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"Reloaded"
The following are some thoughts after seeing "Reloaded" a second time. I've tried to recall the major plot scenes and explain their significance as I understand it. Yes, there are spoilers. If you haven't seen it, don't click for "more."
First, I think one of the best things we learn from "Reloaded" is that the messianic plot is a red herring. As Neo says after his talk w/the Architect: "The One was never meant to end anything. It was just another system of control." Take that, Mr. Thank God. (No offense to believers among us; regardless of wether its a system of control, religion certainly serves important functions in many societies and lives.)
Another thing I learned from this film is that most reviews of it are worthless. Very few people can say many smart things about a movie after seeing it only once. All you get are first impressions, and w/a move like "Reloaded," it's hard to trust those.
The major scenes in terms of plot are:
Neo and the Counsellor on the engineering level of Zion: The counsellor says that this is how people are: We don't care how things work, so long as they work. This is what makes the matrix possible; as Cipher said in the first film, "ignorance is bliss." Hence, the Counsellor seems to suggest that even in Zion people are half asleep. The counsellor also asks, "What is control?" His point seems to be that the struggle w/which Neo should be concerned is not that of man vs. machine (it wasn't in the first film, either, despite what reviewers said); Neo must realize that there is a man/machine symbiosis at work. Perhaps. But the Counsellor is definitely playing on the threads about choice and human agency that come up again in the scene w/the Merovingian (and elsewhere). These themes are also important to his examples of things he doesn't understand, such as the water filtration system in Zion. The Counsellor says he doesn't understand the means, but he does understand the ends of these things. (To use the Merovingian's terms, he has the why.) The Counsellor hopes he'll learn the end (or goal/purpose) of Neo's power, even if he never understands its means. Thus, "Reloaded" is a quest film: Neo's quest for purpose. (What's it all for!?)
Morpheus' speech to the people of Zion: He's not afraid because he remembers where he's come from. Hence, Morpheus is lecturing about the importance of history. This echoes Frederic Jameson's "prime directive" to "always historicize." (However, since Morpheus' vision is later questioned—he believed in the prophecy, and that seems like it was a mistake—this scene might be meant in a Baudrillardian, post-historical, post-Marxist sense. Yes, history is important, but even that is not enough anymore.)
Link and Zee: A plot hole appears in the scene w/Link and Zee as Zee explains why she fears the Neb—it took two of her brothers, Tank and Dozer. We know what happened to Dozer from the first film: Cipher killed him. But what happened to Tank? Perhaps this is explained by the animated short, "Final Flight of the Osiris," which also supposedly explains how Neo gets a certain letter. "Osiris" apparently premiered in March before screenings of a movie called "Dreamcatcher." (This fairly detailed review doesn't mention anything about Tank.) Did anyone see it?
The Oracle: We learn that she is a program. (Does this ruin the metaphor of taking the red pill? In other words, does it mean that taking the red pill is just breaking through to a different layer of deception and control? I think Yes, but that doesn't ruin the metaphor because the red pill level is more enlightened (and therefore more empowered) than the blue pill level.) She tells us that people have to work together to get anything done (hence, the Nietzschean superman thing is out). And we also learn that all the world's anomalies (ghosts, angels, vampires, werewolves, etc.) are the system trying to assimilate programs gone awry. Agent Smith is such a program. (Real world parallel: Think how corporations use things like MTV to co-opt and commodify counter culture. In the '90s we got "alternative" music and that seemed rebellious and a little anarchic until it got into heavy rotation on MTV and "alternative" bands started selling millions of records: "alternative" was a program gone awry, but it was quickly assimilated. The counterculture of the 1960s is another vivid example—it threatened the status quo for a while, but was quickly co-opted and commodified—Flower Power is packaged and sold by Nike and Coca Cola. Now we have "tenured radicals" and other baby boomer demographics to which the system targets specific messages and commodities. I'm sure you could cite many more examples of this.) Finally, the Oracle tells us what all men with power want: More power. (Is she suggesting that power always leads to nihilism?)
