Mark W Tiedemann

Category: current affairs

  • Compassionate Fangs

    Last week I received my DVD of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the new documentary about Harlan Ellison.  I’ve watched it a couple of times now, thoroughly enjoying it.  Neil Gaiman makes the observation in the film that Ellison has been engaged in a great big piece of performance art called “Harlan Ellison” and I think he’s spot on.  Harlan—he is one of the only writers who ever worked in the realm of fantastic literature to be known almost immediately by his first name—is very much part and parcel of his work.  You don’t get the one without the other.

    Which is not to say the work doesn’t stand on its own.  It does, very much so.  No doubt there are many people who have read the occasional Ellison story and found it…well, however they found it.  Anything, I imagine, but trivial.  If they then go on to become fans of the stories, eventually they will become aware of the person, mainly by virtue of the extensive introductions Harlan writes to just about everything he does, secondarily by the stories told by those who know, or think they know, something about him, either through personal experience or by word of mouth.

    He’s fascinating to watch.  Sometimes it’s like watching a tornado form.

    Harlan was born in 1934, which makes him 75 now.  This seems incredible to me, sobering even.  He will always seem to me to be about 40, even though I have seen him now for years with white hair and other attributes of age.  The voice has gotten a bit rougher, but he’s just as sharp as ever.

    I have been in his actual presence on two occasions.  In 1986 he showed up in Atlanta at the world SF convention that year and I have a couple of autographed books as a result.  He dominated a good part of one day for us.   The second time was in 1999 or so, at a small convention called ReaderCon in Massachussetts, where he was guest of honor.  On that occasion I had lunch with him and few others and that lunch remains memorable, because I got to see the man when he isn’t On.  That is, it was before the convention began and he was, so to speak, “off duty” and was more relaxed, less hyperbolic.  And it was a great pleasure.  It is easy to see why people are drawn to him.

    He is something of a contradiction.  He is a fine writer.  Even if one doesn’t care for the subject matter or even finds his style abrasive, it is clear to anyone paying attention that this man can write.  He deserves to be read.  At the same time, he is a class A, high functioning extrovert, one able to extemporize brilliantly and fluently on a wide range of subjects, and exhibits all the traits writers by common apprehension are thought to lack.

    He is also dramatically confrontational.

    In many ways, he reminds me of my father, who is also a man who brooks no foolishness, suffered fools not at all, and generally always said what was on his mind.  Harlan seems to be less controlled so more of his mind gets said than many people can stand.

    The weekend of Readercon way back when  gave me a chance to observe him working and I noticed that—also like my father—Harlan is a 110 percenter.  That is, he gives more than he really has to give, especially when he’s fulfilling an obligation, in this case the duties of the guest of honor.  I suspect he’s like that in his personal life, too, and it certainly shows in the work.  Which also means that when his efforts are in some way betrayed, his disillusionment is also great.  I’ve watched my father end friendships, lose deep interests, and walk away from whole careers because something soured it for him and because he had committed so much of himself there was no room to shrug off the slight and go on from there.   He engaged too deeply, more deeply than the person or object could return or could suspect, and when the break came there was no space for backing off and starting over.

    In Harlan’s case—as, indeed, with my father—the work is and was paramount and would not have been done with as much passion and precision if they were otherwise.

    As far as I’m concerned, Dreams With Sharp Teeth could have been another hour longer.  There are details, aspects of his life and his work, that I would have liked to hear more.  Harlan did not live the life of a writer—he lived the life writers are sometimes said to have lived, and a few did, but most are ill-suited to living.  Hemingway sailed boats, hunted lion, led men in war, boxed, took lovers, and did it all with the kind of gusto that fits someone a writer would write about, not the writer himself.

    Harlan marched with King to Selma.

    I am in no way suggesting he and Hemingway are the only ones to have done such things, certainly not, but they are among a handful who are known for those things as much as for the work.  That takes a lot of presence, a lot of person, a lot of spirit.

    In a way, one could describe Harlan as a perfect storm.  The man matches the words, and the words are…

    I defy you to read Jeffty Is Five or Shatterday or The Whimper of Whipped Dogs or All The Lies That Are My Life or The Executioner of the Malformed Children or I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream or Shattered Like A Glass Goblin and come away unmoved, unaffected, for that moment unchanged.   One Life Furnished In Early Poverty is an homage, a justification, an epitaph, and an elegy all rolled into something that also contains enormous glee and childish wonder.

