Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • The Celebration of the Book, 2010

    I’m taking some time to put on my President’s hat and talk about our upcoming event.
    We’re a week away from the Celebration.  October 23rd at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.

    If you’ve been reading this blog any length of time, then you know about my involvement.  For the last 8 1/2 years I’ve been working for it, trying to make it better, five of those years as president.  We’ve done some pretty cool things in that time.

    The Missouri Center for the Book has, like most such organizations, been undergoing some ups and downs the last few years.  We have been reorganizing in order to be a more vital part of the literary and reading community in Missouri.  Among the things that we have done over the last few years is the establishment of the Poet Laureate office for the state.  We are instrumental in running the program and selecting the candidates for the post every two years.  The program has been very popular.  We also continue to run the state Letters About Literature Awards for students.  Every year we send representatives to the National Book Festival.

    And we put on our annual Celebration.

    There are more things we’re planning for the future, but the Celebration is our signature event.  Public participation and support are essential.  While we are technically a state agency, we receive no direct financial aid from the state, and must rely on people who appreciate what we do for support.  This year’s Celebration is important for a number of reasons, but mainly public participation will determine what kind—and whether—we will have one next year.

    So I’m asking people to come.  Money is fine, we can always use money, but we’d like to see a crowd this year.  We’d like to see you.  There’s nothing like a roomful of warm bodies appreciating what’s on stage to keep something like this going, to keep it alive, to keep it relevant.

    Soon we’ll be launching our new website, which will have blogs and discussion boards, and we can draw the whole state into a wonderful conversation about books and authors.  But even a healthy internet presence and participation by a big online community isn’t the same as people walking through the door, sitting down, and listening to our authors and presenters.

    So plan a weekend, show up.  And next year, we’ll do it again.

  • Hitch

    As I mentioned in my previous post, Christopher Hitchens has esophageal cancer.  He is undergoing chemotherapy.  His prognosis is not good, as this is a particularly nasty form of cancer with a low survival rate.

    It turns out that many people are praying for his recovery, which I find ironic but wonderful.  This is, I’ve been told, what true christianity is supposed to be like—extending the benevolence of your faith to those who might qualify as an enemy.  If only all christians were like that.  If only those who are like that were the loudest voices.

    Unfortunately, the screaming meme misanthropic anti-intellectual pre-Enlightenment ignoramus branch of the movement tends to dominate a lot of the discourse, from the supporters of Proposition 8 to those who are not only praying for Hitch to die, but are sending notice of such prayers to public fora and putting megaphone to mouth so as many people as they can blast with their message will hear.

    I will let Jeffrey Goldberg, correspondent for The Atlantic, express it for me.  He summed my feelings up quite nicely here.

    I know many christians who find their uncouth brethren-in-name an embarrassment.  When they say that “we’re not all like that” they tell the truth.  It is my personal opinion that they would “not be like that” whether they believed in god or nothing, that decency has no denomination and requires no supernatural support mechanism.  I agree with the sentiments of people like Hitch and Richard Dawkins that by and large most people are secular, both in their outlook and their morality, that what is considered good and decent behavior today and what is considered unsupportable have changed over time and it is the pressure of evolving cultural demands, not any new revelation, that has had the most positive effect.  The Enlightenment, wherein many if not all of the ideas of equality and human dignity and the motives for social justice and progress came into their own, was a para-religious movement, sometimes a-religious, occasionally anti-religious.  We do not, most of us, live according to biblical precepts and rules nor would we find it acceptable to do so.

    Whatever the reality, Hitch has argued that history is littered with the bodies of religion’s victims, and while it is legitimate to say that those who performed the atrocities did so outside the proper moral ground of religious feeling, it is also legitimate to argue that they in fact found justification for their actions in those same feelings and in the writings of their various faiths.

    Hitch has spoken positively about Jesus the man and has argued that whoever he was, he was ahead of his time, a great teacher, and laid down a program those who have claimed for two millennia to be his followers have in aggregate failed to live up to.  Those who are praying for Hitch to recover, to be well, are, in this moment, succeeding.  They should deny those who pray for his death the use of the sobriquet Christian.  Not in that they are not living up to the expectations of their faith—in their eyes they are—but in that they have failed to see how their faith has severed them from legitimate moral feeling.

    I do not pray.  But I wish Hitch well.  And for all those believers praying on his behalf—I wish you all well, too.

  • Photography and Change

    Steve McCurry, a famous photographer whose image of an Afghan girl with brilliant green eyes for National Geographic has become iconic, has been given a great and sad gig—Kodak has handed him the last production roll of Kodachrome to take and shoot.  He’s doing it in grand style, traveling all over the world, with a film crew shooting a documentary about it.

    I wanted to be a photographer for National Geographic when I was a teenager.  I knew nothing about how to do that, and for numerous reasons I won’t go into I never found out or took the chance.  I played it safe with a nice steady lab job and didn’t pursue a dream.  Oh well.

    But I have nevertheless made some images of which I am very proud.  Here’s one:

    cedar-in-canyon-copy.jpg

    I just finished Photoshopping this and doing some work on it to make it more what I wanted it to be.  There are reasons for the abandonment of film, yet I feel sad.  Kodachrome had a special look and it was for a long time my favorite film.  The idea that Kodak won’t be making it anymore—or any of its other films—is just too weird to me.  I remember when they purged their paper line.  They once made dozens of types of photographic paper (b & w) in a variety of surfaces and in the mid to late 70s they discontinued 90% of them.  The market was changing, resin coated paper was becoming popular, sales flagged on the harder-to-use fibre papers…

    Still, it’s a loss.  I will be very interested to see what Mr. McCurry does with that final roll.  Meantime, like most of the rest of us, I’m learning to do this digitally.

    Gotta say, it has possibilities for me that are very seductive.

    canyon-swirls-copy.jpg

    Both images were shot in New Mexico.

  • Mel Gibson and Other Musings

    So Mel Gibson has been exposed (once again) as an intolerant, sexist, abusive person.  A recording of a phone conversation with his former girlfriend is now Out There on the internet and one can listen to Mel spill molten verbiage into her earpiece while she calmly refutes his charges.

