The Villain of the Piece

Chuck Klosterman is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His essays (appearing in Esquire, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and elsewhere) most often are on popular culture, but sometimes they are just thoughts on the nature of life. He has the virtue of being non-dogmatic in these latter.  I disagree with a lot of what he has to say, but that is kind of the point of reading him. Klosterman is always at least interesting.

In I Wear the Black Hat Klosterman in a collection of essays muses on villainy including in himself. (Carl Jung would approve.) In the opening essay he explains: “When you’re young, the character you love most [in Star Wars] is Luke Skywalker (who’s entirely good). As you grow older, you gravitate toward Han Solo (who’s ultimately good, but superficially bad). But by the time you reach adulthood…you inevitably find yourself relating to Darth Vader.” His editor doubted the premise but published the book. [I’ve sometimes described Star Wars (jokingly – sort of) as the sad tale of a father trying to get ahead in the universe only to be betrayed by his ungrateful children.] Klosterman isn’t interested in out-and-out psychopaths or beyond-the-pale types such as serial killers, but in more complicated people who have (as we all do) a dark side – most dangerously present in those who don’t acknowledge it. He also muses about how we respond to villainy in others: overlooking some offenses (and offenders) and not others. Our responses, he notes, are not always scaled to the offense but to our own emotional natures. We’re sometimes willing to give a second chance to a charming murderer, for example, but not to some sports figure guilty of nothing more than a bad attitude or to a musician whose style we simply don't like.

Klosterman writes of the rogue in popular culture, such as the trope of the lovable con artist, e.g. Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve or George C. Scott in The Flim-Flam Man. (I’ve written a short story about a con artist myself: The Great Gaffe.) Klosterman relates how he once mentioned his enjoyment of such characters at a bar only to be schooled by another imbiber on how the fellow’s family was destroyed by such a person. Anyone who has been defrauded in a big way in real life, it is true, has no love at all for fraudsters. Klosterman still likes the trope, one can tell, but fully gets how the fictional representation differs from reality. He also discusses changing standards, so that what was, for example, a harmless joke in 1989 is villainous speech 30 years later. He seems OK with that evolution and with speech restrictions of like kind in general: a position that I find appalling (though I’ll ape Voltaire in defending his right to express it), especially by a writer who must know his own words are bound to offend someone. “The Constitution is awesome but overrated,” he says. The Bill of Rights is not overrated; it is underrated. The rest of the Constitution – which mostly just details the nuts of bolts of the governmental machinery – might well benefit from tinkering (and there is a process for that), but I don’t think that is what he means. Our difference of opinion in this matter helps make his broader point, however: that villainy is often just a matter of perspective.

Klosterman writes about the transgressions (real or imagined) of various people from Yoko to Bill Clinton to OJ. “Writing about other people is a form of writing about oneself,” he says. That is true. I’m doing it here. We can understand (and either forgive or not) villainy in others only because of the potential for it in ourselves. The potential is what makes passing on its exercise praiseworthy. I typically avoid Nietzsche quotes because using them seems pretentious, but, in acknowledgment of the blog site’s name, I’ll slip one in anyway: “I laugh at those who think themselves good because they have no claws.”

On balance, Klosterman’s book is worth a read. Too infrequently does one encounter someone giving intelligent thought to first principles, so it is gratifying when one does. However, while I see some truth in the book’s premise, I generally don’t wear hats, and I’ll pass on Darth’s wardrobe altogether for one very good reason: I’d look silly in a cape.

Theory of a Deadman – Villain

The Comic Side of Things

Comic books rule Hollywood. Avengers: Endgame is the highest grossing film of all time, selling well over a billion dollars of tickets on just the opening weekend; in the U.S. tickets for Avengers: Endgame accounted for 80% of all movie tickets sold that weekend. More Americans know who Thanos is than know who Xi Jinping is. Avengers: Endgame is an extreme case, but less extreme than one might think. 2019 is not so very exceptional for the past decade. In 2018 six of the top ten grossing movies were comic book adaptations; all the rest were sequels or remakes. In 2017 five of the top ten were comic book movies; all the rest were sequels or remakes.

