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The WTF Network

The great thinker Voltaire went to an orgy and had a good time, but declined a follow-up invitation. He said, “Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.” That’s how I feel about watching the WTF Network.

Here’s the setup: Out on the West Coast, a colleague is fighting for a cause that’s already taken him to some extremes. Apparently, he slanted his story in a way that fits the format of a TV series called “Most Daring.” (We’ve discussed the proposition that there is no such thing as bad publicity.) So for the sake of team spirit, I decided to watch it, and even turned the TV on a bit early, and caught part of a show called “Cops.”

You will have guessed that the title up there at the top of the page is a gag. Oh, the network has a three-letter name, but they’re a different three letters. I call it the WTF Network, because the words that come to mind again and again are – “What the f***?”

Take “Cops,” for instance. I’m sitting here with a cup of tea, engaging in the spectator sport of looking at my fellow citizens being violently arrested. WTF were the people thinking, who first proposed this as entertainment? WTF causes anybody to watch this genre of television? It’s hard to imagine anyone who has actually been a victim of police brutality, wanting to see this stuff. Or the families of anyone at all who’s been in trouble with the law which, these days, is most people. If I had a son, I wouldn’t want to see a boy his age and general description being taken down by the cops.

Is any of this stuff for real? How much of it is “re-enactment”? I can’t imagine any actor, no matter how underemployed or desperate, consenting to be brutalized in the ways shown here. A large part of this has got to be real, genuine police photography.

“Cops” includes a long, Academy-quality performance by a shirtless driver who is questioned by officers at the roadside. With just a slight tweak, this old boy could be on the “Blue Collar Comedy” stage. Can this possibly be spontaneous and real? Why does this dude so tamely allow his humiliation at the hands of the law to be filmed?

Is any of this stuff, on any of these shows, spontaneous and real? Are they seriously asking us to believe it’s all real? Okay, tornadoes and stuff like that. Fine. But other stuff is impossible to have captured in the way it is shown, under any conceivable circumstances. Is it only obvious to media professionals? Maybe it’s obvious to everybody. Maybe the entire TV audience, these days, is so hip that everyone knows exactly what degree of verisimilitude to infer from any given image. Am I the only moron too unsophisticated to understand that nobody believes anything they see on TV any more, and I’m getting all excited over nothing?

Pretty soon, “Most Daring” starts up. It offers:

—- A subway riot in Buffalo, where I once lived.

— -A train/trailer truck collision that seems to have been filmed from about 99 different angles. Does a railway crossing really have that many cameras pointed at it?

—- A high-speed chase, where two truckers collaborate on blocking the fugitive from passing them. When he tries to pass on the right, they pin his car to a guardrail. Cut to cop being interviewed, later. He says, “To this day, I don’t know who they are.” Are you kidding? They just rode off, like the Lone Ranger? “Who was that masked man?” “Dunno, we’re just an agency with the ability to tap every nationwide database there is, as well as review the footage we ourselves took. How the hell should we know who those truckers were?”

—- Some pedestrian bandito leans in the window of a car stalled in traffic and steals a purse. He weaves his hazardous way through a herd of vehicles, and is chased, and so on. The amazing thing is, the footage is shot from many different directions. No single, stationary surveillance camera took all these pictures. I mention this to somebody, who assures me: Everybody has camera phones now. Okay, say there were 20 people in the area, who could spare enough attention from driving their own cars to take pictures of the crook. How did it all wind up on this show? Did the producers send out a call throughout every possible channel, asking for footage of the event that took place on such-and-such street, on such-and-such date? Did everyone with a camera spontaneously realize they could sell their footage to “Most Daring,” and take the initiative to get in touch? Do people get paid for turning over their amateur videos? Do they get paid the same whether it’s real, or really real?

How does it happen, that cameras are always present for these weird incidents? Sure, security cameras are ubiquitous, the average person is photographed 300 times a day, bla bla bla. But how does all this artful tracking and refocusing come about? This isn’t the work of automatic camera mounted on a wall.

The editors work overtime. If for some dire reason, they don’t have shots from a lot of different angles, they just replay one snippet a whole bunch of times. A suspect on foot gets mowed down by a cop car, and we are treated to the sight of the impact at least half a dozen times. Apparently, they could just put that vignette on an endless loop and sell it to people as a standalone product.