    All I can wonder is,  So what?

    What business is this of ours?  This is private stuff.  People lose control.  Between each other, with strangers, but more often with those closest, people have moments when the mouth ill-advisedly opens and vileness falls out.  The question is, does this define us?  Are we, in fact, only to be defined by our worst moments?

    That would seem to be the case for people like Gibson.  The reason, I think, is that for most of us, the Mel Gibsons of the world have no business having shitty days and acting like this.  For most of us, there is just cause for having these kinds of days and attitudes, because for most of us the world is not our oyster and we do not have the luxury of squandering time, friends, and money.  Mel Gibson is wealthy and famous and, at one time, admired.  He ate at the best restaurants, appeared on television, gave interviews, has his picture on the covers of magazines.  Is seen with other people, regularly, who fall into that category of Those Who Have It Made.

    They aren’t supposed to have bad days.  They aren’t supposed to be shitty to their lovers.  They aren’t supposed to act like people who are desperate, down on their luck, and bitterly outraged at the world.

    The question, though, is, do people who are down on their luck and bitter with their (admittedly pathetic) lot in life act that way?  How would we know?  Joe Asfalt doesn’t get interviewed by People or Us and when he has a falling out with his girlfriend the tabloids do not follow him or them around, looking for a scoop on their latest battle.  When Joe or his girl toss each other out of the house, no one is watching except the neighbors.  So how do we know how they behave?

    Maybe we assume they behave that way and it gives pleasure to see Mel Gibson being a jerk.  Makes him “one of us.”  Except he isn’t.

    But I don’t really give a damn about the private uglinesses of either Joe Asfalt or Mel Gibson.  It only matters to me when their private shittiness emerges into a public display, as in the case of Tom Cruise’s  asinine, Scientology-driven jeremiads about post-partum depression.  That matters because he is Tom Cruise and, like it or not, people put stock in what he says, and that incident had impact on peoples’ lives, not the least of which was Brooke Shields.  If Mel Gibson went berserk during an interview and made pronouncements about “the proper attire, place, position, and attitude” of women, then I’d care about what he thinks and says, because that would have consequences.

    What is unfortunate is that such things affect how we view their work.  It’s not fair, really.  People run the gamut, from really wonderful to really awful, and some of those people are artists.  Some of those artists are really good and create wonderful things, even those artists who may otherwise be reprehensible human beings.  In this regard I can understand the attitude of someone like J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, who have done all they could to keep people out of their private lives.  They given almost no interviews, they never made a big deal about themselves in public, eschewing the limelight.  In the case of someone like Salinger, the hermit approach actually contributed to his celebrity, fueling further book sales, because it becomes part of the myth about him.  It would not matter if he had done what he did with exactly that in mind, it would have happened anyway.  Pynchon less so, perhaps.

    But I can respect the idea that this was done precisely so the work wasn’t colored by the personality of the artist in ways that have nothing to do with the work.

    Society at large has a hunger for the viscera of the artist.  People who may never see a film, read a book, listen to a record with any genuine appreciation for the content of the work will nevertheless pay attention to those things in direct proportion to how much celebrity is attached to the artist.  So much so that we have phenomena like Paris Hilton who is famous for being famous.

    I’ve been mulling these ideas over lately because of the reverse question—how well does any artist know his or her audience?

    And do they want to?

    Demographics seem to drive everything today.  Targeting your audience correctly is the holy grail of promotions.  Is that movie geared toward the 18-to-24 crowd?  Women more than men?  What income bracket?  Education?  In the case of books, this leads me to ask, if they are in “my” demographic target, does that mean they will buy my books because they are predisposed to reading them, or is something much less causally connected, like those people who actually read who are part of that demographic may be more likely to buy my books than people who read who are part of some other demographic…

    But what is it about those other demographics that precludes the likelihood that they’ll buy my book?  That they’d more likely buy some other author’s books, based on the perception that he or she writes for the 25-to-45 upper middle class crowd.

    Pondering this makes my brain hurt.  Of all the factors that contribute to defining a demographic likely to do A rather than B or C, which factors contribute to a strong likelihood that none of them will fit the demographic that will pay attention to your work.

    And if some of those factors have to do with your public persona, then you have to ask which part?  The part that no one is ever supposed to know anything about (like a private phone call to a soon-to-be-ex-lover) or the part that you might tailor exclusively for public consumption.  In which case, isn’t that as much a work of art as the work of art you’re trying to sell?

    But at the end of the day, I’m still left wondering just why anyone is really interested in someone’s private life they do not know.  Not, mind you, in the sense of being disinterested in biography as history—the private labyrinths of a Howard Hughes become, over time, fascinating because of the archaeological nature of examining his legacy—but in the sense of trying to find a one-to-one relevance between you and a celebrity.  In that sense, it becomes legitimate to ask what purpose was served by the years of public attention to some like Wynona Judd and her seeming inability to have a happy life.  The feedback loop between personal tragedy, public perception-reception, and attempted “managing” of the personal in order to accommodate a publicity machine creates an ongoing kind of performance art that eventually has less to do with authentic experience and more to do with Artist As Subject, and therefore becomes increasingly artificial, at least in presentation, regardless of any reality—a reality which, under pressure from the attention, retreats further from the limelight and takes on further burdens in the attempt to be private.  You could see the whole thing as a kind of therapy conducted on the couch of public opinion, but to what benefit?  The thing receiving the therapy becomes less the person than the image.

    And then who is being served?  Is this merely entertainment or is there in fact a public function in all this closet-revelation?

    One thinks of politicians immediately, in particular with respect to sexual impropriety.  Do the private practices of an individual have anything to do with his or her ability to do a particular job?

    I suppose it’s a matter of what job they are required to do.  A senator whose campaign, election, and office concerned fiscal responsibility and who by any measure performs this task competently if not excellently is revealed to keep a mistress or two.  What does the one have to do with the other?  Nothing, really.  Private pecadilloes matter when the impropriety is directly connected with the job—for instance, if said senator had a history of insider trading or embezzlement.

