Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • Petty Stuff, Harlan Ellison, and Therbligs

    I am inspired to write this because of two things, one significant, the other merely annoying.  I start with the merely annoying.

    I’m hopelessly behind the curve tech-wise.  I can barely make my way around the internet, and if something melts down on my computer I run in panic from the room wondering who to call to fix it.  Partly, this is a result of being too busy the last three decades to keep up, partly it is a response to the incessant demands of the digital marketplace to constantly, eternally acquire the latest gadget, the newest thingie, the most recent incarnation of Nousmasticator 3.1, all of which is both time consuming to install and maintain and often pretty damn expensive.  As a child I remember jokes about people who had to buy a new car every year, which later morphed into the “planned obsolescence” of Detroit product that required a new model after sixty thousand miles, but the auto industry never had a thing on the computer world.  I resent it.  Perversely, I’ve refused to keep abreast.  This is classic surgical removal of probosci to articulate displeasure with one’s demeanor.

    And it’s petty.

    This morning a notice for an available upgrade appeared in the hopper of my blog and I haplessly accepted it.  My blog promptly disappeared.  After messing with this, on the phone and by email, for over an hour, I discovered that for some reason the upgrade trashed the files of the existing blog template, rendering it unusable.  Since my system indicated that I still had the damn thing in my archives, I was unable to upload a new version and had to install a brand new theme.  You’re looking at it now.  And actually I kinda like it.

    But that’s not the point. I shouldn’t have had to go through all that nonsense.  I do not need another little Gordion knot of dyspeptic resentment toward the nature of the modern world binding itself into my psyche along with all the other little bits of tedious, petty anoetic effluvia cluttering up my memorative gestalt.

    Which brings me to the other inspiration for this piece.

    Recently, I received in the mail volume 6 of Harlan Ellison’s On The Road lectures.  (An aside, briefly, to suggest you avail yourself of some of these, especially if you are an appreciator of the spoken word and good repartee—they are collections of Harlan’s public presentations over his long career and they are a delight.  They are available by mail through here.)  The liner notes of this one comprise a longish essay by Harlan in which he discourses on one of his attributes.

    He is, he claims, a petty man.

    This is also part of his acceptance speech for the Grand Master of Science Fiction Award, given him by SFWA in 2006 (included in this collection, along with Neil Gaiman’s excellent prefatory words).  He’s copping fair on a characteristic he expresses some regret over, some wonderment about, a puzzle, a burden, an inextricable part of his nature.

    My initial reaction was big deal, aren’t we all?  Then I thought he might have been laying the groundwork for distancing himself, the man he is, from the work he has done, leaving behind nothing unadmitted and owned up to for future biographers, chroniclers, and literary archaeologists (and, let’s face, academic parasites) to “discover” and base a “reassessment” on which will completely miss the point.

    In one of the best author biographies I’ve ever read, Julie Phillips, in her chronicle of the life of Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree Jr., manages to do something rare and remarkable, which is to study the source of fiction without suggesting that the fiction is useful for some kind of psychoanalysis.  She examines the forces in Sheldon’s life that led her not only to adopt a deep cover pseudonym from which to write but to write the kinds of stories she did, but at no point does she suggest the stories are what they are only because Sheldon was troubled, flawed, paranoid, suicidal, whatever.  In Phillips’ hands, the stories are something apart, works of art, certainly created out of the life that shaped them, but once created took on separate status, to be regarded on their own terms and not taken apart or essentially deconstructed based on who Sheldon was (or who we might think she was).  Sheldon wrote the way she did out of her own essence, true, but she nevertheless created something distinct from herself that should be taken on its own terms, for what it is, not for who made it.

    Harlan has as vivid a public presence as himself as his work does as itself.  It’s evident, reading over his essays, that he has mined himself for the substance of his stories, for the raw matter that he then shapes into dramas.  It is legitimate to say that he assays autobiographical themes in many of his best stories, even as it is a mistake to see the stories themselves as autobiographical.  He’s done what good artists do—lived, reacted, felt, put the result into his art, saying to us “I am human, I have felt these things, witnessed these things, concluded these things, and because you, too, are human you will know what I’m saying to you.”  He is not saying in his fiction “This is who I am” but more importantly “This is who we are.”

