Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Philosophy

  • The End of Hell

    Yesterday, our reading group did the last canto of Dante’s Inferno.  We reached the center, climbed the hairy haunch of Satan, and emerged to a place where above could be seen stars.  I’m told each volume of the Commedia ends with stars.

    There is in this final fabrication a very science-fictional scenario which can easily be read as a depiction of a singularity.  All motion has ceased except for the flapping of Satan’s wings and the gnawing of his three mouths on the bodies of the ultimate betrayers, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.  (As in most other places in the Inferno, Dante mixed post Christian Era figures with Classical forms.  He is talking about Reality, not denominations.)  Ice is everywhere, there is a brief description of the center of the earth being the point where all weight is drawn equally.  Time stops.

    Dante seems to have grasped the notion that Absolutes embody extreme conditions, that the core of absolute evil will be a thing where the normal laws of motion, of sight and sound, of behavior all exhibit impossible manifestations.  All is in suspension.

    Imagine cutting your finger.  Imagine the razor edge of a blade sliding through the flesh.  Now imagine that moment, frozen in time, always being the single sensation you experience, constantly, without beginning or end.  Eternity.  Pretty bad.  Now imagine being constantly eaten.

    Now consider:  Dante’s theme is that all these people have done this to themselves.  Satan didn’t put them here, hasn’t manufactured these punishments.  The inhabits did it all on their own.  They are trapped in their own constructions.

    To escape, all they have to do is imagine a way out of their own concepts and then accept it.

    They can’t.

    That is the blade through the flesh, tautologically locked into a continuous feedback loop.

    Dante was not, furthermore, positing that the “truth” these folks turned their back on has much of anything to do with god or ecclesiastical law.  It is entirely to do with their concepts of what constitutes Reality.  By Reality, we mean that which we do in the world.

    What has become clear through 34 cantos is that Dante was concerned not with the tropes of his poem, but with the realities of the denizens he introduces as he and Virgil descend toward Malebolgia.  This is not a religious work.  In this sense, it more closely approaches science fiction than fantasy.  The ghost in the machine which dominated the lives and decision-making of all these souls permeates the narrative like a Turing Test, set to determine which are aware, which are not, and which are aware of the alternatives and refuse to accept them.  Like some pernicious form of nano technology, these people have built their own torments.  Inferno is a parody of the Earth, of life, stripped down and fine-tuned to give the inhabitants what they have acted like they’ve wanted.  Traps, cul-de-sacs, isolation chambers, pain generators…

    And the curious element that recurs throughout is how little they pay attention to anything outside their own small place in the pit.  Many resent Dante coming into their midst, seeing them, but then seem to forget about them as soon as Virgil takes Dante onward.

    Inferno is a piece of psychology.  And the lowest pit is reserved for betrayers who used the excuse of the greater good in order to turn on a friend or leader.

    Dante was a believer in self-retribution.  No matter what fate these folks suffered in life—and many landed in prison or were murdered or otherwise brought to ugly ends—the ultimate punishment is always the damnation of their own inability to see past their own corruption.  It is that which condemns them, which sequesters them.  You get the deep feeling that any of them could leave if they could just see.  But they can’t.  They are morally blind.

    Some seem to prefer where they are.  They do not want to be “saved.”

    Extending this, it would seem that Dante was of the (then heretical) opinion that achieving Paradise was something within our own grasp simply by making a choice.

    Choice.  The ultimate punishment exhibited in Hell is Satan’s own.  He had questioned god’s decision to give humanity free will.  He argued that if given the authority he could guarantee humanity’s worship of god, that he would make the ideal boss.  He apparently didn’t get the whole notion of free will.  And in the end he reins over (or under) a realm occupied by people incapable of choosing any other path than the utterly solipsistic one  that brought them here.  He is stuck in the hole, plugging the way between what is now Hell and Purgatory, eternally in the presence of people who are there because they simply lack the capacity to be anywhere else.  They are chained to their devotions.

    It is now January 5th.  2009.  We have witnessed the meltdown of everything we thought was a successful business model in this country—in the world—and there are no doubt people who have lost everything who don’t understand what brought them to this hill.  They had choices along the way to stop taking profits and invest in something real, but they couldn’t get off the ride.  Someone else, they assumed, would pay the price.  Well, someone else did.  But so did they.

    Metaphorically, I find the parallels fascinating.  It’s almost tempting enough for me to attempt a fantasy to take advantage of the insight.  But then again, it’s not that deep of an insight.

    What I will be interested in is what lies ahead, in Purgatorio.  Will it be peopled by the collateral damage of all the machinations of those in Hell?

    Meantime, I’m writing a new science fiction novel.

  • 2009

    We begin with some quotes…

    It is always an impertinence to claim to write about a community.                Bikha Parekh

    The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust.                                                                Harlan Ellison, forward to The City On The Edge of Forever

    …it was not logic that carried me on; as well one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather.  It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it.                                               John Henry Newman, Apologia

    Good luck to all.

  • Roddenberry

    JANUARY 4, 2009Public Memorial Service for the Late “First Lady of Star Trek” Majel Barrett Roddenberry

    Cast Members and Fans Come Out to Celebrate and Remember Roddenberry’s Life

    WHO:
    Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry, son of Gene & Majel Roddenberry and CEO of Roddenberry Productions, will host cast members, family, friends and fans to celebrate the life of his late mother. Fans are invited to come and pay their respects with the family and share their fondest memories of the late Trek icon.

    WHAT:
    Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry will hold a public memorial service for his late mother. Family, cast members, friends and fans will have an opportunity to remember the legendary “First Lady of Star Trek.” Fans are encouraged to share their favorite memory of Majel from her numerous roles in Star Trek. Expected to attend include members of Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and many others.

