Category: history

culture

Debate the Last

Again, I didn’t watch.  We had a movie from the library to finish and some reading to do and I was beat.

Nevertheless, I’ve been listening to recaps and doing a little post-debate viewing and I have a couple of comments, if only to round out the trend here.

“Syria is Iran’s route to the sea.”

Romney has been saying this from time to time and it is somewhat baffling.  A look at a map shows the problem—a slice of northern Iraq separates the borders of Iran and Syria, not to mention that Iran already has considerable access to the Arabian Sea.  But this is Romney’s explanation for Iran’s pumping of support into Assad’s regime, that they want to use Syria for new bases and an extension of terrorist support.  But in that case, his phrasing is a bit…strange.

So, sure, we have a fleet in the Gulf, so Iran doesn’t actually have such easy access.  But in the other direction, from Syria, it’s the Mediterranean Sea and there are lots of fleets from Europe as well as our own presence, so how exactly would that help?

Ah, it would put them closer to striking Israel!

But it would also put them closer to getting struck by Israel, and the one thing you can say about Israel is, they don’t respond tepidly.

Plus, Assad is about to be ousted.  True, we have no idea what will replace him, but since Iran doesn’t seem to be backing any of the rebel groups, we can assume they don’t see any good successors waiting in the wings, so what exactly is Romney talking about?

Possibly he’s trying to spin this as the new geopolitical threat, that Iran has the long term goal of being the dominant player in the entire Middle East.  Tie this in with Romney’s assertion that the greatest threat we face is not Iran but Russia, and we can see a Machiavellian grasp of realpolitick in action, projecting a dominant Iran tied to an emergent Russian bear.

Except Iran isn’t that fond of Russia and Russia is having fits with politicized Islam.  It is not a clear what exactly Romney sees changing—unless he’s assuming Russian support for Syria will transfer to Iran once Iran has secured Syrian bases…

But there are all those European and American elements sitting there…

Which may be why he made the statement that we don’t have enough ships!  He sees a military gap in strength should all this come to pass!

Reagan built the famous 600 ship navy in the 1980s, which was a huge (and hugely expensive) increase in our seagoing military imprint.  Since Gorbachev was removed and the Soviet monolith collapsed, we’ve been mothballing a lot of that.

But Reagan was also funding Star Wars and ground force build-up and all manner of technomilitary development, all aimed at supposedly facing down Russia.  What often gets lost about this, though, is that this build-up was not intended to actually be deployed against the Soviet Union other than in the way it played out.

We spent the Soviet Union into penury.  Russia always—always—responded to build-ups in other countries by increasing their own, generally to their own detriment.  (The first world disarmament conference was called by Russia, through the minister and advisor Sergei Witte, in response to all the new spending in Europe.  They did this because Witte, as former Finance Minister of Russia, realized that Russia simply could not afford to compete.)  The Soviet Union was vulnerable to paranoia and economically incapable of matching our spending.  Reagan spent the Soviet Union into collapse.

(Of course, by so doing, he doubled the deficit and increased the debt, something we have yet to get a handle on, but that’s another issue.)

For all I know, Mitt Romney may have a century-long perspective of global realignment in mind in his pronouncements, but if so he’s not backed up by anyone reliable in such matters, only his own campaign staff.  Russia may well be a threat, but it will be economic, not military, and even that is a bit of a stretch as they’re still trying to figure out how to turn potential into power.

Iran is actually contained.  This gets lost on a lot of people.  Their currency just collapsed.  The sanctions (which I normally detest) are working and overtures have been made to sit down and negotiate.  The architect of all this nonsense, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is about to lose his office under a cloud of no confidence, and there is a latent revolution just under the surface in Iran.  The Iranian people are generally not thrilled to be ruled by a theocracy and it won’t take much to unseat the clerics.  If we let this happen, if we hold back on overt action, then the Arab Spring may well bloom there and the transition will be organic.

(This is something we seem impatient with.  Not going into Syria, doing the minimum in Libya, letting these things unfold on their own, this is a lesson we have come to the hard way.  The mess in the Middle East is largely the result of our machinations in the ’50s and ’60s and such interference is resented.  Stand back, let it happen, and support, if possible, whatever emerges, and we might undo a century of animosity.)

My own view is that the two biggest threats we face in the coming decades are less centered on specific countries and more on fundamental demographic trends.  But if you wish to put a name to them, there are two axes to look at.  The first is India-China.  Two enormous populations that already have resource problems and a history of border eruptions.  Their competition will spill over into the Pacific and Indian basins and lead to all manner of global resource wars, sometimes fought with armies and navies.  The growing disputes between China and Japan (and Korea and Singapore) is over food resource.  Dress it up any way you care to, it comes down to protein.

The other is Pakistan-Middle East.  This has been the problem for the last two decades.  Pakistan is a nuclear armed seedbed of modern terrorism with a real domestic problem, namely that moderate governments have notorious difficulty sitting on a growing radical population that is also strained for resources.  They are trapped between giants—India, China, the former Soviet Union—with the only natural egress through Afghanistan.  They see themselves as a global power but one that can’t feed itself and is impotent to settle simple local territorial disputes with its neighbors.

That’s the end of my prognostications.  Basically, though, it tells me that Romney has identified all the wrong problems.  Doesn’t matter what his solutions might be if they’re applied in the wrong direction.

So much for that.

But, hey, the Cardinals lost to the Giants.  What could this possibly mean?

culture

Debate Part Dieux?

I only want to say a couple of things about the debate (which I also did not watch, but have been listening to and reading highlights from all morning).  So, like…Obama won, did he?  Huh.

Romney, however anyone feels about him as candidate of choice, apparently had to do a lot of backpedaling and saying things that he’s going to have a lot of trouble with if elected.  Particularly about women.

Never mind the “binders full of women” remark, which is the kind of unfortunate remark anyone might make under pressure.

Here’s the problem with Mitt Romney.  As president, he will be the head of the GOP.  The Republican Party has a number of things they put in its platform that are inimical to women’s progress toward full equity in this society.  Romney, in order to follow through on some of his disclaimers last night, will have to turn around and tell his party that, no, he won’t support those things.

If the GOP retains its relative numbers in Congress—or gains control—just how likely does anyone think it will be that Romney will buck them?  (I’m asking here, I don’t know.  He does not strike me as the sort to go against his board of directors, though.)