    But then those would not be private, would they?  They would involved public factors.  Not sex, but monetary impropriety, even if kept private (and how could it be unless we’re talking about a loan from a brother-in-law that was never repaid?), has a direct public impact.

    Another senator whose campaign, election, and subsequent legislation bear on families, divorce laws, obscenity laws, laws governing the dissemination of birth control or the availability of abortion services or even information about birth control and abortion, or perhaps support of a foreign regime in which women are oppressed, then turns out to be cheating on his wife or has a history of using prostitutes.  Well, that bears directly, doesn’t it?  The hypocrisy of a Family Values politician keeping mistresses certainly is relevant to public policy.

    As unlikely as it might be that such a politician would be elected, someone who declared openly that he or she has had and may continue to have partners before, during, and outside of marriage would not, in my opinion, raise a question of moral conflict under these circumstances.  We could vote for or against from the beginning, there would be no deception.  Likewise with the politician who had exercised “poor judgment” in fiscal matters.

    But the complicating factor in such instances would be how the private matters were disclosed.  This hinges on the question of whether or not a person can and does change over time.  The recently deceased Senator Byrd’s past affiliation with the KKK is an example.  Given the opportunity and time, he demonstrated that, at least in the performance of his office, that circumstance had been left in the past.  Whether he had truly changed in his sentiments is beside the point next to his subsequent public record.

    What all this has to do with Mel Gibson is relevant only in the question of when and how the revelation of private failings is legitimate.  Does the knowledge that Mel Gibson can be a foul-mouthed, abusive, sexist racist impact anyone or anything outside his circle of acquaintances?  Because they, presumably, judge him and act accordingly without public input.  Does this kind of “news” serve any function beyond attracting and increasing the kind of attention that sells tabloids?

    Because everyone has a part of themselves they would rather keep exclusively between themselves and their chosen intimates.  Would it be fair if all of us were recorded displaying our less wonderful aspects and having said recording sent, say, to prospective employers or the dating services we might use or our new date or to the shopowners and restaurateurs we frequent or to business associates?  If all their dealings with us to date have been positive, how are they supposed to react if something like that were suddenly dropped into their lap?  And how would we defend ourselves from the predictable reactions?

    I’m just wondering.

  • Rand, Civil Rights, Rand

    Rand Paul, senate hopeful for Kentucky, made a fool of himself with remarks about the 1964 Civil Rights Act and racism and affirmative action et cetera et cetera so on and so forth.  If Kentucky votes him into office, they get what they deserve.  There was a brief moment when I thought Ron Paul was worthy of some respect—he seemed willing to speak truth to power.  I found that I disagreed with him on specifics, but it is useful (and rare) to have someone doing the Emperor’s New Suit schtick.

    However, anyone who names a child after an ideological demagogue has some serious problems with reality.  (To be clear, Rand, under the circumstances, can only refer to Ayn Rand, the patron non-saint of the Libertarian Movement.)*

    Rand’s pronouncements about the rights of business owners to deny service to anyone they see fit is perfectly consistent with Randian philosophy and politics.  Basically, it says that the person whose name is on the title owns what the title describes outright and has, by dint of absolute moral dictate, dictatorial command over said property and ought to be allowed to do with it what they wish.  Without explanation to anyone and certainly without anyone else’s permission.

    Sounds good, doesn’t it?  I mean, you worked for it, you sweated, earned the means of acquisition, put your name and fortune on the line to own it, worked to make it do what you intended, you should therefore enjoy all rights and privileges in the say of what to do with it.  Your home, your rules.  There’s a feel-good quid pro quo to it that appeals to a basic sense of fairness, suggests a rough equivalence between work and risk and rights.

    This is fundamental to Rand’s whole premise, that the creator, the mind behind creation, the one who brings something into existence is the one who has the only natural say in what that thing so created can and will do and who it shall serve.  For an avowed atheist, Rand had a very mythic, godlike attitude toward life.

    And I suppose if you could somehow make the case that a single individual did indeed create something from whole cloth and by virtue of his or her singular efforts sustained it and drove it and made it successful, there might be a good and valid point to this view.

    But is that ever the case?

    Rand’s famous tome, Atlas Shrugged, makes the argument that the movers and shakers, the people who Do, are absolutely vital to the world.  Nothing would exist without them and if they should withdraw their talent and genius and effort, the world would come to a halt.  She makes the case for the Indispensible Man.  And in the novel (for those of you who have not read it), a man named John Galt, fed up with the growing People’s Movements around the world, which he sees as essentially parasitic, calls a strike of the truly important people.  He convinces the men and women who truly matter to leave the world, retire, disappear, and when they have all left, it seems no one can do what they did, and everything falls apart.  The final image shows them emerging from their high-tech hideaway to assume command as the true and rightful aristocracy of ability.

    It is, in her narrative, a very small group.

    Just for the sake of argument, let me state here that I have seen places where there is indeed a single person whose work and ability are so central to what that business does that if they left that business might very well fail.  I suppose one could draw from that the counter argument that a single individual could build a business from first principles and be the only one who could make it work.

    But it doesn’t work that way in reality and this is where the Randians fall short in their formulation.

    If it is a business, it cannot possibly come into existence in the kind of vacuum that Rand seems to describe.  It emerges from a community.  It exists because it fulfills a need in the community and it succeeds in direct relation to how well it serves that need and how much the community values its work.

    This is not to say the individual is insignificant.  On the contrary, the individual is the one who recognizes, organizes, develops, and then taps into that need.  But once the concept is complete and the seed is planted, nothing further can happen without the community.

    What do I mean by that?  In this country, the community has already provided—communications, infrastructure, raw material, financing, licensing, insurance, regulation that allows for growth, legal structure, security, and—most importantly of all—customers.  The individual cannot accomplish all that alone.  The individual takes advantage of all these things provided by the community in order to build the thing he or she has conceived.  Once built and open for business, the only thing the individual can do of an absolutist nature is shut it down.  Because the ongoing operation of that business is now a co-dependent symbiosis, not with individuals, but with the community.

