Category:

Politics

It’s all over

by Diane Duane April 10, 2017

Over there, anyway.

Secondary to the recent changes in LiveJournal’s TOS, all the posts except this one at my LJ have been deleted. The journal itself, though, has been relocated to new digs at dianeduane.dreamwidth.org. *

In the next little while I’m going to start mirroring some Tumblr posts to the Dreamwidth journal: and (as used to happen at the LJ) some Out Of Ambit posts as well. If I can find a blogging tool that’ll let me blog to all three at once, I’ll be a happy camper. We’ll see how that goes.

ETA: rewriting this for clarity. I first used Dreamwidth’s own import tool to import all my LJ entries and comments to the new clean Dreamwidth journal. (The job executed in stages: the entries took longest to import, they and the comments spending about 36 hours in the queue. The results page once you start the import has a “refresh” link you can click to see how things are coming along. Understandably the Dreamwidth resources are under a fair amount of pressure at the moment, but I wasn’t in any rush.) Then I used this post management tool to bulk-delete the posts at the LJ. It works just fine. NB: if you have a lot of posts, LJ will halt the migration after a thousand posts or so, citing “too much editing” and telling you to come back in an hour and try again. I did that and thereafter the deletions completed smoothly.

*Yes, I do have an older Dreamwidth journal at dduane.dreamwidth.com. I’m still working out what to do about that one.

April 10, 2017

Mindfulness

by Diane Duane January 29, 2017

It’s such an overused term, these last few years. It was originally a technique for achieving a fuller view of the world-as-it-is and a deeper sense of one’s place in that always-fugitive here and now. But more recently it’s been co-opted as a technique for improving work output in corporate settings — a use that’s probably about as far from its original purpose as can be imagined.

The world shifts. You can try to avoid seeing how it’s shifted, how it keeps on shifting — but (in my experience, anyway) that’s a mistake. Turn your head away for too long and when you feel like turning it back again, some new and bigger shift has come that’s twice as hard to deal with as it would have been if you’d kept watching.

I don’t think anyone with interests based in the United States can have failed to notice, in the last week or so, how fast the status quo is shifting under all our feet. To say the trends are alarming is (for me) putting it pretty mildly.

The place where the effects of the shift are unfolding most rapidly is on Twitter. Now, normally Twitter is a place where I spend time in a relatively lighthearted mode, and so when I tweet and retweet there tends to be a lot of art and graphics and photos I like, and news about ongoing writing projects and sales at Ebooks Direct*, as well as Irish news and weird-or-strange news, and travel and cooking and other similar subjects that affect me personally at the European end of things.

Now, since the middle of last year, with the Brexit situation ongoing — and its fallout onto and into Ireland, like the results of a very very slowly growing mushroom cloud — and then the US election, the seriousness-level of my Twitter feed has been increasing. It’s been unavoidable, really, but I’ve tried to maintain a general balance.

The events of the last week have shifted my attention pretty hard, though, and this too is unavoidable. Even at a great distance, I take my US citizenship seriously. When I see the country I grew up in being twisted into unconscionable new shapes, my Twitter feed’s going to reflect my opinions about that and those of others I think need listening to.

I doubt that people who follow me because of an interest in my written work will jump ship just because I’m being mindful of something besides writing and mass media and entertainment. And what I am very mindful of right now is those people who went through the already-significant vetting it takes to get a green card in the post-2001 world, people who went abroad on holiday or to see relatives or for other reasons more urgent, and have suddenly discovered they can’t get home to their families again. I’m mindful of legally-issued court orders that US officials are refusing to obey. I’m mindful of spite and bigotry and stupidity running loose in places where they should never have been permitted access. I’m mindful of Angela Merkel having to explain the Geneva refugee convention to the present inhabitant of the Oval Office. I’m mindful of people who’ve escaped death in other countries and were hoping for peace and a chance to start over in the US, now most likely being shipped back — very possibly to their deaths — without due process. I’m mindful of all kinds of things, norms of law and behavior that we’ve taken for granted for a long time, apparently starting to unravel — thus demonstrating how institutions that seem robust may prove terrifyingly susceptible to accidental or purposeful sabotage by the reckless or thoughtless or cruel.

I have to be mindful of these things when I notice them, at the cost of betraying the priorities that make me write what I do, and the way I do. So if you’re someone who hangs around my Twitter feed mostly for entertainment and you find this level of mindfulness troubling, then I invite you to mute me for a while and come back later to see if the environment suits you better.

