A snapshot of a time and place.
Ann Coulter thinks these folks should still be in jail, despite all evidence to the contrary, and the opinion of the District Attorney. “The odds of an innocent man being found guilty by a unanimous jury are basically nil,” says Coulter. —No footnotes are provided for this assertion
This man—who said this was a good idea—is still the leader of the Party of Lincoln in the Senate. —Moreover, he faces no tough questions over his remarks. (Or where he does his hair, for that matter.)
A large number of people feel government-sponsored racism is not necessary; that diversity in education is not a compelling state interest, and is, furthermore, insulting to minorities; and anyway, in a couple of generations this whole dominant racial majority crap will be a thing of the past, so why bother? (Myself, I agree with Barry that Ignatz hit it on the nose:
(...if you’ve got a test or series of tests that tends to suggest that white folks are disproportionately “deserving of” or “suited to” a college education, then the test clearly isn’t measuring what it ought to be measuring, because I take it as a basic truth that white folks in fact do not disproportionately deserve the good stuff that society has to offer; and correcting for that flaw in the testing system is commendable rather than invidious.)
Meanwhile, six frat members are not to be criticized by their frat for putting on blackface to look like the Jackson 5 or Louis Armstrong for an air guitar contest. —And altogether elsewhere, Sinter Klass is still beating Zwarte Pieten.
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Update! Be sure to check out the MetaFilter comments on this topic for a defense of Lott. (He wasn’t talking about segregation, you see. He’s upset about the partition of Israel, which occurred during the Truman administration. Had we voted Thurmond into office, none of this mess in the Middle East would ever have happened.)
For the record, then.
Yes, it is true that I used to get my hair cut by Joey, at—I cannot recall the name of the establishment at this time. Yes, the one on Hawthorne.
I cannot recall the amount I paid per cut off-hand, no. I tipped five dollars, though, which I think is customary.
Yes, I did at some point last year make the switch to Bishop’s, across the street. When it first opened. I do not recall the exact date, no.
Yes, I am aware that Bishop’s offers a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon while you’re waiting. For free, yes. That may have been a factor in my decision to switch, yes. But also, and I want to stress this—their cuts are cheaper in price. That would have been the primary factor, yes. Not the Pabst. I want to stress this.
I do not recall the exact amount, no. Not at this time. Not for a regular cut. I have never had my hair dyed or colored there, no. Or anywhere else. Frosted? No. Not that, either.
The last time I visited Bishop’s? I had my head shaved. Yes. Bald. They charge ten dollars for that; that amount I do recall. Since then, I maintain my hair myself with electric clippers.
Is that it? Are we done?
—via Calpundit, Daily Howler, TPM, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Think this isn’t something to take seriously? Open the can of worms and peer inside.
Cue Nelson-esque “Haw-haw.”
Since the criticism began in late November, Planned Parenthood said, its card sales have risen, prompting extra card printings. The organization also is selling T-shirts with the words “Choice on Earth.” —via CNN.
It’s an ill wind blows no one any good.
moneylenders : temple :: scoundrels : ?
So I read a squib in the Mercury about how Eugene’s city council had passed a resolution condemning the USA PATRIOT Act—excuse me, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act—but how Portland’s council hasn’t yet said boo on the subject, despite an active Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a burgeoning petition, and a resolution ready to go at a moment’s notice.
I resolved, therefore, to write a letter to my council members. Should fellow Portlanders feel so inclined, well, you can reach Mayor Katz and Erik Sten via email; James Francesconi has a website, but no email links, so it’s an old-fashioned fax for him (503.823.3017), and though Dan Saltzman has a form-mail page (ooh!), his .cgi thingie hiccupped when I tried to paste my letter in, so it’s a fax for him, too (503.823.3036).
Fun fact learned while browsing for some background: the ACLU thinks Oregon’s laudable state laws limiting police actions as regards people who are under no suspicion of having committed a crime are targeted for a hit in the 2003 legislative session, thanks to a vengeful Attorney General Ashcroft. These laws were passed to prevent past abuses from ever occurring again. We should maybe keep our eyes open and our ears to the ground on this one…
(Don’t live in Portland? Want to get your local city council in on the fun and games? It’s easy! Head on over to the national Bill of Rights Defense Committee website, find out if your city’s got a committee going, and if not, get right on it!)
Anyway. The letter, amended with some links:
Last year, when Portland police refused to participate in the mass interrogations of Muslim men, I was proud to be a Portlander. This city had taken a stand for the Bill of Rights, remembering that they are rights accorded to all Americans regardless of race, creed, or religion, and not merely platitudes to be discarded when they become inconvenient. And we held firm to that stand, despite the insults and invective of others around the country who, motivated by a very real fear, had forgotten this basic truth.