    WHERE:
    Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills
    6300 Forest Lawn Drive
    Los Angeles, CA 90068

    WHEN:
    Sunday, January 4, 2009
    9:00 a.m. Press Check-in
    10:00 a.m. Memorial to start

    CONTACT:
    Sean Rossall
    BWR Public Relations
    310.210.7586
    srossall@bwr-la.com

    The above is the public announcement from BWR Public Relations.

    This is not new news that Majel Barret Roddenberry passed away recently after fighting Leukemia.  Like other icons of my youth, the original Star Trek cast and crew are passing on.  We have a new movie about to premier and after four decades of it, Star Trek has gone from movement to myth to parody to cliche and back again.

    I liked the idea of Number One, the original “emotionless” crew member of the Enterprise Majel Barret played in the first pilot, The Cage.  (I thought she looked better as a brunette, too.)  I would have liked to see that.  Television history says the studio told Roddenberry to get rid of her because they couldn’t buy the idea of a woman being second in command of a starship.  Perhaps some of them felt it was too close to home, where undoubtedly many of them found themselves in marriages with women who were not only second in command, but often in charge in fact if not name.  But I don’t buy that story.  The studio after all was DesiLu, which was run by a woman (Lucille Ball) who would very well have known better.  Maybe even she decided that the general public wouldn’t buy it, but I would have bet she’d have taken the chance to try it, especially on a “sci-fi show” that no one was supposed to take seriously anyway.

    No, what I believe is that no one could buy the idea of an emotionally in-control, intellectually oriented woman who was suppsoed to have more brains than even the captain.  That I believe the studio execs might have balked at.  Maybe if Gene had suggested that she had a thing for the captain, he could have sold it.

    But that would have been a cop-out.

    Below is an essay I wrote about Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek in the wake of Gene’s death.  I believe it bears repeating, if for no other reason than Majel was integral to the ultimate success of what he started.

    The world can be a very off-putting place, especially to a kid who can’t seem to catch on to the rules.  Rules are very important.  We’re impressed with that fact from infancy.  If you don’t follow the rules, bad things happen.  If you can’t because you don’t know what they are…well, as the saying goes, ignorance is no excuse: bad things happen.  Not only that, but it’s all your fault.  Something is wrong with you.  Everybody else seems to know the rules, why don’t you?

    For that kid—and there are many more such kids than we’re willing to admit—the world is a baffling, often malignant place.  Sometimes stepping outside of it is the only way to start to make sense of it.  Science fiction is very good at enabling that process.  Through the medium of extrapolatory fictions, future worlds, alien vistas, and an implicit faith that things ought to and can make sense, this world can be made less confusing, brought into some perspective that eluded us before, enabling us to cope a little bit better.

    Gene Roddenberry was one of the most visible practitioners of this process.  For millions of kids—of all ages, 3 to 83—he was a sensible voice speaking in the midst of chaos.  Now that he is gone we wait to see if his voice will continue its patient plea for reason and optimism, whether he meant anything more than a source of entertainment for the masses and profits for the corporations.

    Millions of words have by now been written about Star Trek—what it is, how it evolved, why it works.  The attention it has elicited seems disproportionate for “mere” entertainment.  What was it, after all, but a clever revamping of television westerns in a science fiction guise?  The Frontier (the final one, we are told), the Federation (law and order), and the marshal and his deputies (Kirk, Spock, McCoy).  What was the big deal?  There were other sf series that never came close to having the impact Star Trek did.  We had Lost In Space, Time Tunnel, Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, The Invaders—many of them had longer runs than Star Trek, but not one of them produced the cultural impact Roddenberry’s little “wagon train to the stars” achieved.  Why?

    Among the thousands of different reasons, all of which came together in the years since the series aired, there are a few important ones, reasons without which the show would have been just another sci-fi series, like all the rest, assigned to the trash heap of discarded images from our pasts.
    Roddenberry designed his show for adults.  Regardless how individual episodes came across, there was an underlying maturity to the concept that came across even through the most turgidly asinine scripts.  If there is any proof to this, look at the success of the new series.  The basic architecture Roddenberry cobbled together originally has not changed, yet it still supports itself admirably.  In fact it works better in support of the more intellectual scripts.  It worked in the original series, it worked in the films, and it is working in the new show.  None of the other television SF shows were so designed.  All of them were fairly standard Hollywood concepts that targeted the seven year old, even though disguised in formats apparently for adults.  The kids weren’t fooled and the adult audiences, while entertained, found nothing of lasting value.  Star Trek was designed to appeal to the adult in all of us, and Roddenberry did not underestimate the intellect of his audience —of any age.

    The universe of Star Trek is a functioning model.  You watch the show, you know without being told that somewhere people are getting up, going to work, building homes, carrying on their lives, all in a world that hangs together with the same kind of cohesion as the one we inhabit.  This is art.  This is a level of communication hard to achieve even in shows set in the here and now.  As a result, the series might well have been set anywhere in the Federation, on any ship, on a station, a world, with any array of characters, and it would have worked.  Watching, you knew that.  Kirk, Spock, and McCoy did not comprise the universe of Star Trek, they inhabited it.  Compare that to any of the other sci-fi offerings of Hollywood.  The characters comprised the universe, laws unto themselves, with no connection to a larger universe.  Oh, perhaps a line or two referring to such a universe, but all sense of casuistry was utterly ignored.  Such series offered escapism without rationale, with nothing to believe in.  Empty.

    Which leads to one of the most significant aspects of the phenomenon.  One of the hallmarks of a truly fine work of art, especially literature and by extension drama, is its ability to take us out of ourselves and transport us elsewhere in such a way that, while we’re on the ride, we do not question the mode of travel.  This is the escapist quality of stories.  Great art does this without severing the connection with the given world.  In fact great art gives us a new perspective to bring back to this world when we’ve finished the ride.  It enables us to see our world in a way we had not or could not before.  The best science fiction does this in a marvelously unique way.  Star Trek does this.  It is this that sets it apart.

    I will not argue that any one episode of Star Trek is great art, although a few might be so described.  Several are quite definitely pretty shoddy.  But as a body of work it achieves the status of great art.