    And that is why a business owner doesn’t have the right of judgment to say who shall and who shall not be served—because once the doors are open, that business had joined with the community and become part of it.  If a member of that community comes in to be served, the business owner can only withhold service if that customer violates the greater community standard (no shirt no shoes no service, etc).  And when that action occurs it is not so much the individual expressing an opinion in isolation but the business owner reinforcing community standards that he or she accepted when joining the community as a business.  When you accept all the help provided by the community to enact your concept, you agree to those standards, and cannot arbitrarily dictate who you will or will not serve.

    What is so damn difficult to understand?

    We have a national heritage of the rugged individual which is based partly on reality but largely on a myth.  That myth is the cowboy, the mountain man, the single-minded industrialist.  The independent farmer.

    The cowboy was a wage earner.  The cattleman for whom he worked depended on the markets and the price structure Back In The World to exist, and the money he derived from that interface is all that kept him “independent.”  The mountain men were in many instances businessmen who spent their off time in cities, spending what they’d earned.  The single-minded industrialist depended on the financial landscape provided by the community to become an industrialist.  The independent farmer was only ever independent insofar as he was not dependent on urban markets.

    The other, less pleasant icons, like the gunslingers, were either maladjusted or parasites.   The settlers, who often get a bad rap in old westerns, came west and one of the first things they did was start a community, because they knew they couldn’t survive alone.

    We have lionized these icons.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that until we try to hold them up as counterexamples to the very systems that they themselves were part of.  Then we run into problems.

    Even as a teenager, breathlessly reading the 1000-page-plus epic of Atlas Shrugged, I thought there was something wrong with Rand’s premise—that somehow, all these supposedly indispensable people really were so unique as to constitute a separate species.  No one could take their place?  The only other people on the planet were social parasites and the hapless incompetents like poor Eddie Willers?  That was not my experience.

    So while many may feel a tang of sympathy for the idea expressed by Rand Paul, that the private business owner should be free from the dictates of the community, it’s an idea based on an erroneous notion of how such things exist.  Business is not free from the community—it can’t be—it only exists because of the community.

    And if that person standing there waiting to be served has different skin color, too bad—he or she is a part of the community that has granted you the ability to have a business for them to stand it.  You can’t throw them out without, by extension, throwing the whole community out.

    But this is civil liberties 101.  Why should any of this have to be explained to someone who thinks he has the ability to serve in the Senate?

    *Since writing this, I have learned that I am in error in assuming Rand is named for Ayn Rand.  His proper name is Randall.  Rather than doing the cowardly thing and simply changing what I wrote, though, I decided to leave it stand and add this little mea culpa.  Nevertheless, given the sentiments he expresses, I think the article as a whole is the best way to express my feelings.

  • Labels

    Conservative.

    Liberal.

    We act as if we know what these labels mean.  Conservatives are traditionalists, fiscally opposed to anything that smacks of gambling, private, often religious, and pedantic on what they consider “appropriate” in either government or personal conduct.

    Liberals, on the other hand, are often taken for progressive, willing to spend social capital to repair perceived problems, tolerant, agnostic if not atheist, and overly-concerned with a definition of justice that ought to be all-encompassing rather than what they perceive as sinecure for the privileged.

    Well.  Over on Facebook I posted a brief quote (my own) to boil down the actual underlying distinctions.

    Conservatives are those who don’t like what other people are doing, Liberals are those who don’t like what other people are doing to other people.

    It was meant to be taken as humorous.  But I’m not being entirely flip here.  When you look at it, and try to define the common factor in much that passes for conservative posteuring—of any country, any background, anywhere—it always comes down to one group trying to stop another group from Doing Things We Don’t Approve.

    I heard a news report this morning (on NPR—I unabashedly don’t pay attention to any other news source, I find them all utterly biased) from Pakistan about the university scene there, and one bit caught my attention—at a campus in Punjabi, conservative students who find men and women sitting too close together interfere and move them apart.  At a game of Truth or Dare, conservative students pulled participants out and beat them.

    How does this apply here?  Well, here’s a clip from P.Z. Meyers’ Pharyngula to illustrate:
    Rising Sun School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened. All their signs were torn down and destroyed, and the students were threatened by their peers. There were also letters to the editor of the local paper.

    My daughter comes home today and informs me they have started a new club in Rising Sun High School. The club is known as NRS, which stands for Non Religious Society.

    The members of this club have proceeded to hang posters along the halls of the school. When a student tore the posters down, because they offended him, he got suspended from school. Apparently the students are not allowed to touch these posters.

    To say I was shocked is putting it mildly. My daughter does not hang posters of her Catholic religion throughout the school, and I expect the same type of respect from others. We cannot control what others think or their beliefs, nor do we want to. But I will not have this type of atrocity taking place without having my voice heard.

    My daughter has my permission, if she sees these posters around school, to put up her own. I challenge the principal to say one thing about this. I guarantee you do not want a religious war taking place, as I have God on my side and you’ll lose.”

    Perhaps no one was beaten, but I think the point is well-made.  To be fair, so-called Progressives have a history of barring certain speakers they disagree with from campuses and the like, but I don’t often see such in-your-face geurilla tactics from left-leaning groups in this country.  It happens, sure, but it also happens under an assumption that it’s not sanctioned.  But also, it happens usually as part of an effort on behalf of some other group than the liberal group doing the protesting.

    When you get right down to it, conservatives as a group seem driven by a desire to constrain conduct with which they disapprove—personal conduct.  Perhaps this is a consequence of the way arguments are framed.  But I think not.  Conservatives, by definition, are concerned with preserving things they like about the way they live.  Hence all manner of social protest on the part of conservatives against things that will, they believe, change the way they live—climate change deniers are conservative, anti-abortion advocates are conservative, anti-tax groups are conservative, so-called Strict Interpretation constitutionalists are conservative.  And so on.

