Tag: demagoguery

Absurdity

Common Sense vs Common Crap

This will be brief.  I just saw another of those worthless “memes” comparing capitalism to socialism, this time with regards to military chest-pounding.  Why do “socialist” countries feel it necessary to “parade” their missiles down major avenues* if socialism is such a warm, cuddly, wonderful thing, while capitalism is supposed to be such a brutal, anti-human thing?

And of course, once the comments fly, the “socialist” country held up as example of this is…The Soviet Union.  Which for one thing doesn’t exist anymore, but for another is an example of how labels seem to hold sway over reason too much of the time.

The problem here is that with an avowed socialist in the presidential race, people who oppose him are reaching for any comparison that will make his proposals look horrific.  It’s a failure on the part of those who believe such memes to stop acting like rabbits and use their brains.  So we keep getting treated to these absurd talking points that suggest that under socialism we would come to be just like the former Soviet Union.

How stupid are we?

You find yourself, however, in order to refute the comparison, having to go back and reinvent fire, do the job that ought to have been done in grade school and high school in history and civics classes (oh, wait, we don’t teach civics anymore, do we?) to bring the purveyor of such nonsense up to speed with reality.

I’m not going to do that.  What I’m going to say here is that labels, for either side, explain nothing, but because they are so easy to apply and seem to explain things by association, a lot of people feel they don’t actually have to know anything about the subjects being poorly covered by them.

The former Soviet Union was first and foremost a dictatorship, or, to be a bit more precise, a totalitarian regime.  It used certain socialist ideas as tools internally, but any real analysis shows that it could not be described as a socialist state.  It was not, for one thing, a democracy, and a major aspect of socialism is based on democratic institutions, of which they had none.  Citizens were ruled, they were accountable to a small cadre of functionaries who were not conversely accountable to them.  Law was by decree and the security state held all the power.

This is not socialism.  Just as what Hitler wrought was not—functionally—socialism.  Fascism and Socialism are very different.  But of course, even back then, they understood the power of labels, so they called themselves something they were not and pushed that image and suppressed anyone who said “Wait, that’s not right.”

But even more than that, these things are systems.  They are constructs.  Capitalism is a construct.  It was a made thing, it is an artifice now.  Which means that it is a tool and ought to do as we wish.  So is socialism.  Tools.  We can set limits on both, use them, even combine them into forms that serve our purpose.

That we fail repeatedly to understand that is the largest single problem in our political reality.  And we are kept from understanding that by a crippled educational system and the repeated and deceptive use of labels that even as they purport to inform us and give us some power merely make us less likely to look past them and figure out what the reality is.

Here is the conundrum of our current age.

The benefactor of the current system, known euphemistically as The 1%, are invested in keeping that system in  place.  They do this by distorting government.  The distortion is that they have made it so the government sees them as their primary constituency.

Government therefore fails to serve the rest of us.  We consequently blame it.  Some of us correctly identify the problem and accuse government of being a tool of the 1%.

The solution is shown to be to strip government of its powers to facilitate the desires of the 1%.+

The 1% see this and by other avenues feed us the idea that government alone is the problem and in order to set things right we must take away its ability to function.

In reality, the only tool we the people have to correct the distortion is through government.  Instead of stripping of power, we should be using it in order to correct the systemic distortion.

Government is caught in the middle.  It’s a tool and can only do what it is tasked to do.  If we 99% believe it is at fault and tear it down, the 1% will have no barrier to their continued misuse of capitalist systems.  But we’ve been fed the canard that the government is entirely on their side and is the sole reason for the dysfunction.

Certain corrections to the distortion are based on socialist concepts.  But we’ve been told for decades how awful that would be.  Meanwhile, the situation continues to worsen because there is no viable solution offered, and the only avenue that appears to be viable is to weaken the one thing that might do us good. Our voice, clearly expressed through our government.

So enough with the idiotic comparison and the bullshit that we can’t use systems rather than be victim to them.

All it requires is a little common sense, less common crap, and participation.  Once again, vote. But for the sake of the country, learn something useful about things as they are and how they work.  Right now, we are very much like Thelma and Louise.  “We have to get to Mexico, but I ain’t going through Texas!”

__________________________________________________________________

  • I can’t recall the last time such a parade took place in Stockholm.  Hmm…
  • + One of the ways they do this is by funding candidates and buying elections, sending people to congress who tell us they’ll work for us then turn around and work for them.
culture

Blue Collar Trump

Intellectuals on both sides of the political aisle are scratching their heads at the Trump phenomenon. They wonder how this guy, with all his crudity and his bluster and his fascistic diatribes, can possibly be slapping the pants off the favored sons of the GOP. Liberal, conservative, it doesn’t matter, they don’t get it.

Really?  Or do they just not want to admit they understand perfectly well?

Trump’s appeal is very simple.  He’s putting a kind of blue collar, working class rage right out in front, unadorned, just the way you might get it at any dinner table conversation in a stressed working class household where the most serious piece of reading done is either World News or Car and Driver.  Where the talking heads on Meet The Press are met with derision and complete incomprehension.  He has pitched his language, according to one recent analysis, to a sixth grade or lower level because he knows that is the functional intelligence of the people he’s channeling.

Yes, I said channeling.  He is the embodiment of a feedback machine.  He’s taking in the inarticulate anger of people who feel helpless but who intuit that they’re being shafted and projecting it right back out at them at the same intellectual level.

The thing that sets him apart from Cruz and even Rubio is not that he gets this and they don’t, but that he knows he can make more bank by expressing it without trying to couch it in pseudo-politic, semi-intellectual, quasi-philosophical terms.  He has not said one thing that the others haven’t also said over the last several years, but they do it in terms that hide the scrapyard origins of the sentiment and try to make it appeal to people who wish to believe of themselves that they have a higher grasp of these matters.  The reason so much of their tactic is now failing is that they’ve been trying to play bar band music as though it were a sonata in three parts, and it doesn’t ring true enough in comparison with a guy who knows to stick to three chords and one beat.

Trump is also feeding on a kind of mythic American tough guy attitude that sees the solution to every problem to be corporal—a smack in the jaw, a kick in the groin, a death threat.  When the mind has been taxed to its limit by arguments about refugees, globalization, currency exchange manipulations, multilateral negotiations, regressive tax structures, and ethnic diversity, the impulse is to just throw them all out, slam the door shut, and kick the shit out of anyone with more than a high school education.

And because we as a people rarely look past the surface of things, when confronted with problems that really are complex, we feel used, insulted, talked down to, and effectively sidelined by language and concepts we were never introduced to at home or in school.  We are ignorant but have been told for decades that we have some kind of national character and virtue which doesn’t require us to learn anything in order to know what to do.

But we don’t.  So we get angry and frustrated.  Then someone like Trump comes along and validates our anger and plays on our ignorance and tell us he knows what to do to make us feel better.

He’s a walking, talking symbol of the anti-intellectualism we’ve been suffering and enduring since…well, in this cycle since McCarthy showed politicians how to gain support by putting down smart people.

It should surprise no one that he is popular with that kind of crowd.  The question is, how large is that crowd?

We’d better hope they aren’t even close to a majority.

But if they are, then that says everything we need to know about how our educational system has failed this country.  And with that failure, how our economic systems are failing us.  And with that failure, how our value systems are next to worthless.