At some point I realized this was the wrong TV show. “Most Daring” comes in several varieties, and this was “Commuter Chaos,” which I knew wouldn’t include the segment I was watching for. But I sat there anyway, wondering how much worse it could get. “Commuter Chaos” was a lot like “Cops.” In fact, I’m not even sure which things were on which show. But that doesn’t change the basic essence of the matter.

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Finally, the show I’ve been waiting for – “Most Daring: Bedlam in the Burbs.” The person I sort of know is supposed to be in this one. Some highlights:

—-  A backyard demolition derby. My inner libertarian says people have the right to do whatever they want with their own property, including destroy it. Still, whenever I see cars being gratuitously wrecked, I think of all the people who could really, really use a car and can’t quite manage to get one. What a waste.

—- Police chase a motorist through a semi-rural neighborhood. A guy comes out of a house and throws something at the fugitive’s car as it goes by. Further on, another resident comes out with a gun and shoots at the fugitive’s car. Cut to a cop being interviewed about the helpful citizen with a firearm. “He’s listened to the police scanner over a case of beer and decided to get involved.” Not a word about the wrongness of vigilantism, no word on any arrest of the gun-wielding citizen, nothing like that.

—- This guy tells his girlfriend to pick up a dog collar, and they’re walking along, and all of a sudden she yelps and falls on her ass. It is, of course, a shock collar, whose purpose is to cure gratuitous barking, and the boyfriend has the control in his pocket. We’re supposed to think it’s all spontaneous and the girl was surprised. Didn’t she wonder why somebody was filming her and her boyfriend on their ordinary, mundane stroll through the back yard?

—- There’s a real short clip of a guy firing some kind of long gun, and when it goes boom, his pants fall down. Okay, that was interesting. But why was anyone filming him, to begin with? The unaccountable presence of a camera at these boring scenes is a pretty good indication that a lot of what the audience is supposed to believe accidental, is really on purpose. WTF is the point?

Okay, fine, set up a gag and film it. That’s what Chaplin did. Nothing wrong with that. But these guys want viewers to believe their subject matter is real accident, rather than a staged scene. It’s not enough that an audience should see it and laugh at it. The creators of it also require the audience’s belief in its authenticity. Why?

Why would anyone be filming any of this stuff, unless they knew beforehand that something would happen to liven things up? Well, one of the reasons is that parents will take any amount of pictures of their kids. This is how we get such masterpieces as a little boy learning to ride a bike, crashing into a toy car. And little boy knocked off a trampoline. This is how we get nonsense like the Balloon Boy media circus, as a direct result of the WTF Network culture.

— Some moron douses a basketball with gasoline, lights it on fire, kicks it, and manages to set his foot on fire.

Is it only because I worked as a nurse, that I don’t see the humor? There really isn’t anything funny about, for instance, a hand whose digits are all fused together by scar tissue. I knew a man whose hand was like that. When he was a little boy, his brother tied a rag around his hand, soaked it in kerosene, and put a match to it. He probably told him it would be fun. The parents were Alabama sharecroppers. Reconstructive surgery wasn’t in the cards for that kid.

The argument for not televising jackass stunts: I knew a kid who tried to duplicate one of them, broke his leg, cost his parents a bundle of money and hassle when they could least afford it, because his mother was recovering from two major surgeries and his father had been out of work for a couple of years. Do we really need TV that encourages that kind of thing?

The other side: I had a relative, a couple generations back, who spent his entire life on a couch, in the kitchen of a farmhouse without plumbing or electricity. There was nothing else he could do, being permanently crippled by a fall from the barn roof. Maybe he was up there on legitimate business; maybe it was a jackass stunt. They didn’t have TV. Nobody had TV. Those Alabama folks had kerosene lamps, not electricity. Okay, it could be said that I’ve just demolished my own argument. Kids have always gotten hurt

But to go from “Boys have always done asinine things” to “Therefore we should televise the asinine things done by boys” is a leap of logic I can’t quite negotiate. (For somebody who doesn’t believe in censorship, this is a difficult position to be in.) Let’s start with the very real possibility that the basketball pyromaniac could have set the building on fire. There’s very little humor in a house fire, or a fire of any kind, really. People’s lives are devastated by fire. It’s the kind of thing a survivor never really gets over. I sure hate to typecast myself as a curmudgeon and a stick-in-the-mud, but fire just isn’t that funny.