I make no guarantees about this, mind you. What passed for normalcy just a month ago now suddenly seems lost in a distant golden past — and if I bear weight on the concept of what might happen tomorrow, I can already hear thin ice cracking underfoot. So I’ll react to new events as I must. But I can promise that I’ll keep on working, and keep letting folks know how it’s going when there’s news on something new. Right now it seems important — when anyone comes looking — for me to be found at my post, doing what I’ve been doing for the last few decades: telling stories that will give both you and me something else to be mindful of… if only for short periods.

If (under the circumstances) your preference is to stop paying attention to my Twitter feed, then go well, and look out for yourself. You’ll be missed. If you’re sticking around, though, strap in and we’ll make what we can of the ride together. Your company’s very welcome, even if things around here get so busy that I can’t tell you so myself.

And a final note, in a slightly more typical mode. Try this cupcake recipe; it’s really good even without the frosting. Nobody can be mindful all the time, and while I was in the middle of typing this up I said to myself, “Screw this, I need some chocolate.” …Also, hot tip: I didn’t have quite enough cocoa for the recipe, so Peter suggested I top up the amount by adding Americano-style coffee powder. My God did that work out well. (I just had one with nothing but sour cream on it, and it was fabulous.) Give it a shot.

*Yes, we’re having one at the moment. Go take advantage if you like.

January 29, 2017

Current events Politics science fiction Space

“A whither and a whence”

by Diane Duane January 6, 2017

People who follow my Twitter feed know that it’s pretty eclectic, but there are some themes that repeat besides science fiction and fantasy: art (especially lithography, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and the art of children’s books), transport (especially trains), the news and the follies and pratfalls of those in it, and science (particularly astronomy) and space. Those with eyes to see will have been noticing that I’ve been spending more time than usual “in” space of late.

This is because the news — both the US and European political news — has been driving me up the wall. I keep feeling the urge to turn my attention to space, where at least people seem to be doing their jobs (and matter-of-factly keeping themselves and one another alive in a hostile and unforgiving environment which, given half a chance, would kill them).

I caught myself at this the other day and at the same time found a dim memory of a phrase emerging from the background noise and submerging again, emerging and submerging: something about getting out of the hothouse atmosphere of desperate politics and into cooler air… Finally today, while watching Peggy Whitson spacewalking to install new batteries on the ISS, the phrase “a breather on deck” swam out of the darkness, and I went off to hunt that quote down. (I knew it was C.S. Lewis, but there’s a lot of Lewis and I couldn’t immediately remember the source.)

The quote turns out to have come from Lewis’s essay On Science Fiction. Now, there are some things in the essay that I agree with, and some that make me laugh (Lewis’s theory that the desire for science fiction might “burn itself out” in readers’ minds if there was too much of it turns out not to have been exactly on point), and some that just make me mutter Come on, Clive, get a grip. (Though the essay as a whole is positive, and he does give F&SF a nice plug.) But this passage, about what he labels “eschatological” SF, has resonances for me at the moment, and who knows? It might for someone else too.

Work of this kind gives expression to thoughts and emotions which I think it good that we should sometimes entertain. It is sobering and cathartic to remember, now and then, our collective smallness, our apparent isolation, the apparent indifference of nature, the slow biological, geological, and astronomical processes which may, in the long run, make many of our hopes (possibly some of our fears) ridiculous. If ‘memento mori’ is sauce for the individual, I do not know why the species should be spared the taste of it. Stories of this kind may explain the hardly disguised political rancor which I thought I detected in one article on science fiction. The insinuation was that those who read or wrote it were probably Fascists. What lurks behind such a hint is, I suppose, something like this. If we were all on board ship and there was trouble among the stewards, I can just conceive their chief spokesman looking with disfavor on anyone who stole away from the fierce debates in the saloon or pantry to take a breather on deck. For up there, he would taste the salt, he would see the vastness of the water, he would remember that the ship had a whither and a whence. He would remember things like fog, storms, and ice. What had seemed, in the hot, lighted rooms down below to be merely the scene for a political crisis, would appear once more as a tiny egg-shell moving rapidly through an immense darkness over an element in which man cannot live. It would not necessarily change his convictions about the rights and wrongs of the dispute down below, but it would probably show them in a new light. It could hardly fail to remind him that the stewards were taking for granted hopes more momentous than that of a rise in pay, and the passengers forgetting dangers more serious than that of having to cook and serve their own meals. Stories of the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us.