One last thing which puzzles some folks.  The question rises how evangelical christians find nothing to criticize in the man, how he can get endorsements from the likes of Billy Graham Jr. and Jerry Falwell’s son.  How, with a centerfold model for a wife, he isn’t everything repugnant to them with all their moralistic blatherings about family values.  How they can get so exercised about Michelle Obama’s elegant bare arms and say virtually nothing about the yards of skin Melania Trump has shown in a wide variety of sexual poses.

What’s hard to understand?  Trump’s wife appears to be everything these so-called fundamentalists desire in a wife.  Young, sexy, and, above all, silent.  For them “modesty” only means nobody else gets to play with the goodies or look at the yummies. Michelle Obama offends by quite clearly owning her arms as well as the rest of her person and being a vocal, thinking, independent woman.  It ain’t, in other words, the bareness of her arms that bothers them but the fact that they are hers and she does what she wants with them.  Trump’s wife looks like an Old Testament Prophet’s wet dream.

Trump is not hard to understand, nor is his apparent popularity.  We just have to see, finally, what has been wrought in this country by people who have sold us a bill of goods for decades, all in the name of Amurica.

culture

…and now a word from the stupid

President Obama has announced his supreme court nominee.

A couple of things.  Merrick Garland is not, as claimed by the current spiel from Mitch McConnell and company, an ideologue.  There is a track record of bi-partisan endorsements dating back to the 90s to so testify.  No one who has ever worked with the man has ever called him an ideologue.  This is not open for dispute.  He is a jurist and from all the evidence a man of integrity.

Two, while they keep bringing up the Biden Rule, bear in mind the Biden Rule was a statement on what the Senate is constitutionally required to do and, further, an opinion, one which the Democratic Party has never adhered to even when it sounded like they might.  There was no vacancy to be debated at the time when then-Senator Joseph Biden made his statements.  But even if one wishes to use that as some kind of defense,  it is nevertheless a fact that the Biden Rule was never adopted as A Rule.  Republicans certainly opted to disregard it and history shows that it has never proven a hindrance or an error for a president to nominate for a vacancy during his last year in office.  Now that it appears likely Obama will choose someone who could as easily rule against the GOP agenda as for it, they bring it up and try to make it sound like there is precedent.  There is no precedent.

McConnell’s assertion that the president should allow the People a voice in such a selection is disingenuous.  The People did.  They re-elected Obama by a considerable margin.  This is simply an opportunity for him to fulfill that confidence and do the job for which he was elected.

So they have no precedent.  They have no moral ground for blocking this.  They are risking committing political suicide, in fact, which suggests that they are not listening to their constituents but to their paymasters.  There are several matters before the court this year which, had Scalia survived, might have gone in favor of the Right Wing agenda.  With Scalia gone, that certainty is no more. They hope a Republican will be elected.

On that, though, all of them have come out against their Party frontrunner, Donald Trump.  If he becomes president, according to their recent comments, it will be a disaster.  So they won’t get what they want even if the GOP takes the White House.  They must secretly hope Hillary or Bernie wins.  But if that happens, then their nominee, certainly in the case of Sanders, will be even farther from their ideological hopes.  Unless they intend, if Hillary wins, to mire her presidency in endless specious “hearings” about presumed “crimes.”

All of which tells anyone with half a brain that all they want is to block government from functioning at all.

Of course, if a Democrat wins in November and they retain control of the Senate and agree to advise and consent, then the problem must have been an unwillingness to work with a black man.  Ideology we can assume will not change, at least not sufficiently to matter.

On a personal note, I suspect this will get them drummed out of office.  The Robertson-Scalia court has handed down some of the most regressive decisions in the past two decades.  Just to name one, Citizens United.  I will not exercise here the problems—the moral problems—with that decision.  It is bad jurisprudence.  It is a mockery of even the thing the Right purports to defend, namely the importance of the individual.  It negated that importance by allowing a functional redefinition of what constitutes an individual.  They claim not to like Socialism, but that ruling allowed a form of aggregate personhood which elevated private aggregates to a virtually autonomous condition operationally akin to a kind of collectivism.  That it exists as a privately-held corporate entity does not change that fact that now we actually have some “persons” more equal than everybody else.

Whatever one may feel about the past seven years, in this President Obama has history, logic, and morality on his side.  It’s his job, his duty, and frankly his privilege, and it is the Senate’s job and duty to advise and consent.  History and tradition and even logic are against them, because likely they will have a harder choice of nominees this time next year.  What they are doing makes no sense at all.  It is posturing.

Which is growing very old.  They’re making the Democrats look better than perhaps they really are.

 

Absurdity

Under The Big Top

Chris Christie has endorsed Donald Trump.

I’ve been looking for a point of entry into the campaign thus far and this seems as good a one as any.  Like many, I’ve been watching in amazement as Donald Trump drags open the closet door on the GOP and shows everyone what’s in it.  Thus far in his campaign I haven’t heard anything he has said that, if couched in less caustic, bombastic, or otherwise reworked by spin artists to be more palatable, is not what all the rest have said or hoped for or believed for two decades.  Or more.  In other words, Trump has stripped the politically polished veneer off the GOP platform and shown us the ugly workings inside.

Added to that, on stage, during the debates,he has been shoveling at the other candidates pretty much the same kind of stuff the entire GOP machine has been flinging at Obama or any other Democrat in their sites for the last seven years. Whether it be the hyperbole of floor speeches in the House and Senate or the little email blasts full of non-facts and smears, this is what the Republican Party has dished out consistently at their perceived enemies—all in the name of “taking back the country” or “making America great again.”

The lesson for everyone is that, rather than accrue negative approval ratings, Trump is leading the pack.  The people who believe Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Communist are lapping this noise up as if it’s the Second Coming of Reagan and loving it, entirely sans the sense of irony that Ronald Reagan would be both appalled and unable to win a single caucus on his own in this climate of uber Right Wing—what was it Lindsey Graham said the other day? oh yeah—batshit crazy.

I imagine folks who love Trump now think Graham is a Lefty.  And not a bit of irony to be found among them.

Whether Trump is serious about his stated positions or is playing some very broad game of “let’s implode the Republican Party”, the take-away from this is just how desperately insane a significant segment of our population has become.  That the equivalent of a substanceless spiel worthy of an Adolf Hitler could be seen as a solution to problems which I suspect most of these folks don’t even understand points up the ruin the last three decades of Republican pillage has left of this country.

Education has been mangled in the name of programs that do the opposite of what their labels claim.

Promised jobs bills have either not appeared or have been used to bust unions or position key industries to be sold overseas, with a concomitant loss of the jobs that once anchored our middle class.

Decent politicians have been hounded out of office by demonizing them for actually doing their jobs, to be replaced by people who wouldn’t know how to manage a paper route and whose only claim to electability is how well they can make their constituency believe that someone else is at fault for their decaying situation.

The national debt has become a tool for sucking the latent wealth out of the country and into a pool of capital that “floats” globally and has no national home, a process that is not illegal because the people who might have brought it to our attention and caused legislation to be passed to prevent it have been fired, moved to other positions, or simply had their wings clipped in the name of profits.

Our standing in the world has been damaged because of a policy attitude that is based on some version of the Old West and the town marshal, with the United States willing at the drop of an insult to invade, bomb, destabilize regimes, or sell guns and bullets to terrorists as long as they claim to love capitalism.  Other nations don’t trust us because we gave up solving problems in lieu of international pillage.  (I cite KBR as a prime example of what I’m talking about.)

The middle class economy, which at one time was protected and managed in such a way that once a savings account paid interest upward of 3 to 5 %, a time now mythic in these days of a gutless Fed that won’t raised rates so the multinationals might be forced to pay some of their pilfered pelf back into the hands of those from whom they’ve stolen it.

