Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • Harassment

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Any questions?

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

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

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

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

    The term Privilege applies.

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

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

    It’s a lack of empathy.

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

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

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

    It’s the same thing.

  • A Few Thoughts Concerning Margaret Atwood

    Actually, just one. I’d like her to stop trying to be an authority on science fiction. I haven’t read her new book of essays on the topic, but I’ve heard her in interviews and read some of her thoughts in the past, and based on that she’s pretty much a tourist. Back when her publisher thought claiming her work was science fiction would hurt her sales, she misunderstood the genre magnificently (“Oh, sci-fi has rockets in it. I don’t do that.”) A lot of it reminded me of Susan Sontag’s egregiously off-base attempt to define it.

    Of course, being in the same company as Sontag isn’t a bad thing, especially not if you want to remain within the fold of the folks who persistently fail to “get” any kind of genre work. But it has become obvious that Atwood likes some of the aesthetic possibilities in SF and can’t help using them, and it has become likewise obvious that claiming common cause with SF isn’t hurting her sales, so now she’s a very Out There advocate.

    But she still doesn’t get it. In a recent interview she characterized SF as basically religious, since it speaks to the desire to embrace something vast and elemental and be awed—the way one is supposed to be awed by religious epiphany and ritual evocation of spiritual connection.

    There are two things wrong with this. One, it suggests that the only way humans can experience awe and wonder is within a framework that can only be defined as religious. Two, it ignores the decades-long assault on paradigms that is the core impulse in written SF. Religion is nothing without the continuity of its paradigms, preserved as they are by the acceptance of their unassailability. But, like science, science fiction has no reverence for paradigms that fail to explain anything and the tendency is to go at them tooth and claw in order to rip away the caul that muffles genuine transcendence. This is not religious in the least—it is, if anything, the aesthetic of the newest gadget, a consumer culture variant that says anything done last year is, you know, Last Year.

    That said, science fiction is also like an overcrowded antique shop whose proprietors just can’t bring themselves to throw anything out. Everything that was ever done in the genre since 1926 is still there, used and reused, and that, too, is very much like science.

    Because being “wrong” in the overall sense doesn’t mean all the bits by themselves are in error or are useless. Alchemy and Chemistry are separated by an insurmountable barrier of fact, but some of the laboratory methodology devised in alchemy is still useful in modern chemistry, at least conceptually. Einstein superseded Newton in ability to explain the universe at large, but we haven’t tossed Newton in the dustbin when it comes to working out simple cause-and-effect relations on the macro scale. No one takes Doc Smith’s Lensmen series seriously anymore, but we’re still writing about starships, elite cadres of supercompetent heroes, and interstellar warfare with inscrutable aliens. We just don’t do it with the kind of naivete E.E. Smith used.

    But more than that, the points we’re making are different. We’ve moved on to more sophisticated themes, or even themes that were not considered at all half a century ago. John W. Campbell Jr. declared in the pages of Astounding that no aliens could be morally superior to humans. That’s a laughable, pathetic idea today, but we do still wrestle with the potential relationships.

    Ms. Atwood should read more fantasy if she wants to find religious fiction. Science Fiction is all about how the universe is not dependable, reliable, or amenable to petition. Religion is about finding a way to stability through the assertion of belief over circumstance. Science is about figuring out how things work. Science Fiction is about how to live in the universe science shows us, which offers only the most conditional stability.

    To be fair, I understand where she might get that idea, that SF is religious. It’s the awe, the “sense of wonder”, that is difficult to separate from one of the “varieties of religious experience.” And it may well be that people turn to religion for exactly that thrill of awe. But that’s not the point of religion. And the source of the awe is very different.

    I’m glad she likes SF now. But I’m less sanguine about the expectations she will provide those just coming to SF after having read her ideas. I suspect many of them will be disappointed and give up on it. In this regard, I see her as very much like Harold Bloom, who dumped all over Harry Potter because he thought it was inferior to what he regards as worthwhile YA, all the while missing the good part of the whole Harry Potter phenomenon.

    On the the other hand, maybe it won’t make any difference. Maybe no one will really pay any attention. That, too, will be a shame.

  • Diagnostic Condemnation

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

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

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

    “My car won’t start.”

    “Do you know what the trouble is?”

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

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

    How many people would accept that as a reasonable response?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “It’s broken.”

    “Do you know how to fix it?”

    “No.”

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

    “I have a better idea.”

    “Yeah?”

    “You’re fired.”

  • An Age of Wonder and Annoyance

    I have two things to talk about that are related by the slenderest of threads. Bear with me.