This is where I have to admit that I’ve found myself in serious need of cooling lately. I’ve gone off watching the news nearly as much as I might have done, say, this time last year… because just about every time I turn it on I see a reminder that Ireland’s nearest neighbor has politically shot itself in the foot (and keeps shooting itself in the foot, day after day) in a way that’s inevitably going to affect me personally and profoundly, and all the people around me. Or else I see that my own dear native land has fallen into the clutches of a coalition of the cruel, the venal, the selfish and the narrow-minded — people who I have trouble believing have ever been up on that deck — led (for a new and disastrously random value of “led”) by someone devoid of almost every trait you’d put on a list of the necessities for a person running a large and powerful country. The whole situation gives me the shivers, every day, over and over.

The need for activism to do something about this, and keep it in any way possible from getting any worse than it has to, couldn’t be clearer. But at the same time I keep having to take a few minutes to step up “on deck” — or into the thought of that deadly cold darkness that’s part of my workplace, at one remove — and remind myself that yes, all this is horrible; but if we’re lucky — and smart, and busy in intelligent ways, and noisy when necessary — it will pass. Yes, how it passes is at least partly up to us. Yes, doubtless the next four years (or two years, or ten years: pick your preferred ongoing political crisis) have the potential to go screamingly wrong in ways we can hardly imagine at the moment: ways that will make us stare at one screen or another again and again and go W. T. F and clutch our heads.

But in the meantime it behooves us to make sure we step up on whatever personal upper deck suits us and take a deep breath and do what’s necessary to keep ourselves on an even keel. Read a book, write a book, take a walk, binge-watch some show you love (I’ve been spending nearly as much time in Great British Bake-Off Land as I have in space), do a good deed that no one will catch you at (the perfect karmic antithesis to publicly claiming to have done good and only doing it when forced to), tell somebody you love them (assuming you really do)… and have those acts be about things going better than they are. Any system no matter how large will react to having energy applied to it; and if the energy is positive, there has to be some positive effect that flows from it. I feel certain about that, if not about much else at the moment.

Somewhere in the overlapping Venn-space between Zen and the art of the practice of the sword is a statement that “The raising of the single sword will keep the whole world in peace.” So if it gets quiet over here, and I haven’t said explicitly that it’s because of work, you can assume I’m up on deck, taking that deep breath. I won’t be gone long. I’ve got a sword and I’m not afraid to use it.*

Meanwhile, I’m taking time to enjoy the sight of a woman not all that much younger than me moseying calmly around in vacuum four hundred kilometers or so above the Earth, changing the ISS’s batteries. Some things, at least, and some people, are still working the way they should.

That’s enough certainty for me to be going on with, at least for today. Tomorrow? Like the man says, that’s another day.

*And Peter’s got a whole lot more.

January 6, 2017

Politics

The political post

by Diane Duane October 10, 2016

This was going to get written in the next week or so anyway, but something — a couple of somethings, actually — dropped into my “ask box” on Tumblr. and yesterday seemed the best time to deal with it. (Posting it here and at Facebook today for completeness’ sake.)

for the record anyone voting for Donald Trump is fucking hot flaming trash that needs to be sent to the fucking sun, but still, Clinton’s voter demographic should rethink their whole fucking pathetic liberal lives

That would then be my whole fucking pathetic liberal life we’re discussing, yes? Just so we’re clear. 🙂 Because I’m pretty sure I’m in the demographic.

I think the last time you shared a generalization of this kind with me regarding All Clinton Voters, most of my reply to you was:

But you know what? That response was a bit abrupt (though valid). Let’s try this again. Specifically, I’ll lay out a few details about this Clinton voter’s political experience and how it maps onto this particular US election, and then we’ll see about the rethinking.

I’m sixty-four this year, and this will be my twelfth US general election: I’ve voted in every one since 1972. The first of those votes happened in New York, as I’m a native New Yorker, born in Manhattan. (This could doubtless be taken as an excuse to classify me in the absence of better data as a “New York kneejerk liberal.” To which the only response necessary is that the kneejerk is the body’s shorthand for a reflex response designed to save your life when you’re in danger.) Other votes happened in Pennsylvania and in California, where I’ve lived longer (in the US) than anywhere besides New York. My last US residence was in LA, so I now vote as a Californian.

