David Burchell, James Dean, Rebel without a Cause and the failure of positive parenting when dealing with Islamic terrorists

(Above: Jimmy Dean tries to give away the knife in Rebel Without a Cause. Silly Jimmy.)

David Burchell is usually such a verbose, obfuscating, confusing writer that a visit to his locutory is reserved for the strongest souls. The faint hearted wilt under the onrush of verbiage, but truly You can't give Bin Laden a hug is a worthy outing for specialists seeking that little bit extra in flavorsome loon pond sauciness.

What can you make of this kind of sentence, as David Burchell saunters from World War II to psychiatry?

As it happens, our urge to understand this alienated "other", the better to stop them hating us, is also in large measure an accidental legacy of the Good War. If today we're all amateur shrinks at heart - with fragile selves that break asunder like porcelain vases in our dreams, and then defy our efforts to glue them back together - that has less to do with our steady diet of Hollywood talky-talk than it does with the mundane needs of the US military during World War II.

Oh yes, General Patton and his pearl handled pistol, soldier slapping ways would be mightily pleased with all this mundane talk of the mundane needs of the military after their  mundane fight across Europe and the Pacific. As if you needed any of that talk of patching up shattered souls when a good kick in the pants was all they needed. Mundane needs? Don't come around to Mr. Burchell looking for sympathy good solider Schweik.

Needing to patch together its war-ravaged soldiers before their return to civvy street, the US army of the 1940s created a new kind of mass-production line, this time in group therapy. In the process they funded a vast job-creation program for shrinks, which in turn fuelled the postwar boom in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and general psychobabble. (The process is recorded in a marvellous wartime documentary by John Huston, filmed in New York's Mason Hospital.)

But let's not get distracted by psychobabble and the impact of war on expendable units known as soldiers.

Not when Burchell himself is a master of the art of babble.

Cogitating how to cope with Islamic extremists, Burchell's chief conclusion - as per his header - is that you can't give Islamic extremists of any stripe a hug, but the path to this conclusion takes a wondrous detour through the cinemah.

And in particular "the endlessly invoked but little-watched 1955 Hollywood film starring James Dean."

Yep, that'd be Rebel Without a Cause, currently with a 7.9 rating, and 24,114 votes on the Imdb, and 11 pages of comments with 204 comments, most of which are favorable. Not bad stats for a little watched film, especially if you put it up against the kind of show Burchell might like to watch - say Charlie Bronson in Death Wish with 7.0 and 8,900 votes.

But back to the thesis:

In the movie a young man, deprived of effective authoritative parenting, drifts into petty violence and is forced to improvise his own moral life scheme, along the way accidentally precipitating the death of a gang-leader. The story took some major detours on its way to Hollywood, of course. Dean's character isn't the brutalised son of a violent and illiterate itinerant labourer, but rather the confused middle-class offspring of indulgent but distant parents. And the rage Dean exhibits against his father is not the rebellion of the vassal against the tyrant, but rather the contempt of the adolescent would-be he-man against the office-penned, hen-pecked husband: "what do you do when you want to be a man?" The whole familiar self-indulgent repertoire of alienated middle-class youth, in short.

Ever get the sense someone has watched a movie, and seen an entirely different show to the one you thought you'd watched? Ever seen a movie stripped of its magic, and boiled down - in a mess of reductionist simplistic mis-understandings - to a piece of pop Freudian nonsense? 

Well then, that's how you set up a straw man to analyse our response to suicide bombers. Now as a piece of arbitrary conflation, this is a truly excellent manoeuvre:

When it comes to jihadism, then, it often seems as if we're still channelling Dean's parents in Rebel Without a Cause. We've tried our best, goodness knows. But we know, deep down, that the whole terrorist mess must somehow be our fault, and we'd give anything to make the national family feel happy and complete again. This way of thinking about the matter gratifies us emotionally. After all, as any pop-psychologist knows, to get inside the mind of those who profess to hate us is to demonstrate superior powers of empathy, even some tincture of that moral saintliness demanded of the thoroughly modern parent.

Golly, it says something about Burchell that he watched Rebel Without a Cause - and identified with Jimmie Dean's parents! That's beyond old fogey, that's the full apron, that's Jim Backus in a Mr. Magoo voice. 

Goodness knows, Burchell might well want to channel Dean's parents, but leave the rest of us out of that kind of morbid sickliness. If that's his way of thinking and worse still if that's what gratifies him emotionally, then drown all the puppies I say. And if he thinks that somehow Dean's parents demonstrate superior powers of empathy, exactly what re-cut of the movie was he watching while I was watching the original? 

BTW: The moral saintliness of the thoroughly modern parent? WTF? Suddenly we're in the world of Thoroughly Modern Millie?

