I do no research. Given that I’ve just written a book that revolves around two London Met police detectives, this might seem a little foolhardy. I have no real idea what detectives do with their days. So I made some guesses. I suppose that they must investigate things. I tried to imagine what that might be like. I’ve seen the same films and TV shows that you have. I’ve read the same sorts of cheap thrillers. And I know that everything is fiction. Absolutely everything. Research is its own slow fiction, a process of reassurance for the author. I don’t want reassurance. I like writing out of confusion, panic, a sense of everything being perilously close to collapse. So I try to embrace the fiction of all things.
Category: blog
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It’s More or Less in the Bag
I worry a lot. Bad things really do happen. Unexpected things. It’s smart, I think, to never be too comfortable that you fail to prepare for contingencies. But it looks like some folks are finally beginning to admit one thing: Obama is almost certainly going to get reelected. Ignore the tight race of the national polls, because it’s all about the Electoral College.
Michael Tomasky at Daily Beast lays it out, first adding up the probable outcomes for the East and Midwest, and then moving toward the Left Coast:
Let’s look at these West Coast states. Even though [late on Election Night] they’re still voting in California, obviously Obama is going to win it (55 [electoral votes]). And equally obviously, he’s going to win Washington (12) and Oregon (7), where neither side even bothered to spend a dime. Throw in Hawaii (4). Those 78 votes haul Obama up to 260. That’s something to keep in mind for election night: Whatever Obama’s number is at 10 pm Eastern, add those 78 EV’s—they’re a mortal lock, and a hefty insurance policy. If he wins Nevada (6) and Colorado (9), it’s over.
In other words, Obama can lose the big Eastern four—Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida: all of ’em!—and still be reelected.
Seriously, that’s it. I’ve been saying this for some time now, in fact, referencing Ron Brownstein’s 2009 thesis about the “Blue Wall” of states that will be safe for Obama, barring some cataclysm. In September 2010, when Rick Perry looked like a very strong contender (oops), and he and Romney were showing strength in national polls, I wrote:
If, for example, Perry’s national numbers are strong against Obama, that could be because he’s running enormous margins in states that he’d win anyway like Texas. Obama doesn’t need to win the electoral-vote-rich states like Ohio by big margins. He just needs to win them by a single vote to take their electoral votes. So let’s wait and see whether Perry and Romney are faring this well because they’re genuinely popular across the spectrum, or whether they’re just being bolstered by those states that already loathe their illegitimate, communist, Muslim, Kenyan-born president.
As with these older numbers, the current back and forth in the national polls is what keeps this looking tight. And sure, Obama could very well lose the popular vote and still pull off a victory in the Electoral College (which, while being nice for sparing us a Romney presidency, would only enrage me further at this absurd system). Folks, Obama won 365 electoral votes last time. 95 more than he needed to be elected. You think he can’t scrape that together this time around? Really?
Like I said, I know that bad things can happen. Terrorist attacks, financial crises, scandals, these could all upend everything. But given how things are and are likely to be, this is in the bag for the president. As long as he doesn’t blow it in the campaign. Which, I’d say, is the most likely doomsday scenario of all.
And that’s not very likely, is it?
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Alexander Aan and Me
Considering the maniacal focus I’ve had on the case of Alexander Aan at work, it’d be remiss of me not to deal with it on my own blog. So a quick recap.
Alexander Aan, a civil servant in West Sumatra, Indonesia, posted on Facebook his lack of belief in God and some satirical cartoons about Islam. As a result, he was beat by an angry mob, arrested for atheism, and charged with disseminating information that might incite religious hatred. He facts over two years in jail and a fine that equals about $10,600.
Here’s me, you see. Not only do I get to sit here and blog about atheism and criticize the great scam that is religion, and at worst I could be ostracized by certain segments of our culture. Those may be some pretty big and important segments! But I’m not in any immediate danger because of it.
Oh wait. I actually get paid to be an unbeliever! I work for an organization, one of the prime purposes of which is to advocate on behalf of atheism, secularism, and humanism, all the while trying to lessen the influence of religion on public life. It’s my job.
I won’t be charged with a crime for it. I likely won’t be attacked physically for it. But that’s what happened to Alexander.
