Eclectic and striving never to follow paths into ruts, the OF Blog focuses on essays, reviews, interviews, and other odds and ends that might be of interest to fans of both literary and speculative fiction. Now with a cute owl for your enjoyment.
The older I get, the more cynical I've become about a few matters. Much as I have disdain for the possible ramifications of the SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act), this notion of "going dark" (or having a website "down" or not updating for a day) strikes me more as an ineffectual gesture than perhaps just simply calling for people to flood the phonelines, Facebook walls, Twitter accounts, and email inboxes of those local Representatives and Senators that have indicated possible support for the provisions in this proposed law that would damage more than foreign pirating websites. Something tells me that 99.99% of those who are debating this bill will never be aware of even a Wikipedia "going dark," so perhaps it might be better to just organize in a more effective way and just lobby the hell out of those wavering senators?
In the meantime, I'll be working on two reviews, checking my email, and perhaps send an actual email in protest rather than posturing and pretending that's such a great thing to do. After all, the revolution won't be televised...nor will it occur by having a few, minor symbolic protests that will not get the attention of those who decide these things. Maybe it'd be best if you put actual money where your mouths are and donate to those lobbying against it? After all, $5 will certainly be better than 0.00001% of the populace being aware that you "went dark" for a single day.
The other day, just after watching news footage of the protests in Cairo, I thought I'd ask my dad what his take on the situation was. His response?
"It's a sign of the end times."
And with that, I had to drop the conversation. Wish I were surprised by it, but I was not. My dad is much, much, much more conservative than I am both politically and socially (over the past few years, he's become a near-daily viewer of John Hagee's televangelist show, which ought to explain quite a few things to those who know of this person) and he has a huge blind spot when it comes to the Middle East. If the exact same thing were happening in say Vietnam (where he served a tour), I would imagine that he would have been near ecstatic at the idea of the people protesting (mostly) peacefully against a corrupt and repressive regime.
Yet if it happens anywhere near Israel, he views it as a sign that malignant anti-Israeli forces are gathering power and that the Anti-Christ will soon emerge and the world will be engulfed in the seven years of Tribulation. I've never bought that nonsense that Hal Lindsey and his ilk have been peddling these past couple of generations, but in the name of keeping family harmony (I do generally get along much better with my parents now that I'm in my 30s and don't need quite the separation that I needed in my late teens and twenties), I keep mum.
However, situations like this do make for conversational buzzkills. Any similar topics that create a similar effect between you and friends/family?
And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution?
What good?
Freedom, I replied; which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory of the State - and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman of nature deign to dwell.
Yes; the saying is in everybody's mouth.
I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which occasions a demand for tyranny.
How so?
When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cupbearers presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed oligarchs.
Yes, he replied, a very common occurrence.
Yes, I said; and loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her slaves who hug their chains and men of naught; she would have subjects who are like rulers, and rulers who are like subjects: these are men after her own heart, whom she praises and honors both in private and public. Now, in such a State, can liberty have any limit?
Certainly not.
By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them.
From John Stuart Mill's Considerations on Representative Government:
If we ask ourselves on what causes and conditions good government in all its senses, from the humblest to the most exalted, depends, we find that the principal of them, the one which transcends all others, is the qualities of the human beings composing the society over which the government is exercised.
We may take, as a first instance, the administration of justice; with the more propriety, since there is no part of public business in which the mere machinery, the rules and contrivances for conducting the details of ther operation, are of such vital consequence. Yet even these yield in importance to the qualities of the human agents employed. Of what efficacy are rules of procedure in securing the ends of justice, if the moral condition of the people is such that the witnesses generally lie, and the judges and their subordinates take bribes? Again, how can institutions provide a good municipal administration if there exists such indifference to the subject that those who would administer honestly and capably cannot be induced to serve, and the duties are left to those who undertake them because they have some private interest to be promoted? Of what avail is the most broadly popular representative system if the electors do not care to choose the best member of parliament, but choose him who will spend most money to be elected? How can a representative assembly work for good if its members can be bought, or if their excitability of temperament, uncorrected by public discipline or private self-control, makes them incapable of calm deliberation, and they resort to manual violence on the floor of the House, or shoot at one another with rifles? How, again, can government, or any join concern, be carried on in a tolerable manner by people so envious that, if one among them seems likely to succeed in anything, those who ought to cooperate with him form a tacit combination to make him fail? Whenever the general disposition of the people is such that each individual regards those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on, or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a state of things good government is impossible. The influence of defects of intelligence in obstructing all the elements of good government requires no illustration. Government consists of acts done by human beings; and if the agents, or those who choose the agents, or those to whom the agents are responsible, or the lookers-on whose opinion ought to influence and check all these, are mere masses of ignorance, stupidity, and baleful prejudice, every operation of government will go wrong; while, in proportion as the men rise above this standard, so will the government improve in quality; up to the point of excellence, attainable but nowhere attained, where the officers of government, themselves persons of superior virtue and intellect, are surrounded by the atmosphere of a virtuous and enlightened public opinion.
