Action and Reaction(ary)

"Reactionary" is an interesting word.  Generally, it's defined as a person or view opposing political or social change.  That's no doubt true, but I wonder whether it's clear from that definition that a reactionary is a person or view the essence of which responds to a particular event (i.e. "reacts" to or is a "reaction").  He or she (or whatever), or it, is provoked by something.

The "cartoon" shown above, by the remarkable Gillray, an English political artist of the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era, is an example of a drawing which may be called reactionary.  It's called The Apotheosis of Hoche, and is a reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution.  Hoche was a successful general of Revolutionary France and is shown ascending into heaven bearing a guillotine instead of a harp.

A reactionary person or view is one that is prompted by a particular action, one that is contrary to the status quo in some sense and is so striking that a response is induced.  The response is typically prompt and striking as well, and in many cases thoughtless.  It is, or at least often is, a "knee-jerk" reaction.  Who or what is provoked may not react in circumstances where there is no provocation. 

"Knee-jerk" reactions are common in these sad times and very much in the news.  The nature of the reactions are worthy of study, but so are the events which provoke them.

Most recently, they seem to have been provoked by such things as a (purported) documentary regarding Cleopatra, a kind of fantasy in which the English Queen Charlotte is portrayed as black, a beer commercial which features a transgender person, a beer commercial which is critical of other beer commercials because of the manner in which they portray women, some Disney animated feature in which a character is gay, and it would seem anything which features characters or subjects which are not status quo and is seemingly intended to promote their acceptance.  

As I've noted before in this blog, I'm not inclined to be provoked in any way by any fantasy or fiction featuring characters played by actors of various races.  I think it's silly to be concerned by such things.  However, I confess it I find it annoying where history is tampered with or the laws of physics are waived, unless it's clear that the portrayal of characters isn't meant to have any relation to reality (e.g., superhero movies).  I also object to depictions of history, purported to be factual, which in fact distort or misstate history.

I don't share the fixation it appears many of my fellow citizens of our Glorious Union have on the subject of sex.  So, I wouldn't refuse to, or be inclined to, consume beer or anything else because someone different from me sexually or by gender has been used in its advertising.  I've resigned myself to the fact that there are people who aren't just like me, and think others should do so as well.

But as I've also noted in this blog, I object to what I've described as the "missionary media," those creators of advertising, movies, television, etc., who take it upon themselves to preach; who go out of their way to show us what they think is good and tell us what they think we all should find acceptable.  Note that language--"who go out of their way."  Media manipulates by its nature, but there are some who deliberately seek to manipulate others.  I prefer not to be manipulated, and suspect others prefer not to be as well.  

I don't know how a gay character came to be portrayed in a Disney animated feature, but am reasonably certain it wasn't essential to the plot that we learn that some character is gay.  I think it most likely that someone felt that it would be good for us, the viewers, if someone gay was made part of the story, simply because he or she was gay.  Someone felt that it would be a kind of learning experience for the viewers.  

I must admit that it would be my preference that sexual or romantic relationships of any kind be left for the most part undescribed in media, particularly that directed at children.  I find more than cursory portrayals of those relationships uninteresting in entertainments.  That may make me incapable of fairly judging media devoted to them, as I wish that they would just disappear.  Disney certainly has made more than its share of animated films devoted to heterosexual relationships.  Perhaps it was manipulating us by doing so.

To come to the point I wish to make:  When the missionary media takes it upon itself to preach to us in mass advertising or entertainments, particularly on issues involving race or sex here in our Great Republic, I think it should be expected that there will be reactions, and those reactions will be rejection of what is being preached.  There may be no good reason for the rejections.  They will, nonetheless, be absolute and angry rejections.  In other words, I think that the reactions many deplore, and that are knee-jerk reactions, result from provocation of a kind.  Such reactions will be stronger and more strident the more the preaching takes place.  

It strikes me that the more people are pushed to become what they don't want to become believe what they don't want to believe through mass media, whether that pushing is well-intentioned or otherwise, the more vigorously and unreasonably they'll react.  For example, they might ban certain works from schools, or prohibit certain speech in schools.  This will be taken advantage of by devoted proponents of the political and social status quo.  Those who seek to enlighten us socially, culturally and politically (which in itself has an appearance of arrogance and self-righteousness)  should understand that when they seek to do so they provide fodder for those who benefit from believing or asserting that "social engineering" is involved and that there is a conspiracy among certain elites to program people who disagree, and especially their children.