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I include, as a target for scorn, “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which may be on a different network, but that’s not really important. On most of these programs, most of the material involves somebody getting hurt, with genital injuries especially prized. Again, WTF? Just as a baby can find endless fascination in a bunch of jingling keys, men find endless amusement in the sight of some other guy taking a shot to the balls. And for some unfathomable reason, men love the sound of emergency vehicle sirens and screeching brakes. What’s up with that?

One of these shows even has a motto, “There’s nothing funnier than pain, embarrassment and humiliation!” Maybe so. Maybe also, there’s nothing worse than justifying sadism and bullshit under the guise of humor. Maybe there’s nothing worse than a sense of humor that’s limited to pain, embarrassment and humiliation, and incapable of moving beyond those hilarious qualities. Maybe there’s nothing sadder than elevating funniness to the very highest echelon of values. Maybe… a lot of things.

Humor is great, it’s healing, it’s stress-relieving, yada yada…. But just because a thing makes us laugh, that doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically good. I’m sure there were concentration camp guards who found abundant humor in some of the stunts they got up to. There’s nothing sacred about humor, and if we’re able to see that there are different kinds of humor, and that some are more desirable than others, we are probably happier. The fun of “Blue Collar Comedy” can make you feel good for minutes at a time, and even affect your whole day. The humor of a guru can blow your mind and change your life. Why not aim high?

When negativity takes over my brain, I apply the Codger Test. “If I were 16 or 21, would I feel the same way?” (A song by Will Crist says, “I’ll help you remember your youth.” To which I reply, “No, thanks.” It is all too easily remembered. While I wouldn’t change anything, neither would I want to live through it again.) So I imagine watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos” or, Goddess forbid, “Cops,” at one of tender young ages. First of all, in the Sixties, only a few science fiction writers (and Paul Krassner) could have envisioned the shape of media to come. If, as a young adult, I had by some magical means glimpsed this future, it would have been added to my list of reasons for suicide. So, that’s the Codger Test. Would my opinion then, be the same as now? Hell, yeah. Pacifist though I was, I might even have found it a good reason to put my foot through the TV screen.

“Cops” is particularly distressing. The law-and-order freaks and cop wanna-be types who justify this show’s existence, sit hypnotized by the flashing lights of the patrol car – exactly like strobe-mesmerized hippies at a rock concert, a class of people they consider deviant zombies. (Has anyone ever sued the show for inducing an epilepsy attack with those flashing lights?) I keep wanting to say, “This is pornography,” then I remember the word means “writing about prostitutes.” Does that apply to this show? I haven’t watched enough of “Cops” to know whether it covers hookers, and don’t intend to. Sometimes research is a waste of time.

But on another plane of cogitation, yes, this is prostitution. What is prostitution, but selling something that probably shouldn’t be sold? It’s the same kind of whoredom practiced by small American towns struggling for economic survival, that can’t think of any idea better than “Let’s build a prison!” – with all the enthusiasm of an old cornball movie, “Hey kids! Let’s put on a show!”

Another TV series I don’t intend to treat myself to is “Operation Repo.” Just the ad for it was enough. This is how our invisible rulers maintain control over the population. All they gotta do is, make half the people into government minions with weapons, and the other half into outlaws with weapons. Keep our sorry asses busy clobbering each other, while they get their hands on everything. And free Americans voluntarily subject themselves to this indoctrination. The whole WTF Network is about America wallowing in its own worst impulses, and ya know what? It’s okay not to like it.

