Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • My World of Tomorrow

    This weekend I’ll be attending the local science fiction convention, Archon.  I’ve only missed a couple of these since 1982, when Donna and I went to out very first SF convention, Archon 6. Stephen King was guest of honor and we got to meet many of the writers we’d been reading and enjoying, some, at least in my case, for many years.  Until that year I hadn’t even known such things happened.

    Science fiction for me was part of the fundamental bedrock of my life’s ambitions.  Not just writing it or reading it, but in a very real sense living it.  It is difficult to recapture that youthful, naïve enthusiasm for all that was the future.  The vistas of spaceships, new cities, alien worlds all fed a growing æsthetic of the shapes and content of the world I wanted very much to live in.

    I’ve written before of some of the aspects of my childhood and adolescence that were not especially wonderful.  My love of SF came out of that, certainly, but it was altogether more positive than merely a flight response from the crap of a less than comfortable present.  I really thought, through a great deal of my life, that the world was heading to a better place.  I found the informing templates and ideas of that world in science fiction, in the positivist philosophy underlying so much of it.

    And I liked that world!

    It was not a world driven by bigotry or senseless competition for competition’s sake.  It was not a world where deprivation was acceptable because of innate fatalism or entrenched greed.  It was not a world that lumped people into categories according to theories of race or economics that demanded subclasses.

    True, a great many of the novels and stories were about exactly those things, showing worlds where such attitudes and trends dominated.  But they were always shown as examples of where not to go.  You could read the paranoid bureaucratic nightmares of Philip K. Dick and know that he was telling us “Be careful, or it will turn out this way.”  We could read the dystopias of a Ballard or an Aldiss and see them as warnings, as “if this goes on” parables.

    You could also read Ursula Le Guin and see the possibilities of alternative pathways.  You could read Poul Anderson and see the magnificent civilization we might build.  You could read Clarke and glean some idea of how people could become more than themselves.

    You could see the future.

    And what did that future offer?  By the time I was eighteen I knew I wanted to live in a world in which we are all taken as who we are, humans beings, and nothing offered to one group was denied another just because.  I recognized that men and women are equals, that our dreams and ambitions are not expanded or diminished by virtue of gender.  I understood that building is always more important than tearing down.  I discovered that Going There was vital and that the obstacles to it were minor, transitory things that sometimes we see as too big to surmount, but which are always surmountable.

    Sure, these are lessons that are drawn from philosophy and science and ethics.  You can get to them by many paths.  I just happened to have gotten to them through science fiction.

    I envisioned a world wherein people can engage and interact with each other fearlessly, without arbitrary barriers, and we can all be as much as we wish to be, in whatever way we wish to be it.

    So imagine my disappointment as I watch the world veer sharply in so many ways from that future.  A world where people with no imagination, avaricious or power hungry, people of truncated and stunted souls are gaining ground and closing those doors.

    There is a girl in Pakistan who may yet die.  She’s 14 years old and she was shot by the Taliban because she dared to stand against them.  She assumed her right to go to school, something the Taliban refuse to accept—females should not go to school—and rather than engage her ideas they shot her to silence her.

    In our own country we have men in places of power who think women shouldn’t have the right to control their own bodies, others who opine that maybe slavery wasn’t so bad after all, others who deny the legitimacy of science because it contradicts their wishes and prejudices.

    This is not the world I imagined.  Why would any sane person deny anyone the right to an education?  How could the community around this girl even tacitly support this idea?  This is so utterly alien to me that it is incomprehensible.  This is evil.  This is not the world of tomorrow, but some kind of limpet world, hermetically sealed inside its own seething ignorance that, like a tumor, threatens everything that I, for one, believe is worth while.

    So I write.  I write stories and I write this blog and I write reviews and I write and I talk and I argue.  It is disheartening to me how many people use their ignorance as a barrier to possibility, to change, to hope.  I can’t help sometimes but think that they would have benefited in their childhood from more science fiction.

    I still have hope.  It still comes from the source well of my childhood imagination, that we can build a better world.  If that’s naïve, well, so be it.  Harsh reality, unmitigated by dreams of beauty and wonder, makes brutes of us all.

    See you at Archon?

     

  • Affirmative Action Revisited (Again)

    This will be brief.  The Supreme Court is set to hear another case about affirmative action in education.  A Texas student was not accepted for the University of Texas and has claimed that the only difference between her and other students who did get in is her skin color—she’s white.