Agent Smith: The scene where Neo battles a hundred Agent Smiths serves at least two purposes. First, it's a cool action scene. Yay. But more important, it explains what's happened to Smith: He's unplugged, no longer an agent of the system, but now without purpose because as he says, there is no purpose other than slavery to the system—there's no escape. He has become a nihilist—the archetypal nihilist, in fact. He has no reason for doing anything, except to satisfy his desire to do it. It's all about me, me, me, and me, too. But just as the messianic plot is a red herring, so too, is Agent Smith's nihilism—it doesn't get him anywhere or do anyone any good. The people he converts to his nihilism (by turning them into copies of himself) also only cause trouble. It's also important to note that Agent Smith tries to make a connection between himself and Neo, and in a way they are similar: Like Smith, Neo sees no definite purpose to his actions. The difference is that Neo still hopes and searches for purpose, while Smith has given up.
Lock and the Counsel: This scene (featuring two big lines by Cornel West) suggests that Zion is duplicating the control of the matrix. Lock says he wishes he could understand the counsel's choice, but the counsel says he does not need to understand to obey. This is true of the matrix, as well. An interesting side note: Niobe identifies herself as Captain of the Logos. She's Captain of the Word. This signals the film's concern w/language, or as Foucault would say, discourse.
The Merovingian: (What does it mean?) At the beginning of the scene, Neo says there's something strange about the code of the building and everything—it doesn't look right. Although he doesn't know it, this is because the code is old: They've entered an old, outdated, or early version of the Matrix here. The Merovingian is a program gone awry and he's somehow kept a bunch of old programs with him. Notably, all the old code characters have European accents—it's the "old world," after all. (Note also that the way the Merovingian praises French kind of gives the finger to all those "freedom fries" French-bashing Americans who see the film, doesn't it?) The Merovingian says many important things, one of which is that choice is an illusion created by people with power, for those without power. He also explains that "Why" is power. This is Foucauldian in that Foucault deconstructed the cliche that "knowledge is power" by showing that knowledge is not an absolute, but rather a social construct. A certain piece of information is only considered "knowledge" because we agree that it is. Therefore, it is not enough to know Fact A, we must also know why Fact A is important, otherwise our knowing has no power attached to it. This is the dilemma of Morpheus, Neo and Trinity: They know that they're supposed to be doing things, but they don't know why; therefore, they are powerless. (Tangent: Think for a moment about the "War on Terror"—it's action w/out reason, it has no why—it does not understand what it's fighting or what its ultimate goal is. Not effective. I haven't read it yet, but I'll bet that's what Baudrillard says in this book.) So perhaps the Merovingian is another caution against nihilism—our actions must be reasonable. I don't know what to say about all the cause and effect stuff in this scene, except that perhaps it has something to do w/a critique of teleological thinking. Anyone?
The Architect: The architect debunks the messianic plot and explains more about the origin of the matrix and the fact that it required a woman (another program, actually, who may or may not have been the Oracle) to figure out how to make it palatable to humans. As L. explains it via poststructuralism: The original matrix relied upon coercive power—it forced everyone to do as it required. The revised matrix includes the illusion of choice, so it functions via productive power—it produces cooperative subjects by giving them the illusion that they're producing themselves by making a choice (that isn't actually a choice). (But if this is the case, then doesn't that mean Zion is also a program? Yes, I think so, which explains how/why Neo is able to stop the sentinels near the end of "Reloaded." We'll see.)
[Aside: The concepts of coercive vs. productive power are also helpful in understanding why terrorism (and specifically 9-11) doesn't work. L. could explain this better than I can, but I'll take a stab at it: The people who crashed the planes into the WTC and the Pentagon were using spectacle and physical force to try to change the system of western capitalism with which they find fault. We immediately recognized the spectacle; however, the western world rejected this violence—we rejected "the program" because it didn't offer us a choice. Instead, the system (western capitalism) assimilated the violence of 9-11 by giving it a new meaning ("they hate us because we're free") and using it to justify wars against the system's enemies. And the system of western capitalism does this by flooding us with the illusion of choice: "Should I buy the white one or the pink one?" "Should I vote for tweedle-dee or tweedle-dum?"]
