Oh, right, I have this blog.
It would appear I am on something of a hiatus. (An hiatus? Oh, shush.)
There is work: the balloon went up at the day job, and now I have three times as many people to oversee as before. I really need to finish the ceiling in my office (those of you who’ve assisted, my thanks: it is now just under two-thirds complete. In May—or was it June?—it was one third less than it is now); winter, after all, is coming, and unceiled eaves are drafty. Having in a rash moment submitted a manuscript to a magazine for their consideration, I now feel a nagging itch to do so again; the story that presented itself as next in the queue, however, though clearly outlined on paper, refuses to budge past the opening of the second scene, such as it is. And the Spouse, in a bid to finish her current chapter by the end of October, hell or high water, has drafted me as a jackleg flat colorist, which is pleasantly tedious work, but hard on the carpal tunnel. (Basically, I’m doing stage 3 and a little of stage 4 on a couple of pages.)
So, um. Yeah. The blog-thing. You heard Derrida died, I bet? Yeah. And Superman, right?
Hey, how ’bout that election?
(Oh, don’t feel too badly. There’s emails going back weeks I need to answer, and let’s not even look at the phone calls to be returned, shall we?)
Whoa.
Pincus was one of 1,821 people arrested in police sweeps before and during the Republican convention, the largest number of arrests associated with any American major-party convention. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which unlike New York’s was marked by widespread police brutality, cops made fewer than 700 arrests.
—“Arrests at GOP Convention are Criticized,” Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Let’s not muddle this with nuance.
Once more, folks:
- Democrats depend on registering as many people to vote as possible.
- Republicans depend on preventing as many people from voting as possible.
Vinegar and honey.
The whole point of building on the nines, as slinkP will tell you, was to increase the us, and that you can’t do by walking up to them and sneering and spitting and backhanding them in the face, telling them they’re idiots, full of shit and nonsense, signifying nothing. Find the common ground—it’s always closer than you think: enemy soldiers on the front lines will forever have more in common with each other than with their own generals. Find that common ground and show them the way to us. —Anything else is chest-thumpery, sound and fury, heat without light; aggrandizing the us. Not increasing it.
But sometimes—
Here’s the Yes on 36 site—the one that’s, you know. For kids. Check its hip air of faux defiance, its commodified dissent: “I won’t be redefined.” Check the language in the Q&A on 36: “Measure 36 puts very simple wording in our State Constitution saying marriage is only between a guy and a girl.” Check how open-minded they’re trying to be: “Hopefully all Oregonians are against discrimination. But Measure 36 is only about marriage.” Check the focus of the clippings in their morgue: “Support for same-sex marriage among youth is shallow and summed up in one of the young generation’s favorite words: ‘whatever,’ Stanton says.”
(Of course, you should also check the muddled mix of rough and smooth edges, the use of white-on-grey Trebuchet, the outdated, washed-out rave flyer colors, the Gen X nostalgia-trip Fisher-Price rip in the logo, the awkwardly obvious stock photography and off-the-shelf clipart. You should meditate on why the promotional videos might only be available in Windows and RealPlayer formats. You should view the source and ask yourself what webdesigner worth their salt would use tables for something like this. But hey.)
This is honey, from a comb that’s slick and sophisticated enough. Conn Creative may be a small shop, but it’s a small New York shop, and that alone is enough to suggest this wasn’t ginned up by plucky volunteers with a passion for parttime politics. This them has a bankroll, and they’re using it in a bid to reach out and tear up Larry’s and Cshea’s marriage license, and they have the nerve to try and tell me it’s for my good—and they want so very badly to look hip while they’re doing it!
Gah. It’s the old paradox of contempt for contempt, intolerance of intolerance: I tell myself it would do no good to tell Conn Creative to sit down and be you silent, Christian; they would only stuff their ears with Leviticus and yammer “Sodom Sodom Sodom” till I gave up and went away. I tell myself it would do no good to show them the weddings that will not be stopped by this farce, and the families that will be hurt; they will swear up and down that they aren’t discriminatory, wouldn’t dream of it, that marriage is indeed threatened, oh yes, that this and this alone will save it. —I can’t find common ground with this moonshit bullshine. I have no honey to give them in return; all I have in my mouth is vinegar. All I can do is spit, and sneer. Thump my chest. Throw off some heat, no matter how dark I seem.