There is nothing new about Hollywood raiding comic books for movie plots. The comic book characters Buck Rogers (first appearing in print in 1928) and Flash Gordon (1934) were made into movie serials in the 1930s. Captain Marvel, Batman, the Green Hornet, and Superman were adapted to movie serials in the 1940s. What is new is the way comic book characters bestride cinema. Instead of being minor sideshows, comic book movies today are front and center. They are crucial to the studios’ bottom lines.

Not everyone is happy about this. Jodie Foster, speaking to Radio Times Magazine of superhero movies in particular, complained, “It’s ruining the viewing habits of the American population and then ultimately the rest of the world.” Martin Scorsese said the Marvel movies are “not cinema.” An article in Liev Arts [sic] contends that the popularity of these films is a sign of childishness in modern culture: “The idea that we are now in a childish society is hard to be argued against: everything has become extremely infantile: from politics, where everything is black and white, to relationships and sexuality … almost every facet of today’s culture is defined by high immaturity.” This, I think, is a little harsh – not the assessment of the culture, which I think is spot on, but the assessment of the movies. Some of them anyway. Joker, currently doing a solid box office, shows that it is possible to have an adult and grittily realistic R-Rated movie even with a comic book for a source. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that Joker is an exception. The typical comic book blockbuster (or wannabe blockbuster) is a special-effects rich but otherwise simplistic popcorn movie.

Some of the original comic books on which the movies are based are surprisingly sophisticated: not most but some. The days are long gone when comic books were overwhelmingly aimed at kids and written accordingly. Nonetheless, the more complex comics are almost always simplified for the screen – and made less edgy to boot. Few moviegoers notice this since few read the original comics. Curiously, for all the success of comic book movies, sales of actual comic books continue to decline. Mainstream Marvel and DC titles (including those in digital format) sell a tenth of what they did in the 1960s and 1970s. This is part of the general collapse in recreational reading. (Young Adult fiction seems to be a minor bright spot in sales until one notices that older adults make up most of the readership; YA has drained readers from the adult shelves, but total fiction sales continue to drop.) It is not at all uncommon for movies that sell millions of tickets to be based on comic books with sales in the several thousands. Comics therefore are no longer the core business of comic book companies. Comic books, from a money-making viewpoint, are mostly just test beds for possible screenplays. (Marvel is owned by Disney and DC by Warner Brothers; Dark Horse is still independent though it does have working arrangements with production companies.)

The transition from page to screen can be gentle or jarring. Changes can be minor or can reverse the entire thrust of the original. Unlike in the movie, in Kick-Ass the comic, for example, (minor *Spoiler*) Dave doesn’t get the girl; instead, Katie’s new boyfriend beats him up. Big Daddy also has a major twist that was omitted from the movie. Considering that it condensed six volumes into one movie, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, while it shifts things around, isn’t so very different from the “all the world's a video game and all the men and women merely avatars”-themed Scott Pilgrim books. Quite a bit of the dialogue in the film is verbatim from the books. The 2007 TV series Painkiller Jane, on the other hand, bears almost no relation to the comics but for the character's self-healing abilities. Even the issue with Kristanna Loken on the cover has no connection to the show’s storyline. Jane is a Fed on the show but in the comics is a vigilante who would make Paul Kersey blush. Kingsman went the other direction: Kingsman is a private organization in the movie but a part of the UK government in the comic. Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel How to Talk to Girls at Parties ends when Enn (Henry) and his friends flee a party hosted by alien women. (There is a metaphor here.) This event happens only 20 minutes into the movie version, which then becomes a scifi romcom. The movie Wanted balks at the full cynical brutal nihilism of the comic, which even mocks the reader as a sucker for buying it. The assassins in the movie serve some higher cosmic purpose; they don’t in the comic.

Is there a pattern? Yes. Sharp corners are sanded down. Some of the comics (e.g. Mark Millar’s Wanted and Kick-Ass) are deliberately offensive, apparently out of a conviction that overly sensitive readers deserve to be offended, and should learn to just get over it. Studios trying to fill theater seats with millions of butts excise most of that for obvious business reasons. Movies that are modified less have printed originals (e.g. Scott Pilgrim) with fewer of those issues at the outset. Even a very violent movie (e.g. Kick-Ass 2) is likely to pull punches compared to the source. Anti-heroes in the movies gain more sympathetic backstories and contexts while their enemies lose all nuance, so the protagonists are just barely “anti.” Romances that go badly in the comics tend to go well in the movies. The central conflict almost always becomes vastly simpler on screen so the audience doesn’t have to think about for whom to root. So, there is some basis for the complaints of Jodie and Liev Arts.