    First I’d like to say something about how marvelous is the age in which we live, at least from the perspective of someone who has now lived in a couple of “ages” since arriving on this planet in 1954.

    A short while ago I had lunch. While having lunch I like to watch something, so I popped the DVD of The Right Stuff   into my player and settled back to my roast beef and movie.  While watching, it occurred to me how blase I’ve  become at this technology.

    See, growing up, movies were a Big Deal.  My parents went every other week at least and took me.  Going To The Movies holds a special, nostalgic place in my memory.  It was a shared event, but more than that it was in fact An Event.  TV was there, sure, but it was crappy and even at age four I kind of recognized the difference.  Movies were Big, they were Special, they were Unique—and they went away.  Though it was dependable.  The first run theaters got the new films and ran them for a week, maybe two.  The next batch were due in and they swapped them out, so the films went to the cheaper neighborhood theaters, usually only for a week.  Plus, these were double features.  You sat in the theater for up to four and half hours to see two movies.  Before I was born, it would be two movies, plus—cartoons, a short subject, maybe a news reel.  Going to movies was a significant amount of time and a major outing.

    We brought our own snacks.  Mom would make up some popcorn or put a brown bag of candy together, and we might—might—bring a bottle of soda to share.  The concession stand was more than we could afford usually.

    And after the movies left the theaters, they were gone.  If you  hadn’t seen them when they came out, during the three or four weeks they were in town at one or another theater, you were s.o.l.  Some of the bigger hits might be rereleased a year or two later and a few films were perennially rereleased, but the vast majority did not come back.  You had to remember them.

    Television changed that somewhat when networks started leasing movies to show at certain low-traffic times, and then in the late Sixites and early Seventies there were a variety of movie programs—Movie of the Week, Thursday Night At the Movies, A Picture For A Sunday Afternoon.  Suddenly all these old films started turning up again, and of course after ten P.M. local networks aired a lot of B pictures or films from the Thirties and Forties, but you had to stay up for them, and you never knew what you would get.  (Some of my favorite memories with my dad come from Friday nights, sitting up late, watching some of these movies, some of which were unintentional howlers at which we’d poke fun.)

    A lot of people today probably don’t see the wonder in being able to go to a store or online and buy a film and watch it at home.  VCRs didn’t come in till the late Seventies (and the early models weren’t great), but it ushered in an age of comparative cultural wealth.  The idea, when I grew up, that I could actually own one of these movies, for myself, and watch it when I chose to…

    You forget occasionally to sit back and appreciate what we now have.  It is amazing—the technology, yes, but the fact that I can drop a disc in a machine and watch The Maltese Falcon or  Gone With The Wind  or  The Right Stuff  whenever I please is…incredible.

    That’s the good part.

    The other amazing thing is this vast and complex online community—several communities, actually, some overlapping—that we have with more ease than it used to be to make a long distance phone call.  It’s amazing.  I can communicate with people I would never have known existed in one of those previous “ages” and talk about things only a rare handful of people I ever met face to face would even have been interested in before.  Like-minded, like-enthused, like-whatever people around the globe who can now “chat” online.

    And with whom one can trip over an area of sensitivity so fast and so inexplicably that it makes your head spin.  I have recently had this shoved in my face just how easily some folks take offense and how impossible it can be to explain yourself or extricate yourself.  Unless you want to be an ass, it is often better to simply leave the group in question rather than see the crap continually stirred.

    But because it is so easy to leave, not to mention remain anonymous, I think many people never learn the nuances of real interaction.  Distance used to serve a vital social function, namely keeping people apart by virtue of the difficulty of communicating.  Letter-writing requires thought—the trouble you have to go through to draft the letter, address it, go to the post office, etc. I think tends to make people more thoughtful and thorough.  It’s not like a casual conversation, which the ease of communication has sometimes turned the most serious conversations into because it is difficult to tell when it is time to stop cracking wise.

    Further, though, once a foul has been made, it doesn’t go away.  It perpetuates, spreads, and suddenly people all over may know all about the reputation you have earned through misadventure.

    Part of the problem—a big part, I think—is the fact of the words remaining behind after the conversation is over.  Spoken conversation has a half-life, very short, and events carry people past ill-considered phrasing or cliches, aided by the visuals, the body language and facial expression.  But when you write something down, it has weight, and online exchanges acquire significance never intended for a brief exchange.  You can consider the words, read them over again and again, and derive meaning and intent whether it’s there or not.

    The wonderfulness of our enabling technologies render us lazy, allow us to take for granted things which in an earlier time, with less speed and availability, would not have been so poorly used.

    So instead of a thoughtless sentence being immediately apologized for, brushed aside, and forgotten, the offending sentence lingers, a solid legacy that reminds and continues to irritate.  The down-side of modern ease.

