Looking for Mr. Finch.
Sometimes you wish they’d go for the pith, you know?
Of all the loathsome spectacles we’ve endured since November 2—the vampire-like gloating of CNN commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing his “mandate”—none are more repulsive than that of Democrats conceding the “moral values” edge to the party that brought us Abu Ghraib.
That really ought to be shouted from battlements, for fuck’s sake, but—and much as I love em-dashes, and the clauses you can tuck inside ’em—there’s no rhythm. No rough music. No beat to pump a fist to.
Still. It’s one fuck of a clarion call.
Fred Clark gets it, too; and if his last line is more stiletto-snark than trumpet blare, well, the stiletto’s the weapon of choice right now in the op-ed alleys of the world.
Some political observers have responded to the electoral map and the exit polls by suggesting that if Democrats want to succeed in the scarlet states they will need to: A) accept the gelded notion of “morality” as a category primarily concerned with the condemnation of sexual minorities; and B) join in and embrace this impious form of piety to win more votes.
This is bad advice. It is also—what’s the word I’m looking for?—immoral.
We don’t need their morals. We have a better grasp of the morals they claim than they do. We don’t need their mandate. You ask Americans wherever they live what they want, what they really want from the world, you get them down to brass tacks and away from buzzwords slippery with rhetorical snakeoil, you do that and we win on the issues every single fucking time. What we need is their mantle, the one they drape over themselves before stepping up to the pulpit, the mantle that we let them steal because in a moment of weakness we felt sorry for the people they claimed to be. It’s that air of authority, that choice box seat in the frame they build themselves; it’s the high ground on the battlefield of their choosing, not ours. —It’s an old, old story, this theft, and it hinges on a fundamental human weakness: the confusion of style for substance, medium for message, dazzle for insight, mantle for morals—the design flaw lurking in our fantastic abilities to recognize patterns and leap to conclusions. It doesn’t matter that the emperor has no clothes, so long as he he’s got the mantle. It doesn’t matter, the words coming out of his mouth; we’ll help them along, after the fact, to what we think they were supposed to mean, until they’re no longer recognizable as what was said. We expect them to be moral, because authoritative, older men are always moral authorities—and so they are, no matter what nonsense they spew. We expect them to equivocate, because thoughtful, nuanced folk always equivocate, and would you look at that? —That’s what the mantle does, and that’s why we’ve got to get it back.
How? I don’t know. (Dismantle the hierarchies implicit in your language! cries a wag in the back. Well, bucko: that’s a strategy. What we need, here and now, are tactics.) —The mantle’s a slippery thing, too slippery to grab: it’s an air, yes, an attitude, but it’s also an expectation. It’s a way of seeing, but more imporantly, of being seen. It’s granted as much as it’s assumed; it’s taken as read, as much as it’s spoken. It’s a story, is what it is: the story we expect to see, and the roles we expect the people we’re seeing to play in it. Change the story, and you change the world. We don’t need to take back the mantle before we can go on to win; we take back the mantle, and we’ve won.
—Which puts us in the realm of strategy again. Not tactics. And anyway, sure as dishes and laundry, there’ll be another to fight in the morning.
But are you starting to see the problem with letting the red states go hang, with cutting our shining cities adrift on our blue hills and leaving them to their hardscrabble ignorance? That’s taking on the roles they deign to give us in the story they want to tell, the one they’ve been telling ever since they snatched the mantle from us—and while pretending “they’re” the conscious authors of this story is as artificial as pretending there’s only one story, or heck, that there’s a monolithic “them” against a unified “us,” and you can even make the argument that there’s a dark power in taking up the roles they give us and twirling our mustachios to the hilt, jiu-jitsuing their story over its logical cliff, still: the mills of poetic justice grind even slower than the other exceeding kind, and anyway, there’s other ways.
What other ways?
(What was I saying about pith?)
Look, this whole thing got started because somebody was searching for arthurian parallels and washed up here and when I went poking to remind myself what Arthurian parallels had to do with what I’d thought I’d written, and I found myself in the middle of some stuff about a Joss Whedon television show that has been squatting, all unseen, at the heart of this one-state-two-state-red-state-blue-state bullshit because the story that’s being told, the story that we’re telling, the story that we’re letting them tell has no place for it. And this is pop culture, yes, this is art, such as it is, and all of that is chopping wood and carrying water when what we need, here and now, are tactical airstrikes (our best targets being the news, and how we get it, and how we pass it along: the stories we make all unknowing when we do, and how we go about changing them: that word, sir, “morals”: I do not think it means what you think it means), but this is a long, slow, tedious business, writing, and grace comes from unexpected quarters, and fortune favors the prepared, and this is what I’ve got, here and now. Make of it what you will. Wood’s still gotta get chopped; the water won’t carry itself, and as far afield as we might have wandered from Abu Ghraib and economic injustice, still: the pulpiest attack on this poisonous story we’ve somehow been tricked into telling, the most half-assed all-unknowing attempt at snatching the mantle from the emperor’s bare shoulders—it’s infinitely more useful than yet another round of fucking the South.
And Whedon’s a step or two up from pulp.
Whedon has cited in a number of interviews the effect his professor Richard Slotkin had on him at Wesleyan, and Slotkin’s book, Regeneration Through Violence. With Firefly, I think he was starting to play directly with those ideas in an edgily dicey manner. —Set 500 years in the future, the show’s political setting was a none-too-subtle recreation of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction: the Alliance of rich, industrialized central or core worlds had fought a war to quell the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged outer planets. The rebel “brown coats” had been put down, the frontier overwhelmed, the Union cemented, and now all our heroes can do is scrape by from job to job, keeping a low profile. It’s a standard western setting, troped up into the future, yes—but that doesn’t account for the chill that went down my spine when, in the (second) pilot, as our heroes engineer their last-minute getaway, Mal (the captain of the ship, a former rebel who still defiantly wears his brown coat), smiles and tosses a bon mot at the villains of the set-piece: “Oh,” he says, “we will rise again.”
Jesus, I thought. Does Whedon know what he’s playing with here?
After all, playing by the rules of the metaphor, Mal maps onto the Confederacy—the rebellious, rural, economically disadvantaged butternut-coats that lost. And he’s stubborn, proud, independent, self-reliant, a rugged, gun-totin’ he-man, whose moral gut regularly outvotes the niceties of his ethics, and who nicely fills out a tight pair of pants. He is, in many ways, the sort of ideal idolized by reactionaries and conservatives, and his beloved brown-coat rebellion was everything the neo-Confederates claim of the poor, put-upon, honorable South.
“Oh,” he says. “We will rise again.”
But! Mal was also rather explicitly something of an antihero. Whedon calls his politics “reactionary”—oh, heck, at the risk of derailing my sputtering argument, let me quote him at length:
Mal’s politics are very reactionary and “Big government is bad” and “Don’t interfere with my life.” And sometimes he’s wrong—because sometimes the Alliance is America, this beautiful shining light of democracy. But sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam: we have a lot of petty politics, we are way out of our league and we have no right to control these people. And yet! Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany. And Mal can’t see that, because he was a Vietnamese.
And there’s the world Mal and his crew and fellow travelers play in, where the folksy talk is peppered with Cantonese slang. Women work as mechanics and fight in wars. The frontier isn’t romantic; it’s hardscrabble, nasty and brutal. The Alliance isn’t Evil, just banal, mostly—and what conflict and oppression we see is driven not by race or religion or (admittedly homogenized) ethnicity, but class and economics, pure and simple.
Whatever it is that’s going to rise again, it sure as hell doesn’t look like the neo-Confederate dreams of the South.
The last batch of westerns—Peckinpah, Leone, et al (and yes, I know morally ambiguous began with John Ford, at least; let’s keep this simple)—rather famously took the straight-shooting archetype of the morally upright western hero: the cowboy, the marshal—and turned his independence and integrity and self-reliance rather firmly inside-out. And that was a good and even necessary thing to do, and anyway it made some kick-ass movies. But in savaging the happy macho myths America had told itself back in the 1950s, in trying to cut away the swaggering pride and racism and cocksure aggrandizement that landed us in Vietnam, among other things, we went too far. Hokey as it might seem, there was a baby in that bathwater. And what I think Whedon was doing with his SF western was very deliberately walking up to the other side of the kulturkampf and taking their idea of a good man—the independence, the self-reliance, the folksy charm, the integrity (cited more in breach than practice by the Other Side, whose idea of self-reliance means I got mine, screw you—but I grow partisan, I digress)—he was taking that idea of a good person, a person capable of doing good things, and giving it back to us.
Of course, what you have to realize there, is the story he was trying to change is one we tell ourselves. (Which is why Mal’s an atheist, see. This is therapy, not outreach.) —Thing about changing stories is everything’s up for grabs until the new narrative settles in, and nobody’s gonna know exactly how everything falls out until it does—and that’s maybe another reason why it’s comfortable to paint ourselves with blue-state woad and charge their rhetorical guns, yet again. At least we know what to expect, right?
There’s other ways, though. Might behoove us to start looking for them.
Watchmaker, watchmaker, make me a watch.