The Architect also explains the "remainder," the 1% who won't accept the program even when given the choice. These people instead choose Zion (once they learn about it). Again, this seems to be a false choice; Zion seems to be just another program, another facet of the matrix. Still, the concept of the remainder gives us an explanation for why some people are searching ("It's the question that drives you.You know the question, just as I did."), while others are perfectly content to live in the matrix. L. helpfully pointed out the similarities between "Reloaded"'s use of the remainder and the way Baudrillard writes about it in Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard writes:
Who can say if the remainder of the social is the residue of the nonsocialized, or if it is not the social itself that is the remainder, the gigantic waste product ... of what else? Of a process, which even if it were to completely disappear and had no name except the social would nevertheless only be its remainder. The residue can be completely at the level of the real. When a system has absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothing remains, the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder. (144)
Does this give us some clue about "Revolutions"? Perhaps. But it does seem that we are reaching a point like this in our own world. Note the degradation of the public sphere—education, health care, all social services—as budgets get slashed. We think instrumentally in terms of profit and loss; social services don't fit into that equation very well, and so are peripheral, a remainder. In fact all of the social world—our interactions w/family and friends, our entertainment, any "free" time we have—is a remainder. The system is work, productivity, profit, the economy, etc. Everything else is just left over, extraneous matter that the system would eliminate if it could figure out how to do so. (If you doubt this, ask yourself if your employer would eliminate coffee breaks and lunch hours if he/she could get away with it. All the employers I've ever had certainly would.)
Finally, the Architect sets up a choice for Neo—either be the savior of humanity, or choose love and be responsible for the death of all humans. But even as he poses these options, the Architect seems to know what Neo will do, meaning that this again seems like only an illusion of choice. This is one of the major questions for "Revolutions": Did Neo just do exactly as expected/programmed? Or did he somehow surprise the system? The Architect also notes that hope is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of humans. It's the greatest strength because, no matter how bad things get, we keep hoping they'll get better and that we can contribute to that improvement. Hope is our greatest weakness because it acts as a screen for so much of the "evil" in the world—we see bad things happening but refuse to believe they can be as bad as they seem because our hope clouds our judgment. ("Gee, it sure looks like this war on Iraq is going to be a bad thing, but I hope I'm wrong; I guess I'll just trust my government and hope that it's doing the right thing.")
After the Architect: Neo explains that the One was never meant to end anything. (Note: As many people have noted, "Neo" is an anagram of "one," but that, too, seems like a red herring. "Neo" is also a prefix meaning "recent or new," and in "Revolutions" we see that Neo is not "the one," but he is nevertheless something new. Neo-poststructural, perhaps?)
Morpheus is shocked to learn that "the prophecy" may have been a lie. Morpheus is a teleological thinker—he uses "ultimate purpose or design as a means of explaining phenomena." This has served him well up to this point, just as it served humanity well until the 20th century. However, for many people the death of god meant the end of teleologies and grand narratives. Yet, that leaves the question: What do we put in their place? That is a question Morpheus will have to deal w/in "Revolutions"—how is he going to understand his world if the framework he's always depended on is suddenly proven invalid?
So what does "Revolutions" hold? If, we follow L.'s reading, the two films have thus far stuck closely to poststructuralist lines; however, the problem w/poststructuralism is that it hasn't really figured out what to do now that god is dead and there's no getting outside of power. The trailer for "Revolutions" (which comes on after about 6-8 minutes of credits, if you stick around patiently) doesn't offer too many clues, but it does seem to bring it down to a battle between Neo and "him." This will be less than satisfying for many reasons, but I'll reserve judgment until I see it in November. (It will be out the 5th or the 7th. I'm thinking 7th since the 5th is a Wednesday.)
