Category: history

culture

Education

We seem to have lost sight of a simple truth of late.  Not all things we do should or ought to be money-making enterprises.  Yet we should do them anyway, because, to put it simply, without them we lose everything that makes making money worth the bother.

 

A string of university decisions in the last few years—most recently the forced resignation of the president of the University of Virginia and now the announced cutting of the University of Missouri Press— underscore how far we have drifted from this truth.  None of these decisions have been about bad decision-making or scandal or anything that might impair the work of education.  They have all been about bottomlines and making money.

Basically, the president of the University of Virginia, Teresa Sullivan, was fired over a disagreement with the direction of the university with the board of directors, who wish to see more business courses and fewer liberal arts courses.  But we don’t really know because no cause was ever given.  Inadvertently, a billionaire, Peter Kiernan, admitted to orchestrating her firing behind the scenes, but still never fully explained why.  He has since resigned from the board of directors.

The elimination of the UM Press is even less explicable other than as a bottomline measure—yet the university recently received thirty million to expand its sports infrastructure.

Actually, anyone paying attention knows what is going on.  Boards of directors everywhere are trying to turn universities into money machines and anything that doesn’t turn a tidy profit is set to be axed.

If these were businesses like any other, this is perfectly understandable, even laudable if it means saving the business.  But a university is not a business like any other.  We have forgotten that.

You do not have a university press to make money.  You have it to make available the materials for learning.  You do not have a university to make money.  You have it to teach.

And you should not teach the making of money to the exclusion of all else.  Universities should teach in service to truth and knowledge and discovery and the investment of character and soul in people so that they have an idea what to do with money when they make it.  Universities should not have to be held accountable the way a bank or a factory is.  That’s ridiculous.

Some things should exist because they are beautiful, elegant, meaningful, true, inspirational.  If all of that had to rely on the ability to turn a profit, we would have a civilization of fast-food franchises, malls, comic books movies, bad music, and superficial fashion.

Oh, wait.  We do have that civilization.

Teresa Sullivan has been reinstated at the University of Virginia because of an enormous groundswell of student and alumni support.  Someone even suggested that maybe there should be fewer political appointees to university boards.  Hmm.

I have no such hopes for the survival of the UM Press.  It hasn’t been in the black for years.  In my opinion, that shouldn’t matter.  Important books often do not earn a profit, yet they remain important books.  They should exist, as should presses like UM’s, because they contribute an absolutely vital yet unquantifiable essence to our culture.  They should simply Be.

We need to get over this nonsense before we lose too much of ourselves.  We’ve been fed a line that capitalism is the essence of America.  That’s as far from true as can be.  The essence of America are the ideas that formed us.  Ideas that came out of scholarship and philosophy and education.  Ideas that have become an inconvenience to certain people who have found a good way to use our own commitment to free enterprise against us to destroy the very things that make us who we are.

It’s not the money.  It should not be about the money.  It’s about the mind and what’s in it.

 

history

The Golden (Silver?) Good Ol’ Days

I just finished skimming through a fascinating little bit of fannish history, Earl Kemp’s Who Killed Science Fiction?  Fannish in the sense of science fiction fandom.  It has a rich and varied history and the concerns within the genre are as fraught with angst, ennui, and ambition as any literature.

I am always a bit bemused when I read about this sort of thing, because I came into science fiction through the rotary rack at my local drug store.  (Literally—Leuken’s Pharmacy, on the corner of Shenendoah and Compton, a good old fashioned drug store with a soda fountain, a magazine stand, and two circular racks for paperbacks, two blocks from my house.)  I had no idea about where these books came from, who wrote them, how, not to mention the whole publishing industry and its workings.  I used to think authors were “gray eminences” who occasionally deigned to write a new book and “gift” it to the public.  The notion that they did it for money or to meet a contract deadline or anything so mundane never occurred to me.  It was a wholly mysterious process, with arcane rituals and secret rites.

Nor were all books created equal in my mind.  For some reason—purely aesthetic—I early on decided that the best science fiction, the stuff with true weight and merit, was all published by Avon.  They did Asimov’s magisterial Foundation Trilogy, after all, and that was Significant Literature!  They put out a lot of Zelazny and some Silverberg.

But I knew nothing about fandom.  Occasionally I’d see a notice in the back of one of the magazines I read—If, Galaxy, Amazing, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vertex, Venture—for a convention somewhere, usually a “World Science Fiction Convention” (!), but I thought they would necessarily be by invitation only (where all the gray eminences met to determine the future offerings, etc) and I’d never go to one.

Kemp’s little tome is the result of a survey he sent out around 1960, asking the title question, among others.  Damn.  I started reading the magazines regularly around 1963 or ’64, so if already in 1960 there was concern over SF being dead, then…

Most of the seventy-odd respondents thought SF was not dead at all, but was in the doldrums.  This was right after the so-called Golden Age has ended (roughly between 1938 and 1954 or so) and there was apparently a sense that the Next New Thing hadn’t arrived yet and maybe it wouldn’t.  It was right on the cusp of New Wave and a few years before Campbell changed the name of Astounding to Analog.  There’s the sense of people sort of milling around, waiting for Something To Happen.

Well, it was five years before Dune and seven years before Dangerous Visions, two books that arguably changed the field.  In a way they represent two extremes, the last great epic of traditional SF and the compendium of All The Wild Shit coming down the pike.  (Both books are almost continually in print to this day, and while Dune has become more a media and franchise phenomenon, Dangerous Visions and its sequel is still a touchstone for serious literary study and the taking-off point for the changes in approach and trajectory that drove everything until Gibson, Sterling, and Cyberpunk worked another set of changes on a field that has always been as good as its most recent thing.)

The general consensus throughout the responses was that magazine SF was not dead (and there did seem to be an over-emphasis on the magazines, which at the time were still seen as the major outlet for SF.  Book publishers had not yet really crowded into the field as they did by the end of the decade, although some were putting out quite a lot, like ACE) but it was sick as hell.  I’ve sat in on similar conversations over the last three decades of my own involvement in fandom and I was struck reading this by the similarity in tone and even in content of the arguments.  (Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy, thought everything was fine except for too much psi.)

