The heat wave finally broke and this past weekend we took the dog and went through nearby Carondolet Park, which over the years has become our favorite to stroll. Driving through I often see all kinds of photographic possibilities, and then, when I return with the camera, I can’t find most of them.
But I did get some this time, so I thought I’d just put up a selection. Something apolitical, pleasant, interesting, visually stimulating, etc.
So….
The federal government is currently requiring Fannie May and Freddy Mac to sue their business partners—the banks—over the mess they’ve all made together. This is awkward, because while they do that they are also being required to cooperate to untangle the mess.
Presumably, when all this is done, what it basically means is the government will know who to fine. And at what level.
Which is basically bogus. This situation requires major surgery, months in full body traction, and possibly a mercy killing. All this move does is put another band-aid on it.
They’re still worrying about the wrong people. Investment bankers, mortgage brokers, and such like are not the victims of the current debacle. Many of them, not all, are the perpetrators of it and once more we’re letting the government run around trying to fix their situation while ignoring the people who are really taking one up the ol’ backdoor, namely the Homeowner.
Something began in the 80s that has done huge damage to the so-called American dream. We even had a dress rehearsal for the crash in 2008 back then with the Savings & Loan Crisis (remember that one? Charles Keating and others, including some peripheral involvement of the Bush clan. Anyway…) What began to happen was a systematic turnover of housing in a game of Bubble Bubble, Let’s Make A Bubble. In the heyday of the Yuppie (another old term—remember them? Young and Upwardly Mobile) it became the thing to do to buy a house, live in it for a while, do a little upgrading, then sell it at a higher price within a year or two and use that money to buy a better house in a nicer neighborhood and so one up the ladder until, from a relatively modest initial purchase, you find yourself in a six-figure house with a lot of extra cash from all your shrewd escalations. Banks loved it because the turn-over in loans looked good on their ledgers and the price of housing kept going up in these deals. This came hot on the heels, of course, of the late 70s rehab boom, so for a time the intrinsic value of the properties actually did go up.
But it became a game and the end result was to always inflate the price of the house so you could make a quick profit and lever your way into a “better” home. This had a couple of unintended consequences, one of which we know about because it’s all over the news, the other not so much because its impact was spread all over the place.
The banks got into this in a Big Way and as the Bubble grew they found they could sell their loan bundles into investment portfolios that were backed up by the increasing large mortgage payments. But there was a problem. By law, the side of the bank dealing in consumer home loans was kept separate from the side of the bank dealing in investment banking. A little law called the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) kept these two things from mingling.
The whole point of Glass-Steagall was to control speculation, which had created the huge bubble which burst in October of 1929 and brought on the Great Depression. Bankers and financiers have been trying to repeal the act ever since and they’ve whittled away at it over time. In 1980, the provision that allowed the Federal Reserve to regulate interest rates on savings accounts was repealed and the provision that prohibited a bank holding company to own other financial institutions was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. That opened the flood gates and it took less than ten years to sink the economy. Why we simply didn’t bring Glass-Steagall back in 2008 or 2009, I do not know.
(Yes, I do, I’m being facetious. The financial world still thinks they can build a perpetual motion machine if only regulation didn’t stand in their way, so they keep paying large sums of money to politicians to scuttle efforts to enact real regulation.)
Enough of the bubble has been based on housing that we are still fretting over what to do with all those mortgages that should never have been written.
Which brings me to the part of this that doesn’t get a lot of press. All the people who have been put at jeopardy to lose their homes because the economy is in the tank. I’m not talking about people who had no business buying the houses they were in, but those who till 2008 were managing to pay their mortgages on time and could have continued to do so had the bubble not collapsed along with everything else. And that’s where the whole practice of flipping homes comes into range of my ire.
Consider: the cost of housing has risen far more than wages. It takes a much larger chunk of your income to pay your mortgage than it did in the 70s or the 60s, and I’m talking ratios now. Between 1950 and 1990, average Real income for a working class or middle class family has gone up by a factor of three. In that same period, the cost of a house has gone up by a factor of eight. All this because the phenomenon known as “gentrification” and the financial games played to support it, which has inflated the cost of housing to insane levels.
(Personal anecdote. The costs have continued to rise since the 90s, of course. The house that Donna and I bought in 1992 we could no longer afford today. It’s value has doubled, but our income has not. In fact, our income has been fairly stable over the last 20 years, which I actually think is the case for far more people than polls suggest.)