Whenever I hear about something like, oh, how close we’re maybe getting to reconciling general relativity with quantum theory, I think of the termites.
The termites: there’s this guy on the TV, one of those professionally unflappable British narrator guys, crouching three feet underground in a cramped little dig somewhere in the middle of the East African desert, playing his headlamp over a nightmarishly inscrutable labyrinth of twisty little passages, all alike, maybe wide enough to cram a finger into. The labyrinth is mirrored in the ceiling inches over his stooped shoulders. He’s inside the base of a termite mound, this narrator guy, in an heroically excavated cross-section. Outside, above, it’s a weird flat sail, razor-thin at the top, seven to ten feet tall and it’s easily that long. Aligned north to south so it catches the full weight of the morning and evening sun, but hides in its own sort-of shadow from the brutal noonlight. Inside, those labyrinthine fissures snake through the sail, hollowing it out like worm-eaten driftwood, sinking down another yard or so below the narrator guy’s feet, down to where the mud starts, kept cool and damp by seepage from the water table.
And all of it done by termites: hordes and hordes of plump pale bugs as big as the first two joints of your index finger, that hoisted the sail, dug the labyrinth, and now swarm blindly about, sealing one passage here, opening another there. Why? says the narrator guy, three feet underground. Why this incredible effort, this marvel of insect engineering? His unflappable mien not at all compromised by the dirt streaking his cheeks. Air conditioning, says the narrator guy. The difference in temperatures between the cool air underground and the air in the sail, heated by the sun, sets up a constant flow throughout the nest. Regulated by those swarms of tiny HVAC techs, opening this shaft, closing the other, the ambient temperature throughout most of the nest never fluctuates outside of a narrow 2º Fahrenheit window. And a good thing, that, says the narrator guy. There’s a fungus the termites depend on for their digestion which can only flourish in that temperature range. Without the termites and their marvel of insect engineering, the fungus would wither up and blow away in the 120º afternoons. And without the fungus: no termites.
Hearing this made me all shivery inside. Here I am, a rakishly secular humanist with just enough science to get me into trouble, and this unflappable narrator guy is breezing past an incredible marvel of inhuman ingenuity with a dry, unflapped chuckle, heading off after the next incredible marvel—weaver birds, maybe, or octopi that open Mason jars with their tentacles. I can’t remember. I was left behind with a startling sign of intelligent design, one far more impressive than that dam’ bombardier beetle, and nothing but a dull piece of logic to pick it apart with. How on earth could trial and error, self-organization, and evolutionary pressures have produced such an intricate system of vents and a thermostat far more effective than the one in my office? How could it all have had enough time to work itself out to support this fungus, when without it, the fungus would die? When without the fungus, the termites would starve?
Could it all have been made, and not just happened?
Luckily, I have a friend who’s able to help me sharpen my logic and show me which end to hold it by. (Thanks, Charles.) —My mistake, there on the couch, gobsmacked by the unflappable narrator guy, was (rather foolishly) to assume the fungus’s dependence on that precisely narrow temperature window, and the termites utter dependence on the fungus, were constants throughout the history of their symbiosis; not so. The fungus was hardier in the past; the termites less finicky. The incredible success of their relationship was finely tuned over an incredibly long stretch of time—evolved, one might say, along with the termites’ instincts for building with spittle and homeostasis, and the fungus’s for, well, whatever it is fungi do all day—until it reached its current interdependent apex, littering the East African desert with monuments seven to ten feet high.
So it’s a little thing, and a bone-headed error, and I’m not at all suggesting it’s the same thing, no—well, maybe similar, perhaps, in kind if not degree, but still: I think about that shiver I felt, looking at the inscrutable labyrinth; I remember the ghostly whisper in the back of my brain, insisting despite all I know that it must have been made and couldn’t just have happened, and I think, I think I know what it is that makes people take up ideas like the anthropic principle. And maybe it’s because I share that feeling that I take such an immediate and visceral dislike to them. (Well. The ideas. I mean, it’s nothing personal.)
Magician and Superman.
Favorite line from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, thus far:
“Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people,” said Wellington.
Doesn’t hurt, I suppose, that it’s Stephen Fry’s Wellington I’m seeing in my head.
I’m enjoying the book a great deal: it is, in its own gentle way, precisely the antidote I needed for Stone, even if it’s coming from an unexpected quarter. (I like wondering what Aubrey and Maturin are up to, in this alternate history.) —But (as with any upstairs Britfic, or Merchant & Ivory production) I’m spoiling the fun a little with those nagging issues of class: how delightfully easy it is to study magic, when one doesn’t have to worry about meals or a mortgage or a day job! (But that’s just envy talking. Don’t mind it.) I’m reminded of sprezzatura in evening clothes, and how keeping one’s head when all about you etc. is much easier when you have a certain amount of power, over the situation that’s lopping heads, or at least yourself; it’s therefore a sign of power, and that’s why coolth’s so cool—and maybe, just maybe, why I’m finding Mr Norrell the more sympathetic. (Thus far.)
Which leads me to Scott McCloud, ruminating on the difference between rage, and calm, and how they apply to power fantasies. And I suppose I could dig into the differences between power over and power with—but I’ve just straddled the Pond, by golly. And there’s work elsewhere to be done.
Isn’t it nice we’re all in on the joke.
It’s amazing how quickly a random cruise through the web can send a Lewis Black joke screwballing at you:
The ‘Dirrty’ singer—who is fronting a new MTV documentary promoting sexual abstinence to US teenagers—also says she tries to make love every day and claims she is open to all sexual experiences.
Much as hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, due diligence of a sort is the tribute prankster pundits pay to what passes for objective reality, these days. So I’ll note that it’s all a little more complex than the writer of the blurb above (oh, how they must have high-fived and bumped fists with everybody in the bullpen when that one went through) would have it seem: the documentary in question, “Sex, Votes & Higher Power,” is part of MTV’s Choose or Lose programming, which this year is committed to getting 20 million 20-somethings to vote—which, demographics being what they are, is all to the better end of the short stick we’re holding. And a brief perusal of more in-depth descriptions proves the show is more complex than “promoting abstinence to US teenagers”:
By traveling back to her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, to meet several young women and men who have been directly affected by the government’s policies on abortion, abstinence-only sex ed and dating violence, Christina finds out firsthand what’s going on in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The special will present several sides of the many issues affecting young people and present where both political parties stand on these issues.
And while I didn’t watch it (due to a lack of cable, and not having known of its existence), them what did report what sounds, indeed, like a studiously bent-over-backwards fair-and-balanced approach. —But! The atheists in the audience are already chomping at the “Higher Power” in the documentary’s title: pun or not, it’s a loaded gun of a phrase this year, especially when you drag it out for sex and youth and our misbegotten approach to the incendiary intersection of the two. And much as I might be amused by the image of Christina Aguilera, who says she tries to make love every day, impishly quizzing a couple of Silver Ring Thingers about just how far it is they can go and still abstain, I keep coming back to that MTV press release, which so lovingly cites the Heritage Foundation’s bullshit statistics about the “success” of abstinence-only education.
But again, I didn’t see it, and so I’m not going to get any further out on that limb than this. What’s important here is the Wile E. Coyote moment I had when I first read that line cited above: and what can you say when a pop star who’s working the post-t.A.T.u. mediasphere with coy gossip about shamelessly red-blooded quotidian fucks is cited in the very same article as leaping at the chance to promote abstinence to American teens? —Even adjusting for the Brit-tab snark factor, you have to admire the tesseract of pre-breakfast impossible things lurking at the heart of it all.
Maybe hypocrisy is the tithe virtue pays to vice. Yeah. That’s it.
Hearts & minds.
There’s a story Utah Phillips tells on one of the CDs he’s done with Ani DiFranco, about a shingle-weavers’ strike up in Everett, Washington. The Wobblies and the cops traded some gunfire and some people died on both sides and when the Wobblies got back to Seattle they were arrested and chucked into the brand new Snohomish County jail—a jail they broke, quite literally, by jumping up and down all at the same time and hollering and singing until they cracked the steel south wall. “‘Thus proving,’” says the guy who told the story to Utah, “‘everlastingly what a union is: a way to get things done together that you can’t get done alone.’”
Which is a beautiful moral and it’s something to tuck into the cockles of your heart these days so you can try to fight off the chill whether it’s unions or protest marches or the sacred and profane business of government its own damn self we’re talking about, but it’s not the moral Utah draws, and it’s not why I’m telling you in turn.
“‘Now,’” says the guy who told the story to Utah, “‘we didn’t have any intellectual life. We lived in our emotions. We were a passionate people and we were comfortable in our emotions. We made commitments to struggle, emotionally—commitments for which there are no words. But those commitments carried us through fifty, sixty years of struggle.’ Now,” says Utah, “he says, ‘You show me people who make the same commitments intellectually, and I don’t know where they’ll be next week.’”
And Utah pauses a moment, Ani’s gutbucket guitar twanging along behind him, and then he says, quietly, “Kinda stern, isn’t it.”
