the book, the reader is left with the distinct impression that they are being governed by real, imperfect people who struggle to make planet altering decisions in a way that best serves their picture of reality.
Resolving Standards of Decency
Posted by Keith Spillett in Existential Rambings, The Politics Of Catastrophe on November 24, 2010
Words are powerful and elusive things. We are given words as a method of conveying experience to other humans. They are not perfect tools. They give some insight to the human experience, but they often fail to capture the vivid, richness of emotion and feeling that encapsulates one’s humanity. TS Eliot perfectly captures this idea in Sweeney Agonistes when his protagonist exclaims in frustration “I’ve got to use words when I talk to you!” We tend to believe that we have shared definitions of words so that when we make a statement the listener can have some idea as to what we are experiencing. However, there are words in our language that I believe have such a different definition from person to person that it is nearly impossible to discern what on earth they mean.
One word that would fall into this category would be the word cruelty. I can honestly say that after years of trying to understand it, I still have no clue what this word means. This is troubling because the word cruelty has a remarkable power in our culture. It is a word that can define whether another human or animal is worthy of the ability to continue to live. The word can save one creature from inhuman punishment while sentencing another to horrific torment. But what does it really mean?
When trying to understand the moral dimensions of a word the law can be a good guide. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution includes this word when it says that “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
The Supreme Court has interpreted the part about “cruel and unusual punishment” in countless ways. For our purposes, we are not going to discuss the “unusual” part of the phrase because that simply means it is uncommon or rare. If any cruel punishment happens often, it is no longer unusual. If every murderer were punished by being covered in honey and attacked by bees it could still be outlawed by the court as being a cruel punishment even though it was happening all the time. The key to understanding the Amendment is the word cruel. The Court seems to be trying to distinguish cruelty from non-cruelty in its rulings in this matter.
The Court dispensed with several “cruel” punishments back in 1878 in Wilkerson vs. Utah when Justice Nathan Clifford wrote in his majority opinion that beheading, disemboweling, dissection, burning someone to death and other barbaric methods of torture were not acceptable. It would be hard to find many people who would make the case that those things were not cruel. However, Clifford’s holding was that being executed by firing squad for a crime was not cruel and unusual and, therefore, was Constitutionally permitted. This holding is extremely confusing. Being ripped apart by bullets is not cruel, but being beheaded is cruel. It is quite possible to be shot and to not die immediately, but to linger in pain for hours before perishing. What is the distinction?
In 1951, the Court has begun to move away from other types of punishments. In the Trop vs. Dulles case, a non-death penalty case focusing on the government’s ability to take away a person’s citizenship for deserting while in the army, the ruled that taking someone’s citizenship away was, in fact, cruel and unusual punishment. This is a monumentally significant ruling that called into question many punishments that were being used throughout the country. Justice Earl Warren wrote in his majority opinion that the Eighth Amendment “must draw it’s meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
This phrase is particularly important because Warren seems to be making the point that as our society evolves it is becoming less cruel and the Court should reflect that. These words have pushed the law away from certain punishments that were once accepted. Death by firing squad, once a relatively common punishment, has been eliminated. The Court ruled in Coker v. Georgia (1977) that the death penalty was not acceptable for rape. The Court has stated that executing someone with an extremely low IQ is not permissible (Atkins v. Virginia 2002). The Court has also mandated that those under the age of 18 cannot be murdered for committing a capital crime (Roper v. Simmons, 2005). All of these punishments are considered cruel.
The fascinating part about Trop v. Dulles is that while it holds that taking away someone’s citizenship is cruel and unusual, executing someone is not. This is inconsistency is nothing short of bizarre. Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out the absurdity of this idea in his dissent when he asked whether the words of the Constitution were “so empty of reason that it can be seriously urged that the loss of citizenship is a fate worse than death?”
Unfortunately, this absurd inconsistency does not only reside in the halls of the Supreme Court. It is everywhere you look. In the early days of the War on Terror, we were regularly subjected to surreal debates over why beating someone was cruel while water boarding someone was not. Is it cruel only if the punishment leaves lasting physical scars? Do our standards of cruelty change based on where someone was born?