But back to the thesis, which progressively grows so strange that watching it unfold is like cherishing the flowers in a blow-fly attracting lily:

By the same token, those who seek to empathise with Palestinian suicide-bombers (or PSBs, as it's freakily fashionable to describe them in certain corridors of academe), demonstrate, through their suppression of our mere unreflective instincts against self-immolation, their superior capacity for emotional self-discipline, another modern parenting virtue. And so when someone asks us, naively, how we're willing to sympathise with folks like this, we reply (inwardly and to ourselves) that so much rage and violence must truly be the sign of a very poor upbringing in the national family.

Oh those academics with their leather patches and their acronyms. As if a Murdoch journalist would ever resort to GFC as a term in some kind of freaky fashionable way, when they could reference "mere unreflective instincts against self-immolation" as a demonstration of how verbiage is much better than a short, unresponsive acronym.

Wow. Okay, I get it, there's no room for the insight that someone seeking to randomly blow themselves up and others are seriously mentally and emotionally disturbed, and likely to have been preyed on by older and uglier people who keep themselves alive while sending others off to die.

And never mind skills that have developed during hostage taking negotiations. That's also a waste of time.

 
Yet it's not so clear how these efforts at empathy are supposed to work, in a practical sense. In the 70s, of course, western Europe and North America suffered their own domestic irruptions of nihilistic youthful extremism. But it's doubtful that well-intentioned outsiders' efforts to reason with the Oedipal Baader-Meinhoff kiddies, or the alienated Red Brigades youngsters, or the rebellious young Weathermen, ever did much good. At the 1972 Munich Olympic Games we know sympathetic West German officials attempted to reason with members of the Black September movement, much in the manner of an indulgent parent. It wasn't much of a success.

Yep, if you want to misunderstand the world comprehensively, try keep using a parenting metaphor from a half baked misunderstanding of a nineteen fifties movie and apply it how you will in ways that please you without generating any essential meaning. It's a treat:

If you want to understand the perils of positive parenting towards jihadis, why not observe the travails of those many Muslim community activists who are presently fighting the good fight against jihadism. Generally they discover pretty fast that to be seen as a "moderate", or to be seeking conciliation between extremists and "moderates", is the very kiss of death, since in point of fact extremists despise moderates just as much as alienated teenagers despise do-gooders. In reality, their best bet is to keep their heads down, and struggle for supremacy in the manner of any orthodox political movement.

Why yes, the best way for moderates to succeed is to become extremists, and kick the shit out of their enemies in a righteous Valhalla way. See, I told you Death Wish was Burchell's kind of film. That which doesn't destroy you makes you stronger, hasta la vista baby, well are you feeling lucky punk, get off my lawn, or perhaps just a simple fuck you.

But what on earth does he mean by keeping their heads down and struggling for supremacy in the manner of any orthodox political movement? Are we talking bullets through the front door, baseball bats at ten paces, burning down the temple, halting the concrete pour, or hoping the extremists will allow the voting to take place without the ballot box being stuffed full of anfo and blown apart?

Out of this extraordinary amount of blather what solution do we arrive at, since positive parenting, and being a moderate, or seeking conciliation is the kiss of death, and all we can do is fight and die? 

In the end it will be for those brave souls in the Muslim community to win or lose the fight for the hearts of their own young. For the nation as a whole, I doubt there's any remedy other than the enforcement of those crude but necessary laws that protect citizens from violence by other citizens.

Oh you mean it's just up to the Muslim community, and they can win or lose and it's nothing to do with us, they can take care of their own, and if the hearts of their young end up hooked up to a battery and a bomb, I guess they've failed.

But never mind, the rest of us can just lock them up and throw away the key. What a wonderful, clever way to discover suicide bombers in our midst and disarm, defuse and prevent them from going off?

What's that you say? By definition it's a bit hard to apply those crude but necessary laws to an actual suicide bomber who has blown him or herself up, and left the lawmakers with the ugly job of picking up the pieces?

All I can say is thank the lord David Burchell is neither regularly employed as a movie critic, or as a crisis or hostage negotiator, or for that matter as a conciliator in a community, or a social worker when confronted with alienated youth.

Because he doesn't have a clue. And I suspect there'd be a lot more alienated mad as hell suicide bombers roaming around. Letting themselves off because they've seen David Burchell in full apron positive parenting mode. And it's terrifying and alienating.

Someone who thinks Transformers is a role model for actual ways of constructing a community might best deploy their time by sneaking off to a darkened cinema, and stay there ...

(Below: Jim Backus as Jimmy Dean's dad in Rebel Without a Cause. Enough with the apron Jim, it's not the kind of positive parenting we need these days).