Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • Another Top 100 List

    NPR conducted a survey of the most popular all-time science fiction and fantasy novels and the results are in.  According to the polls, these are the top 100 SF & F novels.

    Like the “other” meme from the BBC that sent around last year, there are some bizarre inclusions—entire trilogies and series instead of single novels—which I suspect are inevitable given the nature of the process.  I mean, I love Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, but that’s what?  Ten books?  Hardly fair.  But then something like Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun actually is a single novel published in four volumes.

    It’s the omissions that bother me.  It’s obvious a lot of young readers contributed, because there seems to be a significant percentage of newer work, often at the cost of seminal works that should be on any representative list.  I mean, hell, Brandon Sanderson has two separate slots but Delany and Silverberg are nowhere to be found.  I expected to see The Song of Ice and Fire on the list given its current popularity, but not that unwieldy piece of self-referential excess The Wheel of Time.  I mean, come on—the best?

    But I see the absence of work that is essential to any overview of 20th Century science fiction—no Joanna Russ, no Van Vogt, no John Brunner, no Gordon Dickson or Poul Anderson or Doc Smith or…

    Partly, I think, the problem is in that they decided to lump SF and Fantasy together.  Expected but disappointing.  I really do not expect people who think the Xanth series fit for a top 100 list to even be aware of  C.J. Cherryh, and if that sounds judgmental, so be it.

    Last year I composed my own list of 100 novels “everyone should read” in response to the BBC meme.  I suppose now I ought to do a 100 SF novels essential to any grasp of what science fiction is.

    Or maybe not.  Maybe this is just the nature of these things when handed over to a committee.

    But I gotta say, women are sorely underrepresented in this.  Of course there’s Ursula K. Le Guin (and Margaret Atwood, which I find amusing for other reasons) and Audrey Niffenegger.  But come on: Octavia Butler, C.J. Cherryh, Joanna Russ, Mary Gentle, Sherri Tepper, Kate Wilhelm, Justina Robson, Nancy Kress, Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore, Margaret St. Clair, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Nicola Griffith, Lisa Goldstein, Michaela Roessner, Emma Bull, Gwyneth Jones….

    You get the idea.

  • The Problem…Succinctly, Loudly

    This has been going around, so maybe you’ve seen it already, but if not here’s another opportunity. Dylan Ratigan is saying what many of us have expressed a part of in the last several years, some of us more so.

    I wrote about this previously here

    Basically, what Ratigan is talking about is the leaching of latent wealth out of the country by multinationals who have corrupted the American political system to guarantee as few regulations as possible, regulations which ordinarily would require then to reinvest that money here instead of taking out of the country to squirrel away in financial safe havens.

    They have managed to convince a lot of Americans that this is to safeguard their freedom of the marketplace, when in fact all it does it give most of us a smaller and smaller allotment of resources with which to work.

    I, too, am dismally disappointed in Mr. Obama, who is just one more politician who lost his cajones when he got into office and refuses to tell the truth.

  • Debunking Du Jour

  • New Website

    I’m kind of pleased about this.  Anyone who has been keeping up with this blog for any time knows I was involved with an organization called The Missouri Center for the Book.  To recap for the benefit of those who are just joining us, the MCB is the state affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, which is an organization that promotes and advocates for what we call The Community of the Book.  That includes authors, sure, but also bookstores, libraries, publishers, bookbinders, even illustrators.

    The Center for the Book is not a remedial reading program.

    There are plenty others that do that.  No, MCB and the other state Centers—and every state has one, plus the Territories—are about the culture of reading.  Now, if that sounds snobbish, then forgive me, but it’s anything but.  The door is open.  Anyone can be a reader.  In fact, in this country I’d have to say anyone who can’t read—no, let me be more specific—anyone who doesn’t read and undervalues reading, it’s on them.  There’s no excuse.  Books are everywhere and while it may be easier to see the movie or go to the mall or whatever else you might do to fill up the time you might spend discovering a great book, to not be part of the Community of the Book is both sad and no one’s fault but your own.  At least, that’s my opinion.