As an Irish citizen I also have a quarter century’s living and voting experience in a country with multiple political parties that are to greater or lesser extents viable at the national level. To put it mildly, it’s interesting watching the parties’ relationships shift, watching coalition governments form and fall apart, watching new parties form and old ones die. I kind of wonder (casting an eye over the present political situation in the US) whether, with an eye to its present—I hope!—near-miss with ochlocracy, it’s up to coping with that kind of institutional instability in the immediate future. I also wonder whether I’d really enjoy the spectacle of a country going through the ructions of a three- or four-party general election for the first time, still wobbling on its training wheels, while it’s also got the power to traumatically destabilize the world economy. (Again.)

But right now these are hypotheticals. I understand that you’re eager for a choice that doesn’t involve either of the main parties, that you support a third-party candidate—and that you’re angry that they have no chance to win. What I know from watching the process close up over here for some years is that truly viable and effective third parties are only built slowly and over significant periods of time. I know this is frustrating, but it’s true. If by some bizarre alternate-universe airport-novel outcome either of the present third-party candidates could be elected President in the US, they would still be incapable of successfully governing because they have no legislative support whatsoever. To be of any use once elected—assuming such an outcome was possible with the present US system of governance (and the chilly mathematics of the situation say clearly why it’s not)—such a President would need a significant portion of the House and/or Senate backing them up. Then there could be horsetrading with the two major parties… but not a second before. (A few interesting articles on this here, here and here, though in each case you want to be alert to the axe each specific writer and organ has to grind.)

You want that working third choice? Then start now. Start downticket and start backing third-party senators and representatives. With any kind of luck, and with a ton of work and persistence, by the end of your lifetime it might happen in the US. If this election cycle invariably leaves you frustrated, well, that’s the way the cookie’s crumbled this time out. Better luck with your next election. And the one after that, and the one after that.

This has to be said too: Since (unlike on this side of the water, where national/general elections are triggered at irregular intervals by other circumstances) it would’ve been plain for some time to anyone who can count that (regardless of the personalities involved) there was going to be a general election this year, I hope you were already actively canvassing and fundraising for third parties a couple/few years ago! If you weren’t, that would make it look like you’ve been just sitting around and hoping that whatever happened in the primaries would by great good luck throw up a candidate you felt comfortable with. That’s not exactly the strongest position to be coming from when opinionating about the quality / lack of quality of other people’s political choices.

That said, I have no idea what your political life looks like except from what I see on your Tumblr: so let’s give you the benefit of the doubt for the moment and move on.

Here’s a useful image to consult before I get into particulars. Some nice person has composed this “quick comparison” chart, and as far as I can tell all the attributed positions are correct. (I am not going to add cites to this or anything that follows, as I have work to do today. Got doubts about anything? Google is your friend.)

comparison

As regards the candidates: I routinely cross party lines in my voting, guided by fairly ruthless pragmatism in my choices of who I want representing me. Yes, it would be wonderful if “is this a good person” could be the only issue in one’s voting, or even the major one. But it’s not. My concerns are: Can this person do the job? Can they do it well? What do they say they want to do? What are the odds they’ll be able to do it? Are the positions they hold that I don’t like sufficiently balanced by the ones I do? (Because successful politics, the kind that actually helps the electorate, is always, always the art of compromise.) Do they have sufficient political experience to manage themselves in their new position (assuming they’re not running for re-election) and avoid being negatively exploited by the other party / their own party? Do they have the fiber / the support to carry their intentions through? Will they be good for their country, both politically and economically? Will they be able to steer it successfully in its international relationships? Will they be able to give the country’s enemies serious second thoughts about messing with them / it? (And there are a lot of other things in the balance for me as well, but those should do to start with.)

On the majority of the above counts, for me, Clinton fills the bill. (And particularly on the last one. I can just see Vladimir Putin—who has been getting increasingly brazen and shameless lately—covering his face and going OH FUCK NO at the prospect of having to deal with a President who, as SecState, is already quite familiar with his nasty wily KGB personality and his sub-rosa machinations, has dealt with them up close and personal, and now has the power she needs to make his world significantly less comfortable. Nor do I have any truck with / time for the ridiculous “hawk” narrative that the Republicans have attempted to plaster Clinton with, or any of the rest of two decades’ worth of frustrated, sheerly misogynistic, spite-fuelled propaganda. In my opinion Clinton is and remains the best-prepared candidate for this job for many decades.)

Do not imagine that I think Clinton’s perfect. She’s not. But she is unquestionably the best of the electable people on offer this year. Additionally: I left NY too soon for her to be my own senator, but I know people who had problems and sought her office’s intervention, and she was personally helpful to them because they were her constituents and she was their senator and it was her job to be helpful. (In these days when half the Senate doesn’t appear to know what its job is, this is pretty refreshing.) And her work record in the Senate is eloquent enough for me as regards her persistence and effectiveness in getting legislation handled.