    Now, by all accounts, she is an excellent student.  According to UT, though, she wasn’t good enough.  They use two metrics to select enrollees—academic scores and what they call “personal achievement” indices, which include extracurricular activities and an essay which is supposed to reveal leadership potential and other qualities that can’t be scored on a test.  UT claimed her academics just weren’t good enough.

    I don’t know the particulars of her case, but one thing that always seems to be left out of reports about this sort of thing is any mention of the value of “higher education.”

    To put it simply, if the entire worth of a college education was about academics—what you learn in the classroom, how well you learn it, and how that fits you for life after schooling—then the critics of affirmative action are absolutely right.  The best qualified students should always have first dibs on places in good colleges and universities.  Smarts should count above all else.  If you’re a straight A student with an I.Q. through the ceiling, there should be no reason to bar you.  Racial quotas would in that case be pointless, because the only thing that would matter is a provable command of knowledge and the capacity to apply it.

    What never gets mentioned—and which I suspect everyone knows—is that the value of a college degree has almost nothing to do with that.  Maybe at one time it did, but no longer.

    What that degree gets you is entreé.  It’s the Old School Tie, the Secret Password, the Letter of Introduction, the Inside Edge, and has nothing to do with how smart or knowledgeable you may be.  That degree gets you preferred treatment in the game of life.

    At least, it used to.  Currently, not so much, although it still provides an edge in the job market.

    In that case, affirmative action is absolutely necessary, because businesses will use any basis to cull applicants, and a degree from a good college or university is an easy one.

    If you can’t get into the school in the first place, you are starting out in second or third place, and if you can’t get in because of ethnicity, well…

    Yes, it’s more complicated than that, especially today, but it is not irrelevant as the critics of affirmative action claim.  Because these schools do not admit only the best.  There are a lot of legacy enrollments, students who get in because they have an alumni card to play, and others who get bought in because their families are rich and maybe endow the school.  Academics have little to do with that and let us not even begin to talk about athletic scholarships that in many instances are even more divorced from intellectual ability.

    (I have no doubt that a significant majority of students in any college are there by virtue of ability.  We aren’t talking about the middle 70% but the people who bookend those students—the privileged and the underprivileged.)

    So.  If the game were all about what you do in the classroom, then I agree, affirmative action serves no useful purpose (after all, if it were all about the brains, skin color would be just as irrelevant as any other non-academic factor).  But since we all know—even if we won’t actually talk about it—that it is about prestige and a kind of club membership, then affirmative action is absolutely necessary.

    You might wonder how I can say these things about our wonderful higher education system.  I’m glad you asked.

    Personal experience.  I’ve worked with, worked for, and had working for me a number of college-degreed people.  I never found them to be superior, in the fields in which I worked, than someone trained on-the-job, as it were—in fact, all of them, without exception, required on-the-job training since their much-ballyhooed degrees had not taught them what they needed in order to actually work in their fields—and in several instances I found them below acceptable ability.  And arrogant about it.  (“I have a B.A. from SmartAss U!  What do you mean I don’t qualify?”)

    (What college and university provide is a place and an opportunity to learn.  For the dedicated scholar, it is one of the most ideal environments in which to expand knowledge and interact with people who can help you hone your intellect.  But to society, that seems not to be the important thing.  People who attend and take no degree are seen somehow as failures.  It’s the degree, because everyone implicitly knows that this is the magic key and what you actually know has no intrinsic value to anyone else until it manifests as positive contribution.  You don’t get to show that without the job and you all-too-often don’t get the job without the ticket.  It’s not how smart you are but how smart other people say you are.)

    Human history can be tracked in many ways, by many trends and institutions.  Club Membership has always been a preferred method of keeping the so-called Masses out of the halls of privilege.  Brains rarely had anything to do with membership.  University affiliation is just one of those ways to keep “undesirables” out.  It has been used to keep women out, keep minorities out, keep the “lower orders” out.  Heaven forbid some kid from a slum demonstrate higher intelligence and better grasp of the material than the spit-polished scion of an old money family!  Why, next you’ll be advocating (gasp) democracy!

  • It Was Fifty Years Ago, Mr. Bond

    “Do you expect me to talk?”

    “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

    The exchange between Bond and Goldfinger may sum up the attitude of many who are tired, offended, or otherwise ambivalent or disinterested in the absurdly long career of the improbable James Bond, 007.  Even those of us who have been more or less unable to let go our adolescent attachment to the character have doubtless wondered why he hasn’t just died.

