Tuesday April 22, 2003

’ROUND HERE WE ALWAYS STAND UP STRAIGHT

I connect to the Internet through AOL, and the first thing I noticed today, as I logged on, was a big photo of a man and a woman, obviously in emotional anguish. Underneath was a caption: “Public pain of Laci’s family, tears and rage over murders”.

And I think to myself: why is this news? Why is this anyone else’s business? Why is it on my goddam monitor when I would honestly rather throw sand in my own eyes than intrude on someone else’s agony like this?

Oh, but wait: it’s the public pain of Laci’s family. So, you know… her parents didn’t have the stoic self control not to break down somewhere where somebody had a camera, and that makes it perfectly acceptable for twenty million people to point and stare.

Okay, then.

I had an epiphany last night, while I was watching The Practice… an epiphany that had nothing to do with how utterly hot Teri Polo is, amazingly enough. (Although she is. She’s got the whole package… face, voice, body… of course, you never know what an actress’ personality is like from watching her play a part, she might be stupid and/or obnoxious… but just lookin’ at Teri… homina homina homina! And she seems to be an excellent actress, too.)

Hey, it’s okay. I’m not starting a Teri Polo website or anything. I refuse to be one of these ridiculous geeks who becomes obsessed with someone he doesn’t even know and starts flooding them with desperate, pathetic attention from a distance. Anyway, Teri, babe-like in her power though she is, would not be the media figure I would get all obsessive about, if I were going to. I don’t know who that would be, actually.. Katie Holmes, maybe. Or Kim Delaney, she seems nice. (See, you have to have a ‘K’ name, apparently.)

No, my epiphany had to do with this blog, and actually, it’s one I’ve had before.

Anyone can write about political rubbish. And many billions do, judging from what I’m seeing as I slog around the blogosphere. And nearly anyone is going to do it better than me.

The only thing I can write about, that will make this blog unique, is, well, me. My life, my experiences, my perceptions and viewpoints.

Of course, that will make this blog really boring and tedious, too, but whatcha gonna do.

Let’s see… oh, my yes. I finally finished that goddam Heinlein article I’ve been writing for weeks now. It’s amazingly long. I originally started writing it as a joke, because Mark Evanier wrote an article about the worst con panels he has ever been on, and one about ‘the influence of Robert Heinlein on modern day superhero comics’ was his choice for the absolute bottom of the barrel. This struck me as funny, because I honestly didn’t think Heinlein had had any influence on modern day superhero comics. (Mr. Evanier noted he could not participate in that panel, whose topic he wasn’t informed of beforehand, because, stunningly, he hasn’t read anything by Heinlein. Make him give back his geek union card, is what I say. Hasn’t read Heinlein? He’s not my brother. He’s just heavy.)

So I decided, ‘who could write an article about the influence of Heinlein on modern day superhero comics?’ Apparently not Mark. Certainly not Bill Patterson, who snottily sneered at me that Heinlein didn’t often write the kind of comic book stories I obviously enjoyed. And of all those who actually could, who was actually a lame enough no-life loser to have the time to do it? Well. When you put it that way. Clearly, this was a job for me.

Anyway, I thought I’d write it as a joke… you know, go down the list of published Heinlein stuff, natter a little bit about each bit of Heinlein writing, then conclude with something like ‘and so we see that ‘The Long Watch’, like each other piece of work by Heinlein we have examined thus far… has had absolutely no influence on modern day superhero comics’.

Yeah. It would have gotten really old. Probably around Citizen of the Galaxy, if not before.

However, as I wrote the damned thing, and was having a reasonable amount of fun just tossing around my various views and non-insights on Heinlein’s work (I love Heinlein’s writing, for the most part, I’m just not a ‘Heinlein was a god in human form’ type fan, like so many Heinlein fans are), a pretty weird thing happened… I started seeing various places where Heinlein could have had some discernible (if minor) influence on superhero comics. I’d just, you know, never thought about it before.

And then I found one particular place where… well… there’s no way to know for sure, but certain dates are very suggestive, and if there is indeed a connection between one particular thing Heinlein wrote, and one particular thing that Gardner Fox wrote at about the same time… well… Heinlein’s influence on modern day superhero comics is simply incalculable.

So it was a really long thing to write, but I learned something (something geeky, pointless, and futile, but still) and I had fun doing it (which, since nobody is ever going to pay me for it, I’d better have) and now it’s posted, where few will ever read it, few will even care…

…but those few, will long for my death.