    But because we live in a culture obsessed with celebrity and the insistent need to bring everyone down to the level of those who prance shamelessly upon the stages of talkshows where their least indiscretion is blown up into a life-changing, earth-shaking moral verdict, it is too often the case that biography trumps creation in the mind of the Public Beast.   Separating the artist from the work is a problem, because the work, while inextricably part of the artist, is not the artist.  The work is the work.

    With that in mind, I read the essay thinking that this was something Harlan was trying to do.  “I know who and what I am and I’ll tell you about it here and now so you don’t have to let its discovery later poison the work I have done.”

    I’ve since reread the essay and listened to more of the CD and I don’t think that’s what he was doing.  At least not primarily.

    He relates an instance of coincidental karma concerning another writer and cosmic payback.  Within the context of his theme—I am a petty man—he suggests that petty gets what petty gives.  It is perhaps an examination of the conundrum some people are that the more they have, the more they succeed, the higher up whatever ladder they’ve been trying to climb they get, it is the little things that never let them fully be as complete as the work they do.

    We’re all petty.  Not so much that we do petty things, but that we have petty thoughts and petty concerns.  Myself, I have a roomful of memories in my hindbrain of embarrassing, unkind, thoughtless things I’ve said and done that I just can’t seem to be rid of.  Most of the time I don’t think about them, but every once in a while, when I’m least expecting it, one of these damn things pops up in my mind and taunts me with the fact that there is nothing I can do to change it!  It happened, it’s done, it’s part of history, and I can never undo it.  I obsess over them for a while, imagining myself behaving differently, using different words, taking a different course, or just paying closer attention at the time.  I’m a writer, I can imagine whole novels of better responses, better motives, better outcomes.

    But there’s nothing I can do and apparently I can’t even forget them.

    Like time and motion studies, I analyze them for clues of my essential cluelessness, which I will also never be able to change, because I didn’t understand it at the time.  Or maybe I did but I still didn’t think it was a bad idea.  Or I knew, but couldn’t figure out how, at the time, to avoid the mess it was about to be.  I rework them in my head, trying vainly to optimize the therbligs of my past and utterly helpless to do so.

    I consider my continual obsessions with these things petty.  The events themselves were petty, inconsequential in the greater scheme of my life, and I imagine that the other players may well not recall them at all.  But I can’t let them go.

    They do turn up in my fiction.  Not the events themselves, usually, but the fact of the pettiness, the nature of the embarrassment or resentment or anger or stupidity.

    And it doesn’t help to Know Better.  It is part of my nature.

    Confessing doesn’t help either.  I could detail here some of the things that occupy these worthless interludes of longed-for repair, but it wouldn’t do me a bit of good.  I’ve learned that sharing embarrassment doesn’t really lessen it, but it does lessen the anxiety you might have that people will judge you for the events in question.

    I suggested that a word had been left out of Harlan’s claim.  It should have read “I am a petty man too.”  He might just as easily have said “I am a compleat human being, having my full measure of all that is human.”  That has the advantage and drawback of distracting people from his point, because, while true, it allows for a generous reception and validation of that “compleatness” as an altogether admirable thing.

    I think he wanted people to focus on a specific point.  “I am a petty man” is the same as saying “It is human to be petty” and therefore, “we’re all petty.”

    From time to time, here and there, more or less.

    Let me tell you something not petty about Harlan Ellison.

    Donna and I attended his last convention, MadCon 2010, in Madison, Wisconsin.  We were in the hotel lobby when he came in.  It was the first time we had seen each other since 1996.  Prior to the convention, when it wasn’t a sure bet that he would make it, due to health issues, I sent him a few photographs I’d taken at that prior occasion.  They weren’t great pictures, but I thought he might want them for his archives.  In fact, they were pretty much not good.  When he realized who I was, he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Tiedemann, those were the worst pictures in the world.  Terrible.”  In front of a small audience.

    By Sunday, he was dancing on his last nerve, and still signing autographs.  I’d given up trying to get one and just lingered at the periphery, and for whatever reason he looked straight at me and said, “Tiedemann, go.  Just go.”

    I riffled my brain to figure out what I’d done, but he had The Look, and I knew better than to argue, so Donna and I went to dinner.