And what is funnier is that the very people who might be able to repair all this are now fighting an uphill battle against charges that have zero substance—that they’re socialists or communists or that they simple want to raise everybody’s taxes or that they’re somehow racists.

Whatever else one might think of them, the only two presidents since 1980 who have overseen a reduction in the deficit and even a partial reduction in the debt are Clinton and Obama.

Every Republican president has presided over massive increases in both the deficit and the debt.

Large deficits and high debt are very good to a certain class of people.  It’s that simple.  Where, exactly, do you think those interest payments—your taxes—go to service that debt?

The newspeak of the current climate is perverse and, I think, brittle.  Observe the shattering going on even within the GOP by Trump, who in almost any other time would be seen as the clown he is acting.  The fabric of deceit and lies and misconceptions and misdirections which have formed the core of the GOP for the last two decades cannot hold against the weight of reality.

The danger, though, is that even more rational people have been infected by the politics of image and the legerdemain of mistrust.  The campaigns of he-said she-said built on accusations over character and presumed crimes have had their effect even on those who seem to know how they work, so that we see Hillary and Bernie being faced off in battles of gotcha that have no substantive bearing on their positions or their policies. We see people declaring that they will sit the election out if the “wrong” candidate wins the Party nomination.

Are people really that unobservant and narcissistic?  All 435 House seats up for reelection this year.    Thirty-four Senate seats are in play.  Twelve governorships.

The presidency isn’t the only thing at stake.  Staying home would be such an abandonment of duty as to amount to moral bankruptcy.

Government, it is said, no longer works.  That’s not true, obviously it does, we are not living in an anarchy.  But within the less absurd scope of what is meant by that statement, government can only work when people are chosen who know how to do it.  We have seen wave after wave of political intransigents and functional idiots sent to Washington time after time.  It should surprise no one that things are not working well.  When a conservative like Lindsey Graham stands up and declares that his party has gone batshit crazy, it would seem time to take back the controls and go to the polls in November.  Staying home would be almost criminal.

This has been a public service screed.  Thank you.

blog

Competency As Test For Civil Discourse

President Obama gave his last State of the Union address this week.  I did not watch it, but I read the transcript.  To my eye, to my mind, it was as fine a way to cap his presidency as one could hope.  He spoke to the future.  Make of that what you will.  Those who do not now or never have liked him, it was all hot air, empty rhetoric, posing for posterity.  For those who believe he has been the best president since the last great one, it was inspirational, an arrow aimed at the next horizon.  For anyone with the slightest grasp of history, how politics works, of even a grasp of the last 40 years, it was a gracious and generous invitation to Do Better.

In contrast, Governor Haley’s official Republican rebuttal was a tortured exercise in finding a way to be right in the cracks of a broken legacy, made nearly irrelevant by an evident lack of understanding and, apparently, knowledge of our country’s history.

Nikki Haley, Governor of South Carolina, said in an interview after her rebuttal “we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion.”

Let me pause for a breath while I ponder the utter feckless ignorance in that statement.  This is the flip side of the Right’s insistence that this country was founded on Christianity, I suppose.  More to the point, if that’s your belief, and you did not notice how stupidly wrong that statement from Governor Haley was, then you do have to ask yourself how you square the contradiction.  If she’s right, then this country was never a “christian” nation.  If it was so founded, then she’s wrong and every single law ever passed has been based on religion.

As to race, please.  Have you never heard of the One Drop Rule?  Or Loving v. Virginia?  Or Plessy v. Ferguson?  No?  What a pristine place your mind must be, then, unsullied by the grimier legacies of this country.

Saying something like that is tantamount to saying “All that stuff we did—we never really did it, it’s only stuff in books we don’t read.”  Wishful thinking and frankly insulting, because for that to pass she has to believe her listeners are stupid and uneducated and ignorant.  She has to bet on you not knowing any better.

Nikki Haley is one of the more reasonable Republicans holding office currently, but it is this kind of tone-deaf, ahistorical, reality-denying rhetoric that makes it impossible for me to take her seriously.  Or any of them, really, so synced to their Party campaign to undo everything from the 1950s (at a minimum) till today just because their constituency will vote for them if they do.  A shrinking constituency, I think.  The louder they get, the smaller their numbers.  But, my word, they are loud.

By comparison, Obama has shown far more gracious tolerance than—well, than I could possibly have shown.

We seem not to teach civics in school anymore.  We should.  We should have a course on civics combined with American history, beginning in grade school (when I got it) and continue on until 12th grade.  No let up.  Cover this stuff in greater and greater detail, ad nauseum, until it sinks in and we no longer think someone knows what he or she is talking about just because they hold high office.

What I will miss most when Obama leaves office is not being talked to like I only have a 3rd grade education by my president.  I will miss his erudition.  Yes, I will miss his humor, his sophistication, even his syntax.

I suspect the rest of the world will, too.

culture

Bang!

We’ve had a banner year of in terms of bizarre homicides.  I could say that all homicide is bizarre, but somehow when it involves people who actually know each other it seems more…expected, I suppose.  Tragic, shocking, but after a little thought you can see how it happened.

So-called mass shootings are another matter. These are exercises in mindless spleen-venting on the part of people who are then portrayed as mentally ill, “radicalized,” or some variation of misanthropic moron, either an ideologue or a racist or sometimes just someone who has reached the end of the apparently short string by which life was hanging.  Collectively we try to make sense of them.  For most of us, this is like making bricks without straw: work the material all you want, it’s just mud in the end and nothing that holds up. We just don’t know.

Into this once more we have another round of what has since 1968 been a cyclic iteration of the Gun Control Debate. The question arose on the federal level during Prohibition when gangsters were running around with Thompson machine guns.  The police argued that the ownership and use of such weapons outside the military represented a public danger, and limitations were duly enacted, but this was by no means the first instance within the borders of the United States when possession of firearms by private citizens was an issue of law.  And to be sure after the Civil War the question had teeth in the face of Reconstruction policies and the subsequent reaction of the defeated South to the condition of free blacks.  There is ample in our history to make a case that the idea of restricting access to personal firearms is a matter of oppression.  Hence these arguments cannot be quietly put to rest.

One thread is the presumed constitutionality of the matter.  The 2nd Amendment is seen by many to guarantee unrestricted access to firearms.  Strict Constructionists line up in odd combinations with Survivalists, militant preservationists, and others to claim the Founders meant exactly this.  On the other side are those who argue they did not.  The fact is, it’s an open question.  A good deal of American law was based on English Law and Blackstone’s Commentaries served as an often unacknowledged guide to the writing of local and state ordinances as well as hovering in the back of all the conventionists’ minds while drafting the various state constitutions and the federal constitution.  This is one reason so many early state constitutions look so much alike, even in language.

What did Blackstone have to say about possession of arms?

5. The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defense, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is also declared by the same statute . . . and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765

Right there we see the basis of our legal understanding and the problem with clarification.  Under due restrictions.  Blackstone—and presumably most if not all the Founders—understood that some regulation was necessary.  But by pairing it with a right both Blackstone and the Founders left the issue vague enough to result in precisely the argument we now have.  I wrote a piece about my interpretation of what the Founders were thinking here.

Recently I saw this debate once again where the minds of the Founders was being analyzed for both pro and con.  I thought to chime in, then held back.  I realized suddenly that it simply doesn’t matter what they had in mind.

