Figuratively Literal

I've written before about biblical literalism and the confusion surrounding it, so I was pleased to read Dennis Baron's essay, "A Literal Paradox", in his collection Declining Grammar (Urbana, 1989). He begins with the text from a New Yorker cartoon of February 28, 1977:

Confound it, Hawkins, when I said I meant that literally, that was just a figure of speech!

I'd already noticed that many people use "literally" as an intensifier, just as many people use quotation marks for emphasis, but I'm so literal-minded myself that it hadn't sunk in that as an intensifer, "literally" means "figuratively." Baron explains that the paradoxical use of words to mean their opposite is a common, longstanding feature of English. "Sanction" (which can mean either to forbid or to permit something) is a well-known case, as is "dust" (either casting dust on an object or removing it). As with many changes in language, though we grammar neurotics rage and gnash our teeth, the figurative use of "literal" is probably not going to go away, especially since so many educated readers (the standard of competence in literacy) are unable to sort out the different meanings and uses of the word -- the current U. S. Secretary of Education, for example. This may not be a problem for most everyday use, but since accusing fundamentalists of reading the Bible literally is such a popular (and inaccurate) ploy, the misunderstanding of "literal" just adds to the mess. Or to the fun, I haven't decided yet. (Baron quotes a writer who warns, "Abuses of the word can seem ludicrous, and those who recognize them enjoy pointing them out" [79].)

Here's what I mean. "Begging the question" is a logical fallacy, known as petitio principii in Latin. It means assuming something that needs to be proved in an argument (and "argument" has to be understood not in its everyday sense of two people yelling at each other, but in its technical sense of "discourse intended to persuade" and "a coherent series of statements leading from a premise to a conclusion"). Outside of academic writing, though, it usually means that a statement raises a literal question that the writer or speaker "begs" to ask, e.g., "Elin Woods is divorcing Tiger -- which begs the question: Elin, when will you marry me?" and that's a reasonable mutation of the meaning. What bothers me is that I find similar misunderstanding of what it means to beg the question even in academic writing. Misunderstanding the technical terms of one's profession doesn't have the real-world consequences in the humanities that it could in the sciences (if your doctor, for example, thought that your femur was a small matriarchal primate instead of your thighbone), but it still seems to me a problem worth taking seriously. In literary criticism, it means at best that the critic has a tin ear for language, so his or her readings can't be trusted.

So, back to "literally." I find accusations of fundamentalist "literalism" in all sorts of writings, including religious professionals who ought to know better, but also among educated laypeople who love to level the charge. Reading Baron's essay sent me back to a Usenet dispute in which I was involved a decade ago. I pointed out that fundamentalists believe that the Bible is inerrant, and must often come up with very non-literal interpretations in order to get rid of errors in the plain, literal meaning of the text. Another person asked me, "Have you conflated 'literal' with 'literary'? I'm confused here." No, I hadn't, and it didn't seem that this guy knew what either word meant. If he were a doctor, I wouldn't trust him with my femur.

Baron, however, gave me a Mobius-strip-like idea. If "literally" often means "figuratively," when anti-fundamentalists accuse fundamentalists of taking the Bible literally, do they really mean that fundamentalists take the Bible figuratively? When they advocate figurative readings, do they mean literal ones?

P.S. The New Yorker cartoon quoted by Baron can be seen in this Slate article on "literally."
(image credits: left; right)

Ho, Ho, Ho

Merry Hanukkwanzamasolstice to all...

Money Changes Everything

This comment today on a post lamenting Obama's strategic decisions and choices at A Tiny Revolution. The comment posted by N E at December 24, 2009 09:55 AM. (No permalink.)

FDR was a good one, but Hoover was actually trying some of those New Deal policies too. There was pressure from the left then. That is what is needed now too. Obama never had a real movement behind him, and unfortunately it doesn't look to me like he believes he can start one. Or if he does, he doesn't know how to do it. He is doing a very bad job at motivational leadership, which is very important.

I'm not sure FDR had "a real movement behind him"; rather, he had real movements putting pressure on him. I think that N E, like so many Obama apologists, believes that Obama would like to do things differently, but doggone it, he just can't -- he's a sweet guy, but "doesn't know how to do it." This is doubtful on many grounds, but foremost among them is this one. (By the way, I must say I wish I had people who'd follow me around, loudly absolving me of all responsibility for everything I do.)

