CNN aired its town hall with Trump and received some criticism for it. But it had been scheduled for a while and since the Right likes to accuse the Left (which CNN is at best only an honorary member) of Cancel Culture, the question to air or not to air doubtless prompted them to err on the side of not canceling. Nevertheless, opinions about the man on the stage notwithstanding, I have no carp about that. The only downside to something like this is that it took up space where something else of presumably more value might have been aired. As that seems rarely a consideration in the board rooms of media companies (what is value?…
Category: Community
Obvious Things
Another school shooting.
And inevitably the posturing of those grimly determined to make it about something else. Gun rights. The deaths are pushed to one side, because it’s the guns that must be protected, because they (so the excuse-making goes) are what stand between our freedom and a tyrannical government, and that any price is worth paying to preserve the means by which such freedom might be maintained, whether that freedom actually manifests as imagined or not.
At this point one thing should be obvious: for the Second Amendment Absolutist, no reasoned argument can be sufficient to change their position, because it is not about what is right, only about what they believe and feel.…
Eyes Open, Mind Engaged
To me, that is the definition of Woke. I’ve been bemused by the backlash of people who, without too much interpretation, are obviously complaining about something else loudly hurling “Woke!” as if it is a pejorative. It’s not that they have a legitimate argument, it is that they are discomfited by the implications and wish to go back to pretending there is nothing to be woke to. It’s not even subtle.
Consider one of the consequences of the backlash—the attempt to ban books. Now, this is nothing new. Banning books that unsettle the comfortable is a long American tradition, quite often less political than the kindred forms of censorship practiced elsewhere.…
On Branding
A couple of recent eruptions over literary works have caused me to contemplate a curious aspect of the cultural situation. The move by Roald Dahl’s publisher to “bowdlerize” his children’s books, to render them more palatable to contemporary audiences, and the to-do over the creator of Dilbert’s public expressions of problematic attitudes. These are the most recent after a long string of reactions to artists who turn out to have opinions, beliefs, and political positions seemingly at odds with their work. Or not. Some of the review of said work has all the makings of a minor industry of reassessments based on the failings of the creators.*…
Greg Bear
I met Greg Bear (briefly) in 1984. One of the first of that generation of science fiction writer of whom I’d become acquainted initially through their short fiction. 1983 was a banner year in many ways and Bear was nominated for two stories—Hardfought and Blood Music, novella and novelette respectively—and I thought both of them were just wonderful. (There is something elegant about Hardfought that transcends even its subject, a kind of perfect example of form.) We went to our first worldcon (LACon II) and attended his reading. He was presenting material from his new fantasy, The Infinity Concerto, and I was fascinated.…
Blame
So Trump said (more or less) that if the midterms go well, he should get all the credit and if they go badly, he should get none of the blame. This is politics. He then noted that what would likely happen is the reverse—that a Republican victory would garner him no credit and a defeat will give him all the blame. Again, this is politics. This kind of thing is standard. We see this at the presidential level all the time, if only in the rather shallow fact that a newly-elected president inevitably gets the blame for what his predecessor did when the new guy fails to magically fix everything in the first hundred days.…
Election
Next week it will be November. Election season.
Voting is already underway and by some reports it is more than tradition would suggest. A great deal is at stake.
I don’t have much to say here. Only that the issue this time around has little to do with what we have come to engage as normal. I do not believe it hyperbolic to suggest that our very way of living is at stake and that voting for narrow interests might be a mistake. The economy will not be fixed by splenetically throwing the majority party out of office. We’re in a fix due to factors beyond the ordinary—a pandemic, a major war in the east, and the aftershocks of certain trade decisions that were not well thought through.…
Please, Pale Person, Please Stop
Only because it is so omnipresent am I aware of the new raging over Ariel in The Little Mermaid and its casting of a Not White actor in the role. I would rather have not had this in my range of consciousness. I cannot convey the depth of weariness at this nonsense. You do this kind of stuff with the expectation that I, based on melanin content, will agree and share your rage.
Skin color is not intelligence. Nor is it a sign, frankly, of any kind of kinship above the purely coincidental.
Stop. Just…stop. I realize you think this of moment, important in some fundamental way, and might possibly be the last ground on which you might take a stand that is no longer acceptable as any definition of civilized, but all you are doing is embarrassing yourself and annoying me.…
Where’s Mine?
People complaining about student loan forgiveness seem to feel there’s a fairness issue at stake. My experience suggests that about 90% of the people who lead with an “It’s not fair!” argument (as opposed to something based on justice) are disingenuous. They tend to see everything as a competition, a race, and any perceived advantage that they don’t get affects their position in the race. Forgiving student debt just means “those people” will be advanced closer to them or maybe even ahead of them and there’s no compensatory bribe on offer to put them back where they think they belong.
What never occurs to them is that the whole thing was rigged in the first place and that maybe they were screwed, too.…
The Chains Of Normal
Over my lifetime, one concept has popped again and again to tangle things in a web of pseudo-logic. It seems to go unexamined most of the time, until it emerges as the fulcrum of issues over systemic change. Normal. We seem ever in search of Normal. To be Normal, to return to Normal, to stop deviations from Normal.
But we have a damnable time defining what that is. I mean, really, just exactly what is Normal?
Normal has changed steadily over my lifetime. And with every major realignment, a new Normal becomes established and accepted and soon enough we find ourselves contending again over that which is Not Normal.…