People will take what they want from the Constitution, just as they do from the Bible, and use it in any way that serves their personal view of how the world ought to be.  The vagueness—assumed vagueness—of the 2nd Amendment in this regard allows for the evolution of civil construction to suit a changing situation.  The whole Constitution is like that.  “What does it mean?” is open to interpretation as long as the issue is recognized as fundamentally important.

(Scalia is simply wrong in his view that the Constitution is not a living document, that it is somehow set in stone and inviolate.  If true, that makes it all but worthless.)

The intent of the Founders, however one wishes to construe it in practice, was to guarantee that the armed power of the state came from the express consent of the people.  That the “king” was not to hold that power exclusively to the detriment of his subjects, but they would hold it to keep the king in check.

How they held it was and is open to debate and certainly open to reformulation.

In that regard, we should also remember that the United States has traditionally been a state opposed to the idea of standing armies and until WWII, when our current arrangement of maintaining a large federal armed force came into acceptance, we raised armies at need.  Consider this from Teddy Roosevelt’s Sixth State of the Union address:

“Our Regular Army is so small that in any great war we should have to trust mainly to volunteers; and in such event these volunteers should already know how to shoot; for if a soldier has the fighting edge, and ability to take care of himself in the open, his efficiency on the line of battle is almost directly Proportionate to excellence in marksmanship. We should establish shooting galleries in all the large public and military schools, should maintain national target ranges in different parts of the country, and should in every way encourage the formation of rifle clubs throughout all parts of the land. The little Republic of Switzerland offers us an excellent example in all matters connected with building up an efficient citizen soldiery.”

And by the way this was one of the primary functions of the NRA before its lobbying arm expanded to dominate the entire machinery of it.

But the fact is, the situation has changed and we are not talking about abstract political philosophy but about access to military style weapons and head’s full of junk going out and popping off at targets of opportunity because they think their world is ending.  Or they want their 15 minutes.  Or they didn’t take their meds.  Or they overdosed on paranoid social media and Fox News.  Or they think—

And we have a multi-billion dollar arms industry that thrives on this stuff, because every time it happens people run out and buy more guns.  Naturally they don’t want to see restrictions.

But to argue that restrictions are in some way a violation of the Founders  intent is not only a narrow and self-serving view but beside the point, because for the most part the people making that argument wouldn’t change their mind if they could be proved wrong.  This is religion for them and like people who insist that Leviticus supports their view of the present world and its ills they will interpret it as they want.

Just as those who find the 2nd Amendment a vestigial piece of antiquated nonsense that perhaps ought to be expunged.

The Founders certainly never intended us to be hamstrung by what they did.  The world is a different place—technologically if not politically—and refusing to sit down and try to find a solution to a problem because “the Constitution says” would likely strike them as absurd.

And childish.

I don’t believe any rational person feels the guy who shot up the Planned Parenthood clinic  is mentally or morally qualified to have had unrestricted access to weapons.  To defend his ability to have them because you think it means you can’t have the same access to the same weapons is a troubling and frankly myopic attitude.  We have a real problem in this country with firearms in the hands of people who, with just a little thought, we know shouldn’t have them.

The people who shot up San Bernardino are a different matter. Sane but definitely operating out of a different playbook than the rest of us, one built on self-justifications, paranoia, and perhaps a bit of political vulgarity that made them feel outside the scope of ordinary avenues of communication.  The fact is, anyone could do this and we have no way of knowing who might or when or why. It would be nice to think we could predict with certainty, but we can’t, so other solutions should be sought.

However, the debate must be had before we can come to any solution.  But stop using the Founders as an excuse.  Be honest—this isn’t about them.  It’s about us.

Absurdity

Crackpottery

As promised, more words.

I haven’t done very much about the political season of late. I’ve been watching it in utter dismay. I am astounded at the circus antics of those who would style themselves as America’s saviors. It’s just possible their intent is to save us from them.

Ben Carson melted down recently, bellowing that Obama didn’t get treated this way. His memory, like everything else, is deficient. But to be fair, Obama gave the sharks less to attack. He behaved like a serious-minded person, offered content, policy ideas, and a grasp of reality that did not lend itself to easy assault unless those mounting the assault intended to do so on the basis of his politics.

So they made shit up. He was born in Kenya. He’s a Muslim. He’s a communist. A variety of lesser things. With an evident lack of ability to attack him on the grounds of political position, they concocted ephemeral bullshit and hoped some of it would stick—as they have continued to do.

Carson has apparently opted to make things up for himself instead of letting others do it for him, and complains when he gets attacked for it. From my perspective, that he has now become the front-runner for the GOP nomination suggests the media has gone easy on him till now, otherwise how could he have reached this point?  When they failed to attack him and focused instead on his chief rival, Donald, he started shoveling out more nonsense to attract the detractors and gain some traction.

As a campaign strategy it may have worked too well.

Really, there are only a couple of things he has said which should have eliminated him from serious consideration long before now.

His comparison of Obamacare to slavery.

No, he did not say slavery was the best thing that ever happened to black people, that was a comment from a satirical website.  But he did suggest Obamacare was akin to slavery because “in a way, it is slavery, because it is making all of us subservient to the government.”

By that thinking, traffic laws make us all slaves.

One might put this down to the hyperbole of political campaigning, and I’m willing to concede that.  In this case, I don’t care, because it is an abuse of language and an insult to morality.  “In a way” nothing is like slavery except slavery, and we need to step back from this kind of comparison.  It’s as bad as labeling any policy you don’t like fascism just because you don’t like it. Or comparing someone to Hitler simply because you disagree with him.  It bends the meanings of those words so out of shape as to render them meaningless.

Besides, the longer the ACA  (Affordable Care Act, not “Obamacare”—this was a law written by congress, not the president, so use the correct labels, please) stands, the more actual citizens like it.  This is not a guess, this is born out by surveys. Oh, and the gargantuan economic meltdown attributed to it hasn’t happened.

It also shows a blatant insensitivity for history, but Carson isn’t the only one who indulges in that.

No, “Obamacare” is not like slavery and by saying that he exhibits a willingness to indulge the basest sort of demagoguery.  And for a doctor to take that line bothers me, since it also shows a disconnect with the realities of his profession.  Now, had he then said “We should go to single payer” then I might listen closer and give him a bit more consideration.

The other thing is this whole magilla about evolution.  He said: “I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary.”

The adversary being Satan.

If you believe in that sort of thing, I can’t argue with you.  It’s bullshit, but belief is one of those non-negotiable things that thrives on disagreement.  The more people tell you you’re wrong, the more noble it is to dig in and believe.  So there is no profit in trying to argue about it.

But that non-negotiable part is worrisome in someone who wants to lead a powerful nation and might be called upon to compromise over fundamental disconnects in ideology in order to preserve, like, the world.  One of the things Obama is continually criticized on by people who think adherence to immovable ideologies is noble is his seeming willingness to compromise. It is seen as weak, poor leadership, etc. It happens to be one of the things I like about him and in that job the ability to listen and accept sometimes uncomfortable differences in pursuit of mutuality and peace is a talent I suspect Ben Carson, if he means this stuff, lacks.

He has made similarly idiotic statements about the Big Bang.

Now, he’s a brain surgeon, which is suppose to be, in certain contexts, code for “really smart.”  I’m not seeing the smart.  He keeps making shit up to gain some kind of street cred among the Party faithful.  That whole thing about being confronted in a fast food restaurant?  True or not, he said of the encounter “Guy comes in, put the gun in my ribs. And I just said, ‘I believe that you want the guy behind the counter.'”  I’m having a hard time seeing how this is any indication of presumed bravery.  He just admitted to telling a robber not to hold him up but hold somebody else up.  Point the gun at the minimum wage worker behind the counter.  Aim that thing at someone else.

