On a clear day you can see the ambiguous heterotopia.
“You’re supposed to have slightly less than one-fifth of your population in families producing children,” the man with the beard and rings said, “and at the same time, slightly over a fifth of your population is frozen on welfare…” Then he nodded and made a knowing sound with m’s that seemed so absurd Bron wondered, looking at the colored stones at his ears and knuckles, if he was mentally retarded.
“Well, first,” Sam said from down the table, “there’s very little overlap between those fifths—less than a percent. Second, because credit on basic food, basic shelter, and limited transport is automatic—if you don’t have labor credit, your tokens automatically and immediately put it on the state bill—we don’t support the huge, social service organizations of investigators, interviewers, office organizers, and administrators that are the main expense of your various welfare services here.” (Bron noted even Sam’s inexhaustible affability had developed a bright edge.) “Our very efficient system costs one-tenth per person to support as your cheapest, national, inefficient and totally inadequate system here. Our only costs for housing and feeding a person on welfare is the cost of the food and rent itself, which is kept track of against the state’s credit by the same computer system that keeps track of everyone else’s purchases against his or her own labor credit. In the Satellites, it actually costs minimally less to feed and ouse a person on welfare than it does to feed and house someone living at the same credit standard who’s working, because the bookkeeping is minimally less complicated. Here, with all the hidden charges, it costs from three to ten times more. Also, we have a far higher rotation of people on welfare than Luna has, or either of the sovereign worlds. Our welfare isn’t a social class who are born on it, live on it, and die on it, reproducing half the next welfare generation along the way. Practically everyone spends some time on it. And hardly anyone more than a few years. Our people on welfare live in the same co-ops as everyone else, not separate, economic ghettos. Practically nobody’s going to have children while they’re on it. The whole thing has such a different social value, weaves into the fabric of our society in such a different way, is essentially such a different process, you can’t really call it the same thing as you have here.”
“Oh, I can.” The man fingered a gemmed ear. “Once I spent a month on Galileo; and I was on it!” But he laughed, which seemed like an efficient enough way to halt a subject made unpleasant by the demands of that insistent, earthie ignorance.
—Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton
Triton broke my brain more than any other book I ever read as a kid: I saw things differently after I read it—politics, sexuality, protagonists, sf. I read differently after I read it. And part of it was the thorny, prickly, problematic, nonexistent government of Triton and all the other Satellites, where you’re free to live under whatever system you want to vote for, or squat in the unlicensed free zones of whatever city you like—but behind it all that immutable, implacable, eminently sensible hand that invisibly takes what each might provide and in turn provides what each might need, but that also enables its agents to speak of “a” state and “a” system and to wage war on its behalf let’s not forget.
But it’s this idea of welfare, this road-not-taken over on the other side of the gulch from years of Reagan-Bush-Clinton, this road we might never have been able to take, but is nonetheless so dam’ sensible, where everyone’s given a hand up when they’re setting out regardless of etc. (and where everyone’s a stakeholder, and thus the system’s as untouchable as Social Security)—it’s this that came to mind when I read about a recent appearance on Glenn Beck’s medicine show by the Incredible paterfamilias himself, Craig T. Nelson, who in the course of a rant on how he’s sick of paying taxes for things that do not benefit him by God, said the following—
I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Did anybody help me out? No!
It’s becoming clear that the question that will define the early 21st century is this: can the white man create a sense of entitled privilege so large even he can see it?
All signs point to no.
Doughty theep.
I wonder how many pro-life national lightning rods have been murdered for their views.
A delightfully odd couple.
Ted Olson and David Boies have together filed a challenge to Proposition 8 in federal court. [via]
H8ers.
Folks, folks: California fucked it up way back on November 2. Getting mad today at a state supreme court that did the best they could with what they had is counterproductive. —I’m pretty sure the landmark 5–4 decision in Bush v. Gore wasn’t the last time a cabal of activist judges bent law and precedent all out of shape to overturn the will of the people, but I trust it proves my point?
