Category: current affairs

Art

My Personal Hall of Fame

This is purely personal pique on my part, but in the recent round of nominations for the rock’n’roll hall of fame, YES was one of the bands being put forward.  I would like to be able to say “much to my surprise” they didn’t make it.  But I’m not surprised, just disappointed.

Which is silly, because I could not care less about the hall of fame.  I know what I like, a lot of it was at one time on the fringes of mainstream, things I choose now still tend to be under-the-radar kinds of things (though much less rock than in previous decades), and I still have my loyalties.  To be sure, there are bands I kind of listen to now, having at one time been massively devoted to (for a week or a year), and wonder what I found so wonderful about them.

But there are a handful I never tire of, especially not the work done in their heyday.  And YES is one of them.  I fell in love with that sound four bars into the first song I ever heard of theirs and even though they’d recorded some duds, made a couple of records of incomprehensibly bombastic ambiance, by and large, overall, I still love them and when they release a new album I buy it, unheard.  Even in their worst, I find things of transcendent beauty scattered throughout.

I’ve written about them before, most notably here , and I don’t really have anything new to say.

Except that I found, here and there, some commentary on the intraweebs concerning their nomination that was mean-spirited and depressing.  I thought, are we still doing that after over four decades?

KISS made it.  Good for them.  They worked hard, they have a large fan base.  I can’t stand them myself, but it’s a big world, room enough for everyone.  If I wanted to, I’m sure I could get downright eloquent about how I feel that sort of music did nothing but lower the general I.Q. and bring down the standards of music.  But it wouldn’t be just about KISS and it wouldn’t be just about certain strains of rock music.

But YES seemed to have made enemies back in the day, people who believe any attempt at elevating the genre above anything more than the old 3-chords-and-a-bridge formula was somehow a betrayal of “authenticity.”  People who turned to rock because they despised classical (or more likely because they didn’t “get” classical) and not only tore at the reputations of YES but at the very idea of progressive rock as a movement.  It doesn’t make sense to me, but…

But music is too personal for the kind of total condemnations or complete annointments it often elicits.  I love YES but I also love Santana.  Not only that, but I’m inordinately fond of Mozart, Schubert, and Howard Hanson.  Not only that, but I’m a devotee of Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Joe Pass.  I love Vangelis as well as Jimi Hendrix, and Joe Satriani is to my ear as much a virtuoso as   McCoy Tyner or  Immanuel Ax.

Such are the inductees into my own hall of fame, of which YES has been an honored member since 1970.

Thank you for indulging me in a brief declaration of personal taste.

culture

War On Christmas?

By now most people know about the flap over FOX News person Megyn Kelly’s absurd remarks concerning the ethnicity of (a) Santa Claus and (b) Jesus.  Actions within the DMZ of the annual War On Christmas have reached new levels of ridiculous.

I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but…

Santa Claus is white?  Really?  After all this time, we’re going to have that debate?

If you must know, Santa Clause is your favorite uncle dressing up in a red suit and bellowing joyously at a key moment in your life.  What color is he?  What nationality?  Whatever you answer, then you know what color Santa Claus is.

Santa Claus is not St. Nicholas.  Not because an argument cannot be made that the legends of St. Nikolaos of Myra (or Bari, depending which one prefers) can’t be construed as the model for the modern Saint Nick, Sinterklaas, aka Santa Claus, but because Santa Claus, culturally, is something else altogether by dint of centuries of “drift” and the compiling of other attributes of distinctly non-Christian provenance.   Like Christmas itself, the two long ago became Something Else.  (The modern Santa Claus is more descended from pre-Christian Germanic Odin than anything Christian.  Christmas itself, as we practice is, is from the Yule celebrations of the same pagan tradition.)

Jesus…well, really, does this actually need explaining?

But the question is, does all this constitute any kind of “War On Christmas”?  I don’t see Christmas suffering a bit.  It is now as has been since I can remember a time of family, of friends, of fellowfeeling, of charity, corny music, decorations, and the setting aside for a day, a week, a month of petty differences to embrace one another.  I haven’t seen much evidence that we’re doing any less of this than ever before.

What there is some struggle over is the idea that some people have it wrong and that those who think they have it right have some kind of obligation to shame the rest of us into accepting their version above any other.  Failing that, they then take it upon themselves to take our indifference to their dogmatic myopia as evidence of a war on Christmas and launch a counterattack by pissing and moaning about…

Well, frankly, about style.  As far as I can tell, they don’t like what other people’s Christmas looks like.  For one, we seem to have these other traditions all mingled in—Hannukah and Kwanza—distorting and “sullying” their vision, as if it’s all some kind of banquet hall and they object to the decorations.

I suppose what really bothers me this time is the flat out racism in evidence.  Santa Claus is white, get over it.  Jesus is white, historical fact, too bad about all you other people who think it might be otherwise.

Seriously?

Let me ask, in all seriousness, what color is the human heart?  I don’t mean the muscle, I mean the essence of our sentiment.  What color is that?  Because I was raised to believe that both Santa Claus and Jesus were all about the human heart, about healing it, about nurturing it, about celebrating it, which makes it an essential aspect of our commonality.  After discarding much of the silliness of both icons, I still find inspiration and succor in that basic truth.  I think that part is a good idea and how it is celebrated is irrelevant alongside the idea that it is celebrated.

And that has no color.  No ethnicity.  No politics, no religion, no ideology.  Just you and me and who we love and who we wish to love and the desire that love be the universal attribute by which we know ourselves.

