Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, BOOM!
Amish suicide bomber.
OK, I had to get that out of my system so I can write about what I want to explore, which is the controversy, or furor, or row, if you will, over the filming of the Hollywood movie "Witness" in 1984 here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
I didn't live here then, but I've since heard the stories -- everybody liked Harrison Ford, by the way. Said he was just a regular guy. ("Witness" trivia: It was the first big-screen role for Viggo Mortensen, from the Lord of the Rings movies. Nobody who wasn't on the set seems to remember him, though. Who knew he was Amish? Aragon Stoltzfus.)
That contretemps come back to mind lately because in many ways it offers an enlightening parallel to the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons of Muhammad.
The obvious difference is that the Amish did not act out their outrage by burning the Australian embassy (director Peter Weir is an Aussie), but if you block out that one glaring fact, you can see some interesting things.
Like the Muslims in Europe, the Amish here are a religious minority, one that deliberately sets itself apart from the mainstream culture. They are subject to a certain amount of rough handling in Western secular culture; local jokes abound about their simple-mindedness or lack of hygeine. Unlike the Muslims in Europe, of course, they are not backed up by a huge swath of the globe where their religion rules, nor does their holy scripture promise them dominion over all the Earth and command them to behead nonbelievers. They just sell us scrapple and shoe-fly pie, which is a more humane death by artery-clogging.
When the Amish learned that they were about to be the subject of a Hollywood film, they were astonished. And worried. Why on earth would Hollywood want anything to do with them? They were accustomed to the curiosity of their "English" neighbors, but Hollywood represents to the Amish the apex of the "worldly" culture of sex, violence, selfish individualism, and reckless secularism that they have carefully excluded themselves from in America. These, after all, are people who consider it the height of vanity to simply take pictures or make images of themselves. And suddenly they were about to have Hollywood cameras thrust upon them.
Anyone who has seen the film knows it presents a completely adoring image of the Amish. "Witness" contrasts the seedy and corrupt world of the Philadelphia police department with the pacifist purity of the Amish farmers. But however angelic the vision was, it was imposed from without. The Amish were being used, objectified, taken as a mere a symbol to represent a one aspect of the conflict in the non-Amish world between pacifism and violence.
The case was complicated by the role of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Motion Picture and TV Development, which had solicited Paramount to do the picture, eager for tourism dollars. The Amish may be simple about many things, but they do understand business, and they knew they were being exploited for money by their own state government.
Amish bishops warned their people not to participate in any way in the film. The film didn't nned them anyhow. At every outdoor shoot in Amish country, crowds of Plain folk gathered to watch out of curiosity. Kelly McGillis, who was to play an Amish woman, spent several days as a guest at an Amish home without revealing her purpose (to learn how to look and sound Amish) or her identity. When it was learned, she was asked to leave.
When a few Amish bishops sat through the resulting film, their worst fears were confirmed. They were horrified by the scene where Ford, wearing in Amish clothing, kicks ass in a street fight. This was a direct insult to their religion. Plain dress sets the Amish apart from the world more thoroughly than any other thing. Their simple garb is a holy uniform, like a nun's habit or a priest's garb, that establishes group identity and boundaries. What wears plain dress is Amish, and they are a community of faith, and pacifism is at their core. The nuance of the plot -- everyone watching the fight scene in the movie would know that Ford was an actor portraying a Philadelphia police officer disguised as an Amishman, and the inappropriateness of his brawling was the point of the scene -- was immaterial to the Amish.
Weir and a local college professor with ties to the community, John A. Hostetler, clashed repeatedly over the portrayal of the Amish while the film was being made. The Amish attitude and sense of being exploited were well-known to the makers of the film. They went ahead with it anyhow.
After it was made, three bishops and another Amish leader took their protest to the state, but they got no further than the lieutenant governor. At one point there was a threat made to uproot the entire colony and go elsewhere. That got some attention, and the state authorities agreed to not do this sort of thing again. The Amish were satisfied, and the state breathed a sigh of relief, because "Witness" was able to be released without protest. It grossed tens of millions of dollars and spiked Lancaster County tourism so sharply that it has only recently begun to fade.
Few people -- if any -- outside the Amish community have raised any objection to the film. The film was within the bounds of propriety of the culture that produced it, even if it was well out of bounds for the culture that was its topic. That, it seems to me, is the essential point. Yes, the right to public speech and artistic freedom entail responsibilities. But those responsibilities are primarily to the standards of one's own culture. Sensitivity to the culture of the "other" is a desirable thing, but it is not a trump.
I was wondering when somebody would raise Witness (1985), because it's an obvious, interesting and appropriate case for comparison.
I think the rights of the Amish were less because they are less violent than others and less aggressive in all sorts of ways, and the rights of Islam are more than those of other religions because Islam is more aggressive, violent and all-round dangerous than other religions.
That's unfortunate.