The American news media brought horrific pictures of the tortures taking place at the Abu Ghraib Prison but has paid scant attention to the thousands of Iraqis (civilian and military) who have been killed during the war. Being threatened by dogs and placed in stress positions is cruel but being killed by an advancing army trying to take control of a city is not?
During the trial of Michael Vick, many stunned Americans stood aghast that a man would injure and punish animals in such a cruel way.
Yet our culture is so committed to the idea of murdering animals for food that we have holidays based around consumption of animals. According to a USDA study from 2000, the average American consumes nearly 200 pounds of meat per year. Killing animals for food is so widely excepted in our culture that one is not astonished to see pictures or statues of smiling, dancing pigs on the wall of a barbeque restaurant. Americans often seem completely blind to the pain and suffering inflicted on animals, until a football player decides to torment dogs for fun. Is it cruelty because the intent was solely to harm animals? Had he eaten his dogs after killing them would it have not been cruel?
Watching news reports about the horrendous cruelty of dog fighting followed by a Wendy’s commercial for a hamburger that features enough bacon on it to clog the arteries of the Mississippi River is enough to confuse anyone who is paying attention. How could one person’s massacre become another person’s feast?
I don’t propose to know how to make the world any less cruel. Human behavior has always mystified me and I certainly have no clue how to change it. However, the poorly defined nature of the word cruel allows people to stand on a moral high ground that is not deserved. We are a society that has laws against forms of cruelty while tacitly accepting other forms as normal behavior.
How can we distinguish what is and isn’t cruelty? I believe that the first step is coming up with a definition for the word that is clear so we can honestly distinguish it. Granted, definitions are never perfect, but when one is defined in a way that is so completely unclear it can warp the sensibilities of a culture to the point of absurdity.
A simple but effective definition of cruelty would be any act that causes harm or suffering to any living creature. This removes the artificial boundaries that have been created and allow us to call things what they are. When the word is defined this way we are not able to make abstract distinctions between who is worthy of cruelty and how much pain they should be allowed to endure. It simply is what it is and we must then cope with it for what it is.
This definition no longer allows us to display cruelty while hiding from behind a moral facade. If we choose to claim we don’t know any better we are not exonerated because in the eyes of the person or animal that is suffering that distinction is meaningless. Cruelty need not be a willful act, it must only be something that causes suffering or harms another. I am not naive enough to believe a revised definition of a word can end human cruelty, but there should be a price for the pain that we inflict or allow on other living things and that cost should be the truth of what we have participated in.
Notes and Existential Ramblings from a Basketball Coaching Clinic in Tunica, Mississippi
Posted by Keith Spillett in Basketball Coaching Nonsense, Existential Rambings on November 20, 2010
Coach Churchill and the War on Loserdom
Back in May I got the opportunity to attend a basketball coaching clinic at the Harrah’s Casino in Tunica. The clinic featured some of the top college coaches in America including George Mason’s Jim Larranaga, LSU’s Trent Johnson, Virginia Tech’s Seth Greenberg and the one and only Robert Montgomery Knight (his friends call him Bobby). Myself and about 1,000 other coaches were herded into an auditorium converted into a gym for three days in order to find out the secrets of how to lead young men and women towards becoming championship caliber athletes. Anyone who has ever been to one of these clinics before knows the drill…coachspeak followed by coachspeak followed by the occasional substantial and interesting point followed by more coachspeak and more coachspeak. By coachspeak, I mean the repeated uses of expressions like “the short corner” or “attacking the elbow” which are meaningful to most coaches but come across like some mysterious hybrid of Swahili and Mandarin Chinese to the uninitiated. The one astute point in the midst of the coachspeak is often fantastic, which is why I highly recommend these clinics to other coaches, but the hours upon hours of coachspeak can take it’s toll on even the most fervent hoops junkie.