While it may well be a minority of the GOP that actually believes some of the nonsense that’s been spewing from their collective gobbit of recent days, the fact is that this same minority has been wagging the dog for some time now.  Romney will have to disavow them, fight them, and stand up and be forcefully reasonable in order to actually protect women’s rights.  Something he apparently gave little actual substance to last night.

Yes, yes, I know, I should not pronounce on what I did not witness.  Fair enough.  But I’m not talking about last night per se, I’m talking about the last several months of campaigning.  Romney started losing women according to polls and modified his campaign rhetoric to compensate.  The problem is, the modifications run counter to the retrograde momentum of a great deal of the Republican Party, and that is where the problem lies.

The other part of this is the simple fact that no matter what he says, if he gets elected, everything will change.  Obama pointed some of it up last night over the public land licensing for oil and coal.  These are the kinds of details and difficulties you can’t always predict before you sit in that chair.  Once actually in office, things Are Different.  (That is why every president ever elected has disappointed some segment of his supporters.)

I’m delighted Obama got feisty.  Romney may well want to win the election, but I wonder if he actually wants the job.  He wants the job he thinks he’s running for, not the one he’ll actually have.  Obama still wants to be president after four years.

But who knows?  My point here is that the presidential election this time is far more about what the opposing Parties will do rather than the candidates themselves.

I’m cutting Obama a lot of slack on the economy, because frankly he told us it would take a long time to recover.  Things are recovering.  Naturally a lot of people are unhappy and not without reason—times are difficult—but he didn’t say it would be quick, which is usually what people want.  (And people with jobs and some security will of course be more patient than those without.)  Romney claims he knows how to create jobs.  Neither man has that kind of control over what is ostensibly a free market.  So as far as I’m concerned, it’s the rest of what Obama has been about that I’m concerned with.

And on that score, it’s a mixed bag.  But just two things: Bush left this country with one of the worst international reputations it has had since Vietnam.  Obama has been carefully rebuilding that.  We simply cannot act unilaterally in the world today and Bush thought he could (“I don’t do nuance.” Indeed) and subsequently pissed everyone off pretty much across the board (except Israel).*

The second thing really is the women’s rights issue.  What many people seem not to get is that this is not “just” about women, but about people—because if you can treat one segment of the population “special” and curtail their rights (pay, self-determination, personal dignity and security of person) then you can do it to any segment.  The Right has more or less successfully made it appear that any time measures are taken to redress inequity for a given group that such measures are Special Treatment and “privileges.”  Gotta hand it to them, they’ve been very, very good at this kind of 1984 newspeak.  But it’s not so and until they stop letting the right wing of the party dictate their flight path I will vote against them.  I don’t want to return us to a Leave It To Beaver world.  No, I don’t think they actually can—social engineering is never so neat and precise—but the attempt to do so, even partially successful, will result in unintended consequences that will do damage to lives that should never have been so harmed.  (Yes, some of these people I do see as the moral equivalent of the thugs who shot Malala Yousafzai. I very badly want these people out of office.)

So.  One more debate and everyone will vote the way they were likely to in the first place.  But I believe we should be clear on why we’re doing so.

Back to work, now.  Thank you for your attention.

_________________________________________________

* It may seem like a fair charge that at some point we should stop beating up on what the Bush Administration did, and in principle I agree.  We should move on.  But let’s be honest—the right wing of the GOP has been carping and complaining about the Johnson Administration since Nixon took office.  Not, perhaps, in name, but their entire direction has been more or less dictated by trying to undo what LBJ did.  Well, in my view, W did one hell of a lot more damage, so forgive us if we still point that out from time to time.

Art

Some Thoughts On SF, Nostalgia, Words

This past weekend I attended our local convention,  Archon.  It’s a St. Louis convention that’s not actually in St. Louis, for many reasons too convoluted to go into here, and this one was number 36.  Which means, with a couple of exceptions, I’ve been going to it for three decades.  (Our first con was Archon 6, which featured Stephen King as GoH, and thus was something of a media circus.  I met several writers, some whose work I knew and loved, others of whom I just then became acquainted—George R.R. Martin, Robin Bailey, Charles Grant, Joe Haldeman, Warren Norwood. Some have passed away, others are still working.)

I go now to meet up with friends of long acquaintance, in whose company we have spent relatively little actual face-time, but who by now have become touchstones in our lives.  It’s odd having people who feel so close that you see at most one weekend a year.  Granted, the internet has helped bridge those gaps, but it’s still a curious phenomenon, one which I kind of dealt with this weekend on at least one panel.

This year, the novel that seems to have garnered the most awards was Jo Walton’s Among Others. It won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, both times beating out what I considered the best science fiction novel of perhaps the last decade, China Miéville’s Embassytown.  

Now, please don’t misunderstand—I thought Among Others was a marvelous novel.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, was, in fact, delighted by it, and certainly being delighted is one of the chief pleasures of reading.  I do not here intend any slight on the work.

But it took two awards that are supposed to honor the best science fiction of the year, and Among Others was barely fantasy.  (One of the things I admired about it was the line Walton danced around separating the fantasy from actual occurrence and simple perception on the part of the characters.)  It is in the long tradition of English boarding school stories, written as the diary of a girl who is somewhat isolated, who has run away from her mad mother (who may be a witch) after a tragic loss of her sister and a crippling accident.  Living with her father now, she is placed in a boarding school where her love of science fiction is one of her chief methods of coping. The novel then chronicles the succession of books she reads over a year or two, many of which were exactly the books I was reading then and loving.  It is in that sense an overview of a particular period in SF, one I found myself reliving with immense pleasure.

Embassytown, on the other hand, is solidly SF built on a very meaty idea that plays out with intensity and provokes a great deal of thought—everything SF is supposed to do.  It is also marvelously well-written and to my mind was hands down the best of the year, if not, as I said, the last decade.

But it lost to the Walton.

Why?

