Category: Politics

culture

Tilting At Icons: Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011

Unless you’ve been living on Mars or under a layer of primordial loam these past few decades, you know who Christopher Hitchens is. He has died. He was an unapologetic pragmatist, atheist, and iconoclast to the end. For an extended obit, go here.

I only knew Hitchens through his work, of which I’ve become quite impressed and even fond in the last few years. He did not tilt pointlessly at windmills. Rather, he spoke truth in the face of sham, questioned revered assumptions, and generally made us all twitch over some specious bit of received wisdom we thought reliable. And he did it in ways and under conditions that often ran counter to public courtesy. “Speaking ill of the dead” was never something he avoided, especially when death seemed about to bestow what in his opinion was an unearned and poorly-considered status on someone. For instance, Jerry Falwell. When most other commentators were suspending whatever critical commentary they might have indulged simply because the man had died, Hitch continued to go after him, unwilling to allow his death to gloss over what Hitch considered monstrosities of ego and policy. Here he is jousting with Sean Hannity:

He had a talent for giving as good if not better than he got from some of the most practiced mouthpieces in the media, rarely ever being shut down or bested in highly-charged, barbed exchanges with pundits attempting to just shut him up. His language skills matched a razor-sharp intellect and he had no qualms about speaking his mind, usually in a way that allowed little purchase for facile counterpolemic.

Here he is at length, discussing his book God Is Not Great, which brought him into line with Richard Dawkins as one of the most hated of the so-called “New Atheists.”

Before all this he had the temerity to attack one of the most unexamined and misunderstood of our modern icons, Mother Theresa. He got a lot of flack for his unflinching analysis of her cult and her hypocrisies. Even non-Catholics balk at saying much of anything negative about her, which is a curious effect of the kind of image-making Theresa used and was used on her. The rush to beatification had all the earmarks of desperation—the need for a popular public figure of piety to bolster the flagging reputation of Mother Church—and it seems to have worked even for those who would otherwise have nothing to do with Catholicism. Mother Theresa has become the byword for a kind of innocent generosity, a pure aching love for humanity that ignores specifics and embraces the general as if the most simpleminded of approaches to problems has a special sanctity. Hitch was one of the few who dared to actually look at the practice of her organization and present the contradictions and, indeed, the grotesqueness at the heart of her philosophy.

He also baffled many of his supporters by doing something I admire above all else. He held views that he deemed right regardless of the political spectrum along which they fell. So he could be a socialist and a hawk. He could be a severe critic of the military-intelligence combine and a patriot. His politics was all over the map in terms of Left-Right and to me it showed the silliness of doctrinaire positioning. He had no patience with idiocy, no matter the side to which it was attached.

Through all this, he was also a generous and polite debater. In a lengthy exchange with Al Sharpton he was never less than cordial, even if unyielding on his principles. He showed us how to do it and not be a bully.

Unless he felt he was being played.

Even when I disagreed with him I admired him. I would say Rest In Peace, but he would not have accepted the implications underlying the sentiment.

I’ll miss him.

culture

Speech, Money, Personhood

Senator Bernie Sanders is sponsoring a Constitutional Amendment to deny corporations the right to be considered persons. His speech is worth a listen.

What amazes me is that this needs to be explained at all. This is one of those no-brainers that anyone on the street ought to be able to understand without much thought. Obviously a corporation is not a person.

But in the esoteric realm of political philosophy, we entertain all manner of chimera for the purposes of achieving certain ends. What we have demonstrated in the Citizens United case and previous court pronouncements regarding money as speech is that when yo break something down far enough, you find you can reassemble it just about any way you want.

Among the many factors that have gone into this debate, the one that seems the slipperiest is the idea that money is speech. This is actually a tricky argument and in many ways very persuasive, since money is the means by which we conduct our lives. On its most basic level, with regards to speech, without money there is no publishing, therefore the dissemination of speech is sorely hampered.

Yet no one mistakes a printing press for the words it reproduces.

I said that very carefully. A printing press produces no words at all. A writer—a human being—does that and the press merely reproduces them. It is a significant distinction. Without the press, the words still exist. Somewhere.

Here’s the thing. Money is not speech. It is a tool. Period. Speech transcends money. For one thing, you can’t horde speech. You can’t stockpile and then dump it in such a way that it will buy something. Speech is not traded in stock markets.

You can suppress speech, but it doesn’t go away. You can withhold it, but then it does nothing, serves no purpose. You can’t exchange one set of words for another and derive greater value. Speech does not have the structure or limitations of money, nor is it susceptible to vagaries of finance.

Speech transmits ideas—all ideas—while money simply is an idea, one idea, which not everyone shares. Speech in its purest form cannot be owned. Yes, you can copyright a particular form of speech, but the fact is anyone can do that for their particular forms, and those forms are the expressions of individuals. You can’t prevent someone from using speech by keeping it from them. No one is homeless or hungry because they don’t have enough speech*.

To assert that money is speech is to cheapen actual speech and turn it into a market commodity. A democracy cannot function that way.

Which is, of course, the whole point. Those most ardently in support of money-as-speech don’t trust democracy, for all the reasons that separate them from those who have no money. The CEO in the board room can’t abide the fact that some homeless person’s speech has the same fundamental value as his, that in terms of rights and freedoms they are equals simply because speech as a freedom is not bankable.