    He should have, certainly after the criminal treatment he endured toward the middle and end of the Roger Moore years.  All due respect to Mr. Moore (he didn’t write the films, he had probably less control than most leading men), I for one never quite accepted him as Bond.  He was always a bit too pretty, a bit too sophisticated, a bit too…light.

    But the movies were popular, he kept signing on, and we endured, waiting for the next incarnation of Sean Connery.

    The iconic Bond image of Connery with the long-barreled Walther (yes, that thing was a Walther, but it was an air gun because the actual prop hadn’t arrived for the photo shoot) which was never seen in any of the Bond films is not the one that summed up the character for me.  Rather it was this one:

    The first real good look at Bond, at the L’Circle club at the beginning of Doctor No.  This is the image that made me want to be Bond— utterly unconcerned, cool, detached, and completely confident within himself.  He’s playing a fairly expensive game of bacarat and he obviously could care less whether he wins or loses.  (Of course, this is not true—Bond always cared about that, but not over trivial things.  The trivial things simple fell in line when he walked into the room, and this was another characteristic that made him, to a clumsy, hormone-laced adolescent, such an enviable figure.  How badly I wanted to simply not give a damn and how thoroughly I gave a damn about not being able to do that.)

    I saw that first Bond film on first release. I was eight at the time and it wasn’t the women that got me, it was that dangerous cool he had at his disposal.  Later, as I reached puberty, the women became important, but till then it was being lethal—and not using it—that was the thing.

    And dressing well and talking well and comporting yourself as if you knew why you were there and what you were doing.  It was a total package that was the only viable replacement for the stoic gunslinger in the westerns.  In the scope of a kid’s imagination, Bond was doable.

    I wrote an essay for one of the BenBella Smartpop anthologies, James Bond In The 21st Century riffing on an imaginary history of the films, with a departure from Sean Connery.  It could have happened, Fleming was not taken with Connery at first, and there were others who could have filled the role.  (Fleming’s choice was David Niven, which, given the physicality of the character, is kind of absurd.  But it explains the subsequent choices, I think, of actors.)  It was also an alternate history of the franchise had it not been the hit that it was.  It was a fun piece to write, but it addressed a serious question.

    Why did a franchise that became, for a time, so massively ridiculous continue to be such a big deal?

    I think the answer is in the new manifestation.  Daniel Craig (and the writers) has gone back to the source in many ways and given us a Bond more in line with Fleming’s original conception of someone who is genuinely dangerous who wears a veneer of polish, culture, and civilization.

    Once again, though, we harken back to that first on-screen look at Bond and see its reemergence in Craig’s portrayal.  Detached, completely in control, cool, and competent.

    But with a difference for the films.

    He’s vulnerable.

    The last time Bond was vulnerable was in On Her Majestie’s Secret Service and Tracy Bond.  After that, he was in all but the Kryptonian origin, Superman.  It became the trademark.  Nothing got through, not really.  He had his empathy boxed up and set to one side, to be taken out on special occasions.

    And there’s an appeal to that, to be sure.  We have all been undone by our notoriously fickle and sabotaging emotions, made fools of, acted stupidly.  What would we give to be able to avoid all that?

    Well, the price is too high, but we have fantasy characters through which to pretend.

    But I think it goes too far and they become so unlikely—not in their actions, the plots that give them a showcase, but in their emotional lives—that we cannot identify with them at all.  All we have then are the toys, the lifestyle, the fashions, and the rollercoaster ride of an action sequence.

    Craig has been allowed to open Bond up so we can reconnect, albeit in a small way, with the pathetic human being caged behind the armor.  The fact that Craig is a first-rate actor (possibly better than Connery even in his prime) doesn’t hurt.

    Bond has survived, though, because at his base he still represents a level of competence in a fickle, dangerous world we would all like to tap into.  Bond is always centered, he always knows what he’s about and how to act on that knowledge, and that is a very attractive ideal.  When you look at the first three Bond films, you can see that and a slightly vulnerable man, one who doesn’t always get it right, who can become involved, and can therefore be hurt. After Thunderball they became all about the gadgets and some surreal good vs evil drama that actually gave a good shadow-theater representation of the world at large.

    The other thing that has carried us through so many really awful Bond films, though, is the myth of the uninvolved sybarite.  He comes in, takes his pleasure, kills the bad guy, and leaves unscathed.  He’s a moral avenger who gets to party occasionally.  His reward for doing the right thing was good food, fast cars, fine clothes, and great sex.  Bond never got fat, never caught a ticket or the clap, never left behind a single mom, and always looked good.  In return, he saved the world.  There was no sacrifice, really—he was a mercenary.