    None of this was particularly meaningful to me as a boy watching the first voyages of the Enterprise.  I was eleven when the show premiered.  I had an interest in science fiction, but not a passion.  I was as much enamored of cowboys and soldiers as of spacemen.  I liked the collection of sf series then available, but I also liked the westerns and a couple of police shows and the war series.  I was also a boy scout, I took music lessons, and had various other interests.

    I was also one of those kids who had an inordinate amount of difficulty making sense of the world around me.  I didn’t know the rules, I didn’t function well within my peer group.  I suppose you might have described me as awkward.  That’s the term used most often about adolescents who, because of hormonal changes and the subsequent shift of social expectations, clumsily stagger through high school to early adulthood.  But there are many who are awkward because they just don’t know what is expected.  They watch those around them and see the ones who learn the rules and acquire the enviable ability to integrate with their social circle with little or no clumsiness and pain and wonder what secret formula is involved, what set of passwords one evokes, and where to go to learn this arcane data.  They have difficulty socializing.  Some manage anyway, eventually achieving an adeptness at it even though they may not quite understand what is actually going on.  Others never quite get the hang of it, but as they grows up it becomes less and less an issue.  Some never fit in.  During these awkward periods, most of them are loners.  I was one of those.

    I didn’t like sports.  I didn’t understand much about cars.  In 1967 I didn’t care much for pop music, including the Beatles.  I had trouble talking to other boys my age, it was impossible to talk to girls.  As a result my social interactions were limited and progressively more difficult to understand.  I also didn’t like school, although I was a bookworm.  While I had friends, they were not close and they as often regarded me as alien, the way I regarded them.
    To me this was normal.  Confusion was just something you lived with.  Nothing made sense.  It is very difficult to convey the impact something like Star Trek had on someone like me.  I know I had trouble explaining it to anyone.  But Star Trek took hold of my imagination immediately.  Here was a world that made sense.  Things happened here for reasons and the reasons were discoverable and understandable.  It didn’t matter that it was a fantasy, it was the process that was important.  Star Trek ultimately taught me that the world has a rationale.

    No big surprise, that conclusion.  But I wasn’t learning it from any other source, not in a way that made any difference.  Not in a way that suggested the future would be better.

    And for many people the entire phenomenon must have appeared utterly bizarre.  I know in my case my father never quite understood.  After one season he had a son who was, for all appearances, a cult convert to a tv show.  I was one of those who went door to door in ’68 with a petition to NBC to forestall its cancellation.  I couldn’t explain it to him any better than I could explain it to my peers.  I didn’t understand it myself.

    When Star Trek was cancelled I was in high school.  Other things vied for my attention and Star Trek took a back seat to the balance of my adolescence.
    Except…

    I went to one of the first Trek conventions in St. Louis.  It wasn’t like the present day ones.  It was a few hours in an auditorium listening to Roddenberry and George Takei speak about the show and about the future and an airing of the uncut pilot, The Cage.  I remember Roddenberry telling us that we were impatient for the future, that we were ready for the 23rd Century Now.  I felt that was true.

    When the rumors of a film began circulating I tried my hand at a script.  It even went off in the mail.  I never heard back, but I didn’t know how such things worked then.

    When the first movie did come out I stood in line in the cold to see it.
    My own writing, while not in the Star Trek mold, has certainly been influenced by it.  I think I would have become a science fiction writer anyway, but probably not the same sort.  Because Roddenberry had done such a good job constructing his universe (stealing from the best), Star Trek taught me some very basic concepts of interconnectedness, taught in a way that provided a key to the understanding of how fiction works as examination of the human condition.

    In terms of understanding how the world works, well…I still don’t understand it.  But that’s all right now.  I understand why I don’t, and that’s enough to be at peace with myself at least.  I understand more than I did and I credit the difference in perspective sf provides with enabling me to understand and providing me the tool—my writing—to keep exploring.  Star Trek, as a world, as a concept, as a way of hoping and dreaming and planning, gave me that.
    That’s a hell of a gift to give someone.

    It seems hard to believe sometimes that the original Star Trek was canceled because it simply didn’t have the ratings.  Yes, the networks killed it.  In these days of cable and Tivo, it’s hard to realize how important time slots were back then.  When they moved the series from Thursday night to Friday night, it was a deathknell.  You couldn’t time-shift your viewing then.  Friday nights, everyone knew, were the nights most people went out to dinner or movies or nightclubs or anywhere.  Friday nights were for dating, not watching SF on tv.

    So the year ends with another tall ship being set to sail out into the bay, to be torched from arrows shot by those left behind, a Viking funeral at least in imagination for one of those who gave us a future to believe in.  Over the top?  Maybe.  But we build the worlds we dream.  We should have good dreams.  Majel Barret Roddenberry gave us some.

  • Koan

    A note I jotted to myself sometime in the past.  I don’t recall the circumstances, but the question posed feels universal.

    The spiritualists cringe and argue against any description of self-conscious life as mechanism, that any mere machine is necessarily only an accumulation of parts and processes that can never rise above its own origins.  They offer in its place a description that makes of us a vessel to contain an essential self that is gifted from without, a near complete something that a priori transcends the mechanistic.  From where?  Choose your own myth of origin.  But they all presume a Maker.  The question must then be put—what separates the divinely made from the “naturally” made or, later, the self-made?  Are they not in the end all simply made things and as such all mechanisms?

  • Chapter the Next

    Yesterday, I stayed home from work again.  Nothing to do.  In a way, I like this.  I’d go on contract with the company if I could, go in only when there was actually something to do.  But it’s not that much money, so it’s a quandary.

    On the other hand, I finished a chapter in a book that’s been teasing me for a couple of years.  I’d walked away form it to write something else, and I’ve been finding it difficult to go back.  I have a lot written—almost a third of it, at least—and I’m loathe to just give up on it, but with one thing or another I just haven’t been able to get any forward momentum.