On the other hand, I recognize the appeal of being able to define personhood any old way you choose—because if you can do that, you can later take that definition away from whoever you want.

*Of course, you may be ignored and your speech overlooked because you’re homeless and hungry. It is not the speech that determines your condition, but the other barriers and circumstances, most of which have to do with money.

culture

Destabilizing The Family

This is an unscientific response to a ridiculous claim.  Rick Santorum, who wishes to be the next Bishop In Charge of America (or whatever prelate his church might recognize) recently made the claim that Gay couples are going to destabilize the family in America in order to accommodate their lifestyle.

We’ve all been hearing this claim now for, oh, since gays stopped sitting by and letting cops beat them up on Saturday nights without fighting back.  Ever since Gay Pride.  Even on my own FaceBook page I had someone telling me I was blinded by the “Gay Agenda” and that the country was doomed—that because of the Gay Agenda little children were being taught how to use condoms in school and this—this—would bring us all to ruin.

So….okay.  How?

If we collectively allow homosexuals to marry each other, how does that do anything to American families that’s not already being done by a hundred other factors?

I’ll tell you what destablilizes families.  And I’m not genius here with a brilliant insight, this is just what anyone can see if they look around and think a little bit.

Families are destabilized over money.  Mainly lack of it, but sometimes too much will do it, too.  But lack of it will do a number on a family worse than almost anything else.  We’ve all grown up hearing the “love is all you need” line that never seems to run out of gas that a lot of people find out fairly quickly once they start living on their own is patent bullshit.  It is true that in order to have a fulfilling life, you need love.  But in order for love to last, you need everything else.  Housing, food, clothing, some degree of security, a smidgen of leisure activity.  Without money—someone’s—you don’t have all that.

And that love thing, heterosexually?  Children tend to result from one of the basic activities, and they cost a lot of money.  A lot.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime, and the more you have, the more money you need to maintain a level standard of living, and believe me, this is not cynicism, this is the way of human nature, when your standard of living erodes, this is not the source of great joy.  It becomes a grinding, frustrating daily chore to make due with less.

Love has a very difficult time surviving such stress.  It can be done, it is done, millions of people probably manage it, but one should envy them their devotion rather than assume something is broken inside all those who can’t manage it.

Money aside, children will destabilize a family.  Let’s be real for minute, not everyone is constitutionally able to be a parent.  Living day in day out with one other person can be a challenge, even if that person is an adult.  If you find that hard, then adding more to the mix, especially if they are not adults, is probably a recipe for craziness.  While lack of material resource exacerbates this condition, it is not necessary for it to be the case.  Some of us are fortunate that we recognized early on our own unsuitability to be parents, for many people, riding on the promises of the romantic fairytale we grew up with, this fact is not discovered until it is too late and there are children who, while perhaps fine people in and of themselves, nevertheless drive the insanity meter up and up and up.

Was a time it didn’t matter.  We had no choice.  People got married and no matter what their circumstances, they didn’t have the option of divorcing and starting over, they were stuck.  We have in many ways romanticized this fact as some indication that modern people lack values.  Nonsense.  If they could have, our forebears likely would have divorced at as high a rate as we do.

Why?  Because like it or not, people change.  We are not the same today as we were ten or twenty years ago.  It is the height of unreasonableness to think we could or should be.

But that doesn’t mean the changes automatically drive us apart.  What it means is that when we get together in the first place we didn’t pay enough attention to who we were then to realize that in five or ten years certain traits were going to drive us or our partners nuts.

Which brings us to one of the most fundamental reasons families fail.  Basic incompatibility.  Let’s be honest—that is what we’re trying for here—there are, have been, and will be many people who pass through our lives with whom we want to spend time with.  Some of those people, the time spent will be intense.  That doesn’t mean they will be lifelong arrangements.  Shall I be blunt?  Okay.  There will be many people with whom we  will want to have sex with, but that doesn’t mean we’d make good longterm partners.  Too many people confuse lust with love.

Worse—too many people confuse love with like.  Longterm is not sustained by love—love is a peak experience and the high is not sustainable.  It may come in waves.  We may “fall in love” with our partner time and time again, but there will be troughs, and in those periods it is not love that carries us but like.  Friendship.  Too often no one tells us this.  Your life partner, if you’re going to have one, has to be your best friend.  You have to like them.  A lot.  It’s different than love.  Love is great, but the fires die down.  The embers rest in how much we like each other.

Finally, though, some relationships have a natural lifespan and it is silly to expect them to shamble on past their demise.  Yes, it hurts.  Yes, it’s usually only one not both who realize this.  But it’s true and it would be wrong to insist on maintaining something that has died.

If you have built a family on the basis of eternally staying together, you may find that all these factors will bring about a lot of hurt and destabilization.  What destabilizes beyond a fundamental lack of the resources to maintain is a violation of expectation.

Now.  In all that, where’s this bullshit that allowing gay people to marry will impact your marriage?  How does that work?  I get the impression that Mr. Santorum thinks that expanding the marriage franchise will somehow debase it and make it something worth too little for people to want to participate in.

