Hug It Out

     While someone who really loves Superman might have some facial hair-based reservations, the TV series Superman & Lois, now in it's final season, has settled meaningfully into being a show about people who care deeply about each other.  Spouses, partners, family, friendships, communities; every episode seems to have at least one tear-inducing moment about human connection.  Something to consider less than a week before election day.

Critical Thinking

      A piece I wrote for LREI's news magazine, on critical thinking in the school's Library program.  Please give it a look.

What Puts the Evil in Evil Geniuses?

      Evil Geniuses is Kurt Andersen's work of (recent) historical and analytical journalism.  It seeks to recount and explain how a group of very wealthy conservatives used their money to alter the public consciousness and influence politics to bolster their own profits, and in so doing set the country on a path of social, economic and climatic ruin.

     In his review of the book for the New York Times Book Review, Anand Giridharadas discusses how Andersen closes the book on a note of hope (I suppose you'd technically call this a spoiler, but I doubt anyone's reading this book for a shock ending).  Just as the conservatives stole the world out from under the liberals back in the 1970s, when liberal power appeared to be at its height, so too can the liberals now take back that power and steer the country away from destruction.  They must, Andersen suggests by way of Giridharadas, simply use the same cunning, the same manipulation, the same power-grasping practices that were once -- and continue to be -- used against them and the rest of us.

     But here's what worries me.  What if it's the abandonment of self-limitation, the willingness to steamroll over everything else in order to get what you want that is the actual problem?  Granted, we are not in a good place right now and granted the liberal route is far preferable in terms of both humane existence and just plain old survival.  And granted, the methods they are currently using have not seemed sufficient to the enormity of the task.  But what if, in doing ANYTHING you need to in order to win, you become something different than you were, and the extreme level of power you wield simply sends us toward ruin, just a different kind at the other end of the spectrum?  What if how you do something is just as loaded with consequences as what you do?

The Coronavirus Novel I'm Not Writing

            A woman gets herself tested for the COVID-19 and they find something they’ve never seen before in the antibody test.  Re-tested and examined, it turns out her blood holds the key to the cure.  Pharmaceutical companies will pay millions for proprietary rights to that key and they will, of course, disseminate it to the world . . . for a price.  Also, though she will be vastly wealthy, the company will control her blood for the rest of her life, meaning among other things she can only ever be examined by their doctors and any blood test she ever gets for any reason will go through them.

            She considers turning it over to the government, for the good of the country and, eventually, the world.  They will pay (way less than a corporation) and they won’t control her blood forever.  But she has deep moral reservations about their politics.  Maybe she could use her cure-blood as leverage, hold it hostage until the government takes some real and permanent steps towards, for instance, improved climate policy.  But should a single person get to dictate policy that will change the course of an entire country?

            She could give it to another country, one that seems to be handling things well, one that seems more likely to share without excessive demands.  But doesn't she have an obligation to her country and its people, which exist beyond a transitory government she may not agree with?  What are all the things her country has given her and should she be thinking in those terms?  Should she consider emigrating?  Does she need to?  What does it mean to be a citizen of a country?

            How about a non-national, she thinks, like the World Health Organization?  Probably she wouldn’t get paid.  The resources at their disposal might be minuscule compared to a private company, so the cure would likely be slower in coming, but would theoretically be distributed more evenhandedly, or at least without as much consideration for profit.

            How does she help the most people as quickly as possible and how much does she consider helping herself?
   

Not a Dystopia

     I didn't set out to write a work of dystopian fiction.  Those That Wake was originally set in the present and the characters in it were trying to prevent circumstances which would lead to dystopia.  Market forces pushed the time-frame of the story ahead a few years, but I worked to ensure that it retained something I felt was crucial: a focus not just on how the world could be worse, but on how certain powers work to make it worse.
     We are not living in a dystopia, though the Coronavirus certainly invites comparison.  Dystopias are about living in an aftermath, dealing with the world after the disaster has happened.  The world is currently working hard to stop the dystopia from setting in (and we will, though exactly how long that will take is hard to say).  This situation is effective, though, for observing how certain powers are meeting the challenge, and also how people are contending with challenges on our own level.
     Reading is an excellent way to spend some extra time inside.  I find that reading books which allow me to conceptualize and understand the problem we're facing help the most.  Two books that get right to the heart of things are:
     Time out of Joint by Philip K. Dick - For my money, this is Philip K.'s best (no small claim in a field of forty-four novels and one hundred and twenty-one short stories).  While it doesn't appear so at first, this is very much about how higher powers deal with times of crisis.  If you believe the article linked in the second paragraph of this post is about how powerful people try to alter the narrative, or if you believe it's the people who wrote that article that are trying to alter the narrative, Time out of Joint will still resonate for you.
     The Plague by Albert Camus - A work of literature that reads like an existential thriller (at times), it has much to say about how people deal -- and fail to deal -- with the particular sort of trouble we're in now.
     Maybe you prefer books that get you far away from the problem.  I get it.  If so, have a look at this, instead.

The Nature of Argument

     In their book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson discuss the ways a few basic human experiences formed our language and the way our language forms our understanding of the world.  Their first example they use is about the way we think of arguments.  The fact that argument is steeped in metaphorical terms like winning and losing, defending your position, attacking your opponent's case, shooting down your opponent's points and going in with the right strategy deeply ingrains in us the idea that argument is warfare.
     What if, I've been wondering, instead of looking at argument as warfare, we understood it as a way to cooperatively solve a problem?  What if, instead of battle, it was a way we helped each other fix things?
     Particularly in light of recent events, just an idea I thought might be apropos to our imminent elections.