One comic I’ll mention just for contrast is Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus Vol. 1, which is a case of screen to page instead of the other way around. Joss Whedon, who wrote the script for the 1992 movie but did not direct or have creative control, was famously unhappy with the result – and with Donald Sutherland who made up his own dialogue and changed the death scene. Joss did have control over the subsequent TV series, which was a critical success, but that movie still nagged at him. The comic is a prequel to the TV series that finally corrects the movie by covering the events of that time period the way Joss wanted; the result is more layered than the film – and better.

Since it doesn’t seem likely movie audiences will develop more sophisticated tastes anytime soon, comic book movies will fill theater screens for at least the next several years even as comic book sales drop further. Arguably this trend is no sillier than the Western genre that filled so many screens in the 1950s – though a few of those films (e.g. High Noon) had something to say. There are more important concerns in the world than questionable taste in movies. Still, sometimes it is rewarding to pass on the latest superhero bash-em-up and instead walk down the multiplex hall to the screen with an indie flick and only three or four people in the seats. The movie might be lousy or it might be a gem, but the odds aren’t any worse just because the actors don’t wear spandex.

  

Trailer for Painkiller Jane: amazingly unlike the source material

The Nightstand Front

 War loomed on my bedside nightstand last week. I commonly keep two books there (trading off to keep each fresh) for the stretch of time after clambering into bed before Morpheus pays a visit, which can be anything from 2 minutes to 2 hours. One was historical fiction and the other just history. “History” is frequently fiction, too, either by accident or design, but in this case the author at least made a real effort to be accurate.

**** ****

December 6, a novel by Martin Cruz Smith

The UK edition is titled Tokyo Station, probably because December 6 is a less ominous date on that side of the pond than on this one. Japanese attacks on British holdings began on December 8 thanks to the International Date Line. 12-07-41 was such a memorable date for my father, who had served on US merchant ships in WW2, that it was the combination to his attaché case. (The utility of a combination lock on an attaché case, which easily can be carried off in toto, is a question for another place and time.)

I have read and enjoyed a smattering of Martin Cruz Smith (including Stallion Gate and Nightwing) since 1981 when I bought in hardcover Gorky Park, the first of his Arkady Renko detective novels. I’ve since dropped the Arkady Renko series in favor of the Fandorin series by Boris Akunin, but I doubted I could go very wrong picking up December 6.

In this novel, set early in December 1941, we meet Harry Niles who runs the Happy Paris nightclub in Tokyo. I don’t know, but I suspect that Smith while writing the book was influenced by the American nightclub owner played by Bogart in Tokyo Joe (1949). I couldn’t help picturing Harry as Bogie in any case. Few American authors are good at capturing the nuances of other cultures except from a The Innocents Abroad perspective of an outsider looking in. Smith did reasonably well with Gorky Park back in ’81, but Russia is, more or less, a Western country. Getting 1941 Tokyo right is a much harder task, and Smith was wise to make the protagonist a wayward scoundrel son of American missionaries who was raised in Japan. The one-foot-in-each-country personal history of the character allows for his deep familiarity with Japan while still accounting for missteps. We thereby get an interesting look from a semi-Western perspective at Tokyo on the eve of war – of an expanded war, that is. War with China had been in progress for 4 years – 10 if you count from the invasion of Manchuria. Harry’s romantic entanglements are also dual: the wife of a British diplomat and the very complicated Michiko.

Harry has connections in the Western embassies and in the Imperial Navy for entirely lowlife reasons. What he sees and hears alarms him, but his unsavory reputation keeps him from being trusted enough by any of them to heed his warnings about the coming conflict that in retrospect seems somehow both inevitable and unnecessary. The reader already knows how history on a grand scale turned out, but, as the hours tick past, Harry’s arc also involves intrigues of personal love and revenge: matters as fateful for him individually as the larger events are for the world.

Thumbs Up.