The Invention of the TV Talk Show in 1721

Here’s a book where a character complains about how he’s always being cheated of the opportunity to use his most witty remarks and best conversational gambits. His friend comes up with a brilliant idea:

“We must collaborate and be witty in partnership; we must join forces. Every day we shall tell each other what we are going to talk about. We shall give each other assistance, so that if someone comes and interrupts our ideas we’ll bring the subject back ourselves; and if it won’t come easily we’ll drag it in willy-nilly. We will agree about where to show approval, where to smile, and where to laugh out loud. You’ll see, we shall set the tone for every conversation, and people will admire our sharp wit and sparkling repartee. We shall provide mutual protection for ourselves by nodding or shaking our heads to each other…. I shall recite some verses of mine and you will say ‘I was there when he did them. It was at a supper-party, and he didn’t have to think for a moment.’ Often we shall scoff at each other, you and I, and they will say. ‘Watch them attacking and defending themselves!’…but they won’t say that we had a preliminary bout the night before. We shall have to get some of those books which are collections of jokes and epigrams intended for people who are not witty and want to make out that they are… I want us to be able to hold a conversation an hour long with clever remarks all the way through.”

In other words, this is the complete plan for a late-night TV talk show, in the tradition of Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Jay Leno, et al. I don’t hesitate to quote at length from the source, because it’s long out of copyright, having been published in 1721, in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. This is what they had back then instead of National Lampoon, Mad, or The Onion. The incredibly prescient Montesquieu was such an advanced thinker, the Catholic church even banned some of his books. One of his novel ideas was, unfortunately, never picked up by Carson in regard to Ed McMahon. “One day it will be your turn to shine, the next you will be my assistant.” This one didn’t fly.

photo courtesy of Dplanet:: , used under this Creative Commons license

The Lapin Story

In college I’d been real interested in the whole question of how kids learn things. My daughter was 3 or 4, and everybody except me was very worried about her not talking. This was before she was diagnosed as almost totally deaf. I refused to panic over her late talking. But of course I wanted to get an idea of how her reasoning skills were coming along. She was sitting on my lap (yes, I sense a bilingual pun coming on), and bear in mind that this was conducted in American Sign Language as well as speech. I set before her the proposition that she was a bunny rabbit.
She denied it. I set out to prove my case. “A bunny rabbit has eyes, right?”
Agreement from her.
“And you have eyes. Same.”
More agreement.
“A bunny rabbit has a nose.”
The poor, innocent kid said, “Yes.”
“And you have a nose.”

Well, you can see where this is going. After several points of agreement (and none of disagreement) I laid the irrefutable conclusion on her. “See? You are a bunny rabbit.”

You know how you can look at a kid sometimes, and see the thought process going on? There was a moment of that, and then it blew her mind. She started to cry.

I felt bad of course, but the memory of that incident turned into an archetypal object. This is the stuff of myth, it’s like a highly personalized meme that embodies an elemental principle.

I totally grok what went on there, because it happens to me all the time. Someone will say a thing, that I just know is off-kilter somehow. It has the telltale whiff of bogosity. A logical error lurks in there somewhere, a non-sequitur of some kind, but I just can’t put my finger on it. It’s very frustrating, and while it doesn’t always make me cry, it does tie up my brain in knots and sometimes it leads to behavior that bursting into tears would be an improvement over.

I was messing around with her head, but in the nicest possible way and for the most praiseworthy motives, taking seriously my responsibility as a parent, to assure that my child gained some basic skills, such as thinking.

In the current climate of weirdness, I could probably be prosecuted for experimenting on a child in this way. Psychological abuse. But government agencies have endless license to do all kinds of bizarre experiments on our kids, and subject them to ghoulish “recovered memory” psychologists, and Goddess knows what-all. And test, test, test them, up the wazoo. (And oh yeah, strip-search them – but that’s another subject. We’re talking about mental cruelty here.) Some people believe that parents’ rights and kids’ rights are extremely violated by, for instance, compulsory vaccination. Yet we let the authorities mess with our kids heads, at will.

Note:
This started with a Facebook discussion of…. I don’t know. Tracing backward, I said to Matt, “Remind me to tell you the lapin story.”
That was because he tossed out lapin and some other random French words.
Before that, I remarked that Kate is not a frere, she is a soeur.
But what came before that? In what context did Matt refer to Kate as a frere?
Anyway, that was the lapin story.