Suspicion is not an unnatural response to those who are missionaries.

 

The Price of Pageantry

From what I've been able to glean from browsing the Internet, the coronation of a British monarch has no legal significance.  The King or Queen becomes the King or Queen automatically on the death of the preceding King or Queen. Whatever authority, whatever capacity, a King or Queen has is vested in them on the moment of the death of their predecessor.  No further action is required.  

The coronation is a ceremony, and it seems primarily a religious one, by which the monarch is anointed and given the regalia--the emblems of the monarchy, such as the scepter, sword and orb.  The resemblance of the orb given to King Charles recently to the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch has already been noted by others.  It is apparently symbolic of sovereignty over the Christian world; thus the cross located on its top.  Like so much else in Christianity, though, it has its origins in pagan Rome. 
Emperors are shown holding it (minus the cross) in coins and statutes.  It denotes authority over the world, Christian or otherwise.   

Religious ceremonies may be as lavish and expensive as deemed proper by the religious, and being religious it's likely they won't be considered wasteful and unnecessary as a result.  But thanks to the cupidity and vanity of Henry VIII, the British sovereign is at one and the same time the head of the English Church and monarch of Great Britain.  The British coronation ceremony, though religious, is at the expense of the State.

That being the case, it would seem consideration of whether a coronation is wasteful or unnecessary is more appropriate than in the case of a purely religious ceremony.  This particular coronation is supposed to have cost around 125 million English pounds, if what I've read is accurate.  

I'm not British, and so am not particularly concerned by the coronation or its cost.  As spectacles go, it no doubt was impressive, from the bits and pieces I've seen.  It seems to have attracted the attention of many in and out of Britain.  Lots of people were in London for the event.  Is that enough to justify its cost?

First, does it require justification?  If our Great Nation held, at government expense, a huge Fourth of July celebration, I think there would be many here who would be in favor of it regardless of the expense.  Is the coronation something similar to such an expression of the founding of a nation, of patriotism, of pride?  

To a certain extent, perhaps, but the coronation didn't seem to be such an expression.  There may have been a time when the monarchy was considered representative of the British nation (or empire), but that's no longer the case.  It remains a source of interest, of course, but judging from what we see of it here that interest is more in the nature of gossip and mockery.  There aren't many monarchies left, and those that maintain are decidedly low-key.  Monarchs now are for the most part powerless.  That's apparently the case with the British monarchy as well, though, at least as far as political power is concerned.  But the British monarchs and their families retain a good amount of wealth, and a good amount of wealth is spent on them for their not very strenuous efforts on their nations behalf.

The coronation was an anomaly in these times.  So is the monarchy, really.  It may be seen as a part of history, and perhaps is best considered just that and no more.  It seems understandable that there are those who question whether it was (and is) worth the cost, at least to me.  I don't see how it can be considered otherwise, by any reasonable measure.  There are better ways to spend such money.  The problem of course is that it's not at all clear it would be spent usefully. 

I tend to think that money spent on the inauguration of an American president is money ill-spent as well.  That ceremony involves parades, speeches, balls, dinners to no apparent purpose as well.  It may not be as expensive as a coronation but it strikes me as no more useful or necessary than one, either.

Perhaps spectacles have some sort of inherent value to us.  We seem willing to devote large sums of money to the show itself and the excitement which surrounds it--to the experience of it.  It may not matter what the spectacle is or what it's about or why it's held.  Maybe it satisfies an urge.  This might be something else we learned from the Romans.  The state or those powerful within it would hold games and triumphs at no direct cost to the people for their entertainment, and this would suffice to make them happy and proud though they were for the most part poor and powerless.  A small price to  pay for such an outcome.

 

The Chilling Peculiarity of Peter Pan

 It seems that Disney has decided that a new movie about J. M. Barrie's creation, Peter Pan, must be made.  I find myself wondering why; not merely why another movie (or TV special, or whatever) is being made, but why Peter Pan himself exists, as a character in Barrie's books and in the many derivations of them on stage and screen.

