{"id":562,"date":"2004-04-01T00:37:54","date_gmt":"2004-04-01T04:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2004\/04\/01\/violent-anachronism\/"},"modified":"2007-02-13T20:21:36","modified_gmt":"2007-02-14T00:21:36","slug":"violent-anachronism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2004\/04\/01\/violent-anachronism\/","title":{"rendered":"Violent anachronism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a1203'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Since I just wrote something about houses and bodies and frightening transformations and medieval fairy tales and classical myths, I have to add that I found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hyperorg.com\/blogger\">David Weinberger&#8217;s<\/a> link, offered on March 29 in his posting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hyperorg.com\/movabletype\/mt-tb.cgi\/1694\">Hyenas on Leashes<\/a>, beyond bizarre.  (N.B.: I&#8217;ve never gotten the hang of doing trackbacks, sorry if this one doesn&#8217;t work, and that particular permalink doesn&#8217;t seem to want to work either, but at any rate, David&#8217;s entry is March 29 1:23pm.)<\/p>\n<p>He links to <a href=\"http:\/\/boingboing.net\/2004\/03\/27\/hyenas_and_baboons_f.html\">this<\/a>, which comes via a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bizarsite.nl\/Nigeriaanse%20geld%20ophalers.html\">Dutch site<\/a> that offers 2 additional pictures.  Take a look.<\/p>\n<p>These particular combinations of man and animal looked to me like some kind of awesome (and really scary) medieval bestiary, or an illustrated mythology: griffons, centaurs, that sort of thing.  Not that medieval bestiaries scare me, but these photos looked scary the way some medieval peasant might have been awed by a bestiary.  They looked fantastic and <i>unnatural<\/i> somehow, and I&#8217;ve been trying to jog the old brain to come up with why they should appear as such (to me, anyway).  Is it the implied violence?  But then, why would a Darth Vadar style futuristic get-up inspire less fear &#8230;?  And the latter does inspire less fear in me: pictures of guys in uniforms with big weaponry don&#8217;t have the power to frighten me in the same way.  Why?  Because we&#8217;ve become used to our technologies, which are packaged largely as consumer goods, to be the purveyors of a violence and disruption <i>we believe we can tame economically<\/i>, but when faced with an image that reaches back in time, a whole new <i>frisson<\/i> makes its way up the spine?   Shouldn&#8217;t the guy with the automatic weapon be scarier?  Do we think that the guy with the automatic weapon is somehow &#8220;nicer&#8221; or <i>saner<\/i> than the guy with the hyena on a leash &#8212; just as we think the guy with the pitbull is probably unbalanced?  But why think anyone with an automatic weapon can be trusted?  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since I just wrote something about houses and bodies and frightening transformations and medieval fairy tales and classical myths, I have to add that I found David Weinberger&#8217;s link, offered on March 29 in his posting Hyenas on Leashes, beyond bizarre. (N.B.: I&#8217;ve never gotten the hang of doing trackbacks, sorry if this one doesn&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}