What stunned my class most about the book was the casual attitude the characters had toward slavery. I mean, how could they not know that slavery was an evil? Nothing could have been more clear to us, nothing. Slavery was pretty much the most evil thing we could think of, and it was mind-blowing to imagine that this wasn’t vividly reflected in the experience of our ancestors.
And so we figured that people back then must have been hateful and stupid monsters, willfully acting in their own best interests at the cost of others. And so we judged everybody in the book, imagining ourselves morally superior to the louts, trolls and insane people who populated the past.
But this didn’t make any sense.
There was absolutely no reason for me to think I had a more finely developed sense of morality than anybody who came before me. There must have been some decent people who participated in slavery and had no idea that what they were doing was wrong, no? They were simply living in the world into which they were born, and to them slavery, like the weather or landscape, was an unexamined fact of life rather than a conscious act of moral will.
This seemed clear to me. I was not unique. I was like everybody else, and that, of course, is a very scary thing to admit to oneself.
Technology has accelerated and amplified our culture in ways that are inconceivable. Every year it seems that the world has changed more than in all the previous millennia stacked before it. It’s dislocating, and I often think of technology, in particular our online lives, as an emergent dimension we don’t yet understand or know how to interact with. Whenever we’re uncomfortable or bored with our physical lives, however briefly, a smart phone serves as a magic wand we can wave to take us to this other realm, and put in that context, none of us should be surprised to find discontent, even anger there.
Our desire for social justice has far outstripped our ability to deliver it, and in many ways I see ideological conflicts as dimensional clashes rather than moral ones. By the standards of today, so much of what we as a society did just ten years ago seems appalling, but as we judge it’s worth remembering that ten years ago we had no idea what we were doing was wrong or unfair. We were just operating within the framework of time and place. So how then to police this if every generation, indeed, every person, is going to be witlessly complicit in ghastly acts ?
Of course, revolution is not about justice, it’s about change.
And as the future and the past battle for supremacy in a ruined present, it seems that the only way it can end, the only way it has always ended, is like in a Shakespearean tragedy—everybody on stage dies, and then, the world purified and laid bare, is seized by those, now done with watching, who had been waiting in the wings.
]]>He may not have been the “best” Bond, but he was my Bond, the one I grew up with.
My parents used to take me to his movies regularly, and it was always a thrill. The iconic, deadly cool theme music, the risque opening in which you could kind-of-and-kind-of-not see naked women, and then the whole camp fantasy of being a handsome and unflappable spy– it was all immensely appealing to a boy on the cusp of puberty.
Kind of like a Wes Anderson film, the Bond movies starring Roger Moore were a child’s vision of the adult world — a comic book fantasia made manifest, but one that promised to be safe, free from the dreary weight of all the unimaginable day-to-day realities that lay ahead.
I was 13 when Moonraker came out. Jaws, a lurching behemoth with steel fangs, was the primary villain, and he was awesome. At the end of the film, after Bond had coasted to victory and Jaws was pulling himself out of the rubble of some foiled plan, a tiny blonde– busty, pigtailed and bespectacled– appeared to help him. Jaws turns and smiles, his metal teeth glinting, and she smiles back. It’s love at first sight, and they then exit into some charming and eccentric future together.
What I remember, and what everybody I have asked remembers about this scene, is that the woman ( Dolly) had braces. This was what connected the two. In spite of their size difference, they were soul mates in braces. It was the sort of thing a 13 year-old kid, the type of kid who might actually have had braces, and that the movie was trying to appeal to, instantly related to. All of us watching, in the midst of our tortured, monstrous throes of puberty, hoped to find a Dolly, too. It was something that resonated deeply and stayed with us.
Anyhow, in returning to the YouTube clip of the scene, I saw that it was clear that Dolly did not have braces.
I mean, I had been fucking positive she had braces.
This braces-less reality seemed utterly impossible to me, like discovering I was a Replicant and not a human at all, but there it was.
No braces.
Anyhow, if like me, you remember Hannibal Lecter saying, “Hello, Clarice,” or Darth Vader intoning, “Luke, I am your father,” or Sally Field shouting, “You like me, you really like me!” while accepting an Oscar, then you have apparently experienced what I have just discovered is known as the Mandela Effect.
Now what the Mandela Effect is, is complicated, Internet complicated, and it’s layered in the sort of conspiratorial proofs that only online culture can provide.
Dive deep, if you wish:
Without tunnelling into the rabbit holes surrounding this phenomena, I will simply say that what clearly emerges from all this is that our memory, be it individual or collective, is incredibly unreliable. Sometimes, what we believe to be true, what we know in our bones to be true, what even our tribe agrees is true, is not true. Memory is mysterious, a product of our consciousness that is constantly being constructed and revised, existing as a work in progress rather than some immutable photograph we can reference at will. Everything is in flux, and the truth, as unpalatable as it is, is that we know nothing for sure, and are very, very easily manipulated. In the furious age of Trump, it’s wise to keep this in mind before launching a scorched earth assault on anything that might contradict our world view. We would all benefit from a little less certainty and a little more kindness, I think.
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