Mark W Tiedemann

Category: current affairs

  • Revenge Porn

    There is probably no way for me to write this without tripping over some bloodthirsty reactionary’s sensibilities, but you know, I don’t really give a damn.

    In my home town, too.

    A St. Louis publishing company has released a 9/11 coloring book.  There is a reaction to it here.  Wonderful cover.

     

    Very patriotic.  Nothing violent on the cover itself, but there are the twin towers and, I think, the proposed memorial tower.

    Oh yes, and a cross.  This is, after all, commemorating the assault by Muslims against Christians.

    The subtitle is interesting: A Graphic Coloring Novel on the Events of September 11, 2001.

    A novel.

    Hmm.

    Well, it is rated PG, I suppose that’s something.

     

    One of the inside images has been getting a great deal of press as an example of what can be found inside.

    Yes, indeed.  A depiction of a SEAL shooting Osama Bin Laden, through one of his wives.  They even made sure you could see the bullet.  They have also depicted Bin Laden as something of a coward—he’s clearly cringing behind the brave woman set to take the shot for him.

    This is about as bad as the Easter Baskets Walmart offered one year full of missiles and bombs.

    Let me be clear here:  I do not mourn Osama Bin Laden.  I feel he was a hateful man who did terrible things and has left the world a much more dangerous place than it was before.  I might have certain moral quibbles about the manner of his demise, but one of my overwhelming feelings is that this is how it ought to have been done back in 2001 and 2002.  The excessive eruption of American military response that has left us with depleted moral force in a world that was already ambivalent about us, mired in two wars that should have been over long ago had they not been disastrously mishandled (and which, according to a recent study, has cost us close to 60 billion in funds stolen by contractors in Iraq alone), and with a hair-trigger police-state mentality that has crippled us in actual problem-solving, much higher energy costs, and a political landscape that will require a combination of Solomon, George Washington, and Albert Einstein to untangle was the most egregious example of vengeance-seeking since Johnson’s refusal to get out of Vietnam.  Had we concentrated on finding Bin Laden and sending special teams to go get him, we would have accomplished much m0re.

    But that would have meant a trial, probably, and a stage on which he might have aired his complaints.  And after all we had a president with something to prove and a vice president whose lust for power is rarely found outside of a bad novel.

    So we now have a coloring book to do more damage by covering up the farce that the last decade has been in the eyes of children who will come of age learning the official version, reinforced by the simple activity of filling in between the lines the pictures in a novel that is basically about revenge.

    I suppose it would be a hard thing to sell if it told the truth, which is that basically in the aftermath of 9/11 America enjoyed more absolute global sympathy than at any time since WWII and we squandered it by acting stupidly.  All this know-how—and we have a lot of that, really—ignored, misused, pissed away.

    It’s possible to characterize almost every war, especially since the end of the 19th Century, as a means by which industry has made more money.  There’s a component of that to every conflict, even WWII, which really was about evil in the world.  But I can’t think of one that has been more nakedly so than Iraq.  With the revelation of the graft and corruption and the outright theft and the complete lack of accountability, it is impossible not to see it as having been instigated for the sole benefit of multinationals, Halliburton being first and foremost.

    But we can’t tell kids that.  Can’t have them grow up thinking the people who run their country can ever be stupid, or greedy, or vain, or misguided, or duped, or simply wrong.  Can’t have that.

    So let’s dress it up like another excusable example of John Wayne diplomacy.

    Shit.

     

  • And The Winners Are…

    The Hugo Awards for 2011 have been presented.  The winners are:

     

    • Best Novel: Blackout/All Clear, by Connie Willis
    • Best Novella: The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang
    • Best Novelette: “The Emperor of Mars,” by Allen M. Steele
    • Best Short Story: “For Want of a Nail,” by Mary Robinette Kowal
    • Best Related Work: Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who
      Love It      , edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea
    • Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse,
      written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright
    • Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan
    • Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who: “The Pandorica Opens”/”The Big Bang,” written by Steven Moffat; directed by Toby Haynes
    • Best Editor Short Form: Sheila Williams
    • Best Editor Long Form: Lou Anders
    • Best Professional Artist: Shaun Tan
    • Best Semi Prozine: Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan, Sean Wallace; podcast directed by Kate Baker
    • Best Fanzine: The Drink Tank, edited by Christopher J Garcia and James Bacon
    • Best Fan Writer: Claire Brialey
    • Best Fan artist: Brad W. Foster
    • John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Lev Grossman

    Congratulations to all (and a special one to my buddy Allen—this is number three now, I believe).

