Category: Personal

Art

Time For A New Photograph

Long time ago, when I was but a teen, maybe right on the cusp, just getting interested in photography, my father and I sat up one evening to watch a PBS thing about Ansel Adams.  To this day I cannot find that film—it included a project of his photographing a Hispanic family living on a scrub farm, very rural, lots of kids.  He was working with both 4X5 and a Hasselblad.  It was a detailed film, taking the viewer through the whole process, from shutter-click to processing, to printing.  It had a substantial impact on me and I would like to find that film again, but I’ve even been to the Ansel Adams Museum in San Fransisco and they profess not to know what I’m talking about.  I doubt I dreamed it—until that point I had no idea who Ansel Adams was.

In any event, there was a tone and approach to the whole enterprise that impressed me.  The man was meticulous, an artist, and he said the word “Photograph” with a kind of reverence that has stuck with me.  They weren’t “pictures”, certainly not “snapshots”, but PHOTOGRAPHS, spoken with a breathy exhalation on first consonant.  I came to associate the word with the best work, the images that really seem to work.  By that token, I have made very few photographs in my life, at least according to the standards I maintain.

But I’ve reached a point where even the effort to make one merits the appellation, so I tend to call every image I make that is supposed to be serious art (whether it succeeds or not) a Photograph.  Vanity on my part.

For instance:

 

I’d like to flatter myself that this is the kind of image that merits the term.  It’s about the symmetry, the balance of the spaces, and the range of tones.  It takes something ordinary and attempts to transform into both a concrete record and an abstract.  Using black & white strips the image to its compositional elements while at the same time the tonal treatment yields nuance.

Lot of hyperbolic nonsense there.  The main thing is, I like it, it appeals to me, and I hope it’s the kind of thing that will reward multiple viewings.  Like any piece of art, the test is whether or not it exhausts itself after one exposure or if it will stand up to repeated inspection.  That I can’t answer.  Not yet.  A lot of my photographs I enjoy looking at still, many of the older black & whites especially.

Oh, that’s another thing.  I tend to think of a Photograph as black & white.  This is prejudice, pure and simple, and early programming.  I have to consciously regard color works as Photographs—and I do—but when I hear the word I immediately, automatically, think black & white.  Apologies to all the very fine color photographers out there.

Anyway, I thought I’d blow my trumpet this morning and indulge a little self-image fantasizing.  Now we can all return to what we were before.  Thank you for your attention and kind consideration.

culture

The Final Solution

No, this isn’t about The Holocaust (capital H) but about something more gradual, systemic, and pernicious.

Georgia is about to execute Troy Davis.  He was convicted of killing a cop.  There are irregularities in the case, namely a majority of “witnesses” have since recanted their testimony.  The rest of the evidence is circumstantial at best, but the state of Georgia is going to kill him anyway.  He was tried, found guilty, sentenced, and his last appeal was denied.

I have a simple, unsentimental reason for opposing the death penalty.  You can’t take it back.

Here is a list of the people exonerated from Death Row since 1973.  From the late 80s on, DNA has become an important factor, but it is a relatively minor one.  Chief factors include witness recantation, capture of the “real” perpetrator, or review of the trial and findings that the State had done a shabby job.

I do not have a problem with the idea that some people may deserve to die.  Life, in and of itself, is not sacred to me.  It simply is.  And we make choices, some of them bad, and decisions get made that have consequences, and people should be held accountable for their actions.

If I walk into my home and find someone there, uninvited, who is raping my wife, has killed my dog, and will likely kill my wife when he’s finished, and I can do so, I will kill him.  I have no moral qualms about that, nor any question about my right to do so.  (Yes, I will probably have to go to counseling afterward, because the taking of a life under any circumstances is a Big Deal.)

But if I come home and find my dog and wife dead already and a month later someone is arrested for it, tried, and convicted of the crime, I do not want him to receive the death penalty.  Maybe that sounds perverse, but it comes down to two simple caveats:  the State tries and convicts innocent people all the time and I do not have 100% confidence that they can do better and if I can’t be 100% sure, I don’t want someone being sure on my behalf, not in something as final as this.

But secondly, I don’t want the State to wield that power.  Certainly it can be argued that certain crimes are so bad that only death may be proper, but laws change and the crimes under which death is dealt can be determined by politics as much as by justice.  I want the State barred from applying that penalty in all cases because I do not trust that only those crimes with which I may have sympathy will receive it.

In short, basically, if I catch the son-of-a-bitch doing the crime and put him down, that’s fine.  After the fact, I will settle for incarceration because I do not want the State to have the power of life and death, especially since they do not use it fairly, nor is the system sufficient to guarantee they kill only the criminal.  Obviously they do not.

By the same token, I do not have the right to go on my own hunt for someone with the view to exact vengeance.  If the State can’t get it right, how can I?  If I miss the chance by not being there when it is done, I can’t recover it and acting on my own is as bad as the State screwing up.