But if that’s true, then it is already worthless.  If the idea of it is that fragile, then preventing gays from marrying will make no difference, it’s already trashed.

But if it was worthless, then why would gays want to do it?

Mr. Santorum most likely wants to see people forced to remain married.  He likely wants to see the end of divorce.  In order to do that, he has to wage war on freedom of choice.

Everyone’s freedom of choice.

The fact is, factors that have little to do with venerable institutions and traditions work to destabilize relationships.  Making the claims he does shows that he doesn’t want to talk about those things.  Because talking about the realities opens the door to all the other things he has come out against to be discussed openly.  People aren’t getting divorced now because gays live the way they do.  They get divorced because they can’t sustain their marriage—because there’s no money or they should not have become parents or the dreams of one or both partners have changed or they frankly should never have gotten married in the first place.  It’s what is between them that is at fault, if fault there is, and the circumstances in which they live.

On the other hand, what exactly does he mean by destabilize?  Because there are many families that have suffered divorce that continued to be families.  The new mates were added in, a larger pool of siblings was created, Christmas cards and birthday wishes go out to a bigger list, and while mom and dad may not be together anymore, no one is fighting and everyone talks and sustains each other.  The family changed shape, it didn’t collapse.  Families survive, albeit in different configurations.  Divorce doesn’t destroy the family, it causes it to evolve.

Oops.  That’s another thing Santorum doesn’t believe in.  Evolution.  No wonder he doesn’t recognize what I’ve just described.

culture

Poll Positions

Comes a point when it is obvious that one’s sympathies lie in a particular direction, whether we want to admit to them or not.  Politically, I tend to try to find something worthwhile across the Left-Right spectrum.  I am, in some ways, a conservative guy.  I’ve never had much issue with a sensible fiscal conservatism, but it has grown increasingly difficult to find anything supportable in the Republican Party.  The kind of conservatism I found sympathetic at one time is such a minor part of the public face of conservative politics these days as to be almost gone.  It is not enough to say to me “Well, it’s still there, once they get in office that will come to fore.”  I don’t see it.  What is more, I don’t care.

Mitt Romney may yet be the GOP nominee and that wouldn’t be a completely horrible thing, but in order to get there he may find himself agreeing to push platform positions he might otherwise fine offensive.  In the meantime, look at the list of alternating absurdities who have been swapping places for the last few months.

Herman Cain.  I have always felt, honestly, that someone from the corporate world—think Ross Perot—would make a mediocre to terrible president.  The structure of the two environments is utterly different.  The priorities are significantly different, often in subtle ways, and the mindset that makes for a successful CEO I think would be like a fish out of water in the realm of federal politics.  But Cain demonstrated a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding about how taxes play out across varying economic lines.  His “999” proposal was absurd on its face, but a little calculation shows it was just one more gimme for the corporate sector at the expense of everyone else.

Michele Bachman is an embarrassment.  If it hadn’t been made clear before, at the debate where she criticized Cain’s tax plan by saying “if you flip 999 over you discover that the devil is in the details.”  Some people may have thought she was joking, but based on the rest of her “philosophy” she was quite serious.  It is very hard to explain how this woman has achieved her political position other than to accept that she is acceptable to people I certainly don’t see eye to eye with on almost any level.  The insulting way she told a high schooler that “gays have the same right to marry as anyone else in this country—as long as a man marries a woman” not only completely sidestepped the point the student was making but tried to sell a facile bit of social legerdemain as if it was a valid point.  She keeps harping on the bankrupt line that gays are somehow demanding a special privilege when that is flatly not true—they are demanding the same right all Americans assume is our birthright, to be who we are and have the laws of the land apply equally to us.  To the Bachman’s of the nation, “being who you are” is only acceptable if who you are meets a specific criterion.

She’s the prettier face of Rick Santorum, who is so obsessed over other people having sex that any kind of policy position he might have on any other topic gets totally drowned out by his raving about sex.  (We should by now realize that generally people who go on and on about how other people are obsessed with sex are themselves far and away more obsessed with it than the people they’re complaining about.  In Santorum’s case, his obsession borders on the macabre.)

Now we have Newt Gingrich, who has the virtue of being insulting to just about everyone in turn.  Poor kids have no habit of work?  Please.  Some of the laziest people I’ve ever met were young adults from moneyed families, usually freshly-minted out of a college they got through as an alumni student.  They are privileged, spoiled, arrogant, and utterly unable to conceive of what work actually is.  Now like all superlatives, this is clearly not true for all of them.  But if you acknowledge that, you have to acknowledge that anything that comes out of Gingrich’s mouth along these lines is almost always a superlative and therefore always false.  But this is more that that “the unemployed are that way because they choose to be and the rest of us shouldn’t be required to pay for them” bullshit the GOP has been pushing since Reagan.

Not content with slandering a whole class of people with whom he clearly has no experience, Gingrich then went on to trot out the old canard that Christianity is “under siege” by virtue of the nation being awash in paganism.  Firstly, he doesn’t have his facts right—the fastest growing segment in the country in terms of religion is the non-religion group, both people who have stopped self-identifying with any denomination and outright atheists.  I know it is common for people who don’t know any better to mischaracterize atheists as pagans, but Gingrich doesn’t have that excuse—he is a smart, educated guy.  So I can only assume that he’s playing to the paranoid proselytes, just like the others.