That’s the first thing to keep in mind. The second is this:
There was this debunker. His name escapes me. He had a shtick like Randi’s: an accomplished stage magician, he’d do the same things psychics do (only better; his cold readings put John Edward to shame, and he did some scary shit with subliminal cues) and, though he wouldn’t give away all his secrets, he’d make it clear how easy it is to pull this stuff off with trickery and sleight-of-mind and a heaping helping of the all-too-willing madness of crowds. But no magic. No psychic frippery. No hints and intimations of the paranormal at all. —He also did some stuff on the side with cult-busting and deprogramming and the like, debunking some specific flim-flammers and helping cops and psychologists pick up the pieces and I don’t know, maybe he saw one too many things; maybe he had that one bad day. Maybe that explains it.
Because between the time he did a show at Oberlin, the one Sarah saw, and the one he did at UMass, the one we all saw together, he’d converted to a rather insistent brand of Christianity. The show he’d done at Oberlin, he’d just done his debunking magic tricks. The show he’d do at UMass, he’d be spending a good half of it proselytizing. —Still, Sarah said we ought to go. He was good. Spooky good. It’d be worth it.
So we went, and he was. He did cold readings and tricks with subliminals (“queenofspades”) and this thing where people on stage wrote secrets on slips of paper that were folded up and then he was on the other side of the stage with a nurse holding his wrist so she could announce that his heart had stopped which would happen whenever the folded-up slip of paper with the right secret was held up. And he assured us all that it was trickery and fast talking, and he told us how someone could use these tricks and an audience’s credulity, its cheerful suspension of disbelief, to make her- or himself look impressive, powerful, connected, in the Know; to exploit and extort and bamboozle; he told us all how important it is to be skeptical, to be rational, to think. And then he told us how the facts recorded within the various Gospels prove the literal truth of the Resurrection—that stone, for instance, rolled in front of Jesus’s tomb, would have taken the effort of several people—people who could not have been there, that first Easter Sunday—to roll back.
He seemed—tired, as he told us this. Resigned, maybe. No: relieved. (I also seem to recall a charmingly idiosyncratic—if alarmist—interpretation of some Cure lyrics, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Anyway. That’s the second thing.
Further up, further out.
Here I am, trying to get some writing done, and Ray Davis with a footnote has to go and open up a wonderful, terrible world where I can while away a Labor Day afternoon. Here’s what you’ll need to play along:
- James Tiptree, Jr.’s 1973 story, “The Women Men Don’t See”;
- Karen Joy Fowler’s 2002 story, “What I Didn’t See”;
- Maureen Kincaid Speller’s mid-August essay, “What James Didn’t See and Karen Didn’t Say”;
- and then, tripping back in time, Ray Davis’s 2002 essay on Fowler and Truesdale, “The enemy of my friend is confused; the friend of my enemy is instructive.”
Have it at. My only contribution to the mix would be the memory it stirred up, of a childhood confusion I doubt was particular to me: on hearing of all those gorilla wars on the nightly news, in Asia and South America, I would lie back and wonder whether they wore uniforms, and how on earth you trained them to hold guns.
No, wait: one more thing. Much as I love Tiptree for her steel and her skew and her sly, sharp sentences, I’ve always come at her stories warily, as if approaching something I was not meant to know. “My usual method of writing,” she said, “is to take one of those pockets in my head that is full of protest against unbearable wrong and dangle plot-strings in the saturated solution until they start coming up with plot-crystals on them.” And she had an uncanny ability to limn a rectitude that, hopelessly outgunned, stood up nonetheless howsomever it could against that unbearable wrong, and even if some of those pockets are thankfully quaintly outdated today, still: it’s hard to look a rectitude like that in the eye when you’re indisputably part of the problem. —I don’t agree with Tiptree’s gender essentialism, or her all-too-apocalyptic take on the war between the sexes; but to ascribe to her a belief in gender essentialism, or an apocalyptic war between the sexes, is deceptively reductive. She was exaggerating to prove a point, is all, and even though I’ll go on chanting “Biology is not destiny!” till my dying day, “The Screwfly Solution” is still going to wake me up now and again in a cold, cold sweat.
(Something else she said: “Listen! Listen and think, you dolt! Feel how it really is! Let me inscribe a little fable on your nose that will carry more than the words with it when you look in the mirror!”)
But some few of those pockets are outdated, quaintly, thankfully, finally. Ruth Parsons digs it up in “The Women Men Don’t See”—
“Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth.” [And I cringe; if there’s anyone in the world I don’t want to agree with, it’s Don Fenton from St. Louis.] “Women do everything men do.”
“Do they?” Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be “My Lai” and looks away. “All the endless wars …” Her voice is a whisper. “All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefield. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—” She checks and abruptly changes voice. “Forgive me, Don, it’s so stupid saying all this.”
It’s not the My Lai reference, no; if there’s anything the past few weeks have proven, it’s that My Lai is still somehow too astonishingly deep and painful for us to be honest with ourselves about it. —But: the whole world has changed. It’s been changing, it’s still changing, it will never stop, and the choice that Fowler’s narrator makes in “What I Didn’t See,” the character of Eddie, what she sees in him, that she can see it at all: ample proof that the whole world did just that. Not enough, no; not nearly enough, except in the ways it’s changed unimaginably much. (It’s hard to see how far we’ve come when we no longer see where we were.) And Lord knows this is far too Pollyannaish a reading to do much more than mark my own starting point in the complex tangle these two stories make when you set them next to each other. Rest assured, it’s not that I’m papering over the prickly price paid by Fowler’s narrator; it’s just I’m weak enough to take what comfort I can from the promise of compromise in the face of Tiptree’s unimpeachable rigor.
Especially when, as aforementioned, I’m part of her problem.
But what comfort I take is itself cold and prickly: the choice Eddie makes, the things that Fowler’s narrator did not see, open whole oceans of unbearable wrongs that have barely been glanced over in this discourse.
She checks and abruptly changes voice. “Forgive me, Don, it’s so stupid saying all this.”
“Men hate wars too, Ruth,” I say as gently as I can.
“I know.” She shrugs and climbs to her feet. “But that’s your problem, isn’t it?”
Doubleplus sprezzatura.
Here’s how it all went down:
I was blitzing through my Bloglines feeds and tripped over this entry by Atrios, which, and it’s not really his fault, reminded me of the existence of that odious little troll reactionary young pundit, Ben Shapiro. What’s Ben up to? I asked myself.
—Using a template with badly specced code and no permalinks, for one thing.
Scroll down to Thursday, 5 August, for his list of a few good books that are out, including Michelle Malkin’s fascinating read on Japanese internment camps, Michael Barone’s intriguing and incisive look at hard and soft Americas, and Hugh Hewitt’s important book on how to crush the opposition while maintaining friendship and civility across party lines. Also recommended: Brad Miner’s book, an insightful and witty look at how men should ideally act.
So I went after The Compleat Gentleman, and was rewarded pretty much right out of the gate:
According to Miner, an executive editor at Bookspan, former literary editor of National Review and author of The Concise Conservative Encyclopedia, a true gentleman is a master of the art of sprezzatura. The term, as used by the Renaissance writer Castiglione, refers to a way of life characterized by discretion and decorum, nonchalance and gracefulness—or, as Miner defines it, the cool exemplified by the men in first class on the Titanic who went bravely to their deaths in evening clothes. Underneath this unflappable quality, which [he] says is not determined by birth or class…
Why not? After all, Leonardo DiCaprio proved anybody could worm their way into first class on the Titanic, so long as they had enough pluck, and a suit of evening clothes.
At least Bracy Bersnak over at Brainwash realizes the inherent problem in trying to appropriate all the exclusive advantages of an always-already dying breed without also owning up to the very real price one must pay for that exclusivity:
A later section of the book on the difficulty of being a gentleman in a democratic age fails to resolve the problematic relationship between the exclusive nature of gentlemanly ideals and social equality. Instead of addressing this issue, Miner characteristically wants to be on both sides of it. On the one hand, he contends that a gentleman must have a discriminating intellect and taste. On the other hand, he is unwilling to say what precludes one from becoming a gentleman. While the idea of the gentleman has always been relatively democratic, being based more on individual merit than noble lineage, it has never been inclusive. It has always been easier to say who manifestly is not a gentleman than to point to someone who manifestly is. Discrimination between who is a man of honor and who is not, between whose word and reputation are considered beyond reproach and whose are not, and between who has decent manners and who has not, have always been essential components of gentlemanly identity.
There is something rather perfectly disingenuous about writing a book that insists lording it over everyone else is within the reach of us all. (And I can’t resist quoting this next bit: “Since he does not apply gentlemanly principles to thorny problems of modern manners, it is no wonder that Miner has a difficult time finding model gentlemen in contemporary culture. When Miner searches for a model gentleman found in popular culture, the example he offers is… Superman.”) —Bersnak goes on rather tiresomely to blame the death of the gentleman on deconstructionism and feminism (you expected maybe the butler?), stooping perilously close to Ryan Thompson’s “positions on why females are ‘special’ in a moral sense” with a lament for the death of the lady, this “finest fruit of civilization,” “turned to rot beneath the withering contempt of feminism.” Presumably, had she never wasted away, gentlemen would still be a dime a dozen in the first class compartments of the western world. But Bersnak (much less Miner) never gets around to telling us when exactly it was that the gentleman wasn’t a rara avis, thin on the ground—for the proper response to “You, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman” has always been “And there are damn few of us left.” Nor does Bersnak seem to realize that the gentleman is as sexy and popular as ever.