    Or go find his two volumes of television criticism, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, books which were the objects of actual censorship (something that never happens in this country, of course) under Nixon.  Though they were written and published in the Sixties, the observations are fresh and if anything more relevant today.

    One thing that I’ve always found interesting, and didn’t quite understand until I met the man and saw him before an audience, is that he is the only writer I know who consistently appears on the covers of his books.  Usually in marvelous illustrations by artists like Barclay Shaw or Leo and Diane Dillon, but consistently enough to be remarkable.  Once you see him and listen to him, you begin to understand.

    Anyway, I recommend the film.  And if you haven’t read any of Harlan’s work, do so before you die.  He really should be up there with Pynchon and Mailer, Vidal and King, Burgess and Hemingway, and others.  In my mind, he is.  He’s that good.

  • Atheists Are (Perhaps) Us…Or Not

    There was a time in this country that an open admission of atheism could get a person severely hurt in any given community.  Ostracism, mainly, which over time can be very damaging.  But like so many other “out of the mainstream” life choices, this too is no longer the case.

    According to this article in the New York Times, “No Religion” has more than doubled on surveys in the past ten to twenty years.  Now, that does not mean all these folks are atheists or agnostics.  It means, quite specifically, that they align themselves with no organized religion.

    Some folks might wonder at the difference.  What is having faith if not in the context of a religious umbrella?

    When I was fifteen I left the church.  I’d been educated in a Lutheran school and received a healthy indocrintation in that faith.  After entering public high school, I found myself growing less and less involved or interested.  There was in this no profound personal insight or revelation.  It was adolescent laziness.  I’d never been a consistent Sunday church-goer, and although there had been a year or two when I actually practiced Testifying, born out of a powerful belief in Christianity, other factors managed to draw my interest away.

    I stopped attending church at all.  I didn’t give it a lot of thought—some, but not a lot—until some visiting teachers showed up at my door from my church.  They were nice, they were concerned.  I’d been receiving the newsletter and so forth.  They wanted to know where I’d been.  I handed them some sophistry about finding another path.  At that point, I still believed in god and accepted Jesus and all that.  And in truth I had begun to suspect that the whole church thing had some serious problems.  But basically, I just didn’t want to be bothered, and all my new friends came from other backgrounds and didn’t go to that church.  I hadn’t especially liked the whole school experience there (having been bullied, mostly, till almost 8th grade) and didn’t have much motivation on that score to go back and make nice with people who had basically treated me like shit.

    They accepted my explanation and went away.  A few months later I received a letter from the P.T.L. and church board telling me my soul was in jeopardy if I didn’t return to the fold.  It took two pages, but the bottom line was I needed to get my butt back to church and beg forgiveness (and pay my dues) or I’d end up in hell.

    I was furious.  My father read the letter, laughed, and pronounced that they were obviously hard up for money, and suggested I ignore it.

    I did for another nine months.  Then I got another such letter.  Shorter, more to point, and the financial aspect was sharper.  This time I didn’t ignore it.  I went to the next open P.T.L. meeting there and when they asked for questions from the floor I stood up, read the letter, and then told them that this amounted to harrassment.  I didn’t care if they needed money, this was a threat and if I heard from them again, especially this way, they would hear from my lawyer.

    I never heard from them again.

    My anger did not subside.  It drove me into a frenzy of religious questioning.  Over the next two years I visited dozens of churches and more than a few off-the-wall sects (even the Church of Scientology), looking for…something.

    I found bits of it here and there.  Being a rather idealistic youth, having not found a satisfying answer in any of them, I opted to have faith my own way and to hell with all of them.  I was done with Organized Religion.

    And that’s how I felt about it for a long time—that it wasn’t god I didn’t believe in, but the church.  The more I studied the more I came to see how the church had become an institution that looked out for its own interests and my personal moral salvation was but a product sold to make sure the slate roofs didn’t leak and the clergy could dress well.  It wasn’t until I almost married a Catholic and went through some of the courses offered that I came to my final revelation that it was all just an extra-governmental method of social organization and control and had no real connection to anything holy.

    Whatever that might be.

    For several years I was militantly anti-religion.  I’ve mellowed.  All that I felt then about the church I do still feel, but not to the exclusion of much else.  I no longer view “church” as evil or even remotely culpable in social ills.  I’ve come to feel that many individual parishes and congregations have staid the tide of harm that sweeps over communities periodically and that without them communities would suffer more because frankly there isn’t anything else that does what a church does.  I believe that if all churches vanished tomorrow, by the end of the year there would be new ones, because people seem to need them.  They might not be called churches, but, like the organization in the Times piece, would serve all the social functions of one.