    Till yesterday.  So this morning I’m taking a stab at the Next Chapter.  And if that flows, if the words come, if the story proceeds, well…

    Couple of things.  I posted a new piece over on Dangerous Intersection about one of my pet peaves with the Culture At Large.  Premature though it is, some folks are declaring that Intelligent Design as a movement is dead on University campuses.  Follow the links.

    I pulled out an old piece of vinyl this morning to listen to, Todd Rundgren’s Initiation, which has some appropriately irreverant material on it—Eastern Intrigue, Initiation, A Treatise On Cosmic Fire—and a lot of good, solid rock’n’roll.

    I’m going into work early this morning, just to wrap it up for the next four days.  I’m now looking forward to doing some actual fiction writing.  Maybe confession is good for the soul—or at least the creative muscle.

    Have a good Christmas.

  • Quotes

    The desire for social equality is not unmixed with a certain eagerness to be rid of the bother of pity.                               Jean Rostand

    Intelligence would seem to exist primarily as a way to outrun natural selection      Samuel R. Delany, 1995

    Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need ruin to make them grow.   Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

    Action is consolatory.  It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.  Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates                                                                                                       Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

  • Maybe We Will

    I did not stay up for the speeches.  I waited.  I just now watched Obama’s acceptance speech.

    Not a victory speech.  An acceptance speech.  There is a difference.  He hasn’t really won anything.  Yet.

    I cannot remember the last time I felt a tingle run through me at the words of someone with a vision.  I always listen with a salt shaker at hand.  But my word, I felt it this time.  I am cautious, but just maybe we will see something new.

    To all those who have already declared themselves ready to oppose Obama and all he stands for, to the Limbaughs, the Ingrahams, and the Hannitys:  you are small souls, stunted in imagination, and cynical in disposition.  You have lost the ability to imagine.  You cannot set aside your aversion to change, or your denials of hope for the time it takes to find out if someone may be honest and honestly intended.  You are the Ellsworth Tooheys, the James Taggarts, the Joseph McCarthys, the Pat Buchanans, and your role models are Timothy McVeigh and Oliver North and, iconographically, J.P. Morgan and Henry Frick.  You so cherish your power to sway people with charred words and bullying bombast that you cannot do the one thing that an Obama quite legitimately asks—set aside differences, come together, work for a future.  You have decided in advance that you do not wish to live in that future, that its shape and size and the decor of its rooms will not suit your taste.  And if it turns out to be a fine future, well-furnished and abundant, you ahve already decided that the people who will live in it do not deserve it.  The maggots of cynicism have shredded your minds and there is no redemption for you from without.  You must save yourselves, but please, don’t do it at our expense.

    I wonder truly just what it is you fear.  What is it you think you will lose?

    Maybe you’ll figure that out as time goes on.  Or maybe we will, and learn to live without you.  You are, in the words of Milton, Blind Mouths.

    Kindly stay out of our way.

  • A Few Thoughts On Election Day

    This morning we got up at four so we had time to drink coffee, wake up, and get to the polls early.  I thought the lines would be long and neither of us have patience for standing around waiting.

    Our poll is within easy walking distance.  Often, in local elections, we take Coffey, and she can get all enthused and friendly greeting people coming and going.  Not this morning.  We arrived at St. John’s Catholic Church and entered the basement of the school.  Six others had beaten us there and they all sat on a pew outside the actual cafeteria space where the voting machines were still being set up and adjusted.

    The first gentleman in line was elderly and had till this year been one of the poll workers.  “But they kicked me out this year,” he said.  He didn’t seem bitter about it and maybe there was good reason—he wasn’t getting around too well—and proceed to tell us some stories about back in the day.

    More people arrived, including a young woman with two small children, one in a carrier.  Conversation was friendly and quiet.

    No one talked about the election.

    This was the first year Donna had not received her voter card in the mail.  I checked with the Secretary of State’s office on the web to confirm that she was still registered (I thought she was, even though I’ve heard all the rumors of purges and so forth—this was just a mailing snafu) and everything went fine.

    By the time we left the line was at least a hundred and fifty people long, shortly after six.

    I complain about the politics of this country a great deal.  I complain about the people I know who express occasionally absurd opinions.  I worry that we won’t get our collective act together until too late, whatever “too late” actually means.  I don’t like us being a laughing-stock in much of the rest of the world.  I am as incensed over the policies of the last eight years as I have ever been in my adult life about politics.  I have found myself able to say the good word or two about Reagan, Bush Sr., even Nixon, but I have found no redeeming qualities in the present resident of the office.

    But I do love this country.

    Anyone who has the temerity to question someone’s patriotism because they disagree with a course of action either has no grasp of what it is they’re defending or is commited to a vision of this country that runs counter to everything good about it.

    Bold words?  Perhaps.  But think about it.  The characteristic trait that marks our national policies since 1789 is that we can change our direction.  We can rethink and then act to alter a course.  We can try something out and if it doesn’t work discard it and try something new.  We can remake ourselves as a nation.

    That is what is happening today.

    Things have gone wrong with our home.  Termites have gotten into the wood work, and it’s time to clear them out and rebuild the damaged parts.  And we will do it without bloodshed.  We will do it without throwing out the parts that still work.  We will do it out of the stuff that truly informs our identity.

    Americans confuse people elsewhere.  We seem at times to have no standards, no principles, no sense of commitment.  We are fickle, reactionary, often foolishly adolescent in our choices of what to do next or where to go.  We adhere, it seems, to no single idea of right.  We make claims for being committed to freedom and then from time to time do things that demonstrably contradict that claim.

    And yet.