I am asking you to make me proud of Portland again.
Cities all over the country have with the help of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee have passed resolutions calling for the repeal in whole or in part of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, and Executive Orders that infringe on our constitutional rights. The USA PATRIOT Act, while passed with doubtless the best of intentions to keep Americans safe in what suddenly seemed to be a much more dangerous world, is nonetheless a hastily drafted, ill-conceived piece of legislation. Legal scholars and civil rights groups are nigh-unanimous in their denunciation of the law. Members of Congress admit that they had not enough time to read and study the bill before voting in favor of it. Some of its more extreme measures have faced judicial challenge and failed, utterly, most notably in the recent ruling that allows Jose Padilla a chance to confer with his lawyers.
But other, equally dangerous provisions have withstood judicial scrutiny, such as the alarming decision to allow warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in the name of protecting us from terrorism. And we cannot afford to wait for all of the various provisions of the law and the Executive Actions it rationalizes to wend their way through the courts. We are told that we can trust our current government not to abuse these powers, but this is not acceptable. It only takes one unscrupulous person to undo the best intentions our government may have for our safety, and no matter how much we may trust our current government, we cannot say the same for future administrations that would have these powers at their disposal. We must let Congress and the President know that this law must be repealed. The actions of those who would protect us must be returned to the bounds of our constitution.
To that end, 17 towns and cities throughout the country, from Berkeley, Calif. to Burlington, Vermont to Eugene, just down the highway, have passed resolutions condemning the USA PATRIOT Act and calling for its repeal in whole or in part. I read with interest Mike Harrison’s comments in the 5 December Portland Mercury, in which he ponders what effect such a resolution could have. Make no mistake: such a resolution would largely be a symbolic act. But such symbols are vital. Portland’s decision not to aid the Justice Department in its interrogation had some measurable impact in protecting the rights of Portland’s Muslims from unwarranted interrogations, but it was far more important as a symbol that prompted other cities to follow our lead. Americans in every state are coming to realize how troubling this act is, and the acts performed and contemplated under its aegis. We are looking to voice our concerns in any way we can. Please, help us. Please take up this cause. Craft and pass a resolution condemning this law and defending our Bill of Rights, and add Portland’s name to this list.
Make us proud of Portland—and our country—again.
Spitting in his coffee.
Back a few years ago, before Rush started going deaf and went away and then stopped going deaf and came back, a friend of mine was working in an office near another office where the radio was tuned to Rush’s show. And the people in that other office would listen and laugh and share the better bits back and forth and “Oh, yeah” and “That’s telling ’im” along with him (and I should probably interrupt this ghastly stereotype of an office full of dittoheads and allow as how my own mother listens to him, or did, for a while, because she thought he was funny), and anyway for my friend this was a constant, low-level irritant, as he walked the halls between that office and his own. “He’s just—always there,” my friend would say. “He’s this smugly arrogant, smooth-talking, oily twit, bombasting away in the background with that pompous voice, and he’s there in your day and in your space making your life that much more unpleasant. But you can’t touch him. You can’t tell him to shut up and you can’t call him on his shit and you can’t argue with him. He’s just—there.” And he’d sigh and glower off in the middle distance somewhere. “You just can’t touch him,” he’d say, his hands rising up, fingers curled in a dramatic impotence. And then he’d get this look on his face. “You can’t trip him when he’s walking down the hall. You know? You can’t even spit in his coffee.”
Well, actually, you can. It just takes a little work.
Cold hands, and a winterscape.
So I was up late last night what with one thing and another and I finally crawled into bed at half past one the next morning. The cat was grumpy but he should understand when I come to bed at that time of night I’m going to shake the blankets out and he’s just going to have to deal.
Jenn was still drawing. (Actually, speaking technically, I think she was applying a texture from a Yoshitoshi woodblock print, but technically it was drawing.) Garbage was on the stereo.
Sometime later I halfway wake up. She’s crawling into bed. Her feet are cold and she shoves them up against mine to warm them which is maybe why I halfway wake up. Her fingers are cold, too. (She’ll tell you it’s because there’s a hole in the wall of her studio where the electric space heater used to be and so she gets this fearsome draft, but really, the woman has poor circulation. Ask anyone who’s shaken her hand.) I manage to find the clock and hit the glowbar: it’s 3:37 in the morning. The cat is on the pillow by my head, so this wakes him up. He lets me know he’s grumpy. Dammit.
This is what she goes through to put up new panels of Dicebox.