    Part of the pleasure of all these things should be from not taking them for granted, from a near conscious recognition of just how cool things are.  On the one hand, we maybe have to grow thicker skins—certainly we have to learn new interpretive skills—and on the other maybe let our skins thin a little so we can sense the amazing gift much of this world is.  Hard to know where to apply what and for a whole generation or two there is the perfectly understandable if annoying question, “What’s the big deal?”

    Unfortunately, if you have to ask…

  • What’s UnAmerican About That?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Steve Jobs: A Quality of Expectation

    I do not own an Apple computer.  I do all my work on PCs because, well, it worked out that way.

    I had an Apple.  First-generation MacIntosh, to be precise.  It didn’t last.

    My partner, Donna, got interested in computers back in the early and mid-80s.  When I say “interested” I mean on the level of “hm, that looks cool, I wonder what it would be like to…”  and not on the level of “that way lies the future, we gotta have one!”  Being somewhat dense when it came to reading her enthusiasms (and separating hers from my own), by various strange avenues, she ended up getting a MacIntosh for Christmas.  Computer and printer.

    Her enthusiasm lasted a month.  She’d gotten a job with a small tech company and worked on PCs all day and when she came home at night, the last thing she wanted to do was more work on a computer, even if it was hers.  Besides—and this may sound odd—the MacIntosh was too easy to use.  She was interested in the programming and the guts and the software.  The MacIntosh was plug-n-play before there was plug-n-play and the software available for it—because it was Apple, it was all proprietary—was expensive!  We acquired a math program and something else.

    I was writing on my IBM Selectric.  The MacIntosh just sat there.

    Then it broke down.

    This is embarrassing.  The motherboard was flawed and one day it just went comatose.  However, because we had used it so little, we didn’t push it to failure until it was out of warranty.  We didn’t know it was the motherboard.

    But before that we had run up against some of the annoying short-comings of the MacIntosh, one of which was file size.  I decided to try writing stories on it.  The rudimentary word processing program—MacWrite—was fine except I could never figure out how to put headers on it and the maximum file size was something like 8 or 9 pages.   That wasn’t the annoying part.  What was annoying was that it would let you get there and then lock up.  There wasn’t enough memory left to delete anything so you could, you know, save the file.  So if you didn’t take care—if, for instance, you got caught up in the story you were telling—you’d reach that limit and then lose the whole file.

    (To be fair, this might have been an issue with that flawed motherboard, but we didn’t know, it was just maddening.)

    It really was kind of a useless thing in our house.

    But it was also kind of very cool.  I mean, I write science fiction.  I was looking at PCs and thinking “that’s not what computers are supposed to look like—the Mac is!”  And I really wanted it to work right, to be as cool as it looked.  There was something about it that prompted an “if only” sentiment.

    Then I got accepted to Clarion.  We decided I could take the Mac for my writing instrument.  We got it fixed.  That’s when we found out it was the motherboard.  At the same time, we upgraded the memory (to ONE megabyte!) and bought an external floppy drive for it.

    Because we had also discovered by then how difficult it was to translate Mac files to PC (to get a decent print out—-we had an AppleWriter dot matrix printer and I frankly never found a font that was usable; you have to recall that this was at a time when magazines and publishers were refusing to accept dot matrix manuscripts and I wanted to get clean laser printer copies, but the only laser printer we had access to was at Donna’s work, which was for PC…) we intended to trade it in on a PC when I got back, but it was just the right size for the trip.

    I was the only one at Clarion with a Mac.  Everyone hated the printer fonts I used.

    Also, there was a heatwave that year in Michigan and the Mac turned out to be very susceptible to overheating.  I had a small fan which I ended up training on the Mac.  I backed up often to the external drive.  It was a trial.

    I was so glad to trade it off for a usable PC.

    But I always had a soft spot for the idea of the Mac and later when they started coming out with better models and then the massive improvements after the whole Lisa thing made it the hardware to have, I wanted one.  But by then I was doing all my work on PC and I was online and publishing worked almost exclusively with PC and and and…

    And Apple products were so damn expensive!

    Aside from that first generation MacIntosh, we have only ever owned one brand new computer.  And now the PC products seem to be as cool as the Apple, so…

    It’s fairly obvious that the coolness of newer PCs, the improvements in speed and reliability, the slick programs available, all that came about as a direct response to the challenge of Apple and Steve Jobs.  Jobs created something with growing gravitic force that has been bending the rest of the computer verse into orbit around it.

    And Apples are science fiction computers.  I’m speaking aesthetically now.  What they do, how they look, the ease of interface—this is where it should be according to the scenarios playing in the heads of science fiction writers.

