Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Politics

  • A Moment of Celebrity Type Stuff

    A friend of mine, the estimable Erich Veith, came by my home a bit over a year ago and we recorded a long interview.  Erich has finally gotten around to editing it and has begun posting segments on YouTube.  Here’s the first one.  (I still haven’t figured out how to embed videos here, so bear with me.)

    Erich runs the website  Dangerous Intersection, where I post opinionated blatherings from time to time and Erich graciously allows me to hold forth in my own idiosyncratic manner.  Why he thought people would also enjoy watching and hearing me as well, I can’t say, but I enjoyed the process and from the looks of the first three (which are up at Dangerous Intersection) I don’t think I came off too badly.

    The one thing that has puzzled me about Erich these past few years is, where does he find the time to do what he does?  I mean, he’s a lawyer, for one thing.  He has two daughters his wife and he are raising.  He’s a musician who occasionally gigs.  And he runs this website, which is quite large and has a lot of traffic, and would seem to me to be just a lot of damn work.  If you haven’t spent some time there, do.  In my experience it’s unique and I’ve enjoyed being a small part of it.

    My thanks to Erich for the opportunity to play at celebrity just a wee bit.  I hope others enjoy the results.

  • James Hogan, Troubled In His Stars

    James P. Hogan had died.

    He wrote science fiction.  The books I read, over 20 years ago, were generally pretty good.  He has the distinction for me of having written one of my favorite debut novels, Inherit the Stars.  It was a murder mystery, a science mystery, a space adventure, and a thorough-going exposition on forensics of all sorts, including, in the end, “evolutionary” forensics (if such a thing exists).

    There is profound irony in that.  The plot hinges around a spacesuited corpse found on the moon at a time when it shouldn’t have been there.  The story is the series of investigations finding out where it came from.  Mars, it is ultimately learned.  But the creature in the suit—hundreds of thousands of years old—could not possibly have evolved on Mars.  Hogan employed genetics and evolutionary biology to solve the mystery.

    The irony is that later in his life—for all I know, even then—he became an evolution denier.  Go to his web page and you can find links to papers by such leading lights of woo-woo Intelligent Design as Michael Behe and William Dembski.

    But that’s not all.  He was a Holocaust Denier.  He was careful not to put it up as a category on his site, with the other things he seemed to be opposed to.  Yet he had made public statements to that effect.

    I stopped reading Hogan when it became clear in his novels that he harbored an absolute hatred of communism and the Soviet Union, so much so that occasionally the polemic spilled into the prose and he seemed at times on the verge of blaming everything on them.  I was never a fan of the Eastern Bloc, but science fiction ought to be about opening possibilities, not treating our entrenched fears as some sort of biblical dogma.  I got bored.  I never went back.  I wonder sometimes how he coped with Perestroika and the collapse of the Wall.
    I write this as a coda to the bit on Mel Gibson.   I read many of his novels and enjoyed them.  I had even spent time in his company and found it pleasurable.  He could tell a good story, a good joke, he was witty, and certainly smart.  But smart doesn’t guarantee rationality or a lock on truth.  Very smart people sometimes hold the most bizarre ideas in the face of reality—of course, being very smart they can explain their misconstruals in such a way that undoing them can become nearly impossible.

    But the work was one thing, the man something else.  I doubt, knowing what I know about his politics and beliefs now, I’ll bother to read another of his books—there’s too little time and too many other books, so any method of cutting back on the list is viable—but all I can do in retrospect is shake my head and wonder at the dark cul-de-sacs humans sometimes slip into and never get out of.

  • Mel Gibson and Other Musings

    So Mel Gibson has been exposed (once again) as an intolerant, sexist, abusive person.  A recording of a phone conversation with his former girlfriend is now Out There on the internet and one can listen to Mel spill molten verbiage into her earpiece while she calmly refutes his charges.

    All I can wonder is,  So what?

    What business is this of ours?  This is private stuff.  People lose control.  Between each other, with strangers, but more often with those closest, people have moments when the mouth ill-advisedly opens and vileness falls out.  The question is, does this define us?  Are we, in fact, only to be defined by our worst moments?

    That would seem to be the case for people like Gibson.  The reason, I think, is that for most of us, the Mel Gibsons of the world have no business having shitty days and acting like this.  For most of us, there is just cause for having these kinds of days and attitudes, because for most of us the world is not our oyster and we do not have the luxury of squandering time, friends, and money.  Mel Gibson is wealthy and famous and, at one time, admired.  He ate at the best restaurants, appeared on television, gave interviews, has his picture on the covers of magazines.  Is seen with other people, regularly, who fall into that category of Those Who Have It Made.

    They aren’t supposed to have bad days.  They aren’t supposed to be shitty to their lovers.  They aren’t supposed to act like people who are desperate, down on their luck, and bitterly outraged at the world.

    The question, though, is, do people who are down on their luck and bitter with their (admittedly pathetic) lot in life act that way?  How would we know?  Joe Asfalt doesn’t get interviewed by People or Us and when he has a falling out with his girlfriend the tabloids do not follow him or them around, looking for a scoop on their latest battle.  When Joe or his girl toss each other out of the house, no one is watching except the neighbors.  So how do we know how they behave?

    Maybe we assume they behave that way and it gives pleasure to see Mel Gibson being a jerk.  Makes him “one of us.”  Except he isn’t.