Who does that leave?  Poor John Huntsman, who doesn’t have a chance, but is the only one of the bunch who is avowedly pro-science and at least is reasonable about tax reform.

Here’s the problem with the current GOP line.  It is soaked in denial, it is retrograde, and it is mean.  This is possibly not all their fault—the party has been dominated for decades now by people who are steeped in social paranoia and resentment and the fear that all the things they think are important are losing meaning.  They don’t understand why so many people have no use for their values.  Many of them don’t like women in power.  A lot of them are homophobic.  And all of them are blinded by the false association between freedom and capitalism pushed by the last three Republican administrations into a state of assuming that anything—anything—that hints of socialism will doom the country.  But mainly they are driven by resentment and antagonism to anything that makes them feel ignorant and provincial and irrelevant, somehow not seeing that they manage to do that to themselves.

I would like to see a healthy Republican Party, one that would serve as a sensible counterweight to the progressivism that has characterized their opposite numbers—a progressivism that is all but gone from the public view because of a spineless attempt to mollify the increasingly vitriolic Right.  We don’t have that.  And I can’t in good conscience vote for any of them.  Every time they get someone reasonable, they either ignore them or drive them out of the Party.  The GOP has been doggedly destroying itself for thirty years.  This was the Party of Lincoln—progressives that ended slavery and advanced the cause of civil rights.

They wouldn’t even let Lincoln speak at the conventions these days.

culture

Payment and Positions

I have been assiduously working on the rewrite of the book I mentioned in the previous post and not much else has gotten done.  I’m 3/4 through and into the difficult part, where the plot actually veers, and I’ve been thinking about game changers as a result, which brings me in a painful arc to…

Newt Gingrich?  Are you serious?

I have no idea who the Republican nominee will be by the end of August 2012.  It’s too soon to make solid predictions.  One thing has been clear, once again, the sensible candidates will not have a prayer.  (I say that ironically.)  Oh, it’s possible Huntsman could be a dark horse that comes on strong in the final weeks before the Convention, but it is also quite obvious that Party as it is currently configured has no use for him.  He does not speak for the GOP base.  He is not enough of anything they currently value.

But then again, Newt isn’t, either.  He’s made a bit of a deal about how he worked with Clinton—and this is true, he did; compared to the current menagerie in Congress, Newt led a House that was a model of bipartisanship —but that is not usually something the GOP base wants to hear.  Cooperation with the antichrist is a Bad Thing.

And his claim is a smidgen disingenuous.  After all, he did lead Congress into a government shut-down that cost his Party seats in the next election.  That may, paradoxically, work in his favor this time, since GOP orthodoxy today is that, above all, get Obama out of the White House.  They will hold their collective noses, it seems, and back any candidate that looks capable of achieving that.  The vitriol among the Party faithful spewed at President Obama is worse than the worst aimed at Clinton, and some of that was pretty awful.  Alien acid-blood awful, with the power to eat through steel deck plating.  This year’s version of the GOP is establishing new levels of the kind of ideological obsession that has gripped them since Clinton beat Bush One, namely a pervasive, near-pathological hatred of all things (A) Liberal and (B) Democratic.

I hasten here to say that there are many conservatives who have a very hard time with this.

There are many liberals who are still stumbling around, shell-shocked from the last 30 years of being a punching bag for a Right Wing that has beaten them so badly about the head and shoulders for being, you know, Liberal, that they seem unable to recognize that we haven’t actually elected a Liberal president since Carter.  In a recent Thanksgiving Day conversation with an older gentleman, he was adamant that Obama was a far Left Liberal if not an outright Communist.  When I ran down the list of things that make him Center Right, I was met with a kind of blank stare.  He agreed singly with each point but, like a tape loop, kept insisting Obama was a Liberal.

Obama’s policies are geared directly toward alleviating the difficulties of the rich, only with some mollifying rhetoric to make it seem he’s about fiscal equality.  He sells it with a somewhat more worker-friendly line of patter, but I’m still waiting for any kind of financial regulatory policy with teeth.  In spite of his avowed revulsion as a candidate for the abuses at Guantanamo and the anti-civil rights policies of his predecessor, he keeps renewing the Patriot Act and Gitmo is still open and he has just signed off on a policy of holding enemies of the state without limit.  He has backed down on his support of Net Neutrality and I’m still trying to make sense of the whole health care package—which, except for one provision, is an essentially Republican proposal from over a decade ago (which they now repudiate rather that give Obama a win on anything) and even that he has sold badly to an electorate that would have backed him had he gone to the mat for single payer.  This is not a Liberal.

And yet.

What is it the GOP wants?

I don’t honestly think they know.  They have characterized the Democratic Party for a long time now as a Party that only ever reacts, never actually steps up and says what it stands for, but I wonder if that hasn’t become the problem with the GOP.  After all, what do they stand for?