Obama didn't want a real movement behind him, because a real movement might develop a mind of its own. He tried to coopt in advance the kind of people who might start one with his own organization, which was very successful in terms of the goal he set for it: to get him into office. That organization was not exactly invisible: the Obama campaign was singled out by Advertising Age for excellence in marketing, beating out Apple Computers. Immediately after the election, the Democratic leadership and the corporate media were nervous that Obama's supporters -- by which term they did not mean his corporate supporters -- would want a say in how he governed. Obama himself has made clear his dislike of any insubordination among the proles, whether in or out of his army. But not to worry, there hasn't been any serious restiveness yet.

I agree that he's doing a bad job at motivational leadership, but I think the way N E phrased this reveals that he accepts the framework of shepherd/sheep as a model for leadership: the idea that the followers will do whatever the leader wants if he just motivates them in the right way. (What motivates his apologists, I wonder -- all those Obama hasbaristas? I don't imagine they're being paid, or even asked personally to mount the defense, yet they are quite dogged in their loyalty and energy and readiness to vilify all of Obama's critics.) I've seen some indication that some of Obama's ground troops are voting with their feet, and drifting out of involvement. I imagine next November will tell us more. But judging by the e-mails I've seen, forwarded to me by a friend who gets them from the Obama organization, I think Obama doesn't realize how upset many of his former supporters are. He assumes that everything he's doing is fine with them, and they only need to be motivated properly, then given their orders. That isn't how it works. The "movement" has to have goals it believes in, and "Obama in 2012" isn't enough for the grass roots unless it means something other than war, torture, and more corporate welfare. Obama's legacy could turn out to be revealing the limits of voting as a medium of change.

Now, I agree, and have often written about it, that many of Obama's fans had inaccurate and unrealistic beliefs about what he stood for and intended to do, let alone what he could do. But I won't blame them for deserting him when they realize that they were wrong about him. What else should they do, change their goals and values? Continue to support him while he stuffs money into the coffers of corporations and devastates the world? No doubt N E thinks so; certainly Obama thinks so. But I'm not the only one who doesn't think so.

In a previous comment thread at A Tiny Revolution, N E and another commenter indicated what they thought the solution might be. N E first:

Our national game is Capitalism, with a fractional-reserve banking system controlled by private banks being the linchpin of the whole system, so big banks are even more important to those players who want to win than Board Walk and Park Place are in Monopoly, whereas people collectively don't even have a crappy little square like Meditteranean Avenue and individually aren't worth a damn thing. It doesn't matter who is playing the game, even the some-call-him Obaminator, 'cuz that's the game fellas.

So change the game.

I love people who adopt this sort of faux-cynical, worldly-wise realist tone. There are certain problems with what I'd laughingly call the substance, however. N E pictures his game of Capitalism as being played by Obama on one side with, well, it's hard to tell who's on the other side. But he does seem to cast Obama as their opponent instead of their collaborator, let alone their instrument; that fits with his general Obama-apologist approach, that Obama is on the people's side but he's just overwhelmed by the Forces of Evil. That doesn't fit well, however, with the metaphor of Obama as a player in the game.

If you play Monopoly (N E's model for this flight of fancy), you're there to acquire Monopoly property and accumulate Monopoly bucks and put the other players out of business. But the President of the United States is not, in theory or in practice, a player in the game. He won't win by putting the other players out of business, and he's not supposed to pile up wealth while he's in office. (Afterwards is another story.) So the metaphor breaks down there.

Further, Capitalism is not a game, and I've written before about the error involved in equating sport with political economy. but even if it were, it is only one game being played in the United States, however big and powerful it is. Most Americans aren't even in the game, for one thing; we're the runts and nerds nobody wanted when sides were chosen. One could move to the model of spectator sports, which many capitalists would like us to do. We can root for our favorite team, wear its colors, and believe that it matters whether it or the other team wins. There's even the tantalizing illusion that we get to choose our favorite team -- Coke or Pepsi, Windows or Mac, Avatar or Alvin -- because Free Choice is what America is all about.

For another thing, there are no rules in the game that can't be changed -- the corporate "players" expect to be able to do it at will, of course, but they needn't be the only ones. In theory, though, and sometimes in practice, there is also a game called Government, which Capitalism has always tried to control and undermine. That's the game Obama is supposed to be playing, but he seems to be a bit vague about his role in it, partly as a result of spending too much time hanging out with the players from Capitalism. The point of the blog post by Jon Schwarz that started me off today was basically that: who is Obama playing for, and is he a loser or just confused?