**** ****

The War for Africa: Twelve Months That Transformed a Continent – by Fred Bridgland

Conflicts that don’t directly involve troops (officially) from one or more of the major powers tend to be regarded as sideshows by journalists and historians from the major powers, when they are regarded at all. The conflicts are central to the people caught up in them of course, and they sometimes have a significance far beyond what is commonly recognized.

A very long and bloody conflict that mattered immensely both locally and broadly was the Angolan civil war that followed the Portuguese departure from Angola in 1975. Fred Bridgland (correspondent for Reuters, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Scotsman), was on scene at various times during it. In The War for Africa he gives a brief overview of the first decade of fighting, but concentrates on the critical period of 1987 and 1988, when Cubans ramped up their intervention on the side of the MPLA (the official government in Luanda: the MPLA military was called FAPLA) while the South African SADF intervened on the side of the rebel UNITA forces led by Jonas Savimbi. Most of the book is a military history of that year, though always in the context of political and diplomatic events. At the time, the MPLA, SWAPO (Namibian rebels based in Angola), and the ANC all were avowedly communist. (The ANC later modified its position and has been the governing party in South Africa since Mandela’s election in 1994.) Pretoria in the ‘80s regarded them as existential threats on the northern border of South West Africa (Namibia), which South Africa still administered. The Cuban interest was ideological while the Soviets played Cold War chess by sending supplies (and unofficially advisors) to the Cubans and the MPLA. The Western powers covertly supported UNITA, but were unwilling to align themselves openly with South Africa. Savimbi himself for obvious political reasons also long denied cooperation with South Africa, but for Machiavellian reasons in fact coordinated closely; there was little real choice. In truth, none of the players in the war was admirable (except sometimes in purely military terms), but the war had profound consequences.

Who won? That depends on how you look at it. The MPLA remained in power and remains in power today, so in that sense it prevailed. Yet it has abandoned communist ideology (it’s now regarded as center-left) while UNITA negotiated participation in a unified Angola as a legal political party. During peace negotiations in ‘88 a strongly reinforced Cuban/MPLA offensive checked the outnumbered SADF at Cuito Cuanavale, which does count as a success. Yet the SADF and UNITA inflicted heavy losses on their opponents and remained in control of core UNITA-held territory, so to that extent they succeeded. Meantime, the war was a serious drain on the already overburdened USSR, which sent the MPLA and Cubans large quantities of weapons including tanks, BMPs, and Mig 23s. The war thereby accelerated changes in Moscow. The 1988 settlement paved the way for the South African withdrawal from Namibia on terms they could accept, Cuban withdrawal from Angola on terms they could accept, and (indirectly) the end of apartheid in South Africa. It’s probably most accurate to say that no one won the war. Yet no one lost either, and in the end that proved to be more important. The civil war in Angola started up again in the early 90s (this time without major outside intervention) but was resolved in 2002 after Savimbi’s demise on terms similar to ‘88.

Since Bridgland had more physical access to the SADF and UNITA, most of the author’s perspective (though not always his sympathies) is from that side of the lines. Nonetheless, despite this limitation, the book is as detailed and fair an account of events as he could assemble.

Another Thumbs Up.

Trailer – Angola the War

Surely You Jest

It will come as a surprise to no one that Hollywood studios are not above fomenting controversy to promote a film. Whatever hand they had in the controversy over Joker, their task was simplified by it being so easily fomentable nowadays. More on that in a moment.

Arthur Fleck, acted by Joaquin Phoenix, is apparently an alternate version of the Joker in this one-off stand-alone movie, since it is hard to see how to fit him into the timeline of any of the other various Batman movies. Joaquin Phoenix is 45, but even if we generously allow that his Arthur is supposed to be an old-looking 30 he doesn’t fit either Christopher Nolan’s trilogy or Suicide Squad. Joker is set in 1981 (the movies on the marquees in the street shots nail down the year) so Arthur would be too old to be the Joker in The Dark Night; were he the same, the police work by the Gotham detectives in that film who are unable to discover the Joker’s identity would be incredibly shoddy. In Suicide Squad, Arthur necessarily would be a senior citizen by any calculation. So, unless a younger Joker was merely “inspired by” this predecessor, the timelines seem distinct. Bruce Wayne, by the way, appears in Joker only as a child.

