Category: Community

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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. We don’t usually protest books here because of political ideology so much as out of a reflexive defensiveness of cherished myths. Some of these are family stories left unquestioned for generations, some of them are the kind of origin stories surrounding the establishment of this or that institution. In most cases, people have embraced these stories and incorporated them into their sense of self, their identity, and when the story is challenged, their apprehension of Who They Are is called into question.

Somewhere along the way the practice of review has either been abandoned or was never inculcated. It comes as a shock that perhaps they should never have accepted uncritically all the things they were fed as children.

But I suspect the most violent reactions are coming from those who perhaps sense the truth beneath the myth and simply do not want to accept it. They do not want to feel responsible. Maybe their concept of a Good Life depends on those myths. Whatever.

Once, in conversation with acquaintances who were very proudly Catholic, the question was raised (by them) “just what was the Reformation all about?” I took it at face value and said, “Many things, but the trigger was over Indulgences.” “What are those?” When I explained what a Plenary Indulgence was, they regarded me with the blank expressions of the never-before-informed. They didn’t believe me. I had to be misinformed. Why would the Church do that? Why would people believe these things would work?

The facts opened a shelf-full of cans of worms that required a profound revision in their understanding of the institution in which they had invested a great deal. Delving into all that threatened their sense of well-being in their self-identification as Catholics. The fact that, as members of that institution, they not only did not know about significant parts of Church history but strenuously did not want to know, dismayed and saddened me, but it served as a good example as the kind of mindset we encounter in those most stridently condemning Woke-ism.

But I have rarely seen a clearer example of “getting it wrong” than this. It is sharper, more clearly delineated, than its predecessor, the rejection of so-called Political Correctness, which was also misunderstood, mostly by those who simply did not want their assumptions about history and culture and politics and personal identity called into question. They did not want to be reminded, held to account, called on the carpet, or simply be required to do the work of realignment necessitated by an acceptance of realities not in evidence in their own lives.  Political Correctness devolved at times into a game of constantly revising what things were called. That, of course, should have been merely a consequence of revising our understanding of relationships, taking into account the realities of others, but that’s complicated and tedious and hard and for people who never internalized actual learning but skidded by on doing well on tests and knowing how to interview successfully and going along with those in power just to get along, it was a slog and often resulted in long periods of just feeling like eggshells were everywhere in their path.

Woke—and, more to the point, being Anti-Woke—is less ambiguous. Woke is a requirement to not privilege ignorance over reality and Anti-Woke is a demand to enshrine specific kinds of ignorance in order to maintain privileged conditions. Every time someone stands up and opposes being Woke, I hear someone insisting on being callous and stupid.

Except for those in leadership positions. They are not stupid. Callous, certainly, but not stupid. (Clever, but not very intelligent.) They know their audience. They’re just venal. In order to attain power, they’re playing their supporters for saps.

The more you know, the more you can know. The more you can know, the less power demagogues can wield over you. The less power they have, the freer you are. The freer you are, the less you have to fear.

So wake up.

Art

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.*

There is a legitimate question of what then to do about the work itself once the creator is revealed to be some degree of objectionable. How does the revelation of an odious aspect of the writer/artist affect the work itself? If one once loved the work, what does one do now that one has been soured on the author?

Because the work is what is it is. It hasn’t changed. We enjoyed it once (presumably) and now, because of factors not in evidence in the work itself, it becomes problematic to admit to once liking it. Why should this happen?

I suspect what we’re seeing is a consequence of the way an artist is marketed now. We live in an age of Brands. To a certain extent, this has always been the case. The Auteur becomes the reason to not only buy the work in question but forms part of the pleasure we derive from it. We seek out that artist’s work because it is that artist. We’re buying the brand. The so-called Madison Avenue Effect is in full play. Marketing has centered not on a given work but on the artist.

In a way, this is smart, because no artist is consistently brilliant, and there has to be a way to sell through lesser works. You make it important that the work is by a brand you value. When successful, this branding can transcend an individual work and guarantee sales it might not otherwise garner. This is most evident when the Brand is sublet, so to speak. Authors become a name on a cover of a book written by someone else. Franchise work. We don’t buy those books because of the (considerably) lesser known writer who actually did the work, but because the Brand above the title promises something we value.

The successful branding has the shortfall that the value of the work becomes secondary. The question of how to regard the work in the event of a catastrophe loss of face is rendered awkward, because while a perfectly reasonable disclaimer that the artist is not the work may be valid on one level, if the value of the work has been displaced by recentering that value on the Brand and the Brand is inextricably bound up in the artist, then effectively we have accepted that the artist is the work. They are of a piece and public disgrace, for better or worse, does accrue to the entire package.