Kurt Vonnegut chimed in with a particularly venomous assault, that not only was it dead but he would be glad to help find the corpse so it could be properly buried.  He wrote a note to Kemp later apologizing and blaming his attitude on his isolation from the field.  Vonnegut made his bones in SF and took many opportunities to diss it because he didn’t want to be regarded by the critics—and therefore his potential audience—as a hack.  Fair enough, but sometimes I wonder if something else was going on there.  He could have distanced himself without pissing all over the whole genre.  Or maybe not.  I have to bear in mind that the critical arena is not what it was then.

The last section of the book contains revisitations some 20 years later, when science fiction was going through an enormous boom.  Some of the pessimism of the earlier responses had to be explained.

A lot of of them credited Star  Trek  with the “revival” of science fiction.  It did bring a much larger audience into the field.  It did open the door for many of those new readers to discover that, as good as they thought Star Trek was, the stuff between two covers was much better.

That all changed again in the 80s with the massive upsurge of Fantasy, all, in my opinion, in the wake of Star Wars, which did something very similar—brought many tens of thousands of new fans eagerly into the field.  But in this instance, a different realization occurred that led to a collapse of science fiction.  Instead of discovering that the material in the books they were now buying was better than Star Wars, they found that it was utterly different—and that they really didn’t like it.

Star Wars—and I’ve said this before, often—is not science fiction (even though Lucas rather hamfistedly and stupidly tried to retrofit it as science fiction in the “first” three movies) but heroic quest fantasy in space.  Or, simply, Fantasy in Skiffy drag.  Audiences went from this to the less reifying work of writers like Brin, Bear, Clarke, Benford, Cherryh, et al and it must have been like a cold shower.  Science fiction requires thought, analysis, its virtue is in the explication and championing of reason, logic, and science, and while there are heroes aplenty in SF there’s not a lot of destiny or “born to the throne” heroes who just Are.

As fast as they blew up the SF bubble, they left it for all the Tolkein clones that began to dominate the publishing field by the late 80s and still command a hefty market share.

Science fiction, it seems to me, has always been a minority taste.  It appeals to people who also find science appealing.  It has always had a fairly solid core of supporters and as a percentage of the publishing market has remained fairly constant, with certain boom times punctuating a more or less steady, dependable foundation.  Science fiction offers marvels, of course, but they are, the best of them, marvels still grounded in an idea of reality.  And reality is tough.  It takes work to survive and thrive.  A good sword arm won’t do you much good when a meteor has holed your ship and all the air is leaking out and you have to figure out how to fix it.  Orbital mechanics couldn’t care less that you’re of the House Royal as your ship starts spiraling down to a nasty end because you didn’t do the math right for re-entry into atmosphere.  Science fiction says “Yes, the future can be wonderful—but it will still be Real and you’ll have to deal with it the same way you deal with what’s real now.”

So, who killed science fiction in my opinion?

Lot of assumptions in that question with which I do not agree.

culture

Denying Reality.

The North Carolina state legislature has adopted new guidelines to address the impact of climate change on their state.  Namely by banning the use of the term “climate change” or the term “sea level rise” unless “authorized.”  In section 2 of their House Bill 819 the prohibitions are laid out very clearly—no state agency is to use those terms when studying, commenting on, or otherwise addressing the impact of…well, you know.

Virginia is following suit.  At least there an answer as to why is offered.  Supposedly, such terms as climate change and sea level rise are “liberal code.”

Excuse me?  Code for what?

The irony astounds.  This is a Republican effort.  For years we have listened to conservatives bitch and complain over P.C. language, as if the prohibition of certain terms was some kind of absurd attempt to pretend a specific reality doesn’t exist.  P.C. has become conservative “code” for liberal bullshit.  But now, conservatives are doing the same damn thing and, I assume, thinking that the elimination from official use of certain objectionable words somehow alters reality.

The world turns, the circle comes back on itself.

The entire conservative objection to climate change science is based entirely on a constituent-driven refusal to acknowledge a reality that might require people—mainly people with interests in certain industries—to change the way they do things.  That’s it.  That’s the problem right there.  We—and believe me I do not let moderates or even some liberals off the hook—do not wish to change our lifestyles. *

The science is in.  Climate change is real.  The oceans are rising (because a lot of well-documented melting is going on in both the Arctic and the Antarctic) and the world is about to look different.  Temperature rise will cause disruption in agriculture, alterations in water table distribution, and weather patterns we are no used to.

This is a fact.  It is not a liberal plot to undermine free enterprise.

The much-vaunted pragmatism that has been a hallmark of conservative posturing for decades has apparently failed to serve them.  They seem to be trying to wish reality away instead of “manning-up” and facing the world on its own terms.  I’m sorry, I find this laughable.

The state legislature of Indiana once attempted to legislate the value of Pi, making it equal to 3 instead of 3.14 etc, claiming the actual value was an affront to nature and god.  The bill didn’t get out of committee, I believe, it never came to a vote, but somebody wrote the damn thing, spending tax-payer money on an attempt to deny reality.  They didn’t succeed.

This did.  At least, it got out of committee and became law.

I wonder what they’ll call it when their coastline is erased from “periodic flooding” that doesn’t go away?

_________________________________________________

*  I know, the “real” issue is anthropogenic climate change.  They don’t like the idea that “we” have caused this.  But damn, you can argue about where it comes from all you want.  That’s not the same as claiming it’s not happening.

Personally, while I have no problem accepting that human activity has contributed to the current conditions, I’m not sanguine about our capacity to do anything useful about it.  If we shut every polluting factory down tomorrow, stopped driving cars, and basically ended our industrial civilization, people—all seven billion of us—are still going to burn things to survive.  We have to.  I seriously doubt at this point anything we do will stop the transformations we’re seeing, at least not in time to make any difference to anyone now living.  The fact is there are too many of us and we’re making more.  The sheer consequence of biomass and its activities has an impact.  So I think we should be paying attention to how to live in the world that’s coming.