In some quarters.
Count Ludovico, a fictional character, explains the contradictory grace of sprezzatura thusly: “It is an art which does not seem to be an art. One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it….obvious effort is the antithesis of grace.” And maybe that makes you think of Zen; me, I’m thinking of cool—specifically, Donnel Alexander’s essay “Cool Like Me” from Might magazine, back in 1997. I only read it the one time, and haven’t seen it since; the internet couldn’t save Might, it seems. (Then, it couldn’t keep Suck alive, and Suck was already in here.) But it stuck with me, and what luck! There’s a review of Street Sk8er on the Electric Playground, which quotes a significant chunk of one of the passages that wouldn’t stop echoing in the back of my brain:
…cool was born out of that inclination to make something out of nothing, to devise from being dumped on and then to make that something special. […]
…music from cast-off Civil War marching-band instruments (jazz); physical exercise turned to spectacle by powerful, balletic enterprise (sports); and streetlife styling, from the pimp’s silky handshake to the crack dealer’s sag… Cool is about trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents… Cool is about turning desire into deed with a surplus of ease… It’s about completing the task of living with enough ease to splurge it on bystanders, to share with others working through their travails a little of your bonus life. In other words, you can give value to your life just by observing me.
So. Those Titanic gentlemen, so inspirational to Brad Miner, going discretely into that good night in their evening clothes? All I have to say to them is this:
Dying is easy. It’s completing the task of living that’s hard.
—And I do hope we’ve also put paid to Nick Confessore’s charmingly silly idea of reforming the military by recruiting liberal gentlemen to the officer corps, which is what Atrios was on about in the first place?
Der Tod und das Mädchen.
A little more on bodies, and hucksters, and being taken for a ride: when you wear a black fedora at every opportunity; when you absolutely forbid photography so you can sell more art books and fridge magnets and mouse pads; when you gussy up a host of various biotechnological processes (some pretty, some not, some elegant, some brutish) with a puffily vague neologism like “plastination”; when you protest a bit too much in your brochures about the scientificity of your purpose, its grandeur, its magnificence; when you trumpet your records broken with eyebrow-kicking statistics; when you dedicate your exhibit to its donors with a large multilingual stone plaque—any one of these may not in and of themselves say huckster or mountebank or aggrandizing four-flusher, but put all of them together, and your nose starts to itch. At least, mine did. And again, this is not a crime: I’m not averse to a wee bit of razzle-dazzle to get ’em in the door. Science, especially biology, badly needs some showmanship these days, and if some niceties are glossed to buff up that dazzle, well, we’re only human. We like us a good story (something the Democrats also need to learn), and we can save the rough edges for the footnotes, and if somebody walks out with a wrong idea, well, there’s no guarantee that arrant pedantry would have prevented it.
But there’s æsthetics, and then there’s ethics.
DALIAN, China (AP)—Hidden in a maze of factories in the heart of this northeastern Chinese port city is the house Gunther von Hagens built—and, for many, a place where nightmares are created.
Inside von Hagens’ sprawling, well-guarded compound, behind a leaning metal fence pocked with holes, are more than 800 human beings—200 of his staffers and 645 dead bodies in steel cases from almost a dozen nations.
The anatomist, whose exhibits of preserved human corpses have riled religious leaders in Europe and attracted the curious and the outraged across the world, set up shop here three years ago to process bodies for his shows.
Last month, media reports from von Hagens’ native Germany asserted that at least two of the corpses, both Chinese, had bullet holes in their skulls—the method China uses for execution. It’s a charge that von Hagens rejects vehemently, saying all his specimens were donated by people who signed releases.
“I absolutely prohibit and do not accept death penalty bodies,” von Hagens, a tall, thin man in a fedora, said this week during a rare tour of his Dalian facility.
But, he added, “Many things can happen. . . . I cannot exclude that (possibility).”
Von Hagens launched his Body Worlds exhibits in 1997 and has shown them to nearly 14 million people from Japan and Korea to Britain and Germany. Shows are running now in Frankfurt, Germany and Singapore.
The displays feature healthy and diseased body parts as well as skinned, whole corpses in assorted poses—a rider atop a horse, a pregnant woman reclining—that show off the preservation technique von Hagens developed in 1977.
Dubbed “plastination,” the process replaces bodily fluids and fat with epoxy and silicone, making the bodies durable for exhibition and study.
Thanks to John & Belle for the tip. —Nothing appears to have come of any charges —“German prosecutors said that as the institutions were legal custodians of the bodies if relatives of the dead did not claim them, Hagens was allowed to buy them,” says this article, which doesn’t do anything to make any of the above come any closer to proper. Nor is this the first time that Körperwelten has raised these sorts of questions. And I’m not exactly thrilled at the idea of a Chinese knock-off—even if the knock-off rather primly disavows the very profit motive that one might maintain has driven von Hagens into graymarket grave-robbing. (There’s other appetites than money-lust, after all.)
If I were snarkout, I might use this as a launchpad for a deftly curated smörgåsbord of links on autopsies and body-imagery and death fixations and the humorously contingent history of corpse-squeam. But I’m not. And I’m at work. And in a mood. von Hagens has done a Bad Thing, but not, apparently, an Illegal Thing (though Germany, perhaps pettishly, is fining von Hagens for “abuse of an academic title”). The people who didn’t explicitly sign on with this project should never have been used—that multilingual dedicatory plaque now thumps like a tell-tale heart—and yet, the harm’s been done: what good would it do to take them down in an essentially symbolic gesture? Æsthetics, to assuage our ethics? (Presuming, of course, that we could even find them.) —The show is loopy as art, and no great shakes as science—but there’s literally nothing else like it (well—except the Chinese knock-off). And there ought to be. Is that enough? (Enough for what?)
Maybe I’ll just end by linking to the lyrics of “The Cowboy Outlaw.”
Men are from Mars; women are from Mars, too, just a different part.
John Holbo is doing some heavy lifting with the capecapades set over at John & Belle Have a Blog, most recently with the one-two punch of “Superbeing and Time” and “Crisis on Infantile Earths,” peering at superheroics through a mock-pastoral lens to good effect. So pardon me as I swipe an epigram from him:
I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the the world crystalizes for us …. They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life … Such images constitute a program, establish our soul’s fixed fund of capital, which is allotted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings.
And then I’ll cite Delany citing Freud :
Freud told us that a perversion was the opposite of a neurosis: In the childhood machinations of psychic development, either we sexualize something or it becomes a neurotic character trait.
Oh, San Diego!
It is and has been for decades the comics convention. It’s the gathering of the tribes: indie auteurs, fan favorites, corporate hacks and shills, visionary geniuses, that guy who did the make-up for the demons on that episode of Buffy, and of course tens of thousands of fans themselves, they all wash up in the great big barn of the San Diego Convention Center for four or five days toward the dog days of every summer. And you can crack jokes these days about how hard it is to even find comics at the Comic-Con these days: sure, the con’s expected to draw 80,000 people this year, as opposed to 40,000 back in 1998, but those 80,000 people are there for the movies and the video games and the toys and the anime and the manga.
And the comics. Yeah. Sure. But if you walk into the middle of the hall you’d be hard-pressed to figure that out at first.
The first is of a woman, long and lean, young, her belly and thighs bared by a gaspingly, laughably fetishistic costume (take your pick: lingerie’d angel; latexed demon; Catholic schoolgirl stripper; battle-thonged nun; tank-topped and hot-panted soldier of fortune; extreme-sports paramilitary cop; strategically splattered with creepy alien encrustations; dolled-up in crotch-floss and body paint). She usually carries a long slender sword, or a gun, or some kind of arcane Japanese farm-implement-turned-weapon, but not always. She sneers, she glares, she’s defiant, she’s angry; if she grins, it’s some kind of feral rictus; sometimes, occasionally, she’s serene, gazing expressionlessly off into nothing at all. She hangs there, on the covers, on the banners, in mid-air, mid-fall, mid-leap, mid-splash; she’s poised, her weapon of choice at the ready, up and back from the follow-through.
The second? Lemme grab At Swim-Two-Birds:
Too great was he for standing. The neck to him was as the bole of a great oak, knotted and seized together with muscle-humps and carbuncles of tangled sinew, the better for good feasting and contending with bards. The chest to him was wider than the poles of a good chariot, coming now out, now in, and pastured from chin to navel with meadows of black man-hair and meated with layers of fine man-meat the better to hide his bones and fashion the semblance of his twin bubs. The arms to him were like the necks of beasts, ball-swollen with their bunched-up brawnstrings and blood-veins, the better for harping and hunting and contending with the bards. Each thigh to him was to the thickness of a horse’s belly, narrowing to a green-veined calf to the thickness of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was wide enough to halt the march of warriors through a mountain-pass.
We are so far beyond wearing the underwear outside our tights it’s not even funny.