So I proposed a panel at Archon to discuss the power of nostalgia in a field that is presumed to deal with cutting edge, next level, philosophically stimulating ideas.  It’s supposed to take us new places.  Granted, most of it no longer does—instead it takes us to some very familiar places (after eight decades of definably “modern” SF, how many “new” places are there really to go?) and in the last couple of decades, it’s been taking us to some very old places, alá Steampunk and alternate history.  I’d never given much thought to this before as a nostalgic longing because in both cases the writers are still proposing What If? scenarios that ask questions about the nature of historical inevitability and technological destiny.  The story might well be set in 1890, but it’s not “our” 1890 and we have to come to grips with the questions of why “our” 1890 has preference in the nature of human development.

But Among Others didn’t even do that.  It was just a recapitulation of one fan’s love of a certain era of fiction.

Again, absolutely nothing wrong with that and I say again, Among Others is a fine novel, I unhesitatingly recommend it.

My question in the panel had to do with the potential for exhaustion in SF.  Paul Kincaid talks about this here in an examination of two of the best Best of the Year anthologies, Dozois’ and Horton’s.  In my own reading, I’ve noticed a resurgence of old models—planetary romance, space opera, etc (Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey for instance)—where we’re seeing writers take these comfortable, familiar forms and rework them with more contemporary sensibilities, broader perspectives, certainly in many instances more skillful prose.  But the “cutting edge” seems to be occupying narrower slices of the collective SF zeitgeist.  (William Gibson, to my mind still one of the most interesting SF writers, has all but given up writing SF in any concrete fashion and is now doing contemporary thrillers from an SF perspective.  Is this cutting edge or an admission that there simply isn’t anywhere “new” to go?  Likewise with Neal Stephenson, who opted to go all the way back to the Enlightenment and rework that as SF—taking the notions of epistemology and social science and applying them to the way a period we thought we knew unfolded from a shifted perspective.)

Kincaid’s piece talks about insularity in the field, which is not a new criticism—arguably, the recent upsurge in YA in the field is a direct response to the ingrown, jargon-laden incestuousness of the field in the 80s and 90s, where it seemed that if you hadn’t been reading SF since the early Seventies you simply would not understand what was going on—but I’m wondering if a new element has been added, that of an aging collective consciousness that unwittingly longs for the supposedly fertile fields of a previous Golden Age in publishing, an age before Star Trek and Star Wars and cyberpunk, when it was easier (supposedly) to write an almost pastoral kind of science fiction and you didn’t need a degree in physics or history or cultural anthropology to find your way.  (I suspect the tenacity of iconic worlds like the aforementioned Star Trek and Star Wars can be explained by a very common need for continuity and familiarity with a story that you can access as much through its fashions as its ideas.)

Having just turned 58, and feeling sometimes more behind the curve both technologically and culturally, I’m wondering if, in a small way, the accolades given to a work of almost pure nostalgia is indicative of a wish for the whole magilla to just slow down.

(The trajectory of my own work over the last 20 years is suggestive, where I can see my interests shift from cool ideas, new tech, stranger settings, into more personal fiction where the internal landscapes of my characters take more and more precedence.  And many of them are feeling a bit lost and clueless in the milieus in which I set them.  Not to mention that I have moved from space opera to alternative history, to more or less straight history and into contemporary…)

The panel was lively and inconclusive—as I expected, because I didn’t intend answering my own question, only sparking discussion and perhaps a degree of reflection.

SF goes through cycles, like any other art form, and we see the various subsets rise and fall in popularity.  There’s so much these days that I may be missing things and getting it all wrong.  The reason I brought it up this time is a response to the very public recognition of a given form that, this year, seems to have trumped what I always thought science fiction is about.

I confess, there are many days I look back to when I first discovered SF, and the impact it had on my adolescent mind (and the curious fact that when I go reread some of those books I cannot for the life of me see what it was about them that did that—no doubt I was doing most of it for myself, taking cues from the works) and when I first thought about becoming a writer.  It does (falsely) seem like it would have been easier “back then” to make something in the field.  Such contemplation is a trap—you can get stuck in a retrograde What If every bit as powerful as the progressive What If that is supposed to be at the core of science fiction.

culture

Affirmative Action Revisited (Again)

This will be brief.  The Supreme Court is set to hear another case about affirmative action in education.  A Texas student was not accepted for the University of Texas and has claimed that the only difference between her and other students who did get in is her skin color—she’s white.

Now, by all accounts, she is an excellent student.  According to UT, though, she wasn’t good enough.  They use two metrics to select enrollees—academic scores and what they call “personal achievement” indices, which include extracurricular activities and an essay which is supposed to reveal leadership potential and other qualities that can’t be scored on a test.  UT claimed her academics just weren’t good enough.

I don’t know the particulars of her case, but one thing that always seems to be left out of reports about this sort of thing is any mention of the value of “higher education.”

To put it simply, if the entire worth of a college education was about academics—what you learn in the classroom, how well you learn it, and how that fits you for life after schooling—then the critics of affirmative action are absolutely right.  The best qualified students should always have first dibs on places in good colleges and universities.  Smarts should count above all else.  If you’re a straight A student with an I.Q. through the ceiling, there should be no reason to bar you.  Racial quotas would in that case be pointless, because the only thing that would matter is a provable command of knowledge and the capacity to apply it.

What never gets mentioned—and which I suspect everyone knows—is that the value of a college degree has almost nothing to do with that.  Maybe at one time it did, but no longer.

What that degree gets you is entreé.  It’s the Old School Tie, the Secret Password, the Letter of Introduction, the Inside Edge, and has nothing to do with how smart or knowledgeable you may be.  That degree gets you preferred treatment in the game of life.

At least, it used to.  Currently, not so much, although it still provides an edge in the job market.

In that case, affirmative action is absolutely necessary, because businesses will use any basis to cull applicants, and a degree from a good college or university is an easy one.

If you can’t get into the school in the first place, you are starting out in second or third place, and if you can’t get in because of ethnicity, well…

Yes, it’s more complicated than that, especially today, but it is not irrelevant as the critics of affirmative action claim.  Because these schools do not admit only the best.  There are a lot of legacy enrollments, students who get in because they have an alumni card to play, and others who get bought in because their families are rich and maybe endow the school.  Academics have little to do with that and let us not even begin to talk about athletic scholarships that in many instances are even more divorced from intellectual ability.

(I have no doubt that a significant majority of students in any college are there by virtue of ability.  We aren’t talking about the middle 70% but the people who bookend those students—the privileged and the underprivileged.)