But I take a pedant’s umbrage. Who wants to be productive? Right now, anyway? So here’s a charming little ditty from France; crank it, so long as you’re not at work sans earphones, and put the don’t-mourn-organize smile back on your face:
They will lose, on this front, anyway; it is inevitable. Doesn’t mean there won’t be setbacks here and there along the way. (So cold, so callous: a marriage forestalled, a life together deferred once more, is but a setback.) —I know! Let’s open it up to some friendly competition: how many states you think will properly recognize marriage before California gets its act back on track?
The power of love.
“As someone who has closely observed politicians for many years, what I see is the rare integrity of a politician who couldn’t rationalize his way to swearing to uphold the laws of his state and nation while breaking them.” —Rick Casey, “Mayor quits job for gay illegal immigrant he loves” [via]
Dear Rick Santelli—
Jon Stewart once spent, oh, about fifteen minutes on Crossfire:
Crossfire doesn’t exist anymore.He’s spent about eight minutes on you and CNBC.
So far.
Lights out.
I hadn’t been getting that much use out of uploading my listening data to last.fm, only a minor check-it-every-couple-of-weeks enjoyment, so as soon as I get home I’m shutting the damn thing down.
Dear Fred Hiatt:
My cat can do what George Will does for you, at a much cheaper price.
Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Rod Dreher (oh, and Ross Douthat) have been having a back-and-forth the past little while on family values; specifically, Rod Dreher’s general condemnation of unmarried mothers and fathers versus Coates’ specific family experience. And to be frank I’ve only been following the one side; I’ve little use for the Crunchy Conservative, and only so much time in my day. —But something about the most recent exchange, the last exchange, made me click through to see what Dreher had to say for himself.
Here’s the set-up, from Coates’ penultimate:
Social conservatives are interested in encouraging one model, and stigmatizing all others. I’m interested in encouraging practices and stigmatizing others. I’m interested in encouraging active involvement in your child’s school, and stigmatizing ignoring the teacher’s phone calls. I’m interested in encouraging fathers to put in as much manpower as they can summon, and stigmatizing those who walk out.
My point wasn’t that my family structure, then or now, should be held up as model. But that in families which social conservatives dismiss on paper, you can find the same values and behaviors that you’d hope to find in a nuclear/traditional family. Ross is effectively arguing that these families should be dismissed anyway—regardless of whether they hold the same practical values that social conservatives hold. Social conservatives are arguing for a world where people are stigmatized for being unmarried. I’m arguing for a world—and have argued for a world—where people are stigmatized for not performing the most elemental of duties.
And this is Dreher’s response:
It seems normal to me that you would stigmatize having sex and having babies outside of marriage, while at the same time loving and trying to help those who have babies outside of marriage—help them to do the best they have with the situation they find themselves in. That’s life. Why does trying to do the latter mean you cannot insist on the former? You don’t help someone deal with the consequences of wrongdoing by pretending that they didn’t do wrong in the first place.
Coates wants to tag the parent—wed or unwed—who slags on their basic responsibilities to their kids. Dreher wants to tag the unwed parents, period, whether or not they meet those basic responsibilities.
—When someone opens the comments under Dreher’s post by rather rudely asking how, exactly, Dreher proposes we go about stigmatizing the unwed, Dreher properly stigmatizes him. But: it’s a damn good question. After all, Dreher demands we stigmatize anyone who falls into this category, even his sterling interlocutor, for the collective good of all our children, whether or not what any particular unwed individual’s doing is working for their particular kids. And the sorts of stigma that have historically been applied have generally been such to make the already difficult task of raising kids that much the harder. —How does he propose to square the circle of stigmatizing the sinners while loving the sinner? Commenter after commenter chimes in, wanting to know.
Mealworm, I’m about to be off the blog for a while, so I will trust others here who share my perspective will be able to give you a more complete answer. I would simply point you to the story from the Gospels in which Jesus defends the woman caught in adultery from the men who were going to stone her. He reminded them of their own sin, and sent them away. But—this is crucial—he did not tell the woman she had done nothing wrong. He only said, “Go forth and sin no more.”
That’s it, right there. Uphold standards as best you can, but be as merciful as you can to those who fail them.