You want a home. You have no intention of playing this game, you just want a nice house in which to live and raise your family. The cost of that house has already been distorted because you neighbors—not all, but it only takes a few—have played this game long enough that the cost of living in a given neighborhood has gone up artificially. It’s not the intrinsic value of the bricks and frame and floors and appliances, but the balance sheet of mortgages and tax assessments that have done this, because a few people are parlaying housing into fat bank accounts. If it only affected the cost of the houses they were buying and selling, it would be different, the risk would all be on them, but that’s not how housing works. You don’t buy A House, you buy a neighborhood.
So the initial cost of that house is already high but you can handle it. However, your ability to handle it is based on a growing economy that can pay you a wage that will cover it. That economy is based on the continual inflation of property values PLUS the value of investment instruments you know nothing about and have very little to do with the physical property, only on the theoretical return on continued mortgage payments on housing sold at inflated prices.
When the bubble bursts, it immediately degrades the resale value of your house, which in current euphemism, puts you underwater. You now owe more on your house than you can sell it for.
Then the dominoes fall. Because investments take a hit, the stock market plummets, spending seizes up, banks stop issuing loans, the movement of currency slows to a crawl, and the company you work for contracts. You lose your job. Through absolutely no fault of your own, you are about to be foreclosed on because you can’t make the payments.
The economy is in crisis. The government steps in to save—
The Banks.
Foreclosures proceed apace, but the banks don’t have to worry about eating the bad loans because they’re receiving money from the government to keep them afloat. Of course, the whole point from the public’s standpoint to keep them afloat is so they will resume making loans so the economy will start growing again and you can get a new job.
But that doesn’t happen. The bailouts cover the losses of investors, not homeowners, who are pretty much screwed.
Why?
Here’s a thought. Let’s use the authority of the FHA and FHFA to direct the banks to write all those mortgages off. I mean it. Tomorrow, if you’re in a house and still owe on it, the day after, it’s yours.
Lunacy? The banks are drowning in unsalable housing right now. They are forced to foreclose because that’s what the rules say, but they can’t resell the properties. By the time they can, the cost on their ledgers will be enormous what with taxes and maintenance—unless they’re not maintaining them or paying taxes, which means local communities take a double hit in decaying housing and loss of tax revenue. By the time the economy turns around, the banks will have an impossible burden in vacant housing, which they will likely sell off in auctions for pennies on the dollar. It would make more sense to just write them off.
You then stay in your house. Without a mortgage, you can afford to take a lower paying job to meet the balance of your needs. More importantly, once your employed again, you can resume paying property taxes, which your local community can use to maintain streets, schools, etc. You lose your house, not only will you be a nontaxpaying homeless person, your credit is besmirched and you will have a very hard time getting another loan for another house, job or no job. The long term consequences of doing otherwise will cost us billions.
But we don’t consider long term. The banks will scream “but all those mortgage payments!” So what? Clean ledgers, the surviving banks can go back into making home loans to the next generation.
None of which will do any good if the same bubble is allowed to grow again.
We keep listening to the wrong people. Bankers at that level will never miss a meal. Homeowners, however, generally do not conduct their finances on that level. It is grossly unfair that responsible people should lose their homes because someone else has played a financial shell game with housing prices that has now put everyone at risk.
But the banks would go under? Some of them. New ones will spring up. I think we have made a huge mistake buying into the idea of Too Big To Fail. No such thing. Size shouldn’t automatically come with special protections against the consequences of greed.
For once, I think private institutions ought to be bypassed. They broke it once (well, several times) and should not be trusted to fix it this time. When the savings and loan collapse occurred in the 80s, thousands of people lost their homes. A couple of financiers went to jail. Big deal. Maybe if the investors in those companies were made to take a hit, they would require more rational—and moral—management from their boards.
Not to worry. This won’t happen. Obama is proposing we find ways of allowing all those people underwater to refinance. Heaven forbid average people get a bailout from their government that might actually do the entire economy some good!
President Obama is withdrawing proposed tighter regulations on smog that had been part of his initial energetic approach to reform early in his presidency. No jobs have been created in the last month and congressional Republicans are shouting about regulations and the burden to business as the major reason. I think they’re running out of excuses. I mean, we’ve rolled back taxes, rolled back regulations, given them money…and still no one is hiring. I don’t think anyone is going to.
Big business, including the banks, are sitting on huge piles of cash right now. Yet they won’t make loans. Not at levels sufficient to boost job growth. So the next step is make businesses even less accountable to the commonweal. When the Republicans run out of things to hand over to business as incentive and there is still no hiring going on, what will they say? Who will they blame?