So let’s sniff and dismiss: it’s simple enough. Comics (cartooning in general) is a perilous shorthand: it traffics in those filament-images of Bruno’s, drawing on them for inspiration, generating them in return, and feeds it with the raw and heady energy of demiurgic subcreation. You draw what you want to draw (if you’re lucky, or at the very least you draw what other people in their wisdom have decided the pop semi-conscious wants you to draw), and you’re making them do exactly what it is you want them to do (or ditto): and any time desire is involved, things get funky fast. We just need to note that mainstream comics (like action-adventure movies, like genre television) is still a heterosexual white man’s game to explain why the images of women are all things to be desired, and the images of men are all things to desire to be.
“The thing about superhero stories,” says John, “is that they make no sense whatsoever, not even a tiny little bit, and never will; but once—when you were small—this made so much sense that nothing else seemed to.” Indeed, except we bemoan the lack of comics for children these days: superhero stories don’t cater to the small as their audience of choice. They fell from grace into a seething pit of that other time when you’re overwhelmed by something that doesn’t make sense, and yet means so much that the rest of the whole wide world can go hang—adolescence. Love and sex; trouble and desire. Those pop-bright demiurgic subcreations are powerful tokens, imagos and eidolons for stuff we couldn’t bear to tackle directly: desire, sex, being desired, having sex, and the world-shaking power it seemed was the only way we could ever get anywhere near the stuff, and yet which required crippling responsibility to keep the rest of the world safe from our terrible might. (Whether this is why superheroes wear their underwear outside their tights, or wearing the underwear outside their tights is why superheroes came to take on this role, is one of those delicious chicken-and-egg questions.) —The battle-thonged Beauties and brawn-strung Beasts on the comics and posters and banners all around us are just those tokens run wild, unshackled from the schoolmarmish constraints of Marketing and Editorial, fastbred at hyperevolutionary speeds to monstrously logical extremes, like bizarre ocean-floor life fished up from a ruthlessly capitalist hotzone. We’re trapped in a straight boy’s daydream, and nothing makes any sense, and it won’t stop grabbing us by the collar and gibbering that attention must be paid, and the post-adolescent fans (and artists, and writers, and editors) all trafficking in this stuff? —Let’s pick up Delany again:
For one thing one learns in fifty years is that, though most of us eventually learn to ask, more or less, for what we want, it is always more or less impossible to ask for what we need. (If we could ask for it, by definition we wouldn’t need it.) That can only be given us. Finally, we are left to conspire, inarticulately and by our behavior alone, to make sure there is as much of it available in the landscape as is possible, in the hope that, eventually, we will be fortunate enough to receive some.
Oh, but that’s mean, that’s cruel, and unfair. Look away from the comics and the posters and the banners we’ve been talking about and watch the people go by. Ignore the costumes for a moment—we’ll get to them—and note how many people who aren’t male and who aren’t white are walking past. It doesn’t look like America—not yet—but it looks a hell of a lot more like America than it did five years ago. Much less ten. —And as for the costumes, well, no one can quite manage battle-thongs, though the occasional Vampirella will come close (with lots of spirit gum in uncomfortable places), and nobody’s brawn is strung quite like that. Still: there’s women dressed as the Beauty we’re all supposed to want, and men dressed as the Beast we’re all supposed to want to be. Dozens of Lara Crofts, a couple of Vampirellas, merry-widowed dominatrices with electrical tape over their nipples, a smattering of Shis, a Lady Death, fresh from her boudoir; Punishers by the score, and that guy from that vaguely western anime with the long red duster and the angular blond hair, Agent Smiths with their hands on their earpieces, and your more faceless Beasts: Imperial stormtroopers in hardcore hardshell, proletarian Ghostbusters toting unlicensed nuclear accelerators, Federation officers and redshirts from a variety of eras. Except—there’s women in those Ghostbuster coveralls, and Federation uniforms; there’s women under the hardshell, and that was a woman walking past in full-on conquistador plate. And if there aren’t any men in battle-thongs, well, there’s the guy in the amazing Las Vegas floorshow fire demon get-up, and the long-haired bare-chested dark wizard-priest guy, in the long black sarong, and—well, maybe we’ll skip over the guy in his boyhood Spider-Man Underoos. (To be wanted? Or wannabe? He doesn’t look like he’s mocking, which is good: one thin layer of parody or pastiche and this whole house of cards of mine collapses into a merry war.)
We’re outside of the simple maps of Beauty and Beast now, the banners and comics that are running lower than the commonest denominator after some ur-image that will make the passersby stop and stare and spend. These people are bodying forth their own filaments, those mysterious, contingent images around which so much that is vital and necessary crystalizes, and if none of them deal directly with sex, still, they’re all tokens of sex and power, trouble and desire, and desire is inherently anarchic, and yet—“The power involved in desire is so great that when caught in an actual rhetorical manifestation of desire—a particular sex act, say—it is sometimes all but impossible to untangle the complex webs of power that shoot through it from various directions, the power relations that are the act and that constitute it,” says Delany. (If the John Birchers up in the valleys knew what was going on down here, they’d be out in force with pitchforks and torches.) And then:
During such power analyses we find just how much the matrix of desire (the Discourse of Desire and the matrix of power it manifests here and masks there) favors the heterosexual male, even if there is no such actor involved. Whoever is doing what the heterosexual male would be doing usually comes out on top. Though his 1915 footnote makes perfectly clear that, by the use of the word “masculine” he simply meant “active,” this may nevertheless have been part of the thrust of Freud’s statement: “that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespective of whether its object is a man or a woman.”
Women taking on their own pop culture images of things to be; men toying with the idea of being wanted—oh, but this is desperately simplistic, a dreadfully reductionist reading of a small little piece of everything that’s going on around us. And to read it all as “sex” (/sex/; «sex»; you know, sex) is to miss the terrible, wonderful, obliterating utility of trouble and desire. (Still: to read it as sex is not to insult capecapaders and cosplayers as somehow stunted, deficient, maladapted: we all need something to get us past those terrible shoals, whether it’s football or ponies, and just because we’re on the other side doesn’t mean we don’t still have a use for boats.) —This is something of what Grant Morrison’s getting at when he talks about fiction suits and pop culture technologies, and it’s rich and strange and powerful.
It’s also enervating and headache-inducing and frankly boring, after a while. (I get it.) Which is when I want to get off the floor and find a dark corner somewhere with some friends I haven’t seen in a year to talk about, you know.
Comics.
Smoke; mirrors.
We will continue to differentiate ourselves from the industry by:
- Delivering value propositions that target end-user appearance and industrial [commodity] markets worldwide using our consultative selling approach;
- Focusing on product and service (customer value differentiation) to maximize margins;
- Building and maintaining inter-functional coordination between facilities, functions and customers to create and deliver value proposition requirements.
—key points from a marketing strategy for a [commodity] corporation
The word /smoke/ refers to a portion of content segmentation which we will conventionally designate as «smoke». At this point, we have three alternatives, whether intensional or extensional: (a) «smoke» connotes «fire» on the basis of an encyclopedia-like representation which takes into account metonymic relationships of effect-to-cause (a case grammar accounting for “actants” like Cause or Agent can represent rather well this sort of meaning postulate); (b) the sentence /there is smoke/ expresses as its content the proposition «there is smoke» which, always by virtue of an underlying encyclopedic representation including frames or scripts (see 3.2 of this book), suggests as a reasonable inference «there is fire» (notice that we are still at an intensional level, since the possibility of the inference is coded among the properties of smoke, independently of any actual world experience); (c) in a process of reference to states of the actual world the proposition «there is smoke», on the grounds of the aforementioned meaning postulates, leads to the indexical proposition «therefore here is fire», to be evaluated in terms of truth values.
—Umberto Eco, “1.7. The Stoics”
from Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
Revolver (six).
“I don’t have any whisky,” may be a fact but it is not a truth.
—William Seward Burroughs
Where were we?
Adam Roberts wrote a good book badly, or at least wrote a book that wasn’t the sort of book I’d wanted to read, and thought it was. Hagen, son of Alberich, pointed out a couple of ravens to Siegfried, and when Siegfried turned to follow their flight, Hagen stabbed him in the back with a spear. Roberts, in the guise of one Kurt Soldan, managed rather thoroughly to misunderstand not only the point but also the particulars of Schrödinger’s cat. Shocked and awed by their defeat at the hands of the French and British and Americans, humiliated and demoralized by the crushing cavils of the Treaty of Versailles, various disparate elements of German society enthusiastically took up the image of the heroic German soldier, stabbed in the back by dastardly November criminals: trade unionists, communists, Jews, liberals. (General Erich Ludendorff sneered, “I have asked His Excellency to now bring those circles to power which we have to thank for coming so far. We will therefore now bring those gentlemen into the ministries. They can now make the peace which has to be made. They can eat the soup which they have prepared for us!”) Incensed at the defacement of a Time magazine cover, Cerdipity drew a cartoon which showed a Democratic peacenik running away after having stabbed an American soldier in the back. (Journalist Joel Engel sneered, “Someday, though, a populace provoked by the left’s constant fire-breathing may look for a dragon slayer who won’t go quite so easily.”) Soured by the world as it is, humming those lines Morrison stole from Morrisey—“There is another world. There is a better world. There must be”—I picked up a book by Adam Roberts and was profoundly disappointed right from the get-go, so I sat down and tried to figure out why. What was I looking for? What was I missing?