Now, to other issues. For me, experience really counts. Which is why none of the other candidates make even a blip on my radar. Trump has no experience in public office whatsoever, but even if he did, he’s also (as has been obvious for a long while, especially to a significant number of my fellow New Yorkers) not really all that good at being human. (Sudden thought. Could it be that simple—that he’s one of those zip-up aliens from Doctor Who? God, it would explain a lot. Maybe even the hair.) (Sorry… sometimes it’s hard to stay out of SF-writer mode.) Anyway, as for dumping his followers in the sun? Naah. They may yet see some other light. Him, though? Don’t tempt me. (…But then again, no. I kind of like the sun. For me, consigning him to the endless dark outer cold has more appeal. I hear the region between Pluto’s orbit and the Oort Cloud is nice this time of year.)

Anyway. Stein is not an option for me either. Running for office is not the same as holding it; she has no actual experience in a political position of any kind… so from my point of view she’s already disqualified. But regardless of any position she may or may not be holding on the issues today, she’s already committed what is for me an unforgivable sin. She is a doctor who refuses to come down unequivocally in favor of vaccination. This means one of two things. (1) She either genuinely doesn’t believe in science or thinks somehow that you can cherrypick the bits of it that you like and ignore the others. This is a truly bizarre position for a doctor to take, but we’ve seen it before in the primaries in the form of at least one candidate who made it plain that being capable of brain surgery doesn’t necessarily imply that you’re otherwise rational. (A realization I had to come to grips with decades ago as a student nurse when scrubbing in on brain surgery during my med-surg rotation. Wow but some surgeons are weird.) Or—and this seems more likely to me— (2) She’s so mercenary in her vote-seeking that she’s unwilling to cleanly cut her ties to antivaxxers. For me, that’s worse in its way than not believing in science. It makes her a doctor gone rogue; a being who’s supposed to be saving lives, but is now playing politics with public-health science for her own purposes, and is therefore potentially destroying them. Her unsubstantiable mutterings about the putative influence of Big Pharma on vaccines don’t convince me in the slightest. Her repeated failure to disavow the antivax position without waffling leaves her blatantly in violation of her medical oaths, and by this failure she has irrevocably positioned herself beyond the Pale and beneath contempt.

Johnson comes off a shade better in experience terms, as he’s at least served as a state governor. But otherwise I’m left unimpressed. He wants to get rid of the minimum wage and do away with Social Security and dismantle Medicare? He wants lower taxes for the rich? He supports Citizens United? Really? Bzzt, wrong answers. (And what the hell was that thing he came out with about the Sun going out, the other week? Five billion years is a little too far down the road to kick the climate-change can! But this also speaks to his gifts [or sad lack of them] as a politician. Johnson should know by now that when you’re on the campaign trail, almost all jokes but the most harmless are off limits. And some are off limits whether you’re campaigning or not. Who remembers “In five minutes we bomb Russia”? As if this week we need any more illustrations of the dangers of the live microphone.)

So there you go; as regards the candidates I’ve said my piece. Now, with all this behind us:

You might feel tempted to suggest that I’m too old to have useful opinions in this climate—that I’m inherently part of “the establishment” and “part of the problem.” Were you to say as much, I’d be tempted to suggest—as gently as possible—that you spend a little more time making it plain to your followers in what ways you’re part of the solution. In service of that goal, you might want to consider taking a couple weeks off from the recreational substances your blog suggests you favor* while you do some serious Googling and find out how—and whether—your internal realities actually map usefully onto the external ones: and then lay out your findings for us in more than one- and two-sentence posts. Perhaps you’ve done so already? Then please point me toward it. Otherwise, if you find the time to get around to this, I’ll view the results with interest.

Finally: just a word about people “voting their consciences.” Most people do, but some do it far better than others. A good sign that you’re really voting your conscience is when you’re doing it not because it makes you feel better, but because you feel your vote is going to benefit the body politic as a whole, your countrymen as a whole, and not so much you and your feels. Sometimes this means voting directly against your own inclinations or preferences. A sign of having truly voted your conscience is that doing so leaves you feeling bruised and uneasy and not particularly satisfied except at the intellectual level. You’re the only one who can tell us how this looks for you… assuming that you choose to.