The thing that disturbs me is that Obama is backing down so much. He even rescheduled his speech to congress because Speaker Boehner said it would be an imposition on returning members. Instead of standing by his decision, Obama reschedules—opposite the first game of the NFL season.
Does anyone think for a minute Bush would have done that? Or Clinton? I approve of the spirit of compromise and cooperation, but it’s getting ridiculous. We have a president who seems incapable of backing up his own positions and all he’s doing is yielding to the screaming meemies of the Republican Party.
Right now, with a couple of exceptions, it is clear that the Republican Party wants to undo everything the government does and hand it all over to private enterprise. Cut taxes, deregulate, suspend oversight.
And right now we are getting report after report how that is simply a stupid thing to do.
If I had to characterize the GOP theme right now, basing it entirely on Rick Perry and Michele Bachman and somewhat on Mitt Romney, it is this: “We will give the government back to the people where we think it belongs—when we’re done, the federal government will do nothing but maybe run the armed forces. Everything else you’ll have to buy from a private contractor. And to make it even sweeter, we won’t even see to it that you’re treated fairly by those contractors, because, you know, regulation stifles growth.”
There are a couple of GOP presidential candidates who aren’t that bad, but they aren’t getting much press, and it doesn’t matter just now because I’m not talking about 2012, I’m talking about right now. I’m not even talking about the Republican Party, I’m talking about our president’s response to this.
Which is to accommodate, accommodate, yield, cave, bend over…
I’m not longer surprised. I voted for someone I thought had the nerve and the principle to stand up to this. This is more of the same nonsense we were getting under Bush, which caused huge problems. Does anyone after a minute’s thought really believe the financial industry took a nose dive because it was over regulated? They’d been getting progressively less regulation for 20 years, even to the point of declawing the very agencies that might have stopped the bleeding before it took the patient with it, all in the name of growth. I have no doubt you could find any number of boneheaded regulations that do no good, but that’s not the same as saying regulation is bad.
I’m no longer surprised. I will likely write in a candidate at the next election.
Hmm? What’s that? What would I have him do? After all, he wants to get re-elected…?
He’s not a shoe-in. If he keeps doing this, there might even be a coup in the Democratic Party. Every poll in the nation in the last year has suggested that the majority of citizens support tax increases, especially on the wealthy, yet it’s as if he’s playing exclusively to the Tea Party.
It’s simple. The situation is all fucked up anyway, you might as well go down as a tiger rather than as a set of changing stripes. Use the bully pulpit. Veto the shit out this GOP nonsense. Start issuing executive orders for works programs and when the challenges come up take ’em on. Get this shit in the courts and instruct the Justice Department to defend your preferred programs to the death. You’re the fucking president, you don’t change your schedule because John Boehner whines. Jobs aren’t being created anyway, so go ahead and try to clean up the air. Use your authority. Fucking stand up for…something.
There are two conceptions at work, in my opinion, in GOP thinking about deregulation and they are at odds with each other. I think that most Republican voters, when they think about this issue, are thinking about small business. They think the burden and the benefit will accrue to companies with a 100 employees or less and that may well be partly true. But all this deregulation nonsense is not going to benefit small business nearly so significantly as it will line the pockets of the huge multinationals. I don’t think most GOP voters conceive of the difference in kind between the local mom and pop manufacturer and, say, Boeing or Monsanto. The environmental regulations are burdensome to a small business, sure, but those small businesses are not dumping kilotons of waste and pumping millions of pounds of carbon into the air. Also, small local business is not skimming their profits and investing them overseas, which is what is happening at the upper levels, and, you know, gravity works—shit flows downhill. ADM creates thousands of tons of waste and the run-off affects family farms, the destruction of which leads to the consolidation of the agribusiness into an entity that controls pricing and then distorts the monetary markets. There are orders of magnitude of difference between a local bakery and Nabisco and the regulations that used to keep these monsters in check are going away and it will end up screwing that local baker and all the rest of us.
But we have a president who swore he was going to make things different and somehow has misplaced his cohones.
If by a miracle either Gary Johnson or Jon Huntsman get the nod for the GOP for 2012, I will seriously consider voting for either of them. There are things I do not like about the GOP philosophy, but on balance, if you’re talking about traditional, Eisenhower Republicans, there are just as many things about the Democrats I don’t like. But these two seem to have a grasp. I honestly don’t think they have a chance, because they are, in fact, too rational for the current crop of GOP delegates. So if, as seems more likely, the top three idiots prove to be too much to beat, I will likely vote for Obama again—I cannot abide the GOP social agenda and I see no point is saving the financial side of this country if the cost is in the freedoms that I think are what make this place worth living in.