Dean Esmay, a very friendly guy who unfortunately disagrees with me on nearly everything political, was kind enough to read my previous Heinlein article and send me some detailed feedback on it, and I always appreciate that. Dean and I mostly agree on Heinlein, except Dean likes Farnham’s Freehold, which is just so wrong, and makes me suspect him of deviancy and Communist sympathies. But other than that, Dean does seem to mostly like the same Heinlein books I do, including Job, which isn’t something you can say for many Heinlein fans. So, yay Dean! And thanks for spending some time on my work.

And continuing this litany of utter tedium (to anyone who isn’t me, that is) we come to the fact that I called the library today, and after being on hold for a few minutes (holy shit, other people call the library?), I got a pleasant woman named Karen who happily renewed my one Martha Wells book and three Chelsea Quinn Yarbro books until sometime in May. Ah, where there are public libraries, there dwells civilization, and my heart.

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SOMEBODY SAAAAAVE ME

Ah, Smallville. A realm where every woman who lives and breathes and walks the Earth is a sleek and flawless goddess (except, apparently, for the evil sheriff, and I don't think she's gonna be around long). A place where you can get superpowers just by sleeping late... and alas, once you do,you'll inevitably be thrashed by a dapper Canadian male model within 40 minutes or so.

I keep trying to stop watching Smallville. The fact that the romances are never going anywhere just aggravates me no end. Every eight or ten episodes, Clark finally gets up his nerve (yet again) and asks Lana out, and Lana decides that this time it will finally be okay, and trembling and doe-eyed, with a breathy little whisper, she says 'yes', and then... Red Kryptonite, or an evil shapeshifter, or, I don't know, a time traveling cyborg from the future, shows up and does something awful and Lana thinks Clark hates her and we start all over again.

So I've been trying to stop watching it (despite the fact that Alison Mack is just so amazingly hot) but what are you going to do? Buffy's a rerun. NYPD Blue is a rerun. Smallville is a new episode, and geez, am I just supposed to sit there with the TV off all frickin' night?

I don't think so.

But I'm telling you, if Clark doesn't wake up and start mackin' on Chloe pretty goddam quick, I'm going to start suspecting he's got something going on on the side with Pete.

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DATA OVERLOAD

I once read somewhere that we used to be able to measure how important and/or busy we were by how many keys we had on our keyrings. (With the always noted exception of janitors.) But in the modern day, we can tell how important and/or busy we are by how many passwords we have memorized and use in our day to day life.

I have way too many passwords memorized. I have like 20 different email accounts. A bunch of different Windows sign ons for my computer (I’m whimsical, I created a sign on for each different web pseudonym I have, and each different protagonist in my novels, with its own password and individual background art on the Windows screen). About four different Angelfire sites… no, five, with this current one, and all of them have different passwords. And I used to have two different log ons at work, as well.

It’s too much. I’m going to start forgetting some of them. So, to give me a reference I can always get back to, I’m going to list every single account and password here.

Just kidding.

Sorry. I know you were really hoping. ;)

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FAITH NO MORE

I’ve occasionally seen conservative Christian sorts get up on various talk shows and expound at length regarding our decaying values, our growing crime rates, our apparent inability as a culture to control our own kids, or even, many of us, our own baser impulses. All of these bible thumpers, to a man, blame this on a growing spiritual void in America. Without basic Christian values, they opine, our culture is inevitably sliding into the pit. Our children join gangs and run wild in the streets. Men lie with men. Women lie with women, and occasionally, with German Shepherds. (Hey, I’ve got an Internet connection, I know about this stuff.) Old ladies get mugged. Kids get raped and tortured. Happy housewives have their own websites where they post pictures of all the guys (and occasional gals) they do while hubby is off at work… or worse, running the camcorder. Everybody between the ages of 8 and 64 has, statistically, at one time or another, smoked marijuana, taken meth, or furtively folded out a Playboy centerfold for a few seconds of forbidden ogling. It’s a bad time, neighbors. And Only A Return To Basic Christian Piety Will Save Us From Chaos.

While some of these claims are exaggerated, there’s a core of truth in there. Yea, verily, I say unto thee… while it pains me to agree on any point whatsoever with Jerry Falwell and his ilk, it is, nonetheless, true… when you take basic religion out of the equation (as, here in godless sinful secular America, we largely have, thank Jebus), a significant percentage of the population starts misbehaving.

Now, mind you, when I say ‘misbehaving’ I don’t mean exactly what Pat Robertson does. A few days back I had an essay on agnosticism, and in it I mentioned the essential dichotomy between religious morality and secular morality. Secular morality is based on the notion that hurting other people without a good reason is wrong. Religious morality defines ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ as quite simply being anything that offends God.