In the classic origin story of the Joker, he is disfigured by falling into a vat of toxic chemicals. In Joker the toxic brew is Gotham City itself. Arthur has serious mental health problems including bouts of inappropriate laughter. This is a real thing, as it happens: the pseudobulbar affect. In a grimy, harsh, depressing city that Arthur has trouble navigating under the best of circumstances, his condition prompts people (horrible people, but a lot of people are horrible) to brutalize him. City budget cuts end the help, such as it was, that Arthur was getting from social services, thereby isolating him more. The few apparent bright spots in his life, we soon learn, are his own fantasies, not reality. Arthur lives with his mother, who once had worked for the Waynes, but he learns things about her that shake even this relationship. Arthur works as a clown and tries his hand at stand-up comedy, but neither work out well for him. The turning point comes when he has an unplanned Bernie Goetz moment: in the subway in his clown outfit he shoots three Wall Street types who for some strange reason are being thuggish. (Thuggery by Wall Street types is usually more subtle than that.) To his own surprise he doesn’t feel at all bad about it. Nor do street demonstrators (later rioters) who don clown masks and glorify the unknown vigilante as a crusader against the 1%. Arthur becomes Joker, adopting the name because he was called a “joker” by a talk show host (played by Robert De Niro) who makes fun of his stand-up act on the air.

Back to the controversy: There are complaints in some circles (including a few major media reviewers) that the Joker is a sort of alt-right anti-hero who could inspire emulation. This is an odd way off looking at it. The politics of the movie are, if anything, the opposite of right-wing as the negative review by the leftish The Guardian noted. Arthur himself comes out and says, “I’m not political” in a context where he is being shockingly honest. Nor would anyone want to be Arthur Fleck. The Joker of The Dark Knight has some appeal in a bizarre way; he is a wildly destructive nihilist, but he has given real thought to what he doesn’t believe; he is having fun and he is not actually crazy. Not so Arthur Fleck: a troubled and deeply unhappy man. “All I have are negative thoughts,” he says. He may find some satisfaction striking back excessively at awful people in an awful city where the joke always has been on him, but he is still a deeply unhappy man.

The movie makes references to numerous earlier films right down to occasional camera angles, as most viewers will notice. They add irony without interfering with the flow of the film. Those looking for a standard comic book movie will not find it here. What they will find is fine acting, a good score, and a solid script. Thumbs Up.

Crème de la Crème

A number of Baby Boomers are commenting on Facebook on the passing of Ginger Baker, the drummer for Cream, at age 80. Given the rocker’s personal history, that’s a ripe enough old age. The only thing I find strange is that rock musicians from my youth are now 80. That just doesn’t seem probable despite the old guy (whoever he is) who looks back at me in the mirror each morning. Cream was definitely in my vinyl inventory back in the day. I mentioned the band in a blog nearly 10 years ago on Myspace. Remember Myspace? That this was a decade ago also seems improbable. As that may be, to mark the passage of one decade and of five, I’ll repost it here today:

February 20, 2010

White Room

Sometime around 1981 I sat at my desk reading a biography of Benito Mussolini. (It was a slow day in the real estate business, rather like today.) Burt Pariser, a local attorney, walked by my desk and caught the title. Shaking his head, he said, “You know, it’s so strange. You [indicating “young people” generally, though I was 28] read that stuff as history. I actually remember those guys.” Burt never met Il Duce personally, of course, but I know what he meant. We always feel a connection to the personalities who were or are culturally prominent in our lifetimes. As a presence in our lives – if only a background presence – they form a part of our own identities. I feel that way about Richard Nixon, for example, whom I actually did see in person a few times, though we never formally (or informally) met as such. The years since 1981 have gone by with their usual predictable yet somehow unexpected rapidity, and now the Nixon Administration is as far back in time as Mussolini was then. I see students studying the era as history.

So now, I sometimes find myself in a curious position as “elder” witness to a funny cultural era. High school kids look at the late-60s/early-70s much as, in 1970, I did at the 1920s. Occasionally I am asked odd questions about them. Just the other day some teenage companions of a friend’s daughter (if you follow that) were at my house and were bored. They discovered the Beatles’ Let It Be album on vinyl on a shelf by the stereo and cranked it up. Afterward, one of them asked me what single song best represents the 60s. It was an intriguing question to which I had no good answer. (Let It Be was 1970, but let’s not quibble.) A decade as musically rich and varied as the 60s is all but impossible to pin down that way. I pretended I had an answer, however. I quickly proclaimed White Room by Cream. Hey, if you want to maintain your image as an authority on a subject, you have to exude an air of ready confidence, especially if the justification for it is lacking. I extemporaneously rattled off a few reasons, and then extracted myself from the conversation.