So, change the game? Another commenter chimed in with this: "In other words, a revolution. Glad to see we agree NE!" Ah, revolution. Leonard Cohen once said, back in the 60s, that every time you use the word "revolution" it gets delayed ten seconds. (Which means we're probably safe for the next several centuries.) After all, we had a revolution in this country, and it left basically the same people in power. I'd have to have some reason to believe that another one would do any different, and I'm not very trusting. Whose revolution? The people's? Hah.

Right now I'm reading a new book, The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit, published by AK Press. The title sums it up: who gets to tell the story of the shutdown of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle in 1999? The corporate media have established the template of a horrific outbreak of anarchist violence, a blow struck at civilization itself, by a bunch of ignorant tree-huggers who pretend to care about the world's poor but are only spoiled brats; it is the WTO and the bold Captains of Free Enterprise who truly care, and who alone hold out hope to the huddled masses.

The reality was somewhat different -- most of the violence was police violence, the police were not out of control but following orders, and the protesters were not only people of all ages and backgrounds but from all over the world; the shutdown also decisively weakened US dominance in the WTO, a blow from which the organization still has not recovered. And the protesters did this without either large amounts of money or the kind of hierarchical, top-town organization that most people take for granted is necessary to achieve such change. (David Solnit remarks that when he was told the budget of Stuart Townsend's 2007 film Battle in Seattle -- $10 million, small for a Hollywood film -- all he could think was that you could fund a hundred shutdowns with that much money.)

How did they do it? David Solnit provides a list of strategic principles compiled by a group of Seattle organizers, which boil down to engaging the media, decentralization, open organizing, clear what-and-why logic, and prior agreements about the types of direct action to use. This sort of thing is unfashionable, because it goes against the grain of professionalization and hierarchy that define a lot of movement work nowadays. A year before Seattle, the Human Rights Campaign and the Metropolitan Community Church decided to organize a Millennium March on Washington, with closed, top-down organization, big names, vagueness about what-and-why (notice the closety name), and corporate sponsorship. It finally took place in 2000 and drew a fair-sized crowd, but not as many as its organizers had hoped, and lost a lot of money. In those respects it failed to achieve its goals insofar as it had any goals beyond partying. Partying is all very well, and certainly accompanied previous gay marches, but it was never clear what political aims the Millennium March had.

Joshua Gamson wrote in The Nation, "The LGBT movement has shifted from one of loosely affiliated activists to one of organizations. Understandably, this freaks some people out. An organizational movement is a different sort of creature, and some of the opposition to the Millennium March is just a recognition that if you're not a member of an organization in the LGBT movement in the twenty-first century, the creature may well bustle along without you." This is false on just about every point. The LGBT movement in the US has always been one of organizations, not "loosely affiliated activists", from Mattachine in 1948 to the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955 to the Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance, and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force after 1969. Much of the opposition to the March came from organizations; the individuals Gamson names were often not activists, but citizens expressing their opinions.

The question that the Millennium March stirred up was What kind of organization? Like Gamson, defenders of the March that I engaged relied on a Marxist, dustbin-of-history attitude: HRC was the wave of the future and other kinds of organization were so Seventies, so get with the program or be left behind. HRC's style of money-driven lobbying, built on achieving access to Washington, has its place no doubt, but as the Millennium March showed, it is also a dead end. Richard Goldstein wrote in the Village Voice that when veteran organizer Mandy Carter "tried to persuade [HRC Executive Director Elizabeth] Birch to embrace a more open organizing process last year, "her feeling was 'Why do we need to take time for those meetings?' For her, it just didn't make sense." It seems that Birch, who once invited a reporter to imagine that "you woke up and found that someone had handed you the movement ... I'll bet you that would have made most of the same decisions I've made", never learned why it was her style of organizing that didn't make sense.

So, revolution? I don't think so, unless the word is used to mean any kind of serious change, which takes out so much of the romance out of it, such as following a bare-breasted babe over a street paved with corpses. Ah, the Struggle! the Glory! But think of what you can do without romance: you can join a movement that brings a powerful international organization sponsored by the United States to its knees. A movement like that could make Barack Obama and his partners in the game of Capitalism take notice. Nothing else will do it.

I Am Loathe to See This Phenomena Be Given Free Reign

Plenty of people have had nasty things to say about Obama's health care bill (it's his now, just as Afghanistan and Iraq are his wars), and I don't have anything to add to them. Obama loyalists are manning the barricades to cast dust in the people's eyes, but both sides are really irrelevant anyway, aren't they? Obama didn't have private meetings with critics of the bill, any more than he spends afternoons playing golf with them.