So.  If the game were all about what you do in the classroom, then I agree, affirmative action serves no useful purpose (after all, if it were all about the brains, skin color would be just as irrelevant as any other non-academic factor).  But since we all know—even if we won’t actually talk about it—that it is about prestige and a kind of club membership, then affirmative action is absolutely necessary.

You might wonder how I can say these things about our wonderful higher education system.  I’m glad you asked.

Personal experience.  I’ve worked with, worked for, and had working for me a number of college-degreed people.  I never found them to be superior, in the fields in which I worked, than someone trained on-the-job, as it were—in fact, all of them, without exception, required on-the-job training since their much-ballyhooed degrees had not taught them what they needed in order to actually work in their fields—and in several instances I found them below acceptable ability.  And arrogant about it.  (“I have a B.A. from SmartAss U!  What do you mean I don’t qualify?”)

(What college and university provide is a place and an opportunity to learn.  For the dedicated scholar, it is one of the most ideal environments in which to expand knowledge and interact with people who can help you hone your intellect.  But to society, that seems not to be the important thing.  People who attend and take no degree are seen somehow as failures.  It’s the degree, because everyone implicitly knows that this is the magic key and what you actually know has no intrinsic value to anyone else until it manifests as positive contribution.  You don’t get to show that without the job and you all-too-often don’t get the job without the ticket.  It’s not how smart you are but how smart other people say you are.)

Human history can be tracked in many ways, by many trends and institutions.  Club Membership has always been a preferred method of keeping the so-called Masses out of the halls of privilege.  Brains rarely had anything to do with membership.  University affiliation is just one of those ways to keep “undesirables” out.  It has been used to keep women out, keep minorities out, keep the “lower orders” out.  Heaven forbid some kid from a slum demonstrate higher intelligence and better grasp of the material than the spit-polished scion of an old money family!  Why, next you’ll be advocating (gasp) democracy!

current affairs

One or Two Observations on Last Night’s “Debate”

Okay, I confess, I did not watch the debate between Obama and Romney.  In my opinion, it doesn’t count for much.  I’ve been listening to both sides now since last spring and I’ve made my decision, so exactly what good would listening to the debate do me?  Or for a committed Romney supporter, for that matter?  None to speak of.

So, observation number one:  I’ve never known anyone who changed their vote because of something in the debates.

That doesn’t mean people haven’t, it’s just that, in the 40 + years I’ve been paying attention, I’ve never met anyone who changed positions because of anything said during one of these.  In my opinion, these are just 90 minute infomercials, a restating of positions, and a jockeying for Gotcha Points.  They will doubtless be relevant to historians at some future date.

Listening to the reactions today, however, has been both entertaining and enlightening.

For instance, one conservative (self-identified) commentator I heard said that “Well, the fact checkers were on Obama’s side even if the facts weren’t.”

Hmm.  This is close thinking?  Even grading on the curve, a lie is a lie, a misstatement a misstatement, a misrepresentation just as misleading, and there are a number of fact checking organizations today that do a very good job at tracking this stuff.

For instance, here’s one that tracked Romney’s misleading statements.  The worst of the bunch was his continued claim that he hasn’t proposed a five trillion dollar tax cut.  The numbers do not support him.

Also, there’s a bit of fast-talking sleight-of-hand even in what he said.  He claimed he intends to provide a 20% tax cut across the board.  Then he claimed that his number one principle is “no tax cut that adds to the deficit.”  Five trillion or not, those two things are utterly incompatible.  Right now, any tax cut will add to the deficit.  People who think he did well because he presented well may have missed that.

(I know, I know, this is more of that trickle-down nonsense, that if people have more of “their own money” the economy will grow.  it still doesn’t address the people who have no money or the fact that people who have a great deal are not redistributing it effectively in this country.)

But even this is beside the point.  If you’re a Romney supporter going into last night, likely you still are.

Observation two:  Hardly anyone remembers the first debate.  Those wondering why Obama didn’t unload on Romney (there’s plenty there in his ammunition box) should just be patient.  Why give the opposition anything to fuel new ads with?  Obama laid back, played a bit of rope-a-dope, and (my prediction) will lay into Romney in the last debate.  Meanwhile, he just has to stick to his record.

But in any case, people remember the last debate, which is the one that provides the final snapshot they will all take with them into the voting booth.  So to say Obama blew it is missing the point.

Observation three:  Rarely are these things actual debates.  You want a debate, you sit the candidates down in a room with a camera and microphone, allot them three hours, and let them go at it.  These formalized Q & A sessions give both candidates too much wiggle room to simply campaign a little more.  It’s not an honest debate.  It’s an airing of positions and demonstration of how well each can duck hard questions or zing the other with a punchy one-liner.

(The next one is supposed to be a town hall format, which might yield some more relevant and honest responses, but even these are so heavily vetted that I don’t expect any surprise questions that flatfoot both of the candidates.)

Observation four:  If people think they can “catch up” with all this by tuning in the debates, they’re wrong.  You don’t even keep abreast by watching the ads or listening to stump speeches.  You have to read, you have to look things up, you have to pay attention to what the Parties are doing.  And if anyone believes they have caught up by watching the debates, well…

One small ancillary observation.  A critic this morning pointed out that Romney kept accusing Obama of “wasting” 90 billion dollars on alternative energy programs, an accusation Obama simply refused to answer.  The conclusion of one pundit was that he couldn’t, because it’s true.

Two things.  Research costs money.  This is why private firms are continually cutting their R & D departments, because they are seen as sinkholes that add nothing to dividends.  (They are also doing it because they have more and more relied on government to pay for basic research.  When the government signs a contract with a big firm for a new whattayacallit that requires development, the company doesn’t pay those costs, the government does, and more and more the government funds basic R & D at all levels.  No one seems to know this.)  Investment in research and development, however, is absolutely crucial and the funding that has supposedly been “wasted” has paid to advance basic knowledge, keep teams of scientists and engineers afloat, preserve a basic substrate of intellectual reserve that without such funding would be lost.  The “waste” is a misnomer because it assumes that the end result, the goal, is profit.  This is a serious mistake.

But the other thing is that when the government pumps money into things like this, they are pumping money into our economy.  Waste?  Ninety billion dollars just got reinvested within our borders.  Out of that paychecks were made, communities kept together a bit better, dollars were distributed to Americans.