I also think we should stop sacrilizing reproduction and making more just for the sake of making more.

blog

The Martian Chronicler

Ray Bradbury died today.

He hadn’t been well, a stroke many years ago left him damaged, doubtless uncomfortable.  But he hung around, the world gave him a few more awards, celebrated him in the small and varied corners where writers of moment get celebrated.  Some people probably thought he’d died already, years past.

But, ironically, he published an essay in the New Yorker a few days ago, autobiographical.  I say ironic because of the title.

I met Ray Bradbury a couple of times.  On neither occasion was it enough to become first-name basis camaraderie.  But he was gracious, friendly, and generous with his time.  The first occasion was at the 1986 World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta, Confederation, where he was guest of honor.

The main hotel, the Peachtree Marriott, was something out of Asimov’s Foundation stories, and the entire sixth floor, if I remember right, was an open deck given over to the hospitality suite.  One evening Ray came bounding through, jogging shorts and a t-shirt, grinning, signing autographs, and talking to people.  I ended up in a small group with him.

One young man wore a dragon on his shoulder.  It was quite a piece of work, with a long neck, all made out of some rubbery material, and he had run tubes through it connected to an air bulb in his pocket.  When he squeezed, the neck stretched and twisted, the little thing looked inquisitive, and Ray was delighted.

All of a sudden he says, “Did you make that?” When the young man said yes, Ray said, “Do you know Ray Harryhausen?  He’s a friend of mine, he does special effects.  He’s always looking for new talent, an apprentice.  I’m going to tell him about you.  You should call him.  Here.”

Phone numbers were exchanged.  It was…amazing.  I don’t know if that kid ever followed through, we watched a career in the making.

Did I say generous?

I don’t know what to call Ray Bradbury’s fiction.  Except for a few stories, it isn’t science fiction.  Nor is it really fantasy.  Harlan Ellison likes the term fantasist, so I’ll go with that.  Bradbury wrote stories that spun webs in the cracks between categories, filled in the gaps in the mind left by tales too one thing or the other to suffice. His Mars only exists as a metaphor, based on nothing but the childish nightmares, daydreams, and fanciful speculations filtered through a gifted artist.  His rockets weren’t really space worthy, but boy were they voyage worthy.  He was romantic according to some.  He was the lineal descendent of Scheherezade.  As long as he was telling the story, everyone had one more day to live.

On a more analytic note, he captured mood better than 99% of anyone else.  I don’t even think his midwest ever really existed, except for one day, lazily drifting through the mind of a passerby who thought he saw Camelot in a farmhouse.  But that state of mind…yeah, that was real, that lived.   Despite its elegiac pace, there was an urgency to it.  It said “Don’t waste time—dream!”

For me it was the Martians that had me.  The Martian Chronicles is one of the few books I’ve read more than once.  It served as the springboard for one of the better homages, Desolation Road, but Ian McDonald did something else with it, unable or unwilling to follow Bradbury.  For Ray, settling Mars was the West, the frontier, and he populated it the way the Rockies stood sentry over the encroachment of the nearer plains.  Only then, everyone left.

Except the dreamers.  The true Martians.

Others will write about his life, his views, his other books.  No doubt someone will point out that he wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick.  All I’ll mention is some of my favorite titles, most of which I read between the ages of 12 and 18.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, R Is For Rocket, S Is For Space, Dandelion Wine, I Sing The Body Electric, and of course Fahrenheit 451.

It’s the words, my friends, the words.

My original copy, still in hand, price .50

And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.

He knew it first when walking downtown. Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dime-store window.  They stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there.

“Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!”

“Oh, my gosh!”

“Nickle tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!”

“Don’t look.  Maybe it’s just a mirage.”

I wish.

Quite suddenly, summer is over.

culture

Honor and Duty

They go where they are sent and do what is necessary, so the rest of us don’t have to.  That’s the idea, anyway.  Sometimes they get sent places they shouldn’t be and told to do things that shouldn’t be done, but that’s not their call.  They have promised to be a shield, to stand between us and the dark places.  It’s our job to know where the dark places are and how much a threat they pose.

It’s our duty to use them wisely so that their honor is our honor.  When it goes well, they return, those that do, and they are admired and we take a collective pride in the job, the sacrifice, the honor which their actions transfer to us.

Sometimes we get it wrong and they come back having broken things and having been broken.

We should never blame them or repudiate them or make them feel they are somehow responsible for our lack of judgment.  When they come back from a bad job, one that was poorly chosen and badly planned, the only thing we need to remember is that any shame is entirely on us.  They get to keep their honor.

I am not a sentimentalist about war.  The world is filled with ugliness and it must be dealt with.  Doing so is not noble work, but those who willing go to do it are themselves noble for the sacrifice.  It’s work no one should have to do.  It is damaging.  It changes people.

I am not a romantic about military service.  It is something that ought not to be needful.

I am a realist.  No one should be made to suffer from someone else’s inability to sustain sentiment or the illusions of romantic mythologizing.

Ugliness and brutality are like cancers and they have to be treated.  Sometimes those who go in to do the surgery get infected with it.  That can’t be helped.  They deserve our support and our help.  They deserve not to be cast aside or forgotten because we are ashamed or embarrassed.  We sent them and if it was to the wrong place for the wrong reason, we should not treat them as if they had the responsibility to say no to us.  They volunteered to do this job, to go where we tell them to go, and do what we tell them to do.

It is therefore our duty to understand before we act, to know the world, to comprehend, to inform ourselves, to take the responsibility seriously and in hand so we do nothing that will compromise their honor in our eyes.

Their honor stands when we get it wrong.  We must remember this and behave accordingly.

It’s Memorial Day.  Remember them.  Remember their sacrifice.  And never, ever blame them for our mistakes.

 

culture

For Those Who Think I Have No Problems With Mr. Obama

This is an article by journalist Christopher Hedges about a historic court case just recently which overturned an egregious and unconstitutional provision of the Defense Authorization Act with which I and anyone with a clue about the nature of abuse of power in this country have had a deep concern since it was initially enacted under President Bush.  I bristled when it was originally enacted, but quite frankly I was unsurprised at the time.