Because we have long lived in the age of the Cult of Personality, is should come as no surprise that the money behind the personality have refined their models to achieve the profits of successful Branding. But once done, then the separation of artist and work, at least in terms of popular acceptance, becomes impossible. We each individually must do the moral maths to determine where the value actually resides. If the artist willingly goes along with the marketing process and embraces the idea of Branding, then it should also come as no surprise when with scandal the work is debased in the same breath.

Is there a way out of this for the artist? I don’t know. If successful enough, other forces will come into play to make him/her/they a Brand. Control slips away. But. One can always just keep one’s mouth shut. Or try. The humility to realize that while you may be very good at this one thing such skill and talent does not translate across disciplines. You are not necessarily guru material. And maybe your feelings about certain things really are not elevated above the simply odious because your popularity has handed you a megaphone.

This requires some sorting out. By all of us, really, but very much so by artists with aspirations to Brandhood.

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  • Yes, we already have something like this, but perhaps not to the level of seeing actual university courses wholly focused on the subject and a burgeoning tell-all industry actively rewarding revelations of personal badness confined to personal opinion. It’s a massive seismic movement now that is largely opportunistic, but is well on its way to becoming a full-blown anti-PR industry.
Art

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. (I also made a bit of a fool of myself with a question, but it was funny.) Afterward we talked to him. The substance of the conversation escapes me, but he was generous and kind and clearly an enthusiast about science fiction as a whole.

I read everything I could get my hands on by Greg Bear. Like others for whom I endured quick obsessions, it burned itself out, and I have a handful of yet-to-be-reads by him, but I have always found his scope and the details with which he built his worlds to be utterly marvelous. I have never not had a great time reading a Greg Bear novel.

I think it was The Forge of God that tripped me up. Amazing book, but it struck me at the time as altogether too depressing. I staggered on through a few more and then my time was consumed by other works.

In some ways, Greg Bear could be seen as the American Iain M. Banks. I am also taken by his occasional forays into prose experiments, his playful deployment of language to set tone. His restraint made these experiments more accessible than others who tried similar things. But always it was the world and ideas that were center stage, carried by an array of characters that were well-made for their tasks. (His short stories are often more experimental and run a gamut of styles and approaches.)

We crossed paths again in 1997 and I got to spend a couple hours with the Killer Bs—Brin, Benford, and Bear. I realize, looking back, that these three writers define a segment of a period for me. The possibilities of narrative trajectories and the skillful interjection of humanist qualities too often under-attended in what we call hard SF. Anyway, grand total of personal interaction with Greg Bear…maybe four hours.

In the lexicon of influences in my reading life (and somewhat in my writing career), Greg Bear is up there with Clarke, Pohl, Anderson, and Gerrold. A very specific set of aesthetics. (Silver Age mainly instead of Golden?) He never got trapped into series, he wrote a wide array of subjects and concepts, and there was a joy inherent in his prose that I found compelling. He reminded me of what it meant to be simply a Fan. The Universe is strange, vast, and polychromatic and he wanted the reader to experience that variety. Did he succeed? Only the individual reader can decide that. The merit is in the attempt and the fact that one can see what he was striving for.

He has gone. I was a little shocked to note that he was only three years older than me, near enough to a contemporary to disorient me a bit. I always think of people who are that good and achieve that much as considerably older than me, which is silly but a heuristic I can’t quite seem to shake.

The books matter. I would like to see them all back in print. We move on too quickly sometimes and forget the pleasures of what came before. I urge any and all to find his books and live with them for a while. Strength of Stones is a marvel. Beyond Heaven’s River an unexpectedly rich treat. Eon a journey to unforgettable time[s]. And do not pass up the short stories.

I’m going to be reading some of those I have yet to. One of our Voices has passed. Read him, let him speak.

Community

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. More seriously, presidents get blame for things that are out of their hands—currently, that would include inflation.

The predicted Red Wave did not happen (except in Florida, but that state currently seems to inhabit an alternate universe) and the Republicans are scurrying about trying explain how it’s not their fault. My take is somewhat different—I’m amazed they did as well as they did. I realize people vote their wallets, but I keep wondering at people so divorced from how things work that they would happily vote away their rights for anticipated solutions which the people they vote for have little to do with. The institution that deals with things like inflation is the Federal Reserve and it is doing its job and as the Fed has a firewall between itself and Congress, there is no value in voting out the party that had nothing to do with the situation in the assumption that the other party, which have virtually no meaningful say in any solution, will magically fix the problem. I look upon the citizenry of my country in bafflement that this simple reality is so hard to grasp.