    And yet when we go wrong, we right ourselves.  We went wrong in 1787 by not dealing with slavery.  In 1863 we corrected that.  In 1832, we erred in the person Andrew Jackson by declining to pursue economic policies that would unify currency and stabilize the internal money system.  It resulted in years of instability, fast-moving currency decimations, and laid the ground (partially) for the Secessions of the 1860s.  We corrected this.  By the end of the 19th Century, we were a nation dominated by monopolies.  We dismantled them and began the long battle to end the virtual servitude of American labor.  Ther 20th Century is marked by a series of innovations aimed at establishing the kind of egalitarian society envisioned by Jefferson and others, culminating in the correction of race relations encapsulated in the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act of the Johnson Administration.

    We could go on.  These back-and-forths came out conflict between interests that, while having certain broad characteristics in common with their predecessors, quite often sprung from disparate groups that seemed to have little in common.

    Except the will to do better.

    What is better, though?  Is it the same thing today as it was a hundred years ago?  Hard to say.  It’s an ongoing discovery, with the added complication that “Better” for one person may not be for another.  We end up, then, in constant dialogue.  Things get bad when we tire of the debate.  We had a massive debate in the Thirties about what had gotten us into a Depression.  While it took a world war to get us out of it, the scaffolding we built during ten years of constant dialogue remained and proved what we’ve come to call the Safety Net—and it worked.  In the Sixties we had a bitter argument with ourselves over the limits of power and the morality of labels.  We exhausted ourselves by the Seventies, and a tired nation stopped paying attention while the forces of retrenchment and privilege undid much of what we thought we’d won.  We’ve been in the midst of another debate since the mid-Nineties, the shape of which was tragically bent by 9/11 and the hysteria that followed.  We seem to be getting back to it now and today may mark a turning point in our quest to determine what it is we mean by Better.

    There is no single label for the core principles of Americans.  Nor, really, should there be.  BY definition, it will mean something slightly different for everyone.  We have managed in over two centuries to—not without difficulty, sometimes ugliness—learn to accommodate that diversity.

    Tomorrow, regardless who wins the election, we will once more be neighbors.  Some will be very disappointed and they will no doubt express it, be angry, and some will try to work to change it.  After all, when you get right down to it, what is a president?  He’s an employee.  He works for us.  Later.  Meantime, we are friends.  There are other things that bind us more thoroughly than elections.  We will laugh and love and try harder to do better.

    We’ll talk.

    Mostly.

    I look forward to it.  That’s why I like it here.  That’s why I can say, without a splinter of embarrassment, that I love my country.

  • SEX!

    Another repost from ’04. Once again, because we’re nearing an election, and once again certain Topics will and have become part and parcel of the political debate, I thought it time to put this back up.

    Did you know that the last week of October is national Protection From Pornography Week? Yes, indeed, signed into law by our illustrious president, Mr. Bush back in 2003. I for one had no idea I needed to be protected from it. How reassuring to know that we are being defended from dangers both real and imagined by the ever watchful gaze of our very own homegrown clerics.

    We’ve spent tax dollars on this. Here is the link to the official White House proclamation.

    Seems innocuous enough, even homey. All that stuff about the destructive effects of porn on children, who can argue?

    Has it occurred to anyone throughout the last two decades (beginning, in my opinion, with Ed Meese—anyone remember him?) of the war on pornography that—like alcohol and tobacco–pornography is simply not for children? It seems a ludicrously simple idea to me—it was never intended for them. We manage to have reasonable laws about things not intended for children. We don’t let them drive cars (except at amusement parks, in specially constructed rides), we don’t let them drink booze, we don’t allow the sale of tobacco to minors. They can’t vote, either, because we presume to decide on their level of intelligence and ability to make political statements. That one may be arguable, but…

    We don’t allow children to sign contracts. We don’t let them in to see “R” rated movies without a parent or guardian. Technically, children aren’t allowed to have credit cards, but sometimes that one slips through the cracks.

    Point being, we manage these other prohibitions quite handily. Occasionally something goes wrong, but we have a system for dealing with it that doesn’t require a national week signed into effect by the president. I mean, we don’t have a National Protection From Contracts Week detailing how contracts have debilitating effects on families and children (especially children, oh, those poor innocents who cannot defend themselves from the deprivations of over-zealous loan officers and contract litigators!).

    The other side of this is, however, perhaps a little more contentious. We don’t allow children to participate in all this stuff, but we make an assumption that adults may, can, and that there is, for the most part, nothing wrong with it!

    So why do we need this Protection From Porn Week?

    Well, it’s not aimed at children. With all that child sexual exploitation is an evil thing and no sensible adult would allow that it’s not, the target here is not to protect children. It’s not even to protect. The target is Sex.

    Since the Sixties there has been a war going on in this country about the public function of Sex in our society. I won’t here detail that war—we sell products with it, but we can’t actually sell the thing itself (except in certain places under strict licensing etc.); we all like to be sexy, even when we don’t admit it, but we don’t necessarily want to follow through on the implications, i.e. have sex commensurate with the degree of sexiness we like to pretend to; sex is one of the most wanted things we have, yet there is a perverse urge to deny it to others when we deem it inappropriate (or even when it is appropriate, just public). The war has taken on all the canny subterfuge and annoying intangibility of the worst aspects of the Cold War, which I think is an ironic if apt comparison. After all, the Cold War was as much about ideas as about actions.

    Attorney General John Ashcroft spent $80,000 on a curtain to hide the tits of Justice so television viewers wouldn’t be offended.

    Who really was? We’ve been looking at public nudity like that for two centuries. Except for a few extreme crackpots, I don’t know of anyone who ever seriously complained—because we have all made the distinction between nudity and sexuality in these instances. I mean, no one seriously gets turned on by the nakedness of Justice. Do they?

    Now, with another far right, religio-obsessed appointment to a position which requires a far more Libertarian attitude than one comparable to Sir Charles Lamb or Carrie Nation, we get closer and closer to the core program of the faction this administration represents.

    Just what is it about these people that they cannot stand other human beings having orgasms which do not lead automatically to child-birth?

    As a statement of principle, let me be up front. I think sex between mutually consenting individuals is a wonderful thing. Under any circumstances. Sex itself is one of the best things we can offer each other. Sex is beautiful, sex is great, sex is a thing to be sought and had and indulged. I have always thought restrictions on it between mutually consenting people were silly if not obscene.