Now, I’ve been beaten up before. As some readers know, I was attacked by two thugs on the street near my apartment in DC in 2010, and it was by several orders of magnitude the worst thing ever to happen to me. It was terrifying, painful, and it sent me on a spiral of fear, guilt, self-loathing, anger, and anxiety that I still work every day to recover from.
But I didn’t get attacked by an angry mob. Alexander did. I didn’t get attacked because of who I am, or what I believe, but Alexander did. When I was attacked, the perpetrators were arrested and put in jail.
But Alexander was the one arrested and put in jail. His attackers are doing just fine.
I really don’t know anything about Alexander. I wrote about the letter he sent to supporters in a kind of charming broken English, so he seems like a gentle guy. But who knows. But I put myself in his place, and I can only imagine what he’s going through. I can approach it in my own mind, but I know that the terror and anger and fear must be multiplied from my own.
So I really want you to do this small thing: sign my organization’s petition to get the White House’s attention, and please, please, please share it with as many people as possible. Nonbelievers and theists alike. It has to get to 25,000 signatures to guarantee a response. If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly progressive-minded with a social conscience, and know how to share a link and send an email. Please do that. It’s literally the least you can all do.
With that, here’s a roundup of information.
- The petition in question.
- CFI’s call to sign the petition.
- Washington Post/RNS coverage of the cause.
- My posts at Friendly Atheist on the petition, Alexander’s letter and why I think his case is important.
- A Point of Inquiry video with Michael De Dora (who has been a champion in working this case) and Chris Mooney about Alexander’s plight.
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Love’s Humble and Astounding Magic
A good friend of mine, and a fellow I’ve been honored to share the stage with for several productions, recently gained a daughter-in-law. James Keegan’s son Thomas married Alyssa Wilmoth, both of whom are good friends, former Shakespearean colleagues, and one-time Toby-sitters. James was tasked, as dads are, with delivering a toast at the wedding reception, and everyone knew to expect something very good and moving, considering James’s wit, intelligence, breadth of literary and theatrical bona fides, and power of delivery. No one expected it to be quite this good.
I asked him if I could post it here, because I thought it deserved to be heard by more folks than were actually there, that it had a resonance beyond the event for which it was intended. He said it was cool, so here it is. Thanks, James.
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As the father of the groom I wanted to say a few words on this important day in my son’s life and I wanted to welcome Alyssa into the Keegan family as I know she is welcomed also into the Lamoureux and Colwell families. I also want to thank Tom and Kathy for so warmly welcoming Thomas into the Wilmoth clan.
It is one of the wonderful truths about days like this: we are enlarged, we are more than we have been, and we have you, Alyssa, and you, Thomas, to thank for it, because you have had the good sense clearly to see and deeply to value each other’s spirits.
Thomas, I am happy to say that I have always liked you, and I still do. From the time you were a small boy you demonstrated three important traits that I have always loved in you and that I have been so pleased to see that you have retained and developed over time: the first is a willingness to enjoy life—to laugh, to have fun, to take pleasure in others—it was my own father’s greatest trait and it makes my heart sing that it has come down to you. The next trait I would call compassion, or fellow-feeling, or an innate sense of responsibility for the welfare of others and for justice. Even in preschool you were a head taller than every other kid in your class and you were always fiercely protective of your comrades, and I know that there are friends here today that would attest to your staunch loyalty and unswerving dependability over years of friendship. The final trait I would talk about here is your romantic heart, your tender heart, your imaginative and open heart. This is the trait that at the age of four, sitting on my lap on a 4th of July night in Rockford Park in Wilmington, Delaware, watching the fireworks burst overhead, caused you to look up into my face and say, “I’d like to die remembering this.” In the moment the statement was astounding to me, deeply romantic, and rather Irish as well—for there is no one like the Irish in my experience for expressing joy in terms of the poignancy of life’s precariousness.
From your father’s view, my son, these are three of your greatest character traits. And from them emanates a strength and confidence in you that I have admired and watched others admire as well. I would also observe here that you have a great vulnerability—it is what some might see as the “weakness” that makes all those strengths possible, but the idea that it is weakness is a misapprehension. As far as we have come as a society, men still learn this idea that they must not show fear, must not reveal doubt, must not acknowledge woundedness. If you can embrace this vulnerability and if you can reveal it to this marvelous woman to whom you have dedicated yourself today, it becomes ironically the greatest strength of all, I think.
