Mark W Tiedemann

Blog

  • What’s UnAmerican About That?

    Herman Cain is the latest in a long line of political mouths calling a populist movement UnAmerican.  He says Occupy Wall Street is an assault on capitalism and that capitalism and the free market system are what have made America what it is.

    Can’t argue with that, but his intended meaning is other than reality.

    Setting that aside for a moment, though, it’s his statement that protests in the street are UnAmerican that I take greatest issue with.  I’ve been hearing that from more or less conservative people since I was old enough to be aware of political issues.  During the Vietnam era, the antiwar movement gained the hatred of Middle America not because they were wrong but because they were unruly, in the street, loud, and confrontational.  “You should work within the system,” people said, “that’s not the way to do it.”

    Except it was clear that working within the system was not achieving results.  The system is so constructed that those who understand where the controls are can make it respond regardless of general public sentiment.  The system is often The Problem, and today we have another example.

    But more fundamentally than that, it was a failure to recognize that people in the street is very much a part of the system.  What do we think “freedom of assembly” is all about?

    Mr. Cain is wrong.  Capitalism did not make this country great, the people who worked with it and in spite of it did.  Capitalism is a tool not a religion.  Likewise with this nonsense about the free market.  That term has lost legitimacy.  What perhaps Mr. Cain means and certainly what most people mean when they use the term—and by “most people” I mean those not in the upper tiers of corporatist elites—is Open Access Markets, which is not quite the same as what we’ve been taught.  I will repeat this: there is no such thing as a free market.  Someone or some group always controls it, usually with the intent to keep others out.  Wealth is accumulated because of control of markets.  The more you can dictate its conditions, the more successful you will be.  This is not freedom, this is economic Darwinism, and when it is left unmonitored and uncontrolled it results in destructive conditions for people unable to participate, just as we have now.

    Open Access Markets means the greatest number of people can participate and there is a modicum of fairness and justice.  You cannot have that without controls, if only to have someone standing there at the gate making sure the bullies don’t keep people out.  We need to start using the language more precisely.

    So what we’re really arguing about now is who will be in control.

    Now back to protests in the street.  You can call them ugly, you can call them upsetting, you can call them many things, but you cannot call them UnAmerican.  The Revolution began with protests in the streets.  Protests in the streets have always been part of parcel of massive change in this country and we now look back with the myopia that seems peculiarly American and blithely forget that all the things we brag about today in terms of social justice began with protests in the streets.  Women’s suffrage, racial equality, fair labor practices, the end of unjust wars, voting rights—run down the list of game-changers and you will find people in the streets making noise and being “unruly.”  It’s as American as baseball, MicroSoft, and Mark Twain.   You find people like Herman Cain condemning it when it threatens power they wish to wield.  He’s running for president.  Before that, though, he is the CEO of a successful corporation.  He feels threatened with changes he can’t predict (although I bet if he gave it a little thought he’d know exactly what those changes would entail) and which would curtail authority he thinks he can exercise if he wins.

    But this is also a man who has made the same old position-of-comfort claim that anyone without a job is personally responsible for that.  This is a refusal to come to terms publicly with the fact that economic systems are just that—systems.  Tools.  And they break down.  And I don’t care what kind of character you have, if you land on the outside of a broken system unable to get back in, it’s not your fault, it’s a problem with the system.

    But there seems to be a desire to treat our economic system more as a church than a system.  Something which simply exists and if we only behave properly will take care of us in its blind benevolence.  I can understand that.  It’s scary to see reality as a complex set of conditions we have little or no say in.  It’s frustrating to realize that you have to actually understand  something that probably has never made sense no matter how many times it has been explained.

    I was raised, as probably most people born in this country, hearing the fairy tale prescription that if you’re honest and work hard you’ll do well.  It has probably never been true but for a relative minority of people, but it’s the kind of myth that the owners of things like to spread because it prepares people to be servants.  I have absolutely no argument with the ideas that you should be honest.  Hard work is essential.  But you have to be aware as well or your honesty and hard work will be turned into a resource to be used by those who “know better” and you can all too easily end up with nothing.  Hard work and honest are necessary but NOT sufficient for—not success, but security.

    We have been giving away the hard won protections earned by hard work, sacrifice, and more than a little blood over the last century, surrendering common sense to a myth of national greatness that says anything that puts a bridle on corporate greed is anti-American.  The heyday of the Middle Class miracle was built on the recognition that you have to keep control of the beast of capitalism and that markets are not free but gladiatorial arenas and the victors are those who set the conditions of combat.  We managed to do this at one time through a lot of sacrifice and, yes, people in the streets speaking truth to power.