Though as Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday, "the mere fact that the health insurance industry and the market generally sees this 'reform' bill as a huge boost to the industry's profitability does not prove, by itself, that this is a bad bill." No, it's "the corrupt, mandate-based strengthening of the private insurance industry, the major advancement of the corporatism model of government, the harm this is likely to do to some who are now covered and some who cannot afford the forced premiums, and the chances for a better bill if this one is defeated." (To be fair and balanced, I should add that Greenwald is probably far too optimistic on that last point, and that he sees some benefits in the bill as it stands.)

But something small caught my bleary eye last night while I was surfing the Web. As a grammar neurotic, I couldn't help noticing that President Obama told the Washington Post (via), "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill." That should have been "every single criterion", of course: "criteria" is plural.

This doesn't affect my opinion of Obama; it's a common slip. But I was reminded of all the Democrats who've been exulting for the past year that we finally have a President who can speak proper English. Do they notice Obama's errors? Probably not: in contrast to "nukular," which is a regional variation associated with the supposedly backward South, ignorance of plural and singular forms of certain nouns is common among the Obamatariat -- "phenomena" also seems well on its way to joining "data" and "media" as a singular form. So are the inability to use apostrophes correctly, the confusion of "rein" and "reign", and so on. Such things wouldn't be worth noticing or mentioning if the people involved hadn't been so self-righteous about Obama's predecessor. I've often thought that what really upset so many liberals was not Bush's policies but his accent; their reaction when Obama continues his policies, their reluctance to speak out against his wars for example, tends to confirm my suspicion.

P.S. Here's another example (via) from Nashville Toys for Tots coordinator Staff Sgt. David Carrier, explaining why children of parents without Social Security cards will receive only coal in their stockings: " ... but we have set a criteria." Susie of Suburban Guerilla called it "a very un-Christian thing to do", which reminds me of a Bible story.

²⁴Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. ²⁵In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at his feet. ²⁶The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.

²⁷"First let the children eat all they want," he told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs."

²⁸"Yes, Lord," she replied, "but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

²⁹Then he told her, "For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter."

³⁰She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Jesus, to his limited credit, had a sense of shame. Luckily for her daughter, the Syrophoenician woman had her wits about her, even if she didn't have a Social Security card.

P.P.S. I'm reading Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary by Dennis Baron, Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois-Urbana, originally published in 1989. In Chapter 10, "Academies of One: The Critics and English Usage," Baron discusses plurals and the confusion that surrounds them. Children, it turns out, is really a "double plural ... which shows an -en plural (as in oxen and brethren) to an obsolete plural in -er".

Double plurals are more common than we think. Quite a few of our singulars were once plural, including a number of French borrowings that developed new plurals once they came into English: apprentice is from the French apprentis (sg. apprenti), invoice from envois (sg. envoi) ... Tweezers comes from the French etuis (sg. etui), 'case,' and was originally (a pair of) twees. Native English breeches (from Old English singular broc, plural breech) is a double plural, as is bodices (bodice is actually bodies, plural of body).

Since criteria comes from Latin, it may not be surprising that even a Harvard man like President Obama is unclear that it's a plural. Certainly many Americans are, though it still seems weird to me -- is criterion so much rarer than criteria that they haven't heard of it? Language changes, though, and it may well be that in a generation or two, criteria will be a standard English singular, with a new double plural form added on.

Identity Politics You Can Believe In

I had an odd, educational conversation in a gay chat room earlier today. I was making small talk with another American, who's about to make his first trip to Korea; he is from California, and mentioned how upset he was by Proposition 8. We agreed that the No on 8 campaign had not been very well run, and I said that I thought part of the problem is that many gay people, including younger ones, seem to be denying the continuing force of homophobia/antigay bigotry in the US.

There's something paradoxical going on with that, because on one hand they are highly aware of bigotry as a threat before they come out, but on the other, when it comes to something like same-sex marriage, they seem to be living in a TV movie where all you have to do is assert The Right Thing and everyone magically comes around in time for the end credits. Maybe one bad-guy bigot remains, but he or she is either ridiculed or exiled. So a lot of the opponents of Proposition 8 seemed to be taken utterly by surprise when they encountered real, serious, deep-rooted opposition. (I mean, like, it's marriage, and marriage is good! Everybody should get married! And it's about equality, and equality is good! How could anyone be against it?)