I am not a very good note taker, but I decided I was going to try to get down as much of what was meaningful as possible. This worked for the first 5 or so hours. I have lovely, detailed sketches of out of bounds plays and wonderful points about how to properly position my post players when they are down on the block. After a certain point, I began to drift away from the land of normal coaching thought. Too many things that were not basketball began to assert themselves into the clinic. The words character and discipline began to rear their ugly heads. Coaching has developed an odd fixation with these ideas over the years. They are somehow indicative of the deeper meaning of sports. If you are a good coach, your team wins. If you are a great coach, your teams win and develop discipline and character. You cannot win without discipline or character. You will be tested; under these circumstances discipline and character will show. The pantheon of great athletes all had discipline and character. Blah, blah, blah. My problem with this formulation is that there is very little discussion over what these terms actually mean. We are just supposed to know.
My mind was spiraling out of control. I had been reading a ton of Descartes and had recently listened to an incredible online course on Death by Yale Professor Shelly Kagan. These thoughts were ping ponging around my mind. They had begun to merge with my notes. Here is the mental chaos that ensued:
(For the sake of time and not boring the noncoaches out there, I have removed all of the traditional basketball and have all left the weirdo philosophical stuff basically untouched)
1. What is character and discipline but the denial of the self? Why must the self be removed or fought for someone to play the game well? Is the self such an albatross that it must be obliterated in order to achieve “greatness”?
2. Does the self even exist? How is it possible for the self to exist as something different from the body? Are there two of us in here? Am I the Ghost in the Machine and if so, who is that in here who keeps telling me to not do the things I want to do? Why am I so committed to not letting the Ghost play?
3. So…does the self exist? It must because we are asked to deny it. Discipline asks us to deny the self, so something must be asking us to deny the self. It must be the self. It is a similar formulation to Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”. There must be a self otherwise what is there to deny the self. The question then becomes, why on earth would the self ask to deny itself? That is a bizarre idea that must lead to a good amount of confusion when someone first enters the “Church of the Winner”.
4. What is discipline? The self wants, the self says no. Why would it deny what it wants? Denial of short-term gratification for deeper long-term fulfillment. Losing the self in the team. But why would we want to lose the self?
5. Why does the self imagine? What set of circumstances would make it want to wish for more or different?
6. Here is a list of the things that have been labeled acceptable by coaches at today’s clinic:
Career gain
Victory over other selves
Destruction of other selves in other uniforms on the path to victory
War
Self-defense
Adulation of other selves if the correct function has been performed correctly
Greed as long as it stays unadmitted
Here are the things that have been labeled unacceptable by coaches at today’s clinic:
Rest
Comfort
Gluttony (in terms of food or comfort, but not in terms of success)
Destruction of other selves wearing the same uniform as you
Adulation of other selves when the correct task has been performed incorrectly
Adulation of other selves when the wrong task has been performed correctly
Obvious greed for the wrong things (cars, status among the wrong people, “bling”)
7. Here are the rules when attempting to gain victory over other selves:
A. Winning at athletic contests can show the superiority of the self that denies the self (but doesn’t admit it)
B. Cheating is wrong because it skews the game, thus defeating the illusion of the level playing field. How can we determine which self is better if we haven’t deluded ourselves into thinking that we have triumphed over another self in a fair set of circumstances?
C. Hard work represents a self more able to deny the wants of the self. Pope Jordan the Ascetic.
D. In work matters, the self that can deny some of the wants of the self (rest, gluttony for the wrong things, comfort) and can nurture other wants of the self (the unspoken enjoyment of adulation, greed for money or status, appearance of a lack of the self) will get almost none of what the self wants, but more than the self that doesn’t.
E. Terminology is the coin of the realm. Terminology is a tiki mask of legitimacy. It is the short cut to proof that one is the self that can deny the self. If I understand these absurd terms, I must have spent hour upon hour of self-denial in learning these hollow metaphors that make very little sense. My commitment to irrational details shows how willing I am to obliterate the self for “greatness”. The more the metaphor rings hollow, the greater the proof of the self that has given up more immediate opportunities for gratification in order to learn them. The sheer absurdity of the basketball cliché has a normative function.