    Time to do it again before we really do lose what makes us great.

  • Steve Jobs: A Quality of Expectation

    I do not own an Apple computer.  I do all my work on PCs because, well, it worked out that way.

    I had an Apple.  First-generation MacIntosh, to be precise.  It didn’t last.

    My partner, Donna, got interested in computers back in the early and mid-80s.  When I say “interested” I mean on the level of “hm, that looks cool, I wonder what it would be like to…”  and not on the level of “that way lies the future, we gotta have one!”  Being somewhat dense when it came to reading her enthusiasms (and separating hers from my own), by various strange avenues, she ended up getting a MacIntosh for Christmas.  Computer and printer.

    Her enthusiasm lasted a month.  She’d gotten a job with a small tech company and worked on PCs all day and when she came home at night, the last thing she wanted to do was more work on a computer, even if it was hers.  Besides—and this may sound odd—the MacIntosh was too easy to use.  She was interested in the programming and the guts and the software.  The MacIntosh was plug-n-play before there was plug-n-play and the software available for it—because it was Apple, it was all proprietary—was expensive!  We acquired a math program and something else.

    I was writing on my IBM Selectric.  The MacIntosh just sat there.

    Then it broke down.

    This is embarrassing.  The motherboard was flawed and one day it just went comatose.  However, because we had used it so little, we didn’t push it to failure until it was out of warranty.  We didn’t know it was the motherboard.

    But before that we had run up against some of the annoying short-comings of the MacIntosh, one of which was file size.  I decided to try writing stories on it.  The rudimentary word processing program—MacWrite—was fine except I could never figure out how to put headers on it and the maximum file size was something like 8 or 9 pages.   That wasn’t the annoying part.  What was annoying was that it would let you get there and then lock up.  There wasn’t enough memory left to delete anything so you could, you know, save the file.  So if you didn’t take care—if, for instance, you got caught up in the story you were telling—you’d reach that limit and then lose the whole file.

    (To be fair, this might have been an issue with that flawed motherboard, but we didn’t know, it was just maddening.)

    It really was kind of a useless thing in our house.

    But it was also kind of very cool.  I mean, I write science fiction.  I was looking at PCs and thinking “that’s not what computers are supposed to look like—the Mac is!”  And I really wanted it to work right, to be as cool as it looked.  There was something about it that prompted an “if only” sentiment.

    Then I got accepted to Clarion.  We decided I could take the Mac for my writing instrument.  We got it fixed.  That’s when we found out it was the motherboard.  At the same time, we upgraded the memory (to ONE megabyte!) and bought an external floppy drive for it.

    Because we had also discovered by then how difficult it was to translate Mac files to PC (to get a decent print out—-we had an AppleWriter dot matrix printer and I frankly never found a font that was usable; you have to recall that this was at a time when magazines and publishers were refusing to accept dot matrix manuscripts and I wanted to get clean laser printer copies, but the only laser printer we had access to was at Donna’s work, which was for PC…) we intended to trade it in on a PC when I got back, but it was just the right size for the trip.

    I was the only one at Clarion with a Mac.  Everyone hated the printer fonts I used.

    Also, there was a heatwave that year in Michigan and the Mac turned out to be very susceptible to overheating.  I had a small fan which I ended up training on the Mac.  I backed up often to the external drive.  It was a trial.

    I was so glad to trade it off for a usable PC.

    But I always had a soft spot for the idea of the Mac and later when they started coming out with better models and then the massive improvements after the whole Lisa thing made it the hardware to have, I wanted one.  But by then I was doing all my work on PC and I was online and publishing worked almost exclusively with PC and and and…

    And Apple products were so damn expensive!

    Aside from that first generation MacIntosh, we have only ever owned one brand new computer.  And now the PC products seem to be as cool as the Apple, so…

    It’s fairly obvious that the coolness of newer PCs, the improvements in speed and reliability, the slick programs available, all that came about as a direct response to the challenge of Apple and Steve Jobs.  Jobs created something with growing gravitic force that has been bending the rest of the computer verse into orbit around it.

    And Apples are science fiction computers.  I’m speaking aesthetically now.  What they do, how they look, the ease of interface—this is where it should be according to the scenarios playing in the heads of science fiction writers.