One more thing about the reviews and the bullk of the discussion I've seen about both Matrix films: There's lots of talk about philosophy and religious "mumbo jumbo," but very few people (outside of academia) talk about Foucault, Baudrillard, or any of the other huge linguists, cultural critics, and critical theorists who inform these films (for example, Saussure and Derrida are two thinkers without whom these films simply wouldn't be possible). Nonetheless, as important as religion and philosophy are to these films, they ultimately seem to serve as background to these other, more obscure structures of thought. The fact that so few people talk about linguistics, structuralism, poststructuralism, etc., is evidence of the problem of the Humanities in the 21st century—no one understands what academics in these fields are doing, and too few academics take the time or make the effort to bring their ideas to a wider audience. This is one of the great accomplishments of the Matrix films: They attempt to translate complex and obscure ideas into something millions of movie-goers can access. Millions of people want to see these movies, and they do see them, and think about them, and talk about them. The experience—the viewing and thinking and talking—may not change much for the vast majority of them, but at least the Wachowski brothers are trying.
My friend J. also pointed out that it's somewhat ironic that someone decided to attach the "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" trailer to "Reloaded." As the terminator himself says in that trailer, he is an obsolete technology. I mean, the Matrix films do the struggle between man and machines so much better than terminator ever did. Except for the fact that the trailer is being shown w/"Reloaded," there's no reason sci-fi/cyberpunk stories have to fit together, but I suppose the terminator series could be something like a precursor of "The Matrix"—the battles that took place before the machines gained the ability to capture and "program" humans. The terminator series appears to function on a metaphor of coercive, or modern, power (force and violence), while the matrix series is concerned with productive, or postmodern, power (the control comes from within the subject being controlled). Yubbledew also functions on a coercive metaphor, while his advisers (e.g., Karl Rove) seem to understand productive power quite well. But I'll leave that to another day...
Posted 10:51 AM | Comments (3) | ai movies
"Revisited"
Books on which The Matrix was based, according to "The Matrix Revisted" dvd:
- Out of Control by Kevin Kelly
- Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
- Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans and Oscar Zarata
Laurence Fishburn on "The Matrix":
Simulacra and Simulation
The matrix has us. Your president is a simulacrum, and so was the saving of Private Lynch [link via Karlin Lillington via Scripting News].
More on the Lynch story:
Posted 09:34 AM | general politics
Times 6?
"Reloaded" was awesome, but I'm going to see it again tonight before I say too much more. Don't believe the reviews that say it's all flash and no dash. Think poststructualism (and here), Baudrillard (and also specifically his chapter in Simulacra and Simulation on "The Remainder" and his more recent book, Impossible Exchange ), Nietzsche (particularly his ideas of the superman (and here) and nihilism (and here)), and Foucault who said:
Foucault permeates both matrix films. Without giving away too much, I think it's safe to say that "Reloaded" shows us that there is no "outside" to the matrix; yet, it also suggests that resistance to the matrix is not futile—a better world is possible. In some ways, the series is becoming a pop-culture, video textbook of poststructural theory—with kung-fu! How can that not rock?
Ed note: Many of the connections mentioned above come directly from L., the brilliant woman in my life who knows poststructuralism and marxism like most people know their own names. She specifically mentioned Baudrillard's chapter on the "remainder" and his book, Impossible Exchange. She also made the connection between Neo's "superman thing" and Nietzsche's superman. Finally, the Foucauldian analysis of the inside/outside of the matrix (and what the film is saying about that) is all her. I've tried in vain since I met her to get her to write things like this down and try to get them published—or at least start a weblog for it (she almost never sees a movie w/out walking away w/a brilliant critique)—but to no avail. I'll keep trying....
Coppertops
Tomorrow is the day. Or, if you're in a major media market, today is the day. As Salon puts it:
But while the press goes googy over the onslaught of Matrix merchandise, it not surprisingly has very little to say about what—besides guns and kung-fu—makes "The Matrix" such a brilliant cultural artifact. I was going to point out a big windy rant to explain what I mean by that, but instead I'll just point you to Jane Dark's Reloaded Questions, which says most of what I wanted to say. After running through a list of the many allusions that comprise the world of "The Matrix"—i.e.: messianism, gnosticism, metaphysical and existential conundrums— Dark says all of those are neat, but not quite the point. Instead, it's all about power (in all senses of the word):
Marx thought so, though in his matrix the master class of machines was just called the master class, the enslaved humans just the workers, and battery power was called labor. Same shit, different name (though not very different: Matrix is just Marxist avant la lettre s).