    But I don’t really give a damn about the private uglinesses of either Joe Asfalt or Mel Gibson.  It only matters to me when their private shittiness emerges into a public display, as in the case of Tom Cruise’s  asinine, Scientology-driven jeremiads about post-partum depression.  That matters because he is Tom Cruise and, like it or not, people put stock in what he says, and that incident had impact on peoples’ lives, not the least of which was Brooke Shields.  If Mel Gibson went berserk during an interview and made pronouncements about “the proper attire, place, position, and attitude” of women, then I’d care about what he thinks and says, because that would have consequences.

    What is unfortunate is that such things affect how we view their work.  It’s not fair, really.  People run the gamut, from really wonderful to really awful, and some of those people are artists.  Some of those artists are really good and create wonderful things, even those artists who may otherwise be reprehensible human beings.  In this regard I can understand the attitude of someone like J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, who have done all they could to keep people out of their private lives.  They given almost no interviews, they never made a big deal about themselves in public, eschewing the limelight.  In the case of someone like Salinger, the hermit approach actually contributed to his celebrity, fueling further book sales, because it becomes part of the myth about him.  It would not matter if he had done what he did with exactly that in mind, it would have happened anyway.  Pynchon less so, perhaps.

    But I can respect the idea that this was done precisely so the work wasn’t colored by the personality of the artist in ways that have nothing to do with the work.

    Society at large has a hunger for the viscera of the artist.  People who may never see a film, read a book, listen to a record with any genuine appreciation for the content of the work will nevertheless pay attention to those things in direct proportion to how much celebrity is attached to the artist.  So much so that we have phenomena like Paris Hilton who is famous for being famous.

    I’ve been mulling these ideas over lately because of the reverse question—how well does any artist know his or her audience?

    And do they want to?

    Demographics seem to drive everything today.  Targeting your audience correctly is the holy grail of promotions.  Is that movie geared toward the 18-to-24 crowd?  Women more than men?  What income bracket?  Education?  In the case of books, this leads me to ask, if they are in “my” demographic target, does that mean they will buy my books because they are predisposed to reading them, or is something much less causally connected, like those people who actually read who are part of that demographic may be more likely to buy my books than people who read who are part of some other demographic…

    But what is it about those other demographics that precludes the likelihood that they’ll buy my book?  That they’d more likely buy some other author’s books, based on the perception that he or she writes for the 25-to-45 upper middle class crowd.

    Pondering this makes my brain hurt.  Of all the factors that contribute to defining a demographic likely to do A rather than B or C, which factors contribute to a strong likelihood that none of them will fit the demographic that will pay attention to your work.

    And if some of those factors have to do with your public persona, then you have to ask which part?  The part that no one is ever supposed to know anything about (like a private phone call to a soon-to-be-ex-lover) or the part that you might tailor exclusively for public consumption.  In which case, isn’t that as much a work of art as the work of art you’re trying to sell?

    But at the end of the day, I’m still left wondering just why anyone is really interested in someone’s private life they do not know.  Not, mind you, in the sense of being disinterested in biography as history—the private labyrinths of a Howard Hughes become, over time, fascinating because of the archaeological nature of examining his legacy—but in the sense of trying to find a one-to-one relevance between you and a celebrity.  In that sense, it becomes legitimate to ask what purpose was served by the years of public attention to some like Wynona Judd and her seeming inability to have a happy life.  The feedback loop between personal tragedy, public perception-reception, and attempted “managing” of the personal in order to accommodate a publicity machine creates an ongoing kind of performance art that eventually has less to do with authentic experience and more to do with Artist As Subject, and therefore becomes increasingly artificial, at least in presentation, regardless of any reality—a reality which, under pressure from the attention, retreats further from the limelight and takes on further burdens in the attempt to be private.  You could see the whole thing as a kind of therapy conducted on the couch of public opinion, but to what benefit?  The thing receiving the therapy becomes less the person than the image.

    And then who is being served?  Is this merely entertainment or is there in fact a public function in all this closet-revelation?

    One thinks of politicians immediately, in particular with respect to sexual impropriety.  Do the private practices of an individual have anything to do with his or her ability to do a particular job?

    I suppose it’s a matter of what job they are required to do.  A senator whose campaign, election, and office concerned fiscal responsibility and who by any measure performs this task competently if not excellently is revealed to keep a mistress or two.  What does the one have to do with the other?  Nothing, really.  Private pecadilloes matter when the impropriety is directly connected with the job—for instance, if said senator had a history of insider trading or embezzlement.

    But then those would not be private, would they?  They would involved public factors.  Not sex, but monetary impropriety, even if kept private (and how could it be unless we’re talking about a loan from a brother-in-law that was never repaid?), has a direct public impact.

    Another senator whose campaign, election, and subsequent legislation bear on families, divorce laws, obscenity laws, laws governing the dissemination of birth control or the availability of abortion services or even information about birth control and abortion, or perhaps support of a foreign regime in which women are oppressed, then turns out to be cheating on his wife or has a history of using prostitutes.  Well, that bears directly, doesn’t it?  The hypocrisy of a Family Values politician keeping mistresses certainly is relevant to public policy.

    As unlikely as it might be that such a politician would be elected, someone who declared openly that he or she has had and may continue to have partners before, during, and outside of marriage would not, in my opinion, raise a question of moral conflict under these circumstances.  We could vote for or against from the beginning, there would be no deception.  Likewise with the politician who had exercised “poor judgment” in fiscal matters.

    But the complicating factor in such instances would be how the private matters were disclosed.  This hinges on the question of whether or not a person can and does change over time.  The recently deceased Senator Byrd’s past affiliation with the KKK is an example.  Given the opportunity and time, he demonstrated that, at least in the performance of his office, that circumstance had been left in the past.  Whether he had truly changed in his sentiments is beside the point next to his subsequent public record.