I come down on the secular side; I prefer not to bring God into my moral values, because God doesn’t talk to me, and I don’t feel like taking my local pastor’s word on right and wrong. So when I say that people without religion have a tendency to misbehave, I’m talking about what I define as egregious anti-social behavior… the kind of thing where the government pretty much has to step in. Crimes with actual victims… murder, rape, theft, assault, kidnapping… this is egregious anti-social activity, and it’s an authority structure’s job to stop that crap from happening. This is why we have authority, why we tolerate it.

It’s a sad truth about humanity that many of us… I don’t want to say ‘most of us’, but, you know, probably that’s true… but, anyway, a significant number of us… will not behave if we don’t have a good reason to. (I misbehave sometimes too, but I don’t consider my misbehavior… occasionally taking home office supplies, stuff like that… to be egregiously anti-social.) There are enough people out there who will, if given the opportunity, steal my stuff, beat me up for fun, rape the cute girl who lives across the hall, etc, etc, that, well, something needs to be done to keep them in check. I myself am under no illusions; if every cop in Tampa went on strike tomorrow, this really peaceful and pleasant city would look like Old Detroit in Robocop twenty four hours later. Maybe most people would still obey the laws… but a lot of people wouldn’t.

But why do I say that there’s some truth in what the Bible-smackers say, about how our decaying cultural values and rising crime rates are directly related to our vast national spiritual void?

Because cops and courts will keep enough naturally anti-social, unenlightened sorts in check for the buses and trains to keep running on time, sure. But that Old Time Religion would do it better.

Many years ago, I had something of an epiphany… yeah, I keep having those. This particular insight burst on me like a howitzer shell going off, as I abruptly realized: religion was absolutely nothing but a social control mechanism. That’s all it was. That’s all it had ever been: the most brilliantly effective social control mechanism ever thought up by the mind of man.

Some prehistoric social genius, faced with a tribal group whose numbers had increased beyond the local alpha male’s ability to control through simple dominance displays and occasional beatings, realized that this shit couldn’t go on. Men were having sex with anyone that was handy when they got horny... other men, their own kids, their own sisters, mothers, cousins, or aunts. Men were also killing other men in order to gain access to their women. Women were stealing pretty rocks from each other, which just started more fights. People were going to the chief and lying to him about what Big Brok had done or said on the hunt, to get him in trouble. Noisy Red Dog had decided that the spirit of the trees was the god for him, which was fine, except Green River Jumper thought the spirit of the trees was a stupid spirit, and said so often, and he and Noisy Red Dog kept getting into fights about it. Nobody was smoking meat, nobody was keeping the fire burning, and nobody was getting enough sleep, because everybody hated everybody else and didn’t dare crash when the rest of the tribe was around and might take advantage.

If a way wasn’t found to stop people from doing all the things they naturally, instinctively, wanted to do, but that were extremely contrasurvival, for the tribe if not for them as individuals, then the tribe was going to fall apart. Further, if there wasn't a way to make everyone in the tribe feel reasonably safe and secure around their fellow tribe members, the tribe would also fall apart. And damn skippy, too.

This may be how social evolution had always worked, prior to that particular moment of brilliant insight. A family became a tribe, the tribe got so big that people stopped regarding various other members of it as really human, and the local alpha male couldn’t control them all, and eventually, the tribe would disintegrate. Lots of people would die, the strongest individuals would survive and form their own small family units, and the whole thing would start all over again.

See, but the thing of it is, is, there are benefits to civilization. You get enough people together in one place, and if you can somehow get them to not beat each other up, rape each other, or kill each other for long enough, good stuff happens. Projects can be planned and completed that one person, or a small group, could never accomplish. More territory can be controlled. Eventually, things that require significant amounts of social cooperation… like agriculture and animal husbandry… can be discovered. At the very least, you can have five or six good strong hunters sit up all night and guard the entrance to the cave, so everyone else can sleep. These are good things, and they’re things you can only do with a large group that trusts each other… at least, to a workable minimum.

The problem, of course, is that nobody is bad in isolation. One person living by him or herself is, by definition, a saint. They have no temptation, there is no vice when you're by yourself. 'Evil' only derives from a social continuum; you have a right to hurt yourself if you want, and if there's no one else around to hurt, you can't do anything wrong. But if there are other people around... well, that's a whole 'nother ballgame. You want what other people have. They won’t give it to you, so you get angry. If you’re confrontational, you beat them up and take it, if you’re not, you sneak in and steal it. Communism was a particularly bold idea that tried to get at the root of this by getting rid of private property. It’s never going to work with us humans, we like our stuff too much.