But it wasn't just kids I had in mind. The professional operatives who ran No on 8 seemed equally unprepared, evidently thinking that a few TV ads would send Evil Mr. Proposition 8 back to his den, muttering "Curses! Foiled again!" Given that money was tight, a volunteer-based grass-roots campaign would have been much more cost-effective. (A California-based friend reminded me soon after the debacle that No on 8 had to compete with the Obama campaign for money and youthful idealism, which is a fair point; but the professionals tend to be opposed to grass-roots work on principle.)

Anyway, my interlocutor and I had just agreed about the denial at work in a lot of gay people's reactions to bigotry when another guy in the chat room intervened. (Thirty years old, Caucasian, chatting from Korea.) He told us that for most gay people, marriage isn't an issue, since marriage is a dying institution. Gay teens don't care about it (!), so they didn't get involved in No on 8. Marriage, he declared, should not be a civil institution. But Proposition 8 was the first time discrimination had been written into a constitution. What he said, aside from being wrong-headed (In My Hubristic Opinion), was irrelevant to what we'd been talking about, and I told him so: we'd been talking primarily about the adults who ran the No on 8 campaign, and that younger people's sense of denial about bigotry had nothing particular to do with marriage. I told him that marriage wasn't a big issue for me either (though I might have added that the young gay kids I work with on Speakers Bureau are mostly very pro-marriage -- more like pro-wedding, really). And even keeping it on his level, Colorado's Amendment 2, which also inscribed anti-gay discrimination into a state constitution, predated Prop 8 by sixteen years. Yes, it was overturned by the Supreme Court; Proposition 8 may also fall, one way or another. But it was not the first, not even the first state constitutional amendment to define same-sex marriage out of existence.

What really seemed to concern this guy, though, was "identity politics" and "playing victim," with an accompanying sense of entitlement, all of which he called "pathetic." He argued that we should just treat people as individuals, not as colors or sexes or sexual orientations, which is what he did, and what was I doing to change society that was as significant as that? I commented that he was throwing out prefabricated boilerplate phrases, and pointed out that antigay bigots, along with Teabag Nation and Republicans generally, also like to present themselves as victims. It's not limited to the standard minorities, who do have real grievances for being treated as their skin color, their sex, their sexual orientation.

He then flipped stances and argued that organizing was the only way we were going to change society, and how did I propose to get gay teens involved in the fight for gay marriage? I reminded him that I don't care if gay teens get involved in that fight, and asked him why he had suddenly decided that "identity politics" was not pathetic after all but a necessary tool for organizing, and why gay marriage was suddenly worth fighting for? He didn't seem to have an answer, and resorted to bluster: so what was I doing for equality and change? I asked him why I should bother to talk to someone who'd simply ignored the content of the conversation he'd joined, who had nothing but slogans to contribute, and kept changing his principles from minute to minute without, apparently, being aware that he was doing so. And there it more or less rested; it was lunch time, and I saw no point in continuing the conversation. (The first guy had dropped out of it early on, to run errands of his own.)

For the record, my personal contribution to equality and change is uncommendably modest. Deciding to be openly gay in a Midwestern college town in 1971 was still a fairly bold decision for the time, and I know I had an effect on the opinions of numerous people, gay and straight, but I'm fully aware of the limitations of such individual choices. I got involved in gay organizations as soon as I found some, but I often found them frustrating because they seemed to have been started without any clear goals, just because organizations were springing up all over the place in those days. But having organized, most people didn't seem to know what to do from there. A visible presence on campus and in town, supplying speakers to classes and other straight audiences, setting up a telephone hotline for peer counseling -- all these were good and important, and of course I'm still running the speakers bureau. Some people came to GLF meetings and demanded to know why we weren't lobbying the state legislature, pressuring Congress, marching in the streets. We'd say sure, do you want to get to work on that? They didn't, but they expected us to; activism as a job for servants. Nowadays there's a state-level gay-rights and lobbying organization, run by professional operatives. One of its presidents, from the 90s, was a gay Republican who, inspired by a gay Democrat to see the potential in gay politics, went from the closet to the head of a state organization in record time -- less than a year, it seemed to me. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it made me wary.