Sometimes I worry that democratic government can devolve to the point of placing more emphasis on texting in votes on reality TV shows than on an active and educated participation in the governance of nations. From reading all of Plato's book and half of Mill's, it seems this concern has been around for millennia. The recent news from North Africa is both exciting and troubling to me; I hope for radical change, yet I fear what might emerge from that radical change as well. Are there wiser, moderate voices that will take charge and think more of the yearnings of the people for liberty without using freedom from autocratic regimes as an excuse to drown out dissenters whose voices ought to be considered as well?
The same question applies here to my own country. Who best represents my own voice when those voted in focus more on appeasing "their bases" than they do on providing what is necessary even for those citizens with whom they have a philosophical disagreement?
That likely will be a question to haunt me for years to come.
This nostalgia for a past often so eclectic as to be unlocatable historically is a facet of the modernist sensibility which has seemed increasingly suspect in recent decades. It is an ultimate refinement of the colonialist outlook: an imaginative exploitation of nonwhite cultures, whose moral life it drastically oversimplifies, whose wisdom it plunders and parodies. To that criticism there is no convincing reply. But to the criticism that the quest for "another form of civilization" refuses to submit to the disillusionment of accurate historical knowledge, one can make an answer. It never sought such knowledge. The other civilizations are being used as models because they are available as stimulants to the imagination precisely because they are not accessible. They are both models and mysteries. Nor can this quest be dismissed as fraudulent on the grounds that it is insensitive to the political forces that cause human suffering...
Susan Sontag, Approaching Artaud
This quote appears as the opening epigraph to Samuel R. Delany's 1983 novel, Neveryóna. I read this part last night and was immediately struck by how much is packed into just one paragraph-sized excerpt. It certainly has some rather provocative things to say, things that would run counter to the sentiments found in another quote, posted over at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist earlier today.
Interesting how "the other" is presented in two very different ways. I'll let you weigh in on both, if you feel like it. Guess which one is closer to my sentiments.
OK, it's me being in turns idealistic and a follower, but as long as the current crisis is going on, I decided that I'll voice tacit support with my color choice.
I usually don't post political stuff here, but this clip, which mixes quite a few double entendres in with a riposte directed at some rather asinine protests taking place tomorrow, I felt was worthy of posting here. Don't know of any fiction writer, living or dead, that might have imagined this sort of fantasy world. Do you?
It is almost midnight as I begin writing this. In a little over five hours, I will wake up, groggy and perhaps bleary-eyed, stumbling from a dream into a waking reality. But tomorrow will dawn on a new day, one that four years ago I could barely hope to see in my lifetime. I remember feeling so down and cynical about the American political process. I recall being despondent about the negativity and the xenophobia that sprung up like mushrooms in the dark, fetid corners after 9/11. So much talk was about the things that divide and little about the things that unite.
Tonight I hope will mark the beginning of a shift from that fear and distrust. I am an American history teacher and when I go into class tomorrow to talk about the Progressive Age, I can point now to an individual whose message tonight harks back to some of their themes, to their hope for creating a better, more humane American society. Things were not perfect at the turn of the 20th century; they are still far from perfect today. But yet the past few months have seen a sea change in attitudes among quite a few people, both in the U.S. and abroad. I have seen dozens of students wearing Barack Obama t-shirts or John McCain buttons. Never did I hear a cross word between supporters of either candidate, even when the pro-Obama students outnumbered the McCain supporters by more than two-to-one. McCain gave a classy speech tonight, one marred only by the hatred, resentment, and aprehensions of a few. Both he and Obama gave me hope that the two can work together to see the fulfillment of the dreams of those Progressives and their political descendents, the ones who gave us a Square Deal, a New Deal, a New Society, as well as influencing many conservatives over the years to place people above profits.
So while I could ramble on for many more paragraphs about how I plan on tying this historic election of a biracial man to all of the hopes, promises, pitfalls, and tribulations of the multiethnic American people, I'll just close by linking to the opening of Obama's victory speech, as it is more eloquent than what I've said above:
The recent shouts of "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" at recent McCain-Palin rallies worries me greatly, for several reasons. While one might presume that my slight alteration of the "Die Juden sind unser unglück" ("The Jews are our misfortune") slogan that appeared at the August 15, 1935 National Socialist-sponsored rally in Berlin is but Godwin's Law on steroids, I would like to posit that instead of stooping to the facile comparison of certain McCain supporters to Nazis/Fascists, that perhaps one ought to delve deeper into the sources of societal unrest and unease.