The funny thing is, now that I’ve had time to reflect at leisure, I still think White Room wasn’t a bad choice. The song was psychedelic, haunting, unorthodox, poetic, and on every rock station’s playlist – though not at the top. The 60s broke with the past in many ways, and so does the song: it has no rhymes, alliterations, assonances, or other traditional devices. The lines do scan, but in an unconventional and imperfect way. In formal terms, they alternate pyrrhic with trochee feet (e.g. /in the / WHITE room/) in hexameter. Like the decade itself, the lyrics seem much more profound than they really are. This is so much the case that many listeners insist they really are about Clapton’s drug use or about the Vietnam War. The trouble with those theories is 1) Eric Clapton didn’t write the song (he played guitar), and 2) the British didn’t fight in the Vietnam War. No, the lyrics mean just what they (admittedly less than straightforwardly) say. A fellow picks up a woman who is both romantic and primal (horses on moonbeams and tigers in jungles) at a party, but no strings can hold her and she leaves him at the station. He feels desolate. That’s it. And, you know? It’s enough.


Lyrics:

White Room

by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown

In the white room with black curtains near the station.
Blackroof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings.
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes.
Dawnlight smiles on you leaving, my contentment.

I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines;
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves.

You said no strings could secure you at the station.
Platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows.
I walked into such a sad time at the station.
As I walked out, felt my own need just beginning.

I'll wait in the queue when the trains come back;
Lie with you where the shadows run from themselves.

At the party she was kindness in the hard crowd.
Consolation for the old wound now forgotten.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.

I'll sleep in this place with the lonely crowd;
Lie in the dark where the shadows run from themselves.


Post script
Not long after the 60s question, the same young person asked what song I thought represented the 90s. I simply refuse to think of the 1990s as ancient times, so I pretended to misunderstand. “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” I answered. “It was the hit of the Spanish-American War.” 

Cream – White Room

NJRD vs GSR – 10/5/19 Derby Recap

Morristown’s remaining roller derby league hosted a double header yesterday. First up was a junior bout, which I did not attend, though the final score was NJRD Juniors 198 – Philly Roller Derby Juniors 116.

The adult teams took to the track at 8 pm: NJRD (New Jersey Roller Derby) on its home rink vs GSR (Garden State Rollergirls) Brick City Bruisers. The first jam began with very firm blocking on both sides that held back both jammers. #14 Ragnorok broke out and scored 11 points for NJRD. #3684 Californikate followed up with a multipass. #18 Fancy Nasty put the first 3 points on the board for GSR, but the first few jams set a pattern that would hold through the first half. Despite GSR successes, such as a power jam by GSR #269 Katsup Pahkol, NJRD dominated the half. Blocking made a major difference. Both teams were competent and could build strong walls, but NJRD was a little better; even when its formations were broken the individual skaters were aggressive, with #1783 Queen Guillotine making some noticeably effective hits. The half ended with the score at 116-39 in favor of NJRD.

In the second half GSR jammers – notably #1732 BlackEye Betty, #926 Bossbabality, and #18 Fancy Nasty – were able to push through or bypass the (still very stiff) NJRD defenses more often. However, NJRD jammers – including #412 Brindiesel and #21 Ginger – upped their success against GSR as well, punching through or slipping past walls, with the result that NJRD expanded its lead. The penalty box was rarely empty for long, indicating redoubled efforts at defense in both teams. #21 Ginger took NJRD over the 200 mark. Bossbabality and Brindiesel both scored in the final jam as the clock ran out. Final score 227 – 82 in favor of NJRD.