Identity politics has problems as a strategy, as black organizations (for example) discovered when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the US Supreme Court in 1991: should "race" take precedence over Thomas's record as a Reaganite collaborator who climbed to prominence over the bodies of his people? In the end it did so, to many people's chagrin. But identity politics is also a useful organizing tool -- is it even possible to organize people without offering them a group identity, a movement, to organize them into? Just about everybody denounces identity politics these days, with old New Leftists blaming it on postmodernists and postmodernists blaming it on the left and postcolonialists blaming it on the West, so that's an indication that something is wrong. Not that I know what it is.

The reason why today's conversation made an impression on me is that it summed up what is, for me, wrong with so much political discourse. Not just today (it's an old problem), not just in America, and not only on the Internet, but in print media and broadcast media and face-to-face interaction. Primed with slogans and misinformation, people don't listen to the other side enough to know whether, let alone why, they disagree. It isn't easy, as I know very well. The biggest irony was my challenger's insistence that The Answer was to treat people as individuals, when he couldn't be bothered to the listen to the individuals he was chatting with.

All Your Faith Are Belong to Us

I took another look at the blog post that led me to write about the War on Christmas, because a word from it had been echoing in my mind all day. That word was "inclusive," which I had trouble believing was really in there because it's such a Politically Correct word to those Canutes who want to return to the 1950s if not the 1890s. But there it was:

There has been a movement in the past decade or so to make Christmas all-inclusive, to call it "holiday" and to expunge any reference to Christmas. Well, Christmas has always been inclusive -- never exclusive. Changing the name to "holiday" does not change the inclusivity of Christmas. It belongs to everyone, but it is still Christmas. How on earth did we allow Christmas to become politically incorrect?

Jo is flat wrong here: Christmas is not "inclusive." Saying "Merry Christmas," for her, is intended to slather Christmas all over the celebrations of non-Christians. (As Stephen Colbert said, there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.) In one respect that's nothing new, since so much of Christmas as we USAns and Canadians observe it is non-Christian: the Yule, the tree, the holly, the mistletoe -- even the prominent role of Santa Claus / Saint Nicholas / Father Christmas has nothing to do with the Mediterranean dying-and-rising god whose birth is commemorated on December 25. But all this is at best syncretism, not inclusiveness: at worst it's forced conversion and assimilation. Christianity absorbed a good deal of local religious forms as it spread all over the world, and often it is difficult to say for sure who absorbed whom: was Rome Christianized, or was Christianity Romanized? The Korean Christians I know, for example, have kept the form of a Confucian funeral and reverence for the dead, baptizing them as it were. This is fine as far as it goes, and it's not unique to Christianity by any means.

Actually "Happy Holidays" is the inclusive phrase, because it includes Christmas with New Year's, the Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, and Epiphany. It does not, as Jo claimed, "expunge any reference to Christmas" any more than it expunges any reference to the other holidays. Indeed, that is the real crime of "Happy Holidays": it treats Christmas as just one more holiday, even if primus inter pares. The same attitude is exhibited by people who object to calling heterosexuality a sexual orientation because to do so implies that homosexuality is equal to heterosexuality. I suspect it's also involved when someone denies that Christianity is a religion, because "religion" is what the heathen believe, while Christianity is a Relationship with God or some such nonsense.

Sometimes, it's true, mere ethnocentric ignorance is involved. A young Pentecostal woman I used to work with asked me one day if I'd be going to church for Easter. I explained that as an atheist, I never go to church. "I thought everybody went to church on Easter," she said with unselfconscious directness, and kept repeating that refrain as I explained that Jews don't go to church for Easter either, since though they believe in the same God they don't believe in Jesus; that Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists don't worship Jesus, so they don't celebrate Easter either. "But I thought everybody went to church on Easter," she insisted. That, I think, is the kind of inclusiveness that Jo has in mind when she says that Christmas is inclusive.

Her attitude wasn't ill-intentioned, but her kind of ignorance, when combined with the War on Christmas crowd's hostility to anyone who won't agree that they own December 25, isn't benevolent either. One of my Facebook friends -- the same one, in fact, who claimed falsely that President Obama had a "holiday tree" in the White House a month back -- posted this weekend to the effect that "They" want to take "Christ out of Christmas." (You know, Them: the same shadowy figures who ruin your favorite movie by making inferior remakes. But then people who'd do that would do anything.) I know she probably just pasted something she'd found online into her status again. She also had it backwards: folks like her won't be satisfied until they've forced Christ into everybody's Christmas, whether we're Christians or not. If the church of her choice hasn't put enough Christ into its Christmas, she should do something about it or find another church. But outside that haven, she needs to mind her own business. Christ never was in my Christmas, and I won't let him in.