What offended me was Obama’s reauthorization.  Mr. Obama is a constitutional historian.  He should know better.  Section 1012 of the NDAA effectively suspends habeus corpus.  It is as unAmerican as it is possible to get and still claim rule of law.

The kicker apparently was during the hearings when the judge, Katherine Forrest, repeatedly asked the government lawyers if they could guarantee that the plaintiffs in this case would not be arrested and detained after the trial.  She asked five times and five times they refused to offer guarantees.  They could not under the act, since apparently writing or speaking in a certain way can be construed as prosecutable under this law.

The fundamental right of an American to think, read, say, or write whatever he or she wants is foundational to our freedoms.  It is stunning that a president as well-versed in constitutional law as Obama could possibly regard this right as optional.

Mr. Bush was an expert in nothing other than getting elected.  His vice president, however, should have known better, but was apparently seized by a fit of Us vs. Them McCarthyism.

I voted for Obama to see the bone-headed practices of the Bush regime overturned, not to see practices continued because, supposedly, they only concerned assumed enemies.

I will likely vote for Mr. Obama in November, but only because I have less patience with the current GOP program.  But that does not mean I think he walks on water.  Indeed, there are many aspects of Mr. Obama’s administration with which I have serious reservations.

But let me be clear—I have policy issues with him.  I don’t give a damn where he spends his Christmas vacation or where he went to school as a youngster.  I could care less that he attended a firebreathing church (christian, btw) where the black preacher unleashed anti-white venom.  Who he associated with in Chicago as an up-and-coming activist doesn’t bother me a bit—I hung out with all manner of varied intellectual bohemian as a youth and I’m fairly certain I can think for myself.  Charges that Mr. Obama is a Muslim or isn’t an American citizen I find infantile nonsense.  (Even if he were a Muslim, so what?  This is America—one’s religion is irrelevant to one’s suitability to public office.)

None of that matters.  What matters is policy.  Reauthorizing this act, especially that part of it, is not policy I can support.  I don’t understand why he did it and I am delighted it has been overturned.

I really do wish people would understand, especially people who all but worshiped Bush and Reagan: the president may be the most powerful person on the planet, leader of the free world and all that, but he is still just an employee.  The president works for me.  I judge him on the merits of the job he does, not on the mythic proportions of what I think he represents.  I am proud to be an American, I don’t need to draw my pride from an elected official.  It would have been nice if all those flag-addled lapel-pin patriots who backed W. had treated him for what he was—an employee.  I tried to fire him once, in 2004, and some folks thought I was unpatriotic for doing so.  But he wasn’t doing the job well.  He wasn’t looking out for my interests.  Or, for that matter, the country’s.

I feel the same about Mr. Obama and this particular bit of nastiness.  I hope he chooses not to appeal this decision.  He would be doing the job I elected him to do then.  Not as well as I would like—it would have pleased me better to see this nonsense excised to begin with—but at least better.

current affairs

Brief Comment About Debt and Taxes

This won’t take long.  I do not intend to put up links or post graphs and charts or cite stats (at least, not much).  This is just a short post to make what ought to be an obvious observation but seems to get no traction in the political discourse.

Washington is once more gearing up for a Debt Ceiling Showdown.  According to the president, we’re going to have to borrow some more money before year’s end, which will require raising the limit on what we may borrow—again.  Speaker of the House Boehner has once more drawn a line in the check register and declared “No further!”  What will follow we have seen before.

Yawn.

Just a couple of points:  both sides in this are correct.  The president and his financial advisers are right, we cannot afford to stop spending or the economy will stall out and things will get worse.  This is a true statement.

As far as it goes.

Boehner and the deficit hawks are also right: whether we like it or not, there does come a point at which it is absolutely true to say “We can’t afford it anymore!”  In recent years, that point has been taken as some large percentage of GDP.

The United States is in some ways like a homeowner who has mortgaged close to 100% of the equity in his house and has suddenly been told he has to take a pay cut.  Depending on the good will of friends, neighbors, and lenders, he may well keep his house and at some point start paying down on the debts, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s gotten himself into a very fragile situation.

Now, the comparison is not precise, but we’re simplifying here.  After all, the homeowner usually doesn’t have a factory in his basement (or a contractor doing the same thing) making things the homeowner can sell—like military hardware and the like—but for our purposes, the similarity will do.

National debate over this issue has been centered on two aspects.  Spending and taxes.

One side says we’re spending too much and need to cut back.  The other says we really need to do something about all those rich people who aren’t paying their fair share of taxes.

Again, both of these points are true—and both are more or less irrelevant.

(Time out for a side comment on this tax thing.  National dialogue is a clumsy beast and the reality of situations often gets buried in the bluster.  Taxes are worse than other subjects, but not by much.  Here is a little fact: when people talk about taxes, no matter which side they’re coming from, they don’t talk about all of them.  On the one hand, the accusation that the wealthy do not pay their fair share is by and large aimed at federal taxes.  And in this the accusation is accurate—no, really, wealthy people and corporations pay very expensive tax lawyers to find loopholes and they do, or they would lose their cushy jobs.  But also, at a certain level, there is no longer such a thing as an American Corporation anymore.  They are multinationals, which means they disperse their holdings across borders, and by shifting things around they avoid taxes.  A lot of taxes, not just American taxes.  But for a lot of people who are well off but not in the 8 and 9 figure club, when they hear that they aren’t paying their “fair share” they quite correctly go ballistic because such accusations almost never take into account state and local taxes, which can in some instances add up to well over 50% of income.  But nationally we’re focused on federal taxes, not ALL taxes. )

(Oh, and the point about corporations being multinationals?  That’s not a tax problem as such.  That’s a problem of jurisdiction.  But never mind that for now.)

I say irrelevant, because, as noted before, to stop spending would be to throw a sequoia in the road to recovery.  Like it or not, federal spending is keeping a lot of business going and a lot of people employed.  When you cut spending, you fire people.  Unless there are private sector jobs that are not tied to government contracts available to rehire them, they turn into the Unemployed (which is becoming like Zombie status these days—once bitten, you’re dead but you still need to eat).  We keep forgetting that roughly half (or more) of government “spending” is payroll and related benefits.