There are countries where the death penalty is used for adultery or blasphemy.  No, we don’t do that here.  But we do have it for treason, and that, it seems to me, is rife for misapplication.  Society changes, politics is fickle.  We don’t kill people for having sex out of wedlock or cursing or suggesting certain ideas aren’t true.  Today.  I’d rather we begin to accept as a principle that the death penalty is never appropriate and find some other way to deal with our urge for vengeance—because that’s all it really is.  We’ve killed a lot of innocent people with it because we were angry.  Not just.  Angry.

And you can’t take it back if you find out you had the wrong guy.

career

Bouchercon 2011

So I have now attended a Bouchercon.

I’ve attended so many SF conventions that they’ve become, if not normal, at least comfortable.   I pretty much know what to expect.  Bouchercon, while in many ways similar to an SF convention, is different enough that I felt like a newbie and a bit like an outsider.  I don’t know the players, I don’t know all the rules, and I didn’t know what to expect.

There were no costumes, no gamers, no room parties (at least not open room parties), no art show, and an absence of what I like to think of secondary and tertiary effluvia in the dealers room—that is, tables of jewelry and fake weapons and action figures and the like.  The dealers room was almost all books.  There were a few DVDs and CDs, but 95% of it was books and magazines.

By Saturday I felt pretty comfortable.  These are people gathered together for the love of a genre and some of the conversation on the panels bridged the gap to SF, confirming that the critical divisions are not between genres but with an Academic snobbery that basically says if it isn’t James Joyce or Hemingway or Pynchon, it’s garbage.  I understood that and subsequently I could talk to these folks without a translator.

I got to chat (briefly but not frivolously) with Val McDermid and Laura Lippman.  I did attend one publisher’s party, but I ended up leaving soon after arriving because I simply couldn’t hear in the crowd.  An age thing, I think, I’m beginning to lose the ability to separate out voices in groups.

Bought too many books.  Again.  But then I brought more than twice as many as I bought home—there is a big publisher presence in the form of free copies.  I have stacks to go through.

As to that, I feel like I’m starting over.  I am profoundly under-read in mystery and thriller.  I recognized many names but then there were so many more I had no clue about.  But that makes it kind of exciting.  I really do have ideas for this kind of fiction.  It will be great to have a chance to write some of it.

As to whether or not I’ll go to another one…that depends on the status of the career.  Next year’s Bouchercon is in Cleveland.  The year after that, Albany, then Long Beach, and then Raleigh.  If I’m doing well enough, quite likely we’ll go to couple of them.  Wish me luck.

blog

New Directions

I’m attending Bouchercon this week, here in St. Louis.  In the last few years I’ve been drifting toward crime fiction, partly in an attempt to cultivate new fields with a view toward getting my rather stagnant career moving, partly because I’ve always written something like it.

The Robot Mysteries were, as advertised, mysteries of a sort.  Crime was happening in them, investigators investigated, macabre stuff occurred.  There was a bit of it in Metal of Night and a couple of major thefts (and murders) were integral to Peace & Memory.  Certain Remains was a mystery, even with noir elements, and the one, poor orphaned Terminator novel I wrote, Hour of the Wolf, was very noirish in tone.

The alternate history, now making its newly-launched circuit in search of publisher, is very much a murder mystery, wrapped around a bit of steampunk.  I moved on from there to write a novel set in the 18th Century that is pretty much a murder mystery and the last book I finished is a straight up and down contemporary murder mystery.  Plans exist to continue all three into future novels.

So when I wondered to my agent if I should maybe attend Bouchercon (after being reminded by good pal Scott Phillips that it was, y’know, right here in town this year) I got a loud, forceful “Well, yeah!”

So in view of a potential new career, I’m updating my image a bit, trying it on for size, as it were, and seeing how it fits.  I asked Scott what to expect and he said “Well, for one thing, there are no costumes.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but really all we have to do is dress well and we’re in costume.”

To which he laughed and informed me that on average the women dress to the nines and the guys show up in jeans and t-shirts.

Well.  I think I’ll just go as myself.

But there are so many of them that it can be hard to choose…

Tonight the festivities kick off with a pre-Bouchercon get-together in University City at a place called Meshuggah’s where monthly readings take place, a gig called Noir at the Bar.  I’ll be there.

So will my new agent. (One of them, that is—I have two, which is kind of…wow.)  Yeah, despite my attempt at a cool demeanor, I’m jazzed about that.  Of all the “agents” I’ve had, I have only ever met two of them, both shortly before they left their respective agencies and me.

Anyway, I probably won’t post anything till next week.  I’m stepping off the platform to head in a new direction.  Here’s hoping it takes me where I want to go.

culture

9/12

I didn’t write anything for yesterday’s commemoration.  Many others, most far better suited to memorializing the day, said a great deal.  My paltry mutterings would add little to what is, really, a personal day for most of us.  Like all the big anniversary events, the “where were you when” aspect makes it personal and maybe that’s the most important part, I don’t know.

Instead it occurred to me to say something about the element of the disaster that puzzles most of us, even while most of us exhibit the very trait that disturbs us deeply in this context.  One of the most common questions asked at the time and still today is in the top 10 is: how could those men do that?

Meaning, of course, how could they abandon what we consider personal conscience and common humanity to perpetrate horrible destruction at the cost of their own lives.