Which—question-ducking aside—is fine, and even dandy, but makes far more sense when applied to Coates’ standard of stigmatizing specific people who fail their specific duties, and not much sense at all when your goal is to stigmatize entire classes of people for the greater good. —The best someone who shares Dreher’s perspective can do to pick up his slack is Turmarion, who says—
The thought that occurs is that it is hard for those (even close kin) who are not actually in the family to know if a father is taking or ignoring a teacher’s call, e.g. In other words, it is much easier to promote (or stigmatize) a pattern, such as marriage, which is publicly declared, than it is to promote (or stigmatize) a complex set of interrelated behaviors which are generally not clear or obvious to outsiders.
Ah, yes. That’s it. Collective guilt is so much more efficient.
It isn’t just the willful confusion of correlation and causation that leads to the willfully silly insistence that if only you all got married, it would all be better; that willfully ignores all the countering wedlocked families, unhappy in their own ways. —It’s the moral cowardice. Dreher refuses to answer the question of how, exactly, he’d stigmatize the unwed in the specific, because he can’t face that very real consequence of what he’s demanding. He can’t be mean, and meanness is what is called for when you want someone good and stigmatized. You need a Coulter for this stuff, or a Hannity. A Dreher just can’t get his hands dirty.
The only other example of stigmatization he offers is from Peggy Noonan:
We have all had a moment when all of a sudden we looked around and thought: The world is changing, I am seeing it change. This is for me the moment when the new America began: I was at a graduation ceremony at a public high school in New Jersey. It was 1971 or 1972. One by one a stream of black-robed students walked across the stage and received their diplomas. And a pretty young girl with red hair, big under her graduation gown, walked up to receive hers. The auditorium stood up and applauded. I looked at my sister: “She’s going to have a baby.”
The girl was eight months pregnant and had had the courage to go through with her pregnancy and take her finals and finish school despite society’s disapproval.
But: Society wasn’t disapproving. It was applauding. Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother and not good for us.
But even here, there’s no actual example of stigma. Merely a desire that she not be, what, applauded? Did she do well in school? Did she have a large family there to cheer her on? What happened to her kid? Did she get the prenatal care she needed? Was she going to live with her folks, or friends, or on her own?
I mean Jesus Mary Mother of God, we don’t even know if she was already married. Just, y’know, in high school. And pregnant.
But assuming she did fit the specific argument Dreher’s supposed to be making. How would he have us stigmatize her? Not applaud so loudly? —But that’s hardly a stigma; that’s treating her just like everyone else. Should we all boo and hiss, then? Should the principal stand up and lean over the microphone and say “Go and sin no more” as she marches past? Should we just not let her cross the stage at all, make our point by absence, allusion, indirection?
How do you stigmatize the sinners without stigmatizing the sinner?
—Meanwhile, here’s a bunch of people who want to get married, who in fact did get married, but same-sex marriage is a violation of Crunchy Conservative constitutional rights or something, and so they must be stigmatized. Still. I bet he can’t bring himself to sit down with each one and tell them to their faces, no, you may not be married, it’s better that way for all the rest of us—
"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.
Sunday morning bang and whimper.
Maybe it’s just me? Probably it’s just me. But there’s something oddly—comforting is the wrong word—about the interference pattern you get when you set this story—
From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn’t we seen it all a hundred times?—the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer… And so, when it finally happened, because it was bound to happen, we all knew it was only a matter of time, we felt, in the midst of our curiosity and terror, a certain calm, the calm of familiarity, we knew what was expected of us, at such a moment.
—next to this speech—
Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist.
—and, well, no, comforted is not a word I’d use. And anyway I’m pretty much positive it’s just me left thinking of Smoky Barnable, carefully planning a ponderous trip into town for supplies, and George Mouse’s fiefdom, his city block of intertwined apartments with their chickens and goats, and over and behind it all the despair of mad Russell Eigenblick, learning he’s not in the story he thought he was, and anyway it isn’t even his story—but mostly Fred Savage, that problematic, magical kuroko, making as much of a place for himself as he can in the interstices—
Resolved:
that henceforth anyone whose argument hinges in any way upon the consideration of America as a “post-racial” society be classed with and treated as anyone prone to statements prefaced by “I’m not a racist, but.”