    I served on the board of directors for nine years.  For five of those nine years I was president of the organization.  In that time, a lot of work got done and some new things came into being, not least of which is the office of Missouri State Poet Laureate—which MCB advocated for, lobbied, worked, and finally achieved, a program which MCB runs.

    I retired from the board this year—last March, to be precise—and there was one thing I wanted to see accomplished that was still hanging fire when I left, something I believed to be vital to the continued health of the organization.  Whether we like to admit it or not, the 21st Century is The Future in more ways than I could have anticipated as a 14-year-old science fiction addict reading Asimov and Heinlein and Anderson and Bradbury.  The digital age is here and books are changing form if not content.  It is not possible to function effectively without participating in that reality.

    MCB had a website.  We’d had for years and it needed upgrading.  We also needed a higher web presence, so the social networking so common today beckoned.

    I’m pleased to inform you all that MCB now has a new website.  Right here.  It just went up in the last week or so.  I’d really like to thank Jarek Steele at Left Bank Books for constructing this and agreeing to be admin.  He did a spectacular job and as time goes on there will be other goodies.  Two regular blogs are projected for it, one for the Poet Laureate, the other of more diverse provenance.  You will note there’s a FaceBook link.

    (I must also give considerable credit to Diana Botsford, who did an enormous amount of prep work on the previous site making it ready for transfer, found us a new ISP, worked hard to get it up to a point where the project was viable—and then due to the vagaries that life throws at us from time to time had to move on.  Diana is a great person.  Visit her site, buy her books.)

    It’s not often you get to say that you accomplished everything you wanted to in a project, and certainly there are some things I didn’t get to do with the MCB, but I can honestly say I took it as far as I could and did the important stuff I wanted to get done.  The new board is going to do some very cool things in the next few years, so I would like to encourage you all to check it out, give it your support, friend the FaceBook page, and bookmark the new site.  They’re good people, it’s a worthwhile organization, a vital cause, and a cool thing.

    I am going to write some more books.

  • Treason To The Future

    No, I’m not going off on some political rant.  At least, I don’t think so.  (I was accused recently of using my blog as a soapbox…well, I thought, isn’t that what it’s for?  The question is, how good is the soap.)

    At our recent Dante session I was reminded of a quote I’d forgotten all about.  One of the best philosophical thinkers of the 20th Century was Alfred North Whitehead.  I recommend him.  Even where I disagree with him, there is plenty to stir the imagination and encourage new thought.  One of his better books, quite short and to the point, is The Function of Reason.  In the chapter three or thereabouts, we find this little gem.

    “To set limits on speculation is treason to the future.”

    By that, I read him as meaning that we must be free to speculate about where we’re going, what we hope to do, how we’ll make it happen.  All ideas are welcome, even bad ones, as long as we’re only speculating.  But more than that, it’s kind of one of those notions that ought to go without saying—all thinking is speculation, even problem solving, and to arbitrarily set limits, to say “You can’t talk about that,” is to shut the door on possible solutions to problems we may not even know we have yet.

    I’m using that quote in a talk I’m doing tomorrow night in Columbia on What Is Science Fiction.  I think it answers a century-worth of ridicule and criticism toward the form that ought not to have come up to begin with, but which was predictable.  People are uncomfortable with change.  (Here’s a little bit of politics coming up.  Sorry about that.)  When you look at the current wrestling match going in the country—indeed, around the globe—there seems to be one basic demand from people with regards to the problems we face:  fix it but don’t change anything.

    Science fiction is all about change.

    There are two ways to look at change—as an inevitable force impossible to avoid or as a fate we seek to hide from.  Change is coming regardless, so hiding does no good, but it does do harm, because in hiding we surrender any say we might have in how change happens.  And when you do that, then whatever happens will probably be something you won’t like.