    What all this has to do with Mel Gibson is relevant only in the question of when and how the revelation of private failings is legitimate.  Does the knowledge that Mel Gibson can be a foul-mouthed, abusive, sexist racist impact anyone or anything outside his circle of acquaintances?  Because they, presumably, judge him and act accordingly without public input.  Does this kind of “news” serve any function beyond attracting and increasing the kind of attention that sells tabloids?

    Because everyone has a part of themselves they would rather keep exclusively between themselves and their chosen intimates.  Would it be fair if all of us were recorded displaying our less wonderful aspects and having said recording sent, say, to prospective employers or the dating services we might use or our new date or to the shopowners and restaurateurs we frequent or to business associates?  If all their dealings with us to date have been positive, how are they supposed to react if something like that were suddenly dropped into their lap?  And how would we defend ourselves from the predictable reactions?

    I’m just wondering.

  • Rand, Civil Rights, Rand

    Rand Paul, senate hopeful for Kentucky, made a fool of himself with remarks about the 1964 Civil Rights Act and racism and affirmative action et cetera et cetera so on and so forth.  If Kentucky votes him into office, they get what they deserve.  There was a brief moment when I thought Ron Paul was worthy of some respect—he seemed willing to speak truth to power.  I found that I disagreed with him on specifics, but it is useful (and rare) to have someone doing the Emperor’s New Suit schtick.

    However, anyone who names a child after an ideological demagogue has some serious problems with reality.  (To be clear, Rand, under the circumstances, can only refer to Ayn Rand, the patron non-saint of the Libertarian Movement.)*

    Rand’s pronouncements about the rights of business owners to deny service to anyone they see fit is perfectly consistent with Randian philosophy and politics.  Basically, it says that the person whose name is on the title owns what the title describes outright and has, by dint of absolute moral dictate, dictatorial command over said property and ought to be allowed to do with it what they wish.  Without explanation to anyone and certainly without anyone else’s permission.

    Sounds good, doesn’t it?  I mean, you worked for it, you sweated, earned the means of acquisition, put your name and fortune on the line to own it, worked to make it do what you intended, you should therefore enjoy all rights and privileges in the say of what to do with it.  Your home, your rules.  There’s a feel-good quid pro quo to it that appeals to a basic sense of fairness, suggests a rough equivalence between work and risk and rights.

    This is fundamental to Rand’s whole premise, that the creator, the mind behind creation, the one who brings something into existence is the one who has the only natural say in what that thing so created can and will do and who it shall serve.  For an avowed atheist, Rand had a very mythic, godlike attitude toward life.

    And I suppose if you could somehow make the case that a single individual did indeed create something from whole cloth and by virtue of his or her singular efforts sustained it and drove it and made it successful, there might be a good and valid point to this view.

    But is that ever the case?

    Rand’s famous tome, Atlas Shrugged, makes the argument that the movers and shakers, the people who Do, are absolutely vital to the world.  Nothing would exist without them and if they should withdraw their talent and genius and effort, the world would come to a halt.  She makes the case for the Indispensible Man.  And in the novel (for those of you who have not read it), a man named John Galt, fed up with the growing People’s Movements around the world, which he sees as essentially parasitic, calls a strike of the truly important people.  He convinces the men and women who truly matter to leave the world, retire, disappear, and when they have all left, it seems no one can do what they did, and everything falls apart.  The final image shows them emerging from their high-tech hideaway to assume command as the true and rightful aristocracy of ability.

    It is, in her narrative, a very small group.

    Just for the sake of argument, let me state here that I have seen places where there is indeed a single person whose work and ability are so central to what that business does that if they left that business might very well fail.  I suppose one could draw from that the counter argument that a single individual could build a business from first principles and be the only one who could make it work.

    But it doesn’t work that way in reality and this is where the Randians fall short in their formulation.

    If it is a business, it cannot possibly come into existence in the kind of vacuum that Rand seems to describe.  It emerges from a community.  It exists because it fulfills a need in the community and it succeeds in direct relation to how well it serves that need and how much the community values its work.

    This is not to say the individual is insignificant.  On the contrary, the individual is the one who recognizes, organizes, develops, and then taps into that need.  But once the concept is complete and the seed is planted, nothing further can happen without the community.

    What do I mean by that?  In this country, the community has already provided—communications, infrastructure, raw material, financing, licensing, insurance, regulation that allows for growth, legal structure, security, and—most importantly of all—customers.  The individual cannot accomplish all that alone.  The individual takes advantage of all these things provided by the community in order to build the thing he or she has conceived.  Once built and open for business, the only thing the individual can do of an absolutist nature is shut it down.  Because the ongoing operation of that business is now a co-dependent symbiosis, not with individuals, but with the community.

    And that is why a business owner doesn’t have the right of judgment to say who shall and who shall not be served—because once the doors are open, that business had joined with the community and become part of it.  If a member of that community comes in to be served, the business owner can only withhold service if that customer violates the greater community standard (no shirt no shoes no service, etc).  And when that action occurs it is not so much the individual expressing an opinion in isolation but the business owner reinforcing community standards that he or she accepted when joining the community as a business.  When you accept all the help provided by the community to enact your concept, you agree to those standards, and cannot arbitrarily dictate who you will or will not serve.

    What is so damn difficult to understand?

    We have a national heritage of the rugged individual which is based partly on reality but largely on a myth.  That myth is the cowboy, the mountain man, the single-minded industrialist.  The independent farmer.