    I would like to upgrade all my computers to Apples.  I’ve wanted to do that for years.  It’s like really wanting to drive a high end, state of the art car, wear Armani suits, play a Les Paul, and drink only the best wine.  It’s a Leica to everyone else’s Nikon, Luxman to Sony, Bose to a box with a speaker in it.

    Steve Jobs made people want better.

    Not everyone.  A lot of people wouldn’t know “better” if it walked up and introduced itself.  But many people.  And he made them feel they deserved it.

    And that there is a reason for better.  This last may seem odd, but think about it.  Many people settle.  They get by.  They manage.  They accept what they think they have to and make do.

    From time to time someone has to remind us that quality is not only justified but essential.  That life shouldn’t be shabby just because we don’t think we can have better.  For all the technical innovations Jobs spurred and enabled and midwived, it was this aesthetic for which he will long be remembered.  He never settled.  He didn’t think we should, either.

    One of the years, I’ll own a Mac again.

  • Controversy Bullies

    We thrive on controversy.  Say something in this country, make a statement, be declarative, and someone will get in your face and tell you you’re wrong and suddenly there’s an audience.  People choose sides, there’s shouting.  We should license controversy vendors who appear quickly to sell tickets, popcorn, and soft drinks of choice when this happens.

    For a long time now there’s been a watchdog group with a website and an agenda to keep track of fraud committed against writers.  You would think this would be a noncontroversial, no-brainer—writers work on margin, are underpaid usually, and can’t afford attorneys to look out for their interests.  Despite exceptions, most writers rarely are able (or even, sometimes, willing) to litigate on their own behalf.  It’s time-consuming, ulcer-causing, and pricey!  And often it’s against a corporate entity that has a war chest that can spend a writer into oblivion even before the case gets before a judge.  So Writers Beware started up as a service to alert writers to who the bad guys are.  And there are—bad guys.

    Not too surprisingly, said bad guys don’t like this.  Writers Beware has taken a bite out of their bottom line, derailed some of their scams, and given writers some power to protect themselves.  That’s to be expected.

    But this is just underhanded.  Assuming for a second it is what it claims, it is to be dumbstruck at the lunacy.  Why would a writer join an organization dedicated to destroying another organization that is protecting writers?

    I don’t know who is really behind Write Agenda, but they’re going after people who have done service for writers.  If in fact individual writers are doing this, it seems as boneheaded as blue collar workers who attack unions for defending higher pay and better working conditions.

    Which happens.

    As a kid, this is simple.  There are bullies in the schoolyard.  It’s nice when the teacher looks out for them and does something, but what was better was for there to be some kid big and bad enough to take on the bullies and sort of protect the weaker ones.  That’s pretty much what such organizations like Writer Beware do.  Fraud is a criminal offense and it’s nice when an Attorney General or D.A. prosecutes for it, but the fact is they don’t have the resources (or sometimes the inclination) to police the way we’d like them to.  So occasionally a watchdog group springs up and when they’re effective, the bullies look for opportunity to get rid of them so they can return to lording it over the other kids.

    But there always seems to be a handful who don’t like the protector.  For whatever reason, they seem to prefer to get beat up rather than accept help.  It doesn’t make sense, it’s counterintuitive—maybe they don’t like feeling beholden and certainly we’d all like to be able to take care of ourselves.

    But we aren’t kids and this kind of assault is pretty common these days.  Labels get thrown around, occasionally bordering on libel or slander, tempers rise, and the controversy draws an audience.

    In this case, it’s reasonably easy to see the difference.  Writer Beware has a track record.  All The Write Agenda seems to have is a bunch of baseless assertions.  But they’re engaging in the Great American Pastime of “Let’s Create A Controversy!” combined with “Let’s You and Him Fight!”    At least we have one advantage in this one—writers (generally speaking) can read.

  • Denial of Agency and Being Off Base

    Recently I participated in a brief exchange on Shelfari that annoyed me.  On a science fiction thread a commenter said he (or she) had recently read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and had enjoyed it even though the fictional conceit was off base.  I asked why and the response was  “His worldview is off-base because it is humanistic – it excludes God.”

    That annoyed me.  Actually, it pissed me off.  The exchange ran a little while and then I suggested it be moved or abandoned.  The admin allowed that it was a troublesome thread and it would be better to just stop it.  I withdrew (except for one more exchange about why it had troubled me since as it continued it turned into a typical “does god exist” thread.  My annoyance was with the assumption that stories can be judged automatically off-base because they don’t take into account a particular belief.