As for taxing the rich, the simple fact is that we could tax them dry and not make up the shortfall.  Focusing on the rich, while in some ways pertinent to our sense of national betrayal and certainly a symptom of the problem, is simply a way of ducking the real problem.

The real problem?

Okay, I said I wasn’t going to cite stats, at least not much, so I beg your pardon for a moment of numbers.  We are also focused like lasers on the Unemployment Rate.

How many of you believe this reflects anything valid?

I said valid, not real.  It certainly does reflect something real, but not what most people seem to think it does, and certainly not what the government pretends it does.

All it reflects is the number of people drawing unemployment compensation as a percentage of the number of people still employed.  It says nothing at all about the people who have exhausted their benefits, fallen off the rolls, and still aren’t employed.

Which number do you think is more relevant?

Here’s where it gets sticky.  If they are no longer drawing public benefits, technically they aren’t a burden, so who cares?  We assume they have found a way to get by.  (Never mind those homeless folks over there.)  Households have increased their residents, adult children have moved back in with parents, parents have moved in with adult children, friends take in friends, etc etc.  So they cost us nothing.  Right?

No, wrong.  They cost us taxes.  If you want to know where the revenue shortfall has come from over the last three decades, it is there, in that growing number of more or less permanently un- and under-employed Americans who lost their jobs, many of them at one time good paying, and have not paid taxes since, because, well, they have no income.

The last time I checked the number was hovering just under sixty million.*

I don’t see anyone talking about that, not directly.  Everyone wants to get the unemployment rate down, as if that means anything to the problem at hand.

Reagan slashed taxes and increased spending.  Except for a brief few years under Clinton, the imbalance created by that has accumulated into the problem we now have.  It’s a thirty-year accrual of debt and hence when I say we can’t tax rich people enough to make up for it, that’s what I mean.

Cutting spending, however, will only increase the unemployment numbers and eventually add to the growing population of permanently unemployed, whose inability to pay normal tax rates has resulted in this current shortfall.  Which shortfall will remain a problem until we can do something about all those unemployed.

Now, the canard that these are lazy people who don’t want to work just won’t wash.  These are people who did work, many of them in well-paying jobs.  Why would they want to lose everything?  It’s absurd.  This is a myth.  To put it bluntly, it’s bullshit.  Have you ever considered how much work it is for someone to take a grocery cart around and fish aluminum out of trash, all day, every day, for pocket money?  But these are the people we don’t see and work we don’t credit.  As the saying goes, a ditch digger works his ass off, burns more calories, goes home worn out, and gets paid a damn sight less than someone pushing paper around a desk for other people.

So why aren’t they working?

Well, that is one of the reasons the rich are getting richer.  It’s systemic.  Jobs have gone overseas, industries have collapsed, communities have been sucked dry to make bottomlines for shareholders without regard to the people doing the actual work.  No one intends anything bad, no one purposefully plans to impoverish their fellows, but this is the way money works in this country, and any attempt to change it is met with ferocious opposition even as we see the inevitable consequences.  It is the worst sort of moral inertia.

But no one in Washington is talking about it that way.  Both sides have valid points—we cannot afford to cut spending and we cannot afford to keep going as we are—and both sides are ignoring the real issue.

You may return now to your regular illusions.

__________________________________________________________

* Lets do some quick and sloppy arithmetic over this, shall we?  Sixty million people earning on average, say, $30,000 a year.  That’s 1.8 trillion dollars.  Now, at, say, 25% taxes, that’s 162 billion a year, over 3 decades?  That’s 48.6 trillion dollars, which is six times the national debt.  Now, I grant you, these calculations are way too loose, but not so loose as to not be in the ball park and show where the “real problem” is.

culture

All Or Nothing

I don’t do many posts about evolution here. It is a topic of interest to me and many years ago I went through a spate of reading everything I could find by Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and a few others to try to wrap my head around it. What I came away with—and this is very important for a point I intend to make later on—is that I am persuaded that evolution is real, that this is a pretty accurate description of how life operates, and that our future understanding of biology will be based solidly on these principles.

I do not have to be an expert on it to accept it.

But this is usually what is required by those who oppose evolution, especially on religious grounds—if you can’t answer their questions with definitive, rigorous fact and keep it all straight, then you are totally wrong and their definition of how life operates is automatically true.

As a technique for debate, this is maddeningly stupid and often effective in the short term. But before I go on, I’d like to present this video, which shows a rather remarkable process going on within the creationist community even as we ponder this difficulty:

For those of you who may not know, Kent Hovind is an apologist for creationism and has been conducting seminars and giving talks for years as to why evolution is categorically wrong. Yet when you look at what’s happening in his own models, it’s obvious he’s accepting certain elements of evolution, just renaming them so as not to evoke the offensive label which is seen now as a counterargument to Genesis. Hypocrisy? Maybe not. After all, every major shift in knowledge occurred, individually and collectively, in opposition to an accepted position. It was a usually a gradual change. It evolved.

Now, the one thing that is not addressed, except very briefly toward the end and rather cheekily, is the main bugbear of all creationists. Human evolution. Maybe creationists don’t get quite so strident about it anymore, realizing that a categorical argument for special treatment doesn’t play as well as it once did, but this can be traced back to Darwin’s day and possibly the best encapsulation of it came from William Jennings Bryan, he of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial.

The man in the 20th Century who came to exemplify the fundamentalist response to evolution said in his famous Menace of Darwinism speech: “…our chief concern is in protecting man from the demoralization involved in accepting a brute ancestry…evolution in plant and animal life up to the highest form of animal might, if there were proof of it, be admitted without raising a presumption that would compel us to give a brute origin to man.”

There you have it. The hangup is Man. It says in Genesis that Adam was hand-crafted by the Almighty and anything suggesting otherwise is simply unacceptable.

Well, the problem is everything we’ve learned since the Enlightenment and Cuvier and then Darwin. That homo sapiens sapiens is a mammal, an animal, and in every respect but our self-delusion we obey the same genetic and environmental laws as every other critter. Furthermore, if we try to pretend otherwise when it comes to medical care, the results are spectacularly ineffective.