So if there’s a war on Christmas, it is being prosecuted by those who keep insisting that there can be only one way to celebrate it.  Such people are truly small of spirit, and now it appears they’re bigoted as well.

Which is really sad.  Look at the opportunity being passed up in this, of getting outside your tiny enclave of conspiracy-driven paranoia and siege mentality and finding out that maybe those people down the street you’re not sure about are really kind of cool and interesting.  Being so publicly obsessed withe tropes instead of getting down with the True Meaning of the Holiday is just dumb and more than a little hateful.

Christmas is what we make it, out of the feelings of sharing and discovery and renewal.  It’s about being open and forgiving and generous and for one day out of the year setting aside differences and realizing that, in a very basic way, there aren’t any.  It’s about letting in the idea that we can be better together than alone and that shared joy multiplies and that there ought to be no limits on that.  It’s a Technicolor time.

It shouldn’t be whitewashed.

culture

Boycotts and Bully Boys

I’m not going to the theater to see Ender’s Game, not because I’m boycotting it or Mr. Card, but because I don’t care enough about it to spend coin on it.  Of course, that can be said of 99% of the movies released in the last couple of decades—we don’t go to the movies anymore.  It’s a habit we got out of shortly after buying a house.  Priorities, y’know?

Not that I don’t eventually see them.  (We finally saw The Time Traveler’s Wife this past weekend, long after it’s theatrical release.  A couple of weeks back we saw Cloud Atlas at a friend’s house.)  We get there, eventually, but we aren’t driven by the mass energy of the zeitgeist.  It has benefits.  Seeing things well after the initial hype and scurry allows for a calmer, less media-driven appreciation.  We see it when we’re ready.

I doubt I’ll ever be “ready” to see Ender’s Game in that for decades now I’ve encountered a low-level of discussion about the novel and, more recently, its author, that “distance” is not something achievable in the sense of seeing it when controversy is not hanging in the air, like the smoke from a dozen cigars shortly after their users have left the room.  Ender’s Game is one of those novels that have acquired a kind of cultural mass, a displacement quotient, around which debate, reaction, argument, and controversy orbit.  Dune is one of those, but for different reasons.  (Outside the genre examples of this abound—think Catcher In The Rye, Ulysses, Atlas Shrugged.)  The mention of them in the right group triggers what eventually become standard, predictable set-piece conversations, and one counts status points and self-defines socially/politically/culturally by one’s stance vis á vis how one feels about the subject.  They take on lives of their own.  You could almost put them down on guest lists or schedule them as part of the entertainment over dinner.

I read Ender’s Game in the early 1980s, I don’t remember exactly when.  I remembered the novelette from which it was expanded as being one of the better stories in Analog in the Seventies.  My reaction?  I enjoyed it thoroughly.  It was a good ride.  I went on to read several more Orson Scott Card novels, eventually losing interest in him.  I felt the sequel to Ender’s Game—Speaker For The Dead—was a superior novel, much more substantive than the first.  I did not then nor do I now think either was Card’s best work.  I went through a phase of OSC and moved on.  (He wrote a series of superb short stories early in his career, which are still, some of them, masterpieces.)

Now the movie is coming out and so has Mr. Card, apparently, and guess what?  He’s become a lightning rod of controversy because he is not much like his landmark stories.  He is a very openly homophobic man and apparently one of those who talks blithely about governmental overthrow if the country doesn’t go the way he thinks it should.

(I say “blithely” because we hear this all the time and often from people who are so engaged with things as they are that it is difficult if not impossible to take them seriously.  It has all the significance of a child threatening to run away from home or stop breathing if things don’t conform to expectations.  It’s a way of attracting a certain kind of attention.  Someday the rest of us may learn that the best way to deal with this is to ignore them.)

How many other people does this sound like?  We may personally know someone who thinks and talks this way.

And most of the time it never comes up.  The plumber might be a Tea Party idiot, but since we never talk politics with him, we never know, and hell, he does good work.  If someone else informs us that he is a political idiot, do we automatically stop using his services?

Boycotts are being called for with regard to OSC.  In one instance, pains have been taken to distinguish between this and any kind of censorship.  It’s not his ideas being boycotted but the man himself, by denying economic support.  A fine line, that, and there is a difference, because ideas can’t be so constrained according to the moral calculus of our political standards, but we can always choose freely what we do or do not spend our money on.  The difference is real, of course, but so is the fact that in public action ideas tenaciously refuse to be teased free of their purveyors, so to attack the one (economically) is to impact the other (dialectically).

I won’t be joining any boycotts.  To my mind, a boycott is personal.  I choose what to spend my money on and that makes it personal.  By joining an organized boycott, it no longer is personal, not in the same way.  It’s political, and mass political movements have a tendency to lose the kind of finesse and nuance the personal necessitates.  Because your personal viewpoint necessarily becomes subsumed in the politics of a movement and dissension from the movement aut0matically becomes suspect by the larger group.  Conformity evolves, individualism becomes confused then lost, and what began as a specific protest of a specific thing becomes a cookie cutter that divides the public from the private in a regrettably destructive way.

Further, this is coming painfully close to book banning.  I know, no one is calling for that, in fact so far everyone is very carefully denying that is what is going on.  But it’s not very many steps between boycotting one movie, one book, one author and boycotting a body of work and then arguing that said body of work should not be “supported” (available) and removing it from…

So it goes.  Suddenly the socially conscious, liberal minded, civil rights oriented boycotters morph into thought police.