Alyssa, beautiful Alyssa, how I love you and what joy it gives me to call you my daughter. I won’t even say “in-law” because you are already the daughter of my heart and “the law” seems a slight thing in comparison to that. You and I have been fortunate to have known and worked with each other even before this great love blossomed and grew between you and Thomas. How many times have we come off stage from doing a scene together and spontaneously expressed our love to one another? I believe we both meant roughly the same thing in those moments. But just so I say it, what I meant was “thank you for being passionately and completely present in the moment,” “thank you for risking the truth with me,” “thank you for putting the story we share before what you might want for yourself.” These are markers of a fine, fine actor, but to me they are very much about who you are as a person. You are talented, you are courageous, you are passionate, you are joyful and sorrowful and willing to face the fearful power of both of those sides of human life. You have a willingness to laugh and to love that is attractive to all those who know you. And I have to think it is one of the things that you and Tom identified early on in each other and that you continue to cherish. You and I know that you can on occasion fall into the trap of perfectionism and be terribly hard on yourself, but I have watched you come to terms with this too and address it not by denying it but by the much more challenging and soul-expanding response of embracing it. Finally, I always love to hear you sing because for me so much of your startling connection to the emotional force of life lived inside the present breath of the body comes through when you sing.
When I look at the two of you together here as husband and wife my heart fills to overflowing. And I think, how fortunate these two people I love are to have found one another.
Last year, as we were looking forward to this day, I was playing Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The play is about magic, particularly about the twin human magics of compassion and passion. Prospero for all his magical powers can only return to the world properly if he embraces the ordinary human magic of forgiveness that arises out of compassion, out of fellow-feeling. And though he can use his art to draw together his daughter Miranda with the shipwrecked prince Ferdinand, he cannot make the two young people fall in love—that is a magic and a mystery beyond his finally meager abilities.
It is very telling, I think, that structurally the scene in which Miranda and Ferdinand acknowledge their love for one another is at the very center of the play. Prospero is above the action and basically beside the point. He comments, but the audience is riveted on the electric magic of love that commands the stage.
The two actors who played those roles—my dear friends Miriam Donald Burrows and Patrick Midgley—are, I am pleased to say, with us today. They did beautiful work last season and I always loved watching them play that scene, and I loved to watch the audience in love with their characters’ love.
Because I knew then that this day was on the horizon, I never watched that scene without thinking of this day, without thinking of Alyssa and Tom.
In that scene those two young fictional lovers virtually wed one another by way of their own heartfelt impromptu vows. The words Prospero speaks in that moment amount to a father’s joyful observation and fervent prayer.
I thought then that those words would be fitting for this moment and I would like all of you to join me in offering them to Alyssa and Tom as a blessing on their union: In front of you there is a little bookmark favor that bears the quotation—in theater parlance, that is your side. Would you all join me now in speaking Shakespeare’s words over this pair of newlyweds, whom we so dearly cherish:
“Fair encounter
Of two most rare affections. Heavens rain grace
On that which breeds between ‘em.”
Alyssa and Tom, I have another version of that blessing for you both as well, a humbler one that hung always for my entire growing up in the kitchen of my parents, Tom’s grandfather and grandmother, Bill and Nora Keegan, as an ever-present reminder of who they were and could be to each other each day.
It is appropriate to a wedding in several other ways in that
• it is now old, and yet its sentiment is always new,
• it is borrowed (because to me it will always be theirs even as it now becomes yours),
• and it is written in blue—the color of hope, love, harmony.
It alludes to the Gospel of Matthew and to Jesus’s message that love is the way. Here is what it says:
When two fond hearts as one unite
The yoke is easy and the burden light.
In The Tempest Ferdinand and Miranda have an instantaneous recognition of one another: the girl sees the boy and says “Lord, how it moves about. ‘Tis a spirit.”
The boy sees this vision of a girl and says, “O, you wonder.”
But after that immediate recognition, which is magical indeed, as all of us who have been fortunate enough to experience it know, a deeper magic happens in that central scene of the play.