There’s a standard set of positions which are becoming strained and a bit threadbare, but still play well to the base.  Some of them are best characterized by Rick Santorum, who also hasn’t a prayer for the nomination but they like him running because he says right out there all the ugly little social things the rest of them are finally beginning to realize don’t play well with independents and moderates (which both sides need in order to win).  The GOP actually does seem to believe women are second class citizens who should be remanded to the custody of the home—which is probably why they have yet to produce a single credible female presidential candidate who is not a basket of lunacy in a nice wrapper.  Where’s the GOP counterpart to Hilary Clinton?  While their rhetoric may allow for one, their actual policies won’t.  (What sane, educated, intelligent woman with any self- esteem could back the systematic war on womens rights the GOP has been tacitly waging since Reagan?  Well, obviously some do, but I wonder how they make that work.)

The Santorum faction simply doesn’t want anyone to be Different.  (He also doesn’t want people to have sex.  I mean, really.  Have you ever listened to any of his interviews when he gets on that subject?)

Now the GOP has decided to take a hardline position on immigration, so much so that the amnesty plan Bush Two proposed would be anathema today, so they have even turned on their own heroes.  (Seriously.  When you go back and listen to Reagan’s comments on wealth inequality and unions you wonder if he would even be let on the stage today.  He sounds like a Liberal!)

Via the Tea Party faction, the GOP has concretized around a kind of do nothing for anyone unless they can afford to pay for it agenda.  The almost criminal assault on collective bargaining that occurred in Wisconsin has backfired a little, but I don’t hear any of the candidates (except for the sensible ones who no one will have to worry about) repudiating Governor Scott’s tactics.

Yes, I know, he had a budget shortfall.  But he didn’t when he took office—the money he claimed he needed to save was money he gave away in three huge tax cuts to corporations.  He established the tax cuts, which created the fiscal problem, and then tried to blame the unions.  This time, a lot of people were paying attention.

But no one in the GOP (except Christie, but he’s not running for president) said he was wrong.

So the GOP seems to have, in practice, a platform that is anti-union, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-blue collar, anti-immigrant, and anti-serious tax reform.  They are opposed to so much I can no longer discern clearly what it is they stand for.

Family values?  Then what’s this wink-and-a-nod stuff over Herman Cain’s sexual harrassment issues or even over Newt’s track record of divorce-and-marry-the-mistress?

Fiscal responsibility?  Then what is with the continued coddling of large corporations that are clearly removing wealth from this country and the repeated evisceration of every pro-consumer bill brought to the floor?

I don’t know what else there is.  Under Bush they demonstrated how little regard they have for science and education.  (No Child Left Behind is a farce and the blatant interference with environmental impact studies was endemic.)  All they care about, it seems, is some kind of Thomas Edison view of entrepreneurs that quite honestly never really existed.

What they actually stand for is the principle that their constituency doesn’t want to pay for anything.  Not through the government, in any case.  They do not wish to pay for education.  They do not wish to pay for keeping the environment clean.  They do not wish to pay for the unemployed, the elderly, the sick.  Hell, they don’t even want to pay for the damage done to soldiers with combat disabilities.  (To be fair, that’s not a strictly Republican problem—we have always had a problem paying for our broken soldiers, no matter which Party is in power.)

All you hear from them is spending cuts and tax cuts.  Cut cut cut.

What do they want this country to look like when they get their way?  I haven’t heard that.  Not in any real way.  They talk about individual self-reliance, but come on, does anyone anymore believe that happens without a lot of, ahem, community support?  Oh, but it should be voluntary, not mandated.

Well, sir or madam, if you don’t want to pay for it and I can’t pay for it, where does that leave us?

I need to get back to my book now.

Art

China Mieville and the Ideology of SF

Now for something fascinating having to do with writing. I just saw this lecture by China Mieville, who I feel is one of the most interesting writers working today. He’s tackling a subject I’ve chewed over quite a lot—the distinction between SF and Fantasy and the theoretical arguments about SF exceptionalism. I have some quibbles, but I would love to sit down with this guy and hash this through, because, to my ear, he’s exactly where I’ve been in terms of what to look at when talking about this.

 

 

I don’t disagree with a single critical element he brings up—and, as he points out, none of what he brings up is particularly new.

One quibble I have is a minor historical point, and this may be a result of my arrival in the genre as a potential practitioner at a time in which advocates of Fantasy were the ones making the grand argument that science fiction was “merely” a subgenre of fantasy—a claim many SF writers (and readers) took loud exception to. Fantasy was gaining ground then in the market and was shoving SF aside as the apparent preferred genre of fantastic literature and was basking in its ascendancy and making claims about how the two really weren’t any different. (Interesting that Darko Suvin’s assertions were published in 1979, about the time this argument was being made most forcefully, a few years before the market reflected the preference of Fantasy over SF.)

For my part, aside from matters of taste, I’ve never really argued that SF is “better” than Fantasy, at least not in any theoretical sense. Only different. I’ve found most examples of hybrids problematic at best, absurd at worst, because of—as Mieville points out—the ideological underpinnings informing them as genres. So the only reason I have ever had a dog in that hunt came from the assertion made by Fantasy advocates about SF being a sub-form and, occasionally, inferior (sometimes by virtue of being hypocritical, sometimes by virtue of an embarrassing specificity).