The simple answer is also the most complex:  they were following a leader.

I’m going to string together what may seem unrelated observations now to make a larger point and I will try to corral it all together by the end to bring it to that point.

Firstly, with regards to the military, there are clear-cut lines of obligation set forth, the chief one being a soldier’s oath to defend the constitution.  There is a code of conduct consistent with that and we have seen many instances where an officer has elected to disobey orders he or she deems illegal or immoral.  There is a tradition of assuming that not only does a soldier have a right to act upon conscience, but that there is an institutional duty to back that right up.  The purpose of making the oath one to the constitution (rather than to, say, the president or even to congress) first is to take the personal loyalty issue out of the equation.

To underline this a bit more, a bit of history.  The German army prior to WWII was similarly obligated to the state.  German soldiers gave an oath to protect Germany and obey its laws.  Hitler changed that, making it an oath to him, personally, the Fuhrer.  (He left in place a rule explicitly obligating the German soldier to disobey illegal or immoral orders.)

Unfortunately, human nature is not so geared that people find it particularly easy to dedicate themselves to an abstract without there also being a person representing it.  (We see this often in small ways, especially politically, when someone who has been advocating what is on its own a good idea suddenly comes under a cloud of suspicion.  Not only do people remove their support of that person but the idea is tainted as well.  People have difficulty separating out the idea from the person.  The reverse is less common, that a bad idea taints a popular leader.)  Dedicating yourself to supporting the constitution sounds simple in a civics class, but in real life people tend to follow people.  (Consider the case of Ollie North, whose dedication to Reagan trumped his legal responsibility to uphold the constitution and its legally binding requirement that he obey congress.)

Next example.  Many years ago, when I was still a teenager looking for a job, I answered an ad for a salesman position.  When I arrived for the interview I found myself in a large room with a group of people all of whom were receiving a sales pitch for the product by one man, who was doing a first-rate job of boosterism for it.  It was a reference book, maybe even an encyclopedia, I don’t clearly remember.  But his pitch was to our potential to make a lot of money selling this product, that it required dedication and belief in ourselves and what we were selling.  He was a good speaker, he got people fired up.

But he didn’t say much about the product.  My questions concerned that and what it would mean for the consumer, but except for the most cursory description, he talked very little about it.  He summed up his twenty minute pep talk by asking if there was anyone still not convinced this would be a good job.  I and a couple others raised our hands.  When I did so, I expected to be given an opportunity to ask about the product.

Instead, he gave us a sad look and said “Well, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I was stunned and, by the expressions on the faces of the others who’d raised their hands, so were my fellow skeptics.  I said, “You’re not going to ask why?”

“Please leave,” was all he said.

Dazed, we left.  I realized much later that what he—his company—were looking for were people who, for their own self-betterment, would be willing to sell anything to anyone.  They did not want skeptics.  It might have been the greatest encyclopedia on the planet, but that didn’t matter.

The Joyce Meyer Ministries are in town this week, apparently.  This is an institution that makes an overt connection between religious fealty and material success.  People give great amounts of money to it to “spread the word” and some of them achieve a certain amount of success.   As with other grandstanding televangelists, the claim is certainly true for herself, her family, and closest associates, but many people have given everything to her and ended up with nothing.  The deeper question, though, is why would anyone continue to give to her institution if, as she claims, it is faith that actually pays off?  Can’t that be handled privately?  Or in another church or institution?

Which of course leads one to wonder at the elasticity of the faithful with regards to those ministers who have been exposed as frauds.  I have no real question as to the motives of people like Jim Bakker or Ted Haggerty or Jimmy Swaggart or even Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson.  I do have deep questions about those who continue to follow them despite revelations of impropriety and fiscal deceit and self-aggrandizement.

I had a customer once who was part of the Democratic Party machine in St. Louis and as long as you weren’t talking about politics he was a good guy.  But when elections were upon us, he would come in an just go on about this candidate or that, and always with the same  “We’ve got to see him elected!”  One year he was working on behalf of someone who had obvious credibility problems (and later was indicted), but his dedication was absolute.  When I pointed out the problems with the candidate, he just looked at me like I had lost my mind.  “But the alternative is a Republican!”  So what? I said.  Better an honest Republican than a crook.  The subsequent harangue I received made it clear that it did not matter who the candidate was or what he or she did, as long as they were Democratic there was simply no question of his support.

I watched people I knew become absolutely enamored of Ronald Reagan, almost from the start.  As his presidency went on and problems emerged, some simply would not abandon him.  They had dedicated themselves to the man and it didn’t matter what he did.  He made them feel “like a real American.”  There are people still who think Nixon was framed and those still who, despite detailed information about his personal life and his presidential decisions think that Kennedy walked on water.  No doubt there will be those who think Bush was one of the greatest presidents ever.

When we ask ourselves about the motives behind 911, this all-t00-human flaw must be at the top of the list.  The men who hi-jacked those planes and wreaked all that havoc had been living here.  They saw the people in their neighborhoods, they spoke to us, they breathed our air—and while I am not one of those who sycophantically hold the United States up as the shining model of political perfection and social maturity, by comparison this is a free country, a good country (which makes our failings and shortcomings all the more painful, because we have fewer excuses)—and yet they did that.  It is legitimate to ask “where were their consciences?  Where was their skepticism?  Where was their ability to make valid judgments?”