F. Emotional and physical discomfort are goals to be aspired towards. The more we pretend we are experiencing them, the more we will be ready when they show up. A champion is one who has vowed to spend his or her entire life mired in this sort of discomfort so that when the moment of real discomfort arises, they will have a lifetime of awful experience to draw on…and then they can put the round ball in the round hole one or two more times than the self in another uniform who hasn’t put him or herself through as much pain.
G. Creativity is something that is both an expectation and a curse. One is expected to think thoughts that fit into a neat box, but in a slightly different way than the other selves. When a self creates something that doesn’t fit in that box and loves it enough to share it with others, the self will be ridiculed or snickered at for the heinous crime of self-indulgence.
8. The self that denies the self (and claims not to) feigns praise for the creator but really respects and admires the editor, the salesman and the promoter. Creativity requires a complete exposure of the unfettered self. The self that denies the self (and claims not to) is appalled by pure creativity because it is a reminder of the dull rituals it is shackled to in the hopes of further denying the self.
9. “Deny! Deny! Deny!” -a coach stressing the importance of defense.
10. If the self that denies the self (and claims not to) conquers other selves, it feels a momentary sense of relief and the joy of not being conquered and being exposed as a self that doesn’t deny itself. This is followed by a horrific realization of the more than 6 billion predatory selves that may be lying in wait; hunting for the same moment of relief and joy.
11. How does the conquering self know the difference between itself and the conquered self? The self needs an Arbiter in order to know it’s worth. Without the Arbiter, the self cannot tell the difference between Pyrrhic victory and a miserable defeat. So, an Arbiter is created. The Arbiter (a scoreboard, an official) is declared real in our minds (except for most of the time). We often declare the Arbiter wrong (the refs hosed us, the final score doesn’t reflect how the game went, etc.). Who even knows who conquered whom?
12. Many of us long for a time (long ago) when “the rules meant something” and could give us a longer period of relief when we conquered the other selves. We think that this time existed and that somewhere along the line the losers rose up through the sleight of hand of a group of morally relative sycophants who took our comfort in winning away. We no longer even feel like we can enjoy the illusion we have created.
13. The odd thing about this belief is that I’m not sure that this magical time of the primacy of rules ever really existed. Maybe all there ever was were a group of selves pointing backwards trying to find new a clever ways to conquer other selves.
14. Consume in the name of the past, in the name of progress, in the name of protection, in the name of peace, in the name of whatever allows us to remember to forget or forget to remember what we are.
15. “Why do we think of offense and defense as different things?” Great point, coach! Better than you even know.
The Locke-Hobbes Complex: Free the Goose, Locke up the Gander
Posted by Keith Spillett in Existential Rambings, The Politics Of Catastrophe on November 7, 2010
The American Leviathan rises up to clobber all of the “bad” people who dare threaten to take our stuff and use our hospitals
The ideas of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes lay at the root of the American governmental experience at many levels. Locke was a social-contract theorist who believed that all humans were born with rights and surrendered them in order to procure the advantages of civilized society. He thought that if there was no government things might not run as smoothly, but people could get by. Locke had a notion that people are rational creatures that are capable of making decisions that are in the best interests not just of themselves, but of the group. Thomas Hobbes also bought into the idea of the social contract, but that is one of the few things the two agreed on. Hobbes thought that human beings were essentially machines that functioned to protect themselves from injury and death and to get what gave them pleasure. Government was meant to act as a check on the base and violent desires of the masses. He thought that without government life (like Napoleon) would be “nasty, brutish and short”. Hobbes thought that you had one basic right, to be protected from the other maniacal machines around you. Any other right could be taken away freely by the government in order to keep the people safe from themselves.
The progenators of the American governmental system were highly influenced by Locke and Hobbes. Thomas Jefferson spent most of his political career doing a fair John Locke impression. He turned Locke’s “life, liberty and property” into “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and parroted Locke’s controversial belief in the right of people to revolt against an unjust government. James Madison (writing as Publius in The Federalist Papers) was clearly channeling Hobbes when he wrote in Federalist #51 that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary” and “ambition must be made to counteract ambition”. Our constitution is a marvel of balancing Locke’s democratic intentions (the House of Representatives, the Bill of Rights) with Hobbes’ fear of the great unwashed hordes (the Senate prior to the 17th Amendment, the Electoral College).