MVPs:

GSR Brick City Bruisers

Blocker: #38 Diem Zee

Jammer: #269 Katsup Pahkol

NJRD
Blocker: #1783 Queen Guillotine

Jammer: 14 Ragnorok

Too Many or Too Few

One reason Thanos is an interesting and effective villain in Avengers: Infinity War is that he is not yet another stale “I want to rule the universe” psychopath in the vein of Ming the Merciless from the ‘30s Flash Gordon serials or Emperor Palpatine of Star Wars. Instead, Thanos is a cosmic eco-warrior. Even though his solution might give most of us pause, his basic concern (that there are too many people – defining “people” as all sentient beings) is widely shared among humans today. I’ve said as much myself (see my 2011 blog NPG [Negative Population Growth]) though I did not and would not suggest removing anyone already here.

When I was born the population of the USA was 150 million and the world population was about 2.5 billion. The US has more than doubled while the global population has more than tripled to 7.7 billion today. The global growth rate per decade has slowed from about 20% back then to 8.7% at present, but since there is a larger base today we are adding 67,000,000 people per year instead of 50,000,000 as in the 1950s. The increase overwhelms efforts to mitigate human impact on the environment. Yet, the ongoing rise is anything but uniform, and the variability indicates a way to reverse it: let poor countries grow rich. The well-to-do (or rapidly becoming well-to-do) countries of Europe, North America, and East Asia in the past few decades have seen their fertility rates drop through the floor to well below replacement level (2.1 per woman). In the 2000s the USA seemed to be an exception (almost) with a fertility rate hovering between 1.9 and 2.1, but in the 2010s the US rate dropped to a more typical first world level of 1.7 and shows every sign of dropping further. The one-child policy famously adopted by China in the late 70s apparently only sped up what would have happened anyway since fertility rates in Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong are 1.13, 1.14, and 1.13 respectively. Several countries are already seeing absolute declines in population with Japan furthest along the path. Countries that are magnets for immigration (e.g. the US, UK, and Canada) still see and will continue to see in the next 30 years substantial population increases despite low domestic birthrates, though the demographic replacement that entails is not without social stresses.

A low birthrate in advanced countries has many consequences: a shrinking working-age population to support an expanding elderly one, for example. Life expectancy is increasing at the same time fertility is dropping; globally, the cohort over age 80 is the most rapidly growing segment of the over-65 population. One other limited but significant consequence is a reconfiguration of international power balances. Susan Yoshihara and Douglas A. Sylva address this in their book Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics. In their historical overview from ancient times to the late 20^th century they note that a growing population was seen by leaders as an unalloyed good – even in China as recently as the early 1970s. (Mao: Every stomach comes with two hands.)

Population and national power never have been and are not now one and the same. Economic, technological, political, and geographic factors matter, too: often they matter much more. Yet, population does matter; all else equal, the more populous nation does have a military advantage. Relative decline (e.g. China [fertility rate 1.6] vs. India [fertility rate 2.2]) can have profound effects. Russia, for example, retains a superb arms industry from small arms up to nuclear weapons, which ensures its great power status, yet its relative position can’t help but be undermined by it’s Western-style fertility rate (1.6) that is projected to reduce its population from 143 million to below 100 million in midcentury. It already relies on a tactical nuclear deterrent to defend itself in the Far East – as NATO did back when it was outnumbered by the Warsaw Pact. Russia is not alone. Say Yoshihara and Sylva, “the only European countries that will avoid population loss by 2050, according to UN projections, are France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Luxembourg, and even these countries will face rapidly aging populations.” The US by contrast, due mostly to immigration and to a smaller extent from longer lifespans, is expected to rise from 329 million today to 438 million by 2050, an increase larger than the entire US population in 1920 (106 million). This would seem to be a major advantage from a power-politics point of view, though of course economic troubles and/or political dysfunction could disrupt that. “The ‘demographic transition’ such as it is,” the authors warn, “will not lead to a demographic peace, nor will a ‘geriatric peace’ descend upon the powers in the next few decades.” The results instead could be turbulent, as relative changes on this scale have been in the past.

As that may be, there are benefits to a smaller population that (IMO) outweigh the risks and costs. There could be some curious outcomes. Since traditional and religious (e.g. Mormon) families tend to be larger (well over a 2.1 rate), for example, they may become a greater share of the population in time – unless their kids don’t follow the same path. It will take a few decades to know, and actuarial tables suggest I won’t be confirming that one first hand. It would be nice to see a global fertility rate drop below 2.1, however unlikely that might be in my lifetime. Thanos can snap his fingers in some other universe.

The Hollies – Too Many People: released 1965, the year the Baby Boom busted