Year: 2013

Beyond the straightforward theme of sending young people to fight and die in war, Alexander Huls reads the new film as a partial defense of Generation Y, with Ender saving the world at the request of condescending and ungrateful Boomers:

Boomers tend to represent Gen Y’s virtues simultaneously as faults (Millennials are great at tech! Millennials are narcissistic and distracted workers because of tech!) but the film understands the impulses behind them. Technology is presented not as an indulgence, but a highly useful tool Ender wields to achieve productive results and self-exploration—not narcissism. When Ender feels outraged that Graff revokes his email privileges, the movie presents the hero’s anger not as lost entitled access to technology. He’s upset that he’s lost what he uses the technology for: meaningfully connecting with people he cares about.

Millennials will likely be happy with the portrayal. They, after all, played a major part in propelling Ender’s Game to its canonical status. This adaptation honors the text they grew up with while heightening the generational conflicts in it, going even rougher on the adults.

Andrew O’Hehir reads into a historical analogy probably not intended by author Orson Scott Card or the filmmakers:

“Ender’s Game” can definitely be read as an allegorical treatment of the other American original sin, besides slavery: the destruction and replacement of Native American society, which stood in the way of our nation’s manifest destiny. The sentimental idea that whites who killed or uprooted the Indians became infused with their spiritual or moral essence did not begin with New Agers in the 1960s. It goes clear back to the invented legend of the first Thanksgiving feast and the apocryphal peace treaty between William Penn and the Lenape chief Tamanend (aka Tammany) in 1683.

Harris O’Malley, who stubbornly refuses to see the film due to Card’s history of homophobia, points out that the book preaches a message of tolerance:

[F]or someone who seems consumed by hate, he has produced what is, in many ways, his own counter-argument. …

Ender’s ultimate strength isn’t his willingness to win at any cost, it’s his empathy. To quote Ender: “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” Ender’s own horror at the realization that he has committed xenocide is born out of that empathy; in the end, he realizes that the “buggers” were never truly the threat that everybody thought them to be.

It’s a shame that Card seems incapable of equal understanding, instead of grumpily complaining about the intolerant reception of his own intolerance.

Rany Jazayerli, a long-time fan of Card’s writing who grew increasingly pained by the author’s hateful rhetoric in real life, grapples with further complexities:

We all feel alienated at some point, but the book’s message resonates even deeper with those who really stick out from the crowd. The empathy extends to the reader. There are no gay characters, but that is presumably because most of the characters are prepubescent children. (Ender is essentially asexual.) But there are girls at Battle School who play important roles; there are characters who are dismissed by other kids because they’re too short; there are Jewish kids who get mocked for the size of their noses.

I am neither gay, nor a girl, nor short. I am, however, a Muslim who grew up in Kansas in the 1980s, and I struggle to think of a more perfect recipe for creating a sense of isolation in an American teenager. … It was in the context of trying to find my place in the world, of struggling to reconcile my faith with my country when I had no role models to show me the way, that I encountered the following passage about Ender and his Battle School classmate Alai. It stopped me cold:

“I don’t want to go,” he said.

Alai hugged him back. “I understand them, Ender. You are the best of us. Maybe they’re in a hurry to teach you everything.”

“They don’t want to teach me everything,” Ender said. “I wanted to learn what it was like to have a friend.”

Alai nodded soberly. “Always my friend, always the best of my friends,” he said. Then he grinned. “Go slice up the buggers.”

“Yeah.” Ender smiled back. Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, “Salaam.” Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden. A suppressed religion, perhaps. Or maybe the word had some private and powerful meaning for Alai alone. Whatever it meant to Alai, Ender knew that it was sacred; that he had uncovered himself for Ender, as once Ender’s mother had done, when he was very young, before they put the monitor in his neck, and she had put her hands on his head when she thought he was asleep, and prayed over him. Ender had never spoken of that to anyone, not even to Mother, but had kept it as a memory of holiness, of how his mother loved him when she thought that no one, not even he, could see or hear. That was what Alai had given him; a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed to understand what it meant.

If you don’t see the importance of this passage, I envy you. Alai is clearly a Muslim, and in the 1980s, Muslims were portrayed in American popular culture as one of three categories, if they were portrayed at all: crazy ayatollahs, greasy lecherous oil sheikhs, or bomb-wielding hijackers. Ender’s Game was literally the first time I had encountered a positive portrayal of a Muslim character in American fiction. It floored me. I finally saw a positive image of myself in print, and it came not from a fellow Muslim but from a wildly popular Christian author who could trace his American lineage for generations.

Previous Dish on the film and the controversy over Card here, here, and here.

The top 33 in America:

Derek Thompson parses the data on work and race:

[Hispanics] make up about half of all farm workers and laborers, 44 percent of grounds maintenance workers, and 43 percent of maids and house cleaners. Blacks, who make up just 11 percent of the workforce, account for more than a third of home health aides and about 25 percent of both security guards and bus drivers – rather low paying jobs. Whites, on the other hand, make up more than 80 percent of the country’s workers. But they account for nearly all farm managers and ranchers (96 percent) construction managers (92 percent), carpenters (91 percent), and CEOs (90 percent). The story is true for Asians, as well – not included in these graphs for a lack of historical data. Asian-Americans account for 5 percent of the workforce, but also a whopping 60 percent of personal appearance workers, (e.g. hairdressers, nail salon workers), 29 percent of software developers, and nearly one in five physicians and surgeons.

