Thursday, October 8, 2009
The Right to Hate
Stumbling around on the Web this morning, I happened on some YouTube clips of Tom Lehrer performing in 1967 for an apparently Norwegian audience, probably for television. I'm a longtime fan of Lehrer, have had his albums for decades and play several of his songs myself, on my six-string piano (to turn around a joke he made in the introduction to "Folk Song Army"). "National Brotherhood Week" was one of the first I learned, and like so many of his political songs from the sixties, it's still pertinent. You can see him playing it for the Norwegians here. I was going to embed it for this post and leave it at that, but then this afternoon I found a link to this post (via) at a blog called First Draft. From there I navigated to this post, "The Right to Hate."
The post was not a declaration of the blogger's right to hate, which might have been interesting. It dealt with a harangue by a Republican Congressman from Texas, Louis Gohmert, against the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes bill. I haven't watched the YouTube clip, but there's a partial transcript in the First Draft post, which closed by saying that people like Gohmert are "never sorry for these kind of statements, or the resulting (understandable) outrage and media coverage. It's how they do business, and the stakes here are high: their right to hate as they see fit."
I see a problem here. Just as many people have trouble distinguishing between rape and consensual copulation, many people have trouble distinguishing between hate and violence. Of course Gohmert has the right to hate as he sees fit, just as liberals do. I daresay the commenter whose loving reaction to Gohmert was "Methinks it's time for retro-active abortion" considers herself a liberal, for example.
Another commenter argued, in response to my own comment, that "a US Congressman speaking in Congress about pending legislation doesn't have the luxury of being 'an individual.' Public servants using public forums and laws to enforce or spread their own bias isn't legit. (yeah, obv. it happens anyway) Louie Gohmert the private citizen can jaw all he wants to his friends down at the hardware store about hating queers. As you say, he has that right. But Congressman Gohmert shouldn't have the right to legislate based on his private feelings/religion/etc."
I don't think that Gohmert was speaking as 'an individual' -- he was speaking as a Christian (apparently he also indulged in a reading from the first chapter of Romans), and he was surely pandering as a politician to his constituency back in Texas. For that matter, in the material quoted in the posting, Gohmert did not say that he 'hated queers'; he spoke against "the ultimate hate monger" Hitler, whom Gohmert apparently didn't know was anti-gay and sent homosexuals to the death camps. I am sure, in fact, that if you asked him, Louie Gohmert would protest that he loves homosexuals and wants us to be freed from our supposed sin. Just as Rick Warren loves us, and every other Christian antigay bigot does. Talking about "hate" in this context is a distraction, as usual. A little honest hate would be refreshing, instead of all this posturing.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The Depressing Thing Is, This Would Probably Work
New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens 'It's Gay To Smoke'
CLOSE-CAPTIONED FOR THE IRONY-IMPAIRED: The above video is satire. It is not meant to be taken literally. If it were, you would have been directed to Fox News, CNN, or the Op-Ed Page of the New York Times.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
The Rule
I've been meaning for a long time to write about "The Rule", a 1985 episode of Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. About a year ago it was featured on National Public Radio, which is some kind of sign of cultural arrival, but it had long been discussed online and elsewhere. As with anything that catches on, there's a certain amount of confusion about it -- what it means, or even what to call it. The name of the episode is "The Rule," but you'll find it referred to as "Mo's Rule" (though this was before the character Mo was introduced), as "The Bechdel Rule" and (as on NPR) "The Bechdel Test." So read it for yourself (click on the image to enlarge it for better readability).
Bechdel has mentioned in interviews that she stole the idea from her friend Liz Wallace, whom she credits in the strip's opening panel, but only hardcore Dykes to Watch Out For fans would recognize a reference to "Liz Wallace's Rule." So I'll try not to be too pedantic, especially since there are other, serious issues involved.