He’s a doctor.  What happened to “Above all, do no harm”?  Why not, “This is between you and me, let’s go out to the parking lot” and get the assailant away from others who might be hurt?

I get it, this is supposed to be his Clint Eastwood moment.  But think about it.  He was figuratively and, if he is to be believed, literally stepping behind someone else in the face of personal harm.

Then, we have his recent problems over—wait for it—the pyramids of Giza.

“My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain. Now all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big — when you stop and think about it, and I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time — to store that much grain.”

To be fair, he said that in 1998, it is not part of his current campaign strategy to undermine archaeology.  But still, it makes one wonder if he has ever read a book outside of his course studies in medical school. There’s a term for this kind of thing:  pseudoscience.

Now he’s bellyaching about media scrutiny.  What did he expect?  He’s running for president.  There is one school of thought that suggests that personal beliefs should be off-limits in considerations of who should serve in that office.  As far as it goes, I accept that.  But when one opens one’s mouth and reveals it to the world, it kind of stops being only a personal belief, it becomes part of what you want the public to perceive, and an indication of what you think is important for the public to make a choice.

Now we come to the West Point thing.  He claims to have been offered a full scholarship.  What does that mean?

Here are the  admissions requirements . Note, one of the requirements is a nomination from a senator, a representative, or a president.  He would have had to apply.  A “recommendation” from a general would not have been enough.

As for his attitude toward the Black Lives Matter movement, well, it may be a question of style, but it seems perverse.  “I hate political correctness” has become akin to those who claim to hate feminism but without actually understanding what it means.

But he has supporters.  More, it seems, than Trump, which may not be saying much.

There is a deep admiration in this country for so-called plain-speaking, especially when it seems to be in service to challenging the establishment.  But such speech ought first and foremost be linked to intelligence and a bit of knowledge about what windmills you think you’re charging.  The flush of shocked cheering at the presumed independence of someone like Ben Carson should give way to a reasoned apprehension that he also seems to be independent of actual reason in too many areas.  On top of his Party consistent adherence to the standard issue GOP platform, this causes me some amusement and a bit of nervousness that people who would vote for him could be so stump gullible.

And the clown car rolls on.

Absurdity

Mania and the Resignation of Reason

Speaker of the House John Boehner is stepping down.  Old news by now, I know, but I’ve been looking at some of the responses and his own statements in the wake of the decision and while this is not a new opinion on my part I have come to the conclusion that a sizable element of the GOP, especially in the House, are simply batshit crazy.  I no longer believe they have an agenda.  As long as it’s not The Other Guy’s program.  When they announced back in 2009 that they intended to do anything to obstruct Obama, regardless, it was annoying but easy to assume that the more rational members of their party would temper their zeal and business would get done as it should.  And that’s been more or less true.  There are procedural tactics that have always been used by the opposition to appear to reject a policy while allowing that policy to proceed.  The GOP has been relying on them more and more so that the People’s Business can get done even while they must look to their base and present a facade of uncompromising opposition.

Boehner has been wrangling this circus now for almost 5 years.  His rhetoric has often made it seem he is one with the BSC contingent (Bat Shit Crazy people) while his deft handling of floor votes, positions, and other alignments of planets has seen more accomplished than one might expect.  But it’s a shell game and he knows it and it must be wearying to have to continually lead with a false face.

Mind you, I am no fan of Mr. Boehner’s policy stances, but he is far more a mainstream politician than appearances suggest, and he is fed up.

Such has been clear to anyone paying attention for a long time.  He has been undercut, encircled, compromised, and used by the BSC contingent and he has from time to time let it show.  Personally, I think he should have taken the high road and called bullshit on these people while he still held the gavel, but who knows what else he has had to deal with that is not public knowledge which may have stayed his hand.  Certainly he’s talking about them now.

The question I have, and have had for some time, is: what is it the BSC faction wants?  What is it they think they’re going after?

The end of welfare?

The privatization of everything the government does?

The cessation of taxation?  All of it?

The building of a military on par with the levels of World War II?

Complete return of all internal policy to the individual states, regardless of constitutionality?

The establishment of a state religion?

The end of any discussions about things that seem to impede the headlong rush toward American hegemony and domination?  (Including climate science, minority and women’s rights, economic justice, environmental science, and judicial reform?  This list could go on and includes just about everything that constitutes a criticism of business as usual.)

I look at the list, by no means complete, and all I see is a lot of flag waving in the wrong direction and rejection of reality.

No wonder the rest of the world is looking at us in dismay, wondering what ever happened to the Wise America that seemed imminent in the post WWII era.

Boehner is calling bullshit now on his colleagues who, by his assessment, seem to have no clue what this country is all about.  Of course he’s not saying it quite that way, but that’s what it amounts to.  They are living in a land of fever dreams and non sequiturs, refusing to compromise over the simplest things because they believe compromise leads to—

What?  I see vague, indistinct fears voiced.  Socialism?  They don’t appear to know what that is.  If they actually believe Obama is a socialist, they clearly have no idea.  But even so, they seem unaware that we’ve been using socialist tools since the 1930s and what do you know, our spines are still straight, our knuckles do not drag on the pavement, and a good number of us can think.  We have become the largest economy on the planet (whether you believe that’s a good thing is another matter, but the point is they think it is, so how has socialism been a problem?), the most powerful military force in history (again, mileage varies on how one feels about that, but they see this as a positive), and until we started enabling the top 1% to suck all the money out of the economy, we had the highest standard of living on the planet, even while incorporating those evil socialist programs.  Of course, they (the BSC faction) believe that if we’ve slipped on that a little it’s because of those socialist programs, not because they’ve been doing everything they can to enable the pillage of our national treasure, but the problem is they still talk about things as if we still had that position in the world and that we’re about to lose it.

Causation is one of those scientificky concepts they seem not to grasp.

But I don’t know what kind of country they think they’ll have when and if they get their wishes.  From the evidence, I don’t think most of us—including them—would like it very much.  They have no vision that I can see.

What I see is a lot of nativist warmongers who think by handing over the keys to the kingdom to the top 1% everything will be marvelous for them.  They remind me of Grima Wormtongue.

But I believe they are caught up in a mania.  They have no program, because that requires reasoned deliberation, and that has become an enemy to them.  They are headlong rushing toward the eradication of the institutions and people they think are their natural enemies, but it’s panic-driven.  It’s like some dark, twisted form of Beatlemania.  Reasonless and ultimately empty, but in this case even the music sucks.  They are a mob.  You speak reason to them and they do not understand.

They have been told so often and for so long that America needs to be great again and they seem never once to stop and ask what that would look like.

A job for everyone?

No divorce?

Minorities in distinctly small numbers who are nothing but grateful just to be here?

Men calling all the shots and women reduced to sex toys and brood mares?

God plastered all over everything, especially those things that should exist unquestioned?

Industry and invention but no actual science?

And what about all those people who simply don’t fit that kind of construct?

Well, that’s what prisons are for, I suppose…

A large part of the problem is that too many of us, even those of us not charter members of the BSC contingent, live too much by labels.  Even when we seem to be on the “right side” of an issue, very often we don’t know what’s in that issue.  This makes it difficult to argue effectively against people who don’t care about any of that but just want to win.  Win at all costs.

We have some serious issues that don’t get any real air-time.  The presidential debate was a demonstration of how little any of these people  are even aware of them.