Miranda in that scene with Ferdinand sees him bearing his burden in the world and her response is the lover’s response of compassion. She asks Ferdinand to let her bear the burden for him. She tells him it won’t even seem like work to her. His reply is the reply of passion, for he tells her that whatever load he carries doesn’t seem burdensome as long as he is in her company while he bears it.
And that—that potent mix of passion and compassion—is love’s humble and astounding magic. Alyssa and Tom, that magic is yours today, and in this joyous moment, your father wishes it may always be so. Bless you both.
With that I ask you all to raise yourselves, your glasses, your hearts, and your voices. Alyssa and Thomas.
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In an email, Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who works with the CMS team at CERN wrote about the Higgs, “I personally do not want it to be standard model anything — I don’t want it to be simple or symmetric or as predicted. I want us all to have been dealt a complex hand that will send me (and all of us) in a (good) loop for a long time.
From the NYT story on the Higgs boson. I love that her attitude is “I hope science shows us we’re wrong, so we can do more science.”
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The Terribleness of Two is Apparently in the Eye of the Beholder
Daycare teacher 1, a few weeks ago:
“Toby’s being very aggressive with the other kids. He’s doing a lot of pushing, and he’s shouting at the teachers. He’s screaming ‘No!’ at everything, and refusing to do anything we ask him, shouting “I cannot!” It’s been extremely difficult, and we’re trying to work out a system to help him to change his behavior.”
Daycare teacher 2, a couple of days ago:
“Toby had a great day today! He played really hard outside today. He’s doing this thing now that’s so funny. He yells ‘no’ all the time and has this thing where he goes ‘I cannot!’ It’s so cute.”
I guess that means we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing.
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Music. Boy, I Don’t Know.
There are times (and these times grow ever more frequent) that I begin to worry about how little I know about contemporary music. I don’t just mean the crappy teeny bopper nonsense that, like some viruses, die as soon as they’re exposed to the air (although I partly mean that, as ignorance of them removes for me a common subject of derision). I’m mainly talking about quality stuff made in the past handful of years.
I’m not an old guy per se at 34, but I feel like my knowledge of new music essentially ended around the time the New Pornographers showed up. Just about every subsequent trend, fad, movement, or wave has since flown right by me.
On its own, this has not bothered me. I have so much to think about and do, that I don’t miss keeping up with popular music like I once did. In these recent years, I’ve been broadening my tastes to the more abstract (that last album I bought in full is the soundtrack to the movie Hanna by the Chemical Brothers), as I’ve begun to find the convention of verse-chorus-verse rock songs to be a kind of tired form (though it’s the form I still traffic in). I don’t mean to presume that this has just happened to the art form at this point in history, indeed I have to guess that many folks when they reach my age come to similar conclusions; that the music that might have moved them if they were 15 simply doesn’t mean as much. Somehow, it feels smaller, less, well, important.
Importance, or some sense of “meaningfulness” is probably the key for me. Life is so unbearably short, and there is so much music out there, that it can seem absurd and wasteful to chase after what might be happening in the music industry this very minute, especially when I don’t have any real understanding of jazz or Beethoven or what have you. What do I know about Eastern music forms? Opera? Almost nothing.
So, if in the sturm and drang of everyday life, with parenting, work, and all the rest, a) how can I be expected to give a damn about yet another edgy, acclaimed act or b) learn to appreciate the vast array of music forms that I’ve never been fully exposed to? I feel similarly about books: who cares what’s on the best seller list, when I haven’t read Dostoyevsky!
When I am asked if I am familiar with a current radio hit, I admit, I’m almost proud to say no. But that pride is laced with shame, shame that I’m not familiar with much else either.
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Things I Can’t Do When I’m Depressed
- Listen to music: If it’s somber or richly produced or instrumented (which is the only kind to which I’ll be inclined), it may only depress me further, or at least more deeply entrench me into the ill feeling. If it’s really good, it will further depress me by reminding me of all the music I’m not writing or recording or performing.
- Read: The solitary and silent nature of long-form reading is too fragile; it leaves too much space in my mind for self-loathing thoughts to intrude and interrupt. And what’s the point of gaining wisdom or exposing oneself to quality works of culture anyway? We’ll all be dead soon.
- Watch television or a movie: I become hyper-aware of the time that is draining away as I sit passively watching other people do things on a screen. May also serve to remind me of the acting/theatre life I left behind, and how I was never really committed enough to it to reach my potential.