    Having said that, look at what I said. “Mutually consenting individuals”. There’s a lot of substance floating beneath the iceberg tip of that phrase. What it implies is profound.

    No one should thoughtlessly indulge sex.

    No one should have sex under inequitable circumstances.

    No one should violate another’s individuality in order to have sex.

    In order to mutually consent to something, we presume a kind of level playing field. You have to know why you’re there, know yourself, know what you’re getting into, and know what you think you’re getting out of it. You have to UNDERSTAND what’s happening.

    Which is what makes all forms of sexual coercion ugly and condemnable. Which is why “No means No” has to be adhered to utterly. Which is why, for all you frat boys, jocks, and hapless wannabe Don Juans (of either gender), getting someone drunk or stoned in order to screw them is a crime.

    It’s also an act of cowardice.

    Equitable conditions is a little less concrete, but in the instance of children it’s absolutely clear, and you can use that as a starting point. There is no way a child is the equal of an adult in any practical sense. Adults having sex with children can never be anything but abuse because of the fundamental disconnect in status and knowledge and experience. There is no possibility of “mutual consent” in this case, because the basis on which such consent is given is absent.

    That shouldn’t be too hard to understand. Other bases of inequity are slipperier but no less real. Financial inequity is a biggie. When the boss threatens job loss if sex is not forthcoming, this is an inequitable circumstance. Of course, this is a power game, and sex should be devoid of power games in order for it to be right. (Unless power is part of the Game, in which both participants are agreed in advance, but that’s not coercion.) Unfortunately, in this society, it goes beyond such simple—and prosecutable—examples as that. Despite our ardent political illusions to the contrary, we do have a class structure, and that alone tilts the scales into inequitable exchanges. Money always shifts the balance. Who you have sex with and why all too often has less to do with sex itself than with other factors. We make jokes, always have, about “marrying money” and “trophy wives”, but the basis of those jokes is not a laughing matter. Coercion goes both ways, depending on circumstances.

    So you see, when I say Mutually Consenting Individuals, that is not a carte blanche. It never was, even though we treat it that way more often than not. Two people are over 21, they can vote, they should be able to do what they want with and to each other.

    Is it ever that simple?

    But aside from these considerations, if conditions of mutuality and consent are met, where does anyone get off suggesting it’s wrong to have sex?

    And just to be clearer, I don’t mean sanctified sex-for-procreation. Nature has pulled a nasty trick on us, in my opinion, by linking sexual pleasure with procreation so strongly. It makes perfect sense in terms of Darwinian necessity, but the contents of our minds is not from that part of nature and is a separate thing from the urges of basic DNA.

    It’s a cliche, of course, but still powerful, that in this society we have no problem with people going to the theater to watch a film in which people kill each other in many and varied and devious and painful ways, but if two people are naked and mutually indulging each other carnally, we try to get it banned. At least limit the audience. Heaven forbid we give our children the idea that sex is good and all right and that maybe violence is bad.

    Which is a curious thing. We raise children to gradually (in theory) learn how to manage the controls of their lives in just about everything—we teach them (supposedly) about cars and traffic laws, about politics, about finances, all gradually over time, so that when they reach adulthood they have some grasp of what all this stuff is about. Except when it comes to sex. We try our best to pretend in front of them that it doesn’t exist, that it’s something they should not know anything about, and then expect them at 21 to all at once comprehend the complex and rich world of sexuality. That’s how it seems anyway.  (And if any proof of this proposition is required, just ask yourselves why this ludicrous Abstinence Only sex ed policy has not been torn to shreds by outraged parents who actually want their kids educated?  I think more parents than not are quite content to assume their children aren’t learning anything that would embarrass the parents to acknowledge.)
    Now we have politicians getting in an uproar over gay marriage. They’ve been in an uproar over abortion since Roe V. Wade, and I do not believe that for most of them it has as much to do with fetuses as it has to do with sex. Notice, almost uniformly all prolife groups refuse to consider a broader, more comprehensive birth control education and availability program. Randal Terry, the former head of Operation Rescue, has stated that all forms of birth control, to his way of thinking, are abortion, murder, and immoral. No, it’s not the morality of abortion, it’s sex. Abortions represent women having sex without consequence (which is a fatuously wrongheaded way to look at it, so self-servingly puerile in its refusal to see any other possible explanation than their own). I would be less inclined to despise the Prolife Movement if they were out there encouraging people to use condoms, the Pill, or sterilization. That they condemn these things almost on par demonstrates that the issue is, really, sex.

    And now we have a White House appointee with exactly these attitudes. (I don’t care if he’s a gynecologist––if I were a woman and his patient, I’d change doctors now––that obviously doesn’t make him sane on the issue.)

    Let’s not kid ourselves. True, there are economic considerations to all these things, but the bottom line here is a public aversion, even hatred, of sex. It’s effective because even people who disagree with the programmatic side of this campaign find it too difficult to stand up and argue the opposite. They get squeamish. After all, it’s personal, it’s private. Of course it is, so why is the government involved at any level other than the FDA approving new contraception?

    It’s a control issue. I’m being a bit Kafkaesque, now, a bit Orwellian, so fair warning that some of what follows is just me thinking out loud and very broadly.

    Something to consider. Traditionally, those in power who work to oppress sex—who enact sodomy laws, or things like the Mann Act, or marital status laws, or laws regulating pornography, or who condemn people who indulge themselves in sex without guilt—the leaders who condemn immorality, who tell us that society will collapse to anarchy if we don’t control our sexual urges, who try to lock us in prisons of fear or guilt, who turn sex into property and then legislate it as such, those people have always indulged themselves, from popes to presidents. Those who are most aggressively anti-sex in public have usually lived private lives drenched in it.  (One need look at the Republican/social conservative roster of hypocrisy to see this.  Not that Democrats don’t cheat on their wives, the it’s more often a hapless thing, not tied to a vociferous Family Values political record.  Dole divorced his wife to marry his mistress.  Gingrich served his cancer-stricken wife divorce papers in the hospital so he could marry his mistress.  McCain divorced his wife to marry his mistress.  Foley campaigned against pornography and worked to stop Gay marriage and has been caught propositioning male pages.  It goes on and on.)
    And they could, because they have the power to condemn those who they coerced. The ultimate inequity. The ultimate abuse.