How likely do I think that is to happen here?  Not very.  But that’s not argument against refusing to participate in the boycott.  Just because in this instance it won’t happen doesn’t make the process any less odious.

This is a purely personal viewpoint.   I won’t join or support a popular boycott like the one being called for against Orson Scott Card because by doing so I lose a certain amount of control over what I might mean by not spending coin on him or his work.

And besides, Card himself stated it—such protests put more money in his pocket, because controversy attracts profits in this game.  Catcher In The Rye might never have become the phenomenon it did had it not been banned.  The wrong kind of attention was paid it and boom! it’s a cultural icon.  Regardless the quality of the book.

My personal opinion about Ender’s Game has been consistent since a few years after originally reading it when I realized that it was—is—manipulative, button-pushing, and fundamentally flawed.  It depicts scenarios of responses to bullying that are devastatingly gratifying and wholly implausible and unsupportable.  It is a well-written rollercoaster ride that I enjoyed at the time of reading that later left a bitter aftertaste.  I thought it only worth praising because of its sequel, which is a novel of redemption and expiation, a startling portrayal of guilt and responsibility and an argument for tolerance.

Which is ironic, since the work portrays a level of empathy and compassion the public statements of the author belies.  The man who wrote Speaker For The Dead is not the same as the one who seems bent on revolution in order to prevent gays from being able to live as equals in a human society.

Unless…and this is a wicked thought, but not inconsistent with some of the great monsters of religious thought down through the ages…unless the whole purpose of Speaker For The Dead  is to argue that such redemption is the whole point of the series.  That Ender is not sorry for what he (unknowingly) did to the Formics so much as willingly embracing his rôle as a Shiva Christ.  His fate, his destiny is to shoulder that responsibility, not avoid it—not wish he had never done it—but to immerse himself in the total package of destroyer and mourner.

And one cannot mourn what is not lost.  So the Formic had to perish so he, Ender, could be St. Stephen.

Which makes it not so much an argument for tolerance, belated or otherwise, but an argument that the goal of human enlightenment is to wallow in the shame of unbridled destruction.

(In a way, this is much like the many cults of the Native American the United States has embraced in the last century and a half, cults that romanticize and eulogize the vanished Indian, appraisals that could not exist the way they do without the very destruction of the Indian they seem to mourn.  The Indian had to die in order for this peculiarly American form of self-flagellation to be enjoyed and enshrined in film.)

Not something, to my mind, which should be shoved off the stage, boycotted into oblivion.  That is something that needs to be discussed, at length, so we can recognize it when we encounter it.

culture

Spoiled Children

“If I don’t get my way I’m gonna hold my breath till I turn blue and die!”

Or some variation thereof.

Am I talking about children?  Of a sort.  I’m talking about congressional Republicans, actually, because that’s about what this current confrontation amounts to.

Very simply, there is a rock-solid block of opposition to President Obama that can only be described as perverse.  Nothing he does is acceptable to a certain cadre of these folks, even if it was originally an idea from the GOP.

When the ACA was being constructed, they derailed single payer, brought in industry deal-breakers, did everything they could to make sure their constituents (read: Big Pharma, Big Med, etc) continued to receive inordinately large slices of the health care spending pie at the expense of a sane program, and, under Obama’s direction, assembled this lurching Frankenstein critter themselves, and have been bitching about it ever since.  They did not want to pass any kind of national health care program, in fact they wanted to take apart the existing ones (MediCare and, most especially, MedicAid), and maybe they thought Obama would veto the beast they built.

He didn’t.  It actually has a lot in it that has turned out to be popular.  That which may be less so or may not work well, will be corrected over time, just like every other program of this sort.  MediCare/MedicAid was a stumbling mess when it was first enacted, but over time it has been modified until both programs work fairly well.  (It took a Republican to recomplicate matters with MediCare Part D, but…)

But the fact is, this is the law.  Not only that, it passed Constitutional muster.  It is the law.  Not only that, the GOP ran partly on repealing the ACA, and Obama was thoroughly re-elected.  It is the law.  The people, in aggregate, have spoken.  It is the law.

Now, it’s not like we haven’t repealed laws before when they proved bad or ineffective.  It’s not like we haven’t changed laws to make them more in line with our expectations.  It’s not like if the ACA isn’t dealt with right now, there will never be a chance again to do something with it.

But there’s a method, a process, a protocol.

I have never liked the back-door method of defunding or underfunding programs voted on in order to keep them inoperative and cause them to function so poorly that people will support their repeal.  It’s a cheat.  It happens quite a lot.  This may be the most high profile example of the attempt yet.  It’s a tantrum thrown by children who haven’t gotten their way.

Sometimes you can debate who started what fight, but the fact is the House has voted over 40 times to repeal “Obamacare” and has lost each time.  How any of them imagined filibustering the entire government over this was in any way defensible beggars the imagination.  To then turn around and say that the President won’t negotiate is ludicrous.

Look, it doesn’t matter if you don’t like the ACA or the idea of it, the fact is we voted on this and it is now the law.  Put your grown up pants on and live with it until, by due process, you can change the law.  Due process.  The system has spoken and you lost.

Boehner, for his part, is an ineffective speaker.  He cannot control his own caucus.  He’s terrified of losing the speakership, so he’s now in a position in which he has to distort the entire process to accommodate less than 40 representatives who are the well-known tail wagging the baffled dog.  In fact, he’s now putting forth such transparent distortions of the truth one wonders what became of the otherwise fairly reasonable congressman.