But the thing I really wanted to talk about here is this debate tactic that requires us—someone like me—to know everything about the position I defend in order to have even a chance at making an impact while my opponents don’t have to know anything, either about my position or theirs. Argument by default, basically. If I am in error in any detail, if I misremember a fact, or don’t know the proper answer to a particular question, then I am instantly wrong and the Default Position is automatically—and inarguably—right.

Recently, in Waco, TX, Bill Nye—yes, the Science Guy—caused a controversy by saying that the moon reflects the sun. It was a minor point, but it was a contradiction of a poetic line from Genesis in which Yahweh is said to have made “two lights” in the sky. Nye was explaining that the moon does not radiate its own light but reflects the light of the sun and a group of people stormed out on him, loudly claiming that “We believe in God!” Well, you may say that this is simply an example of local stupidity, and you’d be right. Not only didn’t these folks understand astronomy and how the solar system works, they didn’t realize that a good deal of the Bible is metaphor and poetry—you know, not literal. If asked “Okay, if it didn’t happen as science has shown us it did, then how did it happen?” they would probably come back with a pat “God did it!” Well, sure, but how? What’s the process? And how come what is described contradicts what we actually see? They wouldn’t have any answers, not only because they don’t know anything about science but they know just as little about their own holy book or theology. All they “know” is that they don’t like questions that seem to undermine that special feeling they’ve always had when it comes to the “fact” that they were “hand-made” by god.

Which they weren’t.

But it’s that debate technique that interests me here. Because it crosses all disciplinary lines. Politics, economics, history—if I offer a perspective that runs counter to common prejudice, I am required to know every bit of the fact involved in my position and not one iota of it can be in error, otherwise I am completely wrong. Contrariwise, though, my detractors aren’t required to know a damn thing factually.

Carl Sagan once stated that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But lately it seems it is the extraordinary claim that seems to require no evidence and the claims of reason are under siege by a requirement that its supporters know ALL. Of course, many if not all “extraordinary” claims along the lines of creationism have no evidence behind them, so requiring it is a bit disingenuous, but really, shouldn’t people even know a little something about what it is they’re defending?

The problem with fact, though, is it doesn’t go away at the behest of ideology. Hence the contortions of the Kent Hovinds, who are trying to find ways to address what is undeniable that don’t contradict their beliefs. Eventually, they may even find out that what they’ve been defending all along has been, well, a misinterpretation. Their positions will evolve.

Meantime, for the record, let me state that I am not an expert on evolution. Nor am I an expert in history, political science, physics, or any philosophical school. I don’t have to be. Because I can look it up.

It’s called using your brains.

culture

A Good Idea To Check Facts First

Back in the 90s, I had an argument with my father about taxes. My dad is pretty much a consistent Republican voter, and at the time he was vociferously displeased with President Clinton. In the wake of Clinton’s tax cuts to the middle class, my dad was railing about how that was a lie, that, in fact, taxes had gone up.

“I got a tax cut,” I said.

He stopped. “Huh?”

“I said ‘I got a tax cut.’ My taxes went down.”

He had a few moments of complete cognitive dissonance. I confess I do not track politics and policy on a daily basis, and often things slip past me that I do not catch, but the fact of the matter was, at that time, my federal taxes went down. I was taking more money home weekly than before Clinton’s “nonexistent” tax cuts. My dad was startled. He couldn’t figure that one out. His taxes had gone up.

“You make a hell of a lot more than I do, dad,” I said. “You are not in the demographic those cuts were aimed at.”

Now, to be fair, we went over it later, and a majority of his tax increases were state and local and one on capital gains, which took a point or two upward tick at the time. His income from investments about equaled his paycheck income, so, yeah, his taxes went up.

I don’t now and did not then have any “investments.” When I hear the term “middle class” I think of my income bracket, which is people who rely almost entirely on their salaries for their income, might own a house, and there may possibly be a 401K somewhere. I have never made more than 28 thousand dollars a year, usually considerably less than that. That’s my income bracket, which I charitably claim as middle class. (It’s not, it’s working class, but in America we view the class divides according to what we own, not what we make—so a nice car, a home in a good neighborhood, new clothes, the ability to eat at a nice restaurant once a week or so, these things make us feel middle class, even if most of it is purchased on credit we may have trouble paying back.)

The disconnect, however, between my father and me had to do with a common American assumption that we are all the same, even when we know we are not. If you’re in my family or one of my circle of friends, the default assumption is that we are living the same level of life. So if good things happen to me, they must also happen to you; if I get what I consider an unfair deal, you must be suffering as well.

Reality is never so neat.

And the assumption blinds us to other realities that drive partisan politics into rabbit holes and blind alleys or vitriolic resentment, hyperbolic castigation, and outright untruth in the name of beating our opponent.

Check this out:

Now, I readily admit this is a collection of clips that is aimed at showing Romney in a bad light (hell, it’s a campaign video). However, Mr. Romney indulges some fairly blatant misrepresentation. You can go to recordings of his stump speeches and find it all, largely unmitigated by any “context” which might moderate the inaccuracies. And embarrassing, since it is so easy to check the facts today.

The main reason Romney can get away with this with his supporters is that people—on both sides—don’t seem to listen to anything other than their preferred sources, which usually do nothing but reinforce the misrepresentation. Repugnant as it may be, if you are going to be politically responsible, YOU HAVE TO CHECK, YOU HAVE TO GO TO YOUR OPPONENTS’ SOURCES AND HEAR WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY, YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHAT HAS REALLY HAPPENED.

Which many of us are no longer doing. I don’t know how many of us ever did, at least willingly. The fact is, though, that there was a time you had to make a huge effort to avoid the other side of the argument. Both views were often on news shows, certainly many papers used to have pro and con columns in their editorial sections, the kind of micro-selection of redacted rhetoric than happens today so easily was possible only with effort and by going to near hermit-level lengths to avoid hearing the Other Side.

Today, we can tailor our newsfeeds to suit our prejudices.