Loompanics

(Originally published at Earthblog.net)

When I think of America, the picture in my mind is not the Statue of Liberty or the flag, but the Loompanics Unlimited catalog. Loompanics is the apotheosis – a word I’ve always craved the opportunity to use – of free speech, the most perfect example of everything that’s right with our beloved country. As Marilyn epitomizes movie stardom, as Willie epitomizes country music –in the same way, Loompanics is the ideal example of what America is all about. Or was meant to be.

Both distributor and publisher, in a typical year the company produced 15 books under its own imprint, and added around 150 new titles from other houses. Four-time Loompanics author Claire Wolfe, who has been called America’s most eloquent anarchist and the Ayn Rand of the 21st century, says, “Loompanics had a well-deserved reputation as the most bold, eclectic, and in-your-face of all freedom-oriented book catalogs.” I’d certainly never received another that featured a disclaimer, warning the customer that the bookseller can’t be responsible for the fate of your package if it happens to cross the path of certain government officials.

The news that Loompanics is folding its tent comes as a real blow to many. “They were one of the only book publishers in the world to publish Ace Backwords. And now they’re closing down. I just hope there wasn’t a connection there,” says the author of Surviving on the Streets, continuing, “Loompanics occupied a special niche in the book publishing world, and now that niche is no more. Which is a sad state of affairs. A lot of would-be rebels, pseudo-nonconformists, and arm-chair anarchists talked ABOUT subversion. Loompanics showed you how to BE subversive.”

The company has published and/or carried the works of Karl Hess, L. Neil Smith, Jim Goad, Russ Kick, Vin Suprynowicz, Paul Krassner, and many other notable thinkers. “I have seen the best minds of my generation…..in the Loompanics catalog,” as Allen Ginsberg might have said in his most famous poem.

The arrival of the 200-plus page, non-shiny, black and white catalog always promised several evenings of delight. Many of those pages were accounted for by articles about the latest abhorrent schemes of the government and big business, making it as much a magazine as a catalog. Other gems also turned up, original essays you can’t find anywhere else, like an Ace Backwords memoir of working in the red-light district.

You Are What You Know
You Are What You Do
Help Yourself
No More Secrets
No More Excuses
No More Limits

That’s the Loompanics philosophy, summed up in 6 precepts. Not a bad platform. If a Presidential candidate offered the same, I’d vote for her.

Loompanics never hesitated to take a stand, announcing Jack Herer’s masterpiece The Emperor Wears No Clothes, as “the most important book we have ever sold!” Some of its offerings were pure philosophy, like William J. Murray’s Anarchic Harmony and Unconditional Freedom. Others sound like an outlaw curriculum: how to do armed robbery, pick pockets, beat a lie detector, collect illegal debts, bury your contraband, change your identity, and disappear.

Before saying “tsk-tsk,” a rational person will pause for moment to consider the multitudes of fellow citizens incarcerated for victimless crimes, who emerge months or years later with a full set of thug credentials. When it comes to manufacturing career criminals, nobody does it better than the American justice system. No mere book of dirty trickery or exotic weaponry could hope to have a fraction of the impact. Government goons may be the only ones remaining who hold the touching faith that books have tangible power. Most real thugs don’t or can’t read.

Loompanics books can help protect your computer from viruses, your phone from tapping, and your house from unauthorized entry. They can also help you promulgate computer viruses, tap somebody else’s phone, and unauthorizedly enter someone else’s house. You could learn how to lie with statistics, and also how to unmask their lies. How to cheat on your wife without being caught, and how to win a street fight in case you get caught anyway. How to create a revolution or a nuclear strike, and also how to survive a revolution or a nuclear strike. It’s equal-opportunity knowledge and, like all knowledge, a sword with two edges. What if everybody knew everything, all the time? Us and them – what then? Can you imagine living on a planet of telepaths?

It goes without saying that Loompanics provided a full complement of sex books and drug books. Not to mention cannibalism, conspiracy theories and female serial killers (one book features 182 of them.) Subjects ranged from the practical How to Get Your Filipina Finacee to the U.S. to the ecclesiastical Sex, Drugs, Violence and the Bible to the whimsical yet totally useful Complete Guide to Science Fiction Conventions.