For instance, whatever your feelings about the causes of climate change may be, the fact is we’re seeing it, and one of the consequences will be a dramatic redistribution of potable water.  This is already happening.  None of those people even raised the issue.  Of course, we’ve been told our real concern is oil, and consequently we’ve seen this horrible practice of fracking take off, to the quick benefit of  certain shareholders, but also to the gradual detriment of water.  Now, there may well be a lot to be discussed on either side of that issue, but it doesn’t even raise a blip on the radar of presidential campaigning!

For another instance, we have a growing number of displaced workers and a shrinking pool of traditional jobs to absorb them.  If anything gets said at all, it is couched in terms of entitlements and lazy people without a single nod to the fact that we are building our own replacements and jobs are simply not there.  No discussion of it at all on the level of local communities devastated by standard Big Business practices that often obliterate local economies.

Oh, can’t talk about that!  That implies a need for Regulation and we all know that regulation is inimical to growth.

Bullshit.

But my point is, these kinds of things, which are real and current and need to be dealt with do not get a reasonable public debate because we’re so damn caught up about someone’s fucking email account or whether angels are real.

I did not side with Mr. Boehner, but he has my sympathy.  He has probably felt like the only rational person in the room most of the time.  He has been bludgeoned by stupidity.

The problem, however, is that the GOP is losing its reasonable members.  They are becoming increasingly shrill because the BSC faction thinks it’s winning because people like Boehner throw up their hands and walk away.  You can only be in the same room with idiocy for so long before you begin to doubt your own sanity.  But it is that shrill, loud whine of lunacy that most people hear and it has the unfortunate attribute of overwhelming everything else.

It would be nice for a change if the quiet, thoughtful ones would stop demurring in the face of what is becoming criminal irrationality.  I kind of like a two-party system, but in order for it to function properly both parties must have credibility.  Right now, judging by the rhetoric and who they have running for the top position, the GOP has no credibility.  Not with me, anyway.  And I don’t think that’s a good thing.

 

Absurdity

Bernie and the Clown Car

Scott Walker has dropped out of the presidential race. Given another month, all that will remain will be Kasich, Fiorino, and Trump.  Maybe Bush, but even he’s been resorting to hired audiences.  Maybe not Kasich, either, he seems not be doing well, but I’ll address that below.

I thought I’d seen the bottom of the barrel in national politics, but this election cycle is so far bottomless in terms of pointless rhetoric, jeremiads, lies, and crappy spectacle.  I would like to say something serious about the GOP but they haven’t given us anything serious since the season premiered. I felt a bit sorry for Governor Kasich, who in the Grand Debate kept trying to bring the discussion back to policy and serious issues.  Unfortunately, he was upstaged by the Trump Train that kept running over the other clowns tied to the tracks.

What can be said of a roster of candidates who seem so dedicated to being on the wrong side of so much?

When Jeb Bush proposed Margaret Thatcher for the face of the ten dollar bill, it was indicative of so many levels of disconnect from American reality that I believed it could not get worse.  (He called her Ronald Reagan’s “partner.”  This is so revealing of so much that it’s difficult to unpack in one sitting.  In truth, I doubt Jeb really understands just how meaningful that gaff was.)  At least Trump is doing what he’s doing on purpose.

It is difficult to see much merit in the choices.

Bobby Jindal wants to be white (or so it would seem—just look at the official portrait he commissioned recently) and denies that race is an issue.  At a time in this country of surging racial tension, I can only imagine what kind of a message he thinks he’s sending.  (Did you know he took his name from the Brady Bunch?  His real name is Piyush)  This is a new level of misrepresentation, but of what I’m not sure I want to say. On policy he’s demonstrated an anti-immigration bias, but that’s in the news a lot.  Of course he’s an antichoice candidate, he couldn’t run on the GOP ticket if he weren’t, but he also backs a Constitutional amendment for a balanced federal budget.  This issue has come up from time to time.  It’s stupid.  It shows a profound misunderstanding of how government funding works.  A state can have such a law and get by because in times of catastrophe a state can depend on the federal government, but only because the federal government is not prohibited from spending outside its budgetary limits.  Put this in the Constitution and see what happens next time a flood or hurricane produces a disaster that requires federal help.  More than that, though, it would produce serious impediments to our international agreements, treaties, foreign aide programs, and all those ships, planes, and soldiers we keep at the ready in case we need to invade another country or intervene between two other powers for the benefit of the world.  Now, Jindal is actually a Rhodes Scholar, which suggests he’s smart enough to know better—know better about a lot of things—so why doesn’t he seem to get this?  I think he does, which means he misrepresenting the issues, which means he doesn’t think the voters aere smart enough to see through this nonsense, but it also means he’s relying on a base that just might be that uninformed.  And,hell, he’s been given the Duck Dynasty Seal of Approval,so maybe that’s the case.  But its disingenuous.  He’s playing to his base at the expense of the truth, which is pretty much what passes for politics in this country, regardless of party, but it appears this year the GOP has distilled itself down to the true essence of nonsense.

Then there’s the usual roster of absurdities—christians are under attack and he wants laws passed to protect them; he’s opposed t gay marriage; another one who thinks corporations are people and pay too much in taxes, despite the growing evidence that corporations of a certain size are really vampires; and he’s a climate change denier.

Of course, he’s polling at 4%, along with Rand Paul, so why pick on him?

No reason other than he, in one person, exemplifies so much that is wrong with the GOP.

Chris Christie is a vindictive man who has nothing but a gruff manner to recommend him, which is wearing thin finally.

Ted Cruz, for all his anti-immigration rhetoric, has had his own oops moment with the question of nationality.  This wouldn’t be an issue if Cruz hadn’t stoked the fires of the Birthers during his tenure in the senate.  And then that gaff where he mixed up “Keynesian” with “Kenyan.”  Cruz also, along with several of the others, wants to make the Patriot Act permanent.  I’ve already stated how this is one of my biggest disappointments with Obama.  What I will not support is another president who can’t see his (or her) way past this kind of fearmongering and sees something “necessary” in violating the Constitution and our civil rights.

But again, Cruz isn’t polling very strongly.

Carly Fiorino is another of those baffling chimeras the GOP seems to love—a former CEO who cost her companies market share and recovered by firing thousands of people and somehow has made this a virtue.  A business “leader” who is actually rather bad at what she does—unless what she think it’s all about is filling her own coffers, then, yeah, she’s great.  But also, this affection they have for business people, as if that’s any kind of recommendation for high office.  Details aside, there is one fundamental difference between government and business that puts the lie to this idea.  Business, at its base, is about beating the competition.  Governance is about accommodating competing factions.  In practice, the two things couldn’t be more different.  So every time I hear a Ross Perot or a Mitt Romney blow smoke about how their business experience has made them fit for the presidency, I first want to ask How?  And then I realize that they have the wrong idea about what government is all about.  Probably they think that once they get in office they can do something about all those annoying rules and regulations that frustrated them in business and then make it easier for businesses to siphon off resources from the public trough.  Which is pretty much what’s been happening since St. Ronnie and the era of deregulation.  I think it’s fair to say we have subsequently found ourselves in deep doo-doo because of it.

No, if Carly does well with the GOP at all it’s because of another fundamental disconnect—they think because the mood of the country seems to favor a woman for president, any woman will do.  They made that mistake with Sarah Palin and that scotched their last chance of electing a serious politician to the White House.