I swear to God there was a there in that the last time I looked.
Let me try again: you’re watching television, and this commercial comes on. There’s a guy sitting in a chair. He’s obviously uncomfortable. Something’s poking at him. He shifts and squirms and reaches down, under the cushion, tugging and pulling until something rips free. He holds it up. It’s that tag: “Do not remove under penalty of law.” SWAT cops burst suddenly through his windows, kick his door in, hold guns on him, bellow his rights at him through a megaphone as he desperately swallows the tag. (I think it was for a chocolate bar. There’s another one which stars those Wallace and Gromit sheep.)
Does it bug you when you remember those tags actually say “Under penalty of law, this tag not to be removed except by consumer”? That they were first put in place to assure the squirming guy that the cushion in question was fresh off the lot, never previously owned, that it was stuffed with specific stuffing? That somehow the meaning of that tag has slipped and shifted from consumer protection to Brazilian harrassment?
And sure, everybody knows that curiosity killed the cat. But: did you also know that satisfaction brought it back? —Imagine two playgrounds, alike in every particular but one: in the first playground, only the first line is allowed. In the second, the entire couplet. Can you chart the resulting differences?
And Siegfried was an arrogant, hubristic ass, a rapist, a murderer, a thief, and his death was necessary to help wash away the curse on the treasure of the Nibelungen and return love to the world, yet look at him now: an heroic soldier, a knight of the realm, the realm itself, struck down in its prime by those who ought to have supported it, our last hope of greatness thrown away by treacherous fifth columnists who should have known better. —And only a dancing Wu Li master would try to insist on the literal ambiguity of Schrödinger’s cat: you can turn an experiment into a metaphor, but you can’t take the gedanken out of the experiment.
And yet—what about Schrödinger’s Knight?
The PCs encounter a knight in an inn. There is a chance of the knight being killed in a combat which erupts at this location. If the knight survives the battle and gets into a conversation with the PCs, then they learn that he is X and they get to hear his story.
If, on the other hand, the knight is killed in the battle, then he is not X, but Y, a messenger carrying a letter for X. In this case, the PCs can learn the same information by finding the letter that Y was carrying on his person.
I think that it might have been Mark Wallace, who in a discussion of this plot technique referred to the knight as “Schroedinger’s Knight.” The reasoning, of course, is that until the in-game events unfold, it is impossible to say whether he is X or Y; until the battle takes place and the PC’s relationship to this character is established, he is effectively both X and Y.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
It’s not getting Schrödinger’s cat wrong that wrecked Stone for me, any more than it’s a seeming ignorance of the dolchstoßlegende that wrecks Cerdipity’s cartoon. Getting things wrong is what we do, after all, and sometimes we do it brilliantly. Meanings shift, stories change: signifiers point ever and always to nothing but other signifiers. If people remembered the same they would not be different people.
And that’s what’s wrong with Stone. The world within those pages is what it is: all signifiers point to thuddingly designated signifieds. In that world, there is only one model, useful or not: the map is the thing mapped. (And thus difficult to fold.) —I’d wanted a labyrinth; I got a tree. I want an encyclopedia; this is a dictionary.
That it is a stunted tree, a mealy dictionary, is a much less shattering disappointment.
—Oh, he also uses “alright” and says things like “It matched the intense yearning of my heart too closely. But then again, I reasoned, it would not be hard to determine that such might be my dream,” and he says things like “To kill so many people! People, true, I had never met before, and whom therefore didn’t truly exist, but nonetheless!” and there’s his thing for noses. But this is stupid stuff.
Until next time, ponder this: why should we cheer when Stephen Hawking reaches for his gun, but hiss and boo when Hermann Göring releases the safety-catch on his Browning?
20 January 1988
Final scheduled Transmission, this Series: 4/27/88 (effective: 5/1/88): Winthrop rowed across the Charles, walked up Pinckney Street and into the State House while the door was unguarded, the Pigs having all taken each other to Happy Hour; Schrödinger, however, has made only partial delivery and may have run afoul of the Hanseatic Factor (last transmission was from Bremen, Lübeck remains silent)—IF Schrödinger has fallen within the aegis of the Lutine Bell, THEN Implement The New Economic Policy (1921); John W. stopped off at Epworth and Samuel advised him to obtain Letters of Marque from Whitehall; Mistah Kurtz is riding anchor off Port Royal while Melanchthon has rented a room within sight of 490 L’Enfant Plaza East, SW, 20219; John Brown has departed Haddington and checked in at Harper’s Ferry; Owsley will shortly begin networking with Alberich, after which the Embarcadero will again be laden with Sutter’s Surprise. The local opera-bouffe will, Deo volente, mercifully terminate on 5/14/88, immediately thereafter punitive operations against the Narragansett will commence. Current print-outs indicate the Iroquois will NOT come to their aid; however, initial field reports from Agitprop indicate that resistance will be fierce and it may be necessary for the advance column to fall back on New Bedford—the following sections should stand ready to receive casualties: WNW, CEC, RWG, PRMcS, KCW. If conventional ordnance does not suffice, Matthias Flacius (Illyricus) will hand-deliver FERMI’S FEAR, after which the heresiarch Roger Williams and his Pelagian cesspool at what is ludicrously known as “Providence” will be deprived of their heathen allies. Once the Black Flag has been raised over “Providence,” the liquidation of The Six Nations will proceed seriatim. The Hudson Valley will then lie open and undefended, fallow ground for the Agenda of 5/72. “Et ad haec quis tam idoneus?” ORA PRO NOBIS, ORA PRO ME.
Revolver (four, revisited).
Er stößt seinen Speer in Siegfrieds Rücken: Gunther fällt ihm—zu spät—in den Arm.
Let’s try a précis in English, shall we?
Siegfried rejoins the hunters, who include Gunther and Hagen. While resting, he tells them about the adventures of his youth. Hagen gives him a drink that restores his memory, and he tells them of discovering the sleeping Brünnhilde and awakening her with a kiss. Suddenly, two ravens fly out of a bush, and as Siegfried watches them, Hagen stabs him in the back with his spear. The others look on in horror, and Hagen calmly walks away into the wood. Siegfried dies, lingering on his memories of Brünnhilde. His body is carried away in a solemn funeral procession.
There it is, boys and girls: the ur-Dolchstoß. Le coup de poignard dans le dos.
Accept no imitations.
He had become painfully aware of the enemy’s overwhelming firepower, of his superiority in the air, of the countless tanks against which one could oppose nothing of equal force. Everyone recognized that Germany, economically exhausted and lacking important raw materials, helplessly faced the enormous harnessing of the world’s resources. But all this had nothing to do with the feeling of superiority as person, soldier, and fighter. The fact that this feeling of superiority was retained after the war’s conclusion is of utmost significance for the German future. It preserves a feeling in society that the battlefield was not left as loser, despite the lost war and the mighty collapse. The consciousness of being superior in fighting ability is the best means for maintaining the military spirit. It also helps cultivate the will to fight for the fatherland’s freedom when destiny calls.
—Friedrich Altrichter,
Die seelischen Kräfte des Deutschen Heeres im Frieden und im Weltkriege
The naïve faith that the German soldier felt himself to be and, in actuality, was a better fighter than the Frenchman, Englishman, American, or Russian reflected the officer’s own narcissism. The fallacious belief that by preserving the German soldier’s sense of superiority one gained a decisive military advantage was possibly tied to two unconscious transactions that typified the right-wing visionaries: the urge to fantasize a war of revenge that would erase the reality of Versailles (and defeat); and the underlying conviction that his and the nation’s strivings were invincible because they were congruent with God’s Plan.
—Peter S. Fisher, Fantasy and Politics:
Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic
I was playing the wisecracking hero in the microscopically budgeted sci-fi thriller: Han Solo in a Clint Eastwood serape, who (interstellar archeologist and plucky sidekick in tow) stumbles over the USS Sulaco and with intuition, sarcasm, and a deeply engrained distrust of ossified authority and The Book manages to save a couple of Marines and the archeologist and his own hide from the pseudoscientific zombie menace We Were Not Meant To Know. (Mostly, what I remember is the Corridor: a couple of sheets of drywall on jerry-rigged 2×4 frames, with sliding doors on either end yanked open and shut by whoever wasn’t running the camera or the lights or staggering about as zombied Marines. “Just like they did ’em on Star Trek,” said the director, justifiably proud of those damn doors, which had eaten half his budget. —Scene after scene after scene was shot in that Corridor.) —I supplied most of the costume myself: the paratrooper boots and the East German army surplus pants I’d scored from Banana Republic, back when Banana Republic was a J. Peterman for high school kids with attitude; the serape, from the year and a half we spent in Venezuela; the khaki shirt I bought for the occasion that I still wear from time to time. But the director insisted on a gunbelt his grandfather had scored: dark brown leather with a heavy metal buckle stamped with the phrase Gott mit uns.
“Can you believe that shit?” he said, grinning. “World War I, that is. They really thought God was on their side.”