First of all, you might wonder if too much isn't being read into The Rule. As it appears in this strip, it's as much a dating strategy as anything. The woman who describes it is as much interested in getting her date alone for some romance as in watching a movie. (Better to eat popcorn at home than in a crowded theater.) But that's part of what makes Alison Bechdel fun to read, and reread: at her best, she mixes interesting ideas with entertaining human stories, and one of her primary aims in Dykes to Watch Out For was to make a comic strip about lesbians and their loves at a time when media images of women-loving women were scarce, even in alternative media. That's what keeps DTWOF and this strip in particular from being a mere exercise in didacticism.
The fact that The Rule has stuck in many people's minds over the past quarter-century, though, while they often forget the story in which it's embedded, shows that the idea has been important for them. Sometimes I think that the idea becomes just an excuse for sloppy list-making, like the quizzes you find on social and tabloid news sites. ("Ten Things You Should Never Say To Your Date." "Which Character in Twilight Are You?") The NPR story is a painful example of this sort of thing, with its clumsy attempts to come up with "rules" for other minorities. It's also arguably mistaken that one reason for the paucity of good female characters is the scarcity of female writers in film and TV. As blogger Jennifer Kesler tells it, the industry is aware of what it's doing, and aspiring female writers will be told not to write scripts that conform to The Rule.
Which brings me to one of the reasons I finally got off my butt to write about The Rule. I recently read the new edition of gay African-American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany's book of critical essays, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. It includes a blistering "Letter to the Symposium on 'Women in Science Fiction' under the Control, for Some Deeply Suspect Reason, of One Jeff Smith", written in 1975. Among much else, Delany talks about his efforts to improve his own depiction of female characters, influenced strongly by his then-wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker. Among the "parameters" he developed was this one (page 102):
Another thing that made me want to write about The Rule was noticing films that conformed to it, though they came from what most people would consider unlikely places. The "conservative" East, for example. When I first saw the South Korean film Blue Swallow (2005), among my many reactions to it was that it passed The Rule with flying colors. A biopic about Park Kyeong-won (1901-1933), one of the first Korean women to become a pilot, it showed Park going to Japan to learn to fly. At the training school she bonded with other young women and discussed the joys of flight and their hopes for their careers. The film was controversial because it dealt with a painful period in Korean history, when Japan colonized and controlled Korea; any ambitious young Korean had to become a collaborator. Park Chung-hee (1917-1979) who later became dictator of South Korea, also trained in Japan.
Park Kyeong-won died when her plane crashed in Manchuria on a propaganda flight. (Jang Jin-young, the actress who played her also died young, of gastric cancer, in 2009.) While Blue Swallow shows Park falling in love with a Korean man (hence the poster image above), as I recall it spends at least as much time on her friendships with other women. It's a very good film in its own right, worth seeing; I like to imagine the two women in "The Rule" stopping off at a video store, picking up Blue Swallow on DVD, and watching it over popcorn. (Image credit)
I've seen a surprising number of other films that conform to The Rule, and I'll probably write about them here in the future.
Bechdel has mentioned in interviews that she stole the idea from her friend Liz Wallace, whom she credits in the strip's opening panel, but only hardcore Dykes to Watch Out For fans would recognize a reference to "Liz Wallace's Rule." So I'll try not to be too pedantic, especially since there are other, serious issues involved.First of all, you might wonder if too much isn't being read into The Rule. As it appears in this strip, it's as much a dating strategy as anything. The woman who describes it is as much interested in getting her date alone for some romance as in watching a movie. (Better to eat popcorn at home than in a crowded theater.) But that's part of what makes Alison Bechdel fun to read, and reread: at her best, she mixes interesting ideas with entertaining human stories, and one of her primary aims in Dykes to Watch Out For was to make a comic strip about lesbians and their loves at a time when media images of women-loving women were scarce, even in alternative media. That's what keeps DTWOF and this strip in particular from being a mere exercise in didacticism.