None of which matters to people who think that if your dividends don’t go up next quarter then the project is a failure.

Anyway, I thought I’d explain why I tend not to watch the debates.*

_________________________________________________

*I did watch the GOP debates last year.  I wanted to get some idea about the candidates with whom I was less familiar.  But once the front runner was sorted out, further debates don’t matter that much. In my humble opinion.

Art

It Was Fifty Years Ago, Mr. Bond

“Do you expect me to talk?”

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

The exchange between Bond and Goldfinger may sum up the attitude of many who are tired, offended, or otherwise ambivalent or disinterested in the absurdly long career of the improbable James Bond, 007.  Even those of us who have been more or less unable to let go our adolescent attachment to the character have doubtless wondered why he hasn’t just died.

He should have, certainly after the criminal treatment he endured toward the middle and end of the Roger Moore years.  All due respect to Mr. Moore (he didn’t write the films, he had probably less control than most leading men), I for one never quite accepted him as Bond.  He was always a bit too pretty, a bit too sophisticated, a bit too…light.

But the movies were popular, he kept signing on, and we endured, waiting for the next incarnation of Sean Connery.

The iconic Bond image of Connery with the long-barreled Walther (yes, that thing was a Walther, but it was an air gun because the actual prop hadn’t arrived for the photo shoot) which was never seen in any of the Bond films is not the one that summed up the character for me.  Rather it was this one:

The first real good look at Bond, at the L’Circle club at the beginning of Doctor No.  This is the image that made me want to be Bond— utterly unconcerned, cool, detached, and completely confident within himself.  He’s playing a fairly expensive game of bacarat and he obviously could care less whether he wins or loses.  (Of course, this is not true—Bond always cared about that, but not over trivial things.  The trivial things simple fell in line when he walked into the room, and this was another characteristic that made him, to a clumsy, hormone-laced adolescent, such an enviable figure.  How badly I wanted to simply not give a damn and how thoroughly I gave a damn about not being able to do that.)

I saw that first Bond film on first release. I was eight at the time and it wasn’t the women that got me, it was that dangerous cool he had at his disposal.  Later, as I reached puberty, the women became important, but till then it was being lethal—and not using it—that was the thing.

And dressing well and talking well and comporting yourself as if you knew why you were there and what you were doing.  It was a total package that was the only viable replacement for the stoic gunslinger in the westerns.  In the scope of a kid’s imagination, Bond was doable.

I wrote an essay for one of the BenBella Smartpop anthologies, James Bond In The 21st Century riffing on an imaginary history of the films, with a departure from Sean Connery.  It could have happened, Fleming was not taken with Connery at first, and there were others who could have filled the role.  (Fleming’s choice was David Niven, which, given the physicality of the character, is kind of absurd.  But it explains the subsequent choices, I think, of actors.)  It was also an alternate history of the franchise had it not been the hit that it was.  It was a fun piece to write, but it addressed a serious question.

Why did a franchise that became, for a time, so massively ridiculous continue to be such a big deal?

I think the answer is in the new manifestation.  Daniel Craig (and the writers) has gone back to the source in many ways and given us a Bond more in line with Fleming’s original conception of someone who is genuinely dangerous who wears a veneer of polish, culture, and civilization.

Once again, though, we harken back to that first on-screen look at Bond and see its reemergence in Craig’s portrayal.  Detached, completely in control, cool, and competent.

But with a difference for the films.

He’s vulnerable.

The last time Bond was vulnerable was in On Her Majestie’s Secret Service and Tracy Bond.  After that, he was in all but the Kryptonian origin, Superman.  It became the trademark.  Nothing got through, not really.  He had his empathy boxed up and set to one side, to be taken out on special occasions.

And there’s an appeal to that, to be sure.  We have all been undone by our notoriously fickle and sabotaging emotions, made fools of, acted stupidly.  What would we give to be able to avoid all that?

Well, the price is too high, but we have fantasy characters through which to pretend.

But I think it goes too far and they become so unlikely—not in their actions, the plots that give them a showcase, but in their emotional lives—that we cannot identify with them at all.  All we have then are the toys, the lifestyle, the fashions, and the rollercoaster ride of an action sequence.

Craig has been allowed to open Bond up so we can reconnect, albeit in a small way, with the pathetic human being caged behind the armor.  The fact that Craig is a first-rate actor (possibly better than Connery even in his prime) doesn’t hurt.

Bond has survived, though, because at his base he still represents a level of competence in a fickle, dangerous world we would all like to tap into.  Bond is always centered, he always knows what he’s about and how to act on that knowledge, and that is a very attractive ideal.  When you look at the first three Bond films, you can see that and a slightly vulnerable man, one who doesn’t always get it right, who can become involved, and can therefore be hurt. After Thunderball they became all about the gadgets and some surreal good vs evil drama that actually gave a good shadow-theater representation of the world at large.

The other thing that has carried us through so many really awful Bond films, though, is the myth of the uninvolved sybarite.  He comes in, takes his pleasure, kills the bad guy, and leaves unscathed.  He’s a moral avenger who gets to party occasionally.  His reward for doing the right thing was good food, fast cars, fine clothes, and great sex.  Bond never got fat, never caught a ticket or the clap, never left behind a single mom, and always looked good.  In return, he saved the world.  There was no sacrifice, really—he was a mercenary.

Except that’s not what Fleming wrote.  And when they rebooted the franchise and chose to do Casino Royale, they put that in there.  It may be ignored in subsequent films (I hope not, it’s what elevates Bond above the common), but it was there—Bond is sacrificing his soul.

That first novel, Casino Royale, was about that.  Bond was a new agent, freshly-minted with a 007 license, and fully a third of the book is him in hospital, working through the emotional and moral calculus of continuing to do this ugly, brutal job.  To their credit, the makers of the first Craig film kept that in.  We were even, dimly, shown its conclusion in Quantum of Solace, where at the end Bond has made his choice, and put on the armor.

It will be interesting to see if they continue to keep him human, if only slightly, or if they’ll do what they did before and turn him into the Road Runner getting one over on all the coyotes on the planet.

Happy birthday, Mr. Bond.

blog

A Romney Review

Over the last few years I have written a great deal on presidential politics and politics in general.  With the first debate this cycle coming up tomorrow night, I thought instead of rehashing what I’ve already said, I would simply link to what I’ve already said, specifically about Mitt Romney.  I was surprised to see how far back I wrote my first post about him, 2007, when he made his bid then.