Oh, funding bills? Like for infrastructure? It is largely accepted by both parties that America’s infrastructure is in sore need of attention, so exactly where is the issue? Inflation or not, roads need repair, as do bridges, and we need a high-speed rail system and high-speed internet, regardless. Not funding these things would make the economy worse. But monetary policy—which is where we find things like inflation—is out of Congress’s hands. Do people really not know this or do they just vote the way they do to be arbitrary?

Let’s assume they do not. Then that means a great many people have no problem with the social fascism extant in the GOP. That voting away civil liberties is somehow worth it to keep a book about LGBTQ+ issues out of the hands of kids, that this is a reasonable trade-off.

Likewise, crippling the healthcare system for women and criminalizing gender-specific treatments is worth reducing half the population to conditions wherein they have much harder times to fight poverty and establish equity, things they have been and are still fighting to obtain for over—well, pick your date: half a century, over a century, since the Founding. Mind you, I am not referring only to abortion, but to a whole host of gynecological needs which even now we see examples of women being denied treatment because healthcare workers are afraid that such treatment might land them in jail, depending on the state. This is not theory but practice.

So the GOP is now making statements about who to blame as if their problems are simply a matter of selecting the wrong candidates. They cannot find it in themselves to look at their policies and recognize that they are out of step with actual people. (Because I can predict with a certain amount of certainty that on any of the above issues, many of them while being quite happy to deny Other People those rights, will expect to retain them as privileges, under the table or otherwise, for themselves.)

I’ve been hearing a handful of Republicans broach the possibility that they have failed on social issues. A few voices, here and there, identifying the problem in their alienation of certain voting blocs with unpopular or tone-deaf stances.

And yet, the over-half-century long propaganda train that has labeled Democrats as, originally, Tax-and-Spend Liberals and more recently as Socialists disturbs enough people that they will blink when given the opportunity to categorically repudiate a party that serves an idea of the free market that doesn’t actually reflect reality and assumes isolationism and defense spending are the only things that matter and that to stay in power is willing to strip people of their civil liberties and their ability to act on conscience and backs censorship and has perfected gerrymandering to the point now that elections are imperiled, too many people seem willing to put their actual rights at risk rather than face a future with the boldness America is supposed to be filled with.

It is heartening that damn near every election-denier across the country has lost their election race, but that leaves us with a party that seems to think this is just a temporary set-back, a matter of popularity rather than policy, too close to securing unassailable positions. Our own Senator Hawley (Missouri) has stated that it is time to bury the old GOP and create a new party, and as far as it goes, I agree. But such a new party, in order to be viable—philosophically, morally, politically—and be something identifiably in step with American principles, would necessarily have no place for people like him.

We cannot rest on this election. It will take a few more election cycles to re-establish the confidence the GOP has damaged in our democracy. And we need a federal election law to prevent states from arbitrarily rejecting fair elections.

Fair elections. It’s amazing how the fraud being claimed by the deniers, when you get right down to it, always ends up demeaning traditionally minority voters and impairing their ability to cast ballots. If you don’t want to be labeled racist, stop tilting the scales to white (usually male) voters. After the 2016 election, when evidence of foreign involvement was demonstrated, commissions worked heroically to close loopholes, plug gaps, and establish the next elections as the safest and most secure in our history. There may still be work to be done, but after all that, to claim that the 2020 election could be stolen is purest fantasy. All that really means is, your candidate lost, and you can’t deal with that. Apparently, a lot of Americans, of both parties, agree. The deniers lost.

Don’t go looking to blame the candidates as such. The problem is in the policies. The shift we may be seeing is a clear statement that those are in need of fixing.

This time, at least, I am somewhat relieved. I’m not holding my breath today. Next time, we need to oust the reactionaries.

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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. It will take time and the appropriate institutions are working on that, mainly the Federal Reserve. The president has little to do with it. Congress can only adjust taxes and approve spending bills. On that note, I think it is clear by now, or should be, that the previous few decades of trying to tax-cut our way out of slumps does not work the way we wish it would. Giving more money to corporations or the wealthy has not worked. Britain is dealing with that in a major way now and they are drowning in the backlash.

We are instead facing an election which will determine how all future elections may be conducted. Those who have decided to push the fallacy that the last election was stolen are allied with state factions that seek to limit who can vote. Spin it any way you want, that’s what it amounts to. We need a national voting law that will override such local attempts and we know that the GOP is not about to back that.

We’re facing an election which may impact what going forward will pass as “legitimate” history, and we know where one faction stands on that because of the books they keep trying to ban and the straitjackets they keep trying to wrap school boards in.