    Preparing this talk reminded me why I’ve always liked science fiction in the first place.  I’ve never been afraid of the future.  The future, to me, has always been a place where the best could happen.  It might not, things might go sour, but it’s not inevitable, and even if we do go through a bad time, the future is still there, with potential.  When I was a kid, Today was always pretty much dull.  Tomorrow—and by that I mean TOMORROW! —held all the really cool stuff I knew would make life better.  By and large, I haven’t been terribly disappointed.  In spite of things transpiring that rather annoy, irritate, and anger me, there is much more that I find generally wonderful.

    The trick is to be open to that part instead of stockpiling a list of complaints.

  • How To Put This As Delicately As I Can…

    Governor Rick Perry, who may or may not be running for president on the Republican ticket (any day now we may—or may not—get an announcement) has put out a call for a great big Texas style get-together prayer meeting.  He has a passel of preachers coming to harrangue about the problems of America.

    There’s only a couple of problems with the guest list and what it says about Perry.

    He has one preacher who said that Hitler was sent by god to force all the Jews back to Israel (part of the Grand Design).

    Another insists that not one more permit be issued for another mosque anywhere in the United States.

    We have another who claims that the reason Japan’s stock market crashed was because the Emperor had sex with the sun goddess.

    Still one more claims that demons are being released through the good works of people who are doing those good works for all the wrong reasons.

    And still another claiming that the Illuminati are still extant and that the Statue of Liberty is an idol to a false god and that the Illuminati seek to reduce the population of the world to half a billion and that Obama’s health care program is the start of the purge.

    Perry himself has claimed that this meeting is important for policy reasons—that here the nation will learn what to do to set ourselves back on track.

    Hmm.

    How can I say this without offending anyone…

    I can’t. So I’ll just say it.

    This is balls out insanity, absurdity carried to the level of national circus, religion administered like fluoride in the water but with the effect of morphine.  People who swallow this nonsense are—

    Careful there now, everyone is entitled to their beliefs, no one’s point of view is superior to anyone else’s, we have to be tolerant and allow people who hold their opinions as they see fit.  This is after all a country that holds with freedom of religion.

    Except that another of the invited preachers has stated quite forcefully that only christians should have freedom of religion, that the Founders never intended it to extend to any other group.  So much for tolerance on that end.

    No, it is time we collectively began calling this what it is.  Bullshit.

    But dangerous bullshit.  All the jokes aside, the possibility of directing national policy based on what some crackpots have gleaned from the Bible, as if there were no other way to see the world, is infantile and potentially destructive to the planet, since many of these folks are panting for the Apocalypse.  They hunger for Armageddon.

    And those who sit in their audiences and lap this up as if it were intellectual ambrosia—of course it must be, look at the signs, it was prophesied, look at the state of the world—validating their apparent revulsion for the things they see around them.

    It is, simply, the politics of bigotry, of intolerance, of ignorance, of fashion, rhetoric designed to trigger emotional responses based on shock and fear and, let’s be honest, stupidity.  And all of it packaged with the imprimatur of a holy book, as if by claiming it all comes from Genesis through Revelations the vitriolic condemnation of whatever one happens to find offensive or simply incomprehensible is justified and actions based on that condemnation are mandatory if we are to “save” the world.  Or just America, as I’ve noticed most of these folks don’t seem to have much use for anything outside our borders.

    It is possible these politicians that dally with this cultural miasma believe they can play with it, a mongoose dance with a venomous cobra, and, after winning the election, can act according to their possibly more rational inclinations.  But it seems that there is a gravitational effect they have failed to consider, and the longer the GOP plays with this nonsense the more distorted and irrational their direction becomes.

    And I hear the defense that these folks are not “real christians”, as if that is somehow encouraging.  If true, then they are mounting an assault on “real” christians, but the problem is, since they base much of this on a belief in the same ideology it’s difficult to attack them on how they’re in error.