The vast majority of German citizens who voted National Socialist in the 1930 and 1932 (twice) did not vote for pograms, Kristalnacht, or the Final Solution. Neither are the vast majority of McCain-Palin supporters pushing for the assassination of Barack Obama or (if Obama wins) for armed rebellion/insurrection. However, there is a common thread that underlies each group, that of uncertainty and the desire for something to be made certain for them.
Whereas the Jewish people existed in a sort of quasi-boogeyman status for several centuries in much of Europe (Christ killers "naturally" leading to periodic accusations that Jews sacrified children in their diabolical plots to subvert Christianity, among other such ridiculous beliefs of the medieval to early modern eras) before being transformed into revolutionary would-be world controls of the Protocals of the Elders of Zion, Ostara, and Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century, for much of the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, American liberalism has been painted as being just as immoral, just as diabolical, just as much of a threat to "traditional moral values." But while most people in previous eras and locales rejected such intolerant, hate-filled speech (just as most do today), there always were (and still are) a few who are suspectible to such accusations. Why hasn't much yet been said in the daily news programs about such people and their suspectibilities?
Perhaps because it would open up a huge, messy can of worms. Prejudice of any stripe is very difficult to overcome. Many members of my own family struggle with the notion of voting for a biracial man for President. Often I have heard my family say things such as "Is he really a Christian? I heard he was a Muslim..." or "I don't know if he won't be assassinated by someone soon, so how can I support him?" I suspect that's just a cover for the worries of what would change if/when someone who has some African ancestry were to be voted President of the United States.
Even more than that is the search for certainty in uncertain times. Usually either people unify despite their sometimes-profound social/political differences (as the U.S. largely did during the Great Depression and World War II) or they begin to search for scapegoats (as a great many Germans did in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles). Are the people today wanting to work toward solutions or towards finding persons/groups to blame? I suspect it's more of a case of lip-service to the former while the latter becomes increasingly an attractive opiate that would calm the unsettled nerves.
Shall be interesting to see what the next few weeks will bring. It is worrisome in the meanwhile to hear of open discussion on several cable news outlets about things such as "the Bradley Effect" or the casting of blame for the global economic crisis on liberals/leftists, minority groups, gays (don't ask how, just know some believe this somehow), and occasionally conservatives, not to mention the passing nod to China, India, Mexico, all illegal/undocumented immigrants, and perhaps a stray speculator somewhere. I am just left feeling dizzy when I contemplate the possible ramifications of this; this virulent, vitriolic anger that is spilling out at Republican rallies (and to a lesser extent and without the personal namecalling at the Democratic ones) just scares and sickens me in a way that I haven't felt ever since I studied late Weimar/early Nazi era German cultural/religious history over a decade ago. Worried, scared people often do some irrational things and that is what I'm afraid will be the fruit of the generation of "culture wars" in my homeland. Anyone else feel anything like this?
Out of 98 votes, it seems that Obama was the clear choice, with 55 votes (56%). McCain was a very distant second at 13 votes (13%), followed closely by Michael Palin of the fictional Silly Party with 10 votes (10%). After them was a tie between Bob Barr of the Libertarian Party and the independent candidate Ralph Nader with 6 votes each, 6% each, with Socialist Party USA's Brian Moore garnering 5 votes (5%). Cynthia McKinney (Green), Róger Calero (Socialist Workers Party), and Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party) each received 1 vote, 1%.
When broken down along the flawed but traditional Left-Right Spectrum, with the Democrats occupying the Center-Left and the Republicans the Center-Right, it would go like this:
Leftist parties (Green, Socialist USA, Socialist Workers Party, Ralph Nader) - 13 votes (13%)
While I know some Libertarians are social leftists to a degree, considering that Barr is a former Republican representative from Georgia and the rhetoric being that of a disaffected part of the Republican Party, I'm moving it to the Rightist side for those reasons.
Needless to say, with an international readership and one that I suspected would lean more to the Left than does American politics in general, the Leftists outnumber the Rightists by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, while there is a surprising 4 to 1 margin between those supporting Obama and those supporting McCain. While all of this is highly unscientific and therefore ought to be taken with ample grains of salt, it was interesting nonetheless. Anyone else want to comment on the poll results?
This might have been the most "real" emotion I saw from any of the four. It was just bizarre after hearing this (even taking into account my own political biases) Sarah Palin launching into what seemed to be a rehearsed response that totally failed to take into account what Joe Biden expressed in such emotional terms. I wonder if this might be part of the reason why the CBS poll had a 46%-21% advantage to Biden among undecided voters.