Most primitive tribal leaders seemed to understand this intrinsically, probably because they themselves didn’t want to give up their stuff. (It’s worth noting that in real life Communism, only the proles are expected to hold things communally… the leaders have lots of stuff, and that stuff is theirs. Furthermore, in order for Communism to survive as long as it did in Russia, or has in China, a lot of basic Marxist tenets have had to be abandoned. People in China do have private dwelling, they do own their own things... more or less... the State can simply take them away, if it wants to.) To survive, ancient tribes needed a social structure that recognized private property as sacrosanct, but that would somehow enforce a universal respect for property rights.

And then some really brilliant primitive social engineer came up with an idea, and that guy (or girl, I suppose) became the first shaman. The idea was as simple as all strokes of innovative genius are: convince the rubes that there is some big supernatural creature that is watching them all the time… and if they break the rules that the tribe has to obey to survive as a tribe, that big supernatural creature will know… and it will be pissed, and it will punish them… if not in this life, then in the next.

(Mind you, most ancient tribal peoples didn’t seem to much go in for the idea of an afterlife. Their gods… or their gods' priesthoods… punished you in this life, when they caught you breaking the rules. The Old Testament is full of examples of Adonai… God, to you heathens… just whacking holy hell out of the Jews every time they pissed Him off. He smote them with plagues right, left and sideways, let them get enslaved for centuries, kicked them around like you wouldn’t believe, mostly because they wouldn’t do exactly what He said, like, you know, slaughter all the damned enemy, without sparing anyone, not even the women and children. The only thing worse than being a member of Adonai’s Chosen Tribe was… well, not being a member, since Adonai was even meaner to non-Jews than He was to his Chosen People.)

And religion is still the best, most brilliant, and most effective social control mechanism ever found. To a large extent, I believe the thumpers are right. A rise in anti-social activity across the boards has accompanied a steady drop in people professing active Christianity in our culture. Crime is up, especially violent crime, crimes not of passion (which anyone can commit, religious or not) but crimes about property. People who see something they want will be tempted to simply take it; for many people, the notion that God is watching them acts as a deterrent. Cops and courts and prisons simply don’t work as well; those are human institutions, and many people simply aren’t as afraid of them as they would be of a great big invisible policeman in the sky who never sleeps and sees everything we do.

It’s worth noting here, though, that many of the things forbidden by our ancient religious codes, which have in many ways become entrenched as cultural taboos and even as the basis for entire volumes of local ordinances, are no longer threats to our civilization or our culture. Most of our sexual taboos come from a time when there was no reliable birth control. Incest had to be forbidden; a tribe couldn’t afford to support a defective child. (On the other hand, some ancient cultures allowed and even encouraged incest among their royalty, but that was usually a religious offshoot; they believed they were ruled by the product of gods mating with mortals, and therefore the royal clan had to conserve that bloodline by marrying among themselves. Genetically, it wasn’t the greatest idea in the world… a lot of Egyptian rulers, apparently, had hemophilia, and some of them, at least, seem to have been Mongoloids… there are several ‘face like the moon’ references in ancient texts regarding some Middle Eastern rulers, and their recorded behavior seems to have been rather childish, to say the least.) Homosexuality, on the other hand, was a waste of sexual energy on non-reproductive acts, and you couldn’t have that, either; the tribe needed all the healthy kids it could get. Women were treated as chattel because every fertile woman had to be kept pregnant as often as possible; child mortality was high, and the only way a tribe became more powerful was by increasing its numbers. And monogamy grew up and was enforced as a way to keep men from killing each other over women.

Taboos against various intoxicants obviously worked the same way. If you’re high as a kite on home made beer or that weird stuff you scrape off the back of blue toads, you’re not much use to the tribe. So ‘god’ declares that your body is a temple and you profane against Him when you corrupt it… which is just another way of saying, the tribe needs you healthy and in your right mind because there’s work to be done, fella. And, again, some intoxicating substances do damage chromosomes; the tribe can’t tolerate that.

Religion, while it’s an excellent social control mechanism, only works through fostering blind, superstitious terror. It requires absolute social conservatism to function. People are not allowed to question, because no religion can survive too many questions. Therefore, people are not encouraged to have original thoughts. All of which means the ancient social taboos and customs, which were necessary and functional for nomadic hunter-gatherers surrounded by armed, xenophobic enemies, get passed down unchanged from generation to generation… until they come down to a time where various technological and social advances have made them obsolete.