(As a personal observation, I find I prefer reading SF and find it very difficult to read Fantasy. However, I can watch Fantasy easily and pleasurably. Only when the quite different faculties employed in reading come into play do I find most Fantasy simply unappealing.)

Anyway, I’d like to offer the video above. I found it quite fascinating and lucid and I agreed with about 90% of it.

culture

Harassment

Herman Cain is having a problem, and it won’t get any better by telling reporters that he won’t discuss it.

I don’t want to get into a big analytical thing about sexual politics here, but from the descriptions so far of what Cain did, he made an assumption that I think is all too common among men of a certain mindset.  Cain apparently made inappropriate comments to women in the context of a working situation.  I have no doubt he shrugged it off and forgot about it until it came back to bite him and probably wondered what the big deal was all through the negotiations of settlements.  “I mean,” he likely thought, “I was just talking.”

Whatever the actual events, this is something that is not hard to understand and is no doubt misunderstood.  I worked with a man who indulged this kind of behavior constantly and couldn’t understand why the women were getting all upset.  In that instance, they were customers and he was the retailer.  He would flirt, make suggestions, even proposition women, and could not fathom why many did not come back or why they would be upset in the least.  After all, he was joking.  He didn’t mean it.  And lastly, well, they didn’t say anything—in fact, some of them laughed.

Partly this is a cluelessness that infects many people.  But this was a dynamic I was able to explain to him in fairly straightforward terms.

If you’re at a party and you proposition someone or make an off-color remark or whatever, everyone is completely free to just walk away.  The behavior may be offensive, but there is no coercion, no one is put into a lousy situation against their will, no one has to listen to you if they don’t want to.  (I’m assuming a party for a party’s sake here, not a party where people from the office are getting to know each other—that’s different because there is less freedom to walk away.)  In this context if you offend someone she can either throw her drink in your face and leave, tell you what a shit-heel you’re being, embarrass you some other way, join in the tastelessness, or whatever.

But in any kind of business context, that freedom does not exist.  Even as a customer.  And this is hard for some people to understand because we’re very informal in many business dealings.  Why isn’t the customer free to behave as she would at a party?  Because as a customer she wants something and she has to deal with you to get it.  It may be a loose constraint, but it is a constraint nevertheless.  So if you come on all boorish and macho, she has an uncomfortable set of compromises she is forced to make.  Either put up with you until she gets what she came for, give up on what she came for and hope she can find it somewhere else, or be offensive right back, souring the cordiality of the interaction.  For the duration of the transaction, server and customer are bound together in an unspoken contractual arrangement that limits the range of response.

Any questions?

Yes, it’s a power situation.  Waitresses understand this very well.  They put up with all kinds of nonsense because they could lose their jobs if they respond as they would on the street with a stranger.  Situations in which people must work together also limit the possible range of reactions.

For the ass hat acting like the reincarnation of Maurice Chevalier, it may not be a big deal—verbal games, fishing for possibilities—or it may be a more insidious game of power plays and sexual predation, but in either event there may well be an obliviousness that leaves the impression that since she didn’t dump a pot of coffee in his lap she must be enjoying the interaction.  Or they may very well know that the woman having to put up with him is in a constrained situation.

Either way, it is not a simple matter of “just funning.”

Guys often just don’t get this.  Guys who have been sexually harassed often do.  They realize that it’s a power situation.  It’s not fun and games, it’s not “innocent”, it is not voluntary on all parts.

The term Privilege applies.

So Herman probably stuck his mouth out there and made inappropriate remarks to women who did not have the freedom to tell him to go fuck himself and probably wondered what the fuss was about when they threatened action.  He had probably behaved that way countless times with no blowback and told himself that these women were aberrations.

On the other hand, he may very well understand that this is a power game, but still not see what real harm there is in it.  He sees the world from a perspective of privilege—the privilege of being in a position from which he need never tolerate unwanted intrusions of this kind, the privilege of being able to respond with a “fuck off” and not worry about the consequences—like losing a job or having a business deal fall through.

It’s a lack of empathy.

Now, after having made it a policy to reject race card politics, he’s claiming these attacks are racially motivated.  No no.  This kind of behavior is colorless.

I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that what has been reported is all that happened.  If it turns out there’s more, well. ..

But I wanted to explain at least this small aspect of sexual harassment that seems so byzantine to people.  It’s really not.  We’ve all seen the “boss” who abuses his employees.  If it were elsewhere, among strangers, and he acted like that, someone might punch his lights out, but his employees are constrained by fear.  We recognize this kind of boss as a bully.

It’s the same thing.

culture

Diagnostic Condemnation

The pundits on the Right are agreed—the Occupy Wall Street protesters don’t know what they’re saying.

“They don’t have an alternative. They aren’t even sure what it is they’re protesting.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hearing this kind of counteroffensive nonargument since I was old enough to understand politics.  What it boils down to is this:

“My car won’t start.”

“Do you know what the trouble is?”

“I turn the key and the motor just turns over and over but it won’t catch and run.”

“You don’t seem to have any understanding what the problem is. Come back when you know what’s wrong, otherwise I can’t fix it for you.”

How many people would accept that as a reasonable response?