But I’m no longer surprised at Obama’s pathetic abandonment of almost everything he said he stood for. Sad and disappointed, but not surprised.
There is probably no way for me to write this without tripping over some bloodthirsty reactionary’s sensibilities, but you know, I don’t really give a damn.
In my home town, too.
A St. Louis publishing company has released a 9/11 coloring book. There is a reaction to it here. Wonderful cover.
Very patriotic. Nothing violent on the cover itself, but there are the twin towers and, I think, the proposed memorial tower.
Oh yes, and a cross. This is, after all, commemorating the assault by Muslims against Christians.
The subtitle is interesting: A Graphic Coloring Novel on the Events of September 11, 2001.
A novel.
Hmm.
Well, it is rated PG, I suppose that’s something.
One of the inside images has been getting a great deal of press as an example of what can be found inside.
Yes, indeed. A depiction of a SEAL shooting Osama Bin Laden, through one of his wives. They even made sure you could see the bullet. They have also depicted Bin Laden as something of a coward—he’s clearly cringing behind the brave woman set to take the shot for him.
This is about as bad as the Easter Baskets Walmart offered one year full of missiles and bombs.
Let me be clear here: I do not mourn Osama Bin Laden. I feel he was a hateful man who did terrible things and has left the world a much more dangerous place than it was before. I might have certain moral quibbles about the manner of his demise, but one of my overwhelming feelings is that this is how it ought to have been done back in 2001 and 2002. The excessive eruption of American military response that has left us with depleted moral force in a world that was already ambivalent about us, mired in two wars that should have been over long ago had they not been disastrously mishandled (and which, according to a recent study, has cost us close to 60 billion in funds stolen by contractors in Iraq alone), and with a hair-trigger police-state mentality that has crippled us in actual problem-solving, much higher energy costs, and a political landscape that will require a combination of Solomon, George Washington, and Albert Einstein to untangle was the most egregious example of vengeance-seeking since Johnson’s refusal to get out of Vietnam. Had we concentrated on finding Bin Laden and sending special teams to go get him, we would have accomplished much m0re.
But that would have meant a trial, probably, and a stage on which he might have aired his complaints. And after all we had a president with something to prove and a vice president whose lust for power is rarely found outside of a bad novel.
So we now have a coloring book to do more damage by covering up the farce that the last decade has been in the eyes of children who will come of age learning the official version, reinforced by the simple activity of filling in between the lines the pictures in a novel that is basically about revenge.
I suppose it would be a hard thing to sell if it told the truth, which is that basically in the aftermath of 9/11 America enjoyed more absolute global sympathy than at any time since WWII and we squandered it by acting stupidly. All this know-how—and we have a lot of that, really—ignored, misused, pissed away.
It’s possible to characterize almost every war, especially since the end of the 19th Century, as a means by which industry has made more money. There’s a component of that to every conflict, even WWII, which really was about evil in the world. But I can’t think of one that has been more nakedly so than Iraq. With the revelation of the graft and corruption and the outright theft and the complete lack of accountability, it is impossible not to see it as having been instigated for the sole benefit of multinationals, Halliburton being first and foremost.
But we can’t tell kids that. Can’t have them grow up thinking the people who run their country can ever be stupid, or greedy, or vain, or misguided, or duped, or simply wrong. Can’t have that.
So let’s dress it up like another excusable example of John Wayne diplomacy.
Shit.
A bit of “local color.”
When you have a dream about an argument, maybe it has some weight and should be written about. Recently, I posted a photograph on my Google + page. This one, in fact:
My caption for it was “What more is there to say?” Partly this was just to have a caption, but also to prompt potential discussion. As symbol, the photograph serves a number of functions, from melancholy to condemnation.
It did prompt a discussion, between two friends of mine who do not know each other, the core of which centers on the divergent meanings of such symbols for them and a question of sensitivity. I won’t reproduce the exchange here, because as far as I’m concerned the question that it prompted for me was one of the idea of “sacredness” and the appropriate use of symbols.
Which immediately sent me down a rabbit hole about the private versus public use of symbols.
Essentially, we all have proprietary relationships with certain symbols. Since I already posted the image, the sign of the cross is one, and not just for Christians. As a symbol it has achieved that universality advertisers dream of. It is instantly recognizable as the sign for a faith movement just about everywhere. It’s possible some aboriginal tribes in the beclouded valleys of New Zealand don’t know what it is, but on the level of international discourse it carries across all lines.