    I would like to upgrade all my computers to Apples.  I’ve wanted to do that for years.  It’s like really wanting to drive a high end, state of the art car, wear Armani suits, play a Les Paul, and drink only the best wine.  It’s a Leica to everyone else’s Nikon, Luxman to Sony, Bose to a box with a speaker in it.

    Steve Jobs made people want better.

    Not everyone.  A lot of people wouldn’t know “better” if it walked up and introduced itself.  But many people.  And he made them feel they deserved it.

    And that there is a reason for better.  This last may seem odd, but think about it.  Many people settle.  They get by.  They manage.  They accept what they think they have to and make do.

    From time to time someone has to remind us that quality is not only justified but essential.  That life shouldn’t be shabby just because we don’t think we can have better.  For all the technical innovations Jobs spurred and enabled and midwived, it was this aesthetic for which he will long be remembered.  He never settled.  He didn’t think we should, either.

    One of the years, I’ll own a Mac again.

  • An Unstaged Moment

    It’s Wednesday, a few days since Archon, and I’m now reconsidering the convention.  I didn’t have a bad time.  I had some great conversations (thank you Vanessa, Jill, Rachel, Lorenzo, Tom, Selina, Lynn, and the folks who showed up at the workshops and no doubt several others I’ve neglected to name) and the art show held some nice pieces, etc.

    Usually when I get done with a convention, I’m inspired.  I get jazzed up and come home rarin’ to write deathless prose.  Not this time.  I’ve been writing constantly on one thing or another for the last six years, almost all novels.  (The state of my office is indicative of this.)

    But it was not a bad weekend and I was caught having a good time.

     

    Jill Lybarger, who once long ago worked at one of the last stand-alone B. Dalton stores in St. Louis and did me great favors by keeping my books on the shelves there, and who has since moved to Chicago with her husband Dane, snapped this of me contemplating—nay, drooling over—a possible purchase of a fine first edition (signed!) something or other at Basement Books in the dealers’ room.

    I’m always a bit dismayed at profiles like this.  I somehow can’t quite make the connection to “That’s me!” because I’m always startled by the disconnect between my actual self and my imagined self (which is stuck somewhere about a decade ago).  Looking at this you’d never know I work out.  I kind of look like an aging private detective.  The developing hunch (from years of leaning over an enlarger and trays and prints in darkrooms) is something I’m probably stuck with.

    Oh, well.  But here is an off-guard moment of me indulging myself.  (I did buy one book from them—a 1st edition of Joe Haldeman’s underappreciated novel 1968.)

    One for the historical record.  With appreciation to Jill for permission to post the picture.  Thank you.

  • Controversy Bullies

    We thrive on controversy.  Say something in this country, make a statement, be declarative, and someone will get in your face and tell you you’re wrong and suddenly there’s an audience.  People choose sides, there’s shouting.  We should license controversy vendors who appear quickly to sell tickets, popcorn, and soft drinks of choice when this happens.

    For a long time now there’s been a watchdog group with a website and an agenda to keep track of fraud committed against writers.  You would think this would be a noncontroversial, no-brainer—writers work on margin, are underpaid usually, and can’t afford attorneys to look out for their interests.  Despite exceptions, most writers rarely are able (or even, sometimes, willing) to litigate on their own behalf.  It’s time-consuming, ulcer-causing, and pricey!  And often it’s against a corporate entity that has a war chest that can spend a writer into oblivion even before the case gets before a judge.  So Writers Beware started up as a service to alert writers to who the bad guys are.  And there are—bad guys.

    Not too surprisingly, said bad guys don’t like this.  Writers Beware has taken a bite out of their bottom line, derailed some of their scams, and given writers some power to protect themselves.  That’s to be expected.

    But this is just underhanded.  Assuming for a second it is what it claims, it is to be dumbstruck at the lunacy.  Why would a writer join an organization dedicated to destroying another organization that is protecting writers?

    I don’t know who is really behind Write Agenda, but they’re going after people who have done service for writers.  If in fact individual writers are doing this, it seems as boneheaded as blue collar workers who attack unions for defending higher pay and better working conditions.

    Which happens.