- Play a game: Again, knowledge of the waste of time stings, but in a video game I may not be aware of time’s passage as much, but then more heavily regret its passing once I’m done, inevitably unfulfilled.
- Call a friend: I hate being on the phone and I never begin impromptu conversations with, well, almost anyone.
- Eat: Everything tastes a little worse, satisfies less, and leaves me with guilt for consuming unneeded, excess calories.
- Write: I only wind up making self-indulgent crap like this.
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Is it time to pull the plug on Web publishing pioneer Salon.com? (Link)
Is it time to pull the plug on Web publishing pioneer Salon.com? (Link)
It seems to me that the problem with the idea of Salon becoming a kind of news nonprofit is not only that it doesn’t have any particular locality’s focus, but that it doesn’t fill any particular need. There is no shortage of outlets for political and cultural news and opinion, and Salon has never carved out a niche that is so particular to it that its absence would at all matter to the wider journalistic world. It’s a fine website, but we can all carry on without it if we have to.
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Is 2012 Plutocracy’s Last Gasp? (Spoiler: No, it’s Not)
Gary Wills, no knee-jerk liberal he, marks this year’s election as a crucial moment for the right.
… this election year gives Republicans one of their last chances—perhaps the very last one—to put the seal on their plutocracy. They are in a race against time. A Democratic wave is rising fast, to wash away the plutocracy before it sets its features in concrete, with future help from the full (not just frequent) cooperation of the Supreme Court.
I accept the premise generally. I have said before that as dire as things might appear for the president this cycle, he nonetheless benefits from the Electoral College system and the raw fact that he has on his side the “Blue Wall” as Ron Brownstein calls it; the eighteen or so states that will absolutely vote Democratic, and the rise of demographics highly favorable to Democrats (youth and Hispanics primarily).
But I think Wills’ classification of 2012 as a do-or-don’t paradigmatic moment is a little too absolutist. Let’s begin with the main claim, that this is the GOP’s last chance to turn the U.S. into a Republican paradise. Hardly. If Obama wins, which I think is likely, yes the demographics will only continue to favor Democrats in later years. But certainly those demographics have not thus far helped the center-left since 2010.
If anything, we’ve found that the a sizable enough bloc of the voting public is sufficiently confused by Republican bullshit and fear-mongering to keep a progressive agenda from being enacted and progressive candidates from having a good shot at political office. Just look at Massachusetts. The very idea that in a regularly-timed general election that someone like Elizabeth Warren would have trouble unseating an amiable doofus squarely in the pocket of Wall Street in one of the bluest states that ever was…well, let’s just say that it’s a situation that argues that there will be plenty of work to do even if Obama and Warren eke out victories.
And as far as those lovely demographics are concerned, the whole reason that they can so heavily place their thumb on the scale is because there are so many of them, right? Which means that those groups will not always be in a minority or underclass situation in total. Naturally, as there are more of the millennials and Latinos in positions of relative affluence and power, they will themselves tend toward more plutocratic positions. Their particular version of plutocracy may not take the form of, say, conservative Christianism (and then again it might), but it would still have the basic hallmarks—a push for policy that makes the already rich and powerful more rich and powerful.
And do I even need to add that a Democratic win is by no means a non-plutocratic win by default? Indeed, the Democratic Party has plenty of centrist and center-right figures in it now due to the lunatic lurch of the GOP in recent years.
This is not even taking into account the accidents and catastrophes of history, like, for example, another global recession, terrorist attack, etc., that vaults another moneyed right-winger to power.
This is hardly plutocracy’s last gasp. And just to take a look at the flip side, a Romney win, though certainly a horrific prospect, does not keep that Blue Wall from adding bricks. The anti-Republican demographics are still expanding, and there’s nothing saying that they won’t boot President Romney if given the chance.
Big if, I know.
As a side note for my fellow atheistic readers, Wills makes clear the contours of the religionist alliance with the Romneys of the world:
The plutocrats have another tool they know how to use—religion. Not that the one percent crams our churches. But our religious leaders service causes helpful to the plutocrats. They are often supporters of war, of righteous certitude about America as an enforcer of “our values” around the world. They are also convenient opponents of the women who are part of the oncoming wave of a democratic demography. The explosion of anti-abortion laws and the opposition to workplace equality are used to placate and mobilize the religious allies of the plutocrats.