The public meaning is also fairly clear—it represents an idea and an institution. The entire apparatus of the Christian faith is symbolized by it, the buildings, the books, the robes, the songs, the defining mythologies, and the philosophical ideas. Publicly it is by and large regarded as a force for good. Publicly, the ideas embodied suggest if not entirely represent a fundamental tendency toward morality and a stated ambition to achieve peace, love, and the concomitant positives associated with a redemptive philosophy.
But the private meanings are wildly divergent and stem from both personal experience and long intellectual examination. In some instances it is difficult to see how certain conclusions can possibly be based on the same thing.
So the question in my mind is, which is more valid? Which should be protected? The public meaning or the private? And should they be kept separate?
In other words, in relation to the photograph above, does the “sacredness” of the symbol allow for not only a condemnation of the obvious vandalism that broke the stone cross in the first place but also a refusal to countenance sympathetic commentary for the breakage? For those who find the symbol personally important, such assaults are seen as insensitive. A violation. Such sympathetic comments also yield a judgment of the person making the comments. Obviously, this an antagonistic situation. But what concerns me here is not so much the antagonism but the mutual rights of the antagonists to use that symbol each in their own way.
Let’s take something more secular. Flag burning. Obviously the symbol of the flag is a potent one, and with powerful public meaning. Just as clearly, there is powerful private meaning and again this personal meaning can be wildly divergent. And again, the question is, which meaning takes precedence?
More to the point, which meaning should take precedence?
If as some believe the image of the flag should be protected, rendering its use subject to specific prohibitions and allowable uses, does it still have utility as a symbol or have we reduced its capacity to represent ideas? Or have we simply declared certain ideas related to it illegitimate?
Which goes directly to the question, can an idea ever be “illegitimate” as an idea?
Historically it’s clear that when a state attempts to bar the public dissemination of an idea, depending on the idea in question, an underground almost automatically springs up and suddenly the state has a problem it may not have had before—namely, a resistance movement. One of the things that made early Christianity so powerful was its official banning by Rome. The state drove it underground where it could not be observed or tracked and it grew on its own until the movement was so powerful that one day it emerged and became the state.
Like all such movements, it was then faced with exactly the same problem its predecessor faced—ideas it could not tolerate that needed banning. And like most such movements, it fell right into the trap of political expedience and suppressed the free exchange of ideas.
It didn’t even keep the same symbol. Originally the fish, the Ichthys, was the primary symbol, and we’ve seen it resurgence today as an alternative to the cross. (The other prominent symbol came under Constantine, the Chi Rho, which includes a cross as an X overlain on a P, and enjoyed almost continual use as a subordinate Christian symbol up the present.) But by the early 3rd Century, the cross had become so identified with Christianity that Clement of Alexandria could call it the Lord’s Sign.
As such, it was the banner for the emergent and often militant quasi-secular institution that was the Roman Church. The fact that it was a Roman form of execution is possibly relevant for this aspect as early on it would have had dual meanings—for many as a sign of punishment more than of sacrifice. (Interestingly, there is a historical quibble with the cross as symbol based on Jesus’ execution as the Greek word in scripture is stauros, meaning an upright stake, without the cross-beam. This is a quibble, since it was the Romans who crucified Jesus and the term was crucifixion. But even in this we see the process of abstracting out meanings for different uses, since the emphasis is placed by Christians on sacrifice and, later, resurrection through the same symbol.)
The symbol has been retasked over the centuries. As such it demonstrates the natural process by which the free use of symbols serves preferred purposes. Once the meaning becomes fixed and institutional protections are put in place to guarantee one and only one meaning (publicly) you begin to see a gradual loss of vitality once you step outside the precincts of an agreed-upon iconographic definition. It is then that institutional problems creep in and a breakdown of original meaning can occur. If one is using the symbol to define something into existence without regard for what it may mean to others, then you produce a situation in which only two responses to the symbol are possible. Complete acceptance or complete rejection.
To make arguments of fine distinction becomes a sisyphean task. To say, for instance, that practices defended by the symbol are not really consistent with that symbol, to those on the outside take on the appearance of special pleading and even self-selected blindness.