    As a kid, this is simple.  There are bullies in the schoolyard.  It’s nice when the teacher looks out for them and does something, but what was better was for there to be some kid big and bad enough to take on the bullies and sort of protect the weaker ones.  That’s pretty much what such organizations like Writer Beware do.  Fraud is a criminal offense and it’s nice when an Attorney General or D.A. prosecutes for it, but the fact is they don’t have the resources (or sometimes the inclination) to police the way we’d like them to.  So occasionally a watchdog group springs up and when they’re effective, the bullies look for opportunity to get rid of them so they can return to lording it over the other kids.

    But there always seems to be a handful who don’t like the protector.  For whatever reason, they seem to prefer to get beat up rather than accept help.  It doesn’t make sense, it’s counterintuitive—maybe they don’t like feeling beholden and certainly we’d all like to be able to take care of ourselves.

    But we aren’t kids and this kind of assault is pretty common these days.  Labels get thrown around, occasionally bordering on libel or slander, tempers rise, and the controversy draws an audience.

    In this case, it’s reasonably easy to see the difference.  Writer Beware has a track record.  All The Write Agenda seems to have is a bunch of baseless assertions.  But they’re engaging in the Great American Pastime of “Let’s Create A Controversy!” combined with “Let’s You and Him Fight!”    At least we have one advantage in this one—writers (generally speaking) can read.

  • Without Naming Names

    I didn’t really enjoy Archon very much this year.  I hesitate to pin blame because so many things are going on right now that my dissatisfaction could be result of factors completely unrelated.  Any number of them might have coalesced into the hazy funk that seemed to follow me around all weekend.

    But there did seem to be a lack of focus at the convention and I was surprised at the lack of meaningful programming.  I volunteered to do two workshops, one on Saturday the other on Sunday, but except for titles and brief descriptions, there was no structure to speak of.  I showed up and improvised and the people in attendance seemed satisfied.  Copious notes were being taken in any case.

    I did get to spend time with people I only see at conventions.  A tip o’ the hat through the internets to Selina and Lynn, Vic, Tom, Rich and Michelle, and a handful of others who made it worth my while to show up.

    One thing I will say, the convention returned to Collinsville, Illinois, which is about 15 miles from my house.  Not an onerous drive except for getting over the bridge, on which this weekend there were repairs and therefore traffic jams.   The convention facilities themselves are okay—it is, after all, a convention center (Gateway) and it is designed for such things.  It used to be there was only one good hotel there, but a Drury has been added.  The dearth of decent restaurants is a problem.  I don’t consider Arby’s, Bandana’s, Ponderosa, Ruby Tuesday, or  Steak’n’Shake decent restaurants.  Fast food, sure.  But there’s still only one really good restaurant there, Porters, which is fine eating and expensive as hell.  Last year Archon moved to Westport Plaza.  I know there were complaints about it being spread out and the dealer’s rooms were on the other side of the plaza from the actual programming, but it was a cool setting, good food, decent hotels, and…

    Yeah, it’s closer to my house, but more importantly there’s no bridge that is always being repaired.

    Even so, that doesn’t explain my loss of enthusiasm.  I think I’m just really tired from the last eight months.  I’m not working on anything right now but what I want to be working on, till my agent tasks me with more revisions or something, so I’ve decided to work on the small stack of short stories I have.  Rich Horton was at Archon and pointedly lamented my non-output of short material.  So that’s what I’m doing now.

    And learning my away around Twitter.  One more distraction, but I’m told it is necessary for my coming popularity vis-a-vis my career.

    Things just seem unsettled lately.  There are reasons which I won’t go into here, but they seem to be ganging up on me.  I’m so easily distracted, I throw my hands up at merest provocation and put off till tomorrow work I really need to be doing today.  For instance, the story I should be working on is staring at my back just now, on the other computer, while I explain all this to you.  It’s a cool story, too, if I can just bring it home.  So while it’s pleasant chatting with you here, and you’re such a terrific audience patiently listening to me gripe about not much, I’m going to hit the publish button and go do that cool story.

    But I wanted to tell you about Twitter.  Really.  (See? I’m not a Luddite.)

  • What They Never Tell You When You Start

  • Ursula and Me

    Ursula K. Le Guin Interview from Jefferson County Library on Vimeo.

  • Denial of Agency and Being Off Base

    Recently I participated in a brief exchange on Shelfari that annoyed me.  On a science fiction thread a commenter said he (or she) had recently read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and had enjoyed it even though the fictional conceit was off base.  I asked why and the response was  “His worldview is off-base because it is humanistic – it excludes God.”