But if God is with you, and nonetheless you lose—well, what?
Obviously, you were betrayed. Robbed. The November criminals worked to sap the will of the fighting man, signing him up for Spartacist soldiers’ and sailors’ unions, filling his head with doubts, suing for peace and signing the treaty of Versailles when it was clear victory was just around the corner, if we’d just held out, if we’d just trusted in Gott, who was mit uns. And we would have, too. But we were stabbed in the back. —Just like Siegfried.
Siegfried? Why him? —He’s the offspring of an incestuous, adulterous union, after all, and it’s no excuse to point out that only such a son who knows no fear can slay the dread dragon Fafnir. He’s a murderous thug who spends most of the Götterdämmerung stumbling about as a drug-addled amnesiac, raping his girlfriend while wearing another man’s face, stealing her ring, pledging her troth to him, blundering off into the bush to go a-hunting with the son of his mortal enemy. —He is an idiot, like Nietzsche’s goddess of victory; without dizziness or fear he sets himself down on the crest of the moment, having forgotten everything from the past, and standing then on a single point he is happy as no one else is happy. He can Get Things Done, that Siegfried. Until Hagen urges him to sing of his past deeds. Until Hagen slips him the antidote to the drug he’d already slipped him, the one that destroyed his memories in the first place. That’s when the two ravens fly up out of the bushes. That’s when Siegfried turns to stare after their flight, distracted, and that’s when Hagen can stab him in the back.
With a spear, we should note. Not a dagger.
I’m just saying.
Wotan has two ravens. Had. —Caw, says the first one. Mer. Mr-no. Murnan. Mourn; remorse. Memory. Mimir. Why.
Caw, says the other one. Cwo. Cwi. Wei; wei; wei wu wei wise. Caw. How.
Hugin is the name of the one; thought. Munin the other: memory. Cwo, cwi; Mr-no. How and why.
The “Liberalist” comprises the Pacifist, the Marxist, and the Jew. He thinks rationally and is only capable of calculating. The volkish man, in contrast, lies rooted in the irrational. He opposes “ratio with religion, the individual with the collectivity.”
Reason is defamed as “whore” of the Enlightenment, as perpetrator of “empty ideals.” An appeal is made to instinct and feeling. Only when thought becomes saturated with feeling does it become acceptable and organic.
—Friedrich Franz von Unruh, “Nationalistische Jugend”
Wenn ich Kultur höre…entsichere ich meinen Browning!
—Hanns Johst, “Schlageter”
Revolver (five).
(In which I take it personal. —The personal is political, after all.)
Int. office, late afternoon, and there’s J. Jonah Jameson, editor-in-chief of the Daily Bugle and Peter Parker’s nemesis, his Commissioner Gordon, you know, in the movie they got that guy who plays the psychiatrist on Law & Order and the white supremacist on Oz to play him, only this is a Frank Miller Daredevil book, so he’s stern and avuncular in all the right ways, and he’s drawn by David Mazzuchelli, so he’s a subversively old skool figure striped with these impossibly rich, impossibly noir, utterly impossible shadows from venetian blinds. He’s got his sleeves rolled up, by gum, and a pre-Bloomberg cigar is smoking like a chimney, and he’s delivering a stern and avuncular beat-down to ace reporter Ben Urich, cowed into submission by the Kingpin’s goons. “Listen, Urich,” and you can hear the growl coming up off of the cheap glossy paper, “there are thing you just don’t let happen in this racket. Number one is you never get scared away from a story. Not while you’ve got the most powerful weapon in the world on your side.” And then he picks up I swear to God a rolled-up newspaper—this is back when Miller knew how to swing a cliché—he picks up this newspaper and he shakes it at Urich. “This is five million readers’ worth of power. It can depose mayors. It can destroy presidents.”
—Oh, but that’s just dinosaur talk! This is the wired age. Everything’s changed. It’s many-to-many and participatory journalism and Nick Denton gossip. It isn’t five million readers; it’s fourteen hundred inbound links on Technorati. It’s ranking as a Mortal Human on the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem. It’s a taste of the power that took out Howell Raines, man.
And it isn’t a rolled-up newspaper he’s shaking at me, either. It’s a photo he’s sliding across the desk, into the light of a halogen desk lamp, the only light in the room. I can’t see his face. He isn’t smoking, but the place smells like old cigarettes and burnt coffee. “Well?” he says.
The photo is a Time magazine cover from 2003, when they chose the American soldier as their person of the year. Somebody’s photoshopped in a Nazi armband, some notches on a riflebutt. “The American myrmidon,” says the headline.
“What about it?”
“It’s a simple request,” he says. “Just say it clearly and unequivocally.” There’s a click, and from somewhere comes this eerie, tinny mock-up of my voice, like a forgotten voicemail message. “This graphic disturbs and disgusts me and it is not representative of what I believe.”
I don’t say anything. It’s been a while, but I’m wishing I had a cigarette.
He clears his throat, leans forward, his chair squeaking. One hand slipping into the light to tap the photo. “Come on,” he says. “Will you denounce this image as vile hatemongering? As something that doesn’t represent your point of view?”
And still I don’t say anything.
“All you have to do,” he says, “is say, ‘That’s disgusting. I don’t believe that.’” It’s my voice again. I bite my lip. He leans back in his chair. “And I’ll believe you,” he says. “I really will.”
The threat is so implicit, so thoroughly beaten into our lizard-brains by years of bad television upon decades of B movies, that he doesn’t even realize he’s making it.
James Howard’s Romeo and Juliet,
or, Revolver (an intermission).
John Holbo cites Nietzsche and makes my head ring, once more proving how inadvisable it is to do this sort of work without a license, or at least a basic grounding in the classics:
The stronger the roots which the inner nature of a person has, the more he will appropriate or forcibly take from the past. And if we imagine the most powerful and immense nature, then we would recognize there that for it there would be no frontier at all beyond which the historical sense would be able to work as an injurious overseer. Everything in the past, in its own and in the most alien, this nature would draw upon, take it into itself, and, as it were, transform into blood. What such a nature does not subjugate it knows how to forget. It is there no more. The horizon is closed completely, and nothing can recall that there still are men, passions, instruction, and purposes beyond it. This is a general principle: each living being can become healthy, strong, and fertile only within a horizon. If he is incapable of drawing a horizon around himself and too egotistical to enclose his own view within an alien one, then he wastes away there, pale or weary, to an early death. Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come—all that depends, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically. This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential.
And, well, yeah, though there’s a demon on my shoulder muttering sardonically, what, you have to repeat history sometimes, to give your life some direction? (What comes after farce? —And if Rumsfeld were to look it over and then note that gosh, there’s a distressing lack of meaningful metrics, well, I might allow as how he is not without his point on this one.) —And so I’m stuck halfway, trying to figure out how to say something not altogether unmeaningful in the matter of World Building v. Allegory, though that’s not it—Tlön v. Quantum Mechanics, perhaps, or Schrödinger v. That Darn Cat—and comes now the Urbane Sophisticate and the Rude Mechanical tumbling ass-over-teakettle down an astroturfed hill, about to crash into Samuel Delany, who’s waiting in the wings for his spearcarrier’s cue as Siegfried bellows his last. And while I’m trying to figure out whether the next move up my sleeve is necessary, or needlessly petty, Nietzsche through Holbo whacks me upside the head with the Martian’s lesson: knowledge is power is a crock. The more you know, the less you can do, and that’s the hidden snare in the Wiccan Rede. (But isn’t that the point? Strength is for the weak! That way, you never have to do anything.) —But this has dissolved into a mush of inside jokes and personal shorthand; airy gestures in the general direction of what I think I’m trying to say, rather than hard work with muscular prose, digging in to figure it out. So I’m off to the drawing board again. In the interests of slaphappiness and the general spirit of what-the-fuck, I’ll leave you with this:
Romeo and Juliet, Wrote by Mr. Shakespear : Romeo, was Acted by Mr. Harris ; Mercutio, by Mr. Betterton ; Count Paris, by Mr. Price, The Fryar, by Mr. Richards ; Sampson, by Mr. Sandford; Gregory, by Mr. Underhill ; Juliet, by Mrs. Saunderson ; Count Paris’s Wife, by Mrs. Holden.
Note, There being a Fight and Scuffle in this Play, between the House of Capulet, and House of Paris ; Mrs. Holden Acting his Wife, enter’d in a Hurry, Crying, O my Dear Count! She Inadvertently left out, O, in the pronunciation of the Word Count! giving it a Vehement Accent, put the House into such a Laughter, that London Bridge at low Water was silence to it.
This Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, was made some time after into a Tragi-comedy, by Mr. James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive; so that when the Tragedy was Reviv’d again, ’twas played Alternately, Tragical one Day, and Tragicomical another; for several Days together.
Revolver (four).
Götterdämmerung
Dritter Aufzug
Waldige Gegend am Rhein—Vor der Halle der Gibichungen
(Zwei Raben fliegen aus einem Busche auf, kreisen über Siegfried und fliegen dann, dem Rheine zu, davon)
HAGEN
Errätst du auch dieser Raben Geraun’?