    Except that’s not what Fleming wrote.  And when they rebooted the franchise and chose to do Casino Royale, they put that in there.  It may be ignored in subsequent films (I hope not, it’s what elevates Bond above the common), but it was there—Bond is sacrificing his soul.

    That first novel, Casino Royale, was about that.  Bond was a new agent, freshly-minted with a 007 license, and fully a third of the book is him in hospital, working through the emotional and moral calculus of continuing to do this ugly, brutal job.  To their credit, the makers of the first Craig film kept that in.  We were even, dimly, shown its conclusion in Quantum of Solace, where at the end Bond has made his choice, and put on the armor.

    It will be interesting to see if they continue to keep him human, if only slightly, or if they’ll do what they did before and turn him into the Road Runner getting one over on all the coyotes on the planet.

    Happy birthday, Mr. Bond.

  • Restraint

    I went back to the gym this morning.  First time in almost two months.

    For those just coming upon this site, I suffered an attack of appendicitis on August 10th.  Three weeks later, there were complications resulting in another hospital stay and further weeks of recovery.

    The surgical wound is now, for all intents and purposes, healed.  So sayeth my primary physician.

    But the doctors at the hospital said no lifting anything over 10 lbs for six weeks.  Donna decided that the second visit for the complications reset that clock, though most of the physicians involved disagreed.  Well, I have to live with Donna, so…

    But this morning we walked the dog—one mile (we have a pedometer now)—and went to the gym.  Donna watched me like a hawk.

    Yes, I lifted more than 10 lbs, but not by much.  Compared to what I was doing in July, today’s workout was pathetic.  But I got through a truncated routine without injury.  We aren’t going for records here, folks, just reestablishing a routine and carefully, oh so carefully, working my way back to something like good shape.

    It hasn’t hurt that I dropped 21 lbs since surgery.  My stomach has shrunk as well, so I’m eating less, and I intend to keep it that way.

    It’s hard.  I’m feeling better, so naturally I feel like I can do more.  And my appetite has definitely returned.  Keeping myself inside new limits is difficult.  The urge to do more, do as much as I think I can, is very strong, and I know I should not.  I should listen to Donna, who has been very good about taking care of me.  And I am.  I held back.  I restrained myself.

    This is not natural for me.

    I’ve been told that it takes the better part of a year to fully recover from major surgery.  There are times I believe it.  But I also believe that you have to push yourself a little.  Becoming comfortable with limits that should only be temporary is a sure way to lose ground, to settle for less.

    Not gonna do that.

    But, hey, I went back to the gym today and nothing hurts!

    It’s a start.

  • Rights

    A couple of posts back I made a claim that seems to have upset a few people, namely that Rights (as we generally use the term) are legal constructs, not something inherent in nature, even though we talk about them as if they were.  One criticism, quite correctly, pointed out that one of the bases of the Enlightenment was a recognition that human rights emerged out of a clear understanding of Natural Law, and that civil law was necessarily grounded in that understanding.

    True, that is how we formulate it.  And it may well be that there is, somewhere, a fundamental natural basis on which we build our moral and legal houses.  But it is not nature from which it is derived in the sense of the physical universe in which we exist—clearly we order our social systems more often in contravention of nature than in imitation—but Nature in the sense that Spinoza and possibly others like Kant and Hegel understood the term, namely reality as we perceive it in respect to our condition.  This is in some ways an abstruse and complex concept and contrary to popular usage it is not common sensical or self-evidently apparent.

    Why do I say that?  Because we are still arguing over what it is we’re trying to describe.

    One of the elements of criticism leveled at me was a spirited defense of the manifest truth of such things as the Declaration of Independence.  My own argument was only that, while we seem to have accepted the moral injunctions of the Declaration, we are still trying to put those concepts into practice through law because we can’t agree on a common meaning.  This has been the case since Day One of our Republic.

    …all men are created equal…

    Great.  Wonderful.  But what does that mean in practice?

    It’s one of those phrases that would seem to be so self-evidently true that it requires no further explanation and should automatically be regarded by all as obvious and put into immediate practice.  Never mind the obvious failures to prevent avaricious and corrupt people to flout such a principle, it has been the case that even people of good will and social conscience have simply not agreed on the supposed self-evident meaning of that phrase.

    Simply put, which men?  All men?  What about women?  Or, at the time it was written, slaves?  What about people in other countries?  What does this mean in terms of resources?  Equal how?  Does this make it incumbent on us to guarantee equality, even for those who apparently are incapable of the unstated but quite real consequent responsibilities?  Should some be held back in order not to tip the scales of social justice unfairly?  And what about those who simply reject that formulation?