    August 6th is the date for this national prayer gorge.  If Rick Perry achieves the nomination, I think we should all be very afraid.  He may think he can control the tiger he’s riding, but he’s likely to get eaten along with the rest of us.

    ______________________________________________________________________

    p.s.  There actually is a Republican candidate this time around that I find I could vote for.  It might be worthwhile to talk this man up a bit.  Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico.  Check out his Issues section.  He sounds like a conservative with a brain who is not afraid to use it.

  • Independence Day

    It’s the Fourth of July.  I’ve been pondering whether or not to write something politically pithy or culturally au courant and here it is, almost noon, and I’ve made no decision.  I think I pretty much said what I had to say about my feelings about this country a few posts back for Memorial Day, so I don’t think I’ll revisit that.

    Last night we sat on our front porch while the pre-Fourth fireworks went off in the surrounding neighborhood.  Folks nearby spend an unconscionable amount of money on things that blow up and look pretty and we benefit from the show.  Neither of us like large crowds, so going down to the St. Louis riverfront for the big explosion is just not an option.  The older I get the less inclined I am to squeeze myself into the midst of so much anonymous humanity.

    We’ll likely go to bed early tonight after watching the rest of our neighborhood go up in brilliance, starbursts, and smoke.

    I suppose the only thing I’d like to say politically is a not very original observation about how so many people seem to misidentify the pertinent document in our history.  The Declaration of Independence is often seen as more important than the Constitution and this is an error, one which leads us into these absurd cul-de-sacs of debate over the religious nature of our Founding.  Because of the reference to Our Creator, people with a particular agenda seem to take that as indicative that this was founded as a christian nation.  Creator is a fairly broad, nondenominational label that encompasses any and all descriptions of gods or nature, but I won’t argue the idea that the men who wrote it were, if anything, more or less christians.  It’s a statement, though, that is intended not to establish that there is a god or that we are beholden to such a thing, but that there are some birthrights we all share that no mortal can blithely assume we don’t possess.  The only thing at the time higher than a king was a god, so, when you read the rest of the Declaration, it is clear that the intended meaning is that a power transcending kings grants us these rights.  They had not yet hit upon establishing a representative democracy, not insofar as every official was to be elected—they may have intended that a constitutional monarchy be used as a model, and Britain already had a history of putting constraints on its monarchs.  But to make the point absolutely clear that no monarch had the authority to take certain rights away, the went one step up.  The use of the term Creator is sufficiently vague and universal that any formulation of Natural Law is covered, even and including a Spinozan construction that makes Nature and God one and the same thing.  Essentially, the fact that people are here, part of the world, should automatically accord them certain status and rights that no one has a legal right to remove.

    But it is a document of intent, namely intent to separate one people politically from another.  The form of the new republic is not addressed in the Declaration.  That work was left for the Constitution, and the way it was originally formulated there was not one mention of god or churches.  It dealt entirely with a secular formulation and I do not believe that was unintentional.  The Bill of Rights was included later, as a deal-making document that certain states insisted on before they would ratify the Constitution, and that’s where you find the establishment clause.

    But the Constitution is a complex, legal document.  There are fine passages in the Bill of Rights, but in the body of the Constitution itself there are few phrases even close to the poetic heights of the Declaration.  The Preamble has some nice things, but we can perhaps understand why most people actually don’t know what’s in the Constitution.

    A shame, really, because it would make things clearer to most folks if they did.  Why are things run the way they are is not explained by the grand polemical declarations of the Fourth of July document, but in the closely-reasoned blueprint of the Constitution.  There is also a reason soldiers swear an oath to uphold the Constitution—not the Declaration—and likewise why politicians are sworn in the same way.

    Namely, it is because we have dedicated ourselves to an Idea.

    Not a person or persons, but an Idea, and this ought to put paid to all this nonsense we’re about to hear about how this country is a christian nation dedicated to god.  It is not.  It is a nation dedicated to the idea that we are free to choose.  And sometimes what our neighbors will choose will run counter to what we may think is right or appropriate or pleasant or…but it’s their choice, just as it is ours to believe as we wish.