Yes, Loompanics has published some unapologetically awful things. Former chief editorial director Steve O’Keefe reminisced to an interviewer about a book (not named) which “so upset the staff that the entire staff revolted against working on it…. Seven printers refused to print it……” The company’s ads have been banned, either permanently or partially, by The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, and Google Adwords, Which is their perfect right, but still…..Soldier of Fortune???

Before accusing Loompanics of being a dreadful bad influence, pause and take a look at some of the stuff you can get at the most respectable giant chain bookstores: for instance, Writers Digest puts out a compendium of poison information, including symptoms, forms, methods of administration and reactions. A similar volume, on murder and forensic medicine, reveals “how police distinguish between accidents and foul play.” But this is okay, according to the party line: such reference books are only for professional writers, who require accuracy in their fictional violent acts. Yeah, sure, you bet.

Many books on tamer, more life-affirming skills could also be found in the catalog: food growing, bee keeping, brain expansion, language-learning. Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead has been a perennial best-seller. It’s typical of the many works teaching vonu, a life of voluntary simplicity, usually mobile, that keeps you off the grid and under the radar. This may be combined with tax “avoision,” a made-up word encompassing avoidance and aversion. A whole catalog sector was devoted to self-sufficiency: taking care of yourself without government “help.” Because once you stick out your arm for a handout, that’s where they put the handcuffs.

To think the company’s chosen books are dangerous because you can learn how to pick locks or handle explosives, is a superficial view. It’s much worse than that. It’s the ideas, such as tax avoision and vonu, which pose a real threat to the encroaching national Dark Age. There is genuine empowerment in the knowledge of skills we hope we won’t need, but might anyway: how to pass a pee test, fight police abuses, prevent identity theft, or navigate the underground economy. However you or I may feel about it, there are things it would behoove us to know, before the day arrives when we regret our ignorance.

Being as how the US keeps a larger proportion of its people behind bars than any other country, the ugly and unfortunate truth is that even in the best of families, someone is likely to wind up a convict. The several books about how to survive in prison become more relevant, as fewer and fewer of us reach the end of life without needing such information.

The founding and sustaining genius behind Loompanics is Mike Hoy, whose interview at AuthorViews.com, recorded only a few months ago, now has an ironic flavor. “I’ve been doing this for approximately thirty years and the good lord willing I’ll be doing it for another thirty.” Willing as any disembodied spirit undoubtedly is, other factors intervened.

If one had a paranoid cast of mind, one might suspect pressure from the authorities. In the current political climate, a publisher with such a customer database as Loompanics must have – not to mention the true identities of authors who write about things nice boys and girls aren’t supposed to know – such a publisher might find discretion the better part of valor, and close the doors before the inevitable visit from mofos in suits sneering, “Hand over your records.”

But that’s only paranoia. One person familiar with the operation says, “The feds haven’t been so bad. Hell, they’re one of Loompanics’s biggest customers.” It’s possible that a mundane factor like insurance costs pounded the final nail into the coffin. Attempts have been made to hold the company responsible for people’s actions, and to collect damages. Mike Hoy says it’s just been a steady decline in sales. Boring, but also reassuring. I’m glad it wasn’t jackbooted goons in the night. Too many Americans have already become martyrs to the sadly misdirected quest for “security.”

(Originally this piece had 3 links, which have apparently now all disappeared. What’s up with that?)

Interview with Mike Hoy on Loompanics’s own site          gone
Hoy on the AuthorViews site                                                       gone
Claire Wolfe’s tribute to Loompanics                                       gone

Borders

(Full disclosure: These days I’m writing for The Blog of Kevin Dolgin.  Reflecting on one of his sayings, found on page 10 of The Third Tower Up From the Road, I was moved to say a few things back.)