    Afterward, we came back into the hotel.  The lobby was empty except for Harlan and Susan.  Whereupon he sat down with us and we had half an hour of very good, private conversation.  He was generous, interested, and, I think, appreciative, at least of the chance to quietly talk to just one or two people, away from the crowds and the demands of Being On.  Whatever, it was special and very, very human.  (No, I won’t tell you what we talked about, it’s none of your business.)

    As I said, petty gets as petty gives.  As far as I’m concerned, Harlan can cop to being petty if he wants, and he would know, but that is simply not my take on him.  He gets no petty from me because he’s never given me any.

    In the final analysis, we should strive to regard people by their best.  If we can’t, at least we should remember that no one is a homogeneity.  We are all amalgams.  And from certain amalgams, strange alloys, bright, alien, and dark, emerge in gnostic forms and Damascene patterns, texture of nous and passion…

  • Miscellany

    Just a bunch of assorted items of some minor interest.

    First up, I did a new interview!  Jared Anderson runs a blog specializing in author interviews and he asked me to contribute.  Mine is now up, for the pleasure of anyone interested.

    Apropos of writerly things, I have finished the second book of my Oxun Trilogy.  The first book, Orleans,  is currently making the rounds via the good offices of my agent, Jen Udden.  Among the various projects I had on hand to work on this past several months, I decided finishing book two might be a good idea.  Oculus is finished.  At least, it will be once Donna completes picking the nits from it.  I hope to hand the manuscript over to Jen some time next week.

    This opens the way for volume three, which I intend to call either Orient or Ojo.  Haven’t decided yet.  Ojo is Japanese for rebirth (roughly) and fits with the theme of the book.  This is the one I’m both really looking forward to and dreading, as it will be primarily historical.

    Meantime, I am about to dive into the rewrite of my historical mystery, per my other agent’s notes (yeah, two agents, it’s complicated, don’t ask, it works), which will likely take up the rest of the summer.

    This afternoon, my friend Russ is coming over with his horn for our last rehearsal before this weekend’s coffeehouse.  We’ve been working on a version of Harlem Nocturne, which we both love and hope to do Saturday.

    Prior to his visit, I have to go mow the lawn.  Tedious but necessary.

    In between all that, I’ve been working on some new short stories.  As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I’ve been having difficulties with short form for—well, for the last several years.  A few months ago I got very angry with myself and just sat in front of the computer, staring at a story fragment, refusing to do anything else until Fred (Fred was the name Damon Knight gave to the unconscious, which he acknowledged but didn’t like calling the Unconscious)—as I say, until Fred belched up the story solution.  I promptly finished three or four more and I intend to keep hammering at the others.  I must have a couple of dozen half-completed short stories and there is no good reason for them not be completed.  Except for Fred.

    Donna’s sisters will be coming into town next week (one from Florida, one from Iowa) and, I assume, hijinks shall ensue.  In the middle of their visit will be a major party and ongoing we have housecleaning.

    I’ve been reading Ray Bradbury, prompted by his death.  I wrote about Ray here.  The other day I finished Something Wicked This Way Comes and, through the eyes of experience, I marveled at the exuberance of his language, something I sort of took in stride the first time I read it back at age 12 or 14.  I’m going to go through I Sing The Body Electric next and then maybe The October Country.  Ray was a unique voice in American letters, a high-wire act and a national treasure.  Unlike many great artists, he did get acknowledged and rewarded.  I think he had an exceptional career, all the more so for having done pretty much what he wanted to do most of the time.  He will not vanish into obscurity, I think.  He was misidentified as a science fiction writer.  What little genuine SF he wrote fell apart on most metrics of good SF, but that’s not what he was trying to do.  He was an American mythographer.  His stories were about the things that informed our national character, down deep inside where we live, and reflected the romance of a national vision that was fractured at best, overambitious always, and essentially naive.  Not that he wrote naively—on the contrary, I think he wrote very perceptively about naivete, and somehow rarely in a judgmental way.

    We’re on the threshold of summer.  We inherited a gas grill which I need to figure out how to get working, because this year I want to barbecue, something we haven’t done here in years.

    There’s more, but I’m rambling.  So to conclude, let me offer up another photograph and bid you adieu till next time.

     

  • Denying Reality.