    The Constitution is first and foremost a framework antithetical to cults of personality.  You want to see what cults of personality do to a nation?  Look at the old Soviet Union.  Or look at Libya.  Or North Korea.

    I don’t give a damn what kind of “character” my representatives possess—I want to know that they will obey the law and do their jobs.  That’s all.  If they do that, they can be a bland or odious as they may.  If they don’t, I could care less what their character is like or their personal qualities.

    Okay, so maybe I did have a few things to say of a political nature.  Must be in the air.  It is, after all, the Fourth.

    Be safe.

  • Pathological Hypocrisy

    I thought I might leave this alone, but some itches are too difficult to leave unscratched.  Others have posted about Rick Santorum’s unbelievable hypocrisy over abortion.  You can read the article here.

    Basically, Mr. Santorum has it in mind to use the law to prohibit a medical procedure his wife had to go through in order to save her life.  As the piece makes clear, in October of 1996, Karen Santorum underwent an abortion in the 19th week of pregnancy in order to save her life from an infected fetus.  She had a 105 degree temperature.  She would have died without the procedure.

    Santorum would make that option illegal.  Basically, his position seems to be that sacrificing his wife for the fetus would be his choice now.  This overlooks the fact that had they not done the procedure, the fetus would not have survived, either.  He would have lost both.  Sacrifices to his conscience, which seems incapable of the kind of triage humans must make all the time.

    Well and good, some people just can’t go there.  But this man is running for president.  He intends that his personal inability to cope be made a national policy of denying anyone the choice of coping.

    I’ve written about my views on the anti-choice movement before, mainly here.

    I have also written before about Mr. Santorum, most notably here.

    So maybe I’ve said as much as I need to say.  But he keeps coming back, making his self-avowed moral arguments, presenting his program as if somehow this would be good for anyone, so maybe saying things just once in opposition to what seems to me to be a kind of morbid obsession and the consequences of seeing this as the guiding principle of the nation is a poor idea.  Whatever the case may be, I can’t leave this alone.

    It has been consistent with Mr. Santorum, this problem he seems to have with matters of sex.  Consistent enough that I don’t think it has anything to do with studied principle.  The whole bit about his bringing the dead fetus out to show his living children smacks of profoundly skewed inner landscapes.  Whatever it may, I know one thing in my bones—I do not want this man making laws for this country, not about this certainly, and probably not about anything else.  He does not speak for me.

    He shouldn’t be seen as speaking for women and here is where I have the deepest concerns.

    This is simple in my mind.  I am a man, I cannot become pregnant.  But I also have an imagination and perhaps sufficient empathy to put myself in the position of a woman who has a choice to make.  Hormones are a big deal, certainly, but I can state unequivocally that something as important as procreation must be entirely in the hands the one most viscerally concerned, and that—whether certain people like it or not—is a woman.  And I ask myself what I would want for myself were I female.  I can’t say with absolute certainty that I would not want to be a mother, but I can state absolutely that I would want that decision to be absolutely mine.  My body, my life, my future.

    No, I do not consider a fetus a human being with all the rights of someone who can sit across from me, breathing on their own, capable of independent action.  Certainly I do not agree that such a being’s presumed status trumps mine.

    We are hypocritical about this.  Save the fetus, then after it is born, let circumstances dictate everything else.  Poverty, developmental disorders, the lack of any future, the whole list of negatives that could be somewhat addressed if the same political will the anti-choice movement exercises in preventing one woman from deciding for herself whether or not to procreate were exercised in the cause of social progress—which many of these same people, Mr. Santorum being a prominent example, are just as actively opposed to.  “You made your own bed, you lie in it” is an old adage that speaks to the harshness of life when unfortunate choices are made, but these folks have added a twist—“We will make sure you lie in the bed you made.”  No choice.  Basically, if a woman has sex and gets pregnant, she must, by their lights, have the child.  And if she herself is a child, or the victim of rape, or too overburdened to take adequate care of another, there will be no help coming from the self-appointed guardians of imposed moralism.