    I also feel that belief in god is not something that will ever go away.  There is a connection people need to feel to things larger than themselves and for many the amorphous thing they call god is it.  I dropped that notion when I realized that I felt exactly—exactly—the same feelings I’d felt toward god when in the grip of great music or in the presence of great art.  It is, in any of its manifestations, a human thing that takes us out of ourselves and shows us what the universe can mean, and there are many ways to tap into that.  There was a time when for the vast majority of people the Church was the only place to go to find that.  Seriously.  In one place, people could stand in the presence of grandeur that took them out of themselves and connected them to a larger realm, through the architecture, the music…and the stories.

    We live in a time when all those things can be experienced by many more people than ever before and in contexts shorn of the rather monopolistic trappings of religion.  Perhaps people do not consciously make that connection, but I think more and more people find that they are, for lack of a better term, spiritually fulfilled in the course of living a full life than was ever possible before.

    So I am careful about associating labels that may not be exactly correct to this growing phenomenon of people rejecting churches.  They are not all atheists.  Many may not be agnostics.  But all of them have discovered that the thing they sought in religion can be found without it.

    The best thing about this is that for all these people there is no one who can write them a threatening letter about hellfire and make them dance to a tune they no longer find danceable.

  • To Explore Strange New Worlds….

    The number of stars discovered having planets in orbit has grown over the years since we figured out how to find them.  Mostly, though, the planets in question have been big Super Jovians, basically failed stars that, had they been a bit more massive, probably would have ignited and turn their primary into a binary or even trinary star system.  Smaller planets— say, like Earth or Mars—are by definition harder to find.

    But find one we have.  Check this piece at Panda’s Thumb.

    The possibilities inch toward probabilities that there is life—rich life, complex life—elsewhere, not just here.  This is a really cool time to be a science fiction fan.

    Or maybe not.  Once the fantasy becomes fact, will it have the same kick?  It’s a question prompted on a much smaller scale by SF stories that have dated badly.  Technology or even basic science has passed them by and rendered them incorrect, obsolete in their premises.  I’ve seen it suggested that such stories be treated as alternate history, which is a good way around some of the pitfalls.  A lot of Arthur C. Clarke falls into this category.  Most of the apocalytpic tales that had us living in ruins before the 21st Century.  Putting a date on the events in a story can have a detrimental effect in terms of its viability in the future.

    This doesn’t bother some people.  I have a hard time with it and I admit it’s a personal thing with me.  When I read a novel that was published in the 50s or 60s about events in the 90s and those events are, necessarily, wrong, my suspension of disbelief goes out the window.  But mainly if the events of the story are sufficiently large scale—like the Soviet Union winning the Cold War or the advent of a nuclear holocaust or a moonbase or major shifts in geopolitics.  If the story is personal and doesn’t require that kind of overall rearranging of the landscape, it works just fine.  But then, is it science fiction?

    Alternate history really would be a good way to view a lot of old SF.  The exploration of strange new worlds we never found…

    In the meantime, we have some real ones that have been found.  How cool is that?

  • On Knocking ‘Em Dead

    By now I think everyone on the blogosphere has heard the story of Susan Boyle.   It is an amazing moment and I hope she goes on to do more, because this woman has the fire and the talent.

    You can tell, when you watch the video, that everyone in the audience and the judges thought this was a joke.  Here’s this dowdy, middle-aged woman with no looks and from a small town and with no creds who claims to want to be great and is going to sing a sentimental song from a musical and, well, shame on them and shame on us, she looked like she was going to croak like a frog.  So many people of like appearance do.  They step up on stage at the karaoke lounge and bellow or whine and it’s terrible and embarrassing and one hopes everyone was drunk enough not to care, but expectations get set.

    To be clear, people who look like that ought to have this kind of talent sound like frogs, too, but somehow we don’t characterize them that way.  We keep expecting beautiful people to be beautiful in everything, or at least to have the good taste to not try what they can’t do.

    One of the judges said that Susan’s performance was a wake-up call.  Indeed.

    I can’t sing.  I know this.  Even though, on occasion, with the right amount of brandy in my belly, I’ve been known to surprise a roomful of people, this is not a talent I have in any reliable measure.  And when I get nervous, it gets worse.

    But I can play piano and guitar and from time to time I’ve actually pulled off a minor coup in public performance.  The hindrance is always the nerves combined with my expectations.  I want to be great.

    And I know I’m not.

    I’m okay with that, though.  As much as I love music, it is not my first love, and playing okay is, well, okay with me.