Romney’s Testament

This was about Romney’s statement that he intended to put his religion in second place as president.  As it has turned out, he has not said a great deal about religion this time around.  His one stab against Obama on that basis—Obama’s supposed “war on religion” —apparently backfired.  Since then, he’s stepped quietly around the issue, ostensibly because he is still viewed with suspicion by evangelicals.  Romney’s a Mormon. Where that fits in the hierarchy of American religious advocacy is problematic, since it is to many barely recognized as christian.

Thoughts On the End of 2010

This was more of an overview on the heels of the mid-terms that put the Tea Party arguably in the driver’s seat of the GOP, a context Romney will have to work with, deal with, should he win—one which has been a problem for him during the past year.

Will ‘E Or Won’t ‘E?

Just after Romney officially declared his candidacy in 2011 and some of the contradictions and conflicts his campaign might face.

No Longer Surprised

This is more a critique of Obama.  It has become apparent to me that I am more partisan this year than I like.  Perhaps I’ve been forced to it, and somewhat reluctantly, but it’s true.  I just can’t see Obama as the big demon the Republican Party is trying to make him out to be.  Still, partisanship, while it has its place, bothers me.  I don’t believe in being on someone’s side just because they wear a particular label.  Partisanship to ideas and ideals, that’s different, but in that vein I have some significant problems with Mr. Obama, some of which I detail here.  I have greater problems with the current GOP.

Poll Positions

I discussed my views on the GOP slate prior to the emergence of Romney as their candidate.  It’s useful, I think, to remember all this because much of it has gone into the GOP Platform.

What Is Wrong With Conservatives?

I got testy here, true enough.  I come from an attitude that says basically “What good is fixing the economy if prosperity flowers in a country wherein the rights and privileges I believe are fundamental to what being an American is are curtailed or gone?”

Here’s A Fact

Most recently, obviously, this is about Romney’s 47% comments.  Which were not, I might add, the most controversial statements in that video, but certainly indicative of a mindset I find troubling, to say the least.

You can scroll back to my latest remarks on Paul Ryan, who may have been Romney’s biggest tactical mistake in the entire year.  I have considered Ryan a policy idiot since his election to congress—and so, apparently, have many of his colleagues in the GOP, so this is not just someone on the Left beating up on him, you know, just because.  I suspect Romney made this choice for three reasons.  Ryan is certainly “conservative enough” for the Tea Partiers and the envangelicals.  He’s not afraid to be an attack dog and say all the outrageous things that Romney likely has sympathy for if not an outright belief in (which also means Romney can take a rhetorical high road and come across gentler and more humane than his running mate).  And he has (presumably) the connections in Congress Romney lacks.

But it seems like every time Ryan opens his mouth, he makes us long for the days of Dan Quayle.

However the debates come out, the thing that I find the most important aspect of this election year is not the presidential campaigning, but the Congressional.  Unless that contingent of intransigent ideologues are removed, we will have four more years of the kind of motionless sturm und drang we’ve been seeing for the last two at least.  The Tea Party representatives did not “sweep into office” with a mandate.  The 2010 elections were some of the lowest voter turnouts in recent memory and none of those elections were landslides, they were all close, marginal victories.  If twice the voters had turned out then, it is my belief not one of those people would have taken office.  I can’t prove that, of course, but I have some small confidence that the majority of Americans are not actually that dumb.

Of course, they may be.

For the record, I’ll restate my major reason for not voting for Romney.  He is on record as an advocate of trickle-down economics.  He hasn’t called it that, but when you look at his stated policies it is obvious.  Basically, we have had over three decades now of supply-side economics and it has left us in a shambles.  It does not do what it has been purported to do.  Why would anyone vote for someone advancing a policy with a demonstrated track record of failure?

Of course there are secondary reasons I won’t vote for him, the number two being that he represents a Party which embraces a whole raft of positions I simply cannot support.  No matter what Romney might think personally, he has the albatross of the current GOP hanging around his neck.

But I also do not think this is a slam-dunk for Obama, regardless what the polls may suggest.  Presidential elections are historically fraught with surprises and upsets.  I think it is therefore incumbent on voters to express their views and to show up on November 7th.  Show up.  Vote.  Because we have a history of ambivalence and, often, apathy in this country when it comes to politics (people love to argue about it, but when it comes to actually participating, that’s another matter altogether), we have often endured government by minority veto rather than majority rule.  Vote.

If you don’t vote, you don’t get to bitch afterward.

culture

Rights

A couple of posts back I made a claim that seems to have upset a few people, namely that Rights (as we generally use the term) are legal constructs, not something inherent in nature, even though we talk about them as if they were.  One criticism, quite correctly, pointed out that one of the bases of the Enlightenment was a recognition that human rights emerged out of a clear understanding of Natural Law, and that civil law was necessarily grounded in that understanding.

True, that is how we formulate it.  And it may well be that there is, somewhere, a fundamental natural basis on which we build our moral and legal houses.  But it is not nature from which it is derived in the sense of the physical universe in which we exist—clearly we order our social systems more often in contravention of nature than in imitation—but Nature in the sense that Spinoza and possibly others like Kant and Hegel understood the term, namely reality as we perceive it in respect to our condition.  This is in some ways an abstruse and complex concept and contrary to popular usage it is not common sensical or self-evidently apparent.

Why do I say that?  Because we are still arguing over what it is we’re trying to describe.

One of the elements of criticism leveled at me was a spirited defense of the manifest truth of such things as the Declaration of Independence.  My own argument was only that, while we seem to have accepted the moral injunctions of the Declaration, we are still trying to put those concepts into practice through law because we can’t agree on a common meaning.  This has been the case since Day One of our Republic.

…all men are created equal…

Great.  Wonderful.  But what does that mean in practice?

It’s one of those phrases that would seem to be so self-evidently true that it requires no further explanation and should automatically be regarded by all as obvious and put into immediate practice.  Never mind the obvious failures to prevent avaricious and corrupt people to flout such a principle, it has been the case that even people of good will and social conscience have simply not agreed on the supposed self-evident meaning of that phrase.