    Because underlying all of this is an old, thoroughly Protestant, Puritan ethic—you fuck, you pay.

    Now, one might ask the question, “What if it is human?  How can we know?”

    Very simple, as far as society is concerned—if the mother says it is, it is.  Until then, it is none of anybody else’s business.  We assign status constantly.  With all manner of things, and who’s to gainsay us when we do?  This is no different.  Which is why I have no problem with the idea that someone can be guilty of murder in the death of a fetus and still demand choice for women—because it is the mother who says.

    That’s perhaps not very tidy and certainly difficult to codify in law, but it is a functional reality—clearly there are people who never accord their children the status of human and abuse them and sell them and often kill them.  The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, I think, was thinking something along these lines with the three trimester test—that as time goes on, the state has more and more interest in the fetus, because clearly by default the mother has decided, after five or six months, that it is a human.

    I grant you many people may not be very comfortable with that, but the whole point of the law is that it’s not up to People, it’s up to the woman.  The individual.  She has to live with it.

    And in this instance, “live” is the operative word.  Late term abortions are rarely elective in the way that first trimester abortions are.  The anti-choice movement has simply lied about that.  Doctors have an interest in the welfare of their female patients and for this reason, this procedure has never been illegal.  Never.  To save the life of the mother has always overridden any presumed rights of a fetus—which, in almost all such cases, will not survive anyway.  So this is criminally stupid to argue this point.

    What Mr. Santorum seems to be suffering from is the fact that he and his family had to make a harsh choice and it traumatized them.  He wants never to have to make that choice again—and who can blame him?  But he’s carrying it several steps further—he wants to eradicate the possibility of that choice ever being made, not only by him or his wife, but by anybody.  He perhaps can’t live with the choice he made and his penance is to take it away from everyone else.  He’s trying to exorcise his demons through public censure and legal flagellation.  It will cost people their lives.

    Jocelyn Elders, one-time surgeon general of the United States, said once that America needs to get over its love affair with the fetus.  I agree.  If we don’t, we will love it to death and many, many women along with it.

    If I were a woman, you bet your sweet ass I would want the choice.  Anything less is a diminution of status.  The state telling me I may not live my life because others have discomfort with certain choices.

  • Teach the Controversy (!)

    I wasn’t sure I’d do this, but I’m really pissed off.

    This morning I opened my front door to find a flier lying on the porch.  I thought it was another local contractor ad or announcement of a barbecue-and-rummage sale, so I scooped it up to glance at it before dropping it in the recycle hopper.  Instead, I find in my hand a vile piece of unconscionable poison.  And it seemed like it would be such a nice day!

    I’m not going to dignify this crap by citing the source.  The header of the two-side sheet reads: The Holocaust Controversy  The Case For Open Debate.  What follows is a putrid example of revisionist nonsense designed to suggest that six million Jews were not systematically slaughtered by the Third Reich.  In tone, it is reasonable.  It does not make many strident claims with exclamation points, just calmly asserts one bullshit “fact” after another (plus a photograph of an open pit containing the skeletonized remains of concentration camp victims labeling it a photo of typhus victims) to lay the groundwork for the claim that the Holocaust didn’t happen, that it is all a Big Lie assembled by a Zionist conspiracy to advance the cause of sympathy for stateless Jews in order to get them a state.

    I will cite one piece of twisty nonsense from the flier.  In one paragraph, the calim is made that in 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum revised the old claim of four million murdered down to one million.  It then goes on with a list of (uncited) claims of further numeric reductions, not by the Auschwitz Museum, but by “a French scholar” and “another mainstream Holocaust scholar” all the way down to half a million.  The wording is slippery.  I advise you to go to the link provided, which is directly to the museum, and read the detailed history.  The paragraph I mention in the flier leaves off with the suggestion that only a half million people were “actually” killed in total.