This amendment—if it passes—is written on tissue paper. It won’t last the decade. We will unwrite it, one way or another, and one day Larry and Cshea will once more be as married as Jenn and me, and just about everyone who ever spoke prominently in favor of 36 will shift and look away and change the subject whenever it’s brought up; if pressed, they’ll write it off as youthful exuberance, as having been caught up in the spirit of a time and a place. One or two of them might have the class to apologize for what they did, but most will just shrug: it all worked out for the best, didn’t it? You got what you wanted. Thank God it’s over and done with.
—Wouldn’t it be so much better to beat them back this year?
If this were a joke, I’d laugh, if it were funny.
The Portland Tribune has a front-page piece this week about the apparent 57% majority here in Oregon who favor Measure 36, which will amend the state constitution to define valid marriages as being only those “between one man and one woman.” The headline reads: “Voters back off from big changes.”
Sorry. Should have warned you to put your coffee down, first.
Look, there’s a sense in which this is true: for over 150 years, the Oregon constitution had language explicitly privileging whites, and retained outdated sections which set up such prohibitions that “no free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such negroes, and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the State, or employ, or harbor them.” —We ripped that language out back in 2002, with Measure 14; so, in a sense, in this one sense, Measure 36—returning, as it does, a measured dollop of discrimination and bigotry to our state constitution—can be read as voters backing away from that 2002 change.
But in every other sense. The obliteration of the legal status of thousands of marriages. The willful imposition of a majority’s bigotry, hatred, and fear on a harmless minority. The appalling ignorance with which we’re setting out to second-class our friends, our neighbors, our families. The conversion of the state certificate that seals my marriage from an implicit mark of privilege to an explicit badge of shame.
These are very big changes indeed, that 57% of the state apparently wants to visit on the rest of us.
And so, in all these other senses, the Portland Tribune ought to hang its collective head in shame at such a misleading lede.
I’ll guarandamntee you this, though: if it passes, it’ll be one hell of a lot less than 150 years before we rip this putrid amendment out. It’s gonna make your head spin, how fast we dustbin this bullshit.
Which side are you on?
Then there’s the days I think it all breaks down as easy and simple as pie:
- Democrats depend on registering as many people to vote as possible.
- Republicans depend on preventing as many people from voting as possible.
“...the first time as satire, the second as product launch.”
These guys probably thought they were being funny.
We buy Kenworth semi chassis and build SUVs on them. Shown is the Dominator model, which includes the eight rear wheels for handling those trips to Sam’s Club.
FEATURES:
- Fits under most bridge underpasses.
- The first SUV to be rated in Gallons per Mile by the EPA
- Meet interesting people while waiting in line at Interstate Weight Stations.
- When kids do the arm signal, you get to honk that really cool air horn!
- Get a big rush when your Firestone tires blow out.
- Lots of road-hugging weight for occupant protection, the ultimate in safety.
- Can seat 20. Go ahead, take the whole soccer team.
- Can tow your camper, yacht, a trailer-load of frozen pizzas, or even your house!
- Yours for under $200,000 ($100,000 for truck chassis + $100,000 standard SUV markup)
But no—they were visionaries.
POSSIBLY TOO MUCH TRUCK. LIKE THAT’S A PROBLEM.
Your eyes don’t deceive you. It’s a pickup truck. From International. Which makes it much more than a pickup truck. It’s an International®CXT—born out of the proven International 7300 severe service truck used by professionals for the most rugged applications.
So you get all the attributes of a commercial truck—but you don’t need a commercial driver’s license to drive it.*
The legendary International®DT 466 diesel engine provides up to 6 tons of hauling power.** The air-ride cab and seats provide an exceptionally smooth ride. And aspacious (sic) and well-appointed interior ensures automotive-like comfort and convenience.
