Printer Friendly

January 30, 2009
Optimism and Defiance
by Honora Chapman
Private Papers

Every morning I open our local newspaper to the Op-Ed page, looking for my daily fix of letters to the editor and syndicated columns. Recently, readers have been understandably excited about the “Extreme Makeover” that just built a beautiful new home for a disabled mother of four here in Fresno, yet they also want to preserve First 5 funding for our poorest children, and they agonize over Hamas and Israel battling in Gaza. Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman’s asks, “What does Israel hope to accomplish?” while Kathleen Parker proclaims the, “Importance of not being so very earnest.”

Parker defends her right to indulge in cynicism and snark every so often, which she is certainly free to do, but when I turned to the newspaper’s entertainment section and saw a couple snarky comments in a review of the new movie Defiance, the drama about Jewish resistance fighters during WWII, it gave me pause. Just how far can we go with snark?

We live in changing times, and language will also follow suit. Parker echoes a point made by Victor in a recent column (“New Animal Farm”): roughly speaking, in President Barack Obama’s new America everything will be rainbows and lollipops, and suddenly everyone will want to do good deeds and look on the bright side of life, labeling what was once “horrible” now not quite so awful. Rhetoric certainly becomes slippery under the pressure of real civil dissention and distress, as Thucydides observed so long ago, and yet even in the wake of our current peaceful regime change, labels will change, too, with the many challenges we face.

But there’s an unreal side to this new optimism, and Parker puts it bluntly, “I’ve got a stash of virtue labels: I voted. I gave blood. Most Americans seem to own a wristband or two indicating a solidarity with some victim group. Here’s an idea: Why not wear a wedding band that says, ‘I married the parent of my child’? By helping the largest victim group in the country — our marginalized kids — we might not need so many third-party do-gooders.”

Ouch. Parker is right: if people took care of their own basic responsibilities in life, such as raising their children in a decent fashion, there would be far fewer societal problems and far less need for volunteerism. President Obama himself has acknowledged this issue of parenting; after all, he knows the pain of having had an absentee parent. Optimism does require a reality check — and it should go hand in hand with hard work, which instills a sense of dignity, provides opportunities, and produces more success. My students at Fresno State are living testaments to this.

Optimism can literally save lives. The new movie Defiance displays an earnest quality in its depiction of over a thousand lives being saved through the hardened optimism and determination of a band of brothers. This earnestness, however, has inspired snark in some reviewers. Our local arts commentator opines, “Even the obligatory ‘deep thought’ themes — how far can you go in terms of revenge and brutality without losing your own humanity? — have a perfunctory pace and feel, as if they were thrown in to satisfy a general-education breadth requirement….It winds up more like a handsomely produced history lesson rather than a harrowing tale of human courage and survival.”

A “general-education breadth requirement”? A “history lesson”? God forbid teenagers should learn something new and different about the Jews in Europe during WWII by going to the movies! Really, if one kid decides to see Defiance (perhaps because the star Daniel Craig has also played the most recent James Bond) instead of My Bloody Valentine 3D (3D is necessary for capturing the nuances of teenage angst and murderous mayhem — yes, that’s me being snarky), I would be jumping for joy as a movie reviewer.

But these are odd times, when taking sideways potshots at Israel during a review of a movie about heroic Jewish resistance to annihilation at the hands of the Nazis, as a few reviewers have done, is considered thoughtful commentary. David Denby, author of the very book on snark that Parker mentions in her column, delivers a far more intelligent and snark-free assessment of the film for The New Yorker, one that appreciates the “tactile…rendering” of the forest and catches and creates allusions to other films such as The Godfather and Munich.

The heroism of the Bielski group depicted in Defiance is born of a gritty, pragmatic optimism backed up by meaningful action. Perhaps in this dawning of a new America with President Obama we can apply some of this heroic optimism — like that of the disabled mom who raises her four children while working and of the men and women serving in our armed forces. Surely these are the people who display the answer to our current troubles through their very actions, not the executives who beg for more government (i.e., taxpayer) money while they line their own pockets with grotesque salaries and discount the shareholders. Since these executives now essentially work on the public payroll, perhaps they should reduce their salaries to the ratio used at my public university: the president earns about five times the salary of a beginning tenure-track professor. Could the bank presidents, for example, live on five times the salary of a starting teller or even a branch manager? One hopes so.

One more thought tangential to the movie Defiance: I am hoping that President Obama will get rid of the fleet of American flags that has served as his backdrop at speaking events and press conferences; it reminds me of the staging for Nazi rallies shown on the History Channel ad nauseam and briefly at the beginning of Defiance. He does not need to prove his patriotism to us; after all, we freely and proudly elected him to lead us as the forty-fourth President of the United States of America. One flag, to reflect one nation, will suffice.