...This is the dystopia on offer in The Matrix. The war between intelligent machines and humans is a sci-fi cliché, no less than hey-this-could-all-be-a-simulation. What the Brothers got is that the masters of reality don't want to destroy us. They want us jacked directly into the economy, stupid, and they want it 24-7. The concept of "the matrix" might stand for abstractions like "ideology" or "the spectacle," but it resembles more concretely the endgame of millennial merger mania—what happens when all the corporations of the world become one seamless super-entity within which you labor, eat, make love, pay rent ( The Truman Show offered a different version of the same surmise). The evolution from Warner Bros. to AOL Time Warner required only a few years of corporate copulation. From AOL Time Warner to the matrix—it's just a kiss away.
Dark obviously took the red pill. I'm guessing "Reloaded" will confirm the accuracy of Dark's reading of "The Matrix"—at least I hope it does.
Spoiler Alert: Near the end of her article, Dark also gives a few little details about "Reloaded," so if you haven't seen it yet and want to do so w/out any spoilage, skip the last couple of paragraphs of Dark's piece.
Ultimate Contradiction
If there was ever an argument for maintaining a robust system of social services, it's natural disasters. Thousands of people have been affected by tornadoes and flooding in recent weeks, many losing their homes and businesses. Should they all be left to fend for themselves? Does anyone begrudge the victims of natural disasters the money they'll get from state and federal governments to help them rebuild their lives. Taxes fund social services that we need to maintain a healthy society. That's why this makes no sense at all:
The story goes on to say that Bush talked a lot about god and prayer, then promised financial aid to those who lost everything. How can this man demand tax cuts even as he promises more spending? How stupid does he think Americans are? (Answer: Very.) Those people in Missouri and other midwestern states are going to need to pray hard, because Bush is doing everything he can to make sure there's no way their state or federal governments will be able to help them rebuild their lives. Isn't "faith" a beautiful thing? "Dear god, thank you for sending these tornadoes to destroy everything I've ever known and loved. Now please help me rebuild everything because the people in my society don't seem to care about anything but themselves, so without you I'm pretty much on my own down here. Thanks."
Posted 05:39 PM | general politics
1L Externship How-To
Here's how one Mid-top-tier 1L got an externship with a federal judge in his/her city of intended practice:
For all 1L job hunt stuff--judge or firm--I think the key is to start preparing in September or October: generating your lists, getting your materials together, etc. You don't want to deal with this stuff during midterms. When December 1 rolled around, I just had to drop the envelopes in the mail. Others in my class hadn't even considered the summer yet and had less luck. Many still don't have jobs.
Sounds like a plan. Many other comments in the thread agree that getting application packets out early (Dec 1) is key. [Link via jd2b.]
Posted 12:23 PM | law school
Catsup
What a strange word that is, "catsup." It sounds funny, and it's spelled funny. How do you say it? Some people say it like "catch-up," which is what I'm doing now. The following are links I don't have time to really comment on, but which are worth posting anyway:
- Earth to Bill Gates: Thank You—I saw the NOW program last Friday and I'll be damned if it didn't make even me, a hardened anti-M$ partisan, think twice about refusing to give my software dollars to M$. (But Gates still didn't pay for his coffee [link via Scripting News.
- TV social experiment involving student ends—Still more proof that more money is not the complete solution to problems w/public education. For those of you who played LSAT games some time in the recent past, this story shows that money is necessary but not sufficient for a good education.
Type-Ho's—It must be hard to be a legal secretary. - Law Review: Worth it or not?—A must-read for people unsure of whether they'll pursue a spot on their law review. Don't skip the comments. [link via jd2b, I think.]
- Senate broadens terror surveillance law—This is not good news.
- Democrats flee Texas, freeze legislature—This also does not seem like good news—neither the Dems leaving or Delay's open attempt to rig the 2004 election in the Republicans' favor. If we thought American democracy could survive the gross influence peddling that is campaign finance, the debacle of election 2000, and unending wars on terrorism that are used to justify what increasingly looks like an unending war on civil liberties (not to mention a corporate press with goals contradictory to those of democracy), we might have to think again.