Obama cannot yield.  This cannot be established as an acceptable tactic.  This is the very definition of minority rule.

All because…

Well, there are a number of theories, but overall it seems because a faction has determined that, though they are a part of it, Government is incapable of doing anything beneficial and the only way to go is to kill it.  We’ve heard that before, from Grover Norquist, but even he is looking at these folks with trembling knees.

They bitch about Entitlement.  What is this if not the full flower of Entitlement?  They feel entitled to school the rest of us on what this country ought to be like.  As if that were not bad enough, they either have no viable vision for what the country should be like or their history is so flawed as to be laughable.  Or cryable.  They know nothing.  They come from districts so jerrymandered that their constituents might as well be clones.  They look at all opposition and see a reflection of their mindset without realizing that they are the ones who will or won’t do everything they accuse their enemies of.  They see the world in terms of conspiracy, in terms of destiny, in terms of some version of history that one might find in the cheapest sort of political thriller, unresearched and fecklessly inept.  They stand up for values of which they have no understanding.

They are acting like spoiled children who never learned how to play with others.  Even their Wall Street supporters are beginning to look at them with alarm.

They didn’t get their way.  Now nobody will get what they want.

I take some small comfort in realizing that this, too, will pass, and they will enter the history along with other factions of discord and ineptness.  I’m just waiting for their “Have you no shame” moment.

And if they don’t know what that is, well, that’s a big part of the problem right there.

culture

Colloquial For “Why, I Didn’t Mean Nothin’ By It!”

I confess when everyone started talking about Paula Deen this past week, I had a moment or two of complete cultural disconnect.

Who?

Oh, she writes cookbooks and does a show on Food Network.  Hm.  So what?

I’m still not altogether sure what she did, what trial she spoke at where she rather obliviously let it be known that she thinks using the N-word is just fine.  I’m not really interested enough in her—or any other cooking personality—to give much of a damn.  I don’t read cookbooks (I have several, I couldn’t tell you who wrote them) and I don’t watch Food Network (we don’t have cable or dish), so this is a part of the popular zeitgeist of which I am rather oblivious.

But I do work in a bookstore now and Paula Deen has a new book coming out.  I just learned that we won’t be handling it.

Here‘s a good piece on this particular aspect and a good write-up on the controversy.

Reading some of the reportage on this has put me in mind to recall all the casual bigots I’ve known over the years.  In some ways they’re worse than the very up front bigots.  With them you know where they stand.  They pretend nothing.  Take them or leave them and here’s why.  No betrayed expectations.

Casual bigots—the ones who blithely reveal themselves in offhand comments and thoughtless characterizations the problems with which they clearly seem utterly unaware—sucker you in.  You start to like them or you do like them.  You might even find yourself building some kind of relationship with them, which suddenly, at the drop of an epithet, you’re forced to revisit.

It’s worse when you work for them.  Your options become severely limited.

I worked for one such for almost nine years.  He was a gregarious, congenial man with the intellectual depth of a Dick and Jane reader.  Quick with a joke, always ready to see the funny side to anything, a natural-born salesman.

Who never understood why propositioning female customers or remarking that certain folks were okay because really they were white people in black skin wasn’t just, well, fine.

Whenever one of his little racist aphorisms popped out, something primal in my backbrain stirred and I wanted a bar of soap or a leather strop.  He “meant nothing” by them.  So why say it? I’d ask.  Why is that guy (who’s white) an asshole and that guy (who’s not white) some variation of n—-r?  Why can’t they both be assholes, if that’s what you mean?

And he for the life of him couldn’t get past the surface detail that the one was white and the other black.  “So a black asshole is fundamentally different than a white one?”

Eyes would glaze over.  Well, obviously, because, well, he’s black.  Not white.

We went round and round with this for years.  I continued to work there because I’d been working there before he bought the business and I loved the place.  I was committed to it on several levels.  He sorely challenged my devotion.

But I also thought—hubristically, perhaps—that I could turn him around.  I really believed in the power of education, that if I explained it, showed him, that at some point the revelation would occur and…

The problem is, many people, possibly most, live by categories.  They have separate compartments into which the different strategies and judgments they must make to get through a day are stored and rather than think it through each time, they just select among the bins.  At a certain level, this is probably necessary—we all have to function on autopilot at times, else we’d overload our consciousness with decision-tree minutiae that would make coming to any decision impossible.  Daniel Kahneman wrote an excellent book about this, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

But the walls of the compartments are often porous and the arrangement changes over time with new information and understanding.

For the casual bigot, though, particular compartments are very deep and filled with too much crap to be easily discarded, and the particular pathway to those compartments is a well-established trail—rut, really—and getting rid of it would require a major trauma.  (I suspect in some ways dealing with an up front bigot might be easier because the walls are even less porous and it might be possible isolate that compartment and sever the connection completely—but I’m guessing there.)

It’s like the casual sexist who just can’t see what harm there is in thinking the way he—or she—thinks.  After all, they don’t mean any harm, and honey, if you’re gonna be one of them feminazis, why then you’re just lookin’ for somethin’ to be offended by.

Gradually, I began to notice another aspect of his personality.  I’m theorizing here, but the behavior was such that it seems a reasonable conclusion.