    But it’s the guts to actually overcome self-consciousness enough to do what you know you can.  Susan Boyle has that.  I have no doubt there are many people who go onto those kinds of shows who really do have talent and blow it because, standing there in front of that audience and those judges, the little troll in the back of their brain tells them they can’t.  It is as much a talent and an ability to ignore that little shit as it is to then perform.  To some extent you have not care.

    But how do you do that when really you care so much it’s painful?

    The only way to shut that troll up is to do this kind of thing at least once.  And then again.  And again.  And so on.

    There was a girl in my grade school, a couple years behind me, who was the epitome of wall flower.  She could never manage to keep her hair combed right, her clothes never fit the way they should, and she muttered in class.  I found out later that she got straight A’s all through school, but she as unremarkable as they come.

    Because I was bullied through most of grade school, I made a deal with the teacher one year to be allowed to come in and play piano during recess.  I did this for a few months until I got in trouble for playing Never On Sunday (it was a parochial school).  A few others would come in, mostly girls, and listen.  I was not a great player by any stretch of the imagination then, but I was 12 and I could play I wasn’t playing hymns, so it was special.

    This girl came in a few times and once she asked if she could try.  There were giggles, but I slid aside and she sat down.

    She was 10 and proceeded to play Claire de Lune almost note perfect.  I recognized it because we had a lot of classical records at home, but the others didn’t.  Still, for about three minutes, it was mesmerizing.  Small hands, they nevertheless flew over the keys during the latter sections of the piece.

    When she finished, I said “That was terrific!  What else can you play?”  Whereupon she turned a brilliant red and ran from the classroom.  I never heard her play again.

    Now I hadn’t thought of her till I saw Susan Boyle.

    Never underestimate the power of human potential.  People will surprise you every time.  If they get a chance.  If they get a shot at living a dream.

    And we should never, ever laugh at someone’s dream.

  • It’s The Women, Stupid

    And now for a romantic interlude in the otherwise dangerous realm of Afghan social morays vis-a-vis the Taliban.  A young couple whose families disapproved of their union ran off to get married.  Married, mind.  Not live together outside wedlock or anything so dramatic, but married.  The result?  They were shot outside their mosque after a tribunal of mullahs condemned them.  Here is the story.

    It is difficult seeing this to remember that this sort of thing is really not consistent with mainstream Islam.  But, just as with certain splinter groups of so-called christian sects, the Qu’ran is continually used to justify the persecution of women.

    Yes, women.  Even though the young man was also killed, it is fairly clear that the main issue the Taliban and other groups like it embrace is the control of women.  They bar them from school, they bar them from conversation, they bar them from public view, they bar them.  All, it seems, they want from women is to be sex slaves for the males selected to possess them and anything—anything—that threatens that is condemned and, as usual, the women pay the price overwhelmingly.  There are other issues covered by strict Sharia Law, but we hear little about that, probably because a lot of it is also covered by more tolerant, liberal interpretations of the law.  The dividing line is over the women.  It is over giving women a voice, a choice, any freedom at all to say no, and defenders of this who deny that it is a mysoginist pathology seem either to not Get It or are lacking any comprehension that women are people.

    To be clear, as I stated, christian groups do this, too.  Maybe they don’t kill them in the street, but that’s only because in the West, the police really will arrest them for that.

    To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s all about the women, stupid.”

    There is no compromising on this, as far as I’m concerned.  To allow this is to make all of us a little less human.

  • Titles That Amazon Has Stripped of Sales Ranking

    A sample of some of the books that have been stripped of their sales ranking by Amazon’s (now disclaimed) Adult Content Policy:

    • Fiction:  E.M. Forster’s Maurice, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, and books by Nicola Griffith, among others.
    • Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs:  Randy Shilts’ The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, Dan Savage’s The Committment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family, Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant, and Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote.
    • History: David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization, and Tin’s The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience.

    More books that have had their rankings stripped.  Regardless whether Amazon backs off of this, people ought to continue raging against them.  They’ll try something else in future if they think they got by without serious damage.

  • Look What Amazon.com Is Doing

    Amazon.com has just initiated a new marketing policy. They are stripping away the sales ranking of any book with so-called Adult Content. Here’s their little explanation:

    “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

    Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

    What this mean in effect, however, is that books primarily with gay and lesbian content are being singled out for exclusion from database searches. It is being applied in a bigoted and surprisingly hamfisted manner to conform to someone’s standard of what constitutes Offensive Material. Adult Content generally means anything with more than coyly suggested sex in it.