Thanks 2017

     On Thanksgiving last year, the country was on the cusp of a momentous change.  Things have not particularly calmed down since then (do they ever, really?), and however you feel that change has paid off for the country, you'd have to agree that things have not exactly become easier or brighter.  But one of the ways we get through it is by finding things we're thankful for, too.  As on Thanksgivings' past, here are a few small things I'm thankful for, that offer sheer enjoyment, but also a deeper perspective on things we take for granted.

All the President's Men by Carl Benrstein and Bob Woodward - As an account of Watergate by the two journalists who broke the story, it's not exactly a light read, nor an escape from the real world.  Adapted into a riveting movie, the book illuminates just how much bigger the story was than the actual break in at the Democratic National Convention headquarters.  Most astonishing is just how deep President Nixon's rabbit hole of corruption went and the lengths he and his people would go to destroy their enemies, both real and imagined.  It happened in the 1970s, but it's still (or once again) a timely read and, ironically, a hopeful one.  Watergate, which felt every bit as cataclysmic as our own era's problems feel now, did change our country forever.  But if we survived that, maybe we can survive a lot more than we think we can. 

Channel Zero: No End House - Comprising the second season of the SyFy Channel's anthology horror series overseen by off-beat horror writer Nick Antosca, this takes the frame of the creaky old scary story standby, the haunted house, and builds something new out of it.  A small group of college-agers are lured by urban myth and social media into a mysterious, intermittently appearing and disappearing house.  Braving its increasingly terrifying rooms, they find that the true danger comes after they leave . . . or think they have.  Creepy, weird and psychologically insightful, this draws its fear from its characters and their relationships and, in a growing pool of TV horror anthologies, puts Channel Zero as the top of the heap.

Cinemaps by Andrew DeGraff and A.D. Jameson - A follow up to DeGraff's Plotted: A Literary Atlas, which provides maps for and commentary on several literary works, this does the same for thirty-five different movies.  You could spend plenty of time pouring over the intricate maps themselves, especially in such clever forms as the multiple time-period representation for Back to the Future, but the perceptive essays that accompany the maps draw insightful new thematic elements out of well-trodden and often-analyzed classics (The Empire Strikes Back and Alien are two particular stand outs).

     Have happy Thanksgiving and take a free, bonus turkey joke while you're at it.

 

March

     A slightly belated congratulations to March: Book Three, the final book in Senator John Lewis's autobiographical March trilogy.  In addition to the Coretta Scott King Award, March: Book Three also won the Printz Award, continuing the graphic novel format's strong history with this award (last year, This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki took a Printz Honor and American Born Chinese by Gene Yang won the award in 2007).
     This is on the heels of being the first graphic novel to win the National Book Award.  It maybe worth thinking about why a book with this particular political outlook should be accruing so much acclaim during this period of the country's political life.

Why and How

     Along the road that led to this Inauguration Day, 2017, I recently reread two books that feel so impossibly relevant to current politics, it's difficult to believe they were both written more than a half a century ago: William Golding's Lord of the Flies and George Orwell's other fictional dystopian rumination, Animal Farm.
     Whether today feels like a celebration to you or a tragedy, I recommend both of these books as a way to understand more deeply why and how this country has arrived where it is.    

9/11

    One likes to think that, after a tragedy or trauma, we eventually become stronger, more capable, wiser because of it.  After all, human experience isn't once long descent into entropy.  That's what we do best, isn't it?  Evolve.  Sometimes, you can't just stand around and hope that you get better, though.  Sometimes you have to do something to help yourself grow.
     Remembering 9/11 three years ago, President Obama said “Even the smallest act of service, the simplest act of kindness, is a way to honor those we lost, a way to reclaim that spirit of unity that followed 9/11.”

Sometimes You Have to Listen

     After weeks of sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "I will not listen to you" at each other,  people who have a responsibility for the welfare of a vast number of lives finally seem to have paid attention.  While one might hope for more than "backing down" and "conceding," they did still manage to cooperate.
     Eighteenth Century writer and philosopher Voltaire said "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."  It's as fine a summation of democracy as I can imagine.  If you're going to devote your life and works to such a concept, as all those people with their fingers in their ears presumably have, it's a relief to know you can still honor the idea of cooperating for a bigger cause over the idea of just being right.

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/v/voltaire109645.html#V5Df2iz03JwDhWHt.99

Lecturing/Yelling

     I read Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges.  Discussing the rise of a corporate-run entertainment culture throughout nearly every walk of life, designed to lull America into consuming more and thinking less, Mr. Hedges presented a disturbingly convincing argument that suggested we are basically headed for the end of the world (as we know it and want it).  To calm myself down, I grabbed a couple of books on the opposite side of the ideological fence, just to balance the input I was getting.  So I read some Glen Beck and some Ann Coulter.  The irony is that they, too, were basically predicting the end of everything good and worthwhile, but blaming different people for it.  Is that the nature of ideology?  Is it ultimately just about who you blame?
     Reading Mr. Hedges' work, fiercely intelligent and well-researched, I often felt like I was being lectured at.  Reading Mr. Beck's and Ms. Coulter's work, both fast-paced and enthusiastic, I often felt as though I was being yelled at.  I mentioned this to someone and she summed it up rather elegantly, I thought.
      "That's because," she said, "liberals always think their party is smarter than it is and conservatives always think their party is dumber than it is."
      I wonder, would any of us make any progress if we tried lecturing more to conservatives and yelling more at liberals?