The result of more than a century of leadership in the truck market, the International CXT delivers performance. In a big way
*State restrictions may apply. Talk to your local motor vehicle department.
**Tow hitch required at extra cost.
Splitter.
Joey Manley’s Graphic Novel Review has launched with, among other things, a meaty interview with Eddie Campbell; read it, even though he’s cranky, and you’ll mourn the vine-death of Egomania and The History of Humor, and despite the fact that in his laudable attempt to atomize all of art into a great amorphous cloud, he somehow staggeringly misses the point of the comics on Trajan’s column. The syllogism Campbell disparages—
- Comics are sequential art;
- Trajan’s column is sequential art; therefore
- Trajan’s column is comics
—is lousy logic, true, but it’s also made of straw. Say instead that you accept, for the sake of argument, the definition of comics as sequential art, well, look at Trajan’s column: see? How much bigger your idea of comics has become? —Campbell and McCloud are trying to do the same thing from the opposite ends of the table: grab somebody, anybody, readers and artists both, by the collar and show them that all they have to work with is one picture after another. That’s it: the only tool; the only limitation. Go! But Campbell’s trying to do it by jettisoning the word “comics” and the brightly colored longjohns overstuffed into its baggage; he wants a new name, a new movement, of graphic novelists, doing some different, other thing. And he’s not without his point, and his point is not without its sympathy. But we’re you and me both at once tenacious and fickle: once we’ve named a thing, we balk at the idea of changing that name—but that very truculence lets black-garbed stagehands work some magic by changing the thing just enough when we’re looking somewhere else. I’ve seen previous attempts to do what Eddie Campbell wants, from “comix” to “drawn books,” and while I’d never say never or not in a million years, nonetheless: my money’s on “comics.” Sad as it may seem, it’s much, much bigger than the longjohns—and it always would have been, if only we’d known how to look.
(“Manga”? Well, yeah, manga’s caught on as a term, but hey: those are Japanese comics. Different thing entirely. —Geeze, what were you expecting? Logic?)
Give me but one firm spot on which to stand—
Swiftly kicked pants for morale unite! Me, I’m still trying to scrape something together, so it’s a good thing Dylan’s on the ball. Here’s the sweet spot:
Robyn commented afterward that the strange thing about this campaign is the less you pay attention to it, the more you somehow assume it’s doing badly, that Kerry is a popsicle stick, that somehow everybody really does just buy into the blatantly painful things this administration has bungled in the past four years.
And then everytime you actually stop to consider it, to actually listen to this guy, you go:
Who the hell was it said we were down on the mat? Screw this Curse of the Bambino mindset, I don’t want to wait till next year.
I want to hear the words President John Kerry was sworn into office today, I want this country to rejoin the planet Earth, I want national forests and fuel alternatives and united allies and goddamned better health care than this corporate bleeding machine we have now.
I want terrorism to decrease because we’re aiding the Middle East instead of exploiting it, I want AIDS funding worldwide, I want couples, no matter what their chromosome tally, to be able to raise children and own houses and go to work without being terrified it will all be taken away.
I want to stop seeing blocks of red and blue, I want a conservative party whose causes I respect with freedom to dissent, I want a liberal party not afraid to be exactly that, and I want moderates to bridge the gap and small parties to give us all a good sock in the nose now and then.
I want American kids to be taught to eat good food, I want schoolteachers to be paid like doctors instead of like dishwashers, I want a strong and able military but one which no longer cancerously devours billions of unnecessary dollars.
I want women to keep their hard choices about childbearing between themselves, their doctor, and their own conscience. I want my library record to be between me and my librarian, I want a working class that doesn’t sell itself out to culture war charlatans in fear, I want solid jobs that are for the good of America and not the board of executives.
Read the rest. Then go! Move the world!
Where were they then?