Who Does the Internet Belong To?

(There's nothing new under the sun ...)

Roy Edroso of alicublog has been writing for the Village Voice for about a year now, I think. He's a good writer, and I mostly respect him even when I disagree with him, as I often do. He's a very valuable chronicler of the right wing of the blogosphere -- I'm very glad he reads Ann Althouse, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, and the like so I don't have to. His latest piece, "Social Media Ruined the Internet", is a bit of a departure from his Voice writings and even from his cultural posts at alicublog. He sums it up with some irony:

In brief, the tech revolution has brought us some clear benefits (e.g., LOLcats, free porn), but when it comes to thinking and communicating, it's been a net loss. (Hoists snifter) Perhaps you disagree?

Well, yes and no. In the column itself he writes that the Internet

has evolved to the point where it can't do much more for you. Which is to say, it isn't going to get any better: it will add features, but will basically remain the same tool: a super TV that you can talk back to.

Ah, talking back -- now, there was an innovation: Social Media, the last significant piece in the internet evolution, and beginning of the end of the dream.

I should mention that I -- like a lot of people, I think -- use "the Internet" rather loosely, to refer not only to the World Wide Web, which is the text/image/audio/video interface of today, but to early incarnations that were generally text-only, like Usenet, Fidonet, Compuserve, and America Online, but which enabled people to connect from their homes, over telephone lines at first, and interact with people elsewhere: potentially with everyone who had access to those networks. I'm talking here about the mid-1980s, when I bought my first Commodore 64 and, soon after, a 300-baud modem.

Far fewer people in those days had computers, and the computers they had were slower and smaller in terms of memory and storage, but it was tremendously exciting to exchange messages, even chat in real time, with people on the American coasts, and occasionally on the other side of the world. I had a Compuserve account for a while, but dropped it when I got my first $90 bill for a month's activity. I never got onto America Online, but I later met people who did, and learned from gay men that AOL and its competitors were very handy cruising and socializing sites. So I'm confused by Roy Edroso's claim that social networking is a recent, even the latest Internet development. It's been there for over two decades.

Edroso is also critical of blogs, somewhat ironic for a blogger, as he admits. Which doesn't mean he's wrong.

It turned out that the internet wasn't an advanced, processing brain, after all, nor an agent of meaningful change. In the political realm, it has revealed only had one enduring value: as a propaganda tool.

This really baffles me. No one who knew anything about computers or their potential could have believed that the Internet was "an advanced, processing brain", could they? Actually, I guess they did; and for most citizens, including early personal-computer users, their notion of the potential of computers came mainly from the Terminator movies. The fantasy that Artificial Intelligence is just around the corner, followed closely by the Obsolescence of Homo Sapiens, is still with us, like predictions of the Rapture. But it's every bit as bogus: the Internet, let alone any individual computer, is not an agent of anything.

A few people have become better informed about national issues because of it, but far more have been made to know to a certainly that the Congressional health care plan includes "death panels," that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya who will turn America socialist, and that his wife is Marie Antoinette. We admit our own part in this, for we would rather focus on the latest batshit crazy thing Michele Bachmann said than on the details of the East Anglia email scandal (which has proved for many that "global warming is a fraud").

But is this really new, or specific to the Internet? True, the Net enables people to disseminate their writings more widely and quickly and cheaply than print or broadcasting did, but the US has a long colorful history of batshit crazy commentators talking over the radio, spitting out cheaply printed or mimeographed broadsides (that very word embodies a long history of printed political ranting) whose content spread widely. As one commenter at the Voice pointed out, "the Federalists didn't have e-mail in 1800, but their attacks on Jefferson were every bit as scurrilous and widespread as the right's smears."

Churches were also good vehicles for influencing communities. In the 1970s and 1980s I worked with Pentecostals who passed around photocopied tracts about how the communist World Council of Churches was scheming to impose a One World Government that would take all references to the saving Blood of Jesus Christ from all Bibles, and make everyone wear the Mark of the Beast or they wouldn't be allowed to buy or sell. Some of this was recycled from Hal Lindsey's infamous The Late Great Planet Earth, but Lindsey was recycling material he'd picked up from other writers and preachers. Word of mouth has killed more than a few people in this country and elsewhere, stirring up lynch mobs without a microchip or a fiber optic involved. "Thanks to blogs," Edroso wrote, "our political discourse now reads like Red Channels mixed with an Andrew Breitbart monologue." I seem to remember it was always like that. Maybe the Net has made things bigger, faster, and worser, but I still think the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

I've long noticed a strain of snobbism in the ambivalence many educated people (including me) feel about the spread of computers to Joe Sixpack, the Unwashed Masses, and the Housewife.