Now I have a job to do, so (having already voted) I’m going to go do that. Meanwhile, thanks for the excuse to get this written. And as a final thought: perhaps you’ll have a look at this post about the election and the younger voter, which comes (as a quote) from my old friend David Gerrold. It’s worth a read.

(And one note in closing to the folks who Tumblr-follow me: please don’t be filling up this guy’s inbox with stuff on my account. He’s got his own thinking to do. Let him get on with it in peace.)

*Disclaimer here: at one period in my post-college days I had access to unlimited amounts of marijuana, just for the asking. I smoked quite heavily for a while there until I suddenly realized that the resulting tension relief meant I was also being relieved of the tension that drove my urge to write. I immediately stopped using, and haven’t smoked weed since except for the occasional strictly social toke at a party—one hit, one fake inhale, pass it on. But anyone who thinks I don’t know how to get the best out of a bong should disabuse themselves of the idea tout suite. 🙂

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October 10, 2016

History Politics

“True Republicanism”: on slaves building the White House

by Diane Duane July 27, 2016

I see that Bill O’Reilly has taken it on himself to enlighten the present First Lady regarding her assertion that slaves built the White House. “Yes, but they were well clothed and fed,” he says. (The implication apparently being: So that’s all right, then.)

Unfortunately for O’Reilly’s thesis, First Lady Abigail Adams (who had the benefit of being actually on site at the time) doesn’t agree. From an 1800 letter to her uncle Cotton Tufts:

The effects of Slavery are visible every where; and I have amused myself from day to day in looking at the labour of 12 negroes from my window, who are employd with four small Horse Carts to remove some dirt in front of the house. the four carts are all loaded at the same time, and whilst four carry this rubish about half a mile, the remaining eight rest upon their Shovels, Two of our hardy N England men would do as much work in a day as the whole 12, but it is true Republicanism that drive the Slaves half fed, and destitute of cloathing, to labour, whilst the owner waches about Idle, tho his one Slave is all the property he can boast, Such is the case of many of the inhabitants of this place.

…Yet O’Reilly claims to have to speak up on this subject because he’s got that “history teacher” thing going on. Not very hard, apparently. What kind of history teacher can’t be bothered to check a primary source?…

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July 27, 2016

Ireland Life Politics

Marriage Equality in Ireland: Yes

by Diane Duane May 22, 2015

“…What will you do next?”

“Besides being King? Well, there was something else…” He looked at [Prince] Herewiss. “Since we don’t have to be running all over the place any more, I thought we might get married.” (The Door into Sunset, 1992)

Today the land of poets and scholars, the country with more Nobel prize winners for literature to its credit than any other on the planet, goes to the polls to vote on the proposition that its Constitution be amended to grant equality in marriage for couples of the same sex.

Since in my fiction people of the same sex have been getting married since the early 90s, it shouldn’t be hard for anyone to guess which way I’m voting.

If you’re Irish, and you’re a registered voter: please get out there today and make your opinion known.

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May 22, 2015

Current events News Politics religion

The Battle of the Invisible Friends (aka "Supreme Being Smackdown")

by Diane Duane October 12, 2008

Can things get any dumber? Don’t answer that question.

“There are millions of people around this world praying to their God — whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah — that [McCain’s] opponent wins for a variety of reasons,” Pastor Arnold Conrad said. “And, Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens.”

(eyeroll) It’s like something out of that old Ken-L-Ration jingle. “My God’s better than your God, my God’s better than yours…” I leave it to others to tease out the five or six hilarious and possibly offensive assumptions and logical fallacies underpinning the above statements. …But the whole thing factors down to: Please, God, don’t embarrass us. Is it just me, or is there something extremely wrong with that entire line of reasoning…and this guy — a clergyman — doesn’t even see it?

Also: has it genuinely never occurred to this cleric that somewhere in America there might possibly be someone praying to the very same God he’s (theoretically) praying to that the Unnamed Opponent should win? And that (to take a slightly different tack) if it turns out to happen that way, that this would — in his theology — be because of his very own God’s will, not as the result of some sublime hyperdimensional WWF match? …No, probably if that concept crept into the guy’s head, said head would explode. Was he perhaps trying to be funny? If so, FAIL.

…And here again we have this weirdness about not naming the other guy even at a distance, let alone when he’s standing six feet away. (“That one?” Tsk tsk.) I mean, surely there’s no point in not-naming even the Lone Power (click here for his version of the icon to the right) or Voldemort when they’re already sitting there waiting for you to finish speaking. Strikes me as rude.