In addition to which, she’s also got a piece in a First Thursday group show. That’d be tonight, it being First Thursday and all. (Which I realize is short notice and I’d have maybe said something sooner but I just found out it was tonight and not a month from now or so this morning as I was putting on my jacket.) So if you live in Portland and you’re at all curious then I recommend you make your way down to PushDot, at 833 Northwest 14th Avenue, there in the Pearl; we’ll be there ourselves at some point or another from time to time.
But if you can’t make it; if you’re in another state or unforgivably busy or some such excuse, well, I’m telling you, it’s more impressive in person, but if you just can’t make it, we’ll understand; we’ll try to understand. Here, then, is a taste of Hecate.
London and France and Bruno’s underpants.
So Bruno’s stripping.
(You don’t know from Bruno? Possibly the oldest and one-of-if-not the best daily strips on the web, originally published in the pages of the UMass Daily Collegian [Amherst] and in painstakingly hand-assembled books and now seven years’ worth online and counting [though the books are still available, yes], about the daily misgivings and peregrinations of a 20-something—no, now 30-something woman who thinks not wisely but too well, who pissed off her parents and dropped out of college and corrupted her niece and ran away to New Orleans and discovered girls and invited a circus to stay in the house of a reclusive crank and helped her fondest enemy find the love of his life and worked for a newspaper and forgot to feed her cat and travelled across country with a theatre troupe and dissed Ginger Spice and moved to Portland on a whim and fell in with a philosophy group at the Pied Cow and didn’t so much try polyamory as get involved with more than one person at once and it didn’t so much work out and she got hit by a car and she traveled across Europe and for a while there she’d been optioned by Jeremiah Chechik and she has these dreams, and all of it in gorgeous black and white, and lately she’s taken up stripping. Exotic dancing. Ecdysiasting. —Thus, Bruno.)
The thing about Bruno stripping—and yes, I see your furrowed brow; let’s drag this out in the open: there is something (inherently?) salacious about a gynephilic artist writing and drawing stories about a woman working in the sex industry; all the good intentions in the world can’t change that fact. (There’s something [inherently?] salacious about androphilic artists doing stories about shirtless Foreign Legionnaires in the Algerian desert, too.) Luckily, Chris doesn’t try to hide this salaciousness; “Me, I’m really attracted to naked women,” as he puts it in a recent journal entry. —But there’s nothing inherently wrong with this salaciousness. As most budding artists sooner or later get around to figuring out, one of art’s great, brute-force purposes is giving shape and form to inchoate desires—or, as Howard Cruse puts it in the delightfully screwball “Unfinished Pictures” (from Dancin’ Nekkid With the Angels):
Ah, for the newly-ripened sexuality of pubescence, the high-voltage horniness of youth! Yech, for the agonies of not being able to do anything about it! Artists have an advantage, though… I was thirteen when I realized I could draw dirty pictures anytime that I wanted to!
Don’t scoff. It’s a heady, potent feeling: you may not be able to control your desires, or the objects of those desires, but you can at least use words or pictures or both to effect some control over images of those objects, and those desires. It’s a damn sight better than nothing. —When done badly, of course, you end up with Victoria’s Secret commercials and Lady Death and everything else on the TV and the radio and the internet that reminds you marketers think there’s nothing cooler in this world than to sell to 13-year-old boys; when done well—in comics, at least—you end up with delightful trifles like Colleen Coover’s girly porno and Dylan Horrocks’s beautifully dirty stories and oh, I dunno, a decent chunk of early Desert Peach. So let’s make sure we’re clear on this: there’s nothing inherently wrong with salacious art.
that that’s what Chris is doing, per se.
He’s done his homework. He has an appreciation of the ironies and the cognitive dissonances; he knows something of what it feels like to have this as a job and something of what goes through your head on stage and when you don’t want to tell your boyfriend what it is you’re doing because he’s at least doing a pretty good job of faking it on paper. He isn’t (or isn’t just) playing salacious games with an object of his desire (“Me, I’m really attracted to naked women,” he says, disingenuously); he’s actively putting himself in her shoes (much as he has been the whole seven-year run thus far). It’s a more richly ambivalent incoherent text than it maybe first appears.
But more to the point: it’s only a small part of her life. —She’s been doing it for four months now, and it’s something of a part-time job; she’s also just self-published her novel and hates working in a mail room and hangs out with her friends and still forgets to feed her cat. And even moreso: we’ve seen seven years of her life so far. We’ve gotten to know Bruno like an old friend, or more importantly, a favorite character in a long-running serial. And for a variety of reasons that with hindsight we can see nudging here and there the past few months, she decided to challenge herself by trying to do this thing. Stripping. And she seems to have found something in it or about it she likes more than not. This person we know has become for the moment a stripper; this stripper is a person we know.