The Powers That Be are saying to the country, “Unless you can articulate exactly what it is you want done, we can’t do anything.”

Where once one might have said in reply “You broke it, you fix it,” that won’t do anymore.  Now the only reasonable response seems to be “If you can’t figure it out, then move aside and let’s elect some people who can.”

The demands of Occupy Wall Street are fairly simple and straightfoward.

1: Get the money out of our politics.  Regardless of the theoretical legitimacy of the decision, the Supreme Court was wrong in spirit with Citizens United.  They missed the point.  We elect those who get on the ballots and those who get on the ballots are those who have the money to do so, and without controls on where that money comes from we are left with candidates picked by those with the funding.

2:  Money is flowing to the top end of the socioeconomic spectrum.  There are many complex reasons for this, some of which are purely systemic, but many of which are by design.  This must be reversed.

3:   Jobs are being shipped out of the country along with a great deal of manufacturing and other business and with those jobs our tax base is eroding.  We cannot tax the wealthy enough to make up the shortfall, but to continue cutting their taxes with the hope that they will reverse their policies and start hiring Americans again is absurd.  That has not happened yet and is not likely to.  It’s not taxes that are making the difference, but the appearance of tax inequity is acting as a corrosive.

4:  The transfer of wealth from public coffers into private hands is theft in all but name and those on the receiving end of this have yet to face any kind of  penalty for their mishandling of the economy or their continuation of business strategies that continue to bankrupt the middle class.

5:  Wall Street exercises too much influence in Washington and in the state legislatures across the country.

None of these are difficult to understand.  It seems to me the protesters are being very articulate.  The problems have grown larger than the normal avenues of redress can bear.

Using the police to try to break this up is an act of fear and is only making the disconnect between our ideals as  a country and reality of our politics that much clearer.

“It’s broken.”

“Do you know how to fix it?”

“No.”

“Then just shut up about it until you can offer a solution.  Go home and put up with it till you can teach me how to repair it.”

“I have a better idea.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re fired.”

culture

What’s UnAmerican About That?

Herman Cain is the latest in a long line of political mouths calling a populist movement UnAmerican.  He says Occupy Wall Street is an assault on capitalism and that capitalism and the free market system are what have made America what it is.

Can’t argue with that, but his intended meaning is other than reality.

Setting that aside for a moment, though, it’s his statement that protests in the street are UnAmerican that I take greatest issue with.  I’ve been hearing that from more or less conservative people since I was old enough to be aware of political issues.  During the Vietnam era, the antiwar movement gained the hatred of Middle America not because they were wrong but because they were unruly, in the street, loud, and confrontational.  “You should work within the system,” people said, “that’s not the way to do it.”

Except it was clear that working within the system was not achieving results.  The system is so constructed that those who understand where the controls are can make it respond regardless of general public sentiment.  The system is often The Problem, and today we have another example.

But more fundamentally than that, it was a failure to recognize that people in the street is very much a part of the system.  What do we think “freedom of assembly” is all about?

Mr. Cain is wrong.  Capitalism did not make this country great, the people who worked with it and in spite of it did.  Capitalism is a tool not a religion.  Likewise with this nonsense about the free market.  That term has lost legitimacy.  What perhaps Mr. Cain means and certainly what most people mean when they use the term—and by “most people” I mean those not in the upper tiers of corporatist elites—is Open Access Markets, which is not quite the same as what we’ve been taught.  I will repeat this: there is no such thing as a free market.  Someone or some group always controls it, usually with the intent to keep others out.  Wealth is accumulated because of control of markets.  The more you can dictate its conditions, the more successful you will be.  This is not freedom, this is economic Darwinism, and when it is left unmonitored and uncontrolled it results in destructive conditions for people unable to participate, just as we have now.

Open Access Markets means the greatest number of people can participate and there is a modicum of fairness and justice.  You cannot have that without controls, if only to have someone standing there at the gate making sure the bullies don’t keep people out.  We need to start using the language more precisely.

So what we’re really arguing about now is who will be in control.

Now back to protests in the street.  You can call them ugly, you can call them upsetting, you can call them many things, but you cannot call them UnAmerican.  The Revolution began with protests in the streets.  Protests in the streets have always been part of parcel of massive change in this country and we now look back with the myopia that seems peculiarly American and blithely forget that all the things we brag about today in terms of social justice began with protests in the streets.  Women’s suffrage, racial equality, fair labor practices, the end of unjust wars, voting rights—run down the list of game-changers and you will find people in the streets making noise and being “unruly.”  It’s as American as baseball, MicroSoft, and Mark Twain.   You find people like Herman Cain condemning it when it threatens power they wish to wield.  He’s running for president.  Before that, though, he is the CEO of a successful corporation.  He feels threatened with changes he can’t predict (although I bet if he gave it a little thought he’d know exactly what those changes would entail) and which would curtail authority he thinks he can exercise if he wins.

But this is also a man who has made the same old position-of-comfort claim that anyone without a job is personally responsible for that.  This is a refusal to come to terms publicly with the fact that economic systems are just that—systems.  Tools.  And they break down.  And I don’t care what kind of character you have, if you land on the outside of a broken system unable to get back in, it’s not your fault, it’s a problem with the system.