I deplore the presence of borders and cross them whenever possible, sometimes just to spite them.
Kevin Dolgin

I grew up in Niagara Falls, New York, which is right across the river from Niagara Falls, Ontario. One of my favorite things to do, as a young teen with very limited resources and an unlimited desire to get out of the house, was to take a walk over to Canada. There were two bridges, one at the north end of town and one at the south. The one at the north end was older and more utilitarian. Cars were stopped and their business politely inquired into, but a pedestrian would go along a rustic path and through a turnstile and onto the

Because it carried only a small fraction of the tourist traffic, the old bridge at the north end of town was the kind of place where a kid could dawdle around, suspended above the Niagara River gorge, and philosophize, and dream. The bridge was bisected by a perpendicular white line of white paint, across the pavement and sidewalks. That was the international border. I could be making this up, but it seems like there were two of those white lines, with an inch or so of space in between. There’s a strong visual memory of parallel lines separated by a gap, and I can’t think where else it could have originated. And I seem to remember wondering what, exactly, was in that space between the lines, that was neither Canada nor the US.

You could stand with one foot on either side of the line (or lines) and be in two countries at the same time. You could remain there and inhabit both countries for five minutes or ten minutes, yet the two halves of your body would still be symmetrical and pretty much interchangeable. A baby born in one particular spot would be American. Born twelve inches away, it would be Canadian. If it were born in the exact middle, would it have dual citizenship, or none at all? If you committed a crime right there, straddling the line, which country would claim the privilege of arresting you? If you dropped dead, which country would pick up the body?

The whole border concept seemed weird and arbitrary. It was a mystery. The water that roared below did not restrict itself to flowing along one side of the river or the other. Still ignorant of what borders meant in such contexts as, for instance, Europe during World War II, I grew up with the notion of a border as a thoughtlessly permeable and basically inconsequential thing. It was only when the Vietnam draft kicked in, that borders started to mean something.

Yeah, sure, wouldn’t it be great to have just one big happy world, with the same set of rules for everyone, the same chances for everyone, and all that good stuff? Only, as some ornery libertarians persist in pointing out, bigger systems inevitably become worse systems for the people who live under them. If everything were uniform, planet-wide, there would be no “there.” No place to escape to, no way to get off the grid, no where to go for a fresh start. A world government is not the kind of experiment which, if it didn’t seem to be working out well, could easily be called off. About borders, I remain ambivalent.

photo courtesy of exfordy, used under this Creative Commons license

Shine the Light

My very favorite art form is the Appreciation. When I find somebody or something I can endorse wholeheartedly, it’s the best kind of piece to write. I’d rather expound upon the reasons why Norman Spinrad is a great among the greats, than write about why the world sucks. One reason why the world sucks is that so many people enjoy pointing it out so very much.

It’s frightening, how many of the world’s prescribers and proscribers have truly horrific home lives. If you can’t form a society with one or two, or a dozen other people – meaning a community that works for every member of it – then how can you be telling anybody how to run entire towns and countries?

Once in a while, I wish all the people who know how to run the world would pause for a moment and ask themselves, “Who am I to tell anybody anything?”

And you, dear reader, might well ask, who is Pat Hartman to tell anybody anything? Well, guess what. I have as much right to speak up, as an archbishop or university professor, or, really as anybody. On any topic. Everybody has an equal right to their say. That doesn’t mean anyone has to listen.

But that’s not the real point. Having the right to speak is only a starting place. There’s a big difference between saying “Everything sucks” and “This is what’s true for me.”

I hear a dear reader saying, “Okay, I’ll try it. This is what’s true for me. Everything sucks.”

And you’re entitled to that opinion. More than entitled – obligated to speak it, if that’s what you think. As long as the disclaimer “This is what’s true for me” is attached. Because ultimately, the only two true things a human can say with absolute certainty are, “I feel” and “I want.”

And I’m entitled to the opinion that it’s more productive to look for the things that don’t suck, and illuminate them.

Dedicated to Senor el Tecolote Loco

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I Didn’t Vote for This

Here, on June 7, 2009, we have an extreme weather event in Fort Collins, Colorado. Hailstorms seem to happen about once a year here, and when they do, fun is had by no-one.

Most of today’s hailstones are definitely as big as peas. Some are the size of hominy kernals (not grits) and some approach the size of chickpeas. When they land on the grass, they bounce like fleas, or popping corn.

The local university had a hailstorm study called COCORAHS. People used styrofoam slabs wrapped with tin foil to preserve the impact profiles of hailstones that fell in their area. The program may not still be going on.