Easier to dismiss the symbols and talk about the thing itself. It is possible for a symbol to obstruct this kind of discourse by insisting on its own unity and, if you will, sacredness. To criticize the point of contention is then to criticize the entire edifice, good and bad, and this is counterproductive. For example, return to the whole flag burning question. When the United States is engaging is actions that citizens regard as antithetical to their idea of “America”, wrapping these actions in the cloak of the flag binds them in with everything that is acceptable, even admirable, about America and makes it difficult to argue that the actions in question are not American—or, as happened during Vietnam, that the people leveling criticism are themselves patriots when they are seen to be criticizing the entirety of America rather than just one set of bad choices, since the choices have been “blessed” by the symbol of the country. At some point it became necessary to shove aside the symbol since its use in the debate had become obfuscatory and divisive. The dialogue that needed to happen was hamstrung because instead of being about an immoral war it became about the morality of the whole country, as symbolized by the flag. Because the flag was held by many to be “inviolate” it became almost impossible for the opposition to use it to effect. It had been taken out of its own utility because the public meaning had become fixed and ran counter to the private meaning of many of the citizens.
If this sounds like a great deal of abstract nonsense, take another example of the misuse of a protected symbol.
The Swastika, as symbol of the Nazis, was given legal protection by the Nazi regime. It became illegal to desecrate it in any fashion. It was applied to all official documents. It was applied to published speeches, laws, passports, even scientific papers. it became the absolute public identity of the German people and any dissent or attempts to set aside Naziism and its symbols in a debate over private meaning and public policy was prosecutable. True, once an outlaw, the law didn’t apply to you, but in order to argue with the symbol and what it stood for, you had to become an outlaw. It fixed the meaning of Naziism and rendered all dissent illegal. Documents lacking the symbol were designated illicit.
There is, you see, great danger in “sacrilizing” symbols.
So what has this to do with an argument over sensitivities and judgments? Since private meaning is exactly that, private, it would seem incumbent upon us to respect that each of us may have experiences and come to conclusions that are entirely at odds with public meanings. If an expression of that dissension can be labeled insensitive, it can only be valid in the matter of other private meanings. To claim the public symbol as one and the same with your private meaning as a way of preventing or invalidating critical remarks of the public symbol and its public meaning—by leveling the charge that the critic is being insensitive—can be seen as an attempt to remove the public symbol from the free exchange of ideas, to “fix” its meaning as inviolate even for those who see it as wholly otherwise. This is hardly fair use since so often a return conclusion is offered about the nature of the critic—a conclusion which may be accurate or may be completely beside the point. In either case, it is not an invitation to dialogue but a wall built to protect against the possible erosion of private meaning by means of critical examination of public symbols—and their public meanings.
My apologies if this has become a bit abstruse, but it’s a difficult topic to deal with in less than precise language. The ideal is to always keep in mind the distinction between an idea and the holder of the idea. Since many people, on both sides of any issue, insist on identifying themselves personally with an idea, this can be a problematic stance. As many Christians say, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” depending on how closely the sinner identifies with the sin in question this may simply not be possible. But it’s a start at acknowledging that experience is important and may not be invalidated by simple recourse to symbols—especially symbols that enjoy special protection from criticism.
Anyway, this is offered as a basis for discussion. It would be interesting to see what comes of it.
Couple of things. One, as noted in the previous post, I’m going to Bouchercon, here in St. Louis this year. The other event coming up—well, Archon, of course, the first weekend of October, but I always try to be there—will be the local independent bookstores bus tour on October 22nd, via St. Louis Alliance. I’ll be at the Book House on Manchester Road from 11:00 AM on and then with readers for lunch. Check the Alliance web page for details.
Today I spent doing some catch-up stuff. Company left this morning, so I cleaned up a bit, walked the dog, then got together with Scott Phillips in U City for coffee. Scott’s a great guy and I owe him for hooking me up with my new agent. He has a new novel out and I urge you all to find it, buy it, read it. The Adjustment is prime Scott, quirky, disturbing, funny, and utterly unclassifiable. (And although I have provided the Amazon link, please buy it from a local, preferably independent bookstore. If you don’t, I’ll know, or I know people who will know, and once they know, well…)
After that, heading back home, I took a detour to visit a friend I don’t see enough of. Vicky was home and we spent an hour or so visiting, something I need to do more often. I’ve known Vicky for mumbles%handovermouth*muffle muffle years and, as with others, time has sort of slipped away and too much has gone by without enough contact. Yeah, I’ve been busy (and sometimes just in no kinda mood to be friendly with anyone) and so has she, but friends are friends and there’s no real excuse. If you delay and accept the excuses, one day you go back and find the place overgrown, abandoned, the windows busted, and the door boarded up.
Anyway, I’m back home now (obviously) and doing some more cleaning up and getting a bit annoyed at myself for being disorganized. There’s more fiction to write, some music to do, and—at the moment perhaps most importantly—a nap that needs taking. I can see it, right there, lying out in the open, unguarded. All I need to do is reach out when no one is looking and take it.