    But are Liberals actually any different?  Liberals, it seems to me, become conservative once they have achieved their goals and suddenly find themselves in positions to defend the way things now are.  Consider:  free market advocates are now conservatives, but if you go back far enough you discover that this was a liberal idea.  At one time, the notion that all children have some right to a college education was a liberal idea, but now it has become an entrenched part of business in such a way that the whole educational apparatus is geared toward the degree as an essential element in the economy, so much so that challenges to the way teaching is done, to the idea that education ought to be fundamentally changed, are viewed as dangerously progressive.  At one time, the idea of organized religious groups becoming politically active was a way Left notion, but it is one that has come to exemplify conservative ideology.

    Liberals tend to displace their personal defense to causes that may not, but could possibly, affect them.  They advocate on behalf of the disenfranchised (while conservatives often seem to consciously dismiss the disenfranchised as having nothing to do with them); they take up causes that are more philosophical in appearance; time and attention is given to people who do not have what the advocates have, namely political power, some economic security, or a voice in the community.  The more thoughtful Left thinkers seem to realize that but for the grace of good fortune they themselves could be living on the street at the mercy of unfriendly authorities, and so make arguments on behalf of those who already are there.  Conservatives seem to feel that those so benighted as to have fallen into such penury have only themselves to blame and dismiss the whole idea of fickle socio-economic shifts that could easily displace the currently secure.

    I say “seems to be” a lot, because obviously on an individual level things get a lot more complicated.  It all resolves to which part of the whole one chooses to look at.

    There are a couple of points at which both sides have it wrong.  For instance, in the matter of the disenfranchised—economically, politically, socially—conservatives seem to believe that one’s condition is one’s own responsibility and therefore nothing to do with those who have, according to their lights, already lived responsibly.  Therefore, so the thinking goes, “I have no responsibility for Those People.”  The liberal tends to believe the disenfranchised are inevitably disempowered due to the structure of social mechanisms, and their condition is therefore not their fault.  “Society has all the blame.”  Of course, this displaces personal responsibility on the part of the liberal to a kind of group thing.  The bottom line is, responsibility still gets shuffled from here to there and very little gets done in the way of solving the actual problems, which are combinations of the two views.

    Another observation I’ve made in the past concerning our two major political parties ties in to this:  Republicans tend to see citizens as those who own property.  Democrats see anyone who lives here legally as a citizen.  Defense of corporate personhood is a Republican ideal, which support business, which is property.  A rough descriptor, but it plays out remarkably in local politics.  In Missouri, several years ago, the Motor Voter registration movement was strongly opposed by Republicans, supported by Democrats.  Can’t have people with no financial stake in the country voting, for goodness sake.

    I find both sides often equally off-base.

    But I find myself siding more often with liberals and the Left because of the apparent obsession conservatives exhibit over Other People’s behavior.  The example from Pakistan has direct equivalents here, and it always comes down to conservatives trying to deny expression to people whose preferences in life-style they abhor.  The entire gay marriage movement is opposed by conservatives.  Why?  What is it they think will actually happen if gays are permitted to marry?  I don’t buy the whole idea that they think it’s unnatural.  I think they dislike the idea of altering their invitation lists and trying to explain to their kids why Tommy and Bill are “getting hitched.”  It is this conservative activism that comes across in things like the Texas School Board’s changes to their base curriculum, altering history and science because they don’t like the way things are changing.  Conservatives don’t appear to really have a problem with contraception for themselves—else where are all the enormous right-wing families, with seven, eight, or nine kids?—they just don’t want Other People to use it to live in ways conservatives find unseemly.  Especially their kids.  The opposition to Evolution is preponderantly conservative because it requires a shift in attitude that seems to reduce the influence of religion and the whole notion of humanity as The Superior Species.   Climate change is aggressively denied by conservatives because if true it means they will have to change the way they live.

    It amounts to a denial of reality.

    On the other hand, liberals indulge equally in different sorts of denialism.  Anti-vaccine advocates, I think, are mostly progressives.  Certainly cultural relativists who are unwilling to make definitive statements about obvious boneheadedness and outright evil in other cultures  (female circumcision, purda, etc) are little better than head-in-the-sand do-nothings.  Nonsense causes, like homeopathy, herbalism, and the like tend to attract people of liberal bents.

    But I think it’s useful to try to dig down deep to the foundational distinctions to see what is really going on.    The one thing that needs to change is the all-encompassing unwillingness, on the part of right and left, to say and listen to things that make us uncomfortable, or disagree with our cherished ideals.  You cannot know how to determine the real, the actual, and the relevant by confining your information to one channel that agrees with you all the time and censoring the other fellow who has a point to make.  We’ve been doing that for much too long and it has been responsible, as much as anything, for the unprecedented divides we see today.  Conservatives aggressively tear down posters while liberals passively refuse to permit a speaker to come, but both actions amount to the same self-imposed deafness.

    We live in an absurd age, when you come right down to it, driven more by labels than any time before.

  • Zelazny and the Perils of Reading at a Young Age

    Recently I started reading Roger Zelazny’s  Amber series.  I’ve been hearing about this for decades, how great it is, and till now it’s one of the few things of Zelazny’s that I’ve resisted reading.

    See, it’s pretty much fantasy, in form if not conceit.  I can see a way to describe the world he created here in quantum mechanical terms and render it SF, but frankly it’s a typical sword and sibling fantasy.  Genealogy and combat.

    But it’s Zelazny, so while reading it one is having a good time.  He was always dependable that way, he was never dull.  This, however, is not his major work.

    But it got me thinking about him again.

    Roger Zelazny caused me, as a kid, to defend myself.

    I attended a parochial school—Lutheran, to be exact.  This was a peculiar situation since my parents, at the time, were more or less Mormon.  The choice of Emmaus Lutheran School came about through a combination of idiotic districting restrictions in the public schools, which would have sent me to a school several miles away when there was one only five blocks away, and their general dissatisfaction with the public school system.  You see, I was a poor student.  They thought it was perhaps a disciplinary problem, one which the public schools, at that time, were by law not allowed to address.  Corporal punishment had been banned in the schools.  (Of course, this didn’t matter to some teachers: I had witnessed a student beaten and humiliated by a gym coach when I was in the first grade.)  They assumed—and I suppose this was true to some extent—that I was playing when I should have been paying attention and that my attention could be gotten by threat of spanking.