And what can be said of Ben Carson, who seems to think African Americans didn’t have it so bad as slaves?  No, I don’t really think he believes that, but it fell out of his mouth, so I have to wonder at the filters he has in place or what really goes on in that skull of his.  Here is a doctor, at least putatively a man of science, who thinks evolution and the Big Bang are inventions of Satan.

Trump is doing well in all this because he is an honest clown.  So far I have not heard one thing he has said that did not come first from the mouth of another GOP face, although couched in more arcane and abstruse rhetoric. He has stripped away the Newspeak  and is simply reporting what, for many people, the GOP has come to stand for.  His misogyny is in line with the voting records and speeches made in opposition to women’s rights we’ve been listening to for decades now.  His immigration remarks reflect the growing nativist sentiment of the party.  His view on the economy is completely in the fold as are his views on taxation.  He is a vulgar, selfish ideologue shouting his message in catchy phrases not quite but almost at the level of what one could find on lavatory walls in truck stops across the country.  He is an outsized, tasteless, gauche demagogue who cannot be argued with by the others on the debate platform because they believe that stuff, too, they just don’t want to say it like that.

Trump is, if he keeps going, handing the next presidency to the Democrats.

The only solution for the GOP is to clean house of all the mean-spirited, small-minded, myopic idiocy that keeps shouting down reason and common sense and find a candidate that speaks to the issues as if he or she actually has a grasp.  I mentioned Kasich.  Not my favorite guy, but he is more reasonable than the rest.  But like past also-rans (I know, he hasn’t dropped out yet, but he can’t compete with the ones fighting for the steering wheel of the clown car, he will) the one GOP candidate that might save the Party and possibly begin to steer it back toward some semblance of rationality has no chance because the screaming hordes cheering on Trump and who would have preferred a Cruz won’t—possibly can’t—listen.  They have been told for decades that the evil Democrats will destroy their country and they just can’t seem to get past that.

And the Democrats?  Most of them seem to be stuck in the “let’s just keep the ship on course and worry about where we’re going once the storm is past” mode.  They will do less damage.  They might, if there is a thorough turn-over in congress, do something worthwhile.

Right now I’m backing Bernie.  I’m too cynical to believe he win the nomination—tricks and deals and smoke-filled rooms have a way with people like him—but so far he’s saying things I find more relevant to the world than any of the others.  And who knows, he could be this century’s Andrew Jackson in terms of a populist revolution.  (No, I do not think Bernie Sanders is in any way like Jackson, just in case any of you who read this might decide I’m making any kind of policy comparison—as far as I’m concerned, the only thing Jackson did came before he took office in terms of expanding the franchise.)

And, really, I think the business-as-usual crowd should be worried—Bernie got applause at Liberty University, of all places, even while maintaining his convictions on an issue which there, of all places, one would think would get him nothing but boos.

As for the GOP, I’m watching the retrenchment of stupidity and ignorance, all because they hate—-I can think of no more accurate word—hate President Obama.  I do not understand.  These are the people who are supposed, by virtue of their election to high office, be above that, but after seven years I can conclude nothing less.  They hate him.  Institutionally.  When he’s gone, I worry that they will do something with that hate other than shed it.  What will be their next target?

Well, there are already several they seem ready to go after.  Some they already have.

blog

I Don’t Read That Stuff

What follows is a completely personal, wholly biased view.

On average, I read between four and seven books a month.  That’s cover to cover.  From time to time I have a month wherein I manage ten to twelve, but that’s getting rarer.  Between four and seven is what it comes out to and at that rate I’m reading fifty to eighty books a year.

I put that out there so that what follows may make more sense than the usual kind of argument about taste in reading matter and why I don’t wish to waste time on certain things.

I’m sixty, which means I have maybe fifteen, maybe thirty years left to do the things I want to do, and I’m getting picky about what fills my time.  Too much trivial nonsense does simply because that’s the way life is.  And it’s hard to break habits made when you were much younger and it felt like time was plentiful.  I’m not being morbid, just practical.  Trivia has a function.  Upon trivia, friendships cement, the culture binds itself together, and the time between important things is bridged with something that at least keeps us engaged.

Anyway, given all this, plus the very important fact that I’ve been reading books (without pictures) since I was eight years old (at least—and I’m not, believe me, being critical of comics, I actively read them till I was 18 or 19 and still consider them worthwhile) and my tastes have…

I was going to say, “my tastes have changed,” and that’s certainly true, but it’s just as if not more accurate to say my tastes have evolved.  I still like the same kind of things I did way back, but not in the same form I did then.  When I was 12, the Lensmen were the ne plus ultra of fiction, the absolute coolest of the cool. Today? Not so much.  But I still love space opera as a form.  Only now I want a better example, language pitched to my level or higher, and maybe some subtext and a story that isn’t just about finding the next biggest weapon to defeat the slimy aliens but maybe tells me something interesting about human nature under unique conditions, which means characters that inhabit more than two dimensions.  While I can’t get through Triplanetary anymore, I can still read Delany’s Nova or Iain Banks’ Culture novels with pleasure.  Why?

No single reason, but a constellation of them resulting in what we start to recognize as serious literature.  The fact is, I pick up Embassytown by China Mieville and I have an experience which simply cannot be duplicated by—

Ah, there’s a problem.  We verge now on comparisons.  And that gets tricky, because I don’t wish to denigrate anyone’s work.  I have always tried to address the different pleasures of fiction, top to bottom, without resorting to saying So-and-So is great while Such-and-Such is crap.  For one thing, a lot of people may very much like Such-and-Such and by calling it crap I am by definition saying they have bad taste.  It becomes elitist in a particularly counterproductive way.

For another, this hasn’t much to do with what one likes.  That word covers a lot of territory and means many vague things having to do with pleasure. No one has cause to say anyone’s pleasure is somehow less important because of its position on some presumed scale of relative value.

But that’s not the same as claiming all experiences are of equal merit.  All books are not the same and yes, some are better than others.  “Like” has little to do with those assessments, though.

A well prepared filet mignon is obviously “better” than a hamburger from a fast food chain.  The fact that McDonalds has sold billions upon billions is not an assessment in any way that their burgers are better than the steak you’ll be served at a five-star restaurant.  Popularity is not an endorsement of quality.

A rough comparison at best, but I make it to establish the idea that while you may eat more burgers than filet mignons garnished with champignon mushrooms, you know the difference and you also know it’s a question of experience that allows us to recognize the distinction and understand it.  You’re going to have a deeper culinary experience with the latter.

Unless you have no taste at all and can’t tell the difference.  That’s certainly possible and by the evidence of certain groups would certainly seem the case.

Enough with the culinary analogy, let me get back to choice of reading material.  What I do not read any longer has to do with opting for the deeper experience.  I read slowly, relative to some, and I don’t have time to tear through mediocre books.  I have developed to the point where Doc Smith just doesn’t do it for me any longer.  I mean, the ideas are great, the seeds of later pleasures, but the execution is pitched to the bright 12-year-old and eschews any kind of nuance.  For one thing, you begin to notice eventually, if you read with any kind of acuity, that while we’re all in the far future, everyone acts and talks as if they lived in 1932 Brooklyn.  Even the aliens.  If it were satire, I could understand, but it’s not, it’s meant to be taken seriously.  And, really, it’s the far future and everyone (even the aliens) is so white.

I want something special.  I want my synapses engaged as fully as possible.  If I have to do a little work to understand the full substance of a sentence, great, especially if the work pays off exponentially.

Which has resulted in a long, gradual drift away from the slam-bang of what once represented the bulk of my reading choice toward material that causes me to react in ways I find much more satisfying.