    If you think this is an academic issue, remember that in the early Republic, not only were slaves and women held to be inferior to “men” but men of property were implicitly and in practice accorded greater rights than those with nothing—like the vote.  Nor did this begin to change until Jacksonian Democracy start the erosion of social privilege in matters of politics.

    Kant, among others, claimed that liberty was based on the free will and its unimpeded exercise and that free will was a product of Reason.  Reason, however, as a necessary aspect of nature, that all humans possessed.  I am not indulging hyperbole when I point out that Reason is a rare commodity, exercised seldom, and usually poorly, and needs nurturing in order to be of benefit to the individual.  Humans possess a cleverness, a proclivity for pattern-seeking and its concomitant capacities for problem-solving at possibly the highest level of any creature on the planet.  But I think it fair to say that this is not what Kant meant by Reason.  He meant the ability to indulge abstraction and thereby project imagination onto a landscape and formulate conceptions not immediate evident.

    Sorry, but I do not believe that is a skill people are born with.  It is a potential, a latent capacity which must be seeded, cared for, fed, and grown.  It is not, by definition, “natural” in the way I think many people conceive the term.  It is only natural in that it is something humans as a species have a potential ability to practice, but we do not necessarily grow up with it.  The pattern-seeking which seems to be hardwired into our brains is generally taken as reason, especially when it produces useful results in environmental manipulation and social construction.  But it ultimately lacks the purely abstract aspect that leads to what we can honestly call ratiocination.  It does not lead to philosophy.

    And it is out of philosophy that any concept of Rights emerges.

    I confess here that this is a rather scary proposition.  Historically, humans base their law on a concept of Higher Order Morality, the assumption that there is an authority above our own which requires certain normative standards.  God, in other words.  A Law Giver.  It is presumed that human law is a reflection of this higher law.  Over time that higher law has morphed into what, during the Enlightenment, became codified as Natural Law.  It is reassuring to believe that we aren’t actually all on our own.

    But even Kant, intuitively or otherwise, seems to have sensed that we are, ultimately, on our own.  In his 1784 essay An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? he states in the first paragraph:

    “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.  Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”

    In other words, maturity, as pertains to the ability to reason, is the point at which we stand on our own, without the crutches of dependency on authority-qua-authority.  By definition, this would include assumed Higher Order sources of law.

    Given the diverse and ever-conflicting nature of civil discourse and the constant disagreement over what is morally defensible within a liberal framework (and by liberal I do not mean its current defamed definition, but the traditional meaning of Liberty of the individual to act as he or she will free of arbitrary constraint) obviously we have no clear, definitive explication of what that Higher Order Law might be.

    We’ve been creating it on our own all along.

    Before I am accused of claiming that a concept of individual rights has no basis in moral reasoning, it is equally obvious that it does.  Common human needs and aspirations are clearly universal and the consequences of oppression are equally obvious across all systems.  This much can be seen and understood and that pattern-seeking creature that is the common condition of all humans can here demonstrate a universal sense of good and evil, right and wrong, beneficial and destructive.  We learn, over time, what will or will not secure a beneficial social environment, at least in its basics.

    Abstractions can clarify as well as obfuscate this, which too-often is diminished by such terms as common sense or natural law.

    What Thomas Jefferson wrote and what the Enlightenment-besotted Founders then tried to put into place is an abstraction intended to guarantee freedom of action by barring arbitrary restrictions.

    You will note, please, that in the initial draft of the Constitution, there is no mention of these ideals.  The Articles that form the principle body of our Constitution is a legal framework and no more.  The Bill of Rights was an afterthought, a demand by those opposed to Federalism and fence-sitters without whom ratification would have been impossible.  And even in the Bill of Rights there is no reference to the kind of natural law argument on which many people assume the legitimacy of said system of rights.

    Which all begs the question as I originally phrased it—if “natural law” is so obvious and so “right” why has there been any need to continually wrestle with meaning and intent?  Why would there ever have been the need for a Civil War, 13th and 14th Amendments, and for the purposes of my prior essay, a 19th Amendment?

    Because it is neither obvious nor is it an inevitable recognition that “all men are created equal.”