    (The reality was less than and more than their surmise.  In truth—and I can only say this in hindsight—public school damaged my interest in learning.  My birthday is in October, roughly five to six weeks into the school year.  When my mother first tried to enroll me, I was only four years old.  They wouldn’t take me, despite the immanence of my turning five.  I had to wait a year.  When I turned six, they pulled me out of kindergarten and put me in first grade, “where I belonged”.  The first grade teacher expected me—and the half dozen others who suffered the same fate—to simply catch up, without any remedial tutoring.  Needless to say, this put me off the whole thing.  That and the fact that classes were boring combined to make me a rather bad student.)

    In fact, I only ever received a spanking in school once, and that for something I didn’t do.  Nevertheless, the threat was there and if this contributed to my somewhat better performance, then so be it.  Personally, I don’t think so.  For one, my grades didn’t improve all that much.  For another, the class sizes were smaller and we did get more attention from the teachers.

    Along with this, though, came religious instruction.

    Somewhere between my entry into this school in third grade and graduation I became an insatiable reader, especially of science fiction.

    Reading alone would have made me odd.  But, like all misfits, my peculiarities came in multiples.  I was a bit puny, always had been, and abhorred pain, which made me an easy target for bullies.  In time I was the brunt of most class jokes.  In fifth grade I needed glasses.  Not only were they black horn-rims, they were bifocals.  To make matters worse, I didn’t like—or understand—cars, sports, or rock’n’roll.  Socially, I was a cipher.  Today you’d say nerd.  (No pocket protector, though; never had one of those.)  But on top of all that, I read.  All the time, whenever I could.  At recess I’d sneak upstairs to a spot on the stage I’d found where no one could find me, and read.  I never was found, even though teachers were looking for me, too.

    Needless to say, I got teased about the reading.

    My best friend sat in front of me in seventh grade.  Greg was very tall for his age and was one of the two boys in the school that no one ever challenged.  We’re still friends.  I tried to get him to read some of my books, but none of them really interested him.  He never questioned my reading, though, until one day his curiosity overwhelmed him.

    I just happened to be reading Lord of Light at the moment Greg chose to turn around and ask  “Why do you read so much?”

    I just looked at him.  I have no idea what went through my mind, but I can make some good guesses.  The thing to say—the truth, which, as good christians, we were taught was next to God—would have been “Because I like it.  It’s fun.”  But this was demonstrably Not True, since very few others of my peers thought it was fun.  Reading was hard, like homework.  Why would you do it if you didn’t have to?  Besides, another good christian virtue was to avoid things that had no other function than pleasure.  We did a lot of things because they were “just” fun, but we knew better than to admit to them.  It was okay to have fun as long as some other, more salient purpose was simultaneously fulfilled.  So I said “Well, I learn things.”

    Greg looked skeptical.  “Like what?  I mean, what are you learning from—what is that?  Lord of Light?”

    “Uh…”  I gazed at the cover of the book, an Avon edition with a black cover and a neat little illustration that looked semi-Indian.  What was I learning from it?  I grabbed at something.  “Well, I’m learning about the Hindu religion.”

    Greg laughed and snorted derisively.  He snatched the book from my hand and studied it.  “This is science fiction.  Why would you be learning about Hindus in this?”

    I was running out of things to say.  I reached for the book and he held it annoyingly out of reach.  He started reading the cover blurb out loud, laughing, mispronouncing words.

    Attracting attention.

    Mr. Obermann, our teacher—and the school principal—suddenly snatched it from Greg’s hand.  Mr. Obermann looked about ninety, but in a George C. Scott kind of robust way.  He glared at us for a few seconds and returned to his desk.

    I watched him for a time—it was supposed to be a study period—and saw him looking the book over.  He frowned deeply and looked at me.  Then he called me to the front of the class.

    “What is this?” he asked, tapping the book.

    “A novel.”

    “What about?”

    Not again.  I have since learned that many very good books, when reduced to paragraph long descriptions, sound ridiculous, but I didn’t quite understand this then.  I tried to explain.  He cut me off, opened a desk drawer, and dropped it in.

    He did not return it to me at the end of the day.  When I asked him about it he said something about material I had no business reading.

    So I told my parents about it.

    My mother took the time to come to school the next day.  She insisted I sit in on her meeting with Mr. Obermann.  She wanted to know why I had not had my book returned and he started explaining about the unsuitability of the subject matter and so on.  Mom interrupted.

    “You’re telling me you don’t want him learning anything about other religions?”

    “This is a Lutheran school.  That’s what we teach here.”

    “I see.  Do you also teach intolerance?”

    Mr. Obermann reddened.  “Mrs. Tiedemann—”

    “I’ll thank you not to censor my son’s reading.  If he can’t handle it, he won’t read it.”

    I was sent back to class then, so I don’t know what else transpired.  My book was returned with an admonition not to bring it to school anymore.

    Given how uncomfortable Mr. Obermann became, I made a practice over the next several months of bringing other, hopefully radical books to class.  And reading them.  In retrospect I suppose my parents were right.  I needed a strict, disciplinary environment in which to improve my learning skills.  Thanks to Zelazny, I learned an important lesson.  It took me years to realize exactly what it was, but the seed was planted there.

    If someone tries to make you defend what you read—or that you read—remember that slogan from Harley-Davidson:  If I have to explain it, you wouldn’t understand.  Just give them a book and tell them to try it out.

  • Outgrowing Illusions

    I met my first real live, honest-to-goodness science fiction writer when I was twelve.  It was a sobering experience.  Several illusions dissipated in a cloud of reality and it has contoured my thinking about writers in general ever since—unjustly, since the illusions banished had really little to do with writing.

    Children tend to take things at face value, approaching life with a literalness that is too often confused with naivete.  Perhaps this is due to the way in which a child’s expectations—often of the most sophisticated construction, like fiction—collide so painfully with reality.