And I don’t see that changing any time soon, either.
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The Tech Press and the Truth
I was rather angered by how the tech press handled the Mike Daisey affair. They seemed to me to be dancing with glee at the prospect of having their consciences somehow cleared because the man delivering the message of the treatment of workers at Foxconn had turned out to be something of a fabulist. Daisey certainly erred when he implied that his theatrical story was documentary truth. But the tech press was way too happy that Daisey had been caught fibbing about details, which of course allowed them to entirely forget what the whole point of Daisey’s crusade was to begin with.
I couldn’t quite see why they would be so blind to such an important distinction. Daisey’s mischaracterization of his theatrical play as journalism aside, surely the tech journos would understand that in the context of theatre, of storytelling, one relays a truth without necessarily telling The Whole Truth. That’s what art does. I found it hard to believe so many in the tech press couldn’t — or wouldn’t — understand this. (Let alone Ira Glass, but that’s another thing.)
Then today I read a piece at PandoDaily by Farhad Manjoo, whose work I normally very much enjoy and find refreshing for its clarity and boldness. Manjoo has decided, long before any dialogue has been written, that the Steve Jobs biopic by Aaron Sorkin will suck. He has pre-reviewed the nonexistent film, and found it to be offensive.
Manjoo first complains that one need only look to The Social Network to see how Sorkin apparently didn’t understand what Facebook really is (a “product” and not an “idea,” which I suppose is a fair point), and took too many liberties with relationships and portrayals.
I would presume that most of you would think, well, it’s just a movie. Let him take whatever liberty he wants! You’d think that, right?
But Manjoo truly opened my eyes to the blind spot of the tech press with this section (emphasis mine):
… Sorkin has said that he was glad Mark Zuckerberg didn’t cooperate with The Social Network, because then he’d have to had to make the character more lifelike: “I feel like, had I met Mark, I would have felt a certain obligation to make the character sound like Mark, walk like Mark, all of those things,” he told New York magazine.
Sorkin also said: “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.” Seriously. Sorkin actually said that. He doesn’t care about the truth.
Hold on, this is supposed to be some kind of scoop? Is Manjoo really, seriously under the impression that he’s somehow nailed Sorkin as a fraud with this quote?
I’m appalled to think so, but it seems to be the case.
I’m almost embarrassed to have to spell this out, but perhaps it’s necessary. Movies, theatre, television, what have you; even when these things are produced with actual historical occurrences as their bases, their end goal will almost never, ever be to merely report the facts as they happened. Rather, the prime objective of artists will always be to make the best possible art, to tell the best possible story. Sometimes that will mean sticking closely to historical fact, sometimes it will mean veering sharply away from reality. But Sorkin is 100 percent correct. His fidelity is not, and should not be, to the “truth,” the facts, but to realizing something special with that particular work, a something from which its own truth emerges.
This is perhaps part of why the Daisey episode drove the tech press into a frenzy of schadenfreude. Not only were they free to use their iPhones without guilt, but they were also completely confused about what it means to tell a story versus reporting on an event. I admit it’s unfair to paint the entire tech press with this brush, but Manjoo’s piece is awfully revelatory and I think this is at least a pretty strong hypothesis.
That said, Mike Daisey did cross a line by implying his story was genuine reportage, but the truth of his play is not therefore diminished. And whatever Sorkin does with the story of Steve Jobs, it will rise or fall on its own merits. Not as a documentary about the man, but as a film with a script and actors to speak the lines.
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In Praise of Maine at the End of America
George Scialabba, reviewing Morris Berman’s final installment of a trilogy of books diagnosing the ills of our grand experiment, provides of litany of horrifying facts about the dismal state of our country’s brains, morals, priorities, and environment, and writes:
Contemplating these dreary statistics, one might well conclude that the United States is — to a distressing extent — a nation of violent, intolerant, ignorant, superstitious, passive, shallow, boorish, selfish, unhealthy, unhappy people, addicted to flickering screens, incurious about other societies and cultures, unwilling or unable to assert or even comprehend their nominal political sovereignty. Or, more simply, that America is a failure.