Think of all the strippers and hookers and sex workers, all those bit parts in all those movies and books and comics, good, bad and indifferent, all those calculating sexpots and hearts of gold with dark and violent pasts. How many of them were strippers first, and people only as afterthoughts? How many of them do you think had writers who knew or even gave a damn about what they’d done in college and the other crap jobs they’d had and the time they’d hitchhiked across the backwoods of Massachusetts and why they’d dumped their third boyfriend and the orrery they’d spent the night under and whether they still forget to feed their cat?
That, I think, is what Chris is doing with Bruno and the stripping, at least in part. Or finding himself doing. And I think that’s far more good than not.
—The reason I bring this up, though: since Chris did a lot of his research for these strips at Mary’s Club, he’s going to be doing a little giving back. He’s going to be hanging out there a week from yesterday (at this point): 11 December, from 7 till at least 9, and he’s encouraging all and sundry who are in the area and so inclined to stop by with books to be signed and dollar bills ($2 for each 3-song set at a minimum, apparently). Myself, I’ve never been to a strip club (I don’t think catching the Porcelain Twinz at Dante’s counts; that’s more of a cabaret setting). It’ll be interesting to see if my money’s where my mouth is.
Figuratively speaking. Geeze. You have such dirty minds…
A distracting thought, occasioned by having caught a repeat of first-season <em>Xena</em> on Oxygen earlier in the evening; also, an amusing <em>Buffy</em> link that involves calculus and matrix theory, courtesy the fine folks at Whedonesque.com.
The phrase, “A mighty princess, forged in the heat of battle,” is probably going to end up being one of the most important contributions of the ’90s to our on-going popular culture.
And, as promised: Vampire Population Ecology.
Taking a bullet.
The highly recommended CalPundit put his money where his mouth was on the whole cocooning thing, the echo chamber stuff, and spent 40 minutes he’ll never get back listening to Rush.
It’s a good thing he did. Those who doubt the vast right-wing conspiracy alluded to by Gore (if Krauthammer says I’m crazy, I don’t ever want to be sane!) should note how Rush has picked up on those unbelievable lucky duckies from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. (Paul Krugman lays out some more of the possible logic behind this bizarre assertion that’s seeking traction in the echo chamber: the man behind the curtain is letting his velvet glove slip. —Thanks to Kevin Moore for reminding me to check in with Krugman.) —Following Kevin Drum’s selfless example, then, I held my nose and plunged into rushlimbaugh.com, and saw the numbers game they’re stacking up to follow in the wake of lucky duckies—and it’s not so bizarre, anymore. It’s scary. They’re serious.
Christ. I’m thinking about the anthropic principle and Buffy and Robin Wood, I want to finally get started writing about web comics, which is one of the other purposes of this blog-thing, I want to think about Jo Maguire and Ysabeau and the City of fucking Roses and the crew of the Catalina de Erauso, and this comes along. I’m lazy and tired and no good with numbers and worse with policy—I’m a propagandistic hack, ladies and gentlemen, a glib farceur who can turn a phrase with a twinkle in my eye and a snort up my sleeve. —I can spot a number of places where holes can easily be kicked in this chimerical nest of deeply disingenuous nastiness: note the vague language with which the supposed canard all wealth is inherited is supposedly overturned: “Most of the rich have earned their wealth… Looking at the Fortune 400, quite a few even of the very richest people came from a standing start, while others inherited a small business and turned it into a giant corporation.” (Emphasis added to flag turns of phrase which really ought to be more specifically defined before taken at all seriously.) Payroll taxes are utterly left out of the equations, as they have been ever since the lucky duckies were first drafted. The enormous (and growing) disparity in wealth between the top 1% and the bottom 50% isn’t even mentioned, except in passing, alluded to as if it’s a falsehood we’ve already dispensed with. Stretching the numbers to include the top 50% is a stroke of necessary genius; it allows Rush to reach the vast majority of his audience, and coddle them into thinking they’re rich, they’re targetted by the Democrats, when in fact the Bush tax cuts would barely touch them, and will end up torching public services they depend on—this isn’t a sincere disagreement due to differing views of human nature and a just society; Rush is shafting his own audience of loyal dittoheads and laughing at them the whole time, and—!