Losing a prejudice is directly proportional to knowing people.  How well and how deeply translates to a subsequent inability to discriminate.

I don’t think he really “knew” anyone.  Everything was on the surface.  He went only so far even with people he genuinely liked.

Not, I think, because he couldn’t.  But he’d never had to.  He couldn’t make the leap to stop designating people by surface details and secondary characteristics because he treated everyone as a collection of surface details and secondary characteristics.

When he finally noticed that we’d lost many of our female customers (especially the younger, “attractive” ones), he seemed genuinely confused and I don’t think he ever recognized that his casual intimacies with them—uninvited—had driven them away.  “But they laugh,” he said when I explained to him once how what he’d been saying as his then-current joke was basically sexual harrassment.  They laugh, which to him meant acceptance.  (Of course, when one of our customers complained to me about it and I told her next time to shut him down, well, the moment she did she went from someone he liked to a Bitch.)  He never looked past that laugh to see the shock and nervousness.  It was all surface.

So when someone so entrenched in certain cultural “norms”—like a Paula Deen—makes news for the apparently “innocent” remarks that have been okay in her group and among her “friends” for years, I recall that nine years of education I received in the company of someone who just never Got It.  And I wonder, how well does this person know anyone?  After all, Paula Deen has handlers, she has advisers, she has people whose job it is to make her aware…and if they can’t get through and break down those compartments, then I have to wonder.  Obviously, it caught everyone off-guard, so it’s not like she’s an up front bigot.

I tried to explain a false syllogism once to my boss and after three sentences I glimpsed a brief manifestation of despair—he sensed, I imagine, that this was a concept that would require him to reassess…everything.

And he just wasn’t able to do that.

As for the “Why, I don’t mean nothin’ by it,” defense…well, then why did you say it in the first place?  Are you always that feckless and shallow?  Is there anything you say that you do mean something by?

And if not, then why are you so confused that no one will take you seriously when you apologize?

Absurdity

On The Extraction of Feet From Mouths

I’ve been thinking deeply about the recent eruption of controversy in SFWA over sexism.  Seems just about anywhere we look in the last several years there are examples of men behaving stupidly toward and about women.  While this is nothing new, where it has been cropping up seems surprising.

There have been several incidents, both online and out in the world, within the skeptical community.  The boys came out to try to tell the girls to get their own clubhouse and stop invading what for some reason these males had regarded as somehow the province of people with testicles.  Prominent women—skeptics, humanists, atheists, scientists—have been treated to high school-level chauvinism by males intent on…

On what?

It’s worth reading this article by Rebecca Watson, one of the most prominent women in the active skeptical world.  Some of what she has gone through seems totally bizarre, of the “what planet did this happen on” variety.  And yet, there it is.  The Thing We (people like me) Had Thought We Were Done With.  Males acting like schoolyard bullies toward women, especially women who claim themselves as individuals with minds, choices, and, apparently, interests that don’t include them.  The boys, that is.

Reading that, someone like me can feel pretty virtuous.  “I don’t think that way!  I don’t do that!  The people I hang with don’t, either, we’ve outgrown adolescence and never were that gauche!”  We might feel that way and some of us might even be justified.

But not all of us.

I’ve been a science fiction reader practically all my life.  I’ve been a professional SF writer since 1990, therefore a member of SFWA.  I have credited science fiction, my early exposure to it, as reason for my awareness of gender issues, my embrace of feminisim, and certainly my affiliation with skepticism, rationality, and—may I say it?—humanist morality.  The circles in which I move resonate with all this as well and over decades a kind of blanket of comforting isolation has settled around me that has buffered me from some of the kinds of bullshit that has evidently been there all along.

There’ve been several instances of sexism over the last few years within the science fiction community, some at an apparently low-level, others fairly significant, culminating in the current Matter At Hand over a series of articles in the SFWA Bulletin (as well as a cover painting for one issue) and the responses prompted concerning them.

Disclaimer:  I tend to ignore the Bulletin anymore.  A lot of the information contained therein is wonderful for beginning writers or those just starting up the ladder of their careers.  Occasionally there’s something technical in an issue worth reading.  But really, it comes because I pay my dues and I go through the Market Report.  Therefore, I had to go find the issues at the center of the storm, dig them out of the pile, and read the pieces in question.

Which means that I absorbed them somewhat in isolation.

Nevertheless, to my complete embarrassment and shame, I misread what was supposed to be the problem.  Then I compounded that failure by defending them.

Not full-faced “what the hell is wrong with you people” defend, just…

The offending articles were two in the long-running series of dialogues by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg about the history of the genre.  These are, for those of you who do not get the Bulletin and don’t know, done as conversations, two guys who’ve been around for a long time, yacking about the Old Days and who wrote what, published where, said that, or did this.  They are framed as personal reminiscence.

Which to my mind is a somewhat different context than a straightforward article about, say, copyright law or manuscript formatting or how to write a cover letter.  It’s a different kind of work and therefore has different parameters.  Like memoir, what the author (or authors) get to talk about and how they talk about it gets more leeway.  Constraints are not as tight, subject and content are more flexible.  To my mind.

So therefore when I read a couple of paragraphs in one of these about a particular editor who was evidently “drop dead gorgeous” and “looked great in a bikini” I thought nothing, or at least very little, of it.  It’s not the same as if it had been a straight up piece about how to submit a story to said editor and had included the aside, “and by the way, when submitting to her, keep in mind she’s a babe!”  Had such a sentence been in such an article, my hair would have stood on end and electric cascades would have run up and down my spine.  What the hell does that have to do with the professional relationship detailed in the article?  And it’s true, that if the article had been talking about a male editor, you would likely never see an equivalent remark “And by the way, when submitting to this guy, remember he has a hell of a package!”