We’re facing an election that may set the stage for the rollback of hardwon rights for minorities and marginalized people, rights that have been mischaracterized as harmful to our civilization. Damned if I can see how. The expansion of rights has marked every period of growth and revivification in our history.

We’re facing an election which will signal whether or not equality has any chance of being the hallmark of our country.

For my part, until the Republican Party begins to repudiate the people and policies exemplified by people like Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Green, Trump and all the rest of the MAGA horde, they will not get my vote. They have been on the wrong side of history for decades. But that assessment aside, the last few years they have moved legislatively and judicially in such ways that people I know—friends, colleagues—have been put at risk, personally, all in the name of supporting a panic-driven creed of intolerance and powermongering.

I don’t care this time how bad the economy might be (it is such a mixed bag, I’m not sure it is bad, just expensive, which for some people may be the same thing), there’s no point in my mind having prosperity if people cannot live without fear.

Vote against the systemic intolerance of those who would have you believe that being Woke is a bad thing.

Absurdity

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.

I know you are probably innumerate, but recently I was reminded of a statistic that sheds a stark light on the thinness of skin your railing against inclusiveness reveals. In a documentary on women in Hollywood, This Changes Everything, which examines the underrepresentation of women in filmmaking, it was striking to me that the percentage of directors who are women has yet to rise much higher than 15%. That figure has usually been lower, a couple of times briefly higher. Coupled with a kind of pervasive cluelessness on the part of men, it reminded me of a statistic related to what we once called (and may still) White Flight, which is the phenomenon of white Americans picking up and moving almost en masse once a certain level of minority presence in a given neighborhood is perceived. It turns out that the average is 12%. One in eight houses in a neighborhood are African-American (and presumably other racial minorities, but the study was done with regards to blacks) and suddenly all the white people seem to say “My god, they’re everywhere!” Twelve percent is far from any kind of majority, or even approaching parity, yet that seemed to be the point at which many white folks felt the need to flee to the counties.

“My god, they’re everywhere!”

I suppose if your default position is that 95% of everyone around should be white, then the upwelling of nonwhite in your area would be quite noticeable. If your default assumption is that only white people are—what?—“safe” to be around, then alarm bells must go off, just by the sighting of a few more nonwhite faces.

Of course, property values play into this, and for no better reasons.

But look, this is simply ridiculous at its base. Time and again, the superiority of ethnic type has been shot down and made odious, so that now all you have to complain about is—fictional characters.

And the now incessant appellation of Wokeness, which you somehow seem to think is some kind of corruption. You seem not even to have the wit to realize how ironic that is.

I no longer care what your excuses are. This has gotten absurd. If some day someone made a new version of Winnie-the-Pooh and instead of a classic  Teddy Bear they cast a Sun Bear or, heaven forbid, a Panda, I suppose you’ll rage against the Woke Left and its anti-Teddy Bear agenda.

What this says to me loudly is that along with everything else, you have no understanding of art (small “a” as a practice of symbolic communication through aesthetic reimaginings and visualizations). So you underline your aversion to being Woke by being decidedly asleep and studiously ignorant.

But please, stop claiming these things in the name of White People. All you’re expressing is a deep fear that you are losing power, which you don’t have in the first place. And you’d know you don’t have it if you were just a teensy bit…woke.

But to be clear, I am not on your side. You do not speak for me. I’m not even getting angry at it any more, just sad and weary. You don’t get it, and you expect me to not get it either, and be angry about it.

Please. Stop.

Community

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. Or maybe they know they were screwed, but can’t seem to grasp that the thing to be gotten rid of is the screwing, simply because.

I don’t know, but it’s nothing new.

To be clear, I’ve seen a lot of people who knew very well that the game was rigged who are quite pleased with even a little redress for other people. So we’re dealing with a handful (maybe) of people who are so invested in the rigged system that they can’t see their way past a sense of being unfairly handicapped and would prefer the rigging remain in place, so they have a shot at winning.

Winning what?

I don’t know. Frankly, I never did know. Life is not a race.

But boy we sure like to see it that way. Getting ahead, keeping up with the Joneses, beating the system, coming out on top, moving up in the world, winning the rat race, catching the brass ring, climbing the ladder…this is how we’ve been trained to see things and it infects every attitude we have. Some of us get over it at some point and realize that we’re being played. Some people seem to like being played. Others want to be the players. Anything that suggests leveling the playing field (another sports/competition analogy) is hateful because it looks like cheating.

Justice never enters into this except as a word used to cover the reality.