Locke and Hobbes are still very much with us today, but in another more bizarre, irrational form. The Locke-Hobbes complex can most clearly be seen in the Tea Party Movement, although it is certainly not exclusive to them. Here’s how it looks: The inward view of many Americans seems to be that Locke was correct. The individual should be controlled by the government as little as possible. Americans should be freed from many of the burdens of taxation or regulation. What’s mine is mine and should not be taken, the government should not restrict the development of business, I should be able to say what I want to say and not be bound by political correctness, and the government should stay out of my private affairs. At first glance, it seems as if Locke would be entirely comfortable at Rand Paul campaign headquarters dressed up like Patrick Henry with a NoBama tattoo on his or her forehead.
However, Locke’s ideas seem to appear in the rhetoric of both major American political parties (and quite a few smaller ones). Some candidates rail against the idea of “big government” that doesn’t seem to get that “the government that governs best governs least”. Others loudly protest a government that restricts reproductive rights or the rights of individuals to choose to live life the way they want to. Whether it be keeping the government’s hands off my money or their laws off my body, the cries of individual liberty seem to echo from every corner of the American political landscape.
It would seem that a people so committed to the idea of the freedom and thriving of the individual would have no place for Hobbes’ principles…and yet they are very much alive in our culture. A person can’t go five minutes without baring witness to a political diatribe on the importance of freedom and yet thanks to ever more strict sentencing laws the Washington Post reported in 2008 that 1 in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison. The United States is the world’s leader in incarcerated adults both in percentage and in number. In order to really understand the perversity of this statistic one must realize that China, a nation that our leaders have regularly excoriated for their unconscionable human rights record, has an estimated population of over 1.3 billion people, while the United States, the world’s beacon for freedom and liberty, has around 303 million people. In spite of nearly a billion more people, China has less prisoners than the United States. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study, non-violent crimes made up nearly half of the state prison populations in 2006. On the federal level, non-violent crimes take up an even higher percentage of reasons for incarcerations. Large numbers of Americans are in prison for non-violent crimes that run the gamut from drug abuse to public intoxication. Clearly, much of the imprisonment in the United States does not even serve the purpose of public safety.
It would seem that a nation with such a highly advanced, Lockean conception of liberty would be able to come up with a solution that involved a bit more creativity than building more prisons, but that seems to be the solution we continue to come up with. At the root of our problem lies an incredibly Hobbesean conception of the role of the state. But, maybe we are just talking about the “bad” people here. A common refrain is that criminals (often defined as the amorphous mass of people out to harm us and take our stuff) are not deserving of the same rights as the rest of us. Even though the Bill of Rights spends nearly half of it’s time dealing with the issue of criminal justice, many believe that the rights of individuals should be obliterated upon the commission of a crime. One would think that this current wave of liberty based hysteria would have brought more politicians into power who opposed the federal government tearing rights away from citizens and yet, Russ Feingold, the one Senator who opposed the 2001 passing of the Patriot Act, the largest broadening of federal investigatory power in the last 50 years, was voted out of office. Is the message more liberty for the “good people”, less protection for “the bad”? How are we able to tell them apart?
There are some things to be feared and some things to be appreciated about each philosophy. Locke’s social contract was so loose that some would get away with crimes that could severely harm their neighbors, but he believed strongly enough in people’s judgements to believe that this problem could be overcome. Hobbes argued for a system that strangled human growth and potential on the altar of safety, but he also realized that there are characteristics that needed to be monitored in human beings in order to allow them to be protected from the loss of their most important right, the right to continue to stay alive. It’s as if our culture has picked out the most base, selfish characteristics of both philosophies and melded them into a giant Leviathan that attacks the liberties of the “bad” with one hand while cherishing the rights of the “good” with the other. What we fail to recognize is that we can easily be mistaken for either. Hell may be other people, but after a while it becomes us.