Which is why nonsense like the Birthers can cling to our political discourse like barnacles to a ship long after it should have died its well-deserved and ignominious death. Why allegations that Obama is a Muslim refuse to go away despite the complete lack of evidence and utter illogic of the charge—because the people clinging to those allegations won’t listen to any other point of view. And they don’t have to, because they can filter it out.

(Illogic? Certainly, on both charges. Consider: if Obama were not a citizen, does anyone honestly believe Hillary would not have mopped the stage up with him in the 2008 campaign? She wanted the presidency in the worst way and such a fact, if it were indeed a fact, would have driven him out of the race well before he was an obvious threat. Likewise with the Muslim charge: if he were, then why has every one of this year’s GOP candidates gone on record saying he is a Christian? Again, there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the charge. Some may claim conspiracy, but to what end? And how many people would have to be involved, even among those who are working ardently to unseat him this year? You would have to believe that every single politician in both parties had somewhere agreed to go along with these allegations. Which means no one is trustworthy, so who does that leave to get your vote?)

But, even as we seem to suffer from a surfeit of tunnel vision, the same resources that allow for selective reinforcement of a priori conclusions can also be used to expand our view and make the kinds of fact-checking comparisons that used to be very difficult for the average citizen. Hence, the above series of clips.

Look, I don’t care if you dislike the president. I loathed Bush. But I can find it in my conscience to credit him with things I thought he did well. I don’t need to call him names, impugn his character, or make up lies about him to find fault with his policies. And it’s the policies that matter. All this nonsense over Obama’s citizenship or religion or anything else like that are worse than libels—they’re distractions.

While some people were getting all exercised about his supposed disregard for White House staffers by spending Christmas in Hawaii, did any of them notice Attorney General Eric Holder’s calm assertion of executive authority to target and kill Americans deemed “terrorists” without judicial review? Hmm? A nasty overturning of due process, but the folks bitching about Obama’s vacation schedule didn’t seem to notice.

The fact that Obama has reauthorized the Patriot Act, including its domestic wiretapping powers, doesn’t seem to trouble very many in the “Obama’s not a real American” camp.

There are a number of campaign promises he made that have yet to be acted upon and some it would seem he has simply chosen to ignore. Now, there’s nothing unusual about that—every president is guilty of that charge, primarily because there is a difference between running for the office and actually holding it, and certainly there are things an elected president becomes privy to that a mere candidate does not know—but it would be nice if the people casting stones did so based on legitimate discrepancies and unfulfilled policy promises instead of on made-up nonsense.

But this won’t matter. Candidate Romney will continue to claim all of the above allegations and his base probably won’t care—because they won’t know. As far as they’re concerned, he’s relaying the truth, because they won’t bother to check it.

And this is one of the chief problems underlying politics. Not just today, but always. “Preaching to the choir,” “playing to his base,” “towing the party line”…nothing new.

But there was a time it was very difficult to find out the truth. That excuse doesn’t work so well anymore.

But then, it’s not about reality. Is it?

culture

The Other Side

Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War.  It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified.  The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation.  The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play.  Had the reformers, exemplified by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, tried to assert any kind of racial equality at the time, the United States would have been stillborn.

Instead, they put a time limit into the document—20 years—which forbade the topic from even being discussed in Congress until that later year, at which time, presumably, the issue would come to the floor for some kind of resolution.  History shows that every such attempt was met with denunciations by southern members of Congress and often with threats of secession—which by then were illegal.

Make no mistake, as some revisionists might have you believe, secession was not an option and everyone who voted to ratify the Constitution knew it.  Contrary to popular mythology, the original 13 states locked themselves together permanently.  A couple of later territories parlayed an “escape clause”—Texas was a big one, but the Texas “right to secede” had a limiting condition: Texas could only leave as long as it never took up arms against the Union, which, much to Sam Houston’s consternation, it did during the Civil War and forever lost that right, despite what Governor Perry might wish people to believe—but by and large, joining the Union was a binding act that could not be reversed other than by armed rebellion.  The South was in the wrong, legally speaking.

Another bit of modern revisionism that has become popular is that the South did not secede over slavery but over “states rights.”  This is patent nonsense and any cursory perusal of the declarations of secession shows that issue number one for all of them was slavery.  They were not going to let Abraham Lincoln and his Republicans take away their property.

It’s difficult to imagine how it must have felt to be caught between the two sides.  Philosophically, I mean.  And where you lived didn’t make much difference.  There were riots in New York and other places in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Many Northerners who had supported Lincoln in the war effort turned on him when the issue changed from preserving the Union to freeing the slaves.  Poor whites were no more enamored of the idea of free blacks than were Southern plantation owners.  As far as they were concerned, it was more competition for already depressed wages.

And the fact is many on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, even among those who didn’t support slavery as such, did not regard Africans as fully human—at least not the equal of white people.

Try as we might to spin it otherwise, the many-faceted nature of the War Between The States turned on questions of what it meant to be human.

We still have not settled that question.  It may be that for many people it is simply not settleable.

I want to be very careful here.  My purpose in laying out the nature of the conflict during the Civil War is to establish a base for what may end up being another civil war if we’re not very careful.  The conduct—philosophically, politically, legally, morally—on both sides of the slave/emancipation divide illuminates aspects of our culture and our nature that are difficult.

There may have been many white people at the time who truly believe blacks were fully human and fully equal by nature to whites.  Most of them did not hold much authority and given subsequent history they did not win the public debate.  African Americans remained second or third class citizens for well over a century after the end of the war and in some ways today still face an uphill struggle for equity.  The bases of the discrimination mutated over time and it might be fair to say problems shifted from nature to nurture and took on sociological contours rather than biological, but the fact remains people do not treat each other as fully human in all circumstances.

It is a salient fact of our history that during the heated debates of the Emancipation and Reconstruction Eras over equal rights, equal status, and equal abilities, one group was not even considered as relevant.  Women.

Certainly the Women’s Suffrage Movement put forth arguments for equality, but the country was not likely to go to war over what people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony asserted—that one half the population lived in conditions of chattel bondage and servitude based on gender.