I did not go to college. There were many reasons for this, not least of them disinterest. I didn’t like school all that much and couldn’t see much value in another four years of jumping through hoops. The fields in which I have made my living, I managed to learn without higher education and all the rest I was able to indulge all on my own. Cost dissuaded me to some extent, and this was back when you weren’t likely to go into lifelong servitude to pay it off.

But society changed—our economy changed—and suddenly college was more a requirement than an add-on. The growing fields, the needs of employers, all these things necessitated more education than high school offered. In order to operate the country, we required more. Given that, it has always seemed fundamentally unfair to me that we then made people pay through the nose for the privilege of filling someone else’s requirements. (I have a very perverse attitude about this kind of thing. My first job out of high school was at a place with a dress code. I literally did not own a tie. They demanded one. I told them they could pay for it. Of course they did not. But, I argued, this is your requirement, why shouldn’t you pay for it? I won’t use the damn thing anywhere else! I met the minimum requirement by acquiring one tie and never taking it home. I left it at work and never washed it. When i left their employ, I left it behind. Petty, certainly, but still—their requirement, they should provide.)

But there are scholarships, grants, all kinds of things to offset the requirements and cover the costs. I don’t care. Because it’s not just employment involved, but class, social interaction. (I was turned down for a date once because I lacked a degree. Yes, this is probably rare, or it was then, but—is it? And why should that matter? We put too much, almost everything on that piece of paper, explicitly and implicitly, and then make it as hard as can be to get one. And the cost now suggests that many people who have managed to get one are in some way undeserving, so they will not be allowed to benefit, in even the most basic way, by being able to “get ahead” as expected.)

I have minimal problems with certain schools charging exorbitant rates—the Ivy Leagues, as they may be—as long as the basic requirements are not rendered punishingly out-of-reach. You want a Harvard education, fine, it costs more. But you just want a degree from a college to meet the requirements of society in given professions? No charge. It’s “our” requirement, after all. The individual does the learning, the name of the school has little to do with that (with certain exceptions). But then we have to be honest about the whole thing and hire according to qualification, not according to association.

The whole thing has become a money-making game that reinforces class distinctions—which we here are not supposed to have.

Damn right I’m fine with debt relief.

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Addendum 8/27/22:  When it became clear after WWII that the whole educational program being offered through things like the G.I. Bill was intended to provide for people in general (and later when racial barriers were being dismantled that barred minorities from access) there was a panic among the self-assumed Elites that the unwashed, the plebes, the commoners were about to share the same benefits and acquire the same functional credentials as the Chosen Children of the wealthy, the entire thing began to be undermined. We should remember that Governor Reagan dismantled the free university system in California, which had been working fine, but which displeased the powers that be. When the laws changed to prevent overt barriers, the only thing left to do was attack it financially and so the rise in costs, in lock-step with the diminishment in state funding, began. Characterize this any way you wish, the effect has been to erect a different set of barriers to those certain people and forces in our society feel should not be allowed to compete or share in that which presumably sets them apart. At every junction in history where a previous unquestioned assumption of inferiority or unsuitability was overturned that had kept certain people out, new “standards” were erected. One of the saddest consequences has been the debasement of the Humanities, because they do not as a rule lead to gold-plated incomes. You want to be a philosopher, fine, but if you come from a working class background and have to pay for it out of your own pocket, you will be crushed by debt for the rest of your life. In any individual instance, we can find many excuses for why what has become a global disgrace, but the aggregate effect is simply that only the few are “supposed” to get the rewards and the people in the “gutter” should stay there.

(Reagan’s ilk identified the rising sector of educated students as the source of a major pain in their collective asses because these kids knew better than to accept the bullshit and demanded change. Therefore, their opportunities to learn enough to challenge the Establishment had to be curtailed.)

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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. It’s understandable that some people get confused and frustrated. I keep remembering poor Tevye from Fiddler On The Roof, striving to find a way to see the changes and accept them, always declaring his fidelity to Tradition.

It doesn’t help that we all have a different idea about what Normal is. Not necessarily wildly divergent ideas, but if the topic is pursued long enough, these small variations can emerge that throw the whole notion of Common Ground into question.

What is Normal?

More to the point, why should we always try to assert a common definition as if anything else will doom us to chaos and agony?

I see two concepts of Normal in conflict. They overlap, but are not the same. The first might be something like “that which supports a common and consensual equilibrium throughout a community.” Normal, in this case, might be construed as that much-acknowledged but hard to achieve “level playing field” we hear so much about.

That it is so difficult to achieve may be due to the other concept of Normal: “that which allows me to feel secure in my expectations and opinions.”