    When pressed, the original commenter admitted that it was Asimov’s world view in general that was the problem—which means that the beliefs (or disbeliefs) of the author were used a priori to judge the quality of the stories.

    Here’s the problem with that:  fiction is about the human condition and the writer is responsible for getting the character and interactions within a story right.  In other words, to tell the truth about people, how they feel, what they do, why they think or act certain ways.  To do this, the writer must imaginatively assume the viewpoint of the characters (to greater or lesser degrees) in order to treat them honestly so what is then written about them is a true picture.

    To do that, the writer must be an observer, a very accurate observer, a student of people, of humanity, even of civilization and culture.

    To claim that a writer cannot write truthfully about the human condition unless he/she already holds a particular world view is sheer, slanderous nonsense.  At its most basic, it suggests that to hold a particular world view might guarantee that a writer not only can but will write the truth, and that simply doesn’t follow.

    But further, it suggests that the truth of human beings is hidden from a writer who doesn’t believe a particular way.  Extend that, and you can take the position that a writer of any other religious view must be incapable of writing accurately and truthfully about people as compared to  a writer who holds a preferred view.  You are immediately immersed in the unsolvable debate over which view is the Truth (capital T) and which false.  Or, furthermore, you would have to accept that a believer would be incapable of writing as honestly about atheist characters, since that is a world view not shared.

    We would, very simply, be unable to speak honestly and truthfully to each other.

    One would have to accept that stories written (truthfully, honestly) by a believer would somehow be different than stories written (honestly, truthfully) by an unbeliever.  But that would deny the universality of human experience.

    On a meaner level, this is a denial of agency.  It’s very much like the argument put forth by those who think Shakespeare is a pseudonym for another author, one of which is the Earl of Oxford.  The argument says that “William Shakespeare” lacked the education and aristocratic sensibility to have penned works of such insight about nobility.  This completely discounts the richness of imagination writers must apply to any subject of which they lack first-hand knowledge.  It says I, if I were Shakespeare, could not possibly have imagined what I wrote and told the truth so accurately because I didn’t possess the proper “world view.”  You can see this argument used against any author or group of authors another group (usually not authors) seek to deny validation.

    (I suggest finding a copy of the late, great Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Womens Writing  for a detailed examination of this process.)

    It suggests two things that are false—one, that there are human experiences to which only select groups are privy and that no one on the outside can possibly know about, and two, that human experience is not universal on some basic level that underlays all successive experiential additions.

    If a religious writer wrote truthfully about two people falling in love and an atheist wrote about the same two people, and both told the truth of what they observed and described the experience of those two characters honestly, how might they differ?  For either of them to make the case, within the story, that their world view mattered in the telling of human truth, the author would have to intrude and, to greater or lesser degrees, proselytize.  You would end up with a bad story at best, propaganda at worst.

    Throw a dozen or two dozen stories on a desk without attribution.  No one knows who the writers are.  Tell me what the beliefs are of the author of each story.  (This presumes excellent stories, truthful stories.)  The idea that an atheist, a humanist, would write “off base” stories because of their world view is a denial of agency.  What that says is that no writer not a believer could write a truthful story about believers, or that a believing writer could not possibly write a story about atheists.

    Nonsense.

    On the question of whether the universe would be depicted differently, well now that is a bit more interesting, but the fact is that the universe is how it is and both atheist and believing scientists see it, measure it, explain it pretty much the same way.  They may argue over first causes, but in the advent of thirteen billion years since that event, both see the cosmos essentially the same way.  Atoms operate the same way for both, gravity is the same for both, the life and death of stars…

    But in fact, it was not the stories that prompted that initial remark, but a knowledge of the author’s world view that colored the perception.  (Of course this is one more reason I tend to tell people that if they really love an artist’s work, see, hear, read as much of the work as possible before finding out anything about them.  The personal facts of an artist’s life can ruin the appreciation for the work.)  This is a dishonest gage.  It sidesteps the only valid metric, which is, does this story say true things about people?

    I won’t go so far as to say that a writer’s world view doesn’t affect the work.  The whole point of doing art is to express personal opinions about subjects.  But at the level of good art, all authors’ work must hold up in the court of truth, and to suggest that certain world views de facto  prevent someone from telling the truth about the subject at hand is overreaching at best.  You can certainly say of certain writers “his/her beliefs so color their work that it is skewed from truth” but it is not correct to say “these beliefs guarantee that their work will be skewed from truth.”

    It also suggests that personal experience can be disingenuous at its core if it leads to conclusions inconsistent with a preferred world view.

    Denial of agency indeed.

     

     

  • Position Statement

  • It’s Not About Sex

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

    Here’s the video:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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