The fact that The Rule has stuck in many people's minds over the past quarter-century, though, while they often forget the story in which it's embedded, shows that the idea has been important for them. Sometimes I think that the idea becomes just an excuse for sloppy list-making, like the quizzes you find on social and tabloid news sites. ("Ten Things You Should Never Say To Your Date." "Which Character in Twilight Are You?") The NPR story is a painful example of this sort of thing, with its clumsy attempts to come up with "rules" for other minorities. It's also arguably mistaken that one reason for the paucity of good female characters is the scarcity of female writers in film and TV. As blogger Jennifer Kesler tells it, the industry is aware of what it's doing, and aspiring female writers will be told not to write scripts that conform to The Rule.
I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see. ...Kesler also mentions in a comment that "the passing or failing of the Bechdel test is not the sole measure of a film’s feminist value", and another commenter adds:
... there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters).
At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”
“Not even if it advances the story?” I asked. That’s rule number one in screenwriting, though you’d never know it from watching most movies: every moment in a script should reveal another chunk of the story and keep it moving.
He just looked embarrassed and said, “I mean, that’s not how I see it, that’s how they see it.”
Right. A bunch of self-back-slapping professed liberals wouldn’t want you to think they routinely dismiss women in between writing checks to Greenpeace. Gosh, no – it was they. The audience. ...
Also, I wouldn’t want anyone to fall into the trap of assuming that just because a movie does pass the test means it’s either a feminist movie or a great movie. Beaches passes the test. I’m not going to stand up and say it’s either great cinema for the ages or a great feminist story (again with the breakdown of women’s friendships over men *sigh*), but I still own it and watch it.If you look again at Bechdel's original comic strip, you'll see that the Rule is a minimum criterion for acceptability in a movie, not artistic quality or exemplary feminist consciousness. It means that if I am going to give my money to the movie industry, it must pander to me at least this much. I've gotten into some weird online debates with people who got upset if I dissed this or that mediocre gay Hollywood film, like Philadelphia, because if we don't support it, Hollywood won't make any more gay movies. (Promises, promises!)
Which brings me to one of the reasons I finally got off my butt to write about The Rule. I recently read the new edition of gay African-American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany's book of critical essays, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. It includes a blistering "Letter to the Symposium on 'Women in Science Fiction' under the Control, for Some Deeply Suspect Reason, of One Jeff Smith", written in 1975. Among much else, Delany talks about his efforts to improve his own depiction of female characters, influenced strongly by his then-wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker. Among the "parameters" he developed was this one (page 102):
Women characters must have central-to-the plot, strong, developing positive relations with other women characters. The commercial/art novel would be impossible without such relationships between men: from Ishmael and Queequeg, to Fafhrd and Mouser, to Huck and Jim, to Holmes and Watson, to Nick and Gatsby, such friendships are the form, content, propellant and subject of the novel. I would pause here to state, from thirteen years' distance, that any novel that does not, in this day and age, have a strong, central, positive relation between women can be dismissed as sexist (no matter the sex of the author) from the start.In short, we have a formulation of The Rule, ten years before it appeared in Bechdel's comic strip. (Or even longer, considering that Delany worked it out in the 1960s.) After more discussion, Delany concluded (page 103):
I still think these parameters are primary. And they still don't go anywhere near far enough!I don't bring this up to imply something like "See, girls, a man got there first!"; rather something more like Great Minds Think Alike. Delany had been influenced by Hacker. His account made me wonder how many other writers of either sex had come to the same or similar conclusions about the depiction of female characters. There is, for example, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own from 1929, where Woolf describes an imaginary novel, Life's Adventure by Mary Carmichael, featuring characters Chloe, Roger, Olivia, Tony and Mr Bigham:
And, determined to do my duty by her as reader if she would do her duty by me as writer, I turned the page and read . . . I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Charles Biron is not concealed? We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—’Chloe liked Olivia . . .’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.This isn't quite The Rule; but the principle that underlies it is present. (If anyone knows of any other, especially earlier, examples, I'd love to hear about them. The e-mail button is up there...)
‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA would have been altered had she done so I As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from LIFE’S ADVENTURE, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.
Another thing that made me want to write about The Rule was noticing films that conformed to it, though they came from what most people would consider unlikely places. The "conservative" East, for example. When I first saw the South Korean film Blue Swallow (2005), among my many reactions to it was that it passed The Rule with flying colors. A biopic about Park Kyeong-won (1901-1933), one of the first Korean women to become a pilot, it showed Park going to Japan to learn to fly. At the training school she bonded with other young women and discussed the joys of flight and their hopes for their careers. The film was controversial because it dealt with a painful period in Korean history, when Japan colonized and controlled Korea; any ambitious young Korean had to become a collaborator. Park Chung-hee (1917-1979) who later became dictator of South Korea, also trained in Japan.
Park Kyeong-won died when her plane crashed in Manchuria on a propaganda flight. (Jang Jin-young, the actress who played her also died young, of gastric cancer, in 2009.) While Blue Swallow shows Park falling in love with a Korean man (hence the poster image above), as I recall it spends at least as much time on her friendships with other women. It's a very good film in its own right, worth seeing; I like to imagine the two women in "The Rule" stopping off at a video store, picking up Blue Swallow on DVD, and watching it over popcorn. (Image credit)I've seen a surprising number of other films that conform to The Rule, and I'll probably write about them here in the future.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Back to the Future, Part LXIX
From Wil Wheaton's blog (he calls it "the coolest picture you'll see all day," and he may be right, but you never know) via Homo Superior (in my interior, but from the skin out I am Homo Sapien too).Also with a curtsey to Homo Superior, this amusing little screed from the San Francisco Chronicle:
To the educated mind, it seems inconceivable that millions of people will choose rabid ignorance and childish fantasy over, say, a polar bear. Permafrost. Rocks. Nag Hammadi. But they will, and they do. Faced with this mountain of factual obviousness, the bewildered fundamentalist will merely leap back as if you just jabbed him with a flaming homosexual cattle prod, and then fall into a swoon about how neat it is that angels can fly.
But it's not just the fundamentalists. This Rule of Idiocy also explains why, when you show certain jumpy, conservative Americans the irrefutable facts about, say, skyrocketing health care costs that are draining their bank accounts, and then show how Obama's rather modest overhaul is meant to save members of all ages and genders and party affiliations a significant amount of money while providing basic insurance for their family, they, too, will scream and kick like a child made to eat a single bite of broccoli.Remember, facts do not matter. The actual Obama plan itself does not matter.
We have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don't let Obama do anything. What kills me is that that's the Democrats' plan, too.It's useless to confront idiots like this with mere facts, like Obama's coziness with the corporate elites, his eagerness to make sure that Change You Can Believe In doesn't inconvenience them in any way, his readiness to pander to and appease the Republicans (however futilely -- what do you call it when someone keeps trying to please someone whose whole existence is dedicated to rejecting him? anyone? anyone?), his continuation of Bush II policies and personnel. They just know that the Little Father is trying to do the right thing, but the Evil Boyar won't let him.
Or a complete idiot like this (do we detect a pattern here?):
[Sarah Palin's] emergence revealed that America is in a period of decadence and unseriousness, even as its decline as an economic and world power accelerated and its moral authority crumbled.Okay, I know that Sully is like too young to remember someone like Spiro Agnew, but he's old enough to remember Dan Quayle. And leave aside the minor point that the US has never really had any moral authority (slavery, the genocide of the pre-Columbian Americans, and all the succeeding imperial adventures from the Philippines to Iraq and Afghanistan), and the even minor-er point that Sullivan's own career (and that of other empty-headed young rightwingers in the supposedly liberal media) is testimony to the decline of American journalism and intelligence if you want to believe in such a thing. The thing to remember is that Palin's emergence showed that Americans aren't all that dumb: they rejected her and her doddering running mate decisively, along with the party that nominated them. And even now, with Fox News and HarperCollins and other interests that hope to make a buck from her even if she never holds political office again, and despite the wishful thinking of the faithful, she's not doing as well as you'd expect (via) if she really epitomized the present state of American culture. I wouldn't want to misunderestimate her, but I think Sully was inflating her significance for his own alarmist reasons. And in doing so, he extended her life in the media. As Oscar Wilde said, The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Keep it coming, idiots!