  • Republicans, Rent Boys, and Rhetoric

    Another outspoken advocate of Public Morals has been caught with a hand slipping into the cookie jar of Craig’s List sex.  Yes, he’s loudly anti-gay and, yes, he’s a Republican.

    Now, I don’t for a second believe being a Republican has anything to do with this, any more than I believe being Catholic has anything to do with pedophilic priests.  I think we largely have the cart turned ’round the wrong way.  I think there is something about both organizations that attract such people, and while you can lay full blame on the Catholic Church for coddling these criminals, you can’t really blame them for creating them.  They came pre-flawed, as it were, and merely found a place to flourish.

    There are theories.  Heavens, there are theories!

    In this particular instance, I’ll go along with a combination of two.  One is the self-loathing of the deeply-closeted gay.  Publicly declaring it perversion, privately unable to keep it under control, and then doing the dumb bit of soliciting for sex via venues that have in the past proved their potential for public exposure.  It’s as if subconsciously they’re crying out “Help me!  Catch me so I can be humiliated into a cure!”  Of course, it doesn’t work that way, but who ever credited one’s subconscious with logic?

    The other part is more sinister and has thousands of years of history to back it up and that has to do with the privileges of power.  The assumption that high status comes, automatically, with perks denied ordinary mortals.

    Or should be denied them.  Which brings the perversion into it.  Not sexual perversion, but the perversion of presumed status.

    See, the powerful have always had access to whatever they wanted, regardless of what the law says.  (Margaret Atwood chronicled this in The Handmaid’s Tale with the visit to the private party where the high mucky-mucks of Gilead get to party down with all the vices they have publicly denied everyone else.  Privilege.

    Now I can get with the idea that status confers perks.  I can.  You work your ass off to achieve position, there should be some things open to you that ordinarily wouldn’t be.

    But not of the illegal variety.  I’m talking about no waiting at the best restaurants, preferred seating at theaters, powerful people willing to take your call with no fuss, that sort of stuff.

    Not crazy sex with rent boys or call girls, which (a) shouldn’t be illegal to begin with and (b) shouldn’t be denied as illicit and perverse.

    But I think one of the things about power is this whole “access to the forbidden” aspect that makes what ought to be available to all something to be denied the general public, put in a box of legislative occlusion, and then indulged behind the most closed of doors, because getting away with it is half the thrill.

    It seems the loudest proponents of so-called Family Values are the ones most often caught in such hypocrisies.  But if you look at it from the angle of privilege seeking to maintain something solely for itself, then you can look at all of history to make sense of it.  Popes and priests with mistresses, even while condemning the whole notion of adultery and fornication for the unwashed masses.  Aristocrats indulging their every whim, kings keeping courtesans, and let’s not even get into the misuse of young boys.

    I do not say that such things never and do not continue to happen at every level of society, but no one pays attention to someone making minimum wage when they bitch about immorality even while they’re fucking their best friend’s wife or diddling their brother’s kids.  Except to put them in jail when they’re caught, at least in the latter instance.  Such people have no ability to effectively shield their behavior.

    What to make of all these Republicans who keep getting caught in blatant hypocrisies?  Is it a Republican disease?  Surely not.  Democrats get outed in pecadilloes.  There is a significant difference, though, in the ideologies.  The Republicans have allied themselves to this whole puritanical anti-sex faction and it is often the worst of them in terms of oppressive legislation and rhetoric that get caught doing almost exactly what they condemn.  Not so much with the Democrats.  I don’t necessarily excuse the behavior, but there’s a considerable difference in the level of hypocrisy.

    I think there is a fundamental pathology involved with people who so publicly seek to condemn sexual activities and an even deeper one in those who condemn what they themselves indulge.  There’s an obsession with sex that, contrary to the rhetoric, is far deeper than any norm one might acknowledge.  People who condemn it with such stridency are probably so obsessed with it that their public stance can only be seen as that of an addict who wants everyone else to take care of his problem for him.  If it is rendered unavailable to everyone, removed from access, then he (or she, but it seems a condition more of males than females—that may be just an aberration of reporting or maybe the women are more careful, and possibly less hypocritical) won’t be able to indulge, temptation removed.