Really, I’ve been up since 5:20 already. We have company coming into town, so most of the day so far has been taken up with cleaning the house and arranging the guest room—which is at all other times my office.
But I sometimes feel that just being able to get up in the morning and do anything constructive is a minor miracle. Oh, nothing significant about that thought. Usually it’s a matter of choosing among several options and then deciding whether I have either the imagination or the energy to tackle any of them. I often have a period of enervation after completing a novel and the older I get the more intense they seem to be.
I didn’t go to the gym this morning as I normally would have because of the incoming company and other scheduling conflicts. I’d decided that before I found out about the company, but now I wonder if I’ll manage it Wednesday. It is too easy to get into a habit of blowing off certain tasks for later. For instance, I keep meaning to write a new short story (started one yesterday, much to my dismay) or pull out the half dozen I have in rough draft and get them in shape. As long as there is a novel in process, I can feel righteous about putting them off. But I have no excuse now other than just not feeling like it.
Not to mention all the things around the house that need tending to. I do a fair job of keeping up with the entropy, but some things slip by and when I get around to them they have grown in size to unmanageable proportions. I have to work up to tackling them. So far, I always do, but there may come a day…
I’m going to Bouchercon. Since at least two of the projects I have under submission to my new agent (did I tell you about my new agent? I’m sure I did) are mysteries—though in truth at least half my oeuvre to date has been a hybrid of SF and mystery (I mean, it even says so on the cover of Mirage, Chimera, and Aurora, an Asimov Robot Mystery), and there are even some noirish aspects to Remains—it seemed sensible to bite the bullet and go to the mystery convention, especially since it’s going to be here, in St. Louis. The plus also is I get to meet my new agent (did I tell you about my new agent? Oh, yeah, I did) face to face.
It’s been feeling like this year a number of things are going to get fixed. All this getting up in the morning has to count for something, right? But one thing I’ve discovered for certain, and it’s something that had been bothering me—I still love to write. Since March I have been working long days on two of my novels, both of which have received major revisions. Hell, the first one was gutted like a fish and rebuilt almost from the bottom up. But because it felt like it was going somewhere, that something was going to come of it, I dived in and had a ball. This was important. I needed to know this, thought I’d been putting off even asking the question.
So getting up in the morning, while still occasionally a pain, has renewed meaning for me. There’s a point to all this effort and that makes a huge difference. Good may yet come of all this.
I do need to make better use of my time. But that’s always been true. So for now, adieu. I’m off to make time bleed a little and get some more done.
The Hugo Awards for 2011 have been presented. The winners are:
Congratulations to all (and a special one to my buddy Allen—this is number three now, I believe).
Another outspoken advocate of Public Morals has been caught with a hand slipping into the cookie jar of Craig’s List sex. Yes, he’s loudly anti-gay and, yes, he’s a Republican.
Now, I don’t for a second believe being a Republican has anything to do with this, any more than I believe being Catholic has anything to do with pedophilic priests. I think we largely have the cart turned ’round the wrong way. I think there is something about both organizations that attract such people, and while you can lay full blame on the Catholic Church for coddling these criminals, you can’t really blame them for creating them. They came pre-flawed, as it were, and merely found a place to flourish.
There are theories. Heavens, there are theories!
In this particular instance, I’ll go along with a combination of two. One is the self-loathing of the deeply-closeted gay. Publicly declaring it perversion, privately unable to keep it under control, and then doing the dumb bit of soliciting for sex via venues that have in the past proved their potential for public exposure. It’s as if subconsciously they’re crying out “Help me! Catch me so I can be humiliated into a cure!” Of course, it doesn’t work that way, but who ever credited one’s subconscious with logic?
The other part is more sinister and has thousands of years of history to back it up and that has to do with the privileges of power. The assumption that high status comes, automatically, with perks denied ordinary mortals.
Or should be denied them. Which brings the perversion into it. Not sexual perversion, but the perversion of presumed status.
See, the powerful have always had access to whatever they wanted, regardless of what the law says. (Margaret Atwood chronicled this in The Handmaid’s Tale with the visit to the private party where the high mucky-mucks of Gilead get to party down with all the vices they have publicly denied everyone else. Privilege.
Now I can get with the idea that status confers perks. I can. You work your ass off to achieve position, there should be some things open to you that ordinarily wouldn’t be.
But not of the illegal variety. I’m talking about no waiting at the best restaurants, preferred seating at theaters, powerful people willing to take your call with no fuss, that sort of stuff.