Finally, this public service announcement, thanks to Wil Wheaton.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
The Bully of the Big Ten
There's a home game in Bloomington today -- oh yeah, did I mention it's football? I pay so little attention to these things. But then most of my American readers, at least, will know that it's football season. Or is it duck season? Wabbit season?
Anyway, on Saturday afternoons on our community radio station there's a regular program of country and vintage rhythm & blues, featuring fake cracker-barrel commentary on the issues of the day, especially sports. The DJs declared Ohio State University "the bully of the Big Ten" (I guess this explains it, but only for football -- other Big Ten sports have their own bullies), and one said he hoped "we" would beat the bully. "Will they be using our blimp?" he then asked, mixing his pronouns. Whose blimp, and who's "they"? Will OSU, the big bullies, use Our Blimp to fly over the stadium and give wedgies to all the IU fans? If "we" use the blimp, maybe to go neener neener neener at the OSU fans, will that help or hurt "our" chances of beating the bully?
Friends who work in restaurants tell me that business was booming last night, and I guess the influx of sports fans is good for jobs and such. Much like last weekend's Lotus World Music and Arts Festival. But the hordes of happy drunks I saw downtown last night outnumbered the crowds I saw last weekend for Lotus. The game started tonight at 7, and it's 9 p.m. as I write this; we'll see how little IU does against the big bad bully. But meanwhile, and more importantly, the State Legislature continues to slash funding for higher education, including IU, and it doesn't matter how many football or basketball games IU wins.
By happenstance there was other hot sports news this weekend on a global scale. The Huffington Post has an item about conservatives reveling in Obama's "Olympic failure," i.e., his failure to convince the Olympic Committee to hold the 2016 games in Chicago. Sam Stein sniffed that Republicans' reaction was "potentially, a risky one, not just because polling data showed that a vast majority of the country wanted America to host the games." It isn't only conservatives who are reveling, bitchez! Dave Zirin had a piece at The Nation, partially recycled at the HuffPost, celebrating Obama's and Daley's failure to push the Olympics on Chicago, and Zirin is not a conservative. (I've relied on his analysis before, here and here.) He argues that "This is a victory for the people of Chicago. Pushing back against immense pressure from the Daley political machine, organizations like No Games Chicago went grass roots, corner to corner, and spoke out against the Olympic storm of gentrification, tax hikes, and police misconduct." But also:
Here's an interesting coincidence for you: Stein at HuffPost cites a Zogby International poll which "showed that 84 percent of Americans support having the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Chicago." Zirin cites a Chicago Tribune poll which found that "a staggering 84 percent of Chicagoans are opposed to spending any public money on the Olympics." I'd say the Chicagoans know better what's best for them, whether or not the IOC had good reasons for turning down Daley's and Obama's bid.
Finally, after properly trouncing the Democratic Party for failing to get a public option (whatever that is) through the Senate Finance Committee while funding an abstinence-only sex ed program, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show showed New York Senator Chuck Schumer, with a weak grimace of a smile on his face, explaining why the Democrats were "feeling good" and making "progress." "Oh, wait a minute, I get it!" Stewart jeered, "you're the lame dad at the Little League game: 'Just because you lost doesn't mean you lost.'"