16 September 1968: American League President Joe Cronin fired umpires Al Salerno and Bill Valentine for trying to start an umpires’ union. Also, the Detroit Tigers whupped the Yankees 9 to 1 at Tiger Stadium. The Beatles, or at least Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, were over at Abbey Road recording “I Will.” The Amtrac Platoon in Vietnam completed Operation “Lancaster II” and began Operation “Scotland Trousdale North.” Orlando Bosch fired a bazooka on a Polish ship in Miami, and is also connected with a bomb blast on the Satrustegui in Puerto Rico; Miami later proclaimed an Orlando Bosch Day. Richard Nixon said “Sock it to me!” on Laugh-In, thereby securing his victory over Hubert Humphrey. Over on CBS, the last episode of The Andy Griffith Show was airing. And the British Royal Mail eliminated the separate rate category for inland postcards, creating a two-tiered system of first- and second-class mail. Confusion reigned, briefly.
Also, I was born. (Thanks, Mom! —I’d link to you, too, Dad, but you don’t have a web presence, and let’s face it: Mom did most of the heavy lifting.)
—16 September is also the birthdate of General Motors, Ed Begley, Jr., and England’s Henry V.
Hearts & minds,
or, The Man in Black.
I spent the bitter month of February, 1992, dressed entirely in black and canvassing door-to-door for MassPIRG. I was dressing entirely in black because I was finally starting to get over having been crushingly dumped the summer before: the sort of break-up where you find yourself on your figurative knees saying something like I love you so much that if you need me to leave I will. —Later, I found a cheery Mexican restaurant and drank too much cheap beer and staggered home singing Waterboys songs at the top of my lungs. I swore off love earnestly and loudly to whomever would listen. Now I was dressing entirely in black. How else was I to reclaim my dignity?
And I was canvassing door-to-door for MassPIRG because I hadn’t had a job in half a year. I was living in a two-bedroom apartment under a cliff in the middle of western Massachusetts nowhere with three close friends (we got up to six total for a bit there), spending entirely too much time hanging out at the UMass Science Fiction Society’s library cum offices—this despite the fact that I was in no wise a student. For a while there, I was trying to perfect my Florentine fencing with a couple lengths of PVC pipe wrapped in foam insulation and duct tape; when I went home for the holidays, I took my brother to the plumbing supply shop so we could make a pair of fresh swords and hack away at each other in the backyard. I have no idea what my parents thought of the whole situation. I spent the rest of that dour vacation hacking away on an old typewriter at a story that still hasn’t gone anywhere, patiently ignoring the doubtlessly good advice they were trying to drill through my skull.
One day after I got back I was musing aloud in the USFS library about jobs and money and the getting thereof. Someone (and I can’t recall who, but I don’t think it was the skinny guy who said he was ex-Special Forces and that we shouldn’t wake him unexpectedly if he dozed off, since he couldn’t be held responsible for what his trained reflexes would do) told me about this guy that this guy he knew knew, who could hook me up with a Situation: I’d get a car key and a piece of paper with two addresses on it in the mail. I’d then go to the first address, somewhere in Greenfield, or Northampton, say, and I’d use the key to open the door of the car I’d find parked there. I’d drive it (scrupulously under the speed limit) to the second address, in an outer borough of New York City, say, where I’d park it, take a manila envelope out of the glove compartment, put the key in its place, lock the doors, and walk away, not looking back. There’d be a sheaf of grubby bills in that envelope: enough for dinner in a restaurant and a night in a crappy hotel before training back up to Massachusetts for another work-free month or so. Until the next car key arrived in the mail. Und so weiter.
Somebody else (and I’m pretty sure it was the cute girl who was into filmmaking and pot, which is how I later came to realize that pot does absolutely nothing for me—nor her, neither, but that’s another story) told me about MassPIRG. You know: the bottle bill? Putting the people back into politics? Ralph Nader’s baby?
I ended up at MassPIRG. They were renting a room up on the second floor of an old open-court motel that had been refitted as a strip-mall, there above the pawn shop where I’d already sold my bass guitar to make rent (no great loss; I’d never made it past Peter Gunn), and they were looking for door-to-door canvassers (they’re always looking for door-to-door canvassers), so I signed up. I had a pulse, so I had a provisional job: canvassers had a couple days out on the sidewalks to make the cut. The PIRG wanted a return on their investment, you know? And I made the cut, so I had a job, my first in six months.