In my teens, men with long hair were seen as violators of Normal. You could point to pictures of Wild Bill Hickock all you wanted, and Society refused to accept that boys walking around with hair to their shoulders was in any way Normal. It wasn’t done. And while it may seem trivial today (because that background concept of Normal has changed) it created an ugly atmosphere in the country. (My freshman year in high school saw the football team assault the handful of “hippies” that attended my school and forcibly cut their hair off. Of course, three years later, some of those with the longest hair in the school were on the varsity team.)

Why should these things conflict? Well, that should not be difficult to understand. If you have an idea of what is Normal and then the community around you exhibits changes that cause you ill-ease, requires you to question your assumptions, or even, at some point, shift your politics or moral assessment, what we see most often is an aggressive denial of those changes, and at some point a reliance on a presumed set of standards called Normal.

“That’s not Normal!”

We can go down the list of things in the last 60 years that were opposed because they were not Normal. Civil Rights. Homosexuality. Women’s Equality. Opposition to these things often enlisted language and philosophies that seemed more involved and sophisticated than merely saying they were not Normal, but when you dig down you can see that, for many people, these were violations of personal desires to feel secure in their expectations and opinions. We know this because over time, all of this has become accepted—become Normal—for most of us. It turned out none of these things were actually dangerous to the community.

Opposing them was.

The perversity of these conflicting concepts of Normal can be seen in cases of those who engage in behaviors which they personally pursue but then hide because they realize this may not be Normal. The awareness of community standards drives the given behavior into hiding. Sometimes these behaviors are inimical, both personally and publicly. But attempting to be seen as Normal overrides even the logic of coming to terms with the deviation.

How to tell the difference? How, in other words, to “normalize” something and how to know when such normalization is not acceptable?

Start with a simple question: does this hurt anyone? (One should include one’s self in that question, but for practical purposes, look beyond.)

Help for certain problems is avoided by the overwhelming urge to appear Normal.

But we don’t actually have a good idea of what that really is. To each their own only goes so far, because the community had to be considered.

So perhaps a definition of Normal might be: “that which allows for a mutuality of conditions sustaining both community equilibrium and personal fulfillment in private choices.”

Ah, but what might this mean in practice?

Obviously, this would entail a recognition that personal concepts of Normal have limits. As would community concepts. (There was a time unwed pregnant girls were put in “homes” so they wouldn’t be seen out in public. A girl in my high school sued the public school system when it tried to kick her out for being pregnant—and won. Of course, many people expressed outrage that a pregnant girl would be attending classes with all of us “innocent” students. But this was what passed for Normal back then. And it changed.) So obviously some notion of harm would have to be better codified on both sides.

It could be worked out. We do it anyway, but it’s such a messy process that often leaves casualties behind. Those chains of Normal are loud when they get rattled. I think it’s an innocuous idea that becomes pernicious too easily. We’ve traditionally been too willing to censure, incarcerate, punish things that in the end only make certain people uncomfortable. Their efforts to suppress behaviors that ruffle their delicate sensibilities (or their power base) harm far more than not.

Just now we’re seeing that conflict play out over competing notions of Normal. Not to make light of it, but really, the outraged sensitivities of one group trying to reassert a standard of Normal that was revealed as inadequate decades ago is causing enormous harm.

Normal is a monster. I’ve had that cudgel waved over my head a good deal of my life, for one thing or another, most of it relatively innocuous in itself. “Why don’t you be normal?” And ultimately, the question had little meaning, because all it meant was “why don’t you be like the rest of us and not make us feel uncomfortable around you?” Well, in the end, their discomfort was not my problem, though they tried to lay it on me. And this was over things like hobbies or aesthetic preferences (my love of science fiction at one time). What might it have been like if the issues had been more life-threatening?

I would welcome a community-wide reassessment of what constitutes Normal. We have a heuristic appreciation of it and in some instances it works well enough, but given that the only constant is change, we need to have a clearer idea about it.

Fascism, after all, is the ultimate insistence by one group on everyone else about what is Normal. We’ve seen what that costs.

 

 

Community

School Prayer

Over the years, I have modified my opinion on this many times. For a long time I believed it was a non-issue—how do you prevent it? If a student is intent on praying, what would prevent it?

Nothing. Which leads to the next realization that the people complaining about, demanding it, leading the charge against a prohibition that does not, in fact, exist are not interested in prayer in school: they’re interest in School Prayer, which requires public demonstration. What they want is openly-led prayer, as a group, with full participation.

This is not prayer, this is indoctrination. This is taking a position and directing the students to attend to what is being advocated. One major problem with this is that those students who decline to participate will be singled out and self-identified. What, one may ask, is wrong with that? Did you never go to school in the United States? Any deviation from a presumed “norm” is an excuse for bullying.

What is desired is an imposition of conformity.