    In the 1970s, an Equal Rights Amendment struggled for ratification and was defeated by people who, without the need to demonize them, simply disagreed with its stated principles.  Many, while willing to admit the core principle of the amendment as valid, worried over the legal ramifications of its enactment.  Ultimately, two things can be said about its defeat.  One, that we do not all agree on what Equality means or to whom it applies.  And Two, that if you can deny a right through legal mechanisms, obviously you can only grant it through the same mechanisms.

    So when I said that, contrary to our cherished prejudices, Rights are legal constructs, this is what I meant.  Each of us, individually, can choose to act according to our own conception of rights and this need not be based on legal constructs, but as a society it is absurd to talk about self-evident rights outside a legal framework.  Rights, on that level, are consequent upon law, and we say what that is.

    Which means we should be a bit more alert about them than we usually are.  Rights are gained and lost all the time and often, if they don’t affect us directly, we don’t even notice.  We rely too much on this idea that our rights are based on some vague Higher Order—Natural—Law and therefore are self-evident and, in the phrasing of Jefferson, “unalienable”, but this prized chestnut means little in the face of a determined effort by some to rewrite the codes for the rest of us.

    Thank you for your attention.

  • Stats

    I downloaded a new plug-in for my blog Wednesday, a little something called Jetpack from WordPress.  I’d seen other sites with a traffic bar showing visits, and I wanted one.  The urge to know, not necessarily who, but how many people are reading your stuff runs deep.

    The first day of its existence was both gratifying and slightly disappointing.  So far this morning, no one has come to visit.  Oh, well.

    But I ran almost immediately into a snag last night.  I received the notice on my task bar of an update for Jetpack, so I dutifully clicked it—

    —and promptly lost the whole thing.  It informed me that the upgrade failed and the plug-in had been deactivated.  I couldn’t find it in my list of available plug-ins, so I tried to reinstall it.  Which it also would not let me do.  It kept informing me that the folder already existed.  But I couldn’t find the folder in order to expunge it, so I was locked out of downloading the new version of Jetpack.

    Not to worry.  I found something else very much like it, but with fewer features—which is fine, I only wanted the stat function.

    This has happened before.  With maybe two exceptions, every time I’ve changed my blog theme it has been because an upgrade has been offered and when I accepted it, it trashed my files and I lost my theme and had to go get a new one.  This is most annoying, because an inevitable consequence has been that attempts to reinstall the trashed theme result in the “you already have this” message, which bars me from having a theme I really like.

    I have sworn off accepting upgrades.  The only ones that work (knock on particle board) have been the WordPress upgrades.

    I wouldn’t mind so much except there’s this little reminder on my task bar when I have one of these pernicious thingies waiting and I feel annoyed and irritated because I can’t find a way to just say No to them and make the reminder go away.

    If there is one thing about the computer age that is one of the most irritating and cost-inefficient—and hugely expensive for business, I might add—it is this continual upgrading.  I know progress is important, I know things get better with work, I know improvements are made all the time, but damn, give it a rest!  I wonder how many people not directly involved realize just how much systems upgrades and changeovers cost in terms of time and lost productivity.  Even a tiny, tiny enterprise like mine, one guy writing stories.  Hours have I wasted when finally forced to change a software system or configure a new machine or learn a new template.

    The other day I complained about MicroSoft Word.  I dislike Word.  I’ve been using WordPerfect for almost 25 years and for my money, WordPerfect 5.1 is still the gold standard.  Simple, intuitive, did everything I wanted or needed.  Why fuck with it?  But I am now on Version 11.

    The problem is, the publishing industry operates on Word, which is not nearly as easy to use or intuitive.  And there are translation problems converting WP to Word which annoys my agent.

    Also, I am still using Windows XP, which seems to be a very stable platform.  (I still wonder what was so wrong with Windows 98—please, no litany of its sins, it was a rhetorical comment.)  I am told we are now up to Windows 8 and some day I will be forced to junk my current machines, buy all new, and learn a new system.

    Give it a rest.  I mean, seriously.  I know we have to keep the economy going, but this is ridiculous.  It is not the same as the automobile industry.  You can still drive a ’38 DeSoto on today’s roads, and having learned to drive that you can, with one or two minor adjustments, drive a brand new car.  Your old model does not cease to function because the new upgrade won’t allow it to interface with other drivers.

    Still.  I manage.  I’m just cranky.  This is not Luddism, do not for a minute think I am anti-cool tech.  But I also do not have a cell phone*.  What I resent is the overcomplications involved in getting “up to speed” with what it au courant.

    I have to go back to work now.  At least English doesn’t go through upgrades that require us to learn, from the ground up, an entirely new language.