The list of inarguable facts speaks for itself.  Women did not have the right to vote (federally, that is—some states granted it, here and there, from time to time, in limited fashion) until 1920.

Throughout the 19th Century, a divorced woman lost everything.  As a married woman, all her property belonged to her husband, including the children, and in the instance of a divorce the law said her ex-husband owed her nothing.  She left with the clothes on her back, which was all she was legally entitled to.  Variations existed here and there, but generally this was the case.

A woman was denied entree into the professions whenever possible.  The first woman to graduate with a medical degree in the United States was Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849.  She was barred residency in a hospital due to her sex.  The struggle continued, but by 1920 women represented only 5% of the entire medical profession as doctors.   Elizabeth Bragg graduated from Berkely in 1876 as a civil engineer, but it was not until 1965 that a woman was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.  In 1869, Arabella Mansfield graduated law school and applied to the bar in Iowa.  Iowa law forbade any but white males from taking the bar, but an exception was made.  She passed.  (A year later the law was repealed, suggesting that she was allowed to take the bar examination with an expectation that she would fail.)

You get my meaning.  The numbers were low, the exceptions more or less famous.  Most women in the professions generally had to give them up when they married and there was no social space for a career woman to live her life with the same expectations of free conduct as her male counterparts.  The professions for women were very much like taking vows.

The Civil War seemed to settle the question as to the humanity of slaves, but did nothing for women.

Of course, had you phrased it that way at the time, many people, including many women, would have looked at you like you had just stepped off a spaceship speaking High Arcturan.  Of course women are human, they might answer.  But, good heavens, they’re women.

As if that explained anything.

At the time, it sort of did, though.  Women had a clearly-defined function as far as society—and most people—were concerned.  They were to be wives and mothers.  Anything else was vanity at best, offensive at worst.  Women should be what they were “made to be” and aspire to nothing more.

It didn’t seem to occur to most people that the prohibition on aspiring to be more implied that women did aspire and aspiration was a wholly human trait.

But I digress.  The fact is, any attempt to question this basic assumption was met with disdain and often the full force of the law.  The Suffrage Movement itself split over the nature of female aspiration—most thought it enough to simply get the vote, while others intended that women be granted the full rank and privilege of being human as expressed by the lives of their male counterparts, with all that entailed.  It might be that this was more a tactical issue, but I don’t doubt that for many it was philosophical as well.  In an instance of political expedience, the Suffrage Movement repudiated the ambition to make women wholly their own agents and decided to stick to the more “sanitary” program of achieving the vote.  They didn’t want to frighten potential male supporters by arguing for their right to be anything other than what they had always been—wives and mothers—only with the right to vote.

Of course, even after gaining suffrage in 1920, women remained second-class citizens because society treated them that way.  Educational opportunities were harder to gain, access to jobs and careers more difficult (and when gained, advancement and recognition delayed or denied), and economic shackles remained.  Up till the 1990s, a woman’s credit history belonged to her husband, and often, even after a divorce, she would find it very difficult to establish any credit on her own without her (former) husband’s history making it awkward.  As the 20th Century progressed, it became clear that the vote simply wasn’t enough, that equality was made up of much more than the franchise—it entails respect, agency, and an assumption of individual worth and merit, none of which can be gained by casting a ballot but only by being allowed to live as one chooses.

I think it came to a real head after the Second World War, when all those women, who had been working in industry, building the machinery with which we waged that war, were told to go home and forget all about self-sufficiency, because the men were coming home and they needed not only jobs but pliant females who wouldn’t compete with them.  It wasn’t just the jobs, but a massive change in the educational system—classes that had opened up to women in the 20s and 30s were suddenly closing down again, women who wanted to pursue careers were castigated as unnatural, the whole weight of cultural expectation that characterized women as essential sex toys and brood mares fell on them in the 1950s and turned that decade into one of the strangest periods of American history and set the stage for all the emancipatory movements of the Sixties and Seventies.  June Cleaver was the cultural icon women were supposed to aspire to.  This to women who had been  and whose mothers had been building tanks, airplanes, and ships in the 1940s, running assembly lines, driving trucks, farming, and so much more.  They were expected to just forget all that and return to a condition of simple-minded obeisance all for the boys coming home.

As patriotic as this sounded, this was an instance where sacrifice becomes a form of slavery.

Yes, there were many women who were probably perfectly happy with this state of affairs.  But their happiness was built on the shattered dreams of women for whom this was simply unacceptable.  The one cannot be justified by the desire for the other.

By now, it may be obvious where I’m going with this.  We are facing the possibility of another civil war, one I’m not sure where the lines will be drawn, but one that could be brutally destructive.  We joked about the War Between the Sexes back in the day, but that’s not what this is.  This is going to be a war over the exact nature of agency.  The flags have now gone up the poles on the one side and I think it has taken a lot of people by surprise.  The blowback is coming.

Here is how I feel about this.  One side in this conflict wishes to privilege potential life in such a way as to deny self-determination and agency to half the population, the half that still has a solid argument that it has not yet been granted full equality with the other half.  That for the sake of what may be they will have to surrender themselves to conditions of servitude that the other side simply does not have to suffer, purely by dint of biology.

It is not sufficient to argue that all the one side wants is for things to go back to the way they used to be.  The way things used to be was not acceptable—that’s why we changed it.  The way things used to be was built on hypocrisies and legal fictions that privileged a status quo which, as long as certain people exhibited no aspirations at odds with the publicly accepted norms, everyone pretended was equal and fair and just.

Well, we all know how often that is actually the case.

What disturbs me—appalls me, really—is how little the Other Side really knows, not only about our history, but about any history, and how they are so easily manipulated by the agents of regress.  There are certain arguments we should have been done with that we’re having to have all over again because people—many people—don’t have a clue what has gone before.

They’re the sorts who believe the revisionists who tell us that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery but states rights or that the South really did have the right to secede.

They’re the sort that believes that any woman who has the temerity to talk publicly about her right to have sex is a slut.

A word to the wise—it’s not temerity; it’s self confidence.

See you on the barricades.