Not crazy sex with rent boys or call girls, which (a) shouldn’t be illegal to begin with and (b) shouldn’t be denied as illicit and perverse.
But I think one of the things about power is this whole “access to the forbidden” aspect that makes what ought to be available to all something to be denied the general public, put in a box of legislative occlusion, and then indulged behind the most closed of doors, because getting away with it is half the thrill.
It seems the loudest proponents of so-called Family Values are the ones most often caught in such hypocrisies. But if you look at it from the angle of privilege seeking to maintain something solely for itself, then you can look at all of history to make sense of it. Popes and priests with mistresses, even while condemning the whole notion of adultery and fornication for the unwashed masses. Aristocrats indulging their every whim, kings keeping courtesans, and let’s not even get into the misuse of young boys.
I do not say that such things never and do not continue to happen at every level of society, but no one pays attention to someone making minimum wage when they bitch about immorality even while they’re fucking their best friend’s wife or diddling their brother’s kids. Except to put them in jail when they’re caught, at least in the latter instance. Such people have no ability to effectively shield their behavior.
What to make of all these Republicans who keep getting caught in blatant hypocrisies? Is it a Republican disease? Surely not. Democrats get outed in pecadilloes. There is a significant difference, though, in the ideologies. The Republicans have allied themselves to this whole puritanical anti-sex faction and it is often the worst of them in terms of oppressive legislation and rhetoric that get caught doing almost exactly what they condemn. Not so much with the Democrats. I don’t necessarily excuse the behavior, but there’s a considerable difference in the level of hypocrisy.
I think there is a fundamental pathology involved with people who so publicly seek to condemn sexual activities and an even deeper one in those who condemn what they themselves indulge. There’s an obsession with sex that, contrary to the rhetoric, is far deeper than any norm one might acknowledge. People who condemn it with such stridency are probably so obsessed with it that their public stance can only be seen as that of an addict who wants everyone else to take care of his problem for him. If it is rendered unavailable to everyone, removed from access, then he (or she, but it seems a condition more of males than females—that may be just an aberration of reporting or maybe the women are more careful, and possibly less hypocritical) won’t be able to indulge, temptation removed.
This is making one’s incapacity to control one’s self everyone else’s problem.
Which is particularly annoying when it shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
What I suspect some of these loudmouthed moralists would be should they be propositioned by a mature, healthy person who just wants a roll in the sack, is rendered impotent. Normal consensual sex? How dare you suggest such a thing! I think without the flavor of the illicit (and how much better if it were also illegal) it would be…threatening. There’s no power to wield, this person is here willingly, there’s no way to guarantee control. And it would be done with a presumption that it’s—gasp!—okay.
I’m remembering Jim Bakker, whose impropriety now is fading into the mists of ancient history, but as head of the PTL indulged himself regularly, but (apparently, and at least in one instance) through the use of ruffies or their equivalent. When Jessica Hahn, one of his parishioners, dropped the dime on him with the full story, two things happened that I found interesting. First, all Bakker’s followers blamed Hahn, even though she had been drugged. Secondly, Hahn apparently discovered that she couldn’t live with the hypocrisy—she liked sex and doing it under the cloak of sinful, illicit ignominy just didn’t play. (What she subsequently did with her career may be of questionable taste, but she never apologized for it or tried to make herself out to be anything other than herself.) But as a by-product of the first thing, Bakker was able to receive a public “cleansing” by admitting his sins and “being forgiven”, which I now believe added a layer of thrill. You can’t experience that thrill if you don’t do anything wrong, so…
Run down the line of such preachers and you see the same pathology as I described with these moralizing politicians. The ultimate was Jimmy Swaggart, whose weeping performance before his followers was disturbing on so many levels—but if seen as part of the thrill may make perfect sense.
I’m not sure the genie will ever be put back in the bottle, and for that I’m glad. But these folks keep trying. Unless sex is dirty, I’m guessing, it just isn’t as much fun.
Nor is it a perk. If everyone can do it, without guilt, freely and consensually, where’s the special privileges for becoming powerful?
I think we would all do well to stop voting for people who run for office on any kind of sexual morality platform. Public health is different, but these folks aren’t combining the two. If anything they’re making it worse, with their jihad against contraception and this nonsensical abstinence only education, which has been repeatedly shown to not work. They are doing the country a disservice.
Besides, it’s getting boring. Utterly predictable, and as boring as the evolution/creationism debate. Which, oddly enough, the same people seem to be involved in…