- Verizon to turn pay phones into WiFi hot spots—This, on the other hand, does seem like good news.
Posted 12:22 PM | Comments (1) | life generally
Academic Blogging
Speaking of Professor Cooper, his recent post on academic blogging looks at the pros and cons of blogging as a law professor. Coming from a different part of the academy (English), I'd say his reflections are correct, as are the comments he quotes from Kieran Healy. In a bit of synchronicity, Scripting News recently explained why academics should blog—and why their institutions should encourage them to do so:
So how do you get your professors on the radar, as acknowledged experts who can communicate to everyday people? With a weblog of course. And then realize that other bloggers (like me!) are consumers of expertise. We need experts to turn to just like the radio guys do. So there's lots of value in staking out the still largely virgin territory of expertise flowing through weblogs.
It makes perfect sense to me. In fact, academics would be the best bloggers for two reasons: First, they're writers. Sure, a lot of them write abstract, hard to read crap, but perhaps blogging would force them to be more clear and concise. (We could hope.) Second, they're experts in something that the rest of the world probably knows very little about. Many of the best blogs come from just such people—people with knowledge and perspectives that would be hard to find anywhere else. But, not surprisingly, I predict academics will be slow to take up blogging—at least academics outside of law. They'll think they're above it, that it's not "serious" enough for them. I tried to encourage a professor of mine—a huge luminary in his field—to take blogging seriously about a year ago, and he just scoffed and said "it's just like a discussion board. It's a fad. Besides, no one will ever read those things." Perhaps he's right, but perhaps he should also consider the increasing cultural, social, and political irrelevance of the humanities before he dismisses an opportunity to reach a wider public. Academia is pointless if the work done inside the "ivory tower" never gets out of its hallowed halls. If academics would work harder to make more than a dozen people care about or understand what they're doing, maybe they wouldn't find themselves panicked about the future of their disciplines.
Yes, that is what you call a tangent. I'll stop now.
Posted 06:58 PM | meta-blogging
Cooped Congratulations
Congratulations to Jeff Cooper at Cooped Up for a great year of blogging. Professor Cooper is a daily read for me (even though he doesn't always update daily), and I would certainly miss his measured and well-written opinions on everything from points of law to the state of contemporary culture. He's also quite fascinated with some sport (baseball, I think), and with wine, but you can just skip those posts if you want—Professor Cooper won't mind. ;-)
Question: What's up w/lawyers and sports? Is it just me, or are a high percentage of lawyers fairly intensely interested in some sport or another? And if it's not just me, then what's the connection between law and sports? Is it just something to talk about to take the mind off of law, or what?
Posted 06:42 PM | Comments (2) | law school meta-blogging
Big Media Trouble
Wow, it's a banner day for bad news about the U.S. media. The FCC has released its plans to deregulate the television industry:
According to The Washington Post:
So what does that mean for you? It means that TV is going to become just like radio. The FCC relaxed radio station ownership limits in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and a wave of buyouts and mergers followed. Today, most major radio markets are controlled by a handful of companies, and the biggest and baddest is Clear Channel. Why does it matter that one company owns so many radio stations? Well, for one thing, that kind of "freedom of the press" buys you rallies for war. There are more problems, w/massively concentrated media ownership (see, for example, Salon's full coverage of Clear Channel and read anything by Robert McChesney), but really, could it get much worse?
If you agree that allowing one company to control TV markets nationwide is not a good thing, sign the petitions at MoveOn.org and MediaReform.net.
UPDATE: For still more information on media reform, also read the last few posts Larry Lessig made in April, as well as just about everything since then.