    That annoyed me.  Actually, it pissed me off.  The exchange ran a little while and then I suggested it be moved or abandoned.  The admin allowed that it was a troublesome thread and it would be better to just stop it.  I withdrew (except for one more exchange about why it had troubled me since as it continued it turned into a typical “does god exist” thread.  My annoyance was with the assumption that stories can be judged automatically off-base because they don’t take into account a particular belief.

    When pressed, the original commenter admitted that it was Asimov’s world view in general that was the problem—which means that the beliefs (or disbeliefs) of the author were used a priori to judge the quality of the stories.

    Here’s the problem with that:  fiction is about the human condition and the writer is responsible for getting the character and interactions within a story right.  In other words, to tell the truth about people, how they feel, what they do, why they think or act certain ways.  To do this, the writer must imaginatively assume the viewpoint of the characters (to greater or lesser degrees) in order to treat them honestly so what is then written about them is a true picture.

    To do that, the writer must be an observer, a very accurate observer, a student of people, of humanity, even of civilization and culture.

    To claim that a writer cannot write truthfully about the human condition unless he/she already holds a particular world view is sheer, slanderous nonsense.  At its most basic, it suggests that to hold a particular world view might guarantee that a writer not only can but will write the truth, and that simply doesn’t follow.

    But further, it suggests that the truth of human beings is hidden from a writer who doesn’t believe a particular way.  Extend that, and you can take the position that a writer of any other religious view must be incapable of writing accurately and truthfully about people as compared to  a writer who holds a preferred view.  You are immediately immersed in the unsolvable debate over which view is the Truth (capital T) and which false.  Or, furthermore, you would have to accept that a believer would be incapable of writing as honestly about atheist characters, since that is a world view not shared.

    We would, very simply, be unable to speak honestly and truthfully to each other.

    One would have to accept that stories written (truthfully, honestly) by a believer would somehow be different than stories written (honestly, truthfully) by an unbeliever.  But that would deny the universality of human experience.

    On a meaner level, this is a denial of agency.  It’s very much like the argument put forth by those who think Shakespeare is a pseudonym for another author, one of which is the Earl of Oxford.  The argument says that “William Shakespeare” lacked the education and aristocratic sensibility to have penned works of such insight about nobility.  This completely discounts the richness of imagination writers must apply to any subject of which they lack first-hand knowledge.  It says I, if I were Shakespeare, could not possibly have imagined what I wrote and told the truth so accurately because I didn’t possess the proper “world view.”  You can see this argument used against any author or group of authors another group (usually not authors) seek to deny validation.

    (I suggest finding a copy of the late, great Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Womens Writing  for a detailed examination of this process.)

    It suggests two things that are false—one, that there are human experiences to which only select groups are privy and that no one on the outside can possibly know about, and two, that human experience is not universal on some basic level that underlays all successive experiential additions.

    If a religious writer wrote truthfully about two people falling in love and an atheist wrote about the same two people, and both told the truth of what they observed and described the experience of those two characters honestly, how might they differ?  For either of them to make the case, within the story, that their world view mattered in the telling of human truth, the author would have to intrude and, to greater or lesser degrees, proselytize.  You would end up with a bad story at best, propaganda at worst.

    Throw a dozen or two dozen stories on a desk without attribution.  No one knows who the writers are.  Tell me what the beliefs are of the author of each story.  (This presumes excellent stories, truthful stories.)  The idea that an atheist, a humanist, would write “off base” stories because of their world view is a denial of agency.  What that says is that no writer not a believer could write a truthful story about believers, or that a believing writer could not possibly write a story about atheists.

    Nonsense.

    On the question of whether the universe would be depicted differently, well now that is a bit more interesting, but the fact is that the universe is how it is and both atheist and believing scientists see it, measure it, explain it pretty much the same way.  They may argue over first causes, but in the advent of thirteen billion years since that event, both see the cosmos essentially the same way.  Atoms operate the same way for both, gravity is the same for both, the life and death of stars…

    But in fact, it was not the stories that prompted that initial remark, but a knowledge of the author’s world view that colored the perception.  (Of course this is one more reason I tend to tell people that if they really love an artist’s work, see, hear, read as much of the work as possible before finding out anything about them.  The personal facts of an artist’s life can ruin the appreciation for the work.)  This is a dishonest gage.  It sidesteps the only valid metric, which is, does this story say true things about people?