Still, about half the ancient codes remain quite valid. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and ‘thou shalt not steal’ and ‘thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor’ are absolute requirements for a civilization that values private property as one of its fundamental social elements to flourish. ‘Thou shalt not covet is a good idea’, although it’s also onerous; the first real recorded instance of government thought policing, and an important essential difference between Western and Eastern moral philosophy. Here we feel guilt even over what we think and feel; there they feel shame only over what they get caught doing… in other words, only over what their society perceives. Which is, in some ways, a much saner way to define good and bad, since good and bad are meaningless outside a social continuum.

So I absolutely agree with the conservative Christians on this point; our civilization has paid a price for our growing (God, I hope its still growing) spiritual void. And a massive spiritual rebirth… a national revival of basic Christian values… would certainly have a positive impact on the violent crime rate… if not in this generation, then in the one to come. Raise a kid to believe that God is watching him or her and ready to start tossing lightning bolts, and most kids will behave in a much more decorous fashion. (Although it’s worth noting that most of the most outwardly 'proper', 'decent', fundamentalist, God fearing, sexually repressed cultures and communities have been shown, historically, to have been the most promiscuous and decadent just under the surface. Nobody has bigger porn collections than the most publicly virtuous Born Again, and nobody swaps wives or fucks their kids with such fervor and frenzy as the outwardly devout. Or so I hear and read, anyway.)

Since I believe this to be true, you might think I support a sweeping cultural return to the basic Christian values of our culture's happier days, that Golden Age when kids were cheerful, clean and compliant, nobody was homosexual, white men had all the really cool jobs, women stayed home and baked, Hispanics all still lived in Cuba or Mexico or Puerto Rico or parts of New York City we never showed on TV, and black people were happy and grateful, by God, to have good jobs as maids and janitors. When people went to church on Sunday and we all feared God and Russia and had bomb shelters in our basements, just in case one or the other started lobbing nudes around. (Hey, God is a nuclear power too, and an erratic one. Ask the former residents of Sodom & Gomorrah if you don't believe me.)

Or maybe that passage made it clear through not so subtle irony that I don’t support such a sweeping turning back of the clock. In fact, I’m vehemently opposed to it. If the only way civilization can survive is a return to repressive religious autocracy, and a rigorous public conformity enforced by the stocks, the whipping post, and the gallows, with our kids taught from the cradle to be terrified of God and eternal hellfire… well, let civilization crash and burn. It jest ain’t wu'th it.

Fortunately, I do believe humans, individually and in large groups, are capable of personal growth and social evolution. I think that our ‘growing spiritual void’ is a sign of increasing cultural maturity. We are, I hope, more and more throwing off the once necessary but now simply repressive shackles of faith, and starting to rely increasingly on ourselves… our power to reason and think, to control our baser impulses, and to respect each other, rather than simply behaving somewhat less brutishly than we really want to out of fear of Divine Wrath.

There will always be people who aren’t ready for that yet… people who don’t want to think for themselves or trust in their fellow man. Worse, there will always be remnants of the old religious authority structure… our shamans and our medicine men, who stand in danger of losing their status, their prominence, and their authority if we finally become fully sane as a culture. Those people… those who don’t want to think, and those who don’t want others to think… are always going to fight, tooth and nail, against the (hopefully) inevitable atrophy of organized superstitious terror as a social control mechanism.

Me, I hope those people’s time has passed… but lately, it’s hard to hold onto that hope. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that pretty much all the people currently screaming that dissent is un-American, and dissenters should be arrested, or simply run over in the street, are also good god fearing, church going Christians. And our current non-President, that guy sitting in Al Gore’s office, proudly calls himself a Born Again Christian, and invokes his ancient, vengeful Middle Eastern God, while he’s ordering the capitol of an Islamic country bombed into rubble.

It’s frightening how many people there still are, that don’t want to think, or that don’t want other people to think, for themselves.

What’s even scarier is the fact that they seem to be running the country right now.

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THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally acceptable social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly… even when I’m talking in ‘public’, to an unknown audience, nearly any of whom may be almost as crazy as that whackjob female blogger I mentioned running afoul of previously.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude that most bloggers who know their opinions are going to offend people tend to take… namely, if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read them or it.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. Oh, I firmly believe that if you really don’t like something, well, you must have hit a link or typed in my URL voluntarily to get here, and you have a back button on your browser… you certainly don’t need to flame me just because something I’ve written here has gotten your shorts all in a bunch.

Nonetheless, this is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out. Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough style and panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded if you write me, okay?