Let me see if I can put this clearly. Sport is not politics; politics is not sport. Setting up proper health care for ordinary citizens matters a great deal -- it is, in fact, a life-and-death matter, unlike who wins the Superbowl or today's IU-OSU football game, which doesn't matter at all. Not in the slightest. And the worst thing about organized sport, even worse than the amounts of money wasted on Albert Speer stadiums and the like, is that it is intended to teach people from childhood that winning a game is as important as feeding the poor or preventing war. And it works -- that's why Americans spend their free time following sports instead of attending to what their government is doing.
But these episodes show just how corrupting is the American tendency (is it usual elsewhere? I don't know; I'm concerned with America because it's my country, drunk or sober) to turn even political conflict into a sporting contest, where supporting your home team is all-important. The whole adversary approach to political matters is a very bad thing for people, though not for career politicians and their corporate base. I've written about that before too, pointing out that it turns questions like a stimulus package or health care reform into personal triumphs or failures for the President. If George W. Bush had failed while in office to get the 2016 Olympics for, say, Houston or Dallas, the same conservatives would be foaming at the mouth right now, ranting about the corruption of the Old Europe and so on. One could reverse my focus to address the corrupting infuence of politics and nationalism and corporatism on the Olympics, but the whole point is that is that sports do not matter. People do.
Anyway, on Saturday afternoons on our community radio station there's a regular program of country and vintage rhythm & blues, featuring fake cracker-barrel commentary on the issues of the day, especially sports. The DJs declared Ohio State University "the bully of the Big Ten" (I guess this explains it, but only for football -- other Big Ten sports have their own bullies), and one said he hoped "we" would beat the bully. "Will they be using our blimp?" he then asked, mixing his pronouns. Whose blimp, and who's "they"? Will OSU, the big bullies, use Our Blimp to fly over the stadium and give wedgies to all the IU fans? If "we" use the blimp, maybe to go neener neener neener at the OSU fans, will that help or hurt "our" chances of beating the bully?
Friends who work in restaurants tell me that business was booming last night, and I guess the influx of sports fans is good for jobs and such. Much like last weekend's Lotus World Music and Arts Festival. But the hordes of happy drunks I saw downtown last night outnumbered the crowds I saw last weekend for Lotus. The game started tonight at 7, and it's 9 p.m. as I write this; we'll see how little IU does against the big bad bully. But meanwhile, and more importantly, the State Legislature continues to slash funding for higher education, including IU, and it doesn't matter how many football or basketball games IU wins.
By happenstance there was other hot sports news this weekend on a global scale. The Huffington Post has an item about conservatives reveling in Obama's "Olympic failure," i.e., his failure to convince the Olympic Committee to hold the 2016 games in Chicago. Sam Stein sniffed that Republicans' reaction was "potentially, a risky one, not just because polling data showed that a vast majority of the country wanted America to host the games." It isn't only conservatives who are reveling, bitchez! Dave Zirin had a piece at The Nation, partially recycled at the HuffPost, celebrating Obama's and Daley's failure to push the Olympics on Chicago, and Zirin is not a conservative. (I've relied on his analysis before, here and here.) He argues that "This is a victory for the people of Chicago. Pushing back against immense pressure from the Daley political machine, organizations like No Games Chicago went grass roots, corner to corner, and spoke out against the Olympic storm of gentrification, tax hikes, and police misconduct." But also:
Now is the time to stand with the people of Rio. It's no secret why the IOC licked their lips at the thought of Brazil. Like China, Brazil is an emerging market yet to be fully "branded" by global multinationals. They also have a police force that shoots first and asks questions never. Their President Lula, who comes from a radical union background, has clearly shown the decrepit, corrupt, IOC Mafiosi that he is willing to play ball. If history is any kind of a guide, the pain for Brazil's working people is now on the immediate horizon. It's our duty to do whatever we can to express solidarity with the favelas, the landless peasants, and the workers about to stare down the barrel of "Olympism." Our work has just begun.