Well, one might ask again, what is wrong with that? Isn’t that part of the point of attending school?

To which I must concede, yes, it is. We wish our people to have a common grasp of what it means to be a citizen and for that a certain degree of conformity is required.

Which is why this is such an intractable issue for many people.

How do I feel about it now?

Well. I believe the problem is not so much with a relative dispositions of a required set of conformist doctrines so much as that this is not supposed to be what school should be about in the first place. School—ideally—is where we should be sending children to learn how to apply skepticism. We should teach them how to think, how to examine the world, take things apart and put them together again. We should be allowing them to discover, in lightly directed ways, how the world works, what it means to develop understanding, and how to approach life critically. We should be teaching them, in short, how to avoid being duped.

While there may be schools where that level of actual learning takes place, for the most part it doesn’t happen other than by accident. I’ve always felt, at least after reaching an age and a level of understanding that allowed it, that public schools are not there to teach but to produce Citizens—consumers, workers, voters, patriots, parrots. Therefore, School Prayer is just another aspect of this and would be consistent with the programmatic inculcation of the conformity too many people prefer to the possibility of having a population of critical individuals questioning every damn thing and maybe challenging the status quo regularly.

So (again) how do I feel about it now?

Absolutely not. Religious instruction of any kind, unless done within the context of history classes, should be kept out of school, because it is by definition antithetical to skepticism. Which is of course why some people want it in there.

Somehow, some way, many students manage to acquire the tools of critical thinking even through the often mind-numbing “instruction” that passes for learning. They emerge as questioners, as independent thinkers. Apparently enough of them that the proselytes of conformity want to throw this in to the mix to see if something can be done to shut it down. So in the name of giving actual freedom of thought a chance, I must declare that I prefer religiosity of any kind kept out of public education. The fact is, religion depends on faith, which is incompatible in concept with skepticism. Mature believers certainly do find ways to balance them, but it seems unfair to expect kids to find that balance before they are even acquainted with the power of their intellects.

The day comes when we actually teach critical thinking as a matter of course, then by all means, admit prayer. Until then, I say leave it out. We do too much already to instill a stifling conformity.

Community

To Be Clear

In the past, I have attempted to present my arguments, my sentiments, in respectful, intellectual, philosophically relevant language—not always successfully, I admit; sometimes my dismay and anger get the better of me, and sometimes there are things too unbelievably stupid to warrant much, if any, respect—and to leave some opening for debate. 

No more.

With the recent Supreme Court rulings, it should be clear to everyone that what is happening is nothing less than an attempt by extralegal and institutional force to change the nature of our country. This is nothing new. What is new (new-ish) is the outright lies and misrepresentation in which these attempts are couched and the complete shameless embrace of those lies. 

The “sanctity of life” is one such misrepresentation. While I have no doubt there are many individuals who sincerely believe in this and are acting out of that conviction, as a movement it has been little more than a duplicitous shell game, the only consistency of which has been the clear aim of reducing large segments of the population to second-class status if not outright bondage. Even where some sincerity is on exhibit, at base it relies on a subversion of individual liberties.

For the last five decades we have come to expect certain things to remain, if not unchallenged, at least established until a better way forward can be found. Because there are elements in our country who will resist and try to eliminate these expectations no matter what, we have struggled along with a variety of less-than-perfect institutional safety nets. Many of these laws were not ideal, but we have defended them because the reality tells us that with what we have to work with at hand, any substitute will be worse, and more recently that there will be no substitute.

Example: the Republican Party has been bitching about the Affordable Healthcare Act since it was enacted. Repeatedly, they have stated their intention to repeal it and “put something better” in its place. Twelve years later, we still have not seen a draft of the “better” only more declarations of intent to repeal. After 12 years you would think they would come up with something, but that has never been their intention. 

Another example: immigration reform. Attempts have been offered, mostly by Democrats, since Clinton. The GOP has blocked all of them, even when one of their favored sons, Bush, was pushing for it. All they have managed to do is use it as a political rallying point to make people angry and drum up votes on the pretense that “they’ll do something.”

Now this past week.

Four justices on the Supreme Court should not be there. One took a spot that ought to have been filled by Obama’s last pick. I do not care how you feel about Obama, the blockage by Mitch McConnell of his nominee was unconscionable, petty, and partisan to the point of doing active harm. The other three were appointed by a man who had made promises to place the worst reactionaries he could get by with on the bench, and clearly they all lied during their hearings.

And what have we seen this week? A weakening of firearm safety laws, a weakening of Miranda, and the overturn of Roe v. Wade, which the liars on the bench swore under oath they viewed as “settled law.” We now no longer know what that means in terms of legal protections.