    I won’t go so far as to say that a writer’s world view doesn’t affect the work.  The whole point of doing art is to express personal opinions about subjects.  But at the level of good art, all authors’ work must hold up in the court of truth, and to suggest that certain world views de facto  prevent someone from telling the truth about the subject at hand is overreaching at best.  You can certainly say of certain writers “his/her beliefs so color their work that it is skewed from truth” but it is not correct to say “these beliefs guarantee that their work will be skewed from truth.”

    It also suggests that personal experience can be disingenuous at its core if it leads to conclusions inconsistent with a preferred world view.

    Denial of agency indeed.

     

     

  • Position Statement

  • It’s Not About Sex

    Rick Santorum answered a question put to him by a serving gay soldier about what he would as president do with the new policy and Santorum did not go off-script. But he did make two mistakes that seem to be endemic in this kind of thing.

    Here’s the video:

    Firstly, he makes it sound like gays have been asking for “special privileges” in this. Why is this so difficult for people to understand? They have not been asking for special privileges, they have been asking for the same privileges. Of course, there’s a secondary problem in even that—we aren’t talking about privileges, but rights, and I hate it when politicians so smoothly degrade rights into privileges for the purposes of making points with constituents. Gays have been asking for the right to serve their country in the military, openly, as themselves, the exact same way straights do.

    The second problem with his answer is the profound naivete he exhibits—as if you can keep sex out of anything. It’s possible he can be excused for not understanding what a barracks is like, he never served in the military, but he could ask! Like any locker room, military barracks’ drip with sex and sexual conversation. It’s a given. You may not like it, but it’s reality. (And in combat, it’s even more so—threat of death ramps up the sexual consciousness of human beings, Darwin telling you that you’re being an idiot for putting yourself in danger and the first thing you need to do if you survive is go reproduce.) The daily, quite normal discourse in military units is something gays have simply not been able to participate in unless they lied about who they were.

    Santorum then trots out the old mantra that the military is no place for social experimentation, demonstrating ignorance of our history—which has been a hallmark of this crop of Republican presidential candidates, either because they genuinely don’t know or they willfully distort it to validate the myths their constituents wish to believe. The United States military has been a testbed for social experimentation almost since the beginning, because it does not function as a democracy (although it did that, too, till after the Civil War—direct election of officers by the men they would lead was common). Just for one example was Truman’s desegregation of the army and navy, which came with similar prophecies of doom and chaos.

    Of course, this was necessary because the military had already been desegregated in the wake of the Civil War, as was the federal government, until Wilson re segregated it. (Yes, good ol’ Woodrow Wilson was a righteous racist—we forget that, among other things.) The military was used as a testbed for coed service and is still wrestling with the idea of women in combat (they have been there all along, unacknowledged). The military has always been used to test run social ideas.

    I don’t like Rick Santorum. I think he’s a hypocrite of the first water, like many of his GOP colleagues, and I’ve written about why I think he’s a hypocrite. But he’s only one of the most extreme examples of an endemic problem in the GOP, which is that they seem incapable of acknowledging the validity of rights for people they don’t like. They hammer on about the constitutionality of this or that and then strip away those rights from people who don’t fit their description of Americans. This has been their problem for a long, long time, but it’s growing to overwhelm them philosophically.

    I once characterized the difference between Democrats and Republicans thus: Republicans believe citizens are those who own property while Democrats believe anyone who lives here legally is a citizen. It’s a rough metric, but damn if the GOP doesn’t keep trying to make it true in all instances. They have taken on a version of stakeholder politics that demands they protect the rights of a shrinking constituency in the face of a growing pool of people who don’t fit that profile. But in this instance they’re going a step further and stating that people who do not fit a standard issue description of the ideal American ought not to expect the same rights—which in this formulation they insist on calling privileges.

    But what genuinely disturbs me is the audience reaction. The cheers of the crowd when Santorum spews this sanctimonious and inaccurate drivel. Those people frighten me. They’re the ones who would approve of the police in the dead of night coming for those they don’t like, completely unaware that a change of adjectives in the policy would make them just as vulnerable to this kind of censure. They really don’t seem to grasp the underlying issues. In this case, all they seem to grasp is that they think two men having sex or two women having sex is yucky and on that basis there should be a national policy to keep them from equal rights. They really don’t seem to understand that it’s not about sex. Not at all.

    By the time they figure out what it is all about, I hope we have a country left for them to correct their mistakes. That may be a bit hyperbolic, but just listen to the cheers.