    The North Carolina state legislature has adopted new guidelines to address the impact of climate change on their state.  Namely by banning the use of the term “climate change” or the term “sea level rise” unless “authorized.”  In section 2 of their House Bill 819 the prohibitions are laid out very clearly—no state agency is to use those terms when studying, commenting on, or otherwise addressing the impact of…well, you know.

    Virginia is following suit.  At least there an answer as to why is offered.  Supposedly, such terms as climate change and sea level rise are “liberal code.”

    Excuse me?  Code for what?

    The irony astounds.  This is a Republican effort.  For years we have listened to conservatives bitch and complain over P.C. language, as if the prohibition of certain terms was some kind of absurd attempt to pretend a specific reality doesn’t exist.  P.C. has become conservative “code” for liberal bullshit.  But now, conservatives are doing the same damn thing and, I assume, thinking that the elimination from official use of certain objectionable words somehow alters reality.

    The world turns, the circle comes back on itself.

    The entire conservative objection to climate change science is based entirely on a constituent-driven refusal to acknowledge a reality that might require people—mainly people with interests in certain industries—to change the way they do things.  That’s it.  That’s the problem right there.  We—and believe me I do not let moderates or even some liberals off the hook—do not wish to change our lifestyles. *

    The science is in.  Climate change is real.  The oceans are rising (because a lot of well-documented melting is going on in both the Arctic and the Antarctic) and the world is about to look different.  Temperature rise will cause disruption in agriculture, alterations in water table distribution, and weather patterns we are no used to.

    This is a fact.  It is not a liberal plot to undermine free enterprise.

    The much-vaunted pragmatism that has been a hallmark of conservative posturing for decades has apparently failed to serve them.  They seem to be trying to wish reality away instead of “manning-up” and facing the world on its own terms.  I’m sorry, I find this laughable.

    The state legislature of Indiana once attempted to legislate the value of Pi, making it equal to 3 instead of 3.14 etc, claiming the actual value was an affront to nature and god.  The bill didn’t get out of committee, I believe, it never came to a vote, but somebody wrote the damn thing, spending tax-payer money on an attempt to deny reality.  They didn’t succeed.

    This did.  At least, it got out of committee and became law.

    I wonder what they’ll call it when their coastline is erased from “periodic flooding” that doesn’t go away?

    _________________________________________________

    *  I know, the “real” issue is anthropogenic climate change.  They don’t like the idea that “we” have caused this.  But damn, you can argue about where it comes from all you want.  That’s not the same as claiming it’s not happening.

    Personally, while I have no problem accepting that human activity has contributed to the current conditions, I’m not sanguine about our capacity to do anything useful about it.  If we shut every polluting factory down tomorrow, stopped driving cars, and basically ended our industrial civilization, people—all seven billion of us—are still going to burn things to survive.  We have to.  I seriously doubt at this point anything we do will stop the transformations we’re seeing, at least not in time to make any difference to anyone now living.  The fact is there are too many of us and we’re making more.  The sheer consequence of biomass and its activities has an impact.  So I think we should be paying attention to how to live in the world that’s coming.

    I also think we should stop sacrilizing reproduction and making more just for the sake of making more.

  • Fishin’ Buddies, Sunday Morning

    Fishin' Buddies

  • A Little Color and Light

    For the weekend…

  • The Martian Chronicler

    Ray Bradbury died today.

    He hadn’t been well, a stroke many years ago left him damaged, doubtless uncomfortable.  But he hung around, the world gave him a few more awards, celebrated him in the small and varied corners where writers of moment get celebrated.  Some people probably thought he’d died already, years past.

    But, ironically, he published an essay in the New Yorker a few days ago, autobiographical.  I say ironic because of the title.

    I met Ray Bradbury a couple of times.  On neither occasion was it enough to become first-name basis camaraderie.  But he was gracious, friendly, and generous with his time.  The first occasion was at the 1986 World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta, Confederation, where he was guest of honor.

    The main hotel, the Peachtree Marriott, was something out of Asimov’s Foundation stories, and the entire sixth floor, if I remember right, was an open deck given over to the hospitality suite.  One evening Ray came bounding through, jogging shorts and a t-shirt, grinning, signing autographs, and talking to people.  I ended up in a small group with him.

    One young man wore a dragon on his shoulder.  It was quite a piece of work, with a long neck, all made out of some rubbery material, and he had run tubes through it connected to an air bulb in his pocket.  When he squeezed, the neck stretched and twisted, the little thing looked inquisitive, and Ray was delighted.