Which I promptly muffed.
I’d like to think when you tot it all up that I raised more money than I cost in wages, though I was goose-egging at an alarming rate toward the end, there. (So maybe if you added in overhead..?) And much as it’s easy to laugh nowadays at the follies of lovelorn drop-out me kicking my way through ice-crusted snowdrifts from one suburban Springfield door to the next in my black boots and black jeans and black turtleneck and my long black coat, it doesn’t change the fact that at the time it all hurt in some deep and ineluctable way that made knocking on strangers’ doors and telling them about such eminently worthy causes as the Reduce Reuse Recycle and Polluter Pays initiatives, asking if such public service weren’t worth twenty, forty, seventy-five bucks, all much harder than it had to be.
And there were those annoying get-to-know-you team-building goal-congruencing exercises! Oy. We had to play them every day before hitting the streets for some godawful reason (then, turnover was high): “If you could be any color, which would it be, and why?” “What’s the best thing that happened to you this week?” “What do you see yourself doing five years from now?” —Gah. I turned in my clipboard after four or five weeks and went back to sulking, thankyouverymuch.
But not before the New Hampshire primaries.
In 1992, Ralph Nader put himself up as a write-in candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the New Hampshire primaries—to make some noise, test the waters, provide an alternative, scare up a soapbox, shake things up. Nobody was thrilled with front-runner Tsongas, but none of the other Democrats seemed ready to call for the all-out revolution needed to undo the 12-year Reagan-Bush interregnum. We wanted fire; we wanted bellies; we wanted motherfuckers up against the wall. We got genteel bupkes. —Hell, Barry put himself up as a write-in from over the border in his UMass Daily Collegian comic strip and got, like, a dozen votes. Discontent was in the air. (Then again, maybe not: Mickey Mouse never actively campaigns and he regularly gets written in, so what do I know?)
So, on that fateful day, when it came time for the get-to-know-you stuff before we got in the car and drove to Springfield to hit the sidewalks (which time, it should be noted, we didn’t get paid for), whoever-it-was who was in charge of congruencing our goals eschewed the usual Barbara Walters group interview for a rousing Nader sales pitch: he’s the guy who invented PIRGs! He saved us from Detroit! He’s running a campaign against corporate interests, for the people of this country, and he needs volunteers! We were asked to sign up for a slot on the bus to go up to New Hampshire and knock on more doors to help get the word out.
Well. I didn’t sign up for a slot on the bus. And I was miffed when he dropped out of the race after posting disappointing returns in New Hampshire. But when the Massachusetts primary rolled around, I wrote him in. And by early November, it was clear Clinton was going to hammer Bush for Massachusetts’ electoral votes, and Clinton was a slick-talking centrist who damn skippy wasn’t going to be putting anybody up against any walls. So I had no qualms about writing in Nader for president again.
(Of course I voted for Nader! I was a whiny pampered guiltily liberal ivory-towered at-loose-ends young white man! Weren’t you paying attention?)
Platitudinum.
All unbeknownst, Messrs. Nielsen Hayden and Humphries are rendering my latest self-indulgence obsolete. Go: present your pants: be swiftly kicked.
Hearts & minds.
There’s a story Utah Phillips tells on one of the CDs he’s done with Ani DiFranco, about a shingle-weavers’ strike up in Everett, Washington. The Wobblies and the cops traded some gunfire and some people died on both sides and when the Wobblies got back to Seattle they were arrested and chucked into the brand new Snohomish County jail—a jail they broke, quite literally, by jumping up and down all at the same time and hollering and singing until they cracked the steel south wall. “‘Thus proving,’” says the guy who told the story to Utah, “‘everlastingly what a union is: a way to get things done together that you can’t get done alone.’”