    However, as a sample of the books not having their sales ranking stripped away, consider these:

    –Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)

    –Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love” (explicit heterosexual romance);

    –Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);

    –Bertrice Smal’s Skye o’Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances

    –and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

    These book sell very well, generally, so it’s obvious that there’s a dollar connection to this new policy. Midlist—the vast majority of books—will be targeted. Why is this important? Because this will delete titles from amazon search engines. It will make a dent in writers’ incomes. It will render invisible Those Sorts of Books. This is 1950s Era censorship and it is a threat to livelihoods as well as the general public’s right to choose what to read.

    Here is a cogent article about this.

    What I want to say right here has to do with the whole notion of isolating Adult Content to appease the screeching of those who would defend us from our own choices. We see this time and again and it is always the same appeal to Family Values, often expanded with a plea to Protect the Children. I see billboards in certain parts of the country now that declare that Pornography Destroys Families. We are meant to hide that part of ourselves from any kind of public display in the name of some sort of imagined “purity” that must be preserved among children so that they aren’t “damaged” by early exposure to human sexuality.

    I’m tired of it. It’s absurd. Not that I think kids ought to be exposed to pornography—not at all—but the whole idea that adults do not have a right to indulge in adult things, without being ashamed of it, from fear that junior might see something he or she is too young to deal with. It does not proctect the children, it makes adults self-conscious, and it falsely assumes that Adult Content is about things none of us should indulge or admit to indulging. It is the age old game of trying to shame people into denying their own sexuality because some people can’t deal with their own.

    And in this instance it has serious consequences for writers and publishers. Amazon.com is an enormous source of income for the publishing industry. Along with the mega-chain booksellers, they have the power to influence the acquisition choices of publishers. Which means that something like this can have a direct impact on the kinds of books that get bought and published.

    This is an offensive against a wide range of subject matter, topics, authors, and sensibilities. Not to mention that it is hypocritically applied. There is a petition here.

    To be sure, we are not talking exclusively or even largely about pornography. We are talking about work that addresses topics that include matters of adult concern regarding sex. By rights, this kind of policy would once again cast Catcher In The Rye back into the shadows of censorship. Censorship.

    It is illegal when the government does it to an already published book. But this is private industry and they set policy any way they please.

    However the power of the purse ultimately is in the hands of the consumer. We have been in some ways tyrannized over the last three decades by the persistent sensitization of protecting children from adulthood. We have been inundated with the suggestion that the private proclivities of some adults are too odious to be revealed or publicly discussed. In the seventh grade I was caught in class reading Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers. The principle thought this was serious enough to call my mother in for a conference. He made it clear by his word choice and body language that he expected my mother to be appaled at my choice of reading material. Instead, she said that she never censored what I read and that if I couldn’t handle something I wouldn’t read it and she would appreciate it if in future he would not censor me.

    She was largely correct. Most of what I read in that novel then went right by me. I don’t advocate handing out Harold Robbins novels to 14-year-olds, but I believe our readiness to panic over such things is ill-advised. Better to discuss these things with kids rather than slap them down or, worse, pretend such books don’t exist. But most importantly, we have to stop behaving as if becoming and adult and embracing adult things is somehow a degradation. I have said before, quite simply certain things are just not for children.  Parents should deal with it.  I do not accept for an instant that the world ought to be ordered exclusively for their level.

    I will not say for their benefit, because people who engage in this kind of idiotic social engineering are not, by and large, doing it for the children—they’re doing for themselves, for what they think the world ought to be like. Using the children is just an excuse.

    I’m tired of it. I think we should all be tired of it.

  • Oh, Please!

    Oh please, is there no respite from this sort of thing?  Over on Pharyngula is this little bit on the Vatican’s newest attempt to recruit an ideal priesthood, this time free of gays.

    Now, the Catholic Church has done screening for centuries.  They actually work hard to dissuade people from attempting to be priests because they know how difficult the various vows are to keep.  I don’t doubt for a minute that some of this screening is responsible, in kind of an unfortunate “unintended consequences” way, with the number of child sexual abuse cases that seem rampant more in the Catholic Church than in any other.  You screen for people who have “normal” sexual proclivities and eliminate the ones who probably won’t be able to maintain celibacy, you end up with (probably) a higher percentage of those who exhibit a lower than average normal sex drive, but may have a higher, shall we say, alternative proclivity…

    Anyway, that’s just my opinion.  But apparently the Vatican has decided there’s something to looking at alternative sexualities as a deal breaker, but for goodness sake the question still needs to be asked, just what is it they find so offensive and, we assume, dangerous about gays?