    All of a sudden he says, “Did you make that?” When the young man said yes, Ray said, “Do you know Ray Harryhausen?  He’s a friend of mine, he does special effects.  He’s always looking for new talent, an apprentice.  I’m going to tell him about you.  You should call him.  Here.”

    Phone numbers were exchanged.  It was…amazing.  I don’t know if that kid ever followed through, we watched a career in the making.

    Did I say generous?

    I don’t know what to call Ray Bradbury’s fiction.  Except for a few stories, it isn’t science fiction.  Nor is it really fantasy.  Harlan Ellison likes the term fantasist, so I’ll go with that.  Bradbury wrote stories that spun webs in the cracks between categories, filled in the gaps in the mind left by tales too one thing or the other to suffice. His Mars only exists as a metaphor, based on nothing but the childish nightmares, daydreams, and fanciful speculations filtered through a gifted artist.  His rockets weren’t really space worthy, but boy were they voyage worthy.  He was romantic according to some.  He was the lineal descendent of Scheherezade.  As long as he was telling the story, everyone had one more day to live.

    On a more analytic note, he captured mood better than 99% of anyone else.  I don’t even think his midwest ever really existed, except for one day, lazily drifting through the mind of a passerby who thought he saw Camelot in a farmhouse.  But that state of mind…yeah, that was real, that lived.   Despite its elegiac pace, there was an urgency to it.  It said “Don’t waste time—dream!”

    For me it was the Martians that had me.  The Martian Chronicles is one of the few books I’ve read more than once.  It served as the springboard for one of the better homages, Desolation Road, but Ian McDonald did something else with it, unable or unwilling to follow Bradbury.  For Ray, settling Mars was the West, the frontier, and he populated it the way the Rockies stood sentry over the encroachment of the nearer plains.  Only then, everyone left.

    Except the dreamers.  The true Martians.

    Others will write about his life, his views, his other books.  No doubt someone will point out that he wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick.  All I’ll mention is some of my favorite titles, most of which I read between the ages of 12 and 18.

    Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, R Is For Rocket, S Is For Space, Dandelion Wine, I Sing The Body Electric, and of course Fahrenheit 451.

    It’s the words, my friends, the words.

    My original copy, still in hand, price .50

    And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.

    He knew it first when walking downtown. Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dime-store window.  They stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there.

    “Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!”

    “Oh, my gosh!”

    “Nickle tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!”

    “Don’t look.  Maybe it’s just a mirage.”

    I wish.

    Quite suddenly, summer is over.

  • Honor and Duty

    They go where they are sent and do what is necessary, so the rest of us don’t have to.  That’s the idea, anyway.  Sometimes they get sent places they shouldn’t be and told to do things that shouldn’t be done, but that’s not their call.  They have promised to be a shield, to stand between us and the dark places.  It’s our job to know where the dark places are and how much a threat they pose.

    It’s our duty to use them wisely so that their honor is our honor.  When it goes well, they return, those that do, and they are admired and we take a collective pride in the job, the sacrifice, the honor which their actions transfer to us.

    Sometimes we get it wrong and they come back having broken things and having been broken.

    We should never blame them or repudiate them or make them feel they are somehow responsible for our lack of judgment.  When they come back from a bad job, one that was poorly chosen and badly planned, the only thing we need to remember is that any shame is entirely on us.  They get to keep their honor.

    I am not a sentimentalist about war.  The world is filled with ugliness and it must be dealt with.  Doing so is not noble work, but those who willing go to do it are themselves noble for the sacrifice.  It’s work no one should have to do.  It is damaging.  It changes people.

    I am not a romantic about military service.  It is something that ought not to be needful.

    I am a realist.  No one should be made to suffer from someone else’s inability to sustain sentiment or the illusions of romantic mythologizing.

    Ugliness and brutality are like cancers and they have to be treated.  Sometimes those who go in to do the surgery get infected with it.  That can’t be helped.  They deserve our support and our help.  They deserve not to be cast aside or forgotten because we are ashamed or embarrassed.  We sent them and if it was to the wrong place for the wrong reason, we should not treat them as if they had the responsibility to say no to us.  They volunteered to do this job, to go where we tell them to go, and do what we tell them to do.