Finally, after properly trouncing the Democratic Party for failing to get a public option (whatever that is) through the Senate Finance Committee while funding an abstinence-only sex ed program, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show showed New York Senator Chuck Schumer, with a weak grimace of a smile on his face, explaining why the Democrats were "feeling good" and making "progress." "Oh, wait a minute, I get it!" Stewart jeered, "you're the lame dad at the Little League game: 'Just because you lost doesn't mean you lost.'"
Let me see if I can put this clearly. Sport is not politics; politics is not sport. Setting up proper health care for ordinary citizens matters a great deal -- it is, in fact, a life-and-death matter, unlike who wins the Superbowl or today's IU-OSU football game, which doesn't matter at all. Not in the slightest. And the worst thing about organized sport, even worse than the amounts of money wasted on Albert Speer stadiums and the like, is that it is intended to teach people from childhood that winning a game is as important as feeding the poor or preventing war. And it works -- that's why Americans spend their free time following sports instead of attending to what their government is doing.
But these episodes show just how corrupting is the American tendency (is it usual elsewhere? I don't know; I'm concerned with America because it's my country, drunk or sober) to turn even political conflict into a sporting contest, where supporting your home team is all-important. The whole adversary approach to political matters is a very bad thing for people, though not for career politicians and their corporate base. I've written about that before too, pointing out that it turns questions like a stimulus package or health care reform into personal triumphs or failures for the President. If George W. Bush had failed while in office to get the 2016 Olympics for, say, Houston or Dallas, the same conservatives would be foaming at the mouth right now, ranting about the corruption of the Old Europe and so on. One could reverse my focus to address the corrupting infuence of politics and nationalism and corporatism on the Olympics, but the whole point is that is that sports do not matter. People do.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Poetry Friday - resonance
resonance
you shake me, man, you make me lie awake,
you make me walk the streets at night until
i stagger sideways and my eyeballs ache.
it's useless staying home. i can't sit still.
i turn the pages but my eyes won't read.
i put on records but my ears won't hear.
my head is hollowed out but not by speed.
my brain's wide open and my need is clear.
the light is on and though it burns my eyes
i wouldn't turn it off if i knew how.
without the glare i couldn't recognize
the need that ties me tighter than a vow.
there's joy in the extremity you bring.
i vibrate to you like a singing string.
May 25, 1980
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Excelsior!
One reason I don't see science and religion (or atheism and religion, for that matter) as mutually exclusive alternatives is that much of what I find in religion turns up in its supposed opponents. (This usually bothers religious believers as much as unbelievers when I point it out -- they tend to be invested in seeing themselves as separated from, and incomprehensible to, the worldly herd.) As I noticed when I read A. C. Grayling, there's considerable overlap between the camps; and why not? Religion (a domain notoriously hard to define and delimit), science (ditto), and atheism (megaditto) are all human inventions, part of whose function is to make sense of the universe in human terms. It seems that we have relatively few themes that concern us, and relatively few ways of discussing them, so it's hardly surprising that people keep inventing and re-inventing the same themes no matter how they identify themselves.
In Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985), which I'm currently rereading, she shows this clearly. Take this example, from pages 32-34.
I've noticed that a lot of people who vigorously support Darwin against Creation in the United States share this fantasy of evolution as an upward "escalator", to use Midgley's word. Despite the efforts of Steven Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, and others to explain to the educated public that Darwin's theory does not entail a linear progression from simple to complex, from lesser to greater intelligence, the fantasy is deeply rooted in many people's consciousness; it's a lot harder to dislodge, apparently, than belief in the creation myths of Genesis.
In Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985), which I'm currently rereading, she shows this clearly. Take this example, from pages 32-34.