Oh that it were not so. And oh that America were not, if you’ll pardon the usage, too big to fail. It would be one thing if we were one nation among many that simply couldn’t get its shit together, plucky as it is. Alas, our influence and power are so enormous that our ever-fraying knot will unravel the rest of the global fabric. As our obese, sweaty Gulliver falls, he will smash many innocent Lilliputians.
This may be part of why I take such comfort newly living in Maine. I harbor a pipe dream of a northeastern secession, something like the fantasies proffered after the 2004 election when blue staters sought to leave the South and the flyovers behind, but something even more concentrated. I envisioned a great sorting-out (or as Mitt Romney might put it, a mass self-deportation), wherein a reasonable transition time is given for all the anti-intellectuals and hyper-Christians to leave the west coast and northeast region, and similarly for the more enlightened and progressive urbanites of the south, to hitch their wagons and resettle in the nation-to-be that suited them better ideologically. No more would our electoral institutions be in thrall to the over-represented bloc of southern and low-population states, no more would our Enlightened Constitution be threatened by attempts to use it to lessen the humanity of any minority group.
Blah, blah, blah, like I said, a pipe dream. But living in Maine gives me a flavor of what America ought to be. It’s not perfect, but there is a refreshing level of tolerance, politeness that is bred into people from their youth, but still manages to express itself as genuine. The politics are relatively unencumbered by stark partisan lines, people of varying (or no) religions are mostly tolerated. Indeed, Mainers even find people from Massachusetts too ill-mannered for their tastes.
So both geographically and sociologically, Maine is kind of the end of America, an oasis from it. When and if America “fails,” I suspect that I and/or my descendants will be glad we’re here. There’s something about the hardiness of Mainers that makes me suspect that whatever goes down, we’ll weather it the best of anyone in the lower 48. I have no evidence to support this other than the anecdotal, but what else can I do?
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In Which I Read the Sam Harris-Bruce Schneier Debate So You Don’t Have To
Long story short: Sam Harris said that we should specifically profile Muslims at airports, not grandmas in wheelchairs and 4-year-old girls, because if someone’s going to try to crash a plane in 2012, it’s almost certainly going to be a radicalized Muslim.
Liberals went insane, calling Harris a racist and other terrible things, atheists disowned him, and I think somewhere Gandhi cried. Harris said, okay, then let me debate it with a security expert. He nabbed security bigwig Bruce Schneier, and they had at it on Harris’s blog.
I begin this as a huge fan of Sam Harris. He has helped me find so much clarity on a enormous range of issues, that he’s something of an intellectual role model for me. Even if I disagree with him, the path he takes to his positions I find extremely admirable.
On this question in particular, I had a lot of cognitive dissonance. My cold, atheist brain said, “Oh right, that makes total sense.” My bleeding, liberal heart went, “But profiling is evil, it casts everyone in the same criminal net!” So I felt quite torn, but unlike many in the atheosphere, I was not willing to toss Harris out with the bathwater, as it were, even if he was wrong. I at no point believed that he came from a place of bigotry or racism or what have you. Others of my atheological ilk did not give him that benefit of the doubt, which I think was a mistake.
Anyway, Harris and Schneier debated at length, and it was a fascinating discussion — often prickly, but always substantive. I chose two pull-quotes that I felt encapsulated the two arguments.
From Harris:
Ordinary bank robbers and murderers are not united by an ideology that they are aggressively seeking to spread—and are spreading, in a hundred countries. They don’t have large networks of support and a larger population of people who sympathize with their basic motives, if not their methods. We do not have charitable foundations and academic departments devoted to promulgating a sympathetic understanding of bank robbery and murder.
In other words, these aren’t lone crazies who could be anybody. There is a specific population that is at the center of this crisis. And there are some people who are so obviously not of this population, that to waste time and energy and money scooping them up is absurd and probably counterproductive.
Here’s Schneier:
It doesn’t matter how effective al Qaeda leaders are at recruiting Muslims who don’t fit the profile. It doesn’t matter what the intelligence says, or who’s right and who’s wrong. By employing a simpler security system, the whole potential avenue of attack—not meeting the profile—disappears.