    _________________________________________________

    *Yes, it’s true, I have no cell phone.  Donna has one, but it was purchased exclusively for emergencies when she took a job in West Jericho.  I refuse.  When I’m not home, you don’t have to reach me.  This may sound selfish, and I agree to an extent, but we managed quite well being “disconnected” for significant parts of the day.  I realize eventually I will have to cave in, but for now I will not participate in the Tech For Tech’s Sake culture.  You want to talk to me, send me an email or leave a message on my answering machine, I’ll get back to you.

  • The Other Side

    I have a confession to make.  While I’m going to vote for Obama again, I do not like everything he has done and, even more, am disappointed by some of what he has not done.

    That’s not the confession.  I promised some folks months back that I would write a post wherein I take Obama to task the same way I’ve been going to town on the Republicans.  I was sincere when I made the promise, because I had, in fact, winced often these past four years when Mr. Obama has let me down.  Or not me specifically, but my expectations.  And this is a question of spin.

    All candidates run on a mixture of core issues and hyperbole.  The nature of the race requires sound-byte, slash-and-burn rhetoric, sweeping generalizations, and occasionally over-the-top characterizations of the opponent and promises too big to keep.  We as voters must walk through all this to determine how much of the hyperbole is simple exaggeration and how much of it is outright lying, slander, or total b.s.  As I say, all candidates do this.  Even after they leave office.  (George W. Bush’s acerbic “Do you miss me yet?” is an example of that, to which my response at the time and still is “You’re kidding, right?”)

    Obama campaigned in 2008 on a wide range of issues and made a LOT of promises.  In fact, I believe he holds the record on the number of promises made by a presidential candidate, by a significant factor.  Depending on where he was at the time, he adroitly tailored his message, made the kinds of specific pledges that are ordinarily suicide for a candidate, and won by the biggest landslide since Reagan

    In all those promises, inevitably some were going to go by the wayside, some were going to simply stall, others were going to stand as reminders of betrayal when exactly the opposite happened.

    But in looking back over the last four years—especially in light of what he came into office having to deal with—I can’t find very much to complain about.

    What there is, though, is pretty bad.

    Implicitly and otherwise, Obama promised that business as usual in D.C. was going to change.  Of course, anyone who believed this was naive at best, but there were a few things that he could have done something about.  One is lobbyists.  He promised to close the revolving door, that people in government would not be permitted to leave for jobs as lobbyists and come right back.  Well, he sort of tried that, but then proceeded to issue waivers for certain people.

    The biggest betrayal to my mind at the time was the selection of his economic team.  One may quibble about this, but I think it fair to say that he had something of a mandate to change the way government dealt with the financial sector.  The appointment of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, both of whom had been instrumental in the years of deregulation that had led almost directly to the 2007-08 meltdown, signaled a marked turn-around from expectations.  At the time I looked at that and thought “What the hell?”  Talk about putting the fox in charge of the chickens.  (Certainly an argument could be made that these people understood the problem better than anybody else, but you also can’t tell me that there weren’t equally qualified and talented people with no ties to the last 20 years of fiscal irresponsibility and with a vision consistent with what we’d been led to believe was going to happen.  Elizabeth Warren was certainly such a person, but then he didn’t stand by her when she had Congress running scared that she meant business.)

    Obama fell down, in my view, by the simple omission of demanding a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.  Clinton had foolishly signed its repeal, it had worked for 60 years, its destruction allowed everything that followed to happen, and yet we heard nothing.  Instead we have an overly complex mess of rules that form a Rube-Goldberg assemblage of fingers-in-leaks that overburden everyone, Wall Street and regulators alike.  And while I came to support the auto industry bailout, his administration has made a hash of the housing recovery.

    But the worst thing is the national security betrayals.  I do not approve of the drone program and I certainly do not like the indefinite detention aspect of the NDAA, which we were led to believe he also felt was a bad law.  Yet he signed the reauthorization and now his justice department is trying to overturn a judge’s ruling that indefinite detention is unConstitutional.  I grant you, this is all inherited from Bush, this is a Cheney construct, but that would seem to me all the more reason to do away with it.  Obama needed to nothing but sit back and let the ruling from bench hold sway, but instead he’s arguing for retention of powers I believed he ran opposed to.

    He’s pulled some other stunts.  While I’m not a fan of Big Oil, I actually think the Canadian pipeline should have gone through.  It would have allowed him to stop issuing so many off-shore permits, which have greater possibilities of failure and environmental damage.  For myself, I wanted to see the end of the faith-based initiatives—this is a clear violation of the separation clause and the only thing that might have made it more palatable over what Bush had done would be its expansion to non-christian institutions.  And I’m still waiting for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, which was one of the worst things done on the federal level in education since…I don’t know.