Some books require more from a reader.  The reader has to rise to the level of the book.  Experience teaches us to recognize these books when we find them—and sort them out from those that may be obtuse just for the sake of hiding their lack of anything to say—and experience also gives us the desire to have those experiences.  Which, perhaps unfortunately, leaves us unsatisfied with less nutritious fare, fare which once filled out requirements.

This is akin to growing up.  You just don’t find the things that fulfilled you as a kid to be all that wonderful as an adult.

Assuming we’ve grown up.

Okay, I am here at the point where I either have to give a concrete example or leave this whole thing a vague, kind of hand-wavy bit of stuff with the message so buried as to be useful only to those of an archaeological bent.  Ordinarily, I would not feel I need to do so, but given events and circumstances in my genre of first love—science fiction—maybe I should just bite the bullet and go for it.  After all, names have already been named and assertions made and being polite to the point of swallowing meaning serves no useful purpose.

I will not, however, name names.  If I do, it will be those who are long dead and whose day is past. Unlike some who have dragged the discourse that is science fiction to the level of a political convention floor fight, I will not point at specific works currently in play in order to say “Here be crap” and make the bones of my argument on the unnecessarily scoured sensibilities of people who toil earnestly at their craft.

Earnestness does not inoculate anyone against doing mediocre work.  Nor does it guarantee exemplary work.

What do I mean by mediocre writing?

Writing that exhausts itself by one reading, fails to fulfill the potential of its ideas, and/or rests upon cliché to make the page turn.

Good writing by contrast allows for multiple readings from which deeper meaning and new interpretations  can be derived.

Sometimes you can see the difference sentence by sentence.  Often scene by scene, chapter by chapter.

When you’re 12 years old, the better writing may leave you baffled, because it is not always straightforward and single-pointed.  So no one should feel bad for not getting Joseph Conrad at that age.

I pick Conrad because he wrote rousing adventures.  But they are so much more than that, and it’s that so much more that has seen his works continue to be published, read, and appreciated by large audiences.  Once you’ve internalized the sea-going thrills and fighting in something like Lord Jim you find that, upon further or more careful reading, there is so much more.  And that so much more actually calls into question the heroic æsthetic of the surface read and causes—presumably—a deep reflection on the the meaning of heroism—and cowardice—and the mythic templates we accept that define them.

Boring?

Well, if you’re bored by such contemplations, then stick with action-adventure.

If beautiful sentences bore you or you are blind to them, stick to simple plot-thickening prose.

If you are not emotionally moved in ways other than by pure adrenalization, then stick to the slam-bang thrills and avoid anything that talks about the soul in multiple ways.

(If you can read Dante’s Inferno and believe that it has anything to do with the afterlife, then stick to work more facile and less steeped in metaphor.  You will do less disservice to Dante and perhaps yourself.)

In short, if a sentence like “It was strange that even sex, the source of so much solace, delight, and joy for so many years, could overnight become an unknown territory where he must tread carefully and know his ignorance; yet it was so*” reads like gibberish, seems pointless, or causes the kind of reaction that refuses to allow for the possibility that more is going on here than simply your inability to decode meaning and apprehend the layers involved, then you may have reached your limit with sentences like “What he really needed was a session with a pleasure unit in order to clear his mind for the ordeal ahead.”  If you can’t understand why the former sentence is a richer text, revelatory of character in ways that the latter sentence simply not only fails to be but in some ways actively resists being, then—

But I border now on insult.  In light of the current kerfluffle going on in the field, it’s hard not to, though.  The essential nature of science fiction is being challenged, all in the name of what appears to be a petty rejection of message.  As if science fiction has not always been message fiction.

In terms of plot and idea, if calling into question the basic assumptions by which civilization, culture, and the very lives we lead promises to be an impenetrable drudge, then I have to wonder why you claim to like science fiction at all.  Because that’s what it’s all about, dislodging the reader from cozy assumptions of self-justified rightness.  And no, stories wherein humanity must wage war against an alien race in order to preserve an identity which goes largely unquestioned do not represent the chief benefit of the form.  The physiognomy and bloodlust of the aliens is exciting for only a brief time if there is nothing more to the story.

Yes, I’m indulging a bit of elitism here.  I have nothing against well-done action stories.  I read one recently that offered, or at least promised, a nice twist on the formula, but then failed to deliver and turned into a pat good-guys-cleverly-defeating-alien-menace-with-cool-explosions story.  I enjoyed the ride but will never read that book again.

And that’s okay.  It was even well-written in terms of character, exposition, pacing.  It’s not a question of condemning things just because they aren’t Dostoevsky.

But using the author of Crime and Punishment as an example, to argue that work deserves an award precisely because it isn’t Dostoevsky is a seriously flawed idea, especially when the award in question is supposedly for the Best of Field.  We give awards to the Dostoevsky’s in order to set bars and celebrate potential, not congratulate ourselves for reveling in mediocrity.  To insist that the better work is undeserving because it does things differently from the usual is a statement of adolescent resentment.

However, that doesn’t seem to be the source of the spleen.  It’s not that SF is message fiction, but the message being conveyed that has sparked all this contention—and who is delivering it.

It can be asserted that overall, since 1926, a good deal of SF, especially of the planetary romance and interstellar adventure variety, has been, in subtext if not overtly, imperialist.  Brave Earthmen venturing forth to conquer and pacify an alien and maleficent universe.  By default if nothing else, most of those high principled adventurers have been white males.  That aspect wasn’t the main point of the choices made, just the default assumption based on current standards of perceived merit.  John W. Campbell, jr. was an unapologetic champion of this ethic, so much so that he eventually annoyed many of his best writers with his chauvinism.  Nevertheless, the model stuck, because it allowed for the continual generation of really cool stories.

Came a time, though, when we finally became a bit more introspective and realized how parochial much of it was, how chauvinistic, and, yes, how racist much of it was.  So, like any healthy art form, stories began appearing that questioned these assumptions.

And the questioning resulted in a lot of really cool stories.

It may be that some folks still like the old ideas and forms so much and, coupled with a weariness of continual reassessment and moral reevaluation, yearn nostalgically for days of unquestioned heroic virtue, that the current noise in opposition to what has been derogatorily labeled as the work of Social Justice Warriors is just their way of stamping their feet and demanding unequivocal action adventure of the so-called Golden Age variety.  From some of the sales numbers I’ve seen, there is a healthy market for such stories.

Speaking personally, though, please don’t try to tell me work built guilelessly on discredited values and outgrown sentiment is award worthy—and by that I mean exemplary of the best, indicative of the future, and representative of the limits of possibility.

I end this now because I am coming perilously close to venting spleen and getting personal.  I’ve watched this advent over the Hugo Awards with dismay and bewilderment.  There has been too much doubling down on false pretense and too much empty fury and not enough genuine debate over what is actually at issue in terms of the work.  Those who have brought this to fruition have placed many of their colleagues in unfortunate situations for no good purpose, or at least for purposes poorly stated if not seriously misrepresented.  If, by their lights, the “wrong” work wins a rocket this year and they continue to erupt in fury over a perceived injustice in the direction of the field, then in my opinion they seriously misunderstand the nature of the endeavor of which they claim a share.

In any event, I have looked at the work at issue and, from a purely personal vantage, like so much else in what is too little time to spare, I have to say, I just don’t read that kind of stuff anymore.

 

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*Okay, I’ll name one name.  That sentence is from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, whose works I suspect, were they being written and published today would bring down the disdain of those who have made loud and gaseous cause over “social justice” fiction.