Simply put, which men?  All men?  What about women?  Or, at the time it was written, slaves?  What about people in other countries?  What does this mean in terms of resources?  Equal how?  Does this make it incumbent on us to guarantee equality, even for those who apparently are incapable of the unstated but quite real consequent responsibilities?  Should some be held back in order not to tip the scales of social justice unfairly?  And what about those who simply reject that formulation?

If you think this is an academic issue, remember that in the early Republic, not only were slaves and women held to be inferior to “men” but men of property were implicitly and in practice accorded greater rights than those with nothing—like the vote.  Nor did this begin to change until Jacksonian Democracy start the erosion of social privilege in matters of politics.

Kant, among others, claimed that liberty was based on the free will and its unimpeded exercise and that free will was a product of Reason.  Reason, however, as a necessary aspect of nature, that all humans possessed.  I am not indulging hyperbole when I point out that Reason is a rare commodity, exercised seldom, and usually poorly, and needs nurturing in order to be of benefit to the individual.  Humans possess a cleverness, a proclivity for pattern-seeking and its concomitant capacities for problem-solving at possibly the highest level of any creature on the planet.  But I think it fair to say that this is not what Kant meant by Reason.  He meant the ability to indulge abstraction and thereby project imagination onto a landscape and formulate conceptions not immediate evident.

Sorry, but I do not believe that is a skill people are born with.  It is a potential, a latent capacity which must be seeded, cared for, fed, and grown.  It is not, by definition, “natural” in the way I think many people conceive the term.  It is only natural in that it is something humans as a species have a potential ability to practice, but we do not necessarily grow up with it.  The pattern-seeking which seems to be hardwired into our brains is generally taken as reason, especially when it produces useful results in environmental manipulation and social construction.  But it ultimately lacks the purely abstract aspect that leads to what we can honestly call ratiocination.  It does not lead to philosophy.

And it is out of philosophy that any concept of Rights emerges.

I confess here that this is a rather scary proposition.  Historically, humans base their law on a concept of Higher Order Morality, the assumption that there is an authority above our own which requires certain normative standards.  God, in other words.  A Law Giver.  It is presumed that human law is a reflection of this higher law.  Over time that higher law has morphed into what, during the Enlightenment, became codified as Natural Law.  It is reassuring to believe that we aren’t actually all on our own.

But even Kant, intuitively or otherwise, seems to have sensed that we are, ultimately, on our own.  In his 1784 essay An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? he states in the first paragraph:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.  Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”

In other words, maturity, as pertains to the ability to reason, is the point at which we stand on our own, without the crutches of dependency on authority-qua-authority.  By definition, this would include assumed Higher Order sources of law.

Given the diverse and ever-conflicting nature of civil discourse and the constant disagreement over what is morally defensible within a liberal framework (and by liberal I do not mean its current defamed definition, but the traditional meaning of Liberty of the individual to act as he or she will free of arbitrary constraint) obviously we have no clear, definitive explication of what that Higher Order Law might be.

We’ve been creating it on our own all along.

Before I am accused of claiming that a concept of individual rights has no basis in moral reasoning, it is equally obvious that it does.  Common human needs and aspirations are clearly universal and the consequences of oppression are equally obvious across all systems.  This much can be seen and understood and that pattern-seeking creature that is the common condition of all humans can here demonstrate a universal sense of good and evil, right and wrong, beneficial and destructive.  We learn, over time, what will or will not secure a beneficial social environment, at least in its basics.

Abstractions can clarify as well as obfuscate this, which too-often is diminished by such terms as common sense or natural law.

What Thomas Jefferson wrote and what the Enlightenment-besotted Founders then tried to put into place is an abstraction intended to guarantee freedom of action by barring arbitrary restrictions.

You will note, please, that in the initial draft of the Constitution, there is no mention of these ideals.  The Articles that form the principle body of our Constitution is a legal framework and no more.  The Bill of Rights was an afterthought, a demand by those opposed to Federalism and fence-sitters without whom ratification would have been impossible.  And even in the Bill of Rights there is no reference to the kind of natural law argument on which many people assume the legitimacy of said system of rights.

Which all begs the question as I originally phrased it—if “natural law” is so obvious and so “right” why has there been any need to continually wrestle with meaning and intent?  Why would there ever have been the need for a Civil War, 13th and 14th Amendments, and for the purposes of my prior essay, a 19th Amendment?

Because it is neither obvious nor is it an inevitable recognition that “all men are created equal.”

In the 1970s, an Equal Rights Amendment struggled for ratification and was defeated by people who, without the need to demonize them, simply disagreed with its stated principles.  Many, while willing to admit the core principle of the amendment as valid, worried over the legal ramifications of its enactment.  Ultimately, two things can be said about its defeat.  One, that we do not all agree on what Equality means or to whom it applies.  And Two, that if you can deny a right through legal mechanisms, obviously you can only grant it through the same mechanisms.

So when I said that, contrary to our cherished prejudices, Rights are legal constructs, this is what I meant.  Each of us, individually, can choose to act according to our own conception of rights and this need not be based on legal constructs, but as a society it is absurd to talk about self-evident rights outside a legal framework.  Rights, on that level, are consequent upon law, and we say what that is.

Which means we should be a bit more alert about them than we usually are.  Rights are gained and lost all the time and often, if they don’t affect us directly, we don’t even notice.  We rely too much on this idea that our rights are based on some vague Higher Order—Natural—Law and therefore are self-evident and, in the phrasing of Jefferson, “unalienable”, but this prized chestnut means little in the face of a determined effort by some to rewrite the codes for the rest of us.

Thank you for your attention.

Absurdity

Ryanism

Paul Ryan, in a little-noticed interview, said the other day—talking about abortion—that rape is simply another “method of conception.”

This is very much in line with Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remark, although it contradicts Akin’s point—which was, somehow, that the reproductive system of a woman being raped (really raped, not sort of raped or falsely raped, by which I infer he means things like date rape or marital rape or being rufied, or anything less than being threatened with death, beaten to a pulp, or gang banged) “shuts down” to prevent pregnancy.  Ryan seems not to be aware of this bit of folksy biology and considers rape as a vector for reproduction.

It’s ironic.  He is also an antievolutionist, but in this he has lent inadvertent support to one of the basic ideas of evolution—that Nature only cares about producing the next generation and will take advantage of any vector to get there.