    The cowboy was a wage earner.  The cattleman for whom he worked depended on the markets and the price structure Back In The World to exist, and the money he derived from that interface is all that kept him “independent.”  The mountain men were in many instances businessmen who spent their off time in cities, spending what they’d earned.  The single-minded industrialist depended on the financial landscape provided by the community to become an industrialist.  The independent farmer was only ever independent insofar as he was not dependent on urban markets.

    The other, less pleasant icons, like the gunslingers, were either maladjusted or parasites.   The settlers, who often get a bad rap in old westerns, came west and one of the first things they did was start a community, because they knew they couldn’t survive alone.

    We have lionized these icons.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that until we try to hold them up as counterexamples to the very systems that they themselves were part of.  Then we run into problems.

    Even as a teenager, breathlessly reading the 1000-page-plus epic of Atlas Shrugged, I thought there was something wrong with Rand’s premise—that somehow, all these supposedly indispensable people really were so unique as to constitute a separate species.  No one could take their place?  The only other people on the planet were social parasites and the hapless incompetents like poor Eddie Willers?  That was not my experience.

    So while many may feel a tang of sympathy for the idea expressed by Rand Paul, that the private business owner should be free from the dictates of the community, it’s an idea based on an erroneous notion of how such things exist.  Business is not free from the community—it can’t be—it only exists because of the community.

    And if that person standing there waiting to be served has different skin color, too bad—he or she is a part of the community that has granted you the ability to have a business for them to stand it.  You can’t throw them out without, by extension, throwing the whole community out.

    But this is civil liberties 101.  Why should any of this have to be explained to someone who thinks he has the ability to serve in the Senate?

    *Since writing this, I have learned that I am in error in assuming Rand is named for Ayn Rand.  His proper name is Randall.  Rather than doing the cowardly thing and simply changing what I wrote, though, I decided to leave it stand and add this little mea culpa.  Nevertheless, given the sentiments he expresses, I think the article as a whole is the best way to express my feelings.

  • Labels

    Conservative.

    Liberal.

    We act as if we know what these labels mean.  Conservatives are traditionalists, fiscally opposed to anything that smacks of gambling, private, often religious, and pedantic on what they consider “appropriate” in either government or personal conduct.

    Liberals, on the other hand, are often taken for progressive, willing to spend social capital to repair perceived problems, tolerant, agnostic if not atheist, and overly-concerned with a definition of justice that ought to be all-encompassing rather than what they perceive as sinecure for the privileged.

    Well.  Over on Facebook I posted a brief quote (my own) to boil down the actual underlying distinctions.

    Conservatives are those who don’t like what other people are doing, Liberals are those who don’t like what other people are doing to other people.

    It was meant to be taken as humorous.  But I’m not being entirely flip here.  When you look at it, and try to define the common factor in much that passes for conservative posteuring—of any country, any background, anywhere—it always comes down to one group trying to stop another group from Doing Things We Don’t Approve.

    I heard a news report this morning (on NPR—I unabashedly don’t pay attention to any other news source, I find them all utterly biased) from Pakistan about the university scene there, and one bit caught my attention—at a campus in Punjabi, conservative students who find men and women sitting too close together interfere and move them apart.  At a game of Truth or Dare, conservative students pulled participants out and beat them.

    How does this apply here?  Well, here’s a clip from P.Z. Meyers’ Pharyngula to illustrate:
    Rising Sun School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened. All their signs were torn down and destroyed, and the students were threatened by their peers. There were also letters to the editor of the local paper.

    My daughter comes home today and informs me they have started a new club in Rising Sun High School. The club is known as NRS, which stands for Non Religious Society.

    The members of this club have proceeded to hang posters along the halls of the school. When a student tore the posters down, because they offended him, he got suspended from school. Apparently the students are not allowed to touch these posters.

    To say I was shocked is putting it mildly. My daughter does not hang posters of her Catholic religion throughout the school, and I expect the same type of respect from others. We cannot control what others think or their beliefs, nor do we want to. But I will not have this type of atrocity taking place without having my voice heard.

    My daughter has my permission, if she sees these posters around school, to put up her own. I challenge the principal to say one thing about this. I guarantee you do not want a religious war taking place, as I have God on my side and you’ll lose.”

    Perhaps no one was beaten, but I think the point is well-made.  To be fair, so-called Progressives have a history of barring certain speakers they disagree with from campuses and the like, but I don’t often see such in-your-face geurilla tactics from left-leaning groups in this country.  It happens, sure, but it also happens under an assumption that it’s not sanctioned.  But also, it happens usually as part of an effort on behalf of some other group than the liberal group doing the protesting.

    When you get right down to it, conservatives as a group seem driven by a desire to constrain conduct with which they disapprove—personal conduct.  Perhaps this is a consequence of the way arguments are framed.  But I think not.  Conservatives, by definition, are concerned with preserving things they like about the way they live.  Hence all manner of social protest on the part of conservatives against things that will, they believe, change the way they live—climate change deniers are conservative, anti-abortion advocates are conservative, anti-tax groups are conservative, so-called Strict Interpretation constitutionalists are conservative.  And so on.