On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet—everywhere.
Via BLDBLG, a piece posted to Italian IndyMedia back in 2004—
I’m an Italian citizen living in Milan, in a building that was built by Immobiliare EdilNord, owned by the actual Prime Minister. I work part-time for the Pagine Utili, owned by the Prime Minister, but possibly I do have good opportunities to be contracted at a Blockbuster, the famous chain in ownership by the Prime Minister. I am since always a fan of Milan, the soccer club of the Prime Minister. I go to work in a car (seen for the first time in a commercial in Panorama, a weekly magazine owned by the Prime Minister) that I bought secondhand from an employee of the Banca Mediolanum, a bank of whom between the biggest shareholders—we see the Prime Minister. The insurance for the car is also owned by the Prime Minister and when I’m driving it happens often that I listen to some radio stations, these as well owned by the Prime Minister. While driving I see walls on which the propaganda for his political group is attached and often I see also his face friendly smiling at me. When I leave my house I first accompany my neighbor who works at the Fibanc Inversiones, owned by the Prime Minister, then I buy for my chef some newspapers and magazines also owned by—the Prime Minister. Sometimes I find traffic on my way, and to tell my colleagues about my eventual late coming I use a cellular phone of the Compagnia Telefonica Mobile that sees the Prime Minister under its shareholders. My house phone is owned by Albacom, Societé per la Telefonia fissa—from the Prime Minister.
Some afternoons I go shopping in the Supermarkets built by the Prime Minister or part of his property, where I buy products, produced, published or sponsored, by the Prime Minister. In the evening I nearly always watch the television, nowadays completely in the hands of the Prime Minister, on which the Movies (often produced by the Prime Minister) are continuously interrupted by Commercials realized by the Prime Minister’s Agenzia Pubblicitaria. And thus through Satellite I try to “get out of Italy” to see if something good is being transmitted there, but also then it happens often to find oneself confronted with Television or Publicity Networks functioning under Mediaset, owned by the Prime Minister. Distrustful and tired I do some surfing on the Internet via the Jumpy Provider, of NewMedia Investment, another property of the Prime Minister and there I find lots of declarations of the Prime Minister, nearly all against his political opponents, but also directed towards me, in which he wants to inform me that he is making laws in my exclusive interest. Every now and then I go to the cinema, to the Prime Minister’s Cinema5 chain, and often I’m aware that the Movie as well as the first coming Publicity are being produced by the Companies in ownership of the Prime Minister. Sundays I like to stay at home, to read books, of which the Publishing Company is in property by the Prime Minister—
Panta rei, everything proceeds—since some time however, I hear a lot of whispering about the Conflict of Interests in relation to our Prime Minister, and so I ask myself: why? Is there something anomalous? I don’t really understand! Could somebody help me?
Tell Tom Tildrum, Tim Toldrum’s dead.
Kali should be pleased: her little diatribe is currently no. 9 with a bullet when you google up “What is modern conservatism?”
“...Okay then. I'll need three tomatoes, a size nine-and-a-half shoehorn, a bit of string, and a small wooden spoon.”
Paul Kelleher
Yes, I’m calling to inform you that my mom died on the 24th of January.
Bank of America Estates representative
I’m sorry. Oh, it looks like she never even missed a payment. That’s too bad. Well, how are you planning to take care of her balance?
Kelleher
I’m not going to. She has no estate to speak of, but you should feel free to just go through the standard probate procedure. I’m certainly not legally obligated to pay for her.
Bank of America
You mean you’re not going to help her out?
Kelleher
I wouldn’t be helping her out—she’s dead. I’d be helping you out.
Bank of America
Oh, that’s really not the way to look at it. I know that if it were my mother, I’d pay it. That’s why we’re in the banking crisis we’re in: banks having to write off defaulted loans.
Over at Alternet, Joshua Holland wants to know why we aren’t rioting yet. Good question.