It’s a confused message, to be sure, and based just as solidly on a categorical denial of women as full citizens.

I say citizen rather than human because the term human brings into this all the distraction about what is human, which people like Ryan have used to completely obscure the downside to their unblinking support of fetuses over women.

Citizens have rights.  You have to be a citizen to be accorded rights and for that to be the case, you have to be here.  Technically, you also have to be able to participate in the polity—vote, work, etc.

We have so geared the idea that citizenship is a given, like breathing, that we forget that citizenship is a membership issue.  It is a legal definition, one which accords rights but also requires that we meet certain criteria.

The argument over illegal immigrants should, if nothing else, give us all a clear lesson in this.  It doesn’t matter to many people that they are humans—they do not have the same rights as Citizens.  There are certain legal standards that must be met and they have to meet them before we grant them citizenship.

(I know, we like to pretend that rights are somehow drawn from nature, or for some “god given”, but it is simply not true.  Claiming it doesn’t make it so.  Rights are legal conditions.  Even our boldest and most eloquent statements about rights—like the Declaration of Independence—required further legal guarantees to have any real force.  We have the rights we claim and make common through law. If it were otherwise, we would never have required the 13th and 14th or a 19th Amendment to the Bill of Rights, nor would we need a Supreme Court.)

The same folks who are unequivocal and clear about that are considerably less so in the case of women’s rights and the question of so-called unborn rights.

Unborn rights are dependent on the rights of those gestating them.

I phrase it that way to strip it of the kind of sentiment that obfuscates the issue and turns it into an impassioned exercise in guilt-driven irrationality.

We have a long history of what it means to grants rights to some by taking them away from others.

Mr. Ryan’s formulation of rape as another “method of conception” cuts right to the center of the problem.  Stating it that way, he implicitly reduces women to what used to be so “charmingly” and euphemistically referred to as A Vessel.  (And, depending on the period, a weak vessel or a filthy vessel or a corrupt vessel—almost never a strong vessel or beautiful vessel or vessel of great value.) We have almost two thousand years of this kind of reduction of half the population to nothing more than a means to an end.

If that doesn’t tell us all we need to know about how he thinks and why he should not be holding political office, I don’t know what would.

But I do wonder how he intends to square himself with his apparently latent Darwinist inclinations…

culture

When Gaffes Become Pathologies

Everyone misspeaks in public from time to time.  It really is unfair to pick on politicians for the occasional gaffe.  But it is fair to ask at what point such gaffes are valid signs of a fundamental problem.  I think Dan Quayle simply needed to stick to the prepared statements—he did not “wing it” very well, but he kept trying, and slipped repeatedly on his inherent inability to compose cogent remarks on the fly.

But Romney is beginning to show some serious problems.  Never mind his 47% statement, he was arguably playing to his crowd. But his recent remarks about being unable to open the windows in an airliner are very troubling.

This is the kind of basic factoid stuff we all should know even if we only learned it from movies.  There is a reason the windows on an airliner can’t be opened and most of us know this.

Two things: either he skipped that part of childhood and adolescence when the rest of us learned this or he’s cracking under campaign pressure and just letting his mouth run without his brain in gear.

It’s a question.  This isn’t like George H.W. Bush’s ignorance over the laser scanner at the grocery store check-out counter—that was new technology and I think he was unfairly beat up about that—but more in line with basic ignorance coming from a man with a lot of education (of a particular sort) and a lot of time spent on planes.

But let me leave off.  As far as I’m concerned, Romney is a clever man but not a smart one.  Hegel talked about such people, the clever ones who seem intelligent because they can fake it, but really have no depth or true understanding.  This is not necessarily a detriment for a president depending on who his handlers are.  I don’t think Calvin Coolidge was smart, just clever (and clever enough to say very little).  Go back over the list of past presidents and there are a number you could identify like that.  (I think Nixon was an interesting case of a smart man who relied too much on cleverness.)  But we don’t usually see this until after they’re in office.  Campaigning is generally an exercise of cleverness, but there’s usually a modicum of intelligence in charge.

In the case of people like Todd Akin, there’s no question.  He is a genuinely unintelligent man.  Certainly not very reflective and possibly one of the most incurious politicians in recent memory.  He’s clever enough to have maintained a career in politics for a couple of decades now.  But when you listen to his pronouncements, even if you agree with them (if you do), and break them down, you see he’s only parroting a kind of semi-urban folk wisdom without any obvious comprehension what some of the words mean.  He seems to have no idea what “socialism” is (this isn’t unique, I wonder how many people do know what it is, especially in politics) and his grasp of anything relevant to women is positively 19th Century.  He gets away with it because he reifies the prejudices of his constituents, which is politically expedient and morally vacuous.  Sometimes, it seems to me, it is the duty of a politician to tell his constituents when they have it all wrong.  (Yes, I realize this could get said politician voted out of office, but I said duty not CYA.)

Still, I don’t know why anyone in this state, at least, is surprised. Akin has been spouting stuff like that for years.  I was only surprised that he said what he said about “legitimate rape” quite so candidly, but I’m not surprised that he believes that nonsense.

I can understand why the GOP began pressuring him to step down, but really, they have only reaped what they’ve sown.  Implicitly, they’ve been backing some version of this for years, and it has become wired into their politics.  They likely, many of them, believe something similar to what Akin said, but they are generally more clever than Akin and know not to say it right out like that.  He has exposed them, though, for anyone willing to look.

Now Newt Gingrich, the Party shill, has come to Akin’s defense, and what is his defense?  “Anyone can make a stupid remark. It’s unfair to castigate him for it.  If we went by that standard, Joe Biden would never be vice president.”

Except.  Except.

When Dan Quayle made his famous gaffe about minds being terrible wastes, everyone made fun of him for the tongue-twisted way he said it, but I think most people knew what he meant.  When Joe Biden makes a bone-headed remark, we can step back and recognize that he didn’t mean that but this other thing.  That’s the nature of gaffes.

The problem here is, if you look at Akin’s record, it’s clear that he did mean what he said.  It wasn’t a gaffe.  He’s sorry that people were offended, but he hasn’t retracted or clarified his statement.  He believes that.

This is different.

And, if you look at the legislative record of the GOP over the last couple of decades, it seems likely many of them believe something like it, too.  That wasn’t a gaffe.

Pathology?