    By and large, the Catholic Church, for all its faults, possesses one of the more sophisticated philosophical approaches to life in all its manifestations among the various sects.  As a philosophy teacher of mine said once, “they seem to have a handle on what life is all about.”  Despite the very public embarrassments that emerge from the high profile conservative and reactionary elements within it, the Catholic Church probably has the healthiest worldview of the lot.  (I was a Lutheran in my childhood and believe me, in the matter of guilt the Catholics have nothing on Lutherans.)

    But they have been electing popes who seem bent on turning the clock back to a more intolerant and altogether less sophisticated age, as if the burden of dealing with humanity in its manifold variation is just too much for them.  They pine for the days when priests could lay down the law and the parish would snap to.  They do not want to deal with humanity in the abstract because it means abandoning certain absolutes—or the concrete—in lieu of a more gestalt understanding.  It would be hard work.

    And they have an image problem.  I mean, if you’re going to let people be people, then what’s the point of joining an elite group when there are no restrictions of the concept of what encompasses human?

    But really…this is just embarrassing.

  • The Irony of Conservatism

    Politics dictated FDA policy?  Say it isn’t so!

    According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda.

    What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call.

    The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue.  I mean, really—it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them.  You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one’s own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one’s life free from government meddling.  Handing both men and women the tools—provided by the free market, to boot—to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives.  They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger.

    What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism.

    Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol’ fashion American Values!  It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and  true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children.

    How did this happen?

    Well, it has occurred to me that one of the singularly binding features of human political reality is the in-built hypocrisy of claiming that you (whoever you are and under whatever system you live) wish to be free.  When you look at that claim—and Americans are by no means exempt—what it means in practice is the freedom to be autocratic in your own way.  Even back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan you heard members of the Mujahadeen claiming thay they were fighting to be free.  But free to do what?  And for whom?  Certainly they didn’t mean freedom for their womenfolk.  No, they meant freedom to be oppressive in their own unique way, and apparently it’s not much different here.

    Freedom is a slippery term.  Anyone with half a brain realizes that absolute freedom is not viable.  Freedom must be tempered by responsibility.  The edges of what constitutes responsible use of form is fuzzy, of course, and so we have laws to constrain those whose situations or philosophies run counter to the common good.  The irony of the pioneer image, the Mountain Man who went west to escape the constraints of civilization is that they never did and for the most part really didn’t want to.  The first thing settlers wanted once they had established themselves was law and order.  The mountain men were by and large entrepreneurs who depended on the civilization they supposedly disdained in order to make a living.  And they had to perforce accept the local laws of the native populations with whom they trafficked.  Freedom does not mean lawless.

    What it means is living within a framework according to your own desires.  You accept the framework while making your own place within it through your own choices and actions.  How well this works out depends on many things.

    When conservatives claim to represent American values for freedom, the image they seem to have in mind is one locked in the amber of time that discludes equality for women.  It is freedom for men.  Not that they do anything and whatever they might wish to do.  No, it is that men determine the framework and then work according to their will to build something within it.  But the image tends to ignore the framework, seeming to take it as given that it exists as something out of nature, god-given, pre-extant.  It is an old, hoary, knotty kind of image that harkens back to notions of the frontier and the need for growing populations and the presumed biblical virtues that allowed us to dominate this continent (displacing, killing, and otherwise bilking the natives out of the land along the way).  What it did not include was the image of women running businesses, holding political office, and certainly not bedding down with anyone they liked any time they liked just to have fun.

    Basically, though, women as equals alters the framework, and everyone has to shuffle to find a new way to live within it.

    So much for the vaunted champions of American individualism.  But still, it is a profound irony that the rhetoric—so powerful, so eloquent, so persuasive—should represent the polar opposite of what it is intended to.

    But some of them, apparently, seem to get it. Good for you, Judge Korman.

  • No, um, well, You Know What Over 18!!

    I have said for years that the convulsions of the Religious Right over abortion has less to do with fetuses than with sex.  Now that we have proof over time that Abstinence Only education DOES NOT WORK, these folks have decided that rather than recant they will go on an even wilder offensive by attacking university level programs.

    All I can do anymore is shake my head and wonder  “Just what is it with these people?”

    But what really annoys me are the many politicoes who go along with this nonsense and can’t seem to muster the nerve to tell them to, well, fuck off.  I mean, really—they can’t honestly be that numerous.

    Or can they?