    It is therefore our duty to understand before we act, to know the world, to comprehend, to inform ourselves, to take the responsibility seriously and in hand so we do nothing that will compromise their honor in our eyes.

    Their honor stands when we get it wrong.  We must remember this and behave accordingly.

    It’s Memorial Day.  Remember them.  Remember their sacrifice.  And never, ever blame them for our mistakes.

     

  • Should the World End…

    …give me a call.  I’m halfway through the current draft of a novel I would like to finish by month’s end (not likely) so I probably won’t be posting much if anything here.  Meantime a couple of new images so you have something cool to see when you drop by.

     

  • Brief Comment About Debt and Taxes

    This won’t take long.  I do not intend to put up links or post graphs and charts or cite stats (at least, not much).  This is just a short post to make what ought to be an obvious observation but seems to get no traction in the political discourse.

    Washington is once more gearing up for a Debt Ceiling Showdown.  According to the president, we’re going to have to borrow some more money before year’s end, which will require raising the limit on what we may borrow—again.  Speaker of the House Boehner has once more drawn a line in the check register and declared “No further!”  What will follow we have seen before.

    Yawn.

    Just a couple of points:  both sides in this are correct.  The president and his financial advisers are right, we cannot afford to stop spending or the economy will stall out and things will get worse.  This is a true statement.

    As far as it goes.

    Boehner and the deficit hawks are also right: whether we like it or not, there does come a point at which it is absolutely true to say “We can’t afford it anymore!”  In recent years, that point has been taken as some large percentage of GDP.

    The United States is in some ways like a homeowner who has mortgaged close to 100% of the equity in his house and has suddenly been told he has to take a pay cut.  Depending on the good will of friends, neighbors, and lenders, he may well keep his house and at some point start paying down on the debts, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s gotten himself into a very fragile situation.

    Now, the comparison is not precise, but we’re simplifying here.  After all, the homeowner usually doesn’t have a factory in his basement (or a contractor doing the same thing) making things the homeowner can sell—like military hardware and the like—but for our purposes, the similarity will do.

    National debate over this issue has been centered on two aspects.  Spending and taxes.

    One side says we’re spending too much and need to cut back.  The other says we really need to do something about all those rich people who aren’t paying their fair share of taxes.

    Again, both of these points are true—and both are more or less irrelevant.

    (Time out for a side comment on this tax thing.  National dialogue is a clumsy beast and the reality of situations often gets buried in the bluster.  Taxes are worse than other subjects, but not by much.  Here is a little fact: when people talk about taxes, no matter which side they’re coming from, they don’t talk about all of them.  On the one hand, the accusation that the wealthy do not pay their fair share is by and large aimed at federal taxes.  And in this the accusation is accurate—no, really, wealthy people and corporations pay very expensive tax lawyers to find loopholes and they do, or they would lose their cushy jobs.  But also, at a certain level, there is no longer such a thing as an American Corporation anymore.  They are multinationals, which means they disperse their holdings across borders, and by shifting things around they avoid taxes.  A lot of taxes, not just American taxes.  But for a lot of people who are well off but not in the 8 and 9 figure club, when they hear that they aren’t paying their “fair share” they quite correctly go ballistic because such accusations almost never take into account state and local taxes, which can in some instances add up to well over 50% of income.  But nationally we’re focused on federal taxes, not ALL taxes. )

    (Oh, and the point about corporations being multinationals?  That’s not a tax problem as such.  That’s a problem of jurisdiction.  But never mind that for now.)

    I say irrelevant, because, as noted before, to stop spending would be to throw a sequoia in the road to recovery.  Like it or not, federal spending is keeping a lot of business going and a lot of people employed.  When you cut spending, you fire people.  Unless there are private sector jobs that are not tied to government contracts available to rehire them, they turn into the Unemployed (which is becoming like Zombie status these days—once bitten, you’re dead but you still need to eat).  We keep forgetting that roughly half (or more) of government “spending” is payroll and related benefits.

    As for taxing the rich, the simple fact is that we could tax them dry and not make up the shortfall.  Focusing on the rich, while in some ways pertinent to our sense of national betrayal and certainly a symptom of the problem, is simply a way of ducking the real problem.

    The real problem?

    Okay, I said I wasn’t going to cite stats, at least not much, so I beg your pardon for a moment of numbers.  We are also focused like lasers on the Unemployment Rate.