Many would like to believe that such men are so different that they cannot be understood.  They weren’t rational, they weren’t “normal,” they weren’t Like Us.

No?  How many of us questioned Bush’s program?  How many of us on this day ten years ago would not have backed his program?  Even in Congress, very few stood up to say “Wait a minute, what are we doing?”

Yes, I know, it’s more complicated than that.  And it is.  But then, it’s more complicated for the other guy, too.  And yet, it comes down to something very similar—go where the leader tells you to, do what the leader orders.  Ask no questions, after all the leader knows best.

Cults work because people want to follow a leader.  They have little trust in their own decision-making abilities, little confidence in their own ideas, even their own personalities.  On some level, the need for validation from a guru is essential for their ability to even get out of bed in the morning.  And I’m not talking about Moonies or Krishna or even the Sword and the Arm of the Lord or Aryan Nation, I’m talking about ordinary people with normal lives who dedicate a part of their psyches to an external source of affirmation.  It can be anything from a favorite musical group to a politician to a preacher, or even something as intimate as a lover or a friend, or something both intimate and impersonal, like AA or Alanon or a survivor’s support group.  What makes this hard is that the tendency is not always bad but sometimes is very positive, very necessary.

It is all-too-easy to hand over too much of yourself to someone else because it is easier than doing the necessary work for yourself.  Most of us do something like this at one time or another, probably a lot of us transfer our dedication from one thing (or person) to another regularly, in a kind of psychic load-sharing routine.  But some of us simply invest everything in one place, one person, and surrender our ability, even our right, to withdraw, to question, to say no when a demand becomes unreasonable or the relationship toxic.

I don’t believe in people that way.  I don’t believe in anything that way.  I don’t draw my validation from a blind commitment to a guru.  I did at one time but I grew out of it and now I find it bizarre when I encounter someone who does that to the point of being unable to accept criticism of the little god at the center of their being.

Which has led me to understand a reaction I’ve had for a long time.  Maybe we’ve all felt this.  When someone comes up to you and starts going on about how so-and-so or this-and-that saved their life, is the greatest thing ever, is the reason they function, I—and probably most everyone—automatically pull back, suspicious and a bit uncomfortable at the protestations of fealty.  I get uncomfortable around the hyper-patriotic and the extremely religious who insist on telling you how much they love their country or their god.  I wrote a little about that here.  I feel, justifiably or not, that they aren’t quite rational about this and maybe not quite reliable.  If the choice came between doing what was right and following their guru into hell, what would they do?

I don’t like that feeling, but I think I understand it now.  That level of dedication to something external suggests to me that they aren’t all there, that they’re using that dedication to make up for an absence of Self, and not just any self, but the self that can act independently of blind faith.  I find I don’t entirely trust them.

And it could be a lack of trust about almost anything.  When faced with that kind of dedication, I find myself almost automatically shutting down certain lines of communication, self-censoring, placing certain topics off-limits.  I don’t know what kind of reaction I’ll get if I say certain things.  I don’t know what this person will do if they feel I threaten their guru.  Most likely cut off similar lines of communications with me.

But that apparent inability to separate out a personal zone of skeptical self-awareness from the object of their obsession tells me that they will not always act on rational premises.  Actions may take the form of insisting certain books be removed from library shelves all the way to…flying planes into skyscrapers.

The 911 hijackers had to indulge a kind of interpretive censorship about everything they saw or heard in this country during their stay.  But it was an interpretation based not on their personal standards of right and wrong, their own skeptical assessment, but on what they had been told they would see by their guru.  Their guru used their culture to reinforce his vision and they had surrendered enough of themselves to his vision that they committed an atrocity.

The difficulty in all this is that we all interpret things based on who we listen to and what we’ve heard.  What the hijackers did, up until the moment they boarded those planes, was not particularly different from what any group does that is dedicated to a cause that seems to run counter to the larger culture.  Eco-terrorists go through the same processes.

I have always held myself apart from the influence of gurus.  Or tried to.  I will use my own judgment, thank you, and often it puts me at odds with momentary protestations of fealty for ideas or persons that I might even agree with, at least in part.    It’s hard work, continually reassessing—which part is me and which is them—and I can understand the impulse of hermits to extract themselves entirely from a culture in order to try to find which is which.  But that doesn’t work, either, because we need feedback in order to perfect judgment.

The lesson of 911 for me was not new but came with added force:  it is never good to follow a guru.  You may agree with someone, work with someone, associate yourself with their ideas, even like them, but trailing along after them like children after the Piper is never good.  Because you must always be able, when they one day turn to you and say “You have go do X for the cause,” to tell them no.  You have to be able to do so even if you don’t.  You may judge that what they’ve told you to do is a good idea—but you must make your own judgment.  It’s a pretty safe bet that if they tell you to go kill a bunch of people in the name of X, they do not have your or anyone else’s best interests at heart.