    But for all that, I have to confess that I still find him far more acceptable than what is being offered by his opponents, whose only solutions seem to be slash-and-burn spending cuts—except to the military.

    So while this post is a complaint, an attempt at fair play, I have to apologize to those to whom I pledge a thorough drubbing.  Even when they make mistakes, I can’t seem to get as pissed at the Democrats right now as I do at the Republicans.  I know that sounds like excuse-making, but there it is.

    I’ll try to do better.

  • Still Plodding

    I’m finally able to sit in front of my computer for more than five minutes at a stretch.  (Nothing painful, just really uncomfortable.)  I suppose I’m progressing. My patience abandoned me weeks ago, but since I have almost no energy, it’s not an issue.

    Next Tuesday I have my follow-up at the various clinics to see if I’m doing well enough to be “unplugged” and go on my own.  Which only means that afterward I have to be vigilant for a couple of months in regards to fever, etc.  Last night I discovered I’ve lost 15 pounds, which under normal circumstances I wouldn’t mind terribly much.

    Meantime, I’m doing some reading.  I have a few books going at the same time.  I’m finally reading the first Aubry/Maturin novel, Master and Commander.  This has been recommended to me by so many people whose taste I trust and I have been so utterly put off by it till now that I feel a bit embarrassed.  The big problem is the plot—which proceeds at a snail’s pace.  But I’ve given it the major attention it clearly deserves and I can appreciate what O’Brian was doing.  Not sure I’ll continue on with it, but I can now declare that it is indeed a fine piece of work.

    A couple of history books, and I’m reading Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow.  Yes, this is a reread, but since my first time was forty-plus years ago, it’s virtually a new book, and I guarantee I missed a lot back then.  I’ll be doing a long post about it soon.

    Anyway, I’ve booted up my novel again and I’m noodling with it.  I’m only three or four chapters from done with it, which makes this past month a real annoying waste in my mind.  But the downtime has given me the space to rethink a couple of things, which is all to the good.  A better book will emerge from this.

    So, till later…

    “Rides”

  • Two Steps Forward….

    Well, things slid backward this past Monday.  I had a low-grade fever all weekend and decided if it was still there Monday morning, call the doctor.  Events took charge and I ended up back at Barnes with a soft-tissue infection in half the appendectomy incision.  They did a CT scan to be sure that was all it was and lo!  I have an abscess.

    So another day in the hospital having a drain installed, which is really annoying.  I’m home now and I have a nurse visiting everyday to make sure things track the way they’re supposed to.  There’s a twice-daily routine to go through which is unpleasant but I’m sticking to the program.  I want this over.

    The nurse is cool, a chipper, upbeat woman named Dawn who is both very sociable and very efficient.  I’m not leaving the house till next Wednesday for a clinic visit.  Fingers crossed, in two weeks all the plumbing will be removed and things will resume some form or normal.

    That’s all for now.  I’m getting reading done but not much else.

  • Plodding Along

    For those who may be interested, recovery continues.  I know things are improving because my memory is fairly clear about how bad things were.  Last week, the week before.  But, as is the nature of the critter, we tend only to focus on the present and how crappy it may be.

    But I am getting work done.  I’ve completed the first few prints I intend to exhibit in this year’s Archon art show.  Done the critiques of the short stories for the workshop I’m conducting then.  And just about finished two chapters in the current project.  (About those chapters, it is with wry amusement I note that I was about to doggedly go down the wrong path in one of them when this nonsense struck.  Between the time off and the percocet hell, I realized the mistake I was about to make and corrected it.  Always look for something positive, you know?)

    Other things are better.  Not great.  I seriously doubt I’ll be back to the gym for at least another month.  And my body seems to have entered another phase of healing, because around noon or one o’clock I seem unable to stay awake.  My sleep is deep.  I’m assuming my body knows what it’s doing.

    Part of my reticence involves a growing lack of patience.  I’m getting well enough to start chafing under the restrictions.  I would really like to walk my dog by myself.  I would like to go to the grocery store so that Donna doesn’t have to.  So on and so forth.  I’d like to be able to say I’m catching up on my reading, but that hasn’t been a notable achievement.

    In any case, I’m still alive and that’s the best part.  So till my next entry here, I’ll leave you with a new image and a hope that the rest ofyour summer is just fine.

     

    Sugar Steel Mill