    But are Liberals actually any different?  Liberals, it seems to me, become conservative once they have achieved their goals and suddenly find themselves in positions to defend the way things now are.  Consider:  free market advocates are now conservatives, but if you go back far enough you discover that this was a liberal idea.  At one time, the notion that all children have some right to a college education was a liberal idea, but now it has become an entrenched part of business in such a way that the whole educational apparatus is geared toward the degree as an essential element in the economy, so much so that challenges to the way teaching is done, to the idea that education ought to be fundamentally changed, are viewed as dangerously progressive.  At one time, the idea of organized religious groups becoming politically active was a way Left notion, but it is one that has come to exemplify conservative ideology.

    Liberals tend to displace their personal defense to causes that may not, but could possibly, affect them.  They advocate on behalf of the disenfranchised (while conservatives often seem to consciously dismiss the disenfranchised as having nothing to do with them); they take up causes that are more philosophical in appearance; time and attention is given to people who do not have what the advocates have, namely political power, some economic security, or a voice in the community.  The more thoughtful Left thinkers seem to realize that but for the grace of good fortune they themselves could be living on the street at the mercy of unfriendly authorities, and so make arguments on behalf of those who already are there.  Conservatives seem to feel that those so benighted as to have fallen into such penury have only themselves to blame and dismiss the whole idea of fickle socio-economic shifts that could easily displace the currently secure.

    I say “seems to be” a lot, because obviously on an individual level things get a lot more complicated.  It all resolves to which part of the whole one chooses to look at.

    There are a couple of points at which both sides have it wrong.  For instance, in the matter of the disenfranchised—economically, politically, socially—conservatives seem to believe that one’s condition is one’s own responsibility and therefore nothing to do with those who have, according to their lights, already lived responsibly.  Therefore, so the thinking goes, “I have no responsibility for Those People.”  The liberal tends to believe the disenfranchised are inevitably disempowered due to the structure of social mechanisms, and their condition is therefore not their fault.  “Society has all the blame.”  Of course, this displaces personal responsibility on the part of the liberal to a kind of group thing.  The bottom line is, responsibility still gets shuffled from here to there and very little gets done in the way of solving the actual problems, which are combinations of the two views.

    Another observation I’ve made in the past concerning our two major political parties ties in to this:  Republicans tend to see citizens as those who own property.  Democrats see anyone who lives here legally as a citizen.  Defense of corporate personhood is a Republican ideal, which support business, which is property.  A rough descriptor, but it plays out remarkably in local politics.  In Missouri, several years ago, the Motor Voter registration movement was strongly opposed by Republicans, supported by Democrats.  Can’t have people with no financial stake in the country voting, for goodness sake.

    I find both sides often equally off-base.

    But I find myself siding more often with liberals and the Left because of the apparent obsession conservatives exhibit over Other People’s behavior.  The example from Pakistan has direct equivalents here, and it always comes down to conservatives trying to deny expression to people whose preferences in life-style they abhor.  The entire gay marriage movement is opposed by conservatives.  Why?  What is it they think will actually happen if gays are permitted to marry?  I don’t buy the whole idea that they think it’s unnatural.  I think they dislike the idea of altering their invitation lists and trying to explain to their kids why Tommy and Bill are “getting hitched.”  It is this conservative activism that comes across in things like the Texas School Board’s changes to their base curriculum, altering history and science because they don’t like the way things are changing.  Conservatives don’t appear to really have a problem with contraception for themselves—else where are all the enormous right-wing families, with seven, eight, or nine kids?—they just don’t want Other People to use it to live in ways conservatives find unseemly.  Especially their kids.  The opposition to Evolution is preponderantly conservative because it requires a shift in attitude that seems to reduce the influence of religion and the whole notion of humanity as The Superior Species.   Climate change is aggressively denied by conservatives because if true it means they will have to change the way they live.

    It amounts to a denial of reality.

    On the other hand, liberals indulge equally in different sorts of denialism.  Anti-vaccine advocates, I think, are mostly progressives.  Certainly cultural relativists who are unwilling to make definitive statements about obvious boneheadedness and outright evil in other cultures  (female circumcision, purda, etc) are little better than head-in-the-sand do-nothings.  Nonsense causes, like homeopathy, herbalism, and the like tend to attract people of liberal bents.

    But I think it’s useful to try to dig down deep to the foundational distinctions to see what is really going on.    The one thing that needs to change is the all-encompassing unwillingness, on the part of right and left, to say and listen to things that make us uncomfortable, or disagree with our cherished ideals.  You cannot know how to determine the real, the actual, and the relevant by confining your information to one channel that agrees with you all the time and censoring the other fellow who has a point to make.  We’ve been doing that for much too long and it has been responsible, as much as anything, for the unprecedented divides we see today.  Conservatives aggressively tear down posters while liberals passively refuse to permit a speaker to come, but both actions amount to the same self-imposed deafness.

    We live in an absurd age, when you come right down to it, driven more by labels than any time before.

  • Ada Lovelace Day

    I just discovered that there is a day for this brilliant woman.

    Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, a scholar, and wrote what is arguably the very first computer program in an essay about Charles Babbage.  Of course, since she was a woman at a time when women were considered not to have either brains or rights, she would have been seen as an anomaly at best, a monster at worst.  Since she had some position, however, she has not been forgotten or dismissed.

    Warning: personal opinion follows.

    Women who denigrate the idea of Feminism and fail to understand how tenuous their position is vis-a-vis  history cause me heartburn.  If they think about it at all, they seem to believe Woman As Property happens in the Third World and nothing like that can happen here (wherever the particular Here happens to be).

    But then you run into something like this.  One paragraph from this report says it all:

    Females do not have voting privileges, but are generally allowed to speak at meetings, according to Klaetsch. Sunday’s meeting was the first time in recent history that St. John’s Council President Don Finseth exercised his authority to prevent females from speaking, church members say.