Which is a beautiful moral and it’s something to tuck into the cockles of your heart these days so you can try to fight off the chill whether it’s unions or protest marches or the sacred and profane business of government its own damn self we’re talking about, but it’s not the moral Utah draws, and it’s not why I’m telling you in turn.
“‘Now,’” says the guy who told the story to Utah, “‘we didn’t have any intellectual life. We lived in our emotions. We were a passionate people and we were comfortable in our emotions. We made commitments to struggle, emotionally—commitments for which there are no words. But those commitments carried us through fifty, sixty years of struggle.’ Now,” says Utah, “he says, ‘You show me people who make the same commitments intellectually, and I don’t know where they’ll be next week.’”
And Utah pauses a moment, Ani’s gutbucket guitar twanging along behind him, and then he says, quietly, “Kinda stern, isn’t it.”
That’s the first thing to keep in mind. The second is this:
There was this debunker. His name escapes me. He had a shtick like Randi’s: an accomplished stage magician, he’d do the same things psychics do (only better; his cold readings put John Edward to shame, and he did some scary shit with subliminal cues) and, though he wouldn’t give away all his secrets, he’d make it clear how easy it is to pull this stuff off with trickery and sleight-of-mind and a heaping helping of the all-too-willing madness of crowds. But no magic. No psychic frippery. No hints and intimations of the paranormal at all. —He also did some stuff on the side with cult-busting and deprogramming and the like, debunking some specific flim-flammers and helping cops and psychologists pick up the pieces and I don’t know, maybe he saw one too many things; maybe he had that one bad day. Maybe that explains it.
Because between the time he did a show at Oberlin, the one Sarah saw, and the one he did at UMass, the one we all saw together, he’d converted to a rather insistent brand of Christianity. The show he’d done at Oberlin, he’d just done his debunking magic tricks. The show he’d do at UMass, he’d be spending a good half of it proselytizing. —Still, Sarah said we ought to go. He was good. Spooky good. It’d be worth it.
So we went, and he was. He did cold readings and tricks with subliminals (“queenofspades”) and this thing where people on stage wrote secrets on slips of paper that were folded up and then he was on the other side of the stage with a nurse holding his wrist so she could announce that his heart had stopped which would happen whenever the folded-up slip of paper with the right secret was held up. And he assured us all that it was trickery and fast talking, and he told us how someone could use these tricks and an audience’s credulity, its cheerful suspension of disbelief, to make her- or himself look impressive, powerful, connected, in the Know; to exploit and extort and bamboozle; he told us all how important it is to be skeptical, to be rational, to think. And then he told us how the facts recorded within the various Gospels prove the literal truth of the Resurrection—that stone, for instance, rolled in front of Jesus’s tomb, would have taken the effort of several people—people who could not have been there, that first Easter Sunday—to roll back.
He seemed—tired, as he told us this. Resigned, maybe. No: relieved. (I also seem to recall a charmingly idiosyncratic—if alarmist—interpretation of some Cure lyrics, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Anyway. That’s the second thing.
Words—
I only ever really knew him through his words, but they were good ones: they were funny, they went on both wisely and too well about things like comics and Buffy, they stood up for small things; they suffered no fools gladly, but he’d occasionally let ’em take a fool around the block and back, and if sometimes they got outraged, it’s only because he was paying attention. He paid a lot of attention; you were going to learn something whenever you let him have his say, and there’s a lot of things in this world both little and big that are the better for it.
A moment of silence, please, for Aaron Hawkins.
—And then start making more noise than ever. He was the Uppity Negro, after all.
Bushgate.
James Wolcott’s take is funnier, but the Editors are far more shrill. —Also, the Editors out-do Josh Marshall’s I-will-show-you-hardball-in-a-handful-of-dusty-paperwork hints one better, with some actual slivers of red meat.
On the other hand, last minute perusal of hithery-thithery pings brings up a pithy post from Majikthise, which will prove, I’m afraid, all too germane to, well, everything.
(Sir, I’m worried about our mood swings.)
M.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
—“Dulci et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen
Sweet and meet, motherfuckers. Sweet and meet.