    Whatever the cause, I went to Carpenter Branch Public Library with a head full of expectations, most of which were based with tortuous logic on the artifacts singularly important to me up to that point—television and books.  My father had seen the notice in the newspaper a week earlier and told me about it, knowing full well my love of science fiction and my complete disregard for newspapers.  (To me, then, the only useful part of a paper was the movie section or, on the weekend, the tv guide.  Oh, yes, the comics, but even these failed to hold my attention.  I had comic books in genres absent from the daily comics page.  At the profoundly serious age of twelve I believed that comics intended only to be laughed at were for kids.)

    The evening of The Event, a week night, saw me being dropped off at the library by my mother.  I was to wait when it was over if she hadn’t returned from the supermarket.

    Carpenter Branch Library is, still, a rather Gothic structure of granite resembling slightly a English castle or some American architect’s idea of one.  It’s blocky and solid and very serious-looking.  There were then two sections.  (It has since undergone a major reconstruction and while it has the same basic idea, the two sections have been combined into a single space and some of the charm has been lost.)  The main building housed the “adult” library.  A smaller annex, reached by way of a short hallway with stained glass windows, was the childrens section.  Interestingly, all the science fiction in the library was shelved here, right along with Winnie-the-Pooh, Encyclopedia Brown, and others.  There was fantasy elsewhere, but I knew next to nothing about that.  Lin Carter hadn’t even begun his Adult Fantasy series for Ballantine.

    About a dozen, maybe fifteen of us gathered for The Event.  I knew none of the other kids.  No one from my school had come, which was just as well as far as I was concerned.  It was obvious several of the others knew each other.  I was asked a couple of times about favorite books and authors and had I read much of tonight’s speaker, but I was inordinately shy and my responses did not invite further conversation.

    Chairs had been set out and a librarian asked us to take seats, our guest would be out shortly.  We settled down and waited and finally he came out of an office to one side.

    My expectations of the world…well, I certainly expected to grow up to be very different than I saw myself then.  I was small, rather puny, and had been an easy, perpetual target for class bullies since I’d been in school.  I took comfort in the fables of empowerment in which I immersed myself.  One of the reasons I loved science fiction then, though I did not consciously understand this, was that much of it depicted worlds in which physical prowess was all but superfluous.  I did, however, read plenty that had to do with just such prowess.  I watched a lot of it on tv, loved movies about such characters, and had unfortunately built an image of the creators that conformed to their characters.  Even then I had stirrings of desire to one day be a Writer and of course I would be a writer like one of these, my idols, who were the Gray Lensman, Lazarus Long, Ned Land, the Dorsai, the Legionnaires of Space.

    Out stepped the first writer I had ever seen “in the flesh” and all my illusions died.

    I asked no questions that night.  I spent most of the session trying not to let my disappointment show.  Thick glasses, portly, no chin to speak of, and wearing an ordinary suit and tie.  I don’t remember a single thing he said.

    What I do remember was his enthusiasm.  It was familiar.  I understood it.  He loved science fiction.

    Over the next several weeks I rewrote him in my imagination.  He received a make-over.  But more important, it sank in past all the other nonessentials that here was an adult—a grown-up, dull, boring, responsible—who loved science fiction.  Loved it!  All the other adults I knew either didn’t understand it or thought it was a waste of time.  One of my teachers actually opined that it was somehow blasphemous because it suggested that we weren’t Jehovah’s one and only single most important creation.  In fact, most of my peers thought I was weird for reading the stuff.  Oh, they liked the movies and the tv shows, but books?  (To be fair, many of them would have found reading for pleasure regardless of genre a singularly bizarre idea—these were largely blue-collar kids who pretty much regarded school as something they had to “get through” before they could do what they wanted, and reading was for sissies.  The fact that I read was bad no matter what.  That it was science fiction was just sauce for the goose.)

    As time passed I stripped away everything else about that night and kept the one thing of value gripped tightly.  It was a validating experience.  I wasn’t weird or broken or from another planet.  And I could look forward to an adulthood in which I could still love science fiction.  It was possible.  After all, I’d met an adult who loved it.

  • Beginnings of a Lifelong (Addiction) Love

    When I became infected by literary influenza (a longterm, chronic condition treatable
    by a steady diet of words) I had four sources of books.  The library, of course, both the one at school and the public one; the books my mother had bought through the Doubleday Book Club and had stored in boxes in the basement; the Scholastic Book Club at school; and Leukens’ Pharmacy around the corner from my house.

    At first my reading tended to be omnivorous, with strong leanings toward books upon
    which favorite films had been based.  But these weren’t that easily obtainable then.  Jules
    Verne and H.G. Wells were the most prominent examples—they along with many other
    writers whose works comprise the category Classics.  My mother’s collection contained
    mostly contemporary mainstream—contemporary to her youth and late adolescence, writers we seldom hear of these days.  Sometimes I wonder if any of them will be read in centuries to come and which, if any, will become the basis of new canonical debates.  Some were prominent writers at one time: Paul Gallico, Frank Yerby, Kathleen Winsor, Mildred Savage, Paul Horgan, Edison Marshall, Norah Lofts.  I haven’t seen their names on anything, reprint or otherwise, for a long time.  I went to a parochial school, so the books in that library were limited by the strictures of religious sensibilities.  As to the Scholastic Book Club, it seems to me now that they consistently underestimated the sophistication of its customers.  Still, I made considerable use of it.  Flyers were passed around in class periodically with an order form attached.  After a couple years, it got so the orders came in two boxes.  One contained the books everyone else ordered, the other box was all mine.

    There was very little science fiction available through these sources.  Even the public
    library I went to had little at first.

    But Mr. Leukens stocked the stuff.