We can dance around these things all we want, but the trajectory is clear. The direction of rightwing politics was set decades ago by the Karl Rove Doctrine of destroying the federal government’s ability to act on social justice at any level. “I want to shrink it to where I can drown it in a bathtub,” he said, more or less. But even he has stepped that back in recent years, realizing that in many instances the only thing securing a civil society was federal oversight. If we had left it entirely up the states, we would likely still have slavery in parts of the United States, segregation certainly, and the freedom of association that comes with advancing civil rights would exist only in pockets.

We now know that this is exactly the goal. There is no excusing it as some sort of abstruse political theory of jurisdictional priority. The intended goal was to return certain people to positions of authority from which they can dictate the social landscape. They are bigots, either primarily as by way of securing power, or as constitutionally incapable of any kind of reliable empathy for people they view as “not my tribe.” The result is the same either way. There is no couching any of this in any terms other than the naked desire to remove themselves from other people they see as inferior and to guarantee those people remain incapable of sharing rights, liberties, or any meaningful means of securing a dignified life.

I will have no truck with this. 

All I can see coming from the current construction of the GOP is little more than petulant white spleen and open fear. The recent statement at a rally by Illinois Representative Mary Miller that the Roe decision is a “victory for white life” will serve as testament of the current “conservative” mindset.

Victory for white life?

Her people tried to explain that she misread the statement, but personally I neither believe that or care. It is perfectly consistent with the brand of reactionary white angst we’ve been seeing the past four or five years. This is in line with the resurgence of what is called Replacement Theory, which is the idea that unless white people start making more babies we will be overwhelmed by “foreigners.” This is nothing but racist fear. 

This is fascism.

The sad fact is, these people are unfazed by this accusation. They are proud of it. They think they’re winning, and in a certain narrow construction of what it is to be an American, this is the thing that matters. Winning. They are embracing this nonsense and feel empowered by these recent rulings. 

They think they are True Americans.

Now Roe. This is the first of a series of attempts to roll back civil liberties. We don’t have to guess, Clarence Thomas has put it in writing. 

Roe, in my opinion, was less than great law. It had weaknesses, the primary one being that it fell short of establishing bodily autonomy. The other problem, which is not the fault of Roe but a facet of how we conduct politics, is that once it was handed down, many of us just thought it was a settled issue. Instead of enacting legislation at the state level to bolster it, we relied on Roe to cover it.

But over the decades it has become clear that Roe represents an aspect of Civil Rights which we also failed to codify when the Equal Rights Amendment fell short of ratification. Too many people simply cannot accept universal equality.

There has always been a part of the American Psyché that nursed aspirations of specialness, which has most often manifested as an attitude that only certain people mattered—which meant many more people did not matter. Efforts to close this misapprehension over what our founding documents meant have resulted in too many periods of strife. When you break it down, all these instances were little more than privilege trying to retain its perquisites and shut others out.

Too often too many of us simply didn’t question this, either because we were doing fine or because we were too dependent on things as they were or because we were afraid.

I have friends who are now frightened. They are vulnerable, they know there are people in this country who fear and hate them, not for who they are but for what they seem to represent, and they see all that is happening as the opening stages of the collapse of an American version of the Weimar period. The next stage is naziism and they will be targeted.

This is now personal. True, it has always been, but there is no longer any excuse to pretend otherwise.

My reaction to this, to those who are cheering the recent rulings, those who would vote for that feckless opportunist again, those who think being an American is only being willing to step on or even kill those who aren’t like them, is—how dare you? How dare you shit on my country. How dare you pretend to be a patriot when the very principles you claim to revere are the very opposite of what you believe?  How dare you presume to threaten my friends because you don’t like the way they talk, dress, eat, feel, love? How dare you hold yourselves to be an example of True American when all that seems to flow from your mouths is disrespect, violence, and hatred? How dare you base all your judgments of others on either the color of their skin, their choice of partners, their gender, or their bank account? 

How dare you force your narrow conception of “appropriate” on everyone around you so you can feel comfortable?

In my opinion, what we are seeing and hearing from them is the death wail of a soon-to-disappear culture that has no valid place in our future. Regressives, not conservatives. I have rarely seen such a wrongheaded embrace of everything odious in our history or culture and such a rejection of a better world.

But before they’re gone, they can do a world of damage. 

They are passing laws to make it illegal to talk about certain things. Take a minute. In the guise of “protecting the children” they are forcing restrictions on talking. 

And if you don’t see what the big deal is, then you are a major part of the problem.

I beg you all, you who see this and wonder and are dismayed, do not let them prevail. You have the future to gain and a world to lose.