    The Nazis murdered eleven million people, systematically, with calculation.  Nearly six million were Jews (the number vary above and below by a few tens of thousands, but they come from testimony given at Nuremberg, from eye-witness accounts, estimates of populations before and after the war, and many other methods of tabulations, not through “best guesses,” which is what the sheet of propaganda left on my porch would have one believe), but there were five million others—gypies, homosexuals, slavs of various nationalities, and political undesirables such as communists, socialists, social democrats, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people accused of being “asocial” or of “socially deviant type.”

    This is not disputed by any credible authority.

    Nor is Hitler’s obsession with the Jews, nor is the history of virulent antisemitism in Europe, nor are the claims made by various members of the Nazi regime, nor is the physical evidence of the camps.

    Over a million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz.  It was a large camp and has become the symbol for all the others.  But bear one fact in mind before you quibble over numbers or intent: the Nazis built 20,000 of these camps.

    Not all have ovens, not all had gas chambers, but all of them were forced labor camps and all of them were in the business of killing the inmates.  Conservatively, all you would need is a hundred deaths per camp to bring it up to two million.  Five hundred per camp and you get ten million.

    People were worked endlessly, underfed, disease ran rampant, mass graves were common.  We have seen this kind of barbarism in our recent history, in Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia.  And yes, Stalin killed millions more.

    The offensiveness of this shit is profound.  Yet here is this scrap of paper suggesting that, like the nonsense over evolution, we should “teach the controversy.”

    Fine.  Here is the controversy I would teach.  The controversy of denial, that people would try so hard to say this never happened or, as is more likely of late, that it wasn’t “as bad” as has been stated.  The controversy that continually puts Jews under the spotlight, which is the same germinal thinking that resulted in this horrific bit of substantiated history.

    I’ve had lengthy conversations with people who believe this.  The hallmark of them is that they managed never to directly address any evidence put before them.  Direct them to the Nuremberg transcripts, they say something about not having found “those” records.  Direct them to eyewitness testimony, they haven’t had a chance to validate it.  The snake-slithers of obfuscation and refusal to confront is incredible to behold, but the question that boggles my mind is this:

    To what end do you wish to exonerate Hitler and the Third Reich?

    Is it that you can’t imagine Europeans doing this?  Look what we did to the Indians.  Is it that you simply cannot bring yourselves to believe the word of anyone not a Christian?  Look at the lies spread in the name of Christ, up to and including the abuse of children by priest (and the fact that in Rwanda there were Catholic priests leading the charge in some areas to slaughter).  Is it that you can’t believe people could be that evil for no reason?  I can see that as a problem, because if they could do something like that, then so could you.

    Here’s the ugly truth—circumstances permitting, most people can be that evil.  Just look at Rwanda.  That was over religion, birth rates, and water tables.  Cambodia was over ideology.

    Oh, but those weren’t white people?  Europeanized, educated, civilized whites?  How could the home of Kant and Beethoven, Goethe and Mann harbor such vileness?

    That’s the controversy.  The fragility of the thin veneer of civilization that keeps us “above it all.”  How easily is it stripped, broken, thrown away if we feel threatened.  (We just extended the Patriot Act another four years, a rather blatant violation of Constitutional liberties, and all just so we’ll feel “safe.”)

    I shouldn’t have been surprised.  There are Nazis in my neighborhood.  But it does shock me, every time I find it.  Turn over a rock you always thought was harmless and even pretty and there are the maggots of the soul…

    Holocaust Revisionism is evil.  It may be on par with the Holocaust itself.  “Oh, don’t pay attention to the screams behind that curtain—it’s not what you think.  Besides, isn’t it a fine curtain?  Do you really think the people capable of creating such a lovely curtain could be monsters?”

    Got one word for you:  Wagner.