But I’m tired. I’m tired of the rank, thug-eyed hypocrisy, I’m tired of the greed no longer even cloaked in a token veil, I’m tired of watching the Mayberry Machiavellis breeze by with a wink and a nod while blowdried newsbots give them hummers in the backs of limousines for exclusive pre-processed infonuggets. I’m tired of the cranky, mean and spiteful things they make me want to say. I’m tired of yelling at headlines and ducking the mid-40s on the cable channels, where the 24-hour news networks hang out. I’m tired of the clench in my jaw and the ache in my fingers and the fizzing anger at the base of my skull and thumping through my veins and even though I know there’s a good fight to be fought, I—
I start whingeing on about myself instead of looking for more. Goddamn. Links.
Anyway. —This is maybe why I at least tend to cocoon. More often than not. Rage and fear, and the Spouse gets worried about the blood pressure.
But if anybody out there has the numbers and a sharp piece of logic, and the time and anger-management skills, could you please fisk this tax-the-duckies bullshit into the oblivion it deserves? —I could use some decent talking points. If I’m going to go pick fights and all.
(“Most people have a particularly strong tendency to ignore views that they disagree with and are presented rudely.” Heh. I can’t even get that one right.)
Sousveillance redux.
This essentially humorous column by Matt Smith has been taken quasi-seriously by John Gilmore and is kicking up a ruckus among the usual suspects. —Myself, I think one participant nailed it when he pointed out that the profound discomfort people are feeling at the idea of posting Poindexter’s personal information is precisely the point.
In related news, Salon has managed to interview a number of computer scientists who, facing the prospect of fat DARPA contracts, nonetheless manage to see some merit in the idea of a Total Information Awareness program. (It’s premium content, so if you don’t have a subscription, click through the little Mercedes commercial for your free daily pass.)
Jeffrey “Frankly, I don’t see any other way for us to survive as a civilization” Ullman, a database expert from Stanford, wrote a rambling piece on Islamic fascists and fundamentalists and warring on terror in the days after 911, including the difference between terrorism and state-sanctioned warfare (terrorists can’t parade their weaponry, a la missiles trooped up and down Red Square back in the day) and a story about the time Osama bin Laden’s nephew dissed his nephew at some toney Eastern college. Salon nipped this quote as a rallying cry of the pro-TIA faction:
Modern technology has given criminals and terrorists many new and deadly options. Just about the only defensive weapon to come out of the developments of the past 50 years is information technology: our ability to learn electronically what evils are being planned. If we use it wisely, we can keep our personal freedom, yet use information effectively against its enemies.
Sounds breathtaking, doesn’t it. We can learn what evils are being planned.
Well, no. We can create massive databases of seemingly trivial information and use it to search for patterns and act or not act on what we find. But how do we know what patterns presage evil? How do we differentiate them from ordinary, everyday activities that fit the (ominously unspecified) pattern? How do we deal with the innocent lives that will be disrupted and possibly ruined by false positives? —There will be false positives. To quote some sobering numbers from Bobby Gladd, a statistician who’s kicked up a ruckus about false positives in the War on Drugs: a pipe-dream TIA that’s 99.9% accurate would still finger 240,000 innocent people. Surely a little disruption in our everyday lives is worth preventing another tragedy, supporters will say; this logic would also have us ban automobiles. More to the point: think of the waste of time and effort on the part of the good folks at the Department of Homeland Security, running down false positives spat out by a clunky, unwieldy database running search algorithms we’re still in the process of, you know. Tweaking.
And hell: how do we define “evil” in the first place? Wave the hand of Potter Stewart over the whole mess and merely know it when we see it? You might want to talk to Greens, nuns and peace activists who’ve tried to catch a plane the past few months before you blithely sign off on someone else’s definition of what it is exactly we’re looking for and trying to stop.
It would be lovely, wouldn’t it? A system that could scan all this trivia and unfailingly find these patterns and bring them to our attention, protecting us from the Bad Stuff before it happens. But putting this system, with its insanely broad sweep, under the control of a secretive branch of the government with a nakedly partisan agenda and the ability to re-write the definition of the thing it’s looking for—
It’s not just un-democratic, un-American, un-free and irresponsible. It’s staggeringly stupid.
(We could, I suppose, call Poindexter, and ask him what he thinks about the abyss gazing back…)
The word for today is:
Sousveillance. —Via Plastic.
It’s a beautiful word and a timely concept and I think David Brin would approve, but I also think it’s only going to work if people come out in droves, cameras in hand, snapping away to prove the point: we have nothing to hide, and we are worried. So enough with the unreasonable, already. —Does that mean that I’ll be out there with them, digital camera in hand, doing my part to swell a trickle into droves? Well, I worry, you know, about safety in numbers and tragic misunderstandings too individuated to make the evening news and the wild-assed hair-trigger assumptions to which some of us seem too ready and willing to leap, these days. So. Um. Ask me later?