    This is in Wisconsin.  Recently.  I grant you, this is not a state practice, but in these times when so many people seem to feel that religion trumps civic law, it’s a disturbing thing to behold.  The question in my mind is, why don’t all the women there pick up their marbles and leave?

    Because they either buy into the second class status accorded them or they like something about the condition they inhabit.  Western women have it easy in such matters—no one will stone them if they get a little uppity.  For them, this is a “lifestyle” choice, at least functionally.  In parts of the Middle East and Africa it’s life or death.

    Back when I was in high school, in the supposedly enlightened United States of America, in 1971, I took an architectural drawing class.  The room was filled with boys.  All boys.

    One girl was taking the class.  Where was she?  The teacher put her in a separate room, the supply room at the back, with her own drafting table and tools.  Why?  Because the morons inhabiting the rest of the class wouldn’t leave her alone, wouldn’t let her do her work, teased her, ridiculed her, abused her, told her she was weird, unnatural, a lesbian, that she wanted to be a man, that all she needed was a good screwing and she’d get this crazy notion of being an architect right out her system.  I heard this, witnessed some of it.  It made me profoundly uncomfortable at the time, but I didn’t understand it other than as the same run-of-the-mill bullying that I myself had been subjected to all through grade school.

    But it went beyond that, I now see, because what was doing ran counter to some idea of what the relative roles of men and women are “supposed” to be.  Did the boys indulging the abuse understand that?  No, of course not.  They were parroting what they’d grown up seeing at home and elsewhere, with no more reflection or self-awareness than the hardwired belief that Real Americans all love baseball that Communism was automatically evil and John Wayne was just shy of the second coming.  Analysis would be the natural enemy to a traditional view that maintained an absurd status quo and should therefore be resisted, hence anyone among their peers that preferred reading to sports was also an enemy.

    So celebrate Ada Lovelace Day.  No one, male or female, should accept restrictions imposed by cant and tradition and national dogma.  But until it is entirely recognized that we are all of us People first, male and female next, and that equal rights accrue to people, not types, none of us are safe in our predilections and ambitions.

  • In Charge and At Large!

    Over this past weekend I had a couple of conversations with some people about the whole prom night controversy and one of the things that got said, which I’ve heard many times before in other contexts, was that, “don’t you think the people in authority know what they’re doing?”

    As if that is any answer when they demonstrate that, clearly, whatever they’re doing it has nothing to do with common sense, ethics, or any kind of honesty.

    I’ve  been hearing that rejoinder for decades, ever since Vietnam, and I keep coming back to that scene in All The President’s Men when Deep Throat lectures Robert Redford about the nature of the administration and he tells him, really, these are not very smart guys.  It was a revelatory moment for me, way back then, and ever since I have had a difficult time accepting any kind of authority Just Because.

    Because no, I don’t think many of these folks who are In Charge know very well what they’re doing.  They got these jobs on some kind of popularity contest basis and as long as nothing requiring a great deal of thought comes before them, it’s just administrative blank-filling.  But when they actually have to make a decision about something for which there is no line on the form…

    The school board—and maybe some of the parents as well—in Itawamba County, Mississippi, reacted from personal revulsion.  They looked at Constance McMillen and thought  “Oh, that’s not right!” and gave it no more thought, because, hey, who’d gainsay them?  The Students?  Big deal.

    But when Constance sued their asses, it changed to a “who the hell do you think you are?” affair and those In Charge, in a fit of pique, demonstrated even more clearly that, regardless of right or wrong, no  student was going to dictate to them, nosirree Bob, and most especially not some tuxedo-wearin’ dyke…I can picture the seething, redfaced rage at the presumption of that girl, tellin’ us we can’t bar anybody we damn please from the prom, like she has rights…

    They reverted to the school yard and turned it into a pissing contest.  Do I think they know what they’re doing?

    No, I don’t think such people are very smart or have good reasons for what they do and I think people who defend their actions on that assumptions themselves don’t give these matters much thought and would likely do as bad if not worse a job.  And that seems fairly consistent with what I see as a given in this country, that, when people get together in a large enough bunch, I.Q. is the first casualty.  No one wants to rock the boat, no one wants their sacred cows slaughtered, and no one wants to offend their neighbors.

    Is it any wonder things are a mess?

    Just askin’…

  • Prom Night, America

    Constance McMillen wanted to go to her high school prom.  Like most students in the United States, she doubtless saw the event as the capstone of four years of effort, a gala event for students that represents a reward for getting to the end of their senior year and, presumably, graduating not only from high school but into adulthood.  One night of glamor and revelry, dressed at a level of style and affluence many might never indulge again, to celebrate the matriculation into the next level of independence.  A party where students can show themselves—to their peers and to themselves—as adults.

    It has become something more, probably, than it was ever intended to be.  Patterned after high society “debuts” at which young ladies of good breeding (and potential wealth) are introduced to Society (with a capital “S”) in a manner that, when stripped of its finery and fashionable gloss, is really a very expensive dating service, with the idea of creating future matches between “suitable” couples, the high school prom is a showcase, a public demonstration of, presumably, the virtues of a graduating class.  Over the last few decades, even the less well-off schools strive to shine in what a prom achieves.  Instead of a local band in the high school gym, with bunting and streamers and colored lights to “hide” the fact that normally gym class and basketball are performed in this room, the prom has become elevated to a decent hotel with a ball room, a better-priced band (or a DJ), and all the attributes of a night on the town in Hollywood.  Tuxedos and gowns are de rigueur and students’ families spare no expense to deck their children out in clothes they really often can’t afford.  Limousines transport the budding fashionistas and their knights errant to the evening’s festivities and you know this cost a fortune.