The land needs the moisture, sure, but not in this format. All over town, people are assessing the damage to their gardens, trees, cars, and (although hopefully, not too many of these) their outdoor animals. I’d worry about the homeless, but they seem to have been pretty well driven out of town the past few years.
I’m sure glad this didn’t happen yesterday, when the Gay Pride festival was going on in Old Town. Imagine what some mindsets could have made out of that.

After the first onslaught, for a while it just rained. And then the hail started again, only briefly this time. Not enough, surely, to do any more damage than had already been done.

Ben Hecht and Bill Haywood

Herman Rosse's interpretation of Bill Haywood

Ben Hecht was both the most cynical and the most–well, uncynical–writer. He certainly knew about the mind’s ability to hold two different, contradictory beliefs at the same time. Hecht was all too aware of cognitive dissonance in himself and others.

The things that people say and believe in and for which they die and in behalf of which they invent laws and codes–these have nothing to do with the insides of people. Puritan, hypocrite, criminal, dolt–these are paper-thin masks.

As he relates in A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, Hecht knew Bill Haywood. In 1918, the union leader had been convicted of espionage, and was out of prison with the case on appeal. Hecht, who had last seen him a couple of years before, ran into Haywood in 1921 and found him to have “the same crooked-lipped smile. And his one eye staring ahead of him with a mildly amused light in it. A rather striking person was Bill. I suppose it was because he always seemed so calm outside.”

Hecht was surprised to find this dedicated political activist in such a frivolous place as a theater, and said so.

Haywood replied that he’d made a list of plays, both musical comedies and dramas, and of cafés and other venues, and had spent the previous month visiting them and checking them off the list. The inference Hecht drew, was that Big Bill Haywood was storing up on some good times before going to the penitentiary to serve an inevitable 20-year sentence.

Less than a week later, Haywood disappeared, and later turned up in Russia, where he lived for the rest of his life. Hecht realized that the plan had been in place all along–no wonder the man was calm! “Yes sir,” Hecht tells us, “this Big Bill Haywood, the terror of organized society, was saying goodbye to his native land as if he were a sentimental playboy.”

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The Frail in the Veil

Here we have a photo of a veiled woman. Its ostensible purpose is to provide a visual means of identifying the subject, to which one can only say, “Huh?”. The paradox is almost too much to contemplate. It’s hard to say which aspect of this concept is most stupid.

First candidate: the entire women-as-property ethos. I like to respect the religious beliefs of others, but dammit, making humans cover their faces, like all the rest of the misogynist creed, wherever it is found, is just repugnant. I’m not in favor of women wearing veils unless they want to, and surprisingly few do seem to want to.

So that’s the first stupid thing. The second is: even bothering to take a picture. A principle of equal treatment? People who have no faces are afforded the same opportunity as those with faces: a means to prove or disprove their identity and their very existence. Seriously, would this picture stand up in court as a solid ID? No? Then what is it doing on this passport?

Or maybe it isn’t so stupid. “We have the technology!” was the motto of the 20th century. It won’t be the motto of the 21st century, because humans won’t be around on the planet long enough to look back on the century with nostalgia, or to identify the most characteristic slogan of that century.

So, who needs a whole face? By now we must certainly have the technology to identify an individual from a photo showing one approximate centimeter of flesh. Which many Muslim women do show. This devout lady, however, reveals nothing.

The next stupid thing is, it gives the bludg an excuse to grab more identification markers. “Yes, modest Muslim women are allowed to wear their veils to be photographed,” say the authorities. “This is why we must also have an alternate means of ID, such as fingerprints. And of course we wouldn’t want to discriminate, so that means everybody gets fingerprinted”. Still, this ID method would not capture data from bilateral amputees, so there must be retina scans… and so on, ad nauseum, ad absurdum and ad infinitum.

The fourth thing, and I won’t call it stupid because that would be offensive, but it sure does cause a person to wonder. Doesn’t Islam forbid the making of images? And specifically, images of people? But in order to move about in the modern world, the leaders of the faith apparently are willing to cut the faithful some slack. Well, why not cut them some slack in the matter of veils, infibulation and, you know, that kind of thing?