That goes for gurus, cults, churches, and governments.

culture

Fiction Matters

What I do puzzles some people.  Always has, even before I was doing it.  All those jokes about bookworms have a solid basis in real experiences—a great many people in our lives do not understand the importance of reading.  Worse, they have no clue about the pleasures of reading, which often makes me very sad.

I was followed around the play ground at school once by three of my classmates who were determined to stop me from reading.  I don’t even remember the book anymore, only that I had finally found a way to enjoy recess, one that took me out of the rough-and-tumble of schoolyard hierarchical nonsense.  But after a couple of months of slipping out of the actual, fenced-in playground and finding a spot behind the bushes fronting the stone wall of the church and sitting there till the bell with a book, a trio of “friends” found me and took my book away.  You can imagine the game of keep-away that ensued, a game I never won.  The teacher caught us—we were technically out of the playground, which was a no-no—and the issue was resolved, as far as I’m concerned, in their favor: I had to return to the general population.  (This kind of thing happened all the time, every time I thought I’d found a way to avoid having to be Out There with the rest of them.  Always the kids making it difficult for me ended up losing me my privilege.  Taught me a lot about how power works in a bureaucracy.)

Anyway, I kept trying and found new places to hide and these same three kept rousting me out and taking my book away.  Finally I found a place inside the school, up in a room above the stage in the gymnasium that no one else seemed to know about.  They never found me there.

But my point is, they just didn’t get it.  Even those who didn’t ridicule me about it tended to be baffled.  What, you’re reading a book?  For  fun?  (To be fair, right about age 13, several of the girls “got it” and for a brief time I was popular with them because I provided them with books they otherwise might never have gotten their hands on.)

So now I write.  Most of the people I associate with now are either writers or readers.  My “group” if you will includes almost no one who doesn’t read.  But I don’t live under a rock so I do run into people from time to time who exhibit dismay at the very idea of writing fiction.

Well, The Guardian  has an article which provides some ammunition against such dismay.  Seems reading fiction promotes empathy.  Interesting, that.  In a country in which reading for pleasure is a minority indulgence, all you have to do is look around at the current political landscape and notice how much this may explain.

Of course, to those of us who’ve been reading since we were old enough to hold a book in our lap this is nothing new.  It’s just nice to have it recognized.

(Although I must admit that my empathy for those assholes who tormented me in school has never been much more than formal or, shall we say, academic?)

Art

Carondolet Park

The heat wave finally broke and this past weekend we took the dog and went through nearby Carondolet Park, which over the years has become our favorite to stroll.  Driving through I often see all kinds of photographic possibilities, and then, when I return with the camera, I can’t find most of them.

But I did get some this time, so I thought I’d just put up a selection.  Something apolitical, pleasant, interesting, visually stimulating, etc.

So….

 

culture

No Longer Surprised

President Obama is withdrawing proposed tighter regulations on smog that had been part of his initial energetic approach to reform early in his presidency.  No jobs have been created in the last month and congressional Republicans are shouting about regulations and the burden to business as the major reason.   I think they’re running out of excuses.  I mean, we’ve rolled back taxes, rolled back regulations, given them money…and still no one is hiring.  I don’t think anyone is going to.

Big business, including the banks, are sitting on huge piles of cash right now.  Yet they won’t make loans.  Not at levels sufficient to boost job growth.  So the next step is make businesses even less accountable to the commonweal.  When the Republicans run out of things to hand over to business as incentive and there is still no hiring going on, what will they say?  Who will they blame?

The thing that disturbs me is that Obama is backing down so much.  He even rescheduled his speech to congress because Speaker Boehner said it would be an imposition on returning members.  Instead of standing by his decision, Obama reschedules—opposite the first game of the NFL season.

Does anyone think for a minute Bush would have done that?  Or Clinton?  I approve of the spirit of compromise and cooperation, but it’s getting ridiculous.  We have a president who seems incapable of backing up his own positions and all he’s doing is yielding to the screaming meemies of the Republican Party.

Right now, with a couple of exceptions, it is clear that the Republican Party wants to undo everything the government does and hand it all over to private enterprise.  Cut taxes, deregulate, suspend oversight.

And right now we are getting report after report how that is simply a stupid thing to do.

If I had to characterize the GOP theme right now, basing it entirely on Rick Perry and Michele Bachman and somewhat on Mitt Romney, it is this: “We will give the government back to the people where we think it belongs—when we’re done, the federal government will do nothing but maybe run the armed forces.  Everything else you’ll have to buy from a private contractor.  And to make it even sweeter, we won’t even see to it that you’re treated fairly by those contractors, because, you know, regulation stifles growth.”

There are a couple of GOP presidential candidates who aren’t that bad, but they aren’t getting much press, and it doesn’t matter just now because I’m not talking about 2012, I’m talking about right now.  I’m not even talking about the Republican Party, I’m talking about our president’s response to this.