The wide net is necessary on a utilitarian level, not necessarily on an ideological level in service of the cause of liberal, pluralistic tolerance. Schneier also seems squeamish about profiling in that vein, but his case is technical: The simpler the system, the more bad guys we’ll catch. Sorry, grandma.
And I find that, if nothing else, very compelling. A lot of folks were trumpeting the idea that Harris had been “pwned” by Schneier, and I think that’s stupid. What Schneier did was point out that even if Harris is correct in his rationale, it didn’t make sense when applied practically to the task of weeding out malefactors.
And this is what I loved about the exchange. It wasn’t a zero-sum, one-guy-is-right-and-the-other-guy-is-an-asshole game. Harris is right: The people trying to bring down planes are radicalized Muslims. It sucks that this is true, and it may not always be true, but it is true now, and all the more pernicious because of the instructions issued to these radicals from their holy book. And Schneier is (I presume) right: A too-nuanced system of profiling turns out to be far more burdensome, expensive, and time-consuming — and therefore less effective — than the simpler system he espouses.
Hemant gets why this was such a good project:
There’s something to be said for a debate that’s not done in front of a crowd, where emotions and sentiment can get the best of the audience and the debaters end up playing to the audience instead of to each other. Here, both sides are laid out — very fairly, I believe, to Harris’ credit — and we can decide for ourselves which side makes a better case.
Exactly. I challenge my atheist and liberal friends who are hopping mad about Harris to adopt this attitude and tone, resist the knee-jerk reflex to oust him from our intellectual lives, and evaluate the claims calmly and rationally. Like he and Schneier just did. They didn’t wind up agreeing, but they also did right by the issue at hand.
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The Banal Quest for Validation
ZachsMind just posted a very thoughtful response to a post of mine from a few weeks back that seemed to get a wee bit of attention from the Tumblrsphere. The meat of my post that has been a few times bequoted is thus:
How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What constitutes a sufficient number of pageviews for a given post? The most obvious answer is that there is no line of demarcation; the act of writing is an end in itself. If I were to have a meaningful conversation with a single person, or even just have something good and substantive to say to an audience of one, would that not be enough?
That was me. Then Zach writes:
Ignoring of course the obvious irony that it takes Fidalgo a blog post about people ignoring his blog to again take notice of his blog (or is that coincidence? I never can tell…)
Oh zing.
That’s not the thoughtful part, but it is funny. Anyway, Zach’s post, which you should read in its entirety, rests on the oft-posited bit of healthy idealism that says it’s really All About the Journey:
It’s not about where we’re going, but the things that happen to us along the way. It’s not about attaining whatever goal you set for yourself or what was set forth by others. It’s about whether or not you enjoy yourself as you go, about the people you meet while traveling, and about the traveling itself. It’s not about the degree or diploma or commendation or trophy. It’s about all the little things you learned to get you to that place… .
Etcetera. Nothing wrong with this, but nothing I have not been advised before. Then Zach, recounting his own first forays into webbyness, hits me with this:
I had wanted people to recognize my gift of gab and my off the wall sense of humor and my quirky individual me-ness. I was hoping somewhere out there an unspecified number of people would naturally and unequivocally accept me for who I am, even if I never figured out just what that was. I reached out. Sometimes I was met with a handshake. Sometimes I was met with a slap on the wrist.
Yowch. That, while not intended as a barb, hit me where it hurt. Because that’s what’s really underneath all of this, right? An age-old and probably banal quest for validation, undertaken in cyberspace where one is a little more protected from the usual prejudices of the physical world (fewer people can judge me for my looks, for example, from my blog). But of course it wasn’t as simple as my fantasy would have it. It takes more than a well-intentioned quirkiness to get people’s attention and have them stamp you with the Humanity Seal of Approval.
And more to the point, it’s not smart to seek validation in this way, or in really almost any way. As I’ve been very painfully learning, if I don’t already buy my own self-worth, all the retweets in the world won’t buy it for me. Trite, but horrifyingly true.
And then Zach gets all poetic, which I totally didn’t expect.
We are all Near Earth Objects revolving and spinning around the sun and each other. Sometimes we bump into one another and that’s sometimes fantastic and sometimes that’s cataclysmic.
How many readers does it take to make this worthwhile? One. You.
It’s all gravy.
Okay okay. I get it. I haven’t digested it quite, but at least I get it.
pav alexander 