    How many of you believe this reflects anything valid?

    I said valid, not real.  It certainly does reflect something real, but not what most people seem to think it does, and certainly not what the government pretends it does.

    All it reflects is the number of people drawing unemployment compensation as a percentage of the number of people still employed.  It says nothing at all about the people who have exhausted their benefits, fallen off the rolls, and still aren’t employed.

    Which number do you think is more relevant?

    Here’s where it gets sticky.  If they are no longer drawing public benefits, technically they aren’t a burden, so who cares?  We assume they have found a way to get by.  (Never mind those homeless folks over there.)  Households have increased their residents, adult children have moved back in with parents, parents have moved in with adult children, friends take in friends, etc etc.  So they cost us nothing.  Right?

    No, wrong.  They cost us taxes.  If you want to know where the revenue shortfall has come from over the last three decades, it is there, in that growing number of more or less permanently un- and under-employed Americans who lost their jobs, many of them at one time good paying, and have not paid taxes since, because, well, they have no income.

    The last time I checked the number was hovering just under sixty million.*

    I don’t see anyone talking about that, not directly.  Everyone wants to get the unemployment rate down, as if that means anything to the problem at hand.

    Reagan slashed taxes and increased spending.  Except for a brief few years under Clinton, the imbalance created by that has accumulated into the problem we now have.  It’s a thirty-year accrual of debt and hence when I say we can’t tax rich people enough to make up for it, that’s what I mean.

    Cutting spending, however, will only increase the unemployment numbers and eventually add to the growing population of permanently unemployed, whose inability to pay normal tax rates has resulted in this current shortfall.  Which shortfall will remain a problem until we can do something about all those unemployed.

    Now, the canard that these are lazy people who don’t want to work just won’t wash.  These are people who did work, many of them in well-paying jobs.  Why would they want to lose everything?  It’s absurd.  This is a myth.  To put it bluntly, it’s bullshit.  Have you ever considered how much work it is for someone to take a grocery cart around and fish aluminum out of trash, all day, every day, for pocket money?  But these are the people we don’t see and work we don’t credit.  As the saying goes, a ditch digger works his ass off, burns more calories, goes home worn out, and gets paid a damn sight less than someone pushing paper around a desk for other people.

    So why aren’t they working?

    Well, that is one of the reasons the rich are getting richer.  It’s systemic.  Jobs have gone overseas, industries have collapsed, communities have been sucked dry to make bottomlines for shareholders without regard to the people doing the actual work.  No one intends anything bad, no one purposefully plans to impoverish their fellows, but this is the way money works in this country, and any attempt to change it is met with ferocious opposition even as we see the inevitable consequences.  It is the worst sort of moral inertia.

    But no one in Washington is talking about it that way.  Both sides have valid points—we cannot afford to cut spending and we cannot afford to keep going as we are—and both sides are ignoring the real issue.

    You may return now to your regular illusions.

    __________________________________________________________

    * Lets do some quick and sloppy arithmetic over this, shall we?  Sixty million people earning on average, say, $30,000 a year.  That’s 1.8 trillion dollars.  Now, at, say, 25% taxes, that’s 162 billion a year, over 3 decades?  That’s 48.6 trillion dollars, which is six times the national debt.  Now, I grant you, these calculations are way too loose, but not so loose as to not be in the ball park and show where the “real problem” is.

  • Bill Donahue and Lawful Bigotry

    I don’t care much for Bill Donahue of the Catholic League. I find him a throwback, a kneejerk bigot who opens his mouth and everything I find insupportable about politicized religion comes out. That said, I also find him refreshing, in that he usually always says exactly what he means and does not equivocate in order make political points with tepid constituencies. For instance:

    That last bit is what I find useful. He wants the law to discriminate against lifestyles with which he disagrees. He has a list. He tells it out with no frills, no conditional language, no soft-pedaling. Bravo, Mr. Donahue, and thank you. It is always best to know where you stand with your opponents.

    He wants the law to discriminate not only against gay marriage, but against cohabitation, probably line marriage, multi-partner marriage, any variation on the good ol’ fashion way grandma and grandpa did that he thinks is disgusting.