I really, really wish I could just stop reading the news until sometime in December. (mutter) I also really wish I could email stuff like this to C.S. Lewis. Imagine the response.

October 12, 2008

Current events Europe Finance Politics

The "tulip bubble": not so bubbly? (and, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings")

by Diane Duane October 10, 2008

With the world markets doing what they’re doing at the moment, it’s no wonder that past crashes and bubbles are being discussed a lot on the Intarwebz. The Tulip Bubble in particular has been getting a lot of attention, maybe because it just seems so nuts now that we’re used to seeing financial madness mostly centered around the (mis)handling of various kinds of paper.

But here’s an interesting article that suggests maybe what happened with the tulips in 1636–7 wasn’t so crazy after all:

[…the Dutch] were rationally responding, in finest efficient-market fashion, to overlooked changes in the rules of tulip investing.

As European prices for the dramatic flowers rose in the 1630s, many burgomasters—local mayors—started to invest in the bulbs. But in the fall of 1636, the European tulip market suddenly wilted because of a crisis in Germany. German nobles were big fans of tulips and had taken to planting bulbs. But in October 1636, the Germans lost a battle to the Swedes at Wittstock. Then German peasants began to revolt. The German demand for tulips sagged, and princes began digging up their own bulbs and selling them….

The sudden glut caused prices to fall, and Dutch burgomasters began losing money. They were in a bind. Trade in tulip bulbs was conducted through futures contracts: Buyers agreed to pay a fixed price for tulip bulbs at some point in the future. With prices having fallen in the fall, leveraged burgomasters were tied into paying above-market prices for bulbs to be delivered in the spring.

Rather than take their lumps, these politically connected investors tried to change the market rules—and they succeeded.

At which point the thoughtful reader says, uh oh!!

“The present regulations suck? Oh, okay, we’ll just change the rules / deregulate!” Does this sound at all familiar?… And why am I not surprised to hear Kipling muttering in the background?

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four…

To my great delight, one of the columnists at the International Herald Tribune this week heard him too. He was writing more in the political mode… but whatever. (A couple of other commentators have picked up on “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” as well, excerpting one verse or another.) For those curious about the poem’s title: “copybook headings” were proverbs, quotations or mottoes printed in perfect handwriting at the top of each page of an exercise book / notebook. You were meant to copy them down the page to perfect your own handwriting.

This is the whole from which the excerpts come, from one of the English language’s great masters of meter…and concept.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

…A footnote to this in passing: Kipling himself was no stranger to market-based financial trouble, bad investments and bank crashes. Chapter V of his autobiography Something of Myself tells how, on his honeymoon, halfway around the world in Japan, he suddenly discovered that his own bank had crashed, and that at the height of his (early) success he was regardless now completely broke:

Here an earthquake (prophetic as it turned out) overtook us one hot break of dawn, and we fled out into the garden, where a tall cryptomeria waggled its insane head back and forth with an ‘I told you so’ expression; though not a breath was stirring. A little later I went to the Yokohama branch of my Bank on a wet forenoon to draw some of my solid wealth. Said the Manager to me: ‘Why not take more? It will be just as easy.’ I answered that I did not care to have too much cash at one time in my careless keeping, but that when I had looked over my accounts I might come again in the afternoon. I did so; but in that little space my Bank, the notice on its shut door explained, had suspended payment. (Yes, I should have done better to have invested my ‘capital’ as its London Manager had hinted.)

I returned with my news to my bride of three months and a child to be born. Except for what I had drawn that morning–the Manager had sailed as near to the wind as loyalty permitted–and the unexpended Cook vouchers, and our personal possessions in our trunks, we had nothing whatever. There was an instant Committee of Ways and Means [convened], which advanced our understanding of each other more than a cycle of solvent matrimony. Retreat–flight, if you like–was indicated. What would Cook return for the tickets, not including the price of lost dreams? ‘Every pound you’ve paid, of course,’ said Cook of Yokohama. ‘These things are all luck and–here’s your refund.’

Whew…

October 10, 2008

Politics Psychology / psychiatry

On Running your Fake Presidential Campaign

by Diane Duane October 9, 2008

Paris Hilton consults Martin Sheen.

October 9, 2008

Current events Home life Politics

Screwtape on Democracy

by Diane Duane October 3, 2008

As a US expat I have the delightful opportunity to vote by mail in national and state elections (for expats they use your last state of residence, which for me is California), and I cast my vote last week. There’s a strange satisfaction about being able to walk down to the mailbox in our local village, slide in the envelope, and walk away knowing that this particular civic duty’s been handled. And a peculiar feeling of calm settles over the weeks that follow in the runup to the first Tuesday in November in any given election year: now I can sit back and watch it all unfold, my part having been played to the last move before the really hectic and desperate ballyhoo sets in.