(Siegfried fährt heftig auf und blickt, Hagen den Rücken zukehrend, den Raben nach)
HAGEN
Rache rieten sie mir!
(Er stößt seinen Speer in Siegfrieds Rücken: Gunther fällt ihm—zu spät—in den Arm. Siegfried schwingt mit beiden Händen seinen Schild hoch empor, um Hagen damit zu zerschmettern: die Kraft verläßt ihn, der Schild entsinkt ihm rückwärts; er selbst stürzt krachend über dem Schilde zusammen)
VIER MANNEN
(welche vergebens Hagen zurückzuhalten versucht)
Hagen! Was tust du?
ZWEI ANDERE
Was tatest du?
GUNTHER
Hagen, was tatest du?
HAGEN
(auf den zu Boden Gestreckten deutend)
Meineid rächt’ ich!
Revolver (three).
So why am I not liking Stone? —As much as I’d like to, anyway.
Well. Open the book to the foreword, cribbed from Quanta: Essays on Quantum Physics by one Kurt Soldan, and follow along as we trip through the fourth paragraph:
You have heard of the famous thought-experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat. The cat lives in an opaque box. It so happens that opening the box will kill the cat, because of the way the box is constructed. We cannot see into the box, or X-ray the box, or anything like that. But we want to know whether the cat is alive or dead inside the box. If we open the box to look, then it is certainly dead—but is it alive or dead now, before we open the box? The quantum moral of this story is that the cat is alive and dead at the same time. It inhabits both states of being simultaneously; what happens when we open the box is that our action of opening the door collapses these quantum probabilities into one single pattern, the pattern being ‘the cat is dead.’ Schrödinger’s famous cat will test the suppleness of your mind, I promise you. You want to think ‘Well, either the cat is alive or it is dead, and by opening the box we find one or the other to be the case.’ But that is not the way it is at the level of the quantum; at the level of the quantum it is ‘the cat is alive and dead until it is observed, and then the act of observation collapses the probability wave-form into a single determined pattern—dead, in this case.’
Now, I am not a physicist. (Ha!) But I read something that pig-ignorant, and I reach for my gun.
Oh, don’t gimme none more o’ that ol’ quantum physics,
No, don’t you gimme none more o’ that ol’ quantum physics,
For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and my cat may die—
Won’t you pour me one more o’ that sinful ol’ quantum physics.
The cat was never supposed to be both. “One can even set up quite ridiculous cases,” said Erwin Schrödinger, before setting forth his famous paradox:
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.
Schrödinger is talking about the usefulness of the “foundation of intuitive imagination”—the map, the model, the tool, the image—one must use to take hold of something like quantum mechanics. But be careful—
Of course one must not think so literally, that in this way one learns how things go in the real world. To show that one does not think this, one calls the precise thinking aid that one has created, an image or a model. With its hindsight-free clarity, which cannot be attained without arbitrariness, one has merely insured that a fully determined hypothesis can be tested for its consequences, without admitting further arbitrariness during the tedious calculations required for deriving those consequences. Here one has explicit marching orders and actually works out only what a clever fellow could have told directly from the data! At least one then knows where the arbitrariness lies and where improvement must be made in case of disagreement with experience: in the initial hypothesis or model. For this one must always be prepared. If in many various experiments the natural object behaves like the model, one is happy and thinks that the image fits the reality in essential features. If it fails to agree, under novel experiments or with refined measuring techniques, it is not said that one should not be happy. For basically this is the means of gradually bringing our picture, i.e., our thinking, closer to the realities.
(Which is a neat explication of the basic scientific method, minus peer-reviewed journals and grant applications; its application to the debate over, say, creationism as a scientific enterprise, is left to some other digression.) —The cat was only ever a warning, a “ridiculous case” demonstrating what happens when you try to use your image, your map, your tool where it doesn’t apply, a blurred photo and not a crisp snapshot. “Of course the cat can’t be both alive and dead at the same time!” says Schrödinger. “The wave function, the psi-function, the system vector—it works, but it’s not all that yet! We have work yet to do to bring our picture closer to the realities! What part of ‘serious misgivings arise if one notices that the uncertainty affects macroscopically tangible and visible things, for which the term “blurring” seems simply wrong’ do you not understand?”
But quantum mechanics is hard, and strange, and that cat-in-a-box is a vivid image, ennit? And so over the years that original ridiculous case has been worn down to a nubbin of a shibboleth: quantum mechanics is so fuckin’ strange, man, there’s like, this cat? That’s alive and dead? At the same time? —To the point that “Kurt Soldan” can write an essay, a whole series of essays, apparently, on quantum mechanics, and can conjure up the cat without even mentioning the thing that makes the gedankenexperiment quantum in the first place: there’s no radioactive substance balanced precisely on a fifty-fifty shot of an atom decaying over the course of an hour, set to trigger a mini-Goldberg deathtrap if it does; instead, there’s just a box impermeable to observation that will kill the cat if you open it. Pop quiz, smart guy: is that cat alive, or dead? Well? You can’t peek inside! You can’t X-ray it! Ha! It ain’t either! It’s both, until you open that box and kill the cat! “If you did not observe,” says our friend Soldan, “the cat would continue to exist in a quantum probability soup. But by observing you collapse the probabilities into a certainty.” (But that’s from later, when Soldan’s talking about a nano-cat, ten atoms long. Is it here? Or there? —You see that look that just passed over some of the audience’s faces? You just spotted the physicists. You want to make ’em look like that again? Tell ’em in all earnestness you heard that quantum computers are so fast because they use CPU cycles on all the infinite copies of themselves sitting idle in all the other infinite manyworld multiverses out there.) —It’s not a sharp photo of a cloud that sort of looks like a cat, it’s an impressionistic watercolor of the feed from somebody’s catcam. It’s using a hammer to adjust the focal length of your laser. It’s using a Portland street map to plot a course to alpha Centauri. It’s a dim echo of a half-understood metaphor hauled out and ginned up to lay the foundation for what I’m afraid is one of the book’s hedgehogs:
And this is the most profound implication of all, the deepest philosophical shake-down; because it follows from this that it is our observation—our power, as sentient intelligences to make the observation—that determines the universe the way it is.
Well, yes, in the sense that specifically observing a particle on the quantum level makes it do things it wouldn’t do if it weren’t observed, and there’s all sorts of neat stuff like quantum cryptography that spins off of that, and you’ve got the Copenhagen interpretation and the Many-Worlds interpretation and the Transactional interpretation (which makes me think of warm fuzzies and cold pricklies hopping back and forth across Planck lengths like fuzzy Maxwell’s demons, silver hammers glinting in the—what? Why are you glaring at me like that?), and you’ve got all sorts of freaky optics experiments that would have made Newton even grumpier than he famously was. But what you don’t have is a goddamn cat that’s neither alive nor dead in a goddamn box somewhere, and from that you can’t determine that your sentience, that self-aware sliver of spacetime just behind your eyeballs, your I-ness, has some anthropocentrically mystical ability to kill that cat or keep it alive just by observing it. (Or, opening the impermeable box. Which kills the cat, in Soldan’s example. The cat presumably being alive otherwise, since there’s nothing else to kill it. Except maybe lack of food, or water. Or air. Since it’s an impermeable box. —And if it’s sentience that pops the cork, don’t you think the cat would have a say in the whole affair?)
The last book I literally threw across the room was Piers Anthony’s Macroscope, on or about the fourth or maybe fifth time the girl physicist was openly pitied by the omniscient third-person narrator for being female, and so not as smart as the boys, and prone to flighty panic, and in need of comfort; maybe it was when her stateroom was decorated with frilly pink windowshades. I can’t remember the precise moment. But! I’ve figuratively thrown many other books across many other rooms for crimes less than this. —It’s one thing to make your way through your particular quotidian routine, ignorant of this or that point of quantum mechanics and the gedankenexperiments that tease them into shape. It’s another thing entirely to claim the authoritative mantle of science fiction with such a baldly shaky grasp of the science involved.
I should probably note: the most prominent Kurt Soldan on Google is a music critic, and no bookfinder I have at my fingertips can turn up the spoor of his Quanta: Essays on Quantum Physics, and anyway, anyone who’s read Dune and its ilk ought to stroke their chins thoughtfully at the aggressive blandness of that citation. Which is why I’m laying Soldan’s sins at Roberts’ feet. —So the possibility exists that this foolery could be deliberately that: foolery, in service of a point yet to be made. (Not quite halfway through the book yet, and I did just read a grippingly horrific murder scene.) I don’t hold out hope, though: the mystical enthronement of sentience is a key to how his FTL travel works, and it’s a sucker’s bet that observation isn’t a key to how the corker of a plot works out. (Besides: if Roberts is capable of japery on such an infuriating level, he’s got a killer deadpan. —But if “Kurt Soldan” wanders onstage, I can’t be held responsible for what will become of my copy.)
And yet: this isn’t what I’m trying to get at. I reached for my gun; I threw the book across the room. But I can put up with a lot to get whatever-it-is I’m after. I can deal with this. I can accept this book on its own science-fantastickal premise and go from there. Right? I’m a mensch. I can pick it back up again.
It wasn’t till later that I found it wasn’t what I was after, so much.