Had you read such a remark, we should all know (if it needs explaining, as it apparently does) that the difference is that in the case of the man it is an irrelevancy but for the woman it is a threat.

More clarity?  While a man might view his “package” as an essential aspect of his identity, society at large does not.  The same cannot be said about a woman and her physical attributes.  Therefore, the inclusion of such a comment about a woman is automatically limiting and de facto sexist.  Because the writer has decided that this is the important fact about this woman and while he (or she) may not intend it to be limiting, there is a whole file cabinet of associated conclusions attached to such a description that gets opened once the statement is made.

Is this a bad thing, you ask?

Well.  As has been pointed out by some over this, good or bad, it is problematic.  Because the message has connotative force in the negative.  Because, unfortunately, for too many people, “looks great in a bikini” is the beginning and end of any worthwhile description.  All else becomes secondary.  Tertiary.  Immaterial.  Distracting.

Welcome to Gor.

My mistake was in not recognizing this essential fact.  That intent doesn’t matter when there is ample information that such a phrase will be taken as a threat by a great many people.*

Resnick and Malzberg also consistently qualified who they were talking about.  “Lady writers” and “lady editors.”  Again, my context filters were on.  I thought, that’s who these guys are, they’re from a generation that would consider that a polite cognomen, what’s the big deal?  Forgetting, as I read, how qualifiers play into limiting people not of the majority culture in, say, ethnicity.  The main subject of the two articles was “Women In Science Fiction”—why the continued use of a label which served only to underscore a “specialness” that is not necessarily positive in the context of professional circles?  While the substance of what they had to say was overwhelmingly laudatory (Alice Sheldon was held up to be as good as Alfred Bester and at no point did a phrase like “well, she was really good for a woman” appear) that continual qualifier became a kind of apology.  In the context of a reminiscence, it was indicative of the character of the two authors—quaint, a “cute” term—but outside that context, it is like continually using the term “black writer” in a piece about African American Writers.  We already know the people being discussed are black, the only reason to continually use the qualifier is to make a point of difference.  Do it enough, the difference becomes the only relevant factor.

I missed all this and shrugged it off.

The other article was, in fact, a How To piece, in which Barbie was held forth as a model for professional behavior.  Now, I can see how the author thought this was tongue-in-cheek, a clever, satirical way to make a point, but…

The only excuse for this is carelessness.

Well, maybe not the only excuse.  Intentional, programmatic sexism is certainly possible.

Barbie cannot be a model for any kind of self-aware, in control, self-directed person.  Other People have always determined, right down to the color of plastic used, what Barbie is, will be, or can be, and this point should have been obvious.  The use of a toy in a prescriptive article, aimed at women, can only be…well, problematic.

Two things here.  The first is, I’m disappointed.  Science fiction has been for me a font of enlightenment.  I don’t mean by that “everything I know about living I got from science fiction.”  What I mean is, that many of the foundational ideas I consider important in my life first came to me from science fiction.  I had to flesh them out later, from other sources, but something as basic as gender equality first penetrated my adolescent brain from reading science fiction.  So for this to have occurred in the field which gave me my earliest intellectual nurture is profoundly distressing.  It’s almost like hearing someway say “Oh, I just say all that shit in my novels, I don’t actually believe any of it!”

And, no, I am not saying that Resnick and Malzberg are themselves chauvinists.  I suspect they’re shocked and dismayed both by the reaction to what they wrote and hurt by the suggestion that they are sexists.  But they dropped the ball in understanding the context in which they wrote.  (They compounded it by crying fowl and bleating about censorship.  No one called for censorship.  If anything, a call was made for more awareness.)

The president of SFWA made a statement about all this which I think is worth reading.  Furthermore, the editor of the Bulletin has stepped down.

I said two things.  I put my foot in my mouth over this because I also failed to see how things have evolved and how they have played out in the last 40 years.  I imagined that we might reach a time when men and women might be able to recognize and appreciate each others’ sexuality without such recognition in any way acting as threat or limitation.  Because a woman is beautiful (or a man handsome) does not mean she is obligated to be that for the fantasy edification of people she doesn’t know or should be constrained by that fact because others can’t see past the surface.  For many people, physicality is destiny.  Or fate.  And often, when people in possession of certain physical traits act in ways that don’t fit  those fantasy preconceptions, there is a kind of breaking that occurs which is profoundly tragic in that such preconceptions should never have been put in place to begin with.  Limitation goes both ways.  If all you can see is the great bod, the perfect smile, and the lush hair, I feel sorry for you—you’re missing a whole world.

Men don’t see this as a problem, though, and that’s why it’s such a big deal.  Men have never been barred from being anything else they want to be by their looks.  At least, not as far as the larger culture is concerned.  A man is good looking, well, that’s just one more thing in the plus column, lucky bastard!

Women have different experiences with that.

Many men will still not get it.  (No doubt a lot of women, too, though for different reasons.)  What they will see is another demand that we stop enjoying women.  That we must ignore their physicality, their sexuality.  That we must turn our libidos off.  They will see this as another call that we stop being “men.”  That’s not it at all.