Anyway and as it is, I think these guys have a better shot at making a point without massively multiplayer civil disrespect. So jot down sousveillance and keep it in mind, but maybe pencil another word in next to it: agitprop.
Here’s your handbasket, what’s your hurry?
Today is World AIDS Day, which means those of us who like our activism wired, typed, and indirect can hook up with Link and Think. —Myself, I can think of no better one-stop links resource than MetaFilter, who’s doing one of their daily specials to get the word out. For instance, it’s where I found this sobering column from Joseph Riverson, which lays out some decidedly cold equations on what the next hundred years could look like; equations that are a staggering testament to the short-sighted, bone-headed, arrogant stupidity of which we’re capable. Makes me want to pick up a copy of And the Band Played On and start beating people about the head and shoulders with it. Various members of the Bush administration, to start...
::
update— Again via MeFi: delfuego posts a link to the first mention of AIDS on Usenet.
The truth is out there.
E, Nev. —The truth about Area 51 has finally been laid bare.
—via the irrepressible Daze Reader. (Hey. People Magazine did name Rumsfeld the sexiest Cabinet member...)
Two pennies for Potter.
So Chris Suellentrop slags Harry Potter a couple-three weeks ago, and blogging’s still in a tizzy. Lessee: Kieran Healy sorta found it interesting; Glenn Reynolds disagreed, and said Potter and George W. have a lot in common; Mark Kleiman rather effectively disagreed with Suellentrop, Healy, and Reynolds, though Healy disagreed with aspects of Kleiman’s disagreement; Barry Deutsch brought up the overarching subtext (or is that too mixed a turn of phrase?) of egalitarianism and free will versus the predetermination of one’s heritage that runs through the books; Sisyphus Shrugged thought Rowling’s pretty much put paid to the notion of predetermination; Deutsch said no, she hasn’t, dammit; Sisyphus challenged him to a duel; and Kevin Raybould thought a) the original piece was satire and b) at the expense of George W., thereby managing the neat trick of agreeing with both Suellentrop and Reynolds, albeit snarkily, and Kleiman agreed with Raybould.
Got all that?
Good.
Me, I think Suellentrop’s bit was a lightweight joke tossed off on a coffee break and, as is usual with professionally generated content on the web these days, not worthy of the amateur discussions it’s arguably sparked. Since I’m not an habitué of Slate (it crashes Mozilla 1.1 on my iBook without fail—funny, that), I first heard about it via a discussion over on Plastic, which focussed (fruitlessly, for the most part) on who’s the better moral agent, Harry Potter or Frodo (who’s stronger: Superman or the Hulk?), with a soupçon of the usual anti-intellectual refrain: “Why do all these critics have to spoil stuff by reeeeeading it? It’s just a freakin’ kids’ book!” But the Plastic discussion did call to my attention this older Slate piece, which insists the Harry Potter books are a repudiation of Thatcherism (and is as cheeky as Suellentrop’s, since it cites this essay in support—which posits Potter as a [Harold Macmillan and Iain McLeod] Tory, and Draco Malfoy as [delightfully] Harry Flashman); it also brought up this book, which argues that the Potter books glorify “that apex of class privilege, the English public school.” (Given that—as a Yank—most of my notions of English public schools involve books in which characters say things like “But just turn over for a moment, Jimmy, and let us have a look at your bottom. I’ve rather a fancy for nice bottoms,” this line of argument threatens rather rapidly to end up in places I don’t want to go.)
I just want to add two points to the Potter hootenanny: the first being something Michael Chabon said, in a Salon interview about his (fantastic) new book, Summerland, which I think gets at the resentment of Harry that simmers under Suellentrop’s fluff piece, and those who take it more seriously than not, what with the moral luck and the free will and the predestination and all. I’ll snip the relevant passage and exercise my Fair Usage rights:
I have a lot of respect for what J.K. Rowling’s done in her books. They’re very pleasurable and enjoyable, but if I had a criticism of them it would be that Harry is too good and too talented too quickly and seems to take to the idea that he’s the special one too easily. It’s always about Harry winning. That’s what he does again and again, and if he ever gets into trouble it’s not because he’s weak or ineffectual and not up to the task, it’s because his opponents are so evil, or someone betrays him so he doesn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t imagine that character because it’s not enough my own experience of childhood.