Their popularity can't be disputed, but I personally find the character and his story disturbing in several ways.  Am I alone in thinking them oddly repugnant?

Like many others, I've seen prior movies and stage productions, and when younger found them interesting enough, though even then I thought them to be particularly incredible, and not really in an engaging way.  The thought of pirates and Native-Americans cohabiting an island along with a group of white boys under the leadership of a sort of boy, also white, who can fly, was one I found difficult to countenance.  That, of course, is to focus only on Neverland itself, not on the sudden, equally inexplicable, appearance of Victorian (Edwardian?) era children from London, who for some reason are taken care of by a dog, on the island.  

None of it made any sense, and while this may be expected in any fantasy, the characters and elements combined so unusually and uncomfortably in Barrie's raised suspicions, even then, that the author was so insensible of the bizarre nature of the combination (pirates and obviously mischaracterized "indians" and fairies and a dog-nanny, etc.) or ignorant of the incongruity involved, or that he believed children's imaginations were utterly haphazard and without context even at the age of the children portrayed by him.  But this is only the skeleton of the story. 

Even more difficult to accept, or explain, is the stage tradition of having a petite woman play the part of Pan.  I'm uncertain how, or why, this tradition arose.  Was it thought too difficult a task to have a boy play the part, and too incongruous for a grown man to do so?  In any case, the woman who played the part was clearly a woman, regardless of the fact she had short hair and no matter how earnestly she tried to ape the movements and speech of a boy, and this created credibility problems, for me anyway.  More significantly, if neither a boy nor a man could be Pan, but a woman could, just what is Pan supposed to be?  Something seemingly inhuman, I suppose; something weird, in any case.  I can't help but think of Mr. B Natural of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame whenever I think of Pan because of this curious tradition.

The story itself is peculiar, even grotesque, particularly given Barrie's personal history.  His older brother died at an early age.  That death devastated his mother, and apparently Barrie would sometimes wear his old clothes and act like him to please her or get her attention.  Pan hated his mother and mothers generally, because, it seems, he found himself cut off from his family while they cared for another boy.  His gang of "lost boys" long to have a mother, however, and here Wendy comes in, acting as proto-mother or quasi-mother to them, and perhaps to Pan as well.  But her relation to Pan is complicated, as certainly in the old Disney movie she has romantic feelings for him and is jealous of his attention to the absurdly named princess Tiger Lily (why a Native-American "princess" would be named after an Asian flower is left unexplained, nor is it explained how Native-Americans would know what a tiger is).

Clearly, Barrie's relationship with his mother influences the characters and the story--something I think must be admitted much as I deplore raising Freudian concerns.  So, I would guess, did the death of his older brother, who became a kind of eternal boy thereby, one which became the subject of his mother's love and grief.  Thus we have a story of a boy who refused to and would never grow up to be a man, living in a preposterous place among preposterous other characters having equally preposterous adventures for all time, without responsibilities, without morals--Pan is blithely callous and even malicious in some respects--without the burdens of life and the decisions which they demand, without consequences, or at least the acknowledgement of them or care about them.   It's a juvenile if not infantile fantasy writ large.  The protagonist is the personification of selfishness.

Apparently, Barrie and others have thought that this kind of life, or anti-life, is something we all dream of, and perhaps they're right given the enduring popularity of the story and the characters.  Perhaps its our fondest wish to be sociopaths.  But if that's so it's a rather grim statement  about us and and a rejection of the life we all must live, its worth and importance, and discourages any participation in it or efforts to make it better, for us and others--better to escape into Neverland.

The new movie supposedly will correct the prior animated one in the sense that Tiger Lily, though still bearing that name, will be played by an actual Native-American, and there are to be other culturally sensitive modifications.  I'm not sure what could be done to counteract the image of woman as being at most and at best a devoted, loving caretaker of adventurous, thoughtless males, as that clearly is her place in Barrie's work.  Nor do I know why this aberrant  fantasy is being resurrected yet another time.  Surely the point of it, to the extent there is one, has been made more than once, and indeed ad nauseam.