Treat women as People first.  Not female People.  People.  It seems so simple, that.  And yet…

Part of the problem in all this is the lack of grasp exhibited by otherwise bright people.  You have to ask yourself, what makes you think that the kind of stuff you’re likely to hear in a bar made suitable copy for a professional journal?  When you insert a sexualized comment in an article about professional people in a given field, you really aren’t talking about them, you’re talking about yourself.

Anyway, I still have a couple of toes to extract, so I’m done talking for now.

One last thing: You’re never too old to screw up, but you’re also never too old to learn from it.

 

_________________________________________________

* Threat?  What threat? I hear some think.  The threat that nothing one does matters if one doesn’t fuck.  That no matter what accomplishments a woman may have, if she’s not also someone interested in, willing, and able to get sweaty with a male who thinks it’s his right and her privilege, then she’s not worth considering.  That any female who seems to think she can be her own Self without this aspect is delusional and that self-selected male has not only the right but the obligation to “show her what she’s missing.”  Basically, we’re talking about rape, implied and actualized, because what matters is the sex.  To be sure, something of this attaches to men as well, but without the element of coercion, which renders it wholly different.  Consider for a moment the most basic difference in attitude regarding “conquests.”  Men who seem to have sex with numerous women acquire, with a few exceptions, a patina of glamor, respect, and envy, while women who engage in a similar lifestyle receive a very different designation and concomitant image and with few exceptions is generally negative.  Furthermore, for men, it is simply one more aspect of their overall image, but for women it almost wholly subsumes anything else about them.  If the boys want the women to stop pointing out their sexism, this will have to change, and the fact that it’s still the case means we have yet to achieve the kind of gender equity men like me thought we were on our way to achieving.

Art

Jack Vance: 1916 – 2013

Jack Vance has died.  Not one of my favorite authors, he nevertheless exerted tremendous influence, even on me, and is more than worthy of our remembrance.  I have written an appreciation over at the Proximal Eye, here.

culture

One Down…

I don’t really have a lot to say about Michele Bachmann other than to note that her decision not to seek reelection seems to be a bellwether for the entire Tea Party movement.  Listening to her over the last several years, especially in her bids for the GOP nomination for president, has been like watching old episodes of the Twilight Zone, where the protagonist wakes up in a world that is similar to but not the same as the one with which he or she had lived in the day before.

Bachmann put herself forward as some kind of Original Intent Constitutionalist during her last campaign, but any examination of what she said and a look at the actual history she was touting seemed to show that her version of what that meant was much like anyone’s version of something they think they understand but haven’t actually studied.  One of her major gaffs was her claim that the Founders had “fought diligently to end slavery.”  I don’t know what was said in her classes about that, but slavery was an off-the-table subject for most of the drafting of the Constitution because everyone knew the southern states simply wouldn’t have anything to do with attempts to outlaw it.  The closest thing to a “diligent fight” among the Founders was an address to congress well after the ratification by an aging and ill Ben Franklin and a few others and then the efforts of John Quincy Adams—son of John Adams, not a Founder—who proved an unpopular one-term president.

Her grasp of the basics of constitutional history seem tenuous at best.  What she did  firmly grasp was the underlying sentiment of those who comprise the staunchest support for the Tea Party—white males with above-average incomes who don’t like taxes.

The Tea Party itself seems to be devouring itself.  We may be seeing its death rattle.  One can only hope.  In terms of social dynamics, the Tea Party’s closest comparison would seem to be one of the extremist groups like the KKK or the John Birchers.  Unlike them, the Tea Party appears more mainstream because it has never espoused racial hatred, so seemed rooted in ideas people could embrace without embarrassment.  But when you look at it, the Tea Party merely replaced ethnic groups with political ideology as the focus for prejudicial treatment.  You can’t accuse them of being racists when it’s not even people they attack but institutions.

Perhaps if they had been more thoughtful about their attacks…

But at base they seem incapable of being thoughtful, at least in aggregate.  One of the reasons they may be falling apart is that individuals who previously identified with them  are  thoughtful and have been finding the movement less and less congenial because of certain unreasonable positions.  They in fact have no solid core to pull people together.  It’s all based on personal prejudice, a poor grasp of realities, and a tacit insistence on absolute individual license—except when it’s for something they don’t like.

What it has been has been a social hissy-fit about the fact that the country is changing and instead of participating in any kind of constructive dialogue to accommodate the inevitable, they dedicated themselves as a group to obstructionism, as if to say “We won’t let anything pass that legitimizes what we don’t like.”

Whether the architects of the movement intended that, this is the result in action.  The Tea Party has lowered public confidence in congress to all-time lows, cost us billions in pointless exercises in ideological spleen, and damaged institutions which previously served necessary functions, all in the name of reinstating a kind of America that seems to exist only in their imaginations.  Imaginations fed more on dinner table jeremiads than actual history.

You can see their lack of real representation in two facts—one, almost all Tea Party candidates benefited primarily from newly gerrymandered congressional districts that went to great lengths to isolate just the right constituency to put them in office.  And even then, fact number two, their greatest successes have all been in midterm elections during low voter turn-out.  The 2010 debacle saw all those Tea Party seats taken with less than a quarter of eligible voters.  In 2012, they began losing those seats.  Bachmann herself barely hung onto hers, and she ran in one of the most tortuously contrived districts in Minnesota.