Would Harry be more likeable (or less prone to prompt such a backlash) if he were weaker? If he were to fuck up once in a while? Are his troubles never the result of his own failing, primarily? Are there always mitigating rationales and extenuating circumstances in the narrative to excuse him from (or at least temper his) self-loathing? —I don’t think the answer’s a simple, binary yes-or-no, and I think Potter-philes and -phobes could each split hairs six ways from Sunday to prove the other’s full of fewmets, but I myself am going to come provisionally down on the side of yes, but. (I still like the kid. And the books. A lot. The movies, not so much. But.)
That said, let’s wipe Harry and blood and moral luck and free will off the table for a minute. There’s a character whose absence from any discussion of Rowling’s morality is sorely felt; who must be given his due if we’re to get a handle on the bigger picture in which these choices (or predestined events) occur. I’m speaking, of course, of Severus Snape. (Sisyphus Shrugged has alluded to theories regarding the parallels between Snape and Harry; I for one can’t wait to hear them.)
Snape, then.
Oh, he’s an asshole, all right. (You can hear it in his very name: Ssssseverus Sssssnape.) He’s mean and he’s rude and he’s spiteful and unjust, and he unfairly favors the students of his own house over the others. He plays favorites and abuses his power to punish those he dislikes and he holds a baseless, irrational grudge against Harry because of a long-ago schoolboy rivalry. Snape is a Slytherin, through and through; he’d never quibble over the means to his ends, and God only knows what he did to earn that Dark Mark on his forearm.
Of course, one could as easily say he merely protects his charges from the perhaps justified but nonetheless pernicious prejudices of other houses, and that when his Slytherins disappoint him, he can be has dangerously spiteful to them as he is to Our Heroes; one could observe that Professor McGonagall is similarly unfair in the protection and advancement of her Gryffindors—if not in the same fashion, or degree, well, the crime’s still something both are guilty of.
But all this smacks of moral relativism—which, I understand, is treason in this time of war.
So what are Snape’s ends, towards which he will use any means? (Mr. Vidal wishes to remind us that “there are no ends, only means.” Mr. Vidal is being a troublemaker again—could someone kindly show him the door?) —There is in this Potterverse a fully functioning society of wizards that allows them to live their lives, exercise their powers, explore their world, interact with each other to shape and mold that society, and pass along what they’ve learned to the next generation, with safeguards in place to keep from distressing the (overwhelming) majority of lumpen Muggles (“freaking the mundanes,” as we put it in college). That society is facing a threat it only barely withstood once before: the magical power and revolutionary ideas of one Voldemort, née Tom Malvolo Riddle, who is not content to keep the wizarding world safe from Muggles’ prying eyes, but would, instead, subjugate the Muggle world to the power of the few but mighty wizards—under his enlightened rule, of course. Standing against this threat? Folks like Dumbeldore, McGonagall, Hagrid, Sirius Black—and Snape.
They have their disagreements. They argue, Snape and Sirius and Dumbeldore, and even fight over where this society of wizards should be going, and what exactly they ought to be passing on to the next generation (and how)—but they all recognize the greater good of that society; they all understand the need to maintain some sort of framework within which they can tussle over their differences.
But we haven’t really dealt with the moral relativism. After all, the argument could be made that this is merely a struggle between two ruling paradigms; over whose vision of the wizarding society will reign supreme. The only reason to like Snape by this logic is because his proximate ends—maintaining the status quo—happen to synch up with those of our nominal heroes: the pampered jock, undeserving beneficiary of dollops of moral luck, his assorted sidekicks and hangers-on, and the white-bearded patriarch sitting at this very apex of class privilege. The characters the writer wants us to like. Snape—pallid, mean, spiteful, unjust Snape—merely shines, a little, in their reflected flattering light; this is no more a sound moral basis for judgement than watery tarts handing out swords.
Luckily, John Rawls is there in the clench.
The wizarding society, as we’ve seen, is unfair. It’s unjust. You can cheat and exploit others and do the wrong thing and still get ahead (in fact, sometimes it seems you must do so, a little, to advance at all). It’s far from perfect. It is, in fact, ripe for some sort of revolution—which is just what Voldemort is offering. But: I can’t think of anyone sane who could from Rawls’s original position choose Voldemort’s ideal over the wizarding world as it is, warts and all. Voldemort is trying to destroy that world—the framework within which the others have their disagreements—but he has nothing more waiting to replace it than “Full bloods only!” and “Loyalty to me!” He doesn’t even bother to cloak his ideology in Marxist world-saving rhetoric or distract the masses with stunningly stage-managed rallies; the best he can do is some lame-ass Skull-and-Crossbones sheets-in-the-graveyard games. Initiation ceremonies for the frat-boy elite. Lucius Malfoy and Wormtail and the other Death Eaters aren’t out to save the world, or make it a better place; they’re out for their own aggrandizement and profit. —Dumbeldore and McGonagall and Hagrid and Sirius and even, young as they are, Harry and Hermione and Ron, all see however dimly that greater good. They’ve all at least given some thought to that original position, if not quite in those terms, and in their own halting, stumbling ways, are working towards their own idea of a better world for all, or most, or at least a goodly chunk. And Snape, though he might have been tempted by Voldemort in the past, sees that greater good as well. And is doing some dicedly dangerous stuff to fight for it.