    Students may be forgiven for believing that it’s for them.

    In its crudest terms, the prom is for the community, a self-congratulatory demonstration of how well the community believes it has done by its youth.  It is a statement about what that community would like to see itself as.  It is—still—a match game, from which future marriages may derive.  It is a staged exhibition of affirmation that the students have come out the end of twelve years of “schooling” the way the community wants them to.  It is, in short, less about the students, and mostly about the school and the community that pays for it.

    (Match game?  Certainly.  And in this, the students play the game.  Truth in advertising requires that I make a disclaimer here.  I did not attend my high school prom.  It was 1973, a time of volcanic social upheaval, and for years I used the excuse that I didn’t go because I didn’t want to participate in an antiquated, farcical, “establishment” exercise in peurile stagecraft.  The truth was, however, I didn’t go because I couldn’t get a date, and without a date, what’s the point?  Part of the shine of prom night is to demonstrate your suitability as a future spouse, your “eligibility”, and showing up solo would be a clear statement that you’re unwanted goods, rejected.  Why couldn’t I get a date?  Ultimately, I’ll never know, but after asking 86 girls and getting a consistent NO, I gave up.)

    So when someone—anyone—wants to attend the prom in a way that violates those community expectations, you may be assured there will be a negative reaction.

    The last time we saw this sort of reaction was—probably—when blacks and whites started going to the prom as couples.  (Especially a black male with a white female, and if the female was blonde, oh my the reaction increased, because there has always been something particularly provocative about the idea of black males touching white females in this country.  This has largely passed now in this country, but when I was a teenager it was guaranteed to cause a fight, certainly an uproar, and many a racist conversation over dinner.)  I personally recall an instance in which a couple of males with LONG HAIR were forbidden to attend the prom unless they got their hair cut to a “proper” length.

    Clothing is a big deal.  Jeans are probably frowned upon, certainly t-shirts.  Another instance I recall was a prom queen who showed up in a dress with a neckline that descended to her navel.  She was already there.  The guardians at the gate quickly assembled a bouquet of flowers three times the normal size and instructed her to hold it up to cover her skin, at least until all the photographs had been taken.

    So we now see a lesbian wishing to bring her date to the prom, dressed in a tuxedo.

    How many violations can we count!  Sexual orientation, dress code, and—probably the most innocent yet deadliest of them all—an expectation that the evening was for her.

    She sued.  The court said her rights had been violated.  She gets to attend.  What does the school do?  What, in effect, does the community do?

    Cancels the prom.

    Now everyone is angry at the lesbian.  It’s her fault.  She took their evening away.

    Really?  As I said, students can be forgiven for believing that prom night is for them.  Maybe it would be fairer to tell them when they’re freshmen that, in fact, no, prom night is not for you, it’s for US.  It’s to make US feel good, feel secure, feel justified, feel vindicated, validated, and reaffirmed that the vision we have for our kids and the community we wish to live in will not soon perish from the Earth.  How dare a single student presume to change the rules of the game and assume that this is somehow her night, as if, somehow, she had any rights at all?

    Because she is, still, a student.  She doesn’t have her diploma yet, only the promise of one, and until she has that piece of paper in hand, she’s a Child.  Prom night is only so she can get a taste of what it could be like to be an adult.

    The hypocrisy is profound.  All the accoutrements of the modern prom clearly—CLEARLY—reveal that among the other expectations students have for the night, many of them, is that at the end of the dancing and the lights and the pretty clothes and the fake debuts and the pretending at a class status most of them will never have they will get laid.  I say hypocrisy because no school official or community leader would ever admit that, yet they accede to the use of privately-leased limos and the holding of proms in hotels, exercising no control whatsoever on the after-hour activities.  Not, I hasten to add, that they could keep students from indulging themselves anyway, but by relinquishing their traditional roles of control of an ostensibly school activity they tacitly approve that activity on that night.  Which makes perfect sense, since, as I said, part of the ritual is matchmaking.

    How could they control it?  Simple.  Put the event back in the high school gym, forbid limousines, require parents to escort their kids to and from the prom.

    Oh, but the local business community would suffer!  All that money!

    Hypocrisy.

    And it gets pointed up by a young woman who wishes to show up as herself, flaunting the fact that her sexual proclivities run counter to the norm—because whatever the reality is between individuals about their relationships, to the public at large homosexuality is inevitably, inextricably tangled up with sex.  People can wink and squint and avert their gaze at what most 17 and 18 year-olds are doing and pretend that, really, maybe they’re not, but Constance McMillen put it right out there.  Showing up at the prom underlined so many of the realities of that night that it made people squirm.

    But rather than deny the hypocrisy, the school canceled the prom, thereby proving that prom night is about their expectations, not about the students.

    Now Constance has engaged on another suit, this one to force the school to hold the prom.  I hope she wins.  Because for four years, high school students are allowed to assume that prom night is their night, and to have it revealed in such a blatant and spineless way that, no, it’s not, requires an answer.  If you advertise something in a particular way, you should deliver.  As for Itawamba County, Mississippi?  Suck it up and live with it.

  • Quote For The Coming Times

    “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” Buddha

  • Prophets, Providence, and Problems: An Observation

    This is one of those notions I stumble on from time to time while daydreaming or free associating.  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about religion of late—as how could many people not be, what with the state of the world (he says with tongue in his other cheek, being both ironic and absurd)?—and trying to come up with some theory of it that might bleed off the poisons that seem to bubble up from it from time to time.