Which is to accommodate, accommodate, yield, cave, bend over…

I’m not longer surprised.  I voted for someone I thought had the nerve and the principle to stand up to this.  This is more of the same nonsense we were getting under Bush, which caused huge problems.  Does anyone after a minute’s thought really believe the financial industry took a nose dive because it was over regulated?  They’d been getting progressively less regulation for 20 years, even to the point of declawing the very agencies that might have stopped the bleeding before it took the patient with it, all in the name of growth.  I have no doubt you could find any number of boneheaded regulations that do no good, but that’s not the same as saying regulation is bad.

I’m no longer surprised.  I will likely write in a candidate at the next election.

Hmm?  What’s that?  What would I have him do?  After all, he wants to get re-elected…?

He’s not a shoe-in.  If he keeps doing this, there might even be a coup in the Democratic Party.  Every poll in the nation in the last year has suggested that the majority of citizens support tax increases, especially on the wealthy, yet it’s as if he’s playing exclusively to the Tea Party.

It’s simple.  The situation is all fucked up anyway, you might as well go down as a tiger rather than as a set of changing stripes.  Use the bully pulpit.  Veto the shit out this GOP nonsense.  Start issuing executive orders for works programs and when the challenges come up take ’em on.  Get this shit in the courts and instruct the Justice Department to defend your preferred programs to the death.  You’re the fucking president, you don’t change your schedule because John Boehner whines.  Jobs aren’t being created anyway, so go ahead and try to clean up the air.  Use your authority.  Fucking stand up for…something.

There are two conceptions at work, in my opinion, in GOP thinking about deregulation and they are at odds with each other.  I think that most Republican voters, when they think about this issue, are thinking about small business.  They think the burden and the benefit will accrue to companies with a 100 employees or less and that may well be partly true.  But all this deregulation nonsense is not going to benefit small business nearly so significantly as it will line the pockets of the huge multinationals.  I don’t think most GOP voters conceive of the difference in kind between the local mom and pop manufacturer and, say, Boeing or Monsanto.  The environmental regulations are burdensome to a small business, sure, but those small businesses are not dumping kilotons of waste and pumping millions of pounds of carbon into the air.  Also, small local business is not skimming their profits and investing them overseas, which is what is happening at the upper levels,  and, you know, gravity works—shit flows downhill.  ADM creates thousands of tons of waste and the run-off affects family farms, the destruction of which leads to the consolidation of the agribusiness into an entity that controls pricing and then distorts the monetary markets.  There are orders of magnitude of difference between a local bakery and Nabisco and the regulations that used to keep these monsters in check are going away and it will end up screwing that local baker and all the rest of us.

But we have a president who swore he was going to make things different and somehow has misplaced his cohones.

If by a miracle either Gary Johnson or Jon Huntsman get the nod for the GOP for 2012, I will seriously consider voting for either of them.  There are things I do not like about the GOP philosophy, but on balance, if you’re talking about traditional, Eisenhower Republicans, there are just as many things about the Democrats I don’t like.  But these two seem to have a grasp.  I honestly don’t think they have a chance, because they are, in fact, too rational for the current crop of GOP delegates.  So if, as seems more likely, the top three idiots prove to be too much to beat, I will likely vote for Obama again—I cannot abide the GOP social agenda and I see no point is saving the financial side of this country if the cost is in the freedoms that I think are what make this place worth living in.

But I’m no longer surprised at Obama’s pathetic abandonment of almost everything he said he stood for.  Sad and disappointed, but not surprised.

Absurdity

Revenge Porn

There is probably no way for me to write this without tripping over some bloodthirsty reactionary’s sensibilities, but you know, I don’t really give a damn.

In my home town, too.

A St. Louis publishing company has released a 9/11 coloring book.  There is a reaction to it here.  Wonderful cover.

 

Very patriotic.  Nothing violent on the cover itself, but there are the twin towers and, I think, the proposed memorial tower.

Oh yes, and a cross.  This is, after all, commemorating the assault by Muslims against Christians.

The subtitle is interesting: A Graphic Coloring Novel on the Events of September 11, 2001.

A novel.

Hmm.

Well, it is rated PG, I suppose that’s something.

 

One of the inside images has been getting a great deal of press as an example of what can be found inside.

Yes, indeed.  A depiction of a SEAL shooting Osama Bin Laden, through one of his wives.  They even made sure you could see the bullet.  They have also depicted Bin Laden as something of a coward—he’s clearly cringing behind the brave woman set to take the shot for him.

This is about as bad as the Easter Baskets Walmart offered one year full of missiles and bombs.

Let me be clear here:  I do not mourn Osama Bin Laden.  I feel he was a hateful man who did terrible things and has left the world a much more dangerous place than it was before.  I might have certain moral quibbles about the manner of his demise, but one of my overwhelming feelings is that this is how it ought to have been done back in 2001 and 2002.  The excessive eruption of American military response that has left us with depleted moral force in a world that was already ambivalent about us, mired in two wars that should have been over long ago had they not been disastrously mishandled (and which, according to a recent study, has cost us close to 60 billion in funds stolen by contractors in Iraq alone), and with a hair-trigger police-state mentality that has crippled us in actual problem-solving, much higher energy costs, and a political landscape that will require a combination of Solomon, George Washington, and Albert Einstein to untangle was the most egregious example of vengeance-seeking since Johnson’s refusal to get out of Vietnam.  Had we concentrated on finding Bin Laden and sending special teams to go get him, we would have accomplished much m0re.