Posted 02:07 PM | general politics
Living With Lies
Speaking of lies, a few weeks ago Robert Scheer penned a good meditation on the question I mentioned a while back: What should we think of the fact that our government no longer even pretends to be telling the truth? Scheer argues that there's probably no more frightening development in recent times; further, he calls Yubbledew Inc., a propaganda machine, and denounces Thomas Friedman's idea that we can shrug off as "hype" the lie that Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S. and world because of its massive stocks of WMDs:
It is expected that despots can force the blind allegiance of their people to falsehoods. But it is frightening in the extreme when lying matters not at all to a free people. The only plausible explanation is that the tragedy of 9/11 so traumatized us that we are no longer capable of the outrage expected of a patently deceived citizenry. The case for connecting Saddam Hussein with that tragedy is increasingly revealed as false, but it seems to matter not to a populace numbed by incessant government propaganda.
Is Scheer right? Have we lost the ability to be outraged? Are we so jaded we just can't force ourselves to care anymore? It's easier not to care, easier to believe Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass (see last post) are "bad apples," easier to believe the President was really trying not to lie, or never would have done so knowingly. To confront these lies is to admit the serious degree to which our vaunted "democracy" is broken. It's easier to do the Scarlett O'Hara and just say "I'll think about it tomorrow." As Cipher says:
Posted 09:33 AM | general politics
Liars
Many of us don't trust what we see, hear, and read in the media, but usually it's not because we think the media is deliberately lying to us. Now that the NY Times has dismissed a reporter who has been doing exactly that since at least last October (possibly for the last four years), we now have more reason than ever to doubt the media—especially the mainstream media, since you don't get any more mainstream than the NY Times. Jayson Blair's list of lies is incredibly long; as the Times admits, he tried just about every form of prevarication known to man:
(See also: This Editor's note.)
Meanwhile, if you watched "60 Minutes" last Sunday, know that Blair's trail of deception is nothing new. The show took a look at Stephen Glass, a writer for The New Republic, says he lied for the thrill of being able to give people the stories they wanted to hear. But whereas much of Blair's lying seemed to be plagiarism, Glass mostly just made stuff up out of thin air:
That was five years ago. Glass has since earned a JD from Georgetown but is having trouble gaining admittance to the NY State Bar because of ethical concerns. Go figure. (But note how he turned to law for legitimacy after being utterly discredited on both a professional and personal level. Does law often attract shady characters simply because they're looking for its imprimatur of legitimacy? Damn, am I a shady character!?)
The fact that journalists are lying comes as no surprise to most writing teachers, who have seen an enormous explosion of plagiarism since the Web replaced the library as the source for research. At the major midwestern university where I've spent the last four years, Triple L has tracked down 13 cases of plagiarism among her students in the last year alone. They do exactly what Blair did—steal whole paragraphs and sentences from multiple sources, patch them together, revise a little, and hope no one notices. And the killer is that when you confront students with concrete evidence that they blatantly cheated and lied, they think you're going to believe them when they tell you they didn't realize what they were doing. At many universities, plagiarism is officially cause for expulsion, or at the very least automatic failure for the course in which the student plagiarized. And while it's possible some universities enforce their strict policies forbidding plagiarism, here at my school the customer—meaning the student—is always right; students generally get warnings and slaps on the wrist (failure on the paper in question, for example, or more often, just dropping its grade by a letter). What's more, the university (as far as I've been able tell) keeps no records of these offenses, so serial plagiarizers get a clean slate every semester to try their games again. This is at a major American university. Is it any wonder we've got young college graduates lying in the media?
(And don't get me started on the example set by politicians who "spin" everything to accomplish their goals. Not to mention Triple L's experience grading for an ethics in engineering class, in which she learned that the vast majority of college students seem utterly unable to recognize an ethical dilemma when it slaps them on the face. The there's the infantilization of American college students which leads them to think they'll never be held responsible for.... Like I said, don't get me started.)
Posted 09:20 AM | life generally
Summer Reading II
Thanks to jd2b for the link to my questions about summer reading. Only one kind reader offered a suggestion (it sounds like a good one), but I (and other pre-1Ls, I imagine) would welcome more discussion of pre-1L summer reading, what to do before law school, etc. Or you could just read this great joke from a law professor at the U of Iowa. Of course, you could always offer discussion and read the joke....
Posted 12:11 PM | Comments (5) | ai books