    To which I can only say, with deep sincerity: fuck you, Mr. Donahue. It’s not your call. These are not your lives to dictate to. This is not your choice to impose. We went through a cultural revolution—it was messy, a lot of it was stupid and ill-conceived, some of it was hurtful—to get out from under exactly that kind of puritanical myopia and take away the ability of the state or anyone else to exercise legal prejudice against people for being together in ways you look at and go “Ewww!” Fuck you. This is my life, my choice, not yours, not the state’s, no one’s. Mine. Ours.

    He talks about the “gold standard” and starts citing the sociological data to back up the claim that children thrive with a traditional marriage. Here he is being a bit disingenuous. Children thrive in families predicated on such standards when several other conditions are also met, and which now social science is beginning to understand that it is those conditions that are more important than the particular arrangement of component parts. Children do not thrive in “broken” marriages, but neither do they thrive in dysfunctional marriages. It’s a simple question—which is better for a child, a “traditional” marriage in which daddy beats the shit out of mommy on a regular basis or that same child in a single parent home where it is loved, protected, and nurtured? And of course, it doesn’t even have to be that dramatic—indifference is destructive, though less measurable. Even if the preferred format is met and adhered to, if the love and nurture are withheld, is that not detrimental? It’s not one man one woman and voila the child grows up happy and well-adjusted!

    He forgets that one of the most powerful mitigating factors in such equations is the community in which a marriage exists. If the community approves and grants its support, all may be well. If the community, for whatever reason, turns on that couple, they will suffer, their marriage will suffer, and the children will suffer. Intolerance is one of the strongest countervailing elements in the potential destruction of a family unit, and it doesn’t even have to be an “alternative” family to suffer it, just different.

    No one should have to be reminded that it was not so long ago that it was illegal in this country for members of different races, specifically blacks and whites, to get married, even if they were of the requisite genders. Many such marriages that took place after it became legal failed because of external pressures—disapproval. There is no magic formula for a marriage.

    One major ingredient, though—love. And it never ceases to amaze me how many self-professed christians seem to have no use for love that does not conform to their prejudices.

    (Nor does it cease to amuse me how often I will hear apologists claim that “those aren’t real christians.” I know what they mean, but let us be honest here—real or not, the bigotry is taught in the name of the same faith. Where do they get it from? They will proudly tell you—the Bible. The tactics of exclusion fail to inoculate those who think themselves “true” christians from the taint of those who aren’t when both draw their lessons from the same well. Perhaps some interpret the lessons incorrectly, but the lesson is nevertheless there to be misinterpreted.)

    But I am glad of Bill Donahue, because he does speak his mind. He is clear and unequivocal and I can point to his words and say “That is what I do not want in this country.” I don’t want to live that way. I do not live that way. We forget that America is supposed to be where you can live as you choose without fear at our peril.

    But, yeah, Bill, the president did have to wriggle about this. Because there are a lot of people who think like you and lot more who sit the fence. Because people are concerned with how they might appear to their friends if they speak their hearts and a lot of people who will bully them into submission for “outrageous” opinions. Because public opinion is a fickle bitch and any politician who blithely ignores it does so at risk of career. The pragmatics of politics make liars of all of them, left or right, depending on the issue. But he’s done a bold and gutsy thing now and he may go down in flames for it. That and other things.

    Marriage is two distinct things these days, in the West. It is a codification of a relationship based on traditions and community feelings. For many, it is a sacred act, between themselves and their god.

    But it is also an economic arrangement, a complex comingling of estates and responsibilities made simple through the expedient conjoining of ritual and contract law. Whether people wish to admit it or not, these are separate things, and this second aspect is by far the more impactful because it determines how you will shape your future together within this community. There are combined over 1500 laws, both state and federal, defining rights, responsibilities, and benefits that accrue to marriage. It is very much a contract.

    And while two people don’t have to indulge a “traditional” religious marriage in order to be legally married, churches do have to adhere to the law in order for their ceremonies to be legally binding. So let’s not kid ourselves about what’s going on here. Getting married is a gamble. Love is not always forever (nor, actually, do I think it ever was or should be in all instances) and yet we have to make our homes within a community of laws. Barring people from the protections of the law because they don’t meet a religious qualification is supposed to be wrong in this country.

    Anyway, kudos to Mr. Obama. And again, thank you, Mr. Donahue—I like to know who I’m disagreeing with and exactly why.