    Not all of them, mind you. I have no doubt that our current president is faithful to his wife. In our present media-invasive climate, if he weren’t we would all know soon enough. But those who benefit from his position, those who support him, those who sycophantically proclaim their loyalty, those who donate money and give favors. There is always a cadre, a circle, around such leaders who do get to have what they want.

    What is distressing is that this is a button so easily pushed. We seem as a collective incapable of arguing back when our leaders tell us we need to oppress sex. Maybe if we stopped acting like sex is something we “get away with” every time we have it, stop acting like the children we claim to be trying to protect—in short, collectively pull our heads out of our posteriors and deny the politicians any right to tell us what is or is not appropriate private behavior, then we could begin to rationalize the discourse and subsequently the panic-driven legal paroxysms we seem to be going through.

    Many—possibly most—people behave quite reasonably about sex. But their voices are not the ones dominating the public discourse. Instead, the discourse is driven by those who wish us to be ashamed of arousal, of touching, of orgasm, as if civilization will perish if we collectively admit to enjoying it.

    Of course, if we did take this approach, then maybe we could also start addressing the real problems we have with it—the inequities in our relationships, the abuse that happens every day, the real disconnects we have between law and practice.

    In order to protect children from it, we should first grow up ourselves, instead of acting like children who’ve been caught with our hands in the cookie jar.

    Until then, we have present-day puritans dictating morality. And we let them, even when we know that what they’re doing is wrongheaded, because we don’t want to admit…

    What? That we like sex? Or that maybe we don’t really know how to deal with it?

    Start with what I suggest: Mutual Consent means a great deal more than just two people saying yes.

    Protection starts with self-knowledge.

    Or maybe we should just wait for the presidential “Protection From Arousal” week.

  • Ignorance Rampant

    The following is a quote lifted from Charlie Stross’s blog and is pretty much In Full.

    We. Are. Not. Going. To. Die. On. Wednesday.

    The maximum energy the particles generated by the LHC (7TeV) get up to is many orders of magnitude below the maximum energy of cosmic rays that hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere from space every fricking day. None of them have created black holes and gobbled up the planet, or turned us all into strange matter. Nor have they done ditto to any cosmic bodies we can see, such as planets or stars. Therefore the world isn’t going end when they switch on the LHC on Wednesday. QED.

    Joking is all very well, but please, can we not be spreading the FUD and scaring people needlessly? The current climate of superstitious dread with respect to the sciences is bad enough as it is …

    As everyone knows we have a presidential election coming up. The two combatants are flinging accusations at one another as to why the other guy isn’t fit to lead. According to McCain, Obama is not only another tax-and-spend Liberal but one with no real experience. McCain is claiming to be an agent of change, despite a record that really doesn’t reflect that. To be fair, he’s been on board with a few bits of legislation that took on some of the more egregious problems in our country, but by and large he’s pretty much just another tax-and-spend Conservative, but one with a lot of experience.

    I quoted Charlie’s post for a specific reason. You can search the blogosphere and find many of these sorts of posts, all done in the face of a minor upswelling of panic among those who don’t know any better claiming that the LHC would cause a major event precipitating the End of the World.

    My question, simply, is this: why would anyone believe this?

    This bears directly on the election. We have many organizations—like FactCheck.com— that take on the rather onerous and often thankless job of vetting statements made by political candidates. Anyone can go look to see which statements are true, false, or exaggerations. There are other sites, like Project For the Old American Century, which have a tally of the abuses of the Bush Administration, with links to sources. The record is there for anyone to go look for themselves and see.

    But people don’t. Well, some people do. But I suspect a lot of people rely on the ads and the occasional televised interview to develop their information about the candidates, which is a pretty useless way to do it.

    I know a woman in her 40s who does not know that women in this country did not always have the right to vote. When I pointed it out that women didn’t get it till 1920, she was incredulous. She didn’t believe me. I pulled out some history books to show her. Her eyes glazed over.

    Next time I spoke to her about it, she had defaulted back to believing that we were the only democracy to guarantee women’s rights from our inception.

    The obstinacy of false beliefs baffles me unlike anything else. I recall some friends who supported Ronald Reagan in 1980, said laudatory things about him, but when I bring it up now they look at me as if I’d sprouted a second head. They have rewritten their own history to disclude this embarrassing bit and will not cop to it.

    Charlie’s post about the idiocy of people’s fears is very political. Remember the Alar issue over apples? The panic that this substance was on all our apples and that it would kill us spread so fast that and regardless of efforts to provide the truth, there were orchards and packing plants that went out of business because of the resulting boycott of apples that would not have hurt anyone because the substance washed off easily.

    People do not understand basic science. Beyond that, there is a lack of understanding of basic logic. Why? Well, for one, it has always been assumed that Common Sense was a natural attribute—and in some small way, a particularly natural attribute of Americans (!) —and needed no assistance from the educational system, when nothing could be further from the truth.

    In the introduction to his study of the history of rational thought, Uncommon Knowledge, Alan Cromer states: “I believe that rational civilization, with its science, arts, and human rights, is humankind’s greatest hope for nobility. But like Jericho, it’s but an oasis in the midst of a vast desert of human confusion and irrationality.”

    Nancy Reagan regularly consulted an astrologer and often took the predictions offered as grounds for forcing changes of itinerary for her husband while in office. Who knows what else might have been effected as a result?