In Knights in white armour (1996, Hutchinson, London), Christopher Bellamy proposes in his Conclusion: revised principles of war and peace a new principle five (p. 231): "Fifth: go with the flow. ... Rowing against the tide is a bad bet." He delicately avoids spelling out what he means in a clear way, but in context (with examples such as ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia) the intention is clear: peace-keepers shouldn't favour the weaker side in a conflict (regardless of alleged rights and wrongs), rather the way to minimise conflict is to avoid challenging those who can and will react violently if their will is checked, and let losers ... lose. Turn a deaf ear to their complaints, and you'll have less trouble.
This appears to be what the British have accepted as a practical principle, abroad (as in Iraq), and even at home. Police have based aggrieved fox hunters to pulp, because it was easy and safe to do so, but Muslims threatening others have been more or less above the law from the time of the riots against Salman Rushdie on. (It's those who go against the Muslim protesters who are vulnerable to police action.)
It's the same in Australia. Muslim Lebanese rape gangs and other thugs who go to the same mosques have grown confident and aggressive in an environment of go-softly policing, while police batons never seen before were employed in numbers against surfies. While some surfies are criminal yobs (and those who got bashed on that occasion surely deserved it - I have no sympathy for rioters), lots of Aussie surfies are as harmless as the Amish (if much less moral), and this has a lot to do with their having lesser rights in practice.
Going with the flow is the easy option, and it's sometimes the only practical option. It's the natural option for a post-modernist society that can't easily say: "this is right and we're going to satand up for it, though the cost may be high." But as a general, pervasive policy of applied justice, which is what we in the West tacitly have settled on, I think it's fatally flawed.
"Going with the flow" means the stealthy abolition of individual rights, such as the right to speak your mind safely. And even between communities such as the Amish and Muslims (who are acting globally as an aggrieved collective regardless of sectarian differences) it systematically rewards the worst with a degree of practical domination over others, while putting the easiest to get along with in a subordinate position, where they are at best indulged petitioners.
The long term effect of favouring dangerous collectives over harmless individuals cannot be good.
Those insane Amish! Will they ever cease their quaint madness?
It's exactly like that time that the Catholics blew up the NBC studios and held wild bloody riots for weeks and weeks because of that Sinead O'Connor stunt with the Pope's photo.
Remember: ALL religious ideas are EQUALLY dangerous.
Well Ben, I find more dangerous those religions that justify murder of infidels and plundering of their countries, but it is just my opinion.
> Few people -- if any -- outside the Amish
> community have raised any objection to the
> film. The film was within the bounds of
> propriety of the culture that produced it,
> even if it was well out of bounds for the
> culture that was its topic. That, it seems to
> me, is the essential point. Yes, the right
> to public speech and artistic freedom entail
> responsibilities. But those responsibilities
> are primarily to the standards of one's own
> culture.
And that makes making money off of and the discracing of the Amish OK? In the end, did the movie really need to be made? No. But, as long as most of us are OK with it that is really all that matters to a society.
Of course if the Amish decided to put a sniper round in the head of each of the producers more people would have cared that they didn't want it to be made. And that is one point of all this. Fear makes people comply to your demands. This fear can be used for "good" (police, military) or "bad" (police, military, thug, islam).
Very few people go into a job where they can protect our society and possibly die doing so. The rest of us really don't have the courage to do that. Or else that is what we would be doing. And it is interesting how we say "freedom is good", yet are so unwilling to even just say those words in a way that could get us killed. Not pick up a gun and serve in the military, just say something like "I don't believe in Islam and I feel Mohammad does not speak for God. And it really disgusts me when I think about the age of his last wife."
How many people believe that, but wouldn't dare publish it in a paper with their name? The cartoons were not really about Mohammad or Islam. They were about people letting fear control what they say and and what they think. We at times try to rationalize the fear with "They are justified in hating us" or "I shouldn't have provoked them". That way we can cower down and not feel defeated. But, that fear still censors our words and thoughts.
That is why we are OK with disgracing the Amish. And why we need to look into our hearts of fear.
Do the Amish watch movies? And don't these events actually support their belief that separation from the world is the only way to live?
There is no such thing as "shoe-fly pie," which sounds as if one throws one's shoe into the batter. It's spelled "shoo-fly," for reasons that are obvious given the pie's high molasses content.
That is all.
Excellent points, Arrow. I wish I had written that instead of my rather lame conclusion.
And Grandma is quite right about "shoo-fly." My bad, though my version is consistent with my mental perception of the taste of it when I'm forced to eat it.
Well, we have now the perfect excuse for all our warring interventions in the ME.
Look, the West prints a few cartoons a couple times, and riots and burning embassies is the reponse.
So, when the Muslim presses print death to the infidel, die American Satan, kill the white cowboys, and Jesus was just a prophet and not the Son of God, and blast it all over Jazeera TV and the others all year long, why invading with the air force, abrahm tanks, and large infantry forces is an equivalent response.
Gee, finally I understand why the war on terror is on as it has been!
(Any on the left want to tell me again why printing the cartoons was uncalled for, or how it should never have been done ? I bet not. This shut them up in chat so quickly you could hear a pin drop. )
:-)
Are the Muslims going to stop their presses now ?
Don't expect the self flattering screwballs on the left to even acknowledge that fair is fair.