(Draco? Draco Malfoy? Well, he’s still young. Kids have a hard time seeing past themselves and their immediate circumstances; coming to recognize something like that original position—if not necessarily in those terms—is a pretty good benchmark for growing up. Harry’s starting to; Draco hasn’t yet, and that’s the big difference between the two of them, I think. There’s still time for Draco. Not that I have high hopes.)
Geeze. Ramble much? I could just as easily have pointed out that Snape fulfills the role of the Honorable Villain: you know, in the comic books, when Spidey has to team up with Doc Oc so their powers combined might defeat the truly alien evil that threatens their status quo, that daily round of relatively inconsequential fisticuffs and snappy banter. “We’ve got to work together to defeat it!” “Make no mistake, Spider-fool. This changes nothing between us. We are still mortal foes!” —Actually, that’s a lousy example. But you get my meaning. Right?
And if that’s not enough, we could go back to Snape’s protective instinct, and the care he takes of his Slytherin charges, the bulwark he presents against the slings and arrows of prejudicial others—including the author, Rowling herself, who insists on describing all Slytherins as thuggish and ugly and mean, shows their every action in the worst possible light, and gives them names like Millicent Bulstrode and Severus Snape and Crabbe and Goyle and Draco frickin’ Malfoy. It’s hard not to feel at least some grudging admiration for a character willing to stand up to his own author, and who does so with such panache that she herself can’t help but recognize how perversely honorable—how queerly cool—he really is.
Aw, heck. Maybe it’s just I have a thing for redemption stories; I’m a sucker for a guy with dark hooded eyes wrestling his own worst instincts on an ill-fated quest to make some sort of amends. We don’t know even now if he’ll pull it off.
But it’s going to be one hell of a show.
—Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Alan Rickman’s a hottie.
Better late than never.
A friend from South Africa passes this bit of old news along.
Desperately seeking perspective.
It’s when you’re chuckling mordantly over an English translation of a Russian tabloid article outing (as secretly straight) one half of a Europop faux-lesbian teen idol duo (currently on the verge of a phonetic American breakthrough) that you realize—
Well, I’m not sure what. But I think in the end it’s more funny than anything else.
Accolades, and a chance to join forces with Bob Barr; also, something of a mission statement.
I don’t see this blog-thing as being a political blog necessarily. I mean, I do try to be PC (politically conscious, that is; “political correctness” is and always has been the shoddiest of straw men), and since I tend to hold more often than not that the personal is political—or was that the other way ’round?—I can’t help but write politically, even when what I’m nattering on about appears to be nothing more than what was on Buffy last night or the sound of Robyn Hitchcock’s guitar. (Or so I’d like to think.) —Cutting through the fog of hazy equivocations: I don’t intend to write primarily about politics, or political ramifications per se; for one thing, so many other people do it much better than I ever could, having as they do patience for such things as facts, reason, and rigorously constructed arguments (I have this weakness for glib misstatements, and tend to start ranting incoherently when allowed to go on too long. Ask anyone) and anyway and more to the point: I just have more fun over here in my corner as a gadfly, raconteur, and freelance paraliterary critic. So.
The political nature of the last couple of posts, then, I blame entirely on the pernicious influence of Barry and his ilk. Alas, a Blog is essential reading—and I’m not just saying that because I’ve known him for holy fuck fifteen years; his blogroll alone is worth keeping onscreen as an endless source of coffee-break–wasting diversions. (Leaving aside his voracious intellect, wicked sense of humor, and all the pretty pictures.)
From that blogroll, then, a new favorite: Jeralyn Merritt’s TalkLeft, an excellent argosy of “crime-related political and injustice news,” whether it’s riffing on what it was that Law & Order guy said, or contemplating the appalling microcosm found within Tabitha Pollack’s terribly contingent release. So, from TalkLeft: a link to the ACLU’s faxblast to President Bush that’ll let you speak out against the odiously un-American Total Information Awareness program. Join former Congressman and perennial right-wing nutcase Bob Barr in fighting the good fight for justice and freedom and the right to enjoy Mom’s apple pie in private.
See? Another descent into glib raillery. Sigh…