    Have a nice weekend.

  • Will ‘E Or Won’t ‘E?

    Mitt Romney has declared his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination.  I don’t have a lot to say about him, other than about his declaration at the same time that one of his priorities (it’s too early to tell if it’s number one or just one of the top three or four) is the repeal of Obamacare.  My reaction:  How’s that going to get him elected?

    See, Mr. Romney put something in place for Massachussetts that is virtually identical.  The main difference is, you know, he—a Republican—did it, not someone else, a Democrat.  Oh, and it’s a state thing not national.

    The other potential candidates are even now working out strategies for putting Obamacare front and center as the biggest issue so they can by extension eviscerate Romney.

    Which will blow up in their faces so bad!

    Because…well, Republicans are big on states’ rights.  So why would something done at the state level by one of their own be a target for Party displeasure when at the same time Romney is talking about removing the national program?  Oh, right, it’s socialism.  I keep forgetting that.  But even so, how do you claim the states should have the right to decide how best to deal with these sorts of things and then denigrate the choice one state has made?

    You might think this is a straw man issue because none of the other potential candidates have actually gone after Romney’s health care legacy except obliquely, but that misses the point.  The entire GOP is on record repudiating Obamacare because it’s socialistic (they claim), so they are opposed to such measures on ideological grounds.  They have to repudiate the same thing on the state level lest they risk looking obviously hypocritical.  They can’t give Romney a pass on it because they’ve spent time, rhetoric, and Party effort on denouncing the idea of such a plan.  They have set themselves up to necessarily go after one of their own.

    Which leaves them with a real problem should Romney emerge as the only one able to effectively challenge Obama.  They will have spent time and energy denouncing him.  But if he gains the nomination they’ll have to pretend they think he’s great.

    Of course, that will only be a problem if Romney does win the nomination.  The GOP has other problems with him.  Like he’s more or less a moderate.  Not nearly red meat enough to go against the incumbent moderate.

    And also of course all this depends on whether Romney can make the charge stick that Obama has “failed America.”  I don’t think he can.  Obama has only failed the self-identified Left wing of the Democratic Party because he hasn’t followed through on may of his campaign promises—promises which, had he followed through on, would have made him an easy target for the Right.  Instead, he’s so center (and occasionally center right) that the GOP actually has some difficulty getting traction on him.  He actually hasn’t failed the Republicans, he just hasn’t gone as far as they would like.

    So if the idea that Obama has failed is to  have any credibility, then it will only be a matter of pointing out who he has failed and how to show that the GOP actually doesn’t have anything to offer that’s much different.

    What?  Deregulation?  I suspect they will have to tread lightly on that one after 2008, since—often ignorant though the American electorate is—most people recognize that our problems then arose from deregulation.

    But even so, if that’s their main thing, then we come back to Romney and the presumed state prerogative to act in its own best interest.  Part of the GOP (those collectively known as the Tea Party wing) are on record as repudiating the very notion of regulation, so what would make it any more palatable on the state level rather than the national level?  Regulation, as everyone knows, is simply bad for business.  To hell with all the things that may need protecting from business—like the environment or education or, well, health care—what we need are jobs.

    Well, yes, but that’s another fly in the pie—all that outsourcing?  Business did that.  It might be argued that they did that to avoid regulation, but that’s kind of a hostage approach.  The threat of job loss to forestall measures that, in bulk, protect.  It looks snotty when you get right down to it.  Besides, most of the job loss through outsourcing occurred during twenty years of the greatest deregulatory period we’ve seen since the 1920s.  Reagan, Bush, then Clinton couldn’t deregulate fast enough—and still all the ills we now suffer just grew and grew.  The coup de’ gras came under Bush Jr., who continued the deregulatory trend.  So who’s kidding who about the cost of regulation?

    Yes, it’s going to be an interesting election cycle this time around.  The GOP will have to either change their policies or we’ll be watching them eat their own in public.