The non-news Top Twitter Trending Topics of the year include Michael Jackson, Harry Potter, and American Idol. Perhaps you feel as if you became better informed on these subjects because of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg. More likely, you were just more inundated with them; you got more video and audio clips, saw more trailers and red-carpet photos, and read more gossip and reiterations of the same bare facts about them. What did social media teach you about Michael Jackson, besides how big a deal it was that he was dead?

And as for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, we can hardly tell you anything you haven't discovered yourself. You have XXX friends; you have XX invitations; so-and-so likes this; view all X comments. These are wonderful tools for shut-ins, of which they have made us all.

Well, yeah, but again the difference is at most one of degree. Supermarket tabloids, the Sports section, Hollywood publicity magazines and entertainment infomercials have long been with us, and many Americans have always paid more attention to the doings of the stars than to politics. The Black Sox scandal of 1919 disillusioned many ("Say it ain't so, Joe!"), but was it more important than the Red Scare and the plight of World War I veterans? I know I have just uttered blasphemy and sacrilege, but I'm an all-purpose infidel and I'm used to it. As for Facebook et al., as I mentioned earlier they are new mainly by comparison to the telephone and the telegraph.

Edroso sums up:

The real force behind blogs, Twitter, and all other social media is its users, which is to say, practically everyone of the internet. And this is the saddest part of the demise of the internet as anything other than a microwave for the mind: we are the ones who killed it. And no matter how feverishly we click and scroll and friend and block, nothing we do can bring it back to life.

I think that reports of the Internet's death are somewhat exaggerated. As I commented,

As I recall the early cheerleading for the Internet, it was like most cheerleading for new or "new" technology: partly corporate marketing blather (part of the point was to convince people that every American must not only have their own computer, but a superfast, superadvanced computer on which to file recipes and write e-mail) and partly technogeek masturbation (technology will save the world! or at least I need to have a personal superconducting supercomputer to write code and play Myst on, which will change the world and give every American a faster, more powerful computer to file recipes and write e-mail on, and that will save the world). And there's always been an uneasy feeling among the geek elites that they didn't want to share this wonderful new technology with housewives and couch potatoes who would just waste it on e-mail, filing recipes and analyzing sports stats instead of inventing new computer languages and more advanced role playing games, as God intended. We should also remember America Online, Compuserve, and the like, which also functioned as social sites and provided conduits for netlore that previously had been lower-tech Xeroxlore and low-tech handcopied folklore.

And I disagree with [another commenter]. The dumbification of, say, movie criticism predates the Internet. It is connected to the corporatization of journalism, but then movie reviewing originated as part of Hollywood marketing, and remains so to this day. See Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars (yeah, it's like totally a print publication, so no link) on the way that, as a serious film critic/reviewer moves up the prestige chain in print media, the space he or she is allotted shrinks. This has to do more with conscious strategies of keeping it simple, by the upper echelons who think of their markets as stupid and uninterested in thinking, whether their markets fit the image, than with any inherent limitation of print. And while yeah, Sturgeon's Law applies to Internet content as much as anywhere else, the Internet also makes it possible for writers to stretch out with less concern about space limitations or what the Advertisers (like the movie companies) will think. The problem is just finding the good stuff, but then it's always been true. "Of the writing of books there is no end." "Another d----d fat square book! Scribble scribble scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?"

Just about everyone, it seems, complains about how much junk there is on the Internet. The fault is always the fault of someone else -- Them, the Dumb Ones, and so on. I confess I often feel that way when I'm on Myspace with its "pimped" profiles, so overloaded with graphics and music that they are literally unreadable, and utterly tacky and devoid of all taste. Still, all that gives their users and proprietors as much pleasure as customizing their personal copies of Emacs gives many computer programmers. (Or used to give -- I'm out of touch.) And if it weren't for the Great Unwashed out there with their Nascar obsessions, what would the elite wannabe's have to play Ain't It Awful over? It doesn't hurt me, or stop me from writing and posting what I want to write and post. Nor does it stop anyone else. If it were decided to bar Teh Stupid from the Net, who would be the gatekeepers? Who would watch the watchers?