But that would have meant a trial, probably, and a stage on which he might have aired his complaints.  And after all we had a president with something to prove and a vice president whose lust for power is rarely found outside of a bad novel.

So we now have a coloring book to do more damage by covering up the farce that the last decade has been in the eyes of children who will come of age learning the official version, reinforced by the simple activity of filling in between the lines the pictures in a novel that is basically about revenge.

I suppose it would be a hard thing to sell if it told the truth, which is that basically in the aftermath of 9/11 America enjoyed more absolute global sympathy than at any time since WWII and we squandered it by acting stupidly.  All this know-how—and we have a lot of that, really—ignored, misused, pissed away.

It’s possible to characterize almost every war, especially since the end of the 19th Century, as a means by which industry has made more money.  There’s a component of that to every conflict, even WWII, which really was about evil in the world.  But I can’t think of one that has been more nakedly so than Iraq.  With the revelation of the graft and corruption and the outright theft and the complete lack of accountability, it is impossible not to see it as having been instigated for the sole benefit of multinationals, Halliburton being first and foremost.

But we can’t tell kids that.  Can’t have them grow up thinking the people who run their country can ever be stupid, or greedy, or vain, or misguided, or duped, or simply wrong.  Can’t have that.

So let’s dress it up like another excusable example of John Wayne diplomacy.

Shit.

 

culture

On Symbols and Fair Use

When you have a dream about an argument, maybe it has some weight and should be written about.  Recently, I posted a photograph on my Google + page.  This one, in fact:

 

My caption for it was “What more is there to say?”  Partly this was just to have a caption, but also to prompt potential discussion.  As symbol, the photograph serves a number of functions, from melancholy to condemnation.

It did prompt a discussion, between two friends of mine who do not know each other, the core of which centers on the divergent meanings of such symbols for them and a question of sensitivity.  I won’t reproduce the exchange here, because as far as I’m concerned the question that it prompted for me was one of the idea of “sacredness” and the appropriate use of symbols.

Which immediately sent me down a rabbit hole about the private versus public use of symbols.

Essentially, we all have proprietary relationships with certain symbols.  Since I already posted the image, the sign of the cross is one, and not just for Christians.  As a symbol it has achieved that universality advertisers dream of.  It is instantly recognizable as the sign for a faith movement just about everywhere.  It’s possible some aboriginal tribes in the beclouded valleys of New Zealand don’t know what it is, but on the level of international discourse it carries across all lines.

The public meaning is also fairly clear—it represents an idea and an institution.  The entire apparatus of the Christian faith is symbolized by it, the buildings, the books, the robes, the songs, the defining mythologies, and the philosophical ideas.  Publicly it is by and large regarded as a force for good.  Publicly, the ideas embodied suggest if not entirely represent a fundamental tendency toward morality and a stated ambition to achieve peace, love, and the concomitant positives associated with a redemptive philosophy.

But the private meanings are wildly divergent and stem from  both personal experience and long intellectual examination.  In some instances it is difficult to see how certain conclusions can possibly be based on the same thing.

So the question in my mind is, which is more valid?  Which should be protected?  The public meaning or the private?  And should they be kept separate?

In other words, in relation to the photograph above, does the “sacredness” of the symbol allow for not only a condemnation of the obvious vandalism that broke the stone cross in the first place but also a refusal to countenance sympathetic commentary for the breakage?  For those who find the symbol personally important, such assaults are seen as insensitive.  A violation.  Such sympathetic comments also yield a judgment of the person making the comments.  Obviously, this an antagonistic situation.  But what concerns me here is not so much the antagonism but the mutual rights of the antagonists to use that symbol each in their own way.

Let’s take something more secular.  Flag burning.  Obviously the symbol of the flag is a potent one, and with powerful public meaning.  Just as clearly, there is powerful private meaning and again this personal meaning can be wildly divergent.  And again, the question is, which meaning takes precedence?

More to the point, which meaning should take precedence?

If as some believe the image of the flag should be protected, rendering its use subject to specific prohibitions and allowable uses, does it still have utility as a symbol or have we reduced its capacity to represent ideas?  Or have we simply declared certain ideas related to it illegitimate?

Which goes directly to the question, can an idea ever be “illegitimate” as an idea?

Historically it’s clear that when a state attempts to bar the public dissemination of an idea, depending on the idea in question, an underground almost automatically springs up and suddenly the state has a problem it may not have had before—namely, a resistance movement.  One of the things that made early Christianity so powerful was its official banning by Rome.  The state drove it underground where it could not be observed or tracked and it grew on its own until the movement was so powerful that one day it emerged and became the state.

Like all such movements, it was then faced with exactly the same problem its predecessor faced—ideas it could not tolerate that needed banning.  And like most such movements, it fell right into the trap of political expedience and suppressed the free exchange of ideas.