    Someone said something to me that triggered this idea and it’s probably not original.  But we were discussing Roman Catholicism and the observation was made that in its long history it has absorbed more than it has suppressed.

    “Of course it has,” I responded.  “That’s how it began, after all, as a congeries of pagan beliefs subsumed beneath an orthodox umbrella.  It is the perfect example of an assembled religion.”

    Regardless where the initial push came from, whatever its core ideology, the fact is that Roman Catholicism came to fruition as a political entity and it was a model of almost democratic universalism.  The holidays (holy days) are mostly borrowings from other disciplines, retrofitted to make people comfortable with the new paradigm.  Its rituals and mysteries are all adaptations of older religious ideas and practices, including a marvelous transplantation from Egyptian mythology of the entire Jesus myth (Horus—almost all of it is duplicated, including certain names, such as Lazarus, and the whole virgin birth motif, which itself is nothing particularly new).  The architects of Roman Catholicism, let us assume to be more gracious than not, recognized a core set of beliefs that did not of themselves require the trappings of a religion or its concomitant institutions, but also saw that most people would prefer (or require) all that such physical and cultural manifestations afford.  Romans above all understood in their bones the function of public architecture and ceremony.  They seemed instinctively attuned to the idea that to get people to behave a certain way they should live within the physical representations of the philosophies behind such behavior.  Romans were Romans as much because of their cities and roads as because of any political philosophy.  The two supported each other.  The church borrowed that big time.

    But as an assembled religion, it had a problem, which was the necessity to obscure all the past manifestations, cut the ties to all the pagan practices they’d taken over, and embark on a long-term campaign to evoke cultural amnesia in order to represent themselves as The Truth.  The problem with this is two-fold:  there are always going to be those who know the facts (because you can’t destroy all the evidence, if nothing else) and you have to be very careful about how you present and protect your core ideas, lest people start interpreting them any old way they please.

    Along comes the Protestant Reformation, which was at base a movement to return to the Church to its original principles and free it from the “corruptions” that had crept in over the centuries.

    The reformers, smart as they may have been, labored under a handicap, namely the overwhelming success the Roman Catholic Church had enjoyed in obliterating and subsuming all those borrowed elements.  The reformers at base believed many if not most of the trappings, which were largely secondary to the core principles, which amount to a set of principles quite separate from the “miracle faith” cult it had become.

    So when the Protestant movement began, they took as their goal the idea that the adaptations were the principle elements of their faith, and tried to return themselves to that basis as if it had had no predecessors.  The Catholic Church itself couldn’t just come out and say “Hey, you don’t understand, the whole idea is to adapt and absorb, not build a wall around a few iconic aspects and throw out everything that looks a little different.”

    Roman Catholicism had largely succeeded by being adaptable to local beliefs.  Look at the bizarre nature of Latin American Catholicism as ample proof of this.  Even to this day, the Catholic Church “compromises” its apparent principles to bring others into the fold—look at the recent attempt to retroactively reabsorb Anglicans.

    Protestantism began as a take-no-prisoners response to what some people saw as corruption—the willingness to concede and adapt.  But it assumed that the Church had been based on something originally “pure” and uncorrupted, a set of ideas that stood apart from everything else.  (To a degree, this was true, but not what the Protestants thought identified it as a priori “Christian” orthodoxy.)  They rejected the malleability of Catholicism, drew a line in the philosophical sand, and argued that the essential element of Christianity was the death and resurrection of a prophet they believed had no antecedents.  What that prophet said and what Christianity embodied as a set of principles for living took second place to the mysteries, and they shut their eyes to the possibility of truth in various guises.

    Which is why Protestants burned more witches and killed more Jews than did Catholics, why Protestant treatment of natives wherever encountered has been harsher and in many instances more fatal than Catholic treatment of the same or similar groups, and why fundamentalism is far more a Protestant problem than it is Catholic.

    We arrive at the 21st Century and see many Protestant denominations “maturing” to the point where they recognize that Fortress Christianity is counterproductive and ultimately a wrong-headed approach—but we also see splinter groups from these major denominations more and more that cling ever more fiercely to the notion that the edifice is the message and the heathens must be stamped out, producing virulent strains of anti-rational lunacy.  (Certainly there are Catholic fundamentalists, but they seem to be a disfocussed, almost inarticulate collection of mystic loonies instead of militant dogmatists.)

    The very adaptability that made Roman Catholicism so successful for so long is based on the fact that they started off as a Rube Goldberg assemblage of beliefs and practices that recognized an idea that truth is a thread running through many fabrics, whereas Protestantism had its birth in the idea that there was only one true suit.

    Hence we find that the Catholic Church, for all its other irrationalities, is able to embrace Darwinism, Galileo, and admit it was wrong about the Jews, while the staunchest Creationists and, often, bigots come out of the Protestant movement.  White Supremacist groups are protestant.  The sputtering fear and hatred of Difference is protestant.  The clinging to Milleniallism and hopes for Armageddon are protestant aesthetics.

    Now, I see no way to address this problem unless Roman Catholicism is willing to come clean.  When a pope (not this one!) comes out and says  “Hey, people, you’re missing the point, and it’s our fault that you do” then we might start to see something ameliorative from within the whole Christian community.  But they can’t really do that.  After all this time, the “point” of Catholicism is its continual attempt to absorb.

    Which is better than some Protestant notions of slash and burn.