    People like easy answers and quick fixes. The present financial crisis we see engulfing Wall Street is not mysterious. It could be seen coming years ago. Loaning money to people who cannot pay it back obviously will lead to illiquidity of the lender if indulged at too great a level, and that is what has happened. To be fair, many borrowers were openly lied to, the mortgages in question misrepresented. The only thing that might have halted the bleeding would have been if the borrowers, en masse, had had the intellectual tools to see bull shit for what it is. Many did not. Many others did not possess the capacity to differentiate between Need and Want. Of course, that obfuscation is a desired quality in business—many industries make their living on the inability of people to make disciplined distinctions. They would hate it if basic economics were taught in grade school on.

    But everyone is acting surprised—and panicked. We are in bail-out mode because big houses, like AIG, are about to go under, and the truth is such institutions, that have been allowed to have tentacles into many areas of the financial garden, are so intertwined with our basic economies that we see it as to our benefit to keep them afloat.

    And we do not understand how we got here.

    Why not? Do we not understand that all the pseudo-Libertarian talk about Free Markets is nonsense?

    No, apparently not.

    On the reverse side, people are being driven by panic. The Stock Market lost 500 points. Omigod, that’s a disaster!

    500 points out eleven thousand. We have lost our sense of proportion. That is less than five percent of total volume. By contrast, the Crash of 1929 saw the Stock Market lose almost 40% of its value in two months.

    Let me quote from the Oxford Companion to United States History:

    The crash did not cause the Great Depression of the 1930s. To be sure, the losses sustained by investors and the greater diufficulty firms had in floating new issues depressed the economy. But the Federal Reserve stepped in quickly, lending freely to member banks and thereby confining the crash to the financial system. During the 1930s, congressional investigations uncovered a number of unsavory practices by the essentially private, unregulated stock exchanges. In response, Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933 and the Security and Exchange Act of 1934, inaugurating active federal regulation of the securities market.

    Sound familiar? And why did we need regulation? Because stupidity combined with avarice results in collateral damage to those not involved with these matters. Officially, we had 24% unemployment during the Great Depression. It was probably, judging by how the numbers get fudged today, more like 30%. We have 6% now and we feel that we are in a major meltdown.

    Granted, for those out of work or on the losing end of investments, the pain is real and not to be scoffed at, but for the rest of us, our overreactions do us little credit. Sound solutions cannot be agreed upon in an atmosphere of panic, and such an atmosphere is fomented by those who have traditionally sought to lead us by the nose for their own benefit.

    The regulatory system put in place in the 30s was designed to prevent something like that from ever happening again, and it worked. Why then would we dismantle it?

    Because we did. We let Reagan’s cronies undo much of the regulation that had previously protected the country as a whole. We’re paying the price now for Free Market advocates getting their wish. They have turned out to be just as irresponsible as in the 20s and 30s.

    But we have been frightened by accusations that regulation somehow equates directly to Socialism, and we have been convinced that Socialism is evil. The arguments which have been used to keep us from being sane and rational about such issues are tissue paper obfuscations, easily seen through by anyone with half a brain, but we as a people buy into them every time. Either we possess profound ignorance or equally profound cupidity. Probably both.

    What Reagan began, Bush has all but finished. He has mounted up a debt so high that we must look far down the road to see it reduced to manageable levels, and yet he is lauded as a Conservative by people who ought to know better by virtue of the fact that they are losing their savings and their children’s future to rising costs.

    Why would they believe it? It is, simply, the same mentality that leads them to accept the Chicken Little warnings about the Large Hadron Collider without question. It is easy to go find the answers to these questions, but answers are not sought. Because it seems that as a people we are trained not to look or, worse, not to trust a rational explanation. It is easier to live in constant panic-mode and hope the next guy in office will fix it all, so we can go back to our thoughtless lives.

    When I was a little kid I remember looking at the exhaust from a factory and asking my dad where all that smoke went. “It just dissipates into the atmosphere.”

    “But won’t the atmosphere fill up some day?”

    “No, the world is too big for that.”

    I was four or five. I accepted the answer, because I trusted my dad. He was an adult, after all, and adults didn’t do stupid things like children did. Now I look on that and see that my innate curiosity and skepticism was at work even then. His answer never satisfied me, but there were other things to do, so I trusted him and let it slide.

    Collectively, we tend to be that way. Occasionally we ask “What about that?” and some “adult” pats our head and tells us not to worry, everything will be fine.

    I grew up expecting adults to be rational. People did stupid things in the past, but supposedly we had learned not to do those things. I was too young then to realize how stupidity clings to people.

    Forgive me if I use words like Stupidity and Moron. I am 53, almost 54, and I have lost all willingness to cut people slack anymore. When I walk into a convention hall filled with dealers in books and movies and jewelry and the fake ephemera of fantasyland (I’m talking about a science fiction convention now) and I see someone purporting to take pictures of your “Aura” (as in Kirlian Aura) with a device that supposedly “spikes” the aura by electricity shunted through one’s body while seated in a chair resembling a bad device from a Frankenstein movie, I get annoyed. When I see people lining up to buy said photos, people who really, I think, ought to know better, I get angry. The charlatan makes a living, the public is gulled, and the one who points out the bull shit is reviled by all.

    We have no patience, it seems, for reasoned discourse, for examination of issues, for anything that would prompt us to take responsibility for our own ignorance. I speak collectively now, for I do in fact know many people who do not see the world this way, but it seems they are always and everywhere too few.

    If the LHC had been built in this country, I fear that some court injunction would have been placed to prevent it from being turned on by some group convinced that it would result in a hole right through the Earth. We are saved from such silliness because the device is in Europe, where the courts, at least, seem less willing to entertain the hysterias of ignorant people.

    So it comes down to which set of lies we will believe. We always end up hoping for the best. So far, the only thing that has buffered us from any truly cataclysmic harm is the sheer size and wealth of this country. But unless we start doing a little rational thinking and start seeing things for what they are, that will not last long.

    I beg your pardon for expressing such pessimism.