I got up this morning and found a phrase tickling at the back of my brain, an itch I couldn’t scratch. “Be like stalks.” It itched and itched and wouldn’t go away.

Be like stalks?? WTF?, I thought while I made the tea, and fed the cats, and cleaned up the kitchen a little, and turned on the computer, and did other morning things. The phrase kept niggling. Fortunately, the source-memory popped up before I had to sink to the level of Googling for it.

The phrase comes from here. I should have known the source would have been C.S. Lewis, who’s long served as virtual Obi-Wan to my Luke in various matters. (“What, you mean for once you’re not quoting Eddison??” I hear an ironic husband-voice mutter in the next room. To which the only possible response is, “Oh, shut up, sweetie.”)

I don’t know that the sudden irruption of the stalks-memory had anything to do with last week’s debate, or last night’s. But the core of the article, which Lewis wrote for the Guardian in 1961, expresses some sentiments that I’ve been feeling very strongly lately, and does it in language that in our semantically gun-shy times would be difficult (if not impossible) to get away with. A few passages particularly bear quoting: in them the experienced senior devil Screwtape holds forth on the technique of mass damnation for his colleagues and subordinates at the College of Tempters —

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided. The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.

The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don’t mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”

…There’s more, and it’s worth reading. But it resolves to this, where Screwtape says:

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.* Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.

…So there’s that phrase. Screwtape closes this arc of discussion with a broad policy statement:

We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of that word, the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that “democracy” in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being Like Folks, Togetherness) is the fittest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.

For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be.

…Whew! I seriously wonder if the Guardian would be willing to publish that article these days. (Then again, they might. But I doubt it would ever turn up in the Times of London, for reasons of its ownership’s political polarity.)

Anyway. That itch is scratched. Now back to work…. (BTW, The Screwtape Letters is being developed as a film at the moment. Boy, would I love to see that screenplay.)

*A strange echo here, for me, to the spot in The Incredibles (it was on here last night) where the former Buddy, now the faux-superhero Syndrome, snarls, “And when everybody’s special… nobody will be.”

October 3, 2008

Current events Europe News Politics

Moneychangers in the temple (shock! horror!)

by Diane Duane September 26, 2008

Oh dear. Yesterday the Archbishops of Canterbury and York condemned London-based brokers who indulged in short selling as “bank robbers and asset strippers” and accused them of “generating unimaginable wealth … by equally unimaginable levels of fiction”.

But now it turns out that the Church of England has been quite willing to sell short and hedge currencies when doing so suited its purposes.

Tsk, tsk. Looks like the fiction isn’t entirely localized. (Someone will mention “whited sepulchres” fairly soon, I’m sure.) These guys should really find out what their financial managers are doing before issuing these pronouncements.

(A Pythonesque touch here: the FT also reports that the CoE “[has] £5.6bn under management, mostly in a mix of equity, property and vast tracts of land.”)

September 26, 2008

Film and TV Politics

Senator Barack Obama meets President Jed Bartlet

by Diane Duane September 22, 2008

Thank you, Aaron.
[scrippet]
OBAMA
I appreciate your sense of humor, sir, but I really could use your advice.

BARTLET
Well, it seems to me your problem is a lot like the problem I had twice.

OBAMA
Which was?

BARTLET
A huge number of Americans thought I thought I was superior to them.

OBAMA
And?

BARTLET
I was.

OBAMA
I mean, how did you overcome that?

BARTLET
I won’t lie to you, being fictional was a big advantage.

OBAMA
What do you mean?

BARTLET
I’m a fictional president. You’re dreaming right now, Senator.

OBAMA
I’m asleep?

BARTLET
Yes, and you’re losing a ton of white women.

OBAMA
Yes, sir.

BARTLET
I mean tons.

OBAMA
I understand.

BARTLET
I didn’t even think there were that many white women.

OBAMA
I see the numbers, sir. What do they want from me?

BARTLET
I’ve been married to a white woman for 40 years and I still don’t know what she wants from me.

OBAMA
How did you do it?

BARTLET
Well, I say I’m sorry a lot.

OBAMA
I don’t mean your marriage, sir….
[/scrippet]

…But the meat’s in the bottom of the “interview.” Go read.

September 22, 2008

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