Update from a reader:

The list forgot to include “NFL Head Coach” and “US Senator”.

Alex Halperin argues that the “entire moon should be an international history and science preserve—an Off-World Heritage site, if you will”:

[A]n increased sense of conscience about the Apollo sites recently spawned a bill to preserve them. The proposal, put before Congress this past summer, is to eventually nominate them as UNESCO World Heritage sites. It’s not perfect. First, under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, accepted by 101 countries, no nation can claim the moon as sovereign territory, an official prerequisite for nomination. And the bill doesn’t cover the rest of the moon—only where the astronauts landed and worked. Instead of passing piecemeal bills, let’s go all the way. The moon was part of Earth until about 4.5 billion years ago, according to current models. It could answer key questions about the history of our planet and therefore needs to be protected.

The idea is not without precedent:

[W]e’ve already reached global consensus on preserving an otherworldly place in this way:

Antarctica. The continent is managed by 50 nations under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty “with the interests of science and the progress of all mankind.” The treaty is short (just 14 articles), and the management duties are light (meetings to discuss updates, procedures, and scientific missions). But it works. For more than half a century, the agreement has allowed science and tourism to flourish in an area that belongs to both no one and everyone.

A preservation treaty for the moon would need a few special clauses. For example, while there’s a voluntary moratorium on mining in Antarctica, it doesn’t make sense to ban the practice on the moon: That’s one of the incentives to get us there. Rare substances, such as helium-3 (a possible fuel for nuclear power), are the sort of rewards that will motivate the development of private spaceflight and off-world habitation. So mining should be allowed, pending environmental-impact assessments similar to those conducted by the U.S. Forest Service. As for tourism, we don’t need to wrap the moon in no trespassing signs, but let’s keep ATVs away from important craters.

(Image of moon by Flickr user shahbasharat)

James Fallon, author of The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain and star of the TED Talk seen above, explores the diversity of psychopathy:

As far as public perception goes, I’d say that the best, most badass, sadistic, ultimate example of a psychopath would be the original Hannibal Lecter. That’s who we think a psychopath is. But I’d argue that Will Graham, the FBI agent who tracks Hannibal, is the version of a psychopath we see more often in reality: he’s the pro-social psychopath, the guy in the office who seems a little off but who doesn’t engage in really ugly, egregious criminal behavior. And that’s where I would put myself. I might have a lot of weird, disturbed thoughts, but I don’t act on those thoughts. The Hannibal guys are a small subset, but they’re certainly overrepresented in the media.

He explains why some psychopaths become killers and others successful CEOs:

[Early in my research], I looked around and knew a lot of great poor people and a lot of really rich jerks, so I said “Hey, if the environment is key to all of this, it really isn’t doing the job we think it is.” Instead, I became convinced that we were born and not raised – and I spent my career studying exactly how the brain influences who we become.

But I didn’t fit my own theory. I had similar brain scans to full-blown, psychopathic killers. I had the genetic profile of a psychopath too. So why didn’t I fall into that kind of behavior? Well, I’d say it’s because I had a very fortunate, very warm upbringing with a wonderful family. And a lot of those who have my same genetic makeup and go onto violence endured awful abuse or trauma.

So you need to give environment more credit than I used to, but that doesn’t mean I’ve thrown out biology: around the time this was all happening to me, the field of epigenetics started to explode. Maybe it isn’t that biology doesn’t determine who you are, but that your environment can play a role in which genes are turned on or off.

Previous Dish on nonviolent psychopaths here, here and here.

Leon Neyfakh addresses the question:

[I]n Russia, despite the passionate efforts of its proponents, [Alcoholics Anonymous] has struggled for acceptance as a legitimate treatment method and has largely failed to catch on. Since 1987, when an Episcopal priest from New York convened some of Russia’s very first AA meetings, only about 400 groups have formed in the entire country – a tiny number, when you consider that there are about 1,600 such groups in the Boston metropolitan area alone.

Why has Russia proven so inhospitable to AA’s ideas? Certainly, the history of distrust between our two countries hasn’t helped. But there have been other obstacles as well – some religious, some medical, some cultural.

At a basic level, its premise of sobriety through mutual support just doesn’t make sense to a lot of Russians. In the past, this has taken the form of anti-Western suspicion – “What are the Americans trying to get out of this?” is a question Moseeva used to hear regularly. But more fundamentally, the group-therapy dynamic collides with a skepticism about the possibility of ordinary people curing each other of anything. “The idea that another drunk can help you is asinine to most Russians,” said Alexandre Laudet, a social psychologist who has researched Russian alcoholism.

Then there’s the problem of opening up to strangers. The AA method works in part through trust in people you’ve never met before, and coming clean to them about one’s most shameful secrets. “It is much harder for a Russian person to talk about himself than it is for an American,” said a Russian AA member named Mikhail. “And there are a lot of reasons why, including that the generation of my parents – and my own, I’m 55 – couldn’t speak the truth at all, because it was possible to get arrested for it.”