Thoughts on this, the debate, and expectations for the next one? While I won't make a regular habit of these type of posts, it is something I consider to be very important, not just because it deals with part of my job description (I am certified to teach U.S. Government/Political Science in addition to History).
Read two interesting posts by Paolo Bacigalupi and John Scalzi this evening on the issue of whether or not a fiction writer ought to discuss politics on his/her blog. Scalzi in particular makes a very important point, one that hits very close at home for me:
Why yes, fiction writers should write about politics, if they choose to. And so should doctors and plumbers and garbage collectors and lawyers and teachers and chefs and scientists and truck drivers and stay-at-home parents and the unemployed. In fact, every single adult who has reason enough to sit down and express an opinion through words should feel free to do just that. Having a citizenry that is engaged in the actual working of democracy matters to the democracy, and writing about politics is a fine way to provide evidence that one is actually thinking about these things.
As a teacher, I have felt rather constrained by the nature of my profession. It has been drilled into my head from my earliest days on the job that there are just certain things that one does not discuss at length in the hearing of students or their parents: religion, one's personal opinions of certain school/community leaders, and politics of course. I have taken that to heart for the most part; I keep my personal life (including this blog) as far apart from my professional one as I can manage.
However, Scalzi is right (and how I wish he wasn't joking about preferring my beloved Vols over UGA...) in that when it comes to matters of import, why are people being reticent in declaring their preferences? I'm not exactly constrained by the Hatch Act, but there is that sense that I shouldn't be prosetlyzing when lecturing about the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th century. I'm not shying away from talking about the perniciousness of racism and nativism, for example, but yet when it comes to coming out and stating directly that I prefer the politics of Eugene Debs over that of James Blaine, I hesitate.
Could it be it's a worry that what I say might just lead to my dismissal, since I don't have tenure? Perhaps, since I do recall quite well being chewed out by an assistant principal my first year of teaching 9 years ago, all because I noted that some people have argued that the 4th Amendment's strictures on searches and seizures have been stretched to the breaking point; apparently I was being "anti-cop" and one student's father is a state trooper and they were upset that I would "imply" that he was "bad" or "not doing his job." I believe there was even a hint that I might not be rehired if I said anything else like that again. I resigned that position the following year and moved to another state to get away from that small town political atmosphere.
But yet it is something that looms over the heads of many teachers. We are held to a different standard. Joe Schlomo can spout out whatever he pleases about Obama or McCain (often with various slurs mixed in), but teachers are expected to shut our yaps and "learn them well." It is much easier to state one's opinions when one's job is not potentially on the line. But I am learning how to skirt around this a bit.
That being said, the Debs comment ought to be a hint about my political persuasions, even if I will rarely say it out loud. Nice to see Michael Palin is up there with McCain in contesting for second place, though...
I'm taking a break from writing my lesson plans for this week, because a thought struck me while I was in the middle of trying to decide how much I ought to incorporate today's immigration debates (in both the U.S. and in many other parts of the world) with the 19th century mass migration of peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe and from China and Japan to the U.S., Canada, and Argentina (among others). In thinking about how to portray the nativist/anti-immigrant attitudes in a way that wouldn't be setting up a straw man (despite my own personal irritation at the antics of such odious groups as the Minutemen), I tried to think of which fantasy stories dealt with the migrations of peoples in a fashion that didn't indicate possible author biases against the migrants.
For the most part, I have failed to think of many positive examples. Tolkien, for example, has been criticized numerous times over the years for having a possibly racist overtone to his portrayal of the peoples of Rhûn and the Harad (not saying I agree with those criticisms, but rather noting that they exist). Elsewhere in other fantasy novels, even many of which purport to be about the "strangeness" of the world around, there is that sense of a vague threat looming, whether it be the newcomers (from the perspective of the main character(s) ) or the protagonist him/herself.
Perhaps I'm just missing the copious counterexamples that could be cited as proof that fantasy (I'm purposely leaving out SF, since I do know of examples there of a benign or at least non-threatening "first contact") stories are not uniformly filled with a sense of unease at the "alien" groups that are "moving in." Anyone care to share examples of stories that explore how such wildly different groups are seen to reach out and to integrate themselves in a fashion that runs counter to the notion that "different equals threatening"?
Because the U.S. Presidential elections seem to generate some discussion on various blogs/forums, I thought I'd post a list of the top 8 (plus 1) candidates for the office of President (because if I limited it to just the Big Two, I'd likely hear about it from someone). Curious to see if there's a correlation between my own political leanings (which I'll leave to the imagination for now) and those of the readers here. Plus for those who dislike politics and love humor, there is a choice just for you...
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