    This is making one’s incapacity to control one’s self everyone else’s problem.

    Which is particularly annoying when it shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

    What I suspect some of these loudmouthed moralists would be should they be propositioned by a mature, healthy person who just wants a roll in the sack, is rendered impotent.  Normal consensual sex?  How dare you suggest such a thing!  I think without the flavor of the illicit (and how much better if it were also illegal) it would be…threatening.  There’s no power to wield, this person is here willingly, there’s no way to guarantee control.  And it would be done with a presumption that it’s—gasp!—okay.

    I’m remembering Jim Bakker, whose impropriety now is fading into the mists of ancient history, but as head of the PTL indulged himself regularly, but (apparently, and at least in one instance) through the use of ruffies or their equivalent.  When Jessica Hahn, one of his parishioners, dropped the dime on him with the full story, two things happened that I found interesting.  First, all Bakker’s followers blamed Hahn, even though she had been drugged.  Secondly, Hahn apparently discovered that she couldn’t live with the hypocrisy—she liked sex and doing it under the cloak of sinful, illicit ignominy just didn’t play.  (What she subsequently did with her career may be of questionable taste, but she never apologized for it or tried to make herself out to be anything other than herself.)  But as a by-product of the first thing, Bakker was able to receive a public “cleansing” by admitting his sins and “being forgiven”, which I now believe added a layer of thrill.  You can’t experience that thrill if you don’t do anything wrong, so…

    Run down the line of such preachers and you see the same pathology as I described with these moralizing politicians. The ultimate was Jimmy Swaggart, whose weeping performance before his followers was disturbing on so many levels—but if seen as part of the thrill may make perfect sense.

    I’m not sure the genie will ever be put back in the bottle, and for that I’m glad.  But these folks keep trying.  Unless sex is dirty, I’m guessing, it just isn’t as much fun.

    Nor is it a perk.  If everyone can do it, without guilt, freely and consensually, where’s the special privileges for becoming powerful?

    I think we would all do well to stop voting for people who run for office on any kind of sexual morality platform.  Public health is different, but these folks aren’t combining the two.  If anything they’re making it worse, with their jihad against contraception and this nonsensical abstinence only education, which has been repeatedly shown to not work.  They are doing the country a disservice.

    Besides, it’s getting boring.  Utterly predictable, and as boring as the evolution/creationism debate.  Which, oddly enough, the same people seem to be involved in…

     

  • Our Dreams Are Sleeping

    Neil DeGrasse Tyson is my favorite science pop star. He is right up there with Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan in terms of ability and scope and style when it comes to explaining science to the public. I’ve heard that a follow-up mini-series to Sagan’s superb Cosmos is in the works with Tyson as the narrator.

    After this, I have to say, I love this guy:

    Back in the Seventies, Robert A. Heinlein testified before congress about the benefits of the space program—the ones people don’t generally know about. Among some of them was the surprising fact that suicides among seniors was sharply down since the Gemini program and the announcement of the Apollo program. Years later I noted that suicides were back up after several cancellations.

    We do not pay enough attention to dreams anymore. I don’t know what happened to us. Even in the dark days of McCarthyism we dreamed big dreams. What, have we suffered exhaustion? Possibly. But the more we gut the things that make people give a damn about getting up tomorrow, the worse everything is going to be. It is not all about money, as some would have us believe. Money is a tool. What are we doing with it? One part of our society seems bent on destroying the mechanisms of improvement for the average American while the other part seems unable to make a stand and say stop the carnage. One part has convinced another part that the problem is all about government redistribution of wealth and we should end entitlements and cut out all this useless spending and let private enterprise do everything. As far as I can see, right now, all private enterprise is interested in doing is building more casinos and feeding larger dividends to people who don’t want to pay taxes to support the dreams of the country.

    It might help, though, if we actually had some dreams again. Time to wake them up and let them play. Before we forget how.

  • Another Top 100 List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    You get the idea.

  • The Problem…Succinctly, Loudly

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

    I wrote about this previously here

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

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

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

  • Debunking Du Jour

  • New Website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I am going to write some more books.

  • Treason To The Future

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

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

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

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

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

    Science fiction is all about change.

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

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

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

  • How To Put This As Delicately As I Can…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Hmm.

    How can I say this without offending anyone…

    I can’t. So I’ll just say it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ______________________________________________________________________

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