    Summer days soon entailed almost daily walks down the block, around the corner, up
    to the next intersection, and across the street to the pharmacy.  This was the real thing.  He even had a soda jerk and you could buy honest-to-goodness Cherry Cokes and hand-dipped malts, served by a high school student in a paper apron and cap.  Along one wall—to the left as you entered—stood the magazine rack.  This one was made of wood, but the design hasn’t changed fundamentally since.  Leukens’ stocked a lot of science fiction magazines, which you could read there if you bought something at the fountain.  I pored over the pages of Worlds of IF, Galaxy, Venture, Analog, and  F&SF.  The word at the time was “keen”.

    But to the right of the big glass door, just as you came in, was a circular rack filled
    with paperbacks.  I have no idea how orders were handled then—I gather Mr. Leukens had very little say in what paperbacks he received and certainly there was no logic to what you found in wire slots—but he seemed to have a source for some of the neatest books.

    The summer of ’67, when the country was beginning to be impacted by the emergent
    Youth Culture and the Summer of Love was on-going, I bought my very first Isaac Asimov book, plucked from the circular rack in Leukens’ Pharmacy.  It was Foundation and Empire, the Avon edition with the Punchatz cover.  I didn’t know what a trilogy was, but the back cover copy alluded to two more books related to this one.

    The book simply felt important to me.  There is an aesthetic to the physicality of
    books rarely talked about, but everyone acknowledges, even publishers, else why so much money and effort taken on covers?  But there is a smell, a feel, things only incidentally related to the text, but details that can shape a book’s reception.  This book represented everything I wanted in those terms.  I didn’t realize this at the time, but it turned out that way.  This, I thought, was what a book—especially a science fiction book—was supposed to be.

    Then I read it.

    What is the process of imprinting that goes on between a reader and a text?  What is
    it that creates a reader, transforms someone passive into someone active in the pursuit of reading?  I have no way to reconstruct the experience, only the memory that it was a
    complete one.  I took that book home, having spent all of seventy-five cents on it, and read it over the next few days and became a science fiction fan.  The magazines hadn’t done it, much as I liked them.  I still read westerns and comic books and war stories and if you’d asked me then what my favorite television shows were I’d have given a list of ten or twelve, not even half of which were sf.  Certainly Star Trek was on at the time, but I’d missed the first season because of parental disapproval (my mother thought it would give me nightmares) so I can honestly say that, while my aesthetic had been prepared by a lot of science fiction, it wasn’t until this encounter that I became utterly enamored of the genre.

    It took me nearly a year to track down the other two volumes.  I haunted Leukens’
    Pharmacy waiting for them to arrive.  I had no idea how unlikely it was that he’d actually
    get them in, only faith that if I waited long enough they’d turn up.  In the meantime, I rarely left the pharmacy emptyhanded.

    Years later the incongruity of it all struck me with a large dose of melancholy.  The
    pharmacy is gone now, of course, part of a vanishing feature of our culture.  Leukens’
    Pharmacy was a hold over from a mythic American past.  Ironic that I had encountered the future within its fading reality.

  • Institutional Abuse and its Discontents

    William Donahue is the head of the Catholic League in America.  Basically, he’s an apologist for all things Roman Catholic, and he comes across like an old line political boss from Chicago or the Lower East Side.  Loud, aggressive, with just enough facts to make him sound like a heavy-weight in more than just bluster.

    In the recent revelations about child abuse in European Catholic institutions and some allegations that the current Pope was responsible for some of it because he was in charge of the supervising organization at the time (which seems like a fairly straightforward argument to me), Donahue went on the attack and in one instance from the Fifties he blamed the parents for not going to the police.

    Everyone I have ever known who is not a Catholic has the same reaction—why didn’t the parents call the police?  Catholic reactions vary depending on age, but by and large this really misses the point.  All it says about these people who didn’t call the authorities is that they were truly devout Catholics, which is just what the Church wanted them to be.  They believed their priests.

    And let’s be honest, it took most of the Seventies for the whole issue of child sexual abuse to emerge from the shadows of “We don’t want to know about this” Ostrich behavior on the part of society in general and most of the Eighties to learn just how not innocent some children can be before this matter drew serious attention.  Prior to the Seventies people tended to think kids “made shit up” all the time and couldn’t be trusted to (a) tell the truth or (b) know what the truth is.  The myths about who does what and when still pervade the culture and the majority of folks (probably) still think pedophilia is the same as homosexuality.  So to assume that way back then people would run to the cops when a little kid said “Father so-and-so played with my wee-wee” is naive and a bit amnesiac.

    Add to that the strong hold Catholicism asserts on its adherents…

    A reasonable question is, what about non Catholic institutions?  A report here discusses the numbers for Protestant churches and the difficulties in collecting and collating the data.  The numbers actually place the incidents on par with claims made against the Catholic Church.  The numbers aren’t that different.

    What is different is the institutional reaction, and that’s where people like Donahue come in.  Protestant denominations do not have the same centralized organizational structure that the Catholic Church has.  When a local minister gets into trouble, or when a bishop finds himself in legal straits, it’s on him.  What makes the Catholic situation odious is the whole attitude the Church takes toward the obligations it expects from its adherents, the responsibilities entailed on the part of the priest, and the level of betrayal which ensues both when abuse is alleged (and demonstrated) and when the Church has moved to cover it up.

    Blaming the parents is a cheap shot.  They were being good Catholics and trusted their priest.  That’s what it meant to be a Catholic then.  I recall no such obligation of trust in my days as a Lutheran.  Sure, we expected we could trust our pastors, but he didn’t enjoy any special immunity if he did something he shouldn’t have done.

    It is not the numbers that are at issue in this.  It is the betrayal.  The nature of trust involved and the destruction of that trust.  Do I think these people were foolish to hold such opinions of their parish priests?  Maybe.  Do I understand it?  Sure.  That’s what they were taught.  The heinous nature of the betrayal only made the break harder to achieve and more painful to endure.

    Do I think institutions ought to expect, command, and hold such trust?  No.  That’s on the Church, though.  For fifteen centuries they’ve rejecting any kind of “eyes open” approach on the part of congregations.  Trust has always been expected to be absolute and blind.  Now they’re paying for it.

    It’s just too bad so many innocent people have to fork over the interest.