Further up, further out.
Here I am, trying to get some writing done, and Ray Davis with a footnote has to go and open up a wonderful, terrible world where I can while away a Labor Day afternoon. Here’s what you’ll need to play along:
- James Tiptree, Jr.’s 1973 story, “The Women Men Don’t See”;
- Karen Joy Fowler’s 2002 story, “What I Didn’t See”;
- Maureen Kincaid Speller’s mid-August essay, “What James Didn’t See and Karen Didn’t Say”;
- and then, tripping back in time, Ray Davis’s 2002 essay on Fowler and Truesdale, “The enemy of my friend is confused; the friend of my enemy is instructive.”
Have it at. My only contribution to the mix would be the memory it stirred up, of a childhood confusion I doubt was particular to me: on hearing of all those gorilla wars on the nightly news, in Asia and South America, I would lie back and wonder whether they wore uniforms, and how on earth you trained them to hold guns.
No, wait: one more thing. Much as I love Tiptree for her steel and her skew and her sly, sharp sentences, I’ve always come at her stories warily, as if approaching something I was not meant to know. “My usual method of writing,” she said, “is to take one of those pockets in my head that is full of protest against unbearable wrong and dangle plot-strings in the saturated solution until they start coming up with plot-crystals on them.” And she had an uncanny ability to limn a rectitude that, hopelessly outgunned, stood up nonetheless howsomever it could against that unbearable wrong, and even if some of those pockets are thankfully quaintly outdated today, still: it’s hard to look a rectitude like that in the eye when you’re indisputably part of the problem. —I don’t agree with Tiptree’s gender essentialism, or her all-too-apocalyptic take on the war between the sexes; but to ascribe to her a belief in gender essentialism, or an apocalyptic war between the sexes, is deceptively reductive. She was exaggerating to prove a point, is all, and even though I’ll go on chanting “Biology is not destiny!” till my dying day, “The Screwfly Solution” is still going to wake me up now and again in a cold, cold sweat.
(Something else she said: “Listen! Listen and think, you dolt! Feel how it really is! Let me inscribe a little fable on your nose that will carry more than the words with it when you look in the mirror!”)
But some few of those pockets are outdated, quaintly, thankfully, finally. Ruth Parsons digs it up in “The Women Men Don’t See”—
“Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth.” [And I cringe; if there’s anyone in the world I don’t want to agree with, it’s Don Fenton from St. Louis.] “Women do everything men do.”
“Do they?” Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be “My Lai” and looks away. “All the endless wars …” Her voice is a whisper. “All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefield. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—” She checks and abruptly changes voice. “Forgive me, Don, it’s so stupid saying all this.”
It’s not the My Lai reference, no; if there’s anything the past few weeks have proven, it’s that My Lai is still somehow too astonishingly deep and painful for us to be honest with ourselves about it. —But: the whole world has changed. It’s been changing, it’s still changing, it will never stop, and the choice that Fowler’s narrator makes in “What I Didn’t See,” the character of Eddie, what she sees in him, that she can see it at all: ample proof that the whole world did just that. Not enough, no; not nearly enough, except in the ways it’s changed unimaginably much. (It’s hard to see how far we’ve come when we no longer see where we were.) And Lord knows this is far too Pollyannaish a reading to do much more than mark my own starting point in the complex tangle these two stories make when you set them next to each other. Rest assured, it’s not that I’m papering over the prickly price paid by Fowler’s narrator; it’s just I’m weak enough to take what comfort I can from the promise of compromise in the face of Tiptree’s unimpeachable rigor.
Especially when, as aforementioned, I’m part of her problem.
But what comfort I take is itself cold and prickly: the choice Eddie makes, the things that Fowler’s narrator did not see, open whole oceans of unbearable wrongs that have barely been glanced over in this discourse.
She checks and abruptly changes voice. “Forgive me, Don, it’s so stupid saying all this.”
“Men hate wars too, Ruth,” I say as gently as I can.
“I know.” She shrugs and climbs to her feet. “But that’s your problem, isn’t it?”