It is a standard charge against religion that it panders to wish-fulfilment, consoling people for their present miseries by promising wonders in the future, thus dishonestly gaining support by dogmatic and unwarranted predictions. With this charge in mind, let us look at the concluding passage of an otherwise sober, serious and reputable book on the chemical origins of life on earth. The writer, a molecular biologist, having discussed evolution and described it, tendentiously but unemotionally, as a steady increase in intelligence, turns his attention to the future. Mankind, he says, is likely to throw up a new, distinct and more intelligent type, which will then become ‘reproductively isolated’. He then goes on (and I have not cheated by removing any words like ‘possibly’ or ‘perhaps’):Midgley was quoting from William Day, Genesis on Planet Earth: The Search for Life’s Beginning (East Lansing MI: House of Talos, 1979), pages 390-92. The name of the publisher made me wary, so I did some digging and found that Genesis on Planet Earth was reissued in a second edition in 1984 by Yale University Press. Day himself went on to publish some suspiciously New Age-sounding titles, as recently as 2000. Midgley says that the second edition didn't include the material she quoted above, but had a new chapter of "much vaguer but every bit as fervent, intense and evangelical [material], about the new levels to which mankind is just about to ascend" (63).He [man] will splinter into types of humans with differing mental faculties that will lead to diversification and separate species. From among these types, a new species, Omega man, will emerge either alone, in union with others, or with mechanical amplification to transcend to new dimensions of time and space beyond our comprehension – as much beyond our imagination as our world was to the emerging eukaryotes … If evolution is to proceed through the line of man to a next higher form, there must exist within man’s nature the making of Omega man. … Omega man’s comprehension and participation in the dimensions of the supernatural is what man yearns for himself, but cannot have. It is reasonable to assume that man’s intellect is not the ultimate, but merely represents a state intermediate between the primates and Omega man. What comprehension and powers over Nature Omega man will command can only be suggested by man’s image of the supernatural.Do any doubts arise? Just one. There may be a problem about timing. Major steps in evolution have been occurring at steadily decreasing intervals, and the next one may be due shortly. It must be the one the writer is waiting for. He adds: ‘On such a shortened curve, conceivably Omega man could succeed man in shorter than 10,000 years.’ Ordinary evolution, however, is too slow to allow of this startling development. So what is to be done? The reply comes briskly.
How then can Omega man arise in so short a time?
The answer is unavoidable.
Man will make him.
This is apparently a reference to genetic engineering, something specially important to those whose faith leans heavily on the dramatic idea of infallible, escalator-type evolution. They demand from that idea, not just an inspiring account of the past, but also hope for continued progress in the future. But the human race cannot be confidently expected to evolve further in a literal, biological sense. Human social arrangements, even in simple cultures, block normal natural selection. And the more elaborate they get, the more they do so. Nineteenth-century Social Darwinists attacked this problem with an axe, calling for deliberate eugenic selection and harsh commercial competition, so that the race could go back to being properly weeded and could continue to progress. As we now know, however, these schemes were not just odious but futile. The scale was wrong. Commercial competition has no tendency to affect reproduction. And as for ‘positive eugenics’, it is not possible to identify desirable genes nor to force people to breed for them. Even if it were, their spread would still be absurdly slow.
The natural conclusion is that such schemes must be dropped, that the human race must take itself as it is, with its well-known vast powers of cultural adaptation, and make the best of its existing capacities. But this thought is unbearable to those who faith in life is pinned to the steady, continuing, upward escalator of biological evolution. ‘If evolution is to proceed through the line of man to a next higher form’, as Day puts it, there simply has to be another way. That wish, rather than the amazingly thin argument he produces about recurrent evolutionary steps, is evidently the ground of his confidence.
I've noticed that a lot of people who vigorously support Darwin against Creation in the United States share this fantasy of evolution as an upward "escalator", to use Midgley's word. Despite the efforts of Steven Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, and others to explain to the educated public that Darwin's theory does not entail a linear progression from simple to complex, from lesser to greater intelligence, the fantasy is deeply rooted in many people's consciousness; it's a lot harder to dislodge, apparently, than belief in the creation myths of Genesis.
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