What successes remain have to do with reactions among independents who are more rationally uncomfortable with some of the policy changes coming down the pike.  Even so, one hopes that people in general are growing weary of the tactics of obstruction which seem to be the only card the Tea Party and its coincidental allies know how to play.  Standing in the way of policy, “just say no” rhetoric, is not policy, it’s irresponsible.

We do need people to represent us who see the world as it is, not dismiss it out of hand and insist on their conception of what it might once have been and could be again, especially when that conception is built on the fabulations of a poor understanding of history and personal prejudice masquerading as thoughtful deliberation.

Farewell, Ms. Bachmann.  Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Absurdity

Bread and Sacred Cows

Anyone who knows me knows I am in general antipathetic toward sports.  I don’t watch it, I don’t follow it, and I could not care less who is winning or losing.  The sun does not rise and set on finals, March Madness, seasons, MVPs, or any of that.  I missed being infected with this particular virus as a child and have never regretted it, as I find the whole thing baffling.

Mind you, I don’t have anything at all against playing sports.  I think more kids should (if they’re allowed in by the jocks, that is).  But watching?

Regardless my feelings about sports as such, my biggest complaint is with the fetishizing of it and the profound cost of such obsession on just about everything.  So much else of considerably more value often goes begging just so a city can have a brand new stadium. Sports, frankly, generates enough income just by being, it does not need tax payer support, and that we grant it any, never mind as much as we do, should be the subject of government hearings.

But what really gets me hot is how much education is distorted by this obsession.

Did you know that, in all likelihood, your state’s highest paid public employee is a coach?

Here’s a delightful article with a colorful chart showing this fact state by state.

Mostly football coaches.

I’m sorry, but—what the fuck is wrong with everybody?  With all that we have slipped behind so many other countries in so many academic areas, exactly how does paying the football coach the highest compensation of any other public employee in a state serve to correct the profound epidemic of DUMB that seems the chief problem facing us today?

The article reiterates the well-established fact that major athletics programs make universities no money.  They cost.

We’re seeing tenure under assault, staffs being cut, tuition rising across the board, and money being spent on something that does nothing to advance the state of learning.  And football?  A moment aside for a personal note of invective.  Traumatic brain injuries, not to mention life-long injuries in general, should place this sport in the same category with boxing.  The group-think, team-spirit lunacy embraced—not by the players but by the fans—would not be a problem if it did not come at the expense of so much else.

(It doesn’t help my attitude that I was once threatened by several members of my high school’s varsity team with being thrown bodily from a third floor window because I expressed the opinion in the school paper that just maybe some other things were perhaps more important than football.)

With all the complaining about wasteful spending we have to listen to from people hell bent on curtailing just about anything useful in education (not to mention the country in general) why do we not hear congress up in arms about this?

Let me be emphatic—when a coach makes more money than a dean of an entire university, something if very, very wrong.  Spin it any way you like, I surely do not want to pay for this kind of crap.

Absurdity

National Day of Idiocy

We should have a National Day of Idiocy to celebrate our rich heritage of public figures who make asinine statements.

I find it both fascinating and revolting how a certain faction reaches for the Holocaust at every opportunity in order to retain their illusion that just about everything that makes them even mildly uncomfortable is part and parcel of the horrible paradigm that led to a slaughter which some of their supporters think never even happened.

The mayor of Charlotte, N.C. declared May 2nd a Day of Reason.  It also happens to be the national Day of Prayer.  While some may see this as pure hype and opportunism, there’s common factor between the two things—both have to do with finding guidance.  I doubt the majority of people see much conflict between prayer and reason—in fact, most would likely conjoin them, if not as philosophical counterparts at least as practical allies—but there are always those who will insist on seeing Evil in everything that is not christian.

So, the Enlightenment led to the Holocaust (because of moral relativism). My my. I suppose that’s why Hitler kept burning books, because he was such an Enlightenment fan boy.

This also overlooks things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Spanish expulsion of Jews, the Thirty Years War, the murder of Giordano Bruno, the Albigensian Crusade…

Of course, all those things were, I suppose, in response to moral relativism?

No, this is typical ahistorical nonsense from people who can’t seem to pull their heads out of the heavenly clouds. It would be laughable if not for its scope. Lamar Smith of Texas is proposing a bill to eliminate peer review in government-funded science programs. It’s a bit more complex than that, but in essence Smith wants technology programs, not basic research, and clearly does not understand how science is conducted or even why it’s important. And he’s on the Science. Space, and Technology Committee. No, wait, he’s the chair of the committee.

Laugh, cry, or go on vacation. The only question is how these people got where they are and have the ability to disrupt so much by sheer assertive nonsense.

What might follow now, as in past posts, would be a lengthy discourse on the nature of reason and why these people are wrong, but I’m tired and really, if you already find what they’re saying and doing crack-brained then you don’t need the lesson. I applaud the mayor of Charlotte for having the chutzpah to declare a Day or Reason in a state that thinks prayer will prevent Obama from being re-elected. (I’ll give you all a minute to digest that.) I’d like to see a few more politicians stand up to the idiocy.

Maybe we should establish a national Day of Lunacy on which we all find someone steeped in misinformation—you know, people who think FOX news is actually news?—and attempt an intervention. Get them to a lecture on the scientific method. Make them watch an episode of NOVA. Take them to lunch with Neil de Grasse Tyson.

What I would very much like to see is a genuine response among enough people matter to defend reason and science and instead of it just being a cool trendy thing that gives us new toys every few years actually elevates the level of national discourse.

Yeah, I still dream occasionally.