It didn’t even keep the same symbol.  Originally the fish, the Ichthys, was the primary symbol, and we’ve seen it resurgence today as an alternative to the cross.  (The other prominent symbol came under Constantine, the Chi Rho, which includes a cross as an X overlain on a P, and enjoyed almost continual use as a subordinate Christian symbol up the present.)  But by the early 3rd Century, the cross had become so identified with Christianity that Clement of Alexandria could call it the Lord’s Sign.

As such, it was the banner for the emergent and often militant quasi-secular institution that was the Roman Church.  The fact that it was a Roman form of execution is possibly relevant for this aspect as early on it would have had dual meanings—for many as a sign of punishment more than of sacrifice.  (Interestingly, there is a historical quibble with the cross as symbol based on Jesus’ execution as the Greek word in scripture is stauros, meaning an upright stake, without the cross-beam.  This is a quibble, since it was the Romans who crucified Jesus and the term was crucifixion.  But even in this we see the process of abstracting out meanings for different uses, since the emphasis is placed by Christians on sacrifice and, later, resurrection through the same symbol.)

The symbol has been retasked over the centuries.  As such it demonstrates the natural process by which the free use of symbols serves preferred purposes.  Once the meaning becomes fixed and institutional protections are put in place to guarantee one and only one meaning (publicly) you begin to see a gradual loss of vitality once you step outside the precincts of an agreed-upon iconographic definition.  It is then that institutional problems creep in and a breakdown of original meaning can occur.  If one is using the symbol to define something into existence without regard for what it may mean to others, then you produce a situation in which only two responses to the symbol are possible.  Complete acceptance or complete rejection.

To make arguments of fine distinction becomes a sisyphean task.  To say, for instance, that practices defended by the symbol are not really consistent with that symbol, to those on the outside take on the appearance of special pleading and even self-selected blindness.

Easier to dismiss the symbols and talk about the thing itself.  It is possible for a symbol to obstruct this kind of discourse by insisting on its own unity and, if you will, sacredness.  To criticize the point of contention is then to criticize the entire edifice, good and bad, and this is counterproductive.  For example, return to the whole flag burning question.  When the United States is engaging is actions that citizens regard as antithetical to their idea of “America”, wrapping these actions in the cloak of the flag binds them in with everything that is acceptable, even admirable, about America and makes it difficult to argue that the actions in question are not American—or, as happened during Vietnam, that the people leveling criticism are themselves patriots when they are seen to be criticizing the entirety of America rather than just one set of bad choices, since the choices have been “blessed” by the symbol of the country.  At some point it became necessary to shove aside the symbol since its use in the debate had become obfuscatory and divisive.  The dialogue that needed to happen was hamstrung because instead of being about an immoral war it became about the morality of the whole country, as symbolized by the flag.  Because the flag was held by many to be “inviolate” it became almost impossible for the opposition to use it to effect.  It had been taken out of its own utility because the public meaning had become fixed and ran counter to the private meaning of many of the citizens.

If this sounds like a great deal of abstract nonsense, take another example of the misuse of a protected symbol.

The Swastika, as symbol of the Nazis, was given legal protection by the Nazi regime.  It became illegal to desecrate it in any fashion.  It was applied to all official documents.  It was applied to published speeches, laws, passports, even scientific papers.  it became the absolute public identity of the German people and any dissent or attempts to set aside Naziism and its symbols in a debate over private meaning and public policy was prosecutable.  True, once an outlaw, the law didn’t apply to you, but in order to argue with the symbol and what it stood for, you had to become an outlaw.  It fixed the meaning of Naziism and rendered all dissent illegal.  Documents lacking the symbol were designated illicit.

There is, you see, great danger in “sacrilizing” symbols.

So what has this to do with an argument over sensitivities and judgments?  Since private meaning is exactly that, private, it would seem incumbent upon us to respect that each of us may have experiences and come to conclusions that are entirely at odds with public meanings.  If an expression of that dissension can be labeled insensitive, it can only be valid in the matter of other private meanings.  To claim the public symbol as one and the same with your private meaning as a way of preventing or invalidating critical remarks of the public symbol and its public meaning—by leveling the charge that the critic is being insensitive—can be seen as an attempt to remove the public symbol from the free exchange of ideas, to “fix” its meaning as inviolate even for those who see it as wholly otherwise.  This is hardly fair use since so often a return conclusion is offered about the nature of the critic—a conclusion which may be accurate or may be completely beside the point.  In either case, it is not an invitation to dialogue but a wall built to protect against the possible erosion of private meaning by means of critical examination of public symbols—and their public meanings.

My apologies if this has become a bit abstruse, but it’s a difficult topic to deal with in less than precise language.  The ideal is to always keep in mind the distinction between an idea and the holder of the idea.  Since many people, on both sides of any issue, insist on identifying themselves personally with an idea, this can be a problematic stance.  As many Christians say, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” depending on how closely the sinner identifies with the sin in question this may simply not be possible.  But it’s a start at acknowledging that experience is important and may not be invalidated by simple recourse to symbols—especially symbols that enjoy special protection from criticism.

Anyway, this is offered as a basis for discussion.  It would be interesting to see what comes of it.