But there seems to be a desire to treat our economic system more as a church than a system.  Something which simply exists and if we only behave properly will take care of us in its blind benevolence.  I can understand that.  It’s scary to see reality as a complex set of conditions we have little or no say in.  It’s frustrating to realize that you have to actually understand  something that probably has never made sense no matter how many times it has been explained.

I was raised, as probably most people born in this country, hearing the fairy tale prescription that if you’re honest and work hard you’ll do well.  It has probably never been true but for a relative minority of people, but it’s the kind of myth that the owners of things like to spread because it prepares people to be servants.  I have absolutely no argument with the ideas that you should be honest.  Hard work is essential.  But you have to be aware as well or your honesty and hard work will be turned into a resource to be used by those who “know better” and you can all too easily end up with nothing.  Hard work and honest are necessary but NOT sufficient for—not success, but security.

We have been giving away the hard won protections earned by hard work, sacrifice, and more than a little blood over the last century, surrendering common sense to a myth of national greatness that says anything that puts a bridle on corporate greed is anti-American.  The heyday of the Middle Class miracle was built on the recognition that you have to keep control of the beast of capitalism and that markets are not free but gladiatorial arenas and the victors are those who set the conditions of combat.  We managed to do this at one time through a lot of sacrifice and, yes, people in the streets speaking truth to power.

Time to do it again before we really do lose what makes us great.

culture

It’s Not About Sex

Rick Santorum answered a question put to him by a serving gay soldier about what he would as president do with the new policy and Santorum did not go off-script. But he did make two mistakes that seem to be endemic in this kind of thing.

Here’s the video:

Firstly, he makes it sound like gays have been asking for “special privileges” in this. Why is this so difficult for people to understand? They have not been asking for special privileges, they have been asking for the same privileges. Of course, there’s a secondary problem in even that—we aren’t talking about privileges, but rights, and I hate it when politicians so smoothly degrade rights into privileges for the purposes of making points with constituents. Gays have been asking for the right to serve their country in the military, openly, as themselves, the exact same way straights do.

The second problem with his answer is the profound naivete he exhibits—as if you can keep sex out of anything. It’s possible he can be excused for not understanding what a barracks is like, he never served in the military, but he could ask! Like any locker room, military barracks’ drip with sex and sexual conversation. It’s a given. You may not like it, but it’s reality. (And in combat, it’s even more so—threat of death ramps up the sexual consciousness of human beings, Darwin telling you that you’re being an idiot for putting yourself in danger and the first thing you need to do if you survive is go reproduce.) The daily, quite normal discourse in military units is something gays have simply not been able to participate in unless they lied about who they were.

Santorum then trots out the old mantra that the military is no place for social experimentation, demonstrating ignorance of our history—which has been a hallmark of this crop of Republican presidential candidates, either because they genuinely don’t know or they willfully distort it to validate the myths their constituents wish to believe. The United States military has been a testbed for social experimentation almost since the beginning, because it does not function as a democracy (although it did that, too, till after the Civil War—direct election of officers by the men they would lead was common). Just for one example was Truman’s desegregation of the army and navy, which came with similar prophecies of doom and chaos.

Of course, this was necessary because the military had already been desegregated in the wake of the Civil War, as was the federal government, until Wilson re segregated it. (Yes, good ol’ Woodrow Wilson was a righteous racist—we forget that, among other things.) The military was used as a testbed for coed service and is still wrestling with the idea of women in combat (they have been there all along, unacknowledged). The military has always been used to test run social ideas.

I don’t like Rick Santorum. I think he’s a hypocrite of the first water, like many of his GOP colleagues, and I’ve written about why I think he’s a hypocrite. But he’s only one of the most extreme examples of an endemic problem in the GOP, which is that they seem incapable of acknowledging the validity of rights for people they don’t like. They hammer on about the constitutionality of this or that and then strip away those rights from people who don’t fit their description of Americans. This has been their problem for a long, long time, but it’s growing to overwhelm them philosophically.

I once characterized the difference between Democrats and Republicans thus: Republicans believe citizens are those who own property while Democrats believe anyone who lives here legally is a citizen. It’s a rough metric, but damn if the GOP doesn’t keep trying to make it true in all instances. They have taken on a version of stakeholder politics that demands they protect the rights of a shrinking constituency in the face of a growing pool of people who don’t fit that profile. But in this instance they’re going a step further and stating that people who do not fit a standard issue description of the ideal American ought not to expect the same rights—which in this formulation they insist on calling privileges.

But what genuinely disturbs me is the audience reaction. The cheers of the crowd when Santorum spews this sanctimonious and inaccurate drivel. Those people frighten me. They’re the ones who would approve of the police in the dead of night coming for those they don’t like, completely unaware that a change of adjectives in the policy would make them just as vulnerable to this kind of censure. They really don’t seem to grasp the underlying issues. In this case, all they seem to grasp is that they think two men having sex or two women having sex is yucky and on that basis there should be a national policy to keep them from equal rights. They really don’t seem to understand that it’s not about sex. Not at all.

By the time they figure out what it is all about, I hope we have a country left for them to correct their mistakes. That may be a bit hyperbolic, but just listen to the cheers.