An Inconsistent Truth: A Psychological Review of The High Art Museum’s Showing of La Moustache 11/5/10
Posted by Keith Spillett in Existential Rambings, Mr. Spillett's Academy Of Film Study For The Mentally Tormented on November 6, 2010
The Citizen Kane of mustache hallucination films
“No one who has not experienced how insubstantial the pageant of external reality can be, how it may fade, can fully realize the sublime and grotesque presences that can replace it, or exist along side of it.”
-R.D. Laing “The Politics of Experience”
It is truly frightening to be in a room full of people who are laughing and not get the joke. I don’t just mean not get the punch line, but not get the words, the meaning or anything else. To feel as if one is from another planet and has landed here with a cursory knowledge of the English language and a two-day session on the lives and mating patterns of human beings under his belt, only to have to listen to two voracious baseball fans discussing the importance of the infield fly rule. Maybe I missed something; maybe something was never there.
I walked into the High Art Museum at about 9:30 at night and was greeted by one person in a fake moustache, then another, then another. I was overwhelmed and confused. Apparently this was the theme of the evening. Moustaches, moustaches everywhere. I had heard that at some point in the evening some men who had real moustaches were going to shave them off. It was one of those hipster rollicking good time things that I’m sure would have really impressed me back when I had rollicking hipster intentions.
The main purpose of this whole thing was to show Emmanuel Carrere‘s surrealist film “La Moustache“. Because of this, I decided to leave my house on a Friday night for the first time since Carter was in office. I love the film. It is a deceptively simple story of madness and personal alienation. A man shaves his moustache and no one believes he ever had one. That’s really all of it. In spite of its insane story line, it manages to come across as a remarkably realistic picture what it is like to experience genuine confusion. For some reason, I had it in my head that seeing the film in a theater would be even better. What I didn’t really get until the lights dimmed was that seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in a theatre is a unique experience because you have an opportunity to see special effects that were meant for a big screen. Seeing a yuppie French couple arguing over the husband’s bizarre personal grooming fantasies is not anymore enjoyable around a bunch of popcorn chomping film fans. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty damned depressing.
The woman who introduced the film was some former film critic from the Atlanta Journal Constitution who really didn’t know very much about the film or the writer or the director or French cinema or how she got to the building in the first place. She kept saying over and over that this film was “funny…really, really funny.” This set a monumentally bad tone for the evening. The crowd immediately settled in, ready for a French yuckfest on par with the work of Johnny Knoxville. I have to tell you, I’ve laughed at a lot of thoroughly inappropriate things in my day, so I guess I had this evening coming to me. I nearly got tossed out of the Phipps Plaza Theater some years back for nearly laughing myself into straightjacket for the last 15 minutes of the faux horror classic “The Devil’s Advocate”. I spent a good portion of my younger years telling horrendously insensitive jokes about everyone from Mother Theresa to Ted Bundy. This night was my punishment for many a sin against good taste. Hopefully, this will count as my confession and I will be absolved of further mental floggings.
I sat there for a good hour and a half with blank expression on my face. The audience exploded with laughter over and over again at the most inopportune times. Marc, the main character played by Vincent Lindon, wanders through the film slowly losing touch with everyone he knows and loves. He begins to doubt the very fabric of reality, becomes a stranger in his own body and disappears into a blinding fog of regret, scorn and loneliness. Hysterical stuff! Marc sifts through the trash, trying to find any proof that his experience is real, that he is not living an unexplainable fantasy and that his mind isn’t decaying. Stop it, my side is hurting!
Truth be told, this is a horrifically sad movie. So many wander through life trying to catch up to the world, trying to understand an endless series of in jokes and references that fly by them, hoping to understand what the world means while being handed self-help books and truisms about “being yourself” and “trying your hardest”. Our personal realities often do not mesh with the world. Our truths are often only true in our minds. One minute’s certainty is the next minute’s mirage. There are nearly 7 billion of us blindly groping for a light switch in the dark only to be handed an octopus. This is the message of The Moustache. To take this film as a lighthearted romp is to miss a wonderfully genuine explanation of what it is like to